Amores 1.1, as usually understood, ends in a way that seems a little flat: after an amusing account of how falling in love made him turn from epic to elegy, the poet concludes by ponderously invoking an elegiac muse.Footnote ¹ In this note I will argue that the ending is more entertaining, and more significant: the muse invoked in the last couplet, who is to inspire the poems to come, is none other than Corinna herself.Footnote ²

Readers have always enjoyed the first part of the poem, with its mock recusatio, its inventive joke about metre,Footnote ³ and its indignant complaint to Cupid. The poet presents himself as a would-be epic poet, wanting only to be left alone with his manly pursuits. Cupid, he says, should mind his own business, but instead he keeps messing up the poet's hexameters and turning them into elegiac couplets (lines 5–18). On top of that our poet has no one to love, whether male or female, and thus nothing to write elegy about (lines 19–20). All this changes with a single arrow from Cupid (lines 21–4), and our poet is well and truly smitten: me miserum, certas habuit puer ille sagittas (line 25).

Scholars are divided on what exactly follows from that. The poet says that he is on fire, and that Love reigns in his empty heart: uror et in vacuo pectore regnat Amor (line 26). Some readers take pectus vacuum literally: although the poet is now a lover, his heart is still empty, so he must not be in love with anyone in particular.Footnote ⁴ On this view we have an amusing paradox: like St Augustine and millions of teenagers since, our poet is in love with love.Footnote ⁵ And indeed, on this reading, the poet is less interested in love itself than with its consequences for his career as a poet. Having been converted from epic to elegy, all our poet wants is help from an appropriate muse (lines 27–30).

But Wilfried Stroh, followed by John Barsby and John Moles, argued that the poet's pectus vacuum is merely his ‘hitherto empty heart’.Footnote ⁶ This seems to me clearly right: when a poet has been shot by Cupid's arrow, and is now miserable and aflame, we infer quite naturally that his ‘empty heart’ is a heart that is empty no longer.Footnote ⁷ As Moles points out, this interpretation is supported by a parallel phrase in the next poem, in which the poet says again that he has been shot by Cupid and that, therefore, love now burns in his ‘occupied heart’.Footnote ⁸ In both passages, as Stroh pointed out, vacuus alludes to the technical vocabulary of the law of property: love has taken possession of a place that was once, but is no longer, available for occupation.Footnote ⁹

This understanding of pectus vacuum has important consequences. All the poet tells us, to be sure, is that he has fallen in love and thus has changed his poetic project. But if he is indeed in love with a particular person – if his heart is not really empty any more – then the poet who lacked materia in lines 19–20 now has someone to write his poetry about. He concentrates, as we have seen, on the consequences of this for his poetry (lines 27–30). But his readers want to know the personal details: who has he fallen for, what's she (or he) like and, indeed, what about that question of sexual orientation?

If we approach the final couplet with these questions in mind, we see that it provides some answers: we may not learn many details about this new lover, but we now know that she is female, and that she is the poet's new inspiration. The poet is still fixated on the metrical implications of falling in love, and he thus concludes with his ponderous joke about the eleven feet with which his new muse will be celebrated. But this does not mean that we are supposed to forget about the girl. Propertius made Cynthia the starting point for his first book of elegies, and Ovid does much the same thing. Corinna is not in fact absent from Amores 1.1: she is the premise of the entire poem, and emerges in the final couplet as its addressee.

Ever since the Renaissance we have taken for granted that a poet might think of his mistress as his muse.Footnote ¹⁰ The Roman elegists thought along the same lines, but they were apparently more careful with their metaphors.Footnote ¹¹ Catullus and Propertius spoke of their mistresses (real or imaginary) as ‘goddesses’, who sometimes provided inspiration.Footnote ¹² Moreover, as Maria Wyke and Alison Keith have shown, Ovid and Propertius explore at length the associations of their mistresses with their poems.Footnote ¹³

But the Roman poets never come out and say that their lovers are their muses.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, they seem to play with that idea, inviting their readers to infer that their lovers, as poetic inspirations, are like the Muses of Pieria and Mt Helicon. Thus Propertius (like Tibullus and Gallus) chooses for his mistress a name associated with Apollo, and hints repeatedly at her similarity to a Muse, but he never actually calls her that.Footnote ¹⁵

Like his predecessors, Ovid sometimes compares his mistress to a goddess, though in some cases he is not thinking of Muses in particular.Footnote ¹⁶ Like Propertius, he can identify Corinna as his only source of inspiration (ingenium movit sola Corinna meum, Am. 3.12.16).Footnote ¹⁷ His choice of the name Corinna probably points, like Catullus’ Lesbia, in the same direction: Antipater of Thessalonica wrote an epigram exalting nine female poets of Greece as mortal analogues of the ‘real’ Muses.Footnote ¹⁸ And it has been observed that, when we first properly ‘meet’ Corinna herself in Amores 1.5, their physical relations are presented as an encounter with divine inspiration.Footnote ¹⁹

But the move at the end of Amores 1.1 is bolder still. The poet posits the existence of a new muse, particularly associated with elegiac couplets. But she is not a tenth Muse, but something intriguingly analogous: she is his poetic inspiration, and the girl he has fallen in love with.Footnote ²⁰