Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility
Elegy after 19 BC

Presents an in-depth study of Propertius' last elegies as an early response to Virgil's oeuvre in its totality.

Donncha O'Rourke (Author)

9781108481731, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 December 2024

502 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 3.2 cm, 0.85 kg

Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility is an in-depth study of Propertius' final collection of elegies as the earliest concerted response to the poetic career of Virgil in its totality. Seven chapters show how Propertius' fourth book, published three or more years after Virgil's death, enacts the canonical status of Rome's foremost poet through an intimate conversation across a number of themes, from socio-political and historical questions centring on, for example, Rome's evolution from rustic past to 'golden age' superpower, gender and patriarchy, and warfare both international and internecine, to literary questions concerning the generic identity of elegy and epic, the appropriation of Callimachus, and the architecture of poetry books. Propertius' totalizing reading reveals an elegiac Virgil as much as it does an epicizing Propertius, with a sometimes obsessive attention to detail that enlarges familiar paradigms of allusion and intertextuality and has implications for how literary and textual criticism are practised.

Introduction: Virgil and the Propertian sensibility
2. Rus in Urbe: Virgilian pastoral in Propertius 4
3. Shades of Dido: the Virgilian women of Propertius 4
4. The Shield of Propertius: Virgilian histories in Propertius 4
5. Romani patria Callimachi: Hellenistic poets at Rome
6. Propertius' Epic Designs: the Virgilian architecture of Propertius 4
7. Conclusions: Propertius and the Virgilian sensibility.

Subject Areas: Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]