Propertius 4.5, Ovid Amores 1.6 and Roman Comedy

Abstract

‘The absence of Roman comedy … from the influences which the [Augustan] poets like to name proves only that they were not creditable, not in fashion, not that they had made no contribution.’ So Jasper Griffin in his recent book on the Roman poets. Griffin observes that scholars have been deterred from postulating Roman comic influence on the Augustan poets merely by the ‘magisterial pronouncements of the great scholars’, and he amasses considerable circumstantial evidence to support his theory that the Augustan poets, and especially the elegists, were indeed indebted to Roman comedy. He observes, for example, that Cicero provides evidence for the continuing popularity of Roman drama; that (a very important point) Horace complains of the popularity of the Roman comedians whom ‘powerful Rome learns by heart’ (Epist. 2.1.60-1); that the same poet, despite his denigration of Roman comedy, obviously knew and referred to it; that Roman comedy seems to be the source, or a source, for the ‘naughtiness’ of elegy and the rejection of traditional Roman values (with the comic amatores distressed by contemporary mores and the elegists flouting them); that if the elegists do not acknowledge their debt to the Roman comic poets, then no more does Horace in the Odes acknowledge his manifest indebtedness to Hellenistic poetry, claiming instead to be following Sappho and Alcaeus.