Introspection and Engagement in Propertius

By Jonathan Wallis

Propertius re-invents Latin love-elegy in his third collection. Nearly a decade into the Augustan principate, the early counter-cultural impulse of Propertius' first collections was losing its relevance. Challenged by the publication of Horace's Odes, and by the imminent arrival of Virgil's Aeneid, in 23 BCE Propertius produced a radical collection of elegy which critically interrogates elegy's own origins as a genre, and which directly faces off Horatian lyric and Virgilian epic, as part of an ambitious claim to Augustan pre-eminence. But this is no moment of cultural submission. In Book 3, elegy's key themes of love, fidelity, and political independence are rebuilt from the beginning as part of a subtle critique of emerging Augustan mores. This book presents a series of readings of fourteen individual elegies from Propertius Book 3, including nostalgic love poems, an elegiac hymn to Bacchus, and a lament for Marcellus, the recently-dead nephew of Augustus.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1108417175
• ISBN13: 9781108417174
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.8"