The Elegiac Domus in the Early Augustan Principate

Abstract

Elegy configures the household (domus) as a response to emerging concepts of the Roman family, an institution whose constitution had been disrupted during the civil wars that preceded the Principate. The Tibullan amator, foregrounding the domus' role in shaping personal identity, weighs allegiance to his ancestral estate against the houses of Messalla and puella, and finally professes devotion to Nemesis' threshold; the Propertian amator, exposing the nomenclature of familial relationships as an unstable resource for self-representation, also turns to Cynthia in a final attempt to consecrate the domus. Such appropriations of the Roman household are best interpreted as a means by which the amatores locate themselves outside the Augustan vision of normative family relationships. at tHe openinG of propertius' second book, the poet-lover follows his recusatio to Maecenas with a discussion of death. He notes that his death will be credited to Cynthia alone, or, more literally, that his funeral will proceed from her house (2.1.55-56):una meos quoniam praedata est femina sensus, ex hac ducentur funera nostra domo.Since one woman has plundered my senses, it is from this house that my funeral will proceed. 1