This book examines the love elegies of the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid from the point of view of the way the meanings attributed to the poems arise out of the interests and preoccupations of the cultural situation in which they are read. It combines detailed discussions of individual poems with discussion and criticism of a variety of sophisticated modern theoretical approaches. It thus aims to advance the argument not only in the field of elegy, but also in issues such as gender, ideology and the theory of reading.