Paraclausithyron

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A Paraklausithyron ( Greek παρα κλαυσι θυρον - crying / complaining at the door ) is a lament that a lover introduces to his beloved in front of the locked door . The term was coined by Plutarch for his philosophical text About love ( Erotikos 8.2 = Moralia 753 a / b).

Typical elements

Typical elements are a lover ( Latin: exclusus amator ) as the lyrical self of the lament, who usually comes drunk from a feast (which is why he takes the twisted wreath of the drinker from his head and hangs it on the door of his beloved) and demands admission to his girlfriend at night , the locked door and the lover who cannot or cannot let him in because of brittleness, greed, infidelity or because of the circumspection of her jealous husband. The lover now sits on the threshold, which is usually described as particularly tough, and tries to use his lament to move either the door or the lover to open it. The Epicurean argument is regularly used that the beloved should let him in because life is too short to forego enjoyment .

The Paraklausithyron in ancient poetry

Greek poetry

The motif was very popular in ancient Greek poetry . After the first approaches, for example in Alcaios of Lesbos and in the comedies of Aristophanes , the full image of the Paraclausithyron did not develop until Hellenism ; B. in the poetry of Theocrit or Callimachus and in the epigrams of Asklepiades , who asks a handsome boy to let him in. Some researchers suggest an influence of the subject on the biblical Song of Songs ( Song of Songs 5.2 to 8  EU on).

Latin poetry

It was revived and varied in the Roman love strategy of the first century BC. For example, Catullus and Carmen 67 wrote a paraklausithyron as a dialogue with the front door, which reports gossip stories about the love life of the house residents to the less urgent and more curious poet. In Tibullus' elegy Adde merum (I, 2), the poet first wants to numb his pain by drinking wine, then soften the heart of his beloved Delia by magic , until finally he threatens the reader who smiles at these comical exertions who laughs at the aberrations of youth in love, will fall in love in old age and behave even more undignified. Ovid finally expanded the motif by the lover in Amores , I, 6 addressing not the door or the mistress, but the doorman , which offers the opportunity for a socio-historically interesting description of this class of slaves . In Multa diuque tuli ( Amores , III, 11), he describes how he was found sitting on the threshold of his girlfriend Corinna's current lover, when he left the house after a night of love with her. After this humiliating experience, he terminates love in the form of the love god Amor and thus also the love poetry of further allegiance. In his Ars amatoria , too , Ovid plays with the motifs of the paraclausithyron. Finally, Properz reverses the motif in his Elegy Quae fueram (I, 16) insofar as the door itself complains here, which has been sung by too many excluded lovers.

Horace also wrote a Paraklausithyron with his Ode Extremum Tanain (III, 10), but unlike the Elegians, he did not play a semi-ironic literary game with the motif, but took the subject more seriously again and invited it with numerous scholarly allusions in the sense of Poeta doctus poetically.

literature

  • Erich Burck : From the image of man in Roman literature , Heidelberg 1966
  • Frank Olin Copley : Exclusus Amator. A Study in Latin Love Poetry , Madison 1959
  • Niklas Holzberg : The Roman power of love. An introduction , Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, 2nd edition 2001
  • Hans Peter Syndic: Catullus. An interpretation. Second part: The great poems (61 - 68) , Scientific Book Society Darmstadt 1990
  • C. Yardley: The Elegiac Paraklausithyron , Eranos 76 (1978), pp. 19-34