5 - An irregular in love's army: the problems of identification

Summary

What's ‘in’ a name? Cynthia in the elegies of Propertius is both a proper name and, as the first word of the first book, the title of the book as well, according to the convention of referring to books by their opening words. Just as arma, the first word of Virgil's Aeneid, serves as a title for the poem and as a generic marker (this poem has warfare as its theme and hence is an epic), so Cynthia serves as a generic marker in the poetry of Propertius (these poems have a woman as their theme and hence are love elegies). Thus in Propertius 1.7, the epic of Ponticus and the elegy of Propertius are differentiated and characterized respectively by the words arma (2, ‘weapons’) and domina (6, ‘mistress’), arma and Cynthia are both signifiers, but a subtle distinction emerges in the categorization of arma as a common noun and Cynthia as a proper noun. Whilst there is ready acceptance that arma can signify many things – weapons, warfare, epic poetry, the male genitalia – even that these can be interlocking links in a chain of signification, there is often reluctance to accept that Cynthia can do other than refer to a person. A so-called ‘proper’ noun seems to demand a single point or object of reference in a way that a ‘common’ noun does not. The derivation of the grammatical term from proprius (‘one's own’) seems to guarantee that the noun is an (or the) exclusive property of the person to whom it refers.