From the origins of the elegiac poetry to the rupture of Ovid in the Heroides

Abstract

This paper aims to achieve a critical course about the elegiac genre since its origins to the Heroides of Ovid. Still in Antiquity, elegy was a genre attached to moan song, mostly funeral. However, when we analyze the elegies of the ancient Greeks and thoso of the Hellenistics, we can not find any composition strictly of moan, what will be seen in the poetry of the Latins starting from Catullus and Gallus. With the last one begins the erotic elegy, in which we find the amorous moan. Tibullus and Propertius take the genre to its ultimate consequences, so that in the last compositions love is no longer the central theme, and Ovid, in this sense, can only break off with the tradition, what in fact he does since the beginning of his poetic career. Thereby, the Heroides are a sample of the originality of the Sulmona poet, besides being his work, after the Metamorphoses, that had the biggest influence in the history of literature.