© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi � �. ��63/�5685�5X- � �34�389 Mnemosyne 70 (�0 �7) �05�-�058 brill.com/mnem Tibullus’ Comedy A note on Tib. 1.2.87-98 Christopher V. Trinacty Oberlin College, Dept. of Classics ctrinact@oberlin.edu Received November 2016 | Accepted February 2017 The connections between Latin love elegy and Roman comedy have been broadly sketched,1 and the particulars of those connections made up one of the fiercest philological debates at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Comedy surely does influence scenes, characters, tropes, and particular poems of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid; this paper highlights an instance in the poetry of Tibullus that stresses his specific interaction with the tropes of Roman comedy.3 Elegy 1.2 offers evidence for Tibullus’ self-conscious creation of a co- medic situation that evokes the world of the stage in order to further his own self-definition as an elegiac poet.4 The clear presence of metapoetic and me- tadramatic language helps to signpost Tibullus’ appropriation and adaptation 1  Cf. Yardley 1973; Griffin 1986, 198-210; James 1998; and Gibson 2005, 167: “Its heroes are fre- quently young lovers who typically operate in an urban context whose features are not made especially distinctive, and where the focus is on the private world of individuals rather than the contemporary world of politics … Roman comedy, particularly that of Plautus, places greater emphasis than its Greek counterpart on two features that are prominent also in love elegy: the alienation of the obsessed young lover from society (as represented by the older generation), and his rejection of war and the soldier.” 2  Cf. Smith 1913, 23 n. 1 and Thomas 1979, 179 for a summary of these arguments. 3  Even Luck 1959, 43 would give Plautus and Terence “a small place” on “the bookshelf of Propertius”. Piazzi 2013 offers a recent survey of all the genres that interact with elegy, al- though her discussion of comedy is notably short (two paragraphs). Cf. Yardley 1973 for com- edy and Propertius; Littlewood 1983 for Tibullus and comedy; Barsby 1996 for comedy and Ovid. Cf. Tib. 1.3.83-92 and Ter. Hau. 279-307 for another notable echo. 4  Bright 1978, 146 notes of this poem and of this section in particular: “It is the liveliest vignette in the entire poem, redolent of the world of comedy.”