Loud and Proud: The Voice of the Praeco in Roman Love-Elegy

Our record of Roman love-poetry, from Catullus on into Propertius and Tibullus and finally Ovid, shows a preference for ‘countercultural’ idioms. These authors switch between voices and vocabularies, as does Horace, the other great first-person poet of the Augustan period. But the love-poet persona builds heavily on subverting the idioms deemed appropriate for freeborn elite Roman males (military language, triumphal imagery, prayer formulas, legalese), and embracing alternative modes of expression (emotional outbursts, passive or submissive behaviour, metaphors of slavery and torture). The techniques of Roman rhetorical training might seem to belong in the first category. However, I propose that we include a different, more scurrilous brand of ‘rhetoric’ in the second category: that of the "praeco" (herald or auctioneer).