For about five hundred years - between Ovid's death (17 AD) and Maximianus' Elegies (6th century AD) - the genre of love elegy disappears. Does this mean that love poetry in general was no longer being written? This was certainly not the case. Poets continued to compose love poetry, merely in other forms than elegy. This book deals with non-elegiac Latin love poetry of Late Antiquity. It is the first monograph to focus on the metaliterary interpretation of four non-elegiac poetic works: the Pervigilium Veneris, Ausonius' Bissula, Reposianus' De concubitu Martis et Veneris, and the Aegritudo Perdicae. The book contains all the required information about these poems (including their date, authorship, structure, and literary tradition). However, its content is predominantly original, as it examines subjects that have not previously been discussed in the past. These include: a) the generic interaction between the poems' 'host' genre and several 'guest' genres that are present within them; b) the metaliterary discourse developed in several passages, which reveals the metapoetic self-consciousness of their poets; c) their hidden demands for the innovation of love poetry; and d) their allusive comments on the conservatism of this era.
Vasileios Pappas, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece.
