Tibillus 1.4

Karen Bassi
Brown University

Tibullus' Priapus poem (1.4) is a dialogue between a human dramatic speaker and the rustic god of gardens. One must ask why the poet has chosen to engage this deity in conversation in an elegiac context.

The poem begins with Priapus in his accustomed outdoor setting, subject to the changing weather. He is not an amorphous or imagined presence, but rather a solid object: a statue. Tibullus' vignette, i.e., man and statue in conversation, is humorous but also reveals a complex psychological narrative.

Priapus is both humorous and erotic.[1] It is this combination of attributes which suits the poem's purposes so well. The repetition of nudux at the beginning of lines 5 and 6 and the words barba and coma establish the erotic environment of the poem which is precipitated by the question "que tua formosos cepit sollertia?" at line 3. Moreover, the address to Priapus as, "Bacchi . . . rustica roles / armeatus curva . . . falce deus" in lines 7 and 8 identifies his mytho-erotic genealogy. As the child of Bacchus and Venus, he becomes a kind of rustic stand-in for Amor, wielding his curved pruning hook instead of Love's bow.

But why does the poem invoke this rustic stand-in, this comic-erotic garden statue? The answer lies in the psychological reading of the poem, which I suggested above. This reading necessitates imagining two levels of discourse taking place within the poem. The first level consists of the speaker in conversation with the god, i.e., the fictional encounter taken at face value. The second level of discourse is one from which this fictional encounter is removed. Here the narrator is to be imagined talking to an inanimate and therefore unresponsive status. At this level the poem is not a dialogue but a monologue. On the first level the 'speaking' Priapus interjects distance and authority between the human interlocutor and his own (the interlocutor's) immediate erotic concerns: he is the pupil of a divine (albeit humorous) magister amoris. The conversation is 'academic' rather than personal.

But elegy must ultimately be personal. It must, in a sense, be a monologue and not a dialogue. Thus, it is the second level of discourse which is the most important for understanding the elegiac persona of the narrator. But before discussing that persona we must ask why the poet has chosen the statue of Priapus as the embodiment of the narrator's internal voice. I believe that there are two reasons. The first has to do with Priapus' erotic and humorous associations mentioned above. As we shall see, the humorous aspect of the god becomes self-referential at the end of the poem. The second reason has to do with the very fact that Priapus is a statue. The concreteness of the god's presence precludes our belief in his speaking. When deities are present in Latin literature we are generally not required by the narrative to conceive of them as statues. (Horace avoids the problem of credibility in Satire 1.8 by making the statue speak but omitting the human interlocutor. Thus the fiction is not intruded upon by 'reality'.) Rather, they simply exist in the imagination of the reader as 'living' yet somehow incorporeal beings.[2] In Tibullus' poem the deity is not 'living' in this sense, nor does he move from setting to setting as, for example, Venus does in Horace Odes 1.30. He is an artifact, a product of human making and he is stationary. His dependence upon a human maker is implicitly emphasized. So too is his dependence upon a human speaker to bring him to life by making him speak. Thus, the god as statue invites our belief that his speech is really the projected speech of the narrator.

What does this projected speech and the fact that it is projected tell us about the persona of the narrator? First, the speaker is attempting to distance himself from his immediate elegiac concern: his involvement with Marathus. He does so my momentarily putting the god's admonition and general precepts between himself and confrontation with the specific situation which requires those precepts to be put into practice. This not only creates distance (distance which is accentuated by the predominance of the future tense in Priapus' speech) but is also an attempt to give credence to the possibility of controlling love through intellectual strategies which, as we will find out at the end of the poem, is impossible. The sentiments of loss and change in Priapus' speech only underscore the speaker's fear of having no control in love.

Lines 57-72, although ostensibly included in the speech of Priapus, move toward revealing more explicitly the internal dialogue which I have suggested. The emphasis is on the here and now (nunc . . . tractant) rather than on future exploits and consequences. This leads directly to the speaker's immediate involvement with Marathus; one which is presumably indicative of the mercenary love which the present age (haec saecula) exemplifies. Moreover, the emphasis on poetry and poets in lines 61-70 seems strange in the mouth of the garden god/statue but very appropriate in the mouth of the speaker whose first person narrative makes him, in a sense, the poet of this poem; the poet who wishes to be loved by a particular boy (pueri, doctos et amate poetas). The exclamation 'crudeles divi!' at line 35 can also be satisfactorily explained by the internal dialogue: the lament of the human speaker breaks through the fictional guise of the god.

In lines 73-4 we suddenly hear that the god gave his precepts to the speaker so that he could sing them to a certain Titius:

Haec mihi, quae canerem Titio, deus edidit ore:
sed Titum coniunx haec meminisse vetat.

This change of direction may be surprising at first but it is less so when we consider that it is yet another distancing technique. The story of Titius is simply the next stage in the speaker's fiction: he moves from putting words into the mouth of the god, to saying that he is only to sing these words for another's sake. Titius' coniunx, however, forbids the song to be sung and is thus the only figure in the poem who seems to have any control over erotic situations.

In lines 75-80 the speaker presents himself as a magister amoris. Again he creates a fiction to postpone the ultimate recognition of the futility of all abstract philosophizing about love. In the end all arts and tricks are useless (deficiunt artes, deficiunt doli 82) including the fictions which he has created in the poem. However, it is not until the last four lines of the poem that the ironic twist which most explicitly underscores this attempt appears. The speaker prays to his beloved to be sparing (parce . . . quaeso) so that he may not be made a "turpis fabula." In recognizing that the speaker has psychologically 'erected' the rustic and comic-erotic statue of Priapus to palliate his own fears about the powers of Eros we, the audience, become the subject of the poem's final verb 'ridebunt'. We do laugh, and future audiences will laugh, at the fabula which the narrator has made of himself. Our laughter, however, is gentle.

[1] Horace's Satire 1.8.4-5 (nam fures dextra coercet / obscenoque ruber porrectus ab inguine palus) graphically illustrates the comic and erotic attributes of the god.

[2] See Horace Odes 1.10, 1.19, 1.30, and 3.4, for example.