TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

described by Christine Brooke-Rose. She finds two surprising, if not analogous, themes
in the Homage. Brooke-Rose argues that what it is that makes the Homage ―the real point
of entry to the Cantos‖ is their treatment of love as ―a generous, joyous, heedless thing‖
as well as ―the underworld Persephone theme.‖
Pound's emphasis on the free love motif in Propertius coincides with the advent of
what JPVD Baldson describes as a sexual revolution in the last days of Republican
Rome. No longer did women conform to the stoic roles of dutiful daughter and patriotic
wife. That ethos discouraged displays of passion and longing; ―love‖ was relegated to the
bodily appetites, an impulse, that if indulged in for its own sake, would bring on a
particular kind of love madness. The degeneration of feminine ―prisca virtus‖ [preciosité]
that typified Propertius‘s rendering of Cynthia came as the consequence of the expenses
incurred through Rome‘s twenty year war with Carthage. This war constituted a
courtesan class and a concomitant sentimental revolution concerning the inferiority of
women. Catullus was the first of the Roman elegists to note the new roles women played
in Roman society by giving his affair with Lesbia an apt rendering in the psychology of
emotional engagement. Love, for Catullus, is not an accident or madness to be avoided.
Lesbia is her own person. She is an object of deserved tenderness and affection. With her,
Catullus: ―can contemplate a permanent alliance‖ (Sullivan 50). Propertius and Catullus
were romantic lovers; tender, and admiring ―[t]heir mistresses [as] their equals, if not, as
Propertius pretends, their superiors. They are valuable not simply as beauties, but as
possible friends and intellectual companions‖ (Sullivan 50). Ovid, the last of the
Republican elegists, obscures this romantic ethos of equality by returning to an older
system of sexual cynicism. His Ars Amatoriae is really a satire of love focusing on
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