Latin erotic poetry is an important genre recording surviving examples of male friendship. This report argues that a specific group of poems involving the poet and his powerful friend should be identified and studied separately as a sub-genre. Drawing examples largely from Horace, Catullus and Propertius, I argue that homosocial erotic poetry exploits the same repertoire of generic conventions as erotic poetry, but reshapes some of them for different functions. To articulate the erotic emphasis and the generic concern of this report, Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “homosocial desire” (1985) is introduced. The concept of homosociality is useful in revealing how male desire in our sub-genre has an erotic tinge and functions to foster the social bond of male friendship, but precludes the homoerotic possibility. Chapter One introduces the important terms and methodology chosen for this study, while Chapters Two to Four define and describe three distinctive features of the sub-genre. Chapter Two is devoted to showing that sermo amatorius, the “love speech” often featured in romantic relationships, can be assimilable to the structure of male homosocial relations. Chapters Three and Four examine how the sub-genre reshapes the recusatio and the topos of wealth to negotiate the tension of desire between the poets and their powerful friends. Ultimately, this report argues that male homosocial desire motivates the sub-generic conventions and thereby the seemingly disparate poems constitute a coherent sub-generic classification. / text

This thesis examines the influence of Parthenius' doctrine of erotika pathemata on the Neoteric epyllion. His influence on Cinna has been readily acknowledged, but except for a few incidental and tentative references, little has been made of his role in determining important features of Neoteric poetry; in fact, many Leading scholars in the field fail even to mention him. A survey of the evolution of the epyllion in the Hellenistic world shows a radical transformation of the Callimachean type by Euphorion and Parthenius", in the late Alexandrian era. It is clearly the late Alexandrian epyllion that became popular with the Neoterics, as the relevant works of Catullus and, what can be conjectured about the nature of the lost Neatenc epyllia suggest. There is a marked bias towards tragic love-stories, sensational and bizarre, often metamorphic and with ample scope for emotional analysis and a subjective treatment. These features closely parallel the tenor of Parthenius', summary of 36 love-stories in the Erotika Pathemata, his only wholly extant work. While the collection was dedicated to Comelius Gallus well after most of the Neoteric epyllia were written, it is safe to assume that Parthenius preached his doctrine from the time of his arrival at Rome, as his widely acknowledged influence on Cinna's Zmyrna, perhaps the first Latin epyllion, seems to suggest. This thesis cannot pretend to defend Ross' extravagant claim that "without Parthenius' timely arrival there could have been no New Poetry"; but it can attempt to illuminate Parthenius' central role in establishing the nature of the Neoteric epyllion. This study has been undertaken, then, in the belief that Parthenius' influence on the Neoterics and on the creation of a new genre at Rome warrants closer scrutiny than has so far been attempted. Thus, it seeks to provide an alternate basis for the analysis of poems like 63 and 64, and heralds a possible shift from the emphasis on the autobiographical approach, which, though undoubtedly valid, has been belaboured in recent years to the point of excess. Abbreviated title: Erocika Pathemata and the Neoteric Epyllion. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Durban-Westville, 1996.

There exists between lyric poetry and music a bond that is at once tangible and grounded in practice, and yet that is indeterminate, a matter of perception as much as theory. From Graeco-Roman antiquity to the modern day, lyrical forms have brought together music and text in equal partnership: in archaic Greece, music and lyric poetry were inextricably (now irrecoverably) coupled; when lyric poetry flowered in the eighteenth century, composers harnessed text to music in order to create the new and fully integrated genre of Lieder; and in our contemporary age, the connection between word and music is perhaps most keenly felt in pop music and song 'lyrics'. In 2016, the conferral of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Bob Dylan brought to wider public attention the nature of lyric's poetical-musical bond: can Dylan be considered a poet if the meaning, syntax and expression of his words are dependent upon music? Is music supplementary to the words or are the two so harnessed that the music is in fact a facet of the poetic expression? The connection between music and poetry is perfectly clear in such integrated lyric forms as these, but a more indeterminate connection can also be felt in 'purely' musical or poetic works - or at least in the way that we perceive them - as our postRomantic, adjectival use of the word 'lyrical' shows. Describing music as lyrical often suggests that it carries an extra-musical significance, a deeply felt emotion, something akin to verbal expression, while a lyrical poem brings with it an emotive aurality and a certain musicality. Text and music of lyrical quality may, therefore, invoke the other for the purpose of expression and emotion so long as our understanding of lyric forms remains conditioned by the appreciation of an implied music-poetry relationship This thesis works within the overlap of music and poetry in order to explore the particular lyric voice of Catullus in the context of his twentieth-century musical reception. Whilst some of Catullus's poems may have been performed musically, what we know of poetry circulation, publication and recitation in first-century BCE Rome suggests that the corpus was essentially textual. Nevertheless, Catullus's poetry was set to music centuries later, not in reconstruction of an ancient model, but in new expression, suggesting not only that composers of the twentieth century found themes in Catullus's poetry that resonated in their own contemporary world but that they found a particular musicality, something in the poetry that lent itself to musical form. I argue that it is in these works of reception that we can most clearly identify the essence of Catullan lyricism. Moreover, by considering the process of reception, this thesis is able to take a broader view of lyric, identifying traits and characteristics that are common to both music and poetry, thus transcending the boundaries of individual art forms in order to consider the genre in larger, interdisciplinary terms.