Tibullus in Love, Horace on Love: Negotiating Genre in C. 1.33

In this paper, I read Horace C. 1.33, nominally a consolation for his friend Tibullus who is disappointed in love, as a negotiation between lyric and elegiac modes. I argue that the poem serves both a humorous, multi-pronged critique of Roman love elegy and an oppositional statement of generic self-definition. I begin by assessing Horace’s criticism of elegy. I contend that Horace faults elegy for being overly emotional, generically over-determined, and excessively reliant on Hellenistic models. This criticism takes on a new valence in the final stanza. Through the comparative adjective melior, Horace, in line with the ancient trend of oppositional generic definition, describes the genre of his own love poetry by explicitly contrasting his work with Tibullan elegy. He thus defines amatory lyric as “not-elegy.”