Introspection and Engagement in Propertius : A Study of Book 3

Argues that Propertius' third book re-invents Latin love-elegy, in competition with Horatian lyric and Virgilian epic, as part of an ambitious claim to Augustan pre-eminence. Uses detailed readings of individual elegies to explore elegy's engagement with emerging Augustan mores.

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.