Potere, differenza e questioni di genere nella poesia d’amore latina. Spunti per un confronto critico tra passato e presente

In Latin love poetry, the conventional male-female power relations that structure society are turned upside down. As is well known, the woman is the “mistress” (domina), the poet in love is her “slave” (servus): literature constructs a world upside down, as has long been recognized in critical studies. In this process of inversion, as we shall see, it is certainly possible to glimpse the emergence of alternative ethical models to the dominant ones, but one question remains open: does the power attributed to female figures in the love relationship actually offer a basis for rethinking gender differences, or does it end up reproducing the negative stereotypes of the feminine constructed and imposed by the male gaze? Some elegies of Propertius and some lyric poems from the fourth book of Horace’s Odes will be the case studies explored in this paper.