elegiac poetry, Latin
elegiac poetry, LatinEnnius introduced the elegiac couplet into Latin (Isidorus 1. 39. 15); four epigrams, epitaphic in form, survive under his name (var. 15–24 Vahlen; 43–6 Courtney). Lucilius (bks. 22–5) used the metre for epitaphs and other short poems descriptive of slaves. An anecdote in Aulus Gellius (19. 9) offers an early glimpse of elegiac epigram on erotic themes, Hellenistic in flavour (Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, and Quintus Lutatius Catulus, c.150–100 BC); a Pompeian wall bears witness to the popular diffusion of such work in the second quarter of the 1st century bc (D. O. Ross Jr., Style and Tradition in Catullus (1969), 147–9). The careers of Catullus and Ovid bound the elegiac genre's most concentrated and distinctive period of Roman development. In particular, by early Augustan times elegy emerges as the medium for cycles of...
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