ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on time in Latin love elegy and, in particular, on the temporal dynamics defining the relationship between Tibullus’ amator and his beloved Delia. Relying on Julia Kristeva’s articulation of “women’s time,” the chapter identifies a pronounced consistency in the language of repetition, delay and confinement in those elegiac vignettes that cast the puella as a dutifully waiting or abandoned beloved. Isolating such properties within a theoretical context that establishes their meaning within larger discourses of power and subversion allows a better understanding of why this particular construction of woman, defined by these properties, was appealing to poets writing in the early Principate. After sketching the temporal pressures that impacted the elite Roman male, which suggest an accelerated life course for such men in the early Principate, the chapter considers how the temporal properties ascribed to poet and puella thwart or propel the progress of the elegiac affair, with particular reference to Delia and Tibullus as represented in poems 1.1 and 1.3. The conclusion returns to the larger context of Roman discourse to suggest that the puella assumes in elegy a function similar to some iterations of the Golden Age in Augustan poetry.
