Elegiac couplets in the context of "Catullus"

The Parilia or Palilia was an ancient Roman festival of rural character performed annually on 21 April, aimed at cleansing both sheep and shepherd. It was carried out in acknowledgment to the Roman deity Pales, a deity of uncertain gender who was a patron of shepherds and sheep.

Ovid describes the Parilia at length in the Fasti, an elegiac poem on the Roman religious calendar, and implies that it predates the founding of Rome (753 BC in the Varronian chronology), as indicated by its pastoral and preagricultural concerns. During the Republic, farming was idealized and central to Roman identity, so the festival took on a more generally rural character. Increasing urbanization caused the rustic Parilia to be reinterpreted rather than abandoned, as Rome was an intensely traditional society. During the Imperial period, the date was celebrated as the birthday of Rome (Latin: dies natalis Romae or natalis Urbis).

Xenophanes of Colophon (/zəˈnɒfəniːz/ zə-NOF-ə-neez; Ancient Greek: Ξενοφάνης ὁ Κολοφώνιος [ksenopʰánɛːs ho kolopʰɔ̌ːnios]; c. 570 – c. 478 BC) was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer. He was born in Ionia and travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early classical antiquity.

As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his work survive in quotations by later philosophers and literary critics.

The Aetia (Ancient Greek: Αἴτια, romanized: Aitia, lit. 'causes') is an ancient Greek poem by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus. As an aetiological poem, it presents a large collection of origin myths in four books of elegiac couplets. Although the poem cannot be precisely dated, scholars estimate it was probably composed between 270 and 240 BC.

Emerging from a tradition of writing going back to the poems of Homer, the Aetia provides the earliest source for almost every myth it relates. The stories of Books 1 and 2 have a dialectic structure, wherein characters engage in a discussion or debate. Books 3 and 4 offer a diverse range of linked dramatic settings. Two poems dedicated to Berenice II of Egypt—Victory of Berenice and Lock of Berenice—bookend the poem's second half.

Amores (Latin: Amōrēs, lit. 'The Loves') is Ovid's first completed book of poetry, written in elegiac couplets. It was first published in 16 BC in five books, but Ovid, by his own account, later edited it down into the three-book edition that survives today. The book follows the popular model of the erotic elegy, as made famous by figures such as Tibullus or Propertius, but is often subversive and humorous with these tropes, exaggerating common motifs and devices to the point of absurdity.

While several literary scholars have called the Amores a major contribution to Latin love elegy, they are not generally considered among Ovid's finest works and "are most often dealt with summarily in a prologue to a fuller discussion of one of the other works".