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Chapter 2 - Rus in Urbe

Virgilian Pastoral in Propertius 4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2024

Donncha O'Rourke
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

The antiquarian interests of Propertius 4 introduce a series of vignettes of early Rome (elegies 4.1, 4.4, 4.9, 4.10), and several further poems include rustic or quasi-rustic loca amoena in less likely contexts (a marine locale in 4.6, an urban park in 4.8). This chapter investigates how these passages engage elegy in an encounter with the genre of pastoral as codified in Virgil’s Eclogues, expanded in the Georgics and inserted in the antiquarian Aeneid. The politics of this encounter are urgent, pastoral being a vehicle of the Augustan ‘Golden Age’, but also inherently evanescent and ‘elegiac’. No less urgent are its poetics, pastoral being a lowly erotic genre like elegy, but also capable of cosmic and epic flights (as in Eclogue 6, notwithstanding its recusatio of epic themes – a tension closely tracked in elegy 4.6 on Actium). This ‘upward mobility’ is another respect in which pastoral is, arguably, analogous to elegy in its late-Propertian phase (if not earlier in the lost work of Gallus, an ‘absent presence’ here). Propertius’ recurrent loca amoena (which are not as idyllic as their name suggests) are thus spaces of generic negotiation in which ideology is never far away.

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Chapter
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Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
Elegy after 19 BC
, pp. 60 - 120
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Rus in Urbe
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.002
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  • Rus in Urbe
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.002
Available formats
×

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.

  • Rus in Urbe
  • Donncha O'Rourke, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
  • Online publication: 28 November 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651745.002
Available formats
×