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Written Women: Propertius' Scripta Puella*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Maria Wyke
Maria Wyke
Affiliation:
The Queen's College, Oxford/Newnham College, Cambridge
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Extract

The narrative organization of Propertius' first poetry-book seems to encourage a practice of reading the characters and events of his love elegy as real. The predominantly autobiographical mode allows the reader to equate the lover of the text with the author Propertius. Direct addresses to a beloved ‘Cynthia’ who is allocated physical and psychological characteristics suggest that the narrative's female subject has a life outside the text as Propertius' mistress. The illusion of a real world populated by real individuals is then sustained by various other formal mechanisms such as the regular deployment of addresses to the historically verifiable figure of Tullus or occasional references to the landscape of Baiae, Umbria and Rome. Having established a recognizable setting, the poetry-book seems even to account for its own existence as literary discourse with the claim that composition is a method of courtship. Writing is subsumed within and subordinated to an erotic scheme: Propertius writes to woo a woman.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 77 , November 1987 , pp. 47 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Maria Wyke 1987. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 See e.g. Fedeli, P., Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 3 (1981), 227–42.Google Scholar

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9 Lyne, 140, justifies the brevity of his survey of books 3 and 4 on the grounds that they are no longer Cynthia-centred, but does not remark on the discrepancy between his accounts of books 1 and 2. Cf. the priority given to the Monobiblos over book 2 in Stahl, Propertius.

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13 For such attempts to construct a physique for Cynthia out of her poetic features see M. Wyke in Averil Cameron (ed.), History as Text (forthcoming).

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36 Contrast Lieberg, op. cit. (n. 31), 265. To sustain a role for Cynthia as Muse in 2. 10, he was obliged to reintroduce Cynthia as a Kreatur Amors.

37 These are the only two relations to poetic production the puella is allowed by Stahl, , Propertius, 172Google Scholar.

38 2. 11. 1. I.

39 2. 11.6.

40 2. 12. 23.

41 2. 12. 24.

42 For the interrelation of poems in the Propertian corpus including the pairing of 2. 11 with 2. 12 see Ites, M., De Propertii Elegiis inter se conexis (1908).Google Scholar

43 2. 11.

44 Although two of the MSS attach 2. 11 to the previous poem, the consensus of Propertian criticism reads the six lines as an epigram. Boucher, Etudes sur Properce, 354 notes that in the Propertian corpus epigrammatic poems occur elsewhere only at the ends of books.

45 Two such poems are attributed to Callimachus (AP 7. 415 and 525), and one is concerned with Callimachus' Aetia (AP 7. 42). See King, op. cit. (n. 27), 79.

46 ibid.

47 For doctus as a term in the Augustan literary critical vocabulary see Fedeli, P., Properzio: II Libra Terzo (1985), 620Google Scholar on ‘docte Menandre’ of Prop. 3. 21. 28.

48 Cf. Veyne, op. cit. (n. 2), 73 for this play on doctus and the Propertian game of treating his literary creation as a well-lettered girl.

49 2. 12. 1–12.

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52 2. 12. 13–16.

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56 Richardson, op. cit. (n. 6), 247 compares Cat. 43. 2 and Horace, , Odes I. 32Google Scholar. 11.

57 1. 7. 19.

58 Hor., Sat. 1. 10. 58–9.

59 Cf. Amores 3. 1. 8 where the personification Elegia is provided with unequal feet to match the unevenness of elegiac verse; and for this polemical use of the female body see Wyke in History as Text (forthcoming).

60 2.13. 1–8

61 See L. P. Wilkinson, CR 16 (1966), 142.

62 Aetia fr. 1. 27; Virgil, Ecl. 6. 67. See King, op. cit. (n. 27), 83.

63 See e.g. Lyne, , Love Poets, 137Google Scholar, where he refers to 13B and thus accepts without comment the subdivision attributed to Broekhuyzen in Barber, op. cit. (n. 7).

64 As Rothstein, op. cit. (n. 29), 289–90: Enk, 179; Camps, op. cit. (n. 18), 115.

65 As Wimmel, op. cit. (n. 10), 41 n. 1; Wilkinson, CR 16 (1966), 141–4; Ross, Backgrounds, 34–5; King, op. cit. (n. 27), 84; Williams, , Figures of Thought, 125–8Google Scholar.

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68 2. 13. 9–14.

69 As Wilkinson, 142–3.

70 Williams, 128.

71 King, 84.

72 Eel. 6. 71.

73 See D'Anna, G., Athenaeum 59 (1981), 288–9.Google Scholar

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76 Eel. 6. 30.

77 Eel. 6. 3. For the employment of Cynthius as a key Callimachean term by Virgil see W. Clausen, AFPh 97 (1976), 245–7, and now Virgil's ‘Aeneid’ and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (1987), 3; for Cynthia as a subsequent development see Boyancé, P., L'influence grecque sur la poésie latine (1956), 172–5.Google Scholar

78 The Zusammenhang of 2. 10–13 was observed by Ites, , De Propertii Elegiis (1908), 26–7Google Scholar and accepted as part of his schema for book 2 by Juhnke, , Hermes 99 (1971), 104 and 112.Google Scholar

79 My purpose here will not be to argue a full case for the unity of book 2 but to offer reasons for the place of poems 2. 10–13 within a poetry-book.

80 Lachmann, K., Sex. Aurelii Propertii Carmina (1816), xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar and cf. O. Skutsch, HSPh 79 (1975), 229–33.

81 The existence of such a long-term plan does not necessitate the simultaneous publication of all three volumes as was suggested by Williams, G., Tradition and Originality (1968), 480–95.Google Scholar

82 op. cit. (n. 10), 193 and 188 n. 1.

83 The revised three-book edition of the Amores has also been compared for its similarly lengthy middle book by W. R. Nethercut, ICS 5 (1980), 94–109.

84 Hutchinson, G. O., JRS 74 (1984), 100.Google Scholar