Tra elegia e principato: un'interpretazione di Tibullo

This volume offers a critical rereading of Tibullus' work, relating it to the sociopolitical dynamics of the first Augustan decade. From the perspective of an only apparently disengaged love poet, Tibullian elegies constitute a privileged observatory for grasping the profound changes affecting in those years the function of the poet, the status of literary patronage, and the ideal of otium. The image of Tibullus as the author of the rêverie, as a secluded man of letters contentus vivere parvo, with which critics have long identified him, does not do justice to a poet who not only turns out to be well inserted in the new political climate established by Augustus, but actively elaborates an elegiac project that determines his own form of participation, silent but constant, in the ideological core of the Principate.