Paraclausithyron

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Paraclausithyron is a motif in Greek and especially Augustan love elegy, in which the speaker as lover stands outside the beloved's locked door and complains that he cannot get in. Catullus (67) engages the door in dialogue; Horace offers a less-than-serious lament in Odes 3.10; Tibullus (1.2) appeals to the door itself; in Propertius (1.16), the door is the sole speaker. In Ovid's Amores (1.6), the speaker claims he would gladly trade places with the door keeper, a slave who is shackled to his post. In the Metamorphoses, the famous wall (invide obstas) with its chink (vitium) that separates the star-crossed lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, seems to be an extension of this motif. The appeal of the paraclausithyron derives from its condensing of the situation of love elegy to the barest essentials: the lover, the beloved and the obstacle, allowing poets to ring variations on a basic theme.