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Chapter 3 - Shades of Dido

The Virgilian Women of Propertius 4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2024

Donncha O'Rourke
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
Elegy after 19 BC
, pp. 121 - 199
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Shades of Dido
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.003
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  • Shades of Dido
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Shades of Dido
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.003
Available formats
×