Hopeful Poetry: Tibullus's Spes and Her Literary Lineage

This paper shows how Spes in Tibullus II 6 is a literary construct re-elaborating Greek models (Hesiod, Theognis) and how the allusion to these is intertwined with and signposted by co-occurring allusions to other authors (Theocritus, Apollonius). The result of such stratified intertextuality is Tibullus’s appropriation of disparate literary portrayals of ‘hope’ to the code of Roman love elegy.