Trilingual Love on the Bay of Naples: Philodemus AP 5. 132 and Ovidian elegy

Abstract

The paper is a contribution to the growing interest in the influence of Philodemus’ poetry upon Latin poetry, in particular elegy. It explores the socio-cultural and literary-historical implications of Philodemus’ epigram AP 5.132 (Sider 12), which concerns the speaker’s infatuation with an Oscan girl called Flora. This poem, short though it is, reveals a poet interacting with the linguistic and cultural diversity of Campania of the late Republic. It is well known that, in its description of the girl’s physical body, this epigram influenced Am. 1.5, the poem in which Ovid first introduces his girlfriend Corinna. What I shall also argue is that Philodemus’ play in his epigram with the dynamic multiculturalism of Campania transfers in Ovid’s Amores and Fasti to a fuller exploration of the crosscultural resonances in the name of the elegiac woman, including the goddess Flora, who was worshipped in Oscan territory as well as at Rome.