ABSTRACT
Roman love elegy collectively constitutes a story of loss, but not a story of resignation. The surviving elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid take as their central organizing viewpoint the experience of a young man deeply, disastrously in love with a woman who is either uninterested in or incapable of the kind of faithfulness he seeks from her. The elegiac poet's world is permeated with a melancholy longing for that perfect oneness with the beloved that is always just beyond his reach. This perfect oneness may have existed in the past or may in the future, but the present is an existence of strife, longing, and complaint. And yet, although the elegists may explicitly admit that their mistresses are unworthy of love bestowed on them, they never give up the attempt to win them over, to prove themselves victorious in the erotic contest of wills. In this tangled web of desire and disappointment, one of the most prominent images is the servitude of love (servitium amoris). The poets of this genre describe their situation of endless wanting and endless striving by writing themselves into the poems as the slaves of their beloveds. The poet-lover does not imagine himself as a slave in order to renounce his claims on the beloved, but both to express his dissatisfaction and to attempt to overcome the beloved's resistance. 1
