Tecta libido : les avatars de l’épigramme érotique dans la latinité tardive

This paper offers an overview of the epigrams on love and sex contained in the main collections of late-antique Latin profane epigrams (Ausonius, Epigrammata Bobiensia, Ennodius, Anthologia Latina). In general, sexual matters are mostly treated in scoptic or satirical epigrams, with a clear preference for vicious practices, grotesque characters or abnormal behaviours (including bestiality) and a taste for indecent and even disgusting details. However, sexual topics are rarely conveyed by verbal obscenity. Among love epigrams, gnomic or epideictic poems prevail, and love experience is more often intellectualized than narrated or described. Only few epigrams focus on the pleasures of eros and sex: otherwise, love is most often longing than satisfaction, or it causes suffering, regret or unfulfilled desire; and carnality appears to be viewed with a tinge of distrust or even (as in some poems of the Salmasian Anthology) of sexophobia.