| dc.description.abstract | This chapter explores specific figures and words associated with the role of the beloved in ancient literature. One of the most prominent of these roles is that of Latin love poetry’s puella (Lat. ‘girl’); it therefore offers a natural point of depar-ture for this chapter’s investigation. The puella resembles and is indeed in current scholarship commonly compared to the figure ofthe meretrix (Lat. ‘prostitute’) of Attic New/Roman comedy, who may also be an object of love. However, the con-spicuous contrast between the frequent occurrence of the word meretrix in com-edy and the virtual absence of this word from Latin love poetry suggests that the puella may also be fruitfully compared to other figures of the beloved. In this re-gard, the etymologically linked word puer (Lat. ‘boy’), which appears in that same poetry also in reference to beloved persons, emerges as particularly rele-vant, especially as both Latin terms may correspond to the Greek gender-inclu-sive word παῖς (‘child’), which can also denote the beloved in Greek poetry. As will be argued, a pursuit of the etymologically linked designations of both male and female objects of love – in both Greek and Latin – offers a fresh perspective on the striking figure of the puella in Latin love literature, which arguably helps us to interpret her as an embodiment of a particularly significant moment in the history of literature in the West. | en_US |
