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.

This chapter uses medieval chronicles and annals to explore how river disasters were understood and remembered, and how people chose to tell stories about rivers. A focus on floods brings up issues of risk and resilience, and how floods were interpreted by medieval people. The chapter also focuses on how rivers are connected to other memorable and historic events and why they were such powerful stories. The chapter then turns to the ways that rivers were incorporated into monastic memory and to stories of foundation, and how holy sites were seen as revealed by God and the saints. The chapter ends with a case study focused on St. Sturm and the monastery of Fulda, with a focus on the role of rivers in the house’s history.