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Notes on Propertius Books I and II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

S. J. Heyworth
S. J. Heyworth
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
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Extract

I offer some notes on the text of Propertius. In the apparatus to individual passages Ω is employed to indicate the archetype, i.e. the consensus of N and A. Only two quires of A are extant, and after 2. 1. 63 its place is taken by descendants: F, L (2. 21. 3 ff.) and P. These derive more immediately from a manuscript of Petrarch (here called Π), copied from A in the Sorbonne in 1333, and now lost. The delta mss. (DVVo.) I discard; they are too interpolated and contaminated to aid in the reconstruction of Π. They may contain some elements of truth independent of N and A/Π, but J. L. P. Butrica has shown that another group of mss. headed by Vat. Lat. 3273 has a stronger claim to be cited in the apparatus for these readings, as it antedates Δ. However, as the matter is controversial and not of vital importance for my discussions, the group is here ignored. In the absence of a satisfactory arrangement of the humanistic conjectures into groups akin to those introduced by Mynors in his Catullus, I use the age-old catch-all ς for unauthoritative readings found in fifteenth-century mss.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , December 1984 , pp. 394 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1984

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References

1 Unpublished Toronto thesis, 1978: ‘The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius’. The University of Toronto Press advertises a forthcoming revised version, Phoenix Supplementary Volume 17.

2 Oxford, 1958.

3 The epigraph of Ezra Pound's Mauberley.

4 CQ 43 (1949), 23Google Scholar.

5 JPh 16 (1888), 33–4Google Scholar = Classical Papers (Cambridge, 1972), 52–3Google Scholar.

6 See Housman's article, CQ 3 (1909), 244–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar = CP 790–4.

7 Löfstedt, Einar, Vermischte Studien (Lund, 1936), 114–17Google Scholar argues that dolor can mean ‘Leidenschaft, Liebe’ in Propertius as perhaps in later authors. But I do not find late medieval manuscripts and late antique texts convincing evidence that Propertius would use a word indicating pain of a passion that is mutual.

8 The other is at 2. 26. 25.

9 Cf. Seneca, Contr. 6. 1Google Scholar for a similar play on fides.

10 CQ's referee informs me that in fact Leidens. B.P.L. 133A (Burman's primus Leidensis) immediately changed intonat to intonet; this suggests the reading was a slip not a conjecture. He also puts forward the view that one might correlate the two verbs by writing conueniant to match intonet and supports this by saying that a and u are perhaps easier to confuse than a and e. Sense, I think, supports the indicative; and the palaeographical point is without weight.

11 fugam stratosque is another possibility (cf. Ovid, , Met. 11. 394)Google Scholar; but et points the structure better.

12 According to Hanslik.

13 AJPh 100 (1979), 78Google Scholar.

14 Quoted by Vulpius ad loc. His interpretation, accepted by Burman, is close to mine, but they do not bring out the point that Propertius' offering marks a change in occupation rather than the success of a prayer.

15 See also Williams, G., Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry (Yale, 1980), 140–44Google Scholar. Whitaker, R., Myth and Personal Experience in Roman Love-Elegy (Göttingen, 1983), 101, esp. n. 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, draws attention to the repetition of forma and formosus throughout the poem.

16 Knoche, U. in Miscellanea Properziana (Atti dell' Accad. Properz. del Subasio – Assisi, 1957), 66Google Scholar; Hubbard, Margaret, Propertius (London, 1974), 53Google Scholar.

17 I owe sincere thanks to Professors Kenney and Sandbach for their encouragement and their critical comments on these notes, and also to the editors and referee of CQ.