Through a broad history of the interpretation of Pauline letters, the chapter highlights a difference between their earliest understanding as authoritative and scripture-like, and Enlightenment readings when they became valued for their historical worth. Both during and following the Enlightenment, issues surrounding the letters became relevant, such as authorship, provenance, language style, and social-political context. In addition, scholars like F.C. Baur and others mined the letters they deemed authentic for what they might reveal about Early Christianity. Yet the methodologies adopted to assess a letter’s authenticity (authorship) and historical reliability were variously flawed and very often circular, with the result that the scholarship reified a subjective an and unsubstantiated history. Criteria of authenticity reveal Pauline favoritism. The interpretation of Pauline letters as genuine correspondence can be attributed in large part to the flawed interpretation of the nineteenth-century scholar Adolf Deissmann. While rejecting Deissmann’s underlying and determinative rationale, NT scholars nonetheless carried forward his overall assessment of the letters as genuine correspondence.

Propertius’ self-proclamation as the ‘Roman Callimachus’ in elegy 4.1 is something of a provocation in a poem and book of Vigilian epicizing ambition – a provocation staged in Horos’ immediate reassertion of a doctrinaire interpretation of Callimachean programmatics. This chapter unpacks these apparent tensions chiefly through exploration of Propertius’ attention to Virgil’s prior programme of Callimachean allusion: thus elegies 4.3, 4.6 and 4.11 recycle Virgil’s use of the Coma Berenices to mediate Caesar’s catasterism; 4.6 reconstitutes the Callimachean hymns that lie behind the shield of Aeneas; 4.9 identifies the rival Callimachean and Apollonian models that Virgil unites in Aeneas’ visit to the future site of Rome; and the book as a whole is peppered with scholarly readings of Virgil’s learnedness. In this way Propertius 4 shows that Callimachus was always already a patriotic poet (despite the tendentiousness of the Roman recusatio), that Virgil had his own claim to Callimachean (and so to Propertian) refinement, and that genre does not preclude an elegist from Virgilian themes (hence Propertius’ obsessive matching of Virgilian and Callimachean stichometries and line-counts).

Drawing together and supplementing the structural and stichometric parallels observed beween Propertius and Virgil so far, this chapter refreshes an old debate about the genesis of Book 4 with the argument that the collection builds into itself a carefully designed Virgilian architecture. Or rather, architectures: Propertius 4 vacillates beween a ten-unit bucolic substructure and a twelve-unit epic superstructure; like the Georgics and the whole Virgilian corpus that encloses that work, it locates at its centre a Callimachean ‘Victoria Caesaris’, complete with Apolline temple; and in the ostensibly ‘Iliadic’ 4.7 and ‘Odyssean’ 4.8 it inverts the Homeric diptych of the two hexads of the Aeneid, but in a way that also recognizes the Virgilian sequence and how it is blurred. Symbolic of this protean book is Vertumnus in elegy 4.2, the shapeshifting god whose loquacious statue – the work of the Mamurius who fabricated the eleven copies of Numa’s legendary shield – not only replicates, en abyme, the book’s range of Virgilian lexis, but also encodes its Virgilian structure. A coda to the chapter shows that Ovid repeatedly draws on Vertumnus as ambassador of metamorphic elegiac-epic poetics.

Propertius’ elegies on the rise of Rome (4.1), the treachery of Tarpeia (4.4), the Battle of Actium (4.6) and the spoils thrice dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius (4.10) boast ostensibly triumphant and teleological narratives that have little by way of elegiac sensibility. Yet this chapter argues that Propertius accesses via Virgil’s Aeneid alternative and less self-assured histories based on repetition and defeat. A locus for this tension betweeen linear and circular chronology is the shield of Aeneas, with its presentation of historical scenes up to Actium, an ecphrasis that Propertius recasts (with an eye on its notionally static and spatial properties) in his own description of Actium in elegy 4.6. The shield features also in elegy 4.4 to associate Tarpeia’s treachery with the Gallic sack of Rome, a historical ‘interpenetration’ much in keeping with Virgilian technique. In 4.10 further intertextuality with the Aeneid multiplies the canonical three dedications of spolia opima in a way that destabilizes the institutionalized Augustan history of Jupiter Feretrius. Ultimately, Propertius’ reading of Virgil implies that not even Rome is immune to the vicissitudes of an elegiac history.

Despite elegy’s newfound aetiological and epicizing strains in Propertius 4, the book is a veritable chorus of female voices: Arethusa, Tarpeia, Acanthis and Cornelia join Cynthia (in her belated return) to articulate private sentiment and personal experience in the patriarchal world of which, dead or moribund, they are collatoral damage. This chapter explores how Propertius connects his female cast (which includes cameos also from the legendary Cassandra, a priestess of the Bona Dea, and Cleopatra) with the women of Virgil’s Aeneid, who likewise are evanescent (yet never silenced) victims. Chief among these heroines is the ‘elegiac’ Dido, her volubility in life and silence in the underworld refracted in the monologues of Arethusa, Tarpeia and Cynthia. Present too throughout the book are Dido’s Virgilian analogues (e.g., Camilla, Cleopatra and, perhaps, Helen), while the action of the Aeneid as a whole, from the sack of Troy to the Latin war and death of Turnus, are variously rewritten – by Propertius and Horos in opposing programmes, by Cynthia in the militia amoris of her last hurrah and by Cornelia, in whose ghostly allusion to the Danaids echo the final lines of the Aeneid.

The antiquarian interests of Propertius 4 introduce a series of vignettes of early Rome (elegies 4.1, 4.4, 4.9, 4.10), and several further poems include rustic or quasi-rustic loca amoena in less likely contexts (a marine locale in 4.6, an urban park in 4.8). This chapter investigates how these passages engage elegy in an encounter with the genre of pastoral as codified in Virgil’s Eclogues, expanded in the Georgics and inserted in the antiquarian Aeneid. The politics of this encounter are urgent, pastoral being a vehicle of the Augustan ‘Golden Age’, but also inherently evanescent and ‘elegiac’. No less urgent are its poetics, pastoral being a lowly erotic genre like elegy, but also capable of cosmic and epic flights (as in Eclogue 6, notwithstanding its recusatio of epic themes – a tension closely tracked in elegy 4.6 on Actium). This ‘upward mobility’ is another respect in which pastoral is, arguably, analogous to elegy in its late-Propertian phase (if not earlier in the lost work of Gallus, an ‘absent presence’ here). Propertius’ recurrent loca amoena (which are not as idyllic as their name suggests) are thus spaces of generic negotiation in which ideology is never far away.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.