“Conquered nations mean nothing in love”: Political Dissent in Propertius's Elegy II.7 and Donne's “Love's Warre”

Summary

ALTHOUGH many scholars and critics have noted Ovid's influence on John Donne's Elegies, few have observed in detail the debt these poems also owe to Propertius. Born about fifteen years before Ovid, Sextus Propertius wrote four volumes of elegies in which the speaker—between other sporadic adventures—sings of the joys and the hardships he experiences in his affair with Cynthia, a married woman. But behind the anxious language of love lies assertively irreverent political commentary. By most estimates, Propertius lived between 50 B.C. and 2 B.C., a time of epic political upheaval in Rome. When he was born Rome was still a republic; by his fifth birthday Julius Caesar had defeated the Pompeians in Spain, declaring himself to be the sole ruler of all Roman lands; as Propertius approached manhood, he witnessed the end of the Roman Republic and the onset of two more civil wars when the Caesarians (Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus) defeated the Republicans (led by Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero) in 42 B.C. Octavian then conquered his fellow triumvirs to claim Caesar's title, culminating in his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C. Once Octavian acquired the title Augustus in 27 B.C., he began transferring more power to himself and dispatching troops to strengthen the borders. While poets such as Virgil praised Augustus for his strength, other poets such as Propertius and his younger friend Ovid sneered at the new Caesar's megalomania. Mocking Virgil's epic dactylic hexameters, Propertius and Ovid criticize Augustus with the elegy, a genre borrowed from the Greek Hellenistic period that limpingly alternates between hexameter and pentameter.