La gelosia delle donne nella poesia d’amore latina: alcuni esempi di analogie situazionali (e divergenze) fra teatro comico e ‘comunicazione’ elegiaca

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the emotion of jealousy as associated with female characters in Latin love elegy, especially through select poems of Propertius and Ovid (Cynthia, Arethusa, Corinna, and Hypsipyle). Building on the studies of James McKeown, Elaine Fantham, David Konstan, and Ruth Rothaus Caston, I focus on the similarities and differences between Roman elegy and Latin comedy and mime, taking into account Ovid’s words (Tr. 2.497-514) about farce and the typology of adultery mimes. My discussion of select passages from Propertius and Ovid demonstrates that the portrayal of female jealousy in these authors is not a simple reproduction of that emotion on the Roman stage or an accurate depiction of it, mirroring real life; rather, it is closely connected to the literary background of the elegiac readers and to their sophisticated engagement with the poets’ own response to the discourse on jealousy in Roman culture.