Introspection and Engagement in Propertius

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.