¹ The Propertius emphasized by, e.g., Veyne, P., Roman Erotic Elegy (1988)Google Scholar, passim, but especially chs 2, 3, and 4.

² As T. S. Eliot says of the Homage: ‘It is not a translation, it is a paraphrase, or still more truly (for the instructed) a persona. It is also a criticism of Propertius, a criticism which in a most interesting way insists upon an element of humour, or irony and mockery in Propertius, which Mackail and other interpreters have missed’ (Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot (1928), 19).

³ ‘How to read’, Literary Essays (1960), 25.

⁴ ‘A regrounding of the original in a contemporary sensibility’, as Sullivan, J. P. (Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (1964), 20) calls it.Google Scholar

⁵ As Auden points out in his essay ‘Reading’ (The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963), 3–4), ‘to read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally’.

⁶ The book is currently a very fashionable issue. Cf. Nunberg, G. ( ed. ), The Future of the Book (reviewed by D. P. Fowler, TLS 10 May 1996, 11–12)Google Scholar.

⁷ Even in the ancient world Horace reads Homer ethically (Epist. 1.2.1–5); Ovid playfully suggests that you could read both the Iliad and Odyssey as love stories (Trist. 2.374–82). Cf. U. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (1990): ‘The limits of interpretation coincide with the rights of the text.’

⁸ cf. Hutchinson, G. O., JRS 74 (1984), 99–106Google Scholar; McKeown, J., Commentary on Ovid's Amores (1987– ), Vol. IGoogle Scholar; Santirocco, M., Unity and Design in Horace's Odes (1986)Google Scholar.

⁹ cf. Brink, C. O., Horace On Poetry ii, ‘The Ars Poetica’(1971), 445–67Google Scholar; K. W. Gransden, Commentary on Virgil's Aeneid viii (1976), 4–11. As James Joyce, unsurprisingly privileging authorial intention over reader-power, said of Ulysses, ‘I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality’ (quoted by D. Bordwell, Making Meaning (1989), 249).

¹⁰ Like that suggested for Propertius by Dettmer, H. in Horace: a Study in Structure (1983)Google Scholar. Cf. the reviews by Hutchinson, G. O., (JRS 75 (1985), 313–14)Google Scholar, and by Syndikus, H. P. (Gnomon 57 (1985), 11–15)Google Scholar. Cf. also van Sickle, J., The Design of Virgil's Bucolics, Filologia e critica 24 (1978)Google Scholar, and the review by Nisbet, R. G. M. (JRS 69 (1979), 231)Google Scholar.

¹¹ cf. Nunberg, op. cit. (n. 6), 20: ‘Raffaele Simone… sees in the future of the book a dissolution of the membrane that has surrounded the historically constructed “closed text” – original, authorial, perfected, a space that resists all intrusion – and a return to the medieval notion of the “open text”, an object that is “penetrable, copiable, limitlessly interpretable”.’.

¹² Note the prominence, for example, of poetry and song in Virgil's Eclogues.

¹³ cf. Skutsch, O., CP 58 (1963), 239Google Scholar: ‘A symmetry such as that shown here arises neither by accident nor even by careful arrangement of matter created previously: a certain amount of writing must have been done to meet the demands of the symmetry intended.’ Skutsch gives his schema on p. 238. See also Camps on the arrangement of the contents in Book I (Commentary (1961), 10f.). M. Hubbard's remarks on this issue (Propertius (1974), 28–9) are characteristically perceptive: ‘The second half of the book is much less tightly knit. One motif is recurrent, the exploration of love in absence, but though recurrent it is not dominant. A letter to Cynthia at Baiae (11) establishes it, and it is then developed in two poems, one (12) probably to Ponticus …, one to Gallus (13); both poems have something mechanical about them, and there is something mechanical too in their placing, followed as they are by another once more contrasting Propertius with Tullus (14); this placing seems designed to link the two parts of the book … ’

¹⁴ Significantly, there is no equivalent for prima in Propertius' ‘model’, the Meleager epigram A.P. 12.101.

¹⁵ cf. 1.12.20: ‘Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit’. And indeed she will be. For, the last mention of Cynthia is in the elegy preceding the book's three-poem coda (cf. Skutsch, op. cit. (n. 13)), 1.19, where the poet envisages his own death. Note too that Cynthia ends Book 3, so that Books 1–3 retrospectively become a unit. On closure, see Fowler, D. P., M & D ( 1989), 75–122Google Scholar; also Roberts, D., Dunn, F. and Fowler, D. P. (eds), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (1997)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Cynthia comes from Cynthius, a cult title of Apollo, as is Tibullus' Delia. Gallus'xs Lycoris, from Lycoreus, is also a cult title of Apollo, notably in his poetical aspects, cf. Anderson, R. D., Nisbet, R. G. M., Parsons, P., JRS 69 (1979), 148Google Scholar.

¹⁷ cf. Martial 14.189: ‘Cynthia, iucundi carmen iuvenale Properti’. And if Cynthia is the book, then 1.2, in which the poet exhorts Cynthia to renounce cosmetics and luxurious adornment in favour of natural beauty, is a coded statement of adherence to Callimachean principles, cf. Callimachus, Iambus 3; cf. Ross, D., Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry (1975), 102Google Scholar n. 2. For the motif of make-up, see Prop. 1.15. Also A.P. 5.123 and Tib. 1.8.9–16. On the whole topic, see especially Wyke, M., JRS 77 (1987), 47–61Google Scholar. Also eadem, PCPhS 33 (1987), 153–78Google Scholar; Helios 16 (1989), 25–47Google Scholar; and in Cameron, A. (ed.), History as Text (1989), 111–43.Google Scholar

¹⁸ At 1.9.3 and 1.11.19.

¹⁹ For a similar stress in earlier Latin poetry, cf., e.g., Catullus I; Virgil, Eclogues 6.9–12; later, cf., e.g., Martial 1 Praef. 2 (with Howell), 118, 11.1, 108. The topic is much discussed. On Hellenistic bookishness, see, e.g., Bing, P., The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets, Hypomnemata 90 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Text: Fedeli unless otherwise stated.

²¹ The old conjecture vidi is preferable to the MS tradition's cogis here (dittography of cois).

²² Elsewhere in Book 2, in addition to nineteen occurrences of carmen and carmina and six of versus, there are the following references to books, tablets or pages: liber: 3.4, 24a. 1, 34.27. libellus: 13.25, 25.31. tabellae: 6.27, 20.33. pagina: 21.1, 34.89. And Book 2 as it stands is framed by two elegies (1 and 34) which state the poet's literary aims and intentions. Or do these poems top and tail two separate books, or the remains of two separate books? Lachmann's view (maintained by Hubbard, M., Propertius (1974), 41–2Google Scholar) was that 2.10 was the opening poem of a new, third book. S. J. Heyworth (diss., University of Cambridge (1986), 126ff.; and PLLS (1995), 165–85) also argues that Book 2 originally comprised two books, but that 2.10 was closural, and that a new book begins with 2.13. G. P. Goold (Loeb edn, 1990, 16ff.) agrees. But despite the mention at 2.13.25 of tres … libelli (possibly a reference to the first three books of Propertius' Elegies as we have them, see Hutchinson, op. cit. (n. 5)) the issue must remain sub iudice. (See now also R. O. A. M. Lyne in this present volume, pp. 21–37.)

Book 3 contains seven occurrences of carmen and carmina and two of versus as well as the following references to books, tablets, or pages: liber: 21.28. libellus: 2.17, 3.19, 9.43. tabellae: 23.1, 23.11. pagina: 1.18, 3.21, 25.17.

²³ All translations are by Guy Lee (1994).

²⁴ Seen. 15 above and pp. 53–4 below, with n. 91.

²⁵ formae is further repeated at 3.25.18. For the view that 3.24 and 3.25 constitute a single poem, see n. 90 below.

²⁶ cf. Gallus fr. 3: ‘maxima Romanae pars eris historiae’ (editio princeps: Anderson, R. D., Parsons, P. J., and Nisbet, R. G. M., JRS 69 (1979), 125–55)Google Scholar. Cf. E. Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets (1993), 265. For a full bibliography, see J. Blansdorf's 1995 Teubner of Fragmenta Poetarum Latinorum, 252–5.

²⁷ For some suggestions of book-arrangement in Callimachus' Aetia, see Kerkhecker, A., ZPE 71 (1988), 16ffGoogle Scholar. On the sequence of ‘Roman Odes’ in Horace, see the monograph by Witke, C., Horace's Roman Odes (1983)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Camps, , Commentary (1966), 4.Google Scholar

²⁹ After the Editio Aldina (1515), older editors (e.g., Muretus, Scaliger) print them as one poem on poetry and immortality, and Pound follows this in his Homage. The Editio Gryphiana (1573) detaches the opening couplet from 3.2 and makes it the final couplet of 3.1, and many editors find this attractive (Camps, ad loc. points out that this would leave 3.1 consisting of exactly 20 + 20 lines, and 3.2 exactly of 8 + 8 + 8). See also Rothstein, M., Die Elegien des Sextus Propertius (2nd edn, vol. I, 1920Google Scholar; vol. 2, 1924).

³⁰ Compare the opening and closing couplets of each:

3.4.1–2:

Arma deus Caesar dites meditatur ad Indos

et freta gemmiferi findere classe maris.

Caesar the God plans war with wealthy India,

To furrow with his fleet the pearl-bearing seas.

3.5.1–2:

Pacis Amor deus est, pacem veneramus amantes:

stat mihi cum domina proelia dura mea.

Love is the God of peace; we lovers venerate peace:

Enough for me tough battles with my mistress.

3.4.21–2:

praeda sit haec illis, quorum meruere labores:

me sat erit sacra plaudere posse Via.

The spoil be theirs whose hardships have deserved it;

I'll be content to applaud on the Sacred Way.

3.5.47–8:

exitus hic vitae superest mihi; vos, quibus arma

grata magis, Crassi signa referte domum.

For me life's outcome shall be this, but you to whom

Wars are more welcome, bring Crassus' standards home.

³¹ Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (1972), 76ff.

³² Cynthia is hinted at, though she is not actually named in this book until 3.21.9. Cf. 3.20.8, the girl's illustrious ancestry, with 2.13.10, Cynthia's illustrious ancestry.

³³ Significantly, Pound placed these two elegies first in his Homage.

³⁴ Via, at 3.1.14 and 3.1.18 (cf. Pindar, Paeans fr. 7b. 11–12, Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1. 25–8, Lucretius 1.926–7), initiates the notion of journey or voyage, cf. 3.21 and 3.22. The journey may be fatal, as at 3.7, infernal, as at 3.18, or mock-dangerous, as at 3.16. Book 3 itself is, of course, a kind of poetic journey (an investigation is, after all, a tracking). There are nineteen occurrences of via in the Book as a whole (Book 1 has six, Book 2 thirteen, Book 4 twelve). Via is, of course, a word that can be metaphorically applied not only to a way of life, but also to a way of poetry (OLD S. V. via §7, §10). Cf. also Becker, O., Das Bild des Weges und verwandte Vorstellungen im fruhgriechischen Denken, dissertation, University of Leipzig (1937).Google Scholar

³⁵ cf. 3.1.4: ‘Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros’. Propertius has inverted the order of precedence of Greek and Italian in the Horatian intertext, Odes 3.30.13–14:

princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos

deduxisse modos.

Horace claims as his achievement the formal blending of Greek with Italian rhythms. Propertius trumps this: he, so it would seem, is going to bring Italian content to Greek form. See Camps, ad loc.

³⁶ cf. 3.1.18 pagina nostra ∼ 3.25.17 mea pagina. In Book 4 Propertius goes on to explore Rome present and Rome past.

³⁷ The Callimachean aesthetic had taken an oppositional stance to the literary authority of epic and tragedy. When translated to Rome, this meshed with an oppositional stance to social and political authority: a choice of literary style could now also represent a choice of life style. Cf., e.g., F. Cairns, Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome (1979), 32–4.

³⁸ cf. Boyancé, P. in L'influence grecque sur la poésie latine de Catulle à Ovide, Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique ii, Fondation Hardt (1956), 184–93Google Scholar.

³⁹ At least, there appears to be a Greek form here. The reading is uncertain. The mss. read cythalinis, or something similar. Cytaeines is Hertzberg's conjecture (Medea is called Cytaeis at 2.4.7), and this is approved by Prinz, (WSt 54 (1936), 87)Google Scholar. Leo offers Cytaeiadis, which Fedeli finds attractive on the basis of Apoll. Rhod. 2.399, 4.511, and 2.1267. Other conjectures include Hertzberg's alternative Cytinaeis, read by Camps, and Guyet's Cytaeaeis.

⁴⁰ The concept of militia amoris is probably more Roman than Greek. Although the idea would seem already to have been in Gallus (cf. Virgil, Eclogues 10.44–5 with Coleman, and also Clausen, ad loc.) it was probably Propertius who further developed it. Cf. Spies, A., Militat omnis amans. Ein Beitrag zur Bildersprache der antiken Erotik, dissertation, University of Tübingen (1930)Google Scholar; Galinsky, K., WSt 82 (1969)Google Scholar; Baker, R. J., Latomus 27 (1968)Google Scholar; McKeown, on Ovid, Amores 1.9Google Scholar; also D. F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love (1993), 53ff.; and Gale, M. R., JRS 87 (1997), 77–91Google Scholar.

⁴¹ The very first elegy swiftly makes the point: V. 15 Ceres; V. 18 Priapus; V. 20 Lares; V. 36 Palem. On the diminution of Greek mythology in Tibullus, see Lightfoot, J., Parthenius, unpub. D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford (1995), 68Google Scholar.

⁴² The Book's opening sequence of five poems, with projections from more general reflections on poetry into a more specific manifesto and then into society, politics, and life, also bears an ironic relationship to Horace, , Odes 3.1–6Google Scholar, the Roman Odes, cf. Sullivan, J. P., Propertius: A Critical Introduction (1976), 12ff.Google Scholar, and Witke, op. cit. (n. 27). It is clear, too, that in 3.1 and 2 Propertius has his eye on Horace, , Odes 3.30Google Scholar. He caps Horace, however, by putting his claims to immortality at the start, not the end of the book. Such affinities with Horace incidentally suggest a (some-what shaky) terminus post quern for the book of 23 B.C., the publication year of Odes 1–3, just as the Parthian settlement gives a terminus ante quern of 20 B.C. The Horatian dimension in Propertius has apparently caught the attention of Pound. In Homage ii he renders Propertius 3.3.7 ‘et cecinit (Pound follows the cecini of Muller's Teubner text. See n. 48 below) Curios fratres et Horatia pila’ as:

I had rehearsed the Curian brothers, and made remarks on the Horatian javelin

(Near Q. H. Flaccus' book-stall).

Pila is, of course, neuter plural, but there is another Latin word, pila, feminine singular, meaning a book-stall. See Rudd, N., The Classical Tradition in Operation (1994), 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. also Pound's comments in a letter to his old professor, Dr Felix E. Schelling (Selected Letters (1950), 178): ‘[Mackail] doesn't see that S. P. is tying blue ribbon to the tails of Virgil and Horace, or sometime after his first “book” S. P. ceased to be the dupe of magniloquence and began to touch words somewhat as La Forgue did.’

⁴³ Callimachus, Aetia frr. 1 and 2. Cf. Wimmel, W., Kallimachos in Rom, Hermes Einzelschriften 16 (1960)Google Scholar; Clausen, W., GRBS 5 (1964) 181–96Google Scholar = Quinn, K. (ed.), Approaches to Catullus (1972), 269–84Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ The poetic topography ultimately derives from Hesiod, Theogony ad init.

⁴⁵ Reading Guyet's iam for the MS. tam.

⁴⁶ cf. Luck, G., The Latin Love Elegy (1959), 132–3Google Scholar; Hubbard, M., Propertius (1974), 79–80Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For the symbolic correlation of height of water with height of literary genre, see Virgil, Eclogues 6 (with Clausen). There Gallus is first shown as an erotic elegist wandering (errantem) by the Permessus at the foot up the mountain. He then goes higher up Helicon in connection with his learned, aetiological elegy on the Grynaean Grove (VV. 64–73). Cf. Propertius 2.10.25–6. But see further Ross, D. O., Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry (1975), 31–6Google Scholar (on Eclogue 6). Note also the commentary on the Aetia dream (Aetia Fr.2) in Pfeiffer's Addendum (Callimachus vol. 2 (1953), 102ff.Google Scholar).

⁴⁸ Or did Propertiu s write cecini, the reading offered by codices deteriores? Cf. Skutsch, O., Annals of Quintus Ennius (1985), 408, 502–3Google Scholar, with T. J. Cornell's review, JRS 76 (1986), 244–50Google Scholar, esp. 248; Heyworth, S. J., CQ 36 (1986), 199–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 201–2. Skutsch believes that Ennius told a story of the Gallic Sack in which the Gauls actually took the Capitol, and thus there were no geese, cf. JRS 43 (1953), 76–7Google Scholar, and JRS 68 (1978), 93–4Google Scholar. Hence cecini (which is also the reading Pound found in Müller's 1892 Teubner text). But a list of Ennian themes would in any case surely be intended (cf. Shackleton Bailey, D. R., Propertiana (1956), 139Google Scholar), and the tense is awkward. Cecinit appears preferable in every way.

⁴⁹ He may even have made a deliberate chronological error. In 3.3.8, he ascribes to Ennius' Annales (reading cecinit, see preceding note):

regiaque Aemilia vecta tropaea rate.

But the famous triumph of L. Aemilius Paullus over Perses of Macedon took place in 167 B.C., i.e., two years after Ennius' death. Unless the reference is to the victory of L. Aemilius Regillus over the Syrian fleet at Myonnesus in 190 B.C., cf. Butler and Barber, ad loc; Mantina, M., ‘Ennio, poeta cliens’, Quad, di fil. class. dell'Univ. di Trieste I (1979), 45–61Google Scholar; Skutsch, op. cit. (n. 48), 552. It is possible that Propertius was simply confused. Cf. Shackleton Bailey, op. cit. (n. 48), 140; Goold, ad loc. It is also quite plausible, however, that Propertius is demonstrating his unsuitability for Roman epic by a telling anachronism. If the line-order of the MSS is correct – and there is no evidence that it is not – an event of the second century B.C. (V. 8) is certainly made to precede an event of 390 B.C. (V. 12, the geese saving the Capitol from the Gauls), cf. Camps, ad loc.

⁵⁰ As is made clear by Gorgoneo in V. 32.

⁵¹ Note also the stress on artifice at vv. 27–30:

⁵² Cairns, op. cit. (n. 31), 185ff., categorizes it as a propempticon that includes, as a generic sophistication, a triumph-poem, in anticipation of the event. He apparently detects in it no insincerity at all. But that is difficult to sustain. Hubbard's barbed reading (Propertius, 103ff.) is surely far more persuasive.

⁵³ Horace's poem has its own ironies. The last line (consule Planco) takes us back to a time when not all of Horace's disputes and quarrelling were about love, precisely to the year 42 B.C., when Plancus was consul and Horace fought against Octavian at Philippi.

⁵⁴ And, incidentally, an intended ordo legendi is hereby unequivocally established: 3.5 is clearly to be read after 3.4, cf. Hutchinson, op. cit. (n. 8).

⁵⁵ Propertius here seems to have a mischievous eye on Virgil, , Georgics 2.475ffGoogle Scholar. See also V. 4 bibit e gemma, and Georgics 2.506.

⁵⁶ Otherwise, the only trace of the Greek/Italian theme between 3.5 and 3.9 is 3.7, where Paetus, lost in the Carpathian sea between Rhodes and Crete on a business trip to Alexandria, prays for his corpse to be cast up on the coast of Italy:

at saltem Italiae regionibus evehat aestus:

hoc de me sat erit si modo matris erit. (3.7.63–4)

At least let the tide cast me upon Italy's coast.

Enough if my remains can reach my mother.

⁵⁷ cf. Hubbard, op. cit. (n. 13), 19: ‘It is more characteristic of Propertius to look for variation as well as an underlying harmony.’

⁵⁸ cf. Macleod, C., Greece and Rome 26 (1979), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar = Collected Essays (1983), 227; Gold, B. K. in Gold, B. K. (ed.), Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome (1982), 103–17Google Scholar; also, Gold, B. K., Literary and Artistic Patronage in Greece and Rome (1987), 166ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Maecenas, of course, was not really unambitious, cf. Lyne, R. O. A. M., Introduction to Propertius The Poems, trans. Lee, G. (1994), xiii.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Canam, V. 47; ordiar, V. 50; prosequar, V. 53. Cf. Hubbard, op. cit. (n. 13), 111–12. Camps, ad loc, would prefer to read crescat in V. 52 and take them all as present subjunctives.

⁶¹ Brockhuizen's palmary emendation, cf. Virgil, , Georgia 3.41Google Scholar:

tua, Maecenas, haud mollia iussa;

and n. b. sub tua iussa, V. 52 above. See Macleod, C., ZPE 23 (1976), 42–3Google Scholar = Collected Essays, 216–17.

⁶² cf. Livius Andronicus, Odissia,fr. I:

Virum mihi, Camena, insece versutum

(where Camena pointedly occupies the same position as Homer's ἔννεπε).

Apparently Naevius too, in his Carmen Belli Punici, had invoked Camenae, who may owe their connection with poetry to an etymology linking their name with carmen. The Greek Musae were first invoked in Latin by Ennius at the opening of the Annales, possibly coinciding with his patron M. Fulvius Nobilior's association with their cult. Cf. Skutsch, op. cit. (n. 48), at 1.1 (pp. 144–6).

⁶³ It may be significant that all the references to the Muses in Book 3 occur in the first five poems: 1.10; 1.14; 2.15; 3.29; 5.20.

⁶⁴ cf. Griffin, J., ‘Propertius and Antony’, Latin Poets and Roman Life (1985), 32ffGoogle Scholar. = JRS 67 (1977), 17–26Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ cf. Griffin, J., Latin Poets and Roman Life (1985), 1ffGoogle Scholar. = JRS 66 (1976), 87–105Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ cf. Horace, , Epodes 16.2Google Scholar; Livy, Praefatio 4. The sentiment probably goes back to the lost preface to Sallust's Histories. See Woodman, A. J., Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (1988), 131–2.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Rawson, E. (The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969), 107ff.Google Scholar) documents how Sparta was the admired paradigm of Roman Stoical moralists, which gives these remarks a nice edge.

⁶⁸ cf. Lyne, R. O. A. M., The Latin Love Poets (1980), 133ffGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Odes 2.19, also addressed to Bacchus and also containing references to Pentheus and Lycurgus.

⁷⁰ cf. Shackleton-Bailey, op. cit. (n. 48), 200–1.

⁷¹ On the unity of the poem, see Williams, G. W., Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (1968), 413ffGoogle Scholar.

⁷² At least, her beauty and her illustrious ancestry, cf. 2.13.10, would seem to point in that direction.

⁷³ foedera, V. 15; foedere, V. 21; foedera, V. 25; iura, V. 15; lex, V. 16; pignora, V. 17; omina prima, V. 24; sacra marita, V. 26.

⁷⁴ cf. Catullus 51.if. If, that is, the arrangement of Catullus' poems owes anything at all to the poet himself. For suggestions that it might, see, e.g., Quinn, K., Catullus: The Poems (2nd edn, 1976), 9–20Google Scholar; Ferguson, J., LCM 11 (1986), 2–6, 18–20Google Scholar; Wiseman, T. P., Catullus and His World (1985)Google Scholar; Schmidt, E. A., Philologus 117 (1973), 215–42Google Scholar. Also, Macleod, C. W., CQ 23 (1973), 304–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar (on Catullus 116). On the whole question, see Syndikus, H. P., Catull (1984–1990), 1.52–62Google Scholar. It is anyhow quite likely that Propertius' text of Catullus would already have looked much like the one we have, even if the arrangement is that of an editor.

⁷⁵ For the equation of amatory and poetic career, see above.

⁷⁶ cf. Baker, R. J., AJP 90 (1969), 333–7Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ cf. Hubbard, op. cit. (n. 13), 90 n. 1.

⁷⁸ cf. als o 1.1.29–30.

⁷⁹ Water again, like 3.3, and recalling Hesiod, Theogony ad init., and Callimachus, Hymn 2.105–12. On water imagery, see Pfeiffer, R., History of Classical Scholarship (1968), 1.125–6Google Scholar (and Excursus on p. 284); also, Cameron, Alan, Callimachus and His Critics (1995), 363–6.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Significantly, this appears in neither of the laudes Italiae that lie behind Propertius: Virgil, , Georgics 2.136–76Google Scholar and Horace, , Odes 1.7.1–20Google Scholar.

⁸¹ KP3, 25.

⁸² There is a possible connection with Catullus 42, cf. Williams, op. cit. (n. 71), 492. The Propertian poem is imitated by Ovid, , Amores 1.12Google Scholar.

⁸³ op. cit. (n. 14), 90.

⁸⁴ Persuasively analysed by Cairns, op. cit. (n. 31),76ff.

⁸⁵ i, puer, atque meo citus haec subscribere libello.

(Horace, , Satires 1.10.92Google Scholar)

i, puer, et citus haec aliqua propone columna.

(Propertius 3.23.23)

⁸⁶ See the motif of the escaping book in Horace, , Epistles 1.20Google Scholar, and Arrian's preface to the Discourses of Epictetus ‘which have fallen, I know not how, without my will or knowledge, into the hands of men.’ Also Horace, Ars Poetica 389–90:

delere licebit

quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti

And Ovid, , Tristia 1.1Google Scholar; Martial 1.3 (with Citroni, and also Howell); Martial 11.1 (with Kay). Cf. Symmachus, , Epistles 1.31Google Scholar: ‘once a poem has left your hands, you resign all your rights, a speech when published is a free entity.’ And B. A. van Groningen, Traité d'histoire et de critique des textes grecs (1963), 25 (on ἐκδιδόναι, edere): ‘They imply the activity not of a publisher or a bookseller, but of the author himself, who “abandons” his work to the public; he gives them the opportunity to read it, to recopy it, to pass it on to others. From that moment the text goes off at random. ‘Van Groningen may be exaggerating. At least, Cicero's describas licet, ‘you can copy it’ (on releasing the de Oratore to Atticus for publication, ad Att. 4.16.2) suggests as much. See also Plato, Phaedrus 274b–279b (with, e.g., Rutherford, R. B., The Art of Plato (1995), 267–71Google Scholar, especially 268: ‘It shows naivete to suppose written words worth much, for they cannot defend themselves nor can they choose to whom they speak’). Cf. Derrida, J., ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in La dissemination (1972), 71–197Google Scholar. Finally, idem, De la grammatologie (1976): Any written text ‘is readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I don't know what its alleged author consciously intended to say at the moment of writing it, i.e. abandoned the text to its essential drift.’

⁸⁷ See p. 40 above for the idea of the physical text.

⁸⁸ The poem amusingly takes the form of a lost property notice, cf. Cairns, loc. cit. (n. 31).

⁸⁹ The situation in Catullus 42. Propertius' jocularity is appropriate to a poem that is part of a retrospective of his earlier life, love, and poetry.

⁹⁰ N Vo separate them into two elegies. Other MSS join them together into one, followed by Fedeli and Goold. See Fedeli's note at 3.25.1, p. 211. Also, Heyworth, S. J., PLLS 8 (1995), 172Google Scholar (with n. 22).

⁹¹ There are several clear reminiscences of the opening of Book 1:

3.24.2: oculis … meis ∼ 1.1.1 suis… oculis

3.24.1, 7–8 refer to beauty and make-up, cf. 1.2

(note also the ring around 3.24 and 25: falsa est ista tuae, mulier, fiducia formae 3.24.1 ∼ eventum formae disce timere tuae, 3.25.18; cf. Penna, La, Maia 7 (1955), 134ffGoogle Scholar)

3.24.9–10 refer to amic and to witchcraft, cf. 1.1.19–20, 25–6.

⁹² cf. Hubbard, op. cit. (n. 13), 92, 157ff. Hubbard points out the contrast between what she calls‘the new Horatio-Callimachean style’ of 3.24 and the earlier manner Propertius employs in the more conventional 3.25.

⁹³ cf. Williams, op. cit. (n. 71), 417. For conflict of mind within the renuntiatio amoris, see Cairns, op. cit. (n. 31), 80ff.

⁹⁴ He is no longer the elegiac lover devoted to one woman, cf. Suerbaum, W., RhM 107 (1964), 357Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ The issue is pursued into 4.1. Cf. Macleod, C. W., PLLS 1976 (1977), 141–53Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ cf. Sullivan, J. P., Ezra Pound and Sextus PropertiusGoogle Scholar; Messing, G. M. in Poetry and Poetics from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, ed. Kirkwood, G. M. (1975), 105–331Google ScholarHooley, D. M., The Classics in Paraphrase (1988)Google Scholar; Arkins, B., Paideuma 17, 29–44Google Scholar; Fedeli, P., ‘La traduzione-pastiche: il Properzio di Ezra Pound’, Lexis (1988), 225–233Google Scholar; idem, ‘Tradurre poesia, tradurre Properzio’, Aufidus, Rivista di scienzia e didattica delta cultura classica iv, 10 (1990), 93–130; Rudd, N., The Classical Tradition in Operation, 117–58Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ In his Review he counted ‘three score errors’ in the first four sections alone (‘Pegasus Impounded’ (Poetry, April 1919), reprinted in E. Homberger, Ezra Pound. The Critical Heritage (1972), 155–7). These charges are vigorously rebutted by Pound in a letter to Alfred R. Orage (Selected Letters, 148–50). The dispute between Pound and Hale is discussed by Rudd in an Appendix (op. cit. (n. 96), 151–8). Rudd also investigates the extent to which Pound's version might actually be a sensitive response to Propertius' innovative use of language (ibid., 140–6).

⁹⁸ Pound (1975).

⁹⁹ op. cit. (n. 14), 160.

¹⁰⁰ Selected Letters, op. cit. (n. 97), 178.

¹⁰¹ My main sources on Vorticism are the Reprints of Blast, Stephen Spender's The Thirties (Review of Wyndham Lewis's One-way Song) and Noel Stock's biography of Pound (1974), especially p. 202 quoting Lewis's Enemy of the Stars: ‘The earth has burst…Our vortex is white and abstract with its redhot swiftness.’ Cf. also Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir (1970), 92Google Scholar: ‘The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.’ And Pound, Ezra in Blast (1914), 153Google Scholar (quoted in Zinnes, Harriet (ed.), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (1980), 151)Google Scholar: ‘All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energised past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. ALL MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us.’

¹⁰² cf. Literary Essays (1954), 33:.‘Unless I am right in discovering logopoeia in Propertius (which means unless the academic teaching of Latin displays crass insensitivity as it probably does)…’

¹⁰³ See p. 39 above.

¹⁰⁴ cf., e.g., The House of Splendour (Collected Shorter Poems, 49), in which the idea of poetic creation is symbolized (Pindarically) by the central image of the house, and which strikingly closes:

and there are powers in this

Which, played on by the virtues of her soul,

Break down the four-square walls of standing time.

See also Literary Essays, 4: ‘It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits…’

¹⁰⁵ Sullivan's term, ‘creative translation’, would seem to be particularly appropriate here.

¹⁰⁶ cf. Make It New (1934), 159–60: ‘if a work be taken abroad in the original tongue, certain properties seem to become less apparent, or less important. Fancy styles, questions of local “taste”, lose importance. Even though I know the overwhelming importance of technique, technicalities in a foreign tongue cannot have for me the importance they have to a man writing in that tongue; almost the only technique perceptible to a foreigner is the presentation of content as free as possible from the clutteration of dead technicalities, fustian à la Louis XV; and from timidities of workmanship. This is perhaps the only technique that ever matters, the only maestria’. And Literary Essays, 239: Arthur Golding, the Elizabethan translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, ‘was endeavouring to convey the sense of the original to his readers. He names the thing of his original author, by the name most germane, familiar, homely, to his hearers. He is intent on conveying a meaning, and not on bemusing them with a rumble. And I hold that the real poet is sufficiently absorbed in his content to care more for the content than the rumble’. Also Literary Essays, 268: ‘when [Rossetti] says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original… he meant by ’beauty” something fairly near what we mean by the ‘emotional intensity’ of his original’. See further ‘I gather the Limbs of Osiris’, in W. Cookson (ed.), Selected Prose 1909-1956 (1973), 21–43, together with Charles Tomlinson's comment in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980), XV: ‘What Pound's essay implies for a translator of poetry is that he must find a way of so placing his substituted words that the electric current flows and that there is no current wasted. If you fail here, at the level of the electric interchange of the words, you fail badly and this is the most common failure in translated poetry’.

¹⁰⁷ cf. Selected Letters, 231: ‘I certainly omitted no means of definition that I saw open to me, including shortenings, cross cuts, implications derivable from other writings of Propertius, as for example the “Ride to Lanuvium” from which I have taken a colour or tone but no direct or entire expression’. The different explanations for Pound's sometimes maverick renderings of Propertius are neatly summarized by Rudd (op. cit. (n. 96), 147–50).

¹⁰⁸ cf. Homage iv

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION WITH

LYGDAMUS

Significantly, this is the only subtitle in the Homage.

¹⁰⁹ Might the treatment Propertius had received from Classical scholars also have acted as some kind of provocation or inspiration here? After all, Pound was only doing what they had been doing: transposing and re-arranging the text.

¹¹⁰ Homage I begins:

Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas

It is in your grove I would walk.

Homage XII ends:

And now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand

among these.

¹¹¹ Pound's ending to the Homage, not in Propertius, and omitted from Selected Poems (1975). It is short enough to quote in full:

The black panther lies under his rose tree

And the fawns come to sniff at his sides:

Evoe, Evoe, Evoe Baccho, O

ZAGREUS, Zagreus, Zagreus,

The black panther lies under his rose tree.

∥ Hesper adest. Hesper ∥ adest.

Hesper ∥ adest. ∥

¹¹² An orgiastic figure who merges with Dionysus, ct. KP 5, 1446–7.

¹¹³ The treatment of the gods in the Homage is interesting, and not in Propertius. There appears to be a shift away from Apollo. (From Apollonian to Dionysian/Zagreusian, perhaps.) Is Apollo a false prophet? Initially what Apollo says is broadly correct, but he is patronizing, censuring. He seems enabling, but is in fact restricting. And he is eventually rejected as too associated with the underbelly of imperialism and war. In Homage XII

Virgil is Phoebus' chief of police.

Propertius, Pound claims (Selected Letters, 231) ‘presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire as they were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire.’ The issue of antiimperialism in Propertius and Pound is treated by Rudd (op. cit. (n. 96), 117–30). Rudd points out (129) that only about a quarter of the Homage has anything to do with imperial themes, and that it does not in truth amount to much of a challenge to the British Empire. Nor does he think that Propertius' anti-Augustanism ought to be taken too seriously. For a somewhat different assessment of Propertius' attitude towards Augustus, see J. Griffin, op. cit. (n. 64), esp. 42 with the bibliography in his n. 61.

¹¹⁴ Polydmantus for Polydamas, Deiphoibos for Deiphobos, Oetian gods for Oetia's god. Propertius is suggesting that the famous myths depend upon their writers: he compresses the myths until they are nearly incomprehensible. Pound makes the touch of absurdity into much more blatant nonsense. He exploits the fact that his audience generally never has heard

of Polydmantus, by Scamander.

Propertius is nearly meaningless here, but his compression can be unravelled; Pound becomes meaning-less. His poetry makes the point that these myths have died. On Pound's rendering of Propertius in this passage, see Rudd, op. cit. (n. 96), 140–1, 143–4.

¹¹⁵ Hesper suggests both evening and the West.

¹¹⁶ cf. Durant, A., Ezra Pound, Identity in Crisis (1981),esp. 34ff.Google Scholar

¹¹⁷ cf. Mauberley, Hugh Selwyn, ‘The Age Demanded’ IV, Collected Shorter Poems (1984), 203Google Scholar:

A consciousness disjunct,

Being but this overblotted

Series

Of intermittences.

¹¹⁸ Also from Homage I:

I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.

And:

I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,

Seeing that long standing increases all things

regardless of quality.

And:

And I also among the later nephews of this city

shall have my dog's day.

Further from Homage VII:

Me happy, night, night full of brightness

Oh couch made happy by my long delectations.

¹¹⁹ cf. from Homage I:

My vote coming from the temple of Phoebus in Lycia, at

Patara.

On the one hand ‘my vote’, an apparently simpleminded response to the sound of ‘vota’. On the other the little pedantic footnote ‘in Lycia at Patara’, an over-academic gloss that sounds like a commentary. These opposite mistakes are poised too symmetrically at each end of the line to be random. Pound is contrasting different mis-translations. This beautifully matches Propertius’ idea: the poem is about a hollow future greatness, and Pound is showing how easily its greatness is distorted by the language of a distant time. The poem itself becomes the scene of a battle between vitality and deadness.

¹²⁰ cf. Kenner, H., The Pound Era (1975), 192–222 (on Cathay).Google Scholar

¹²¹ A comment by Pound to Alfred Orage (Selected Letters, 149).

¹²² Pound, of course, was the author of ABC of Reading (1951), and ‘How to read’ (Eliot, T. S. (ed.), Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 15–40).Google Scholar