Patricia Johnson, in her study (1996) of Metamorphoses 5, points out that Ovid departs from more traditional depictions of the deities of love in elegiac poetry by conflating Roman political aggression with mythical sexual aggression, and by constructing Venus' role in the rape [of Proserpina] through allusions to poetic as well as political works, primarily the Aeneid, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and Cicero's Verrines. Venus's is a boundless imperium sexuale, the flipside of what Leslie Cahoon (1988) calls the Roman libido dominandi, the drive to conquer. [...] [In Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae,] Venus also appropriates the language of war, e.g., subagere and ducere triumpho - an Ovidian maneuver, whereby a typical elegiac technique that draws from the epic tradition is transplanted back with an imperialist flavor into epic. But recognizing the intervening medium of elegy is necessary for appreciating this warlike Venus. Deployed in Ovid's elegy, the metaphor of love as war can achieve such power because of the inherent ontological irony (though opposites, love and war describe each other) and the generic tension (the epic in the elegiac). Genre as a literary institution normalizes certain uses of language as "proper" or "natural" (that is naturalizing them as literal) and marks other uses as metaphorical. For example, "besieging" an enemy in an epic is literal, while "besieging" an unrequited love in an elegy is metaphorical. Moreover, the direction of signification in a particular metaphor is determined by genre as well. In elegiac poetry, which describes love in terms of war, the direction is from war to love, with martial signs "carried over" (metaphora) into the amorous realm. In Ovid's and Claudian's descriptions of Venus, however, the metaphor loses its existence as metaphor explicitly, for the determining institution of genre has been reversed: "love as war" now becomes "war as 'love as war.'" In other words, in the tautology of "war as war," a second-order metaphor (i.e., metaphor of a metaphor) masquerades as a literal expression that negates the intervening term of love. This maneuver teases the reader with the elusive direction of the metaphor - if there is even one - asking [them] to recognize the epic in the epic-in-elegy.
- from "Hellish Love: Genre in Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae," S-C Kevin Tsai; emphases mine















