Propertius’ poetry has always offered a certain scholarly pleasure to those interested in unpacking a poem as literary sleuths, sifting through the density of mythological exempla as so many elusive clues to an underlying narrative. Allusions to obscure variants of a myth sit oddly with his poems’ surface rhetorical arguments, compelling a deeper inquiry. However, satisfactory readings have often fallen short, yielding to textual editing and a view of Propertian mythic detail as mere Hellenistic ornamentation. H.’s volume refuses to see the elegiac poet's use of mythological allusion as lacking a deeper rationale than Alexandrian polish. Rather, the book successfully builds the case for a sustained competition between Propertius and Virgil that unfurls, through a deft manipulation of myth, over the course of a decade. Shifting the date of publication for the Monobiblos from the scholarly consensus of 30 bce, post-Actium, to before Actium, allows H. to view many of the poems in Propertius’ first book as an immediate polemical response to the recently published Eclogues, as an initial defence of elegiac aesthetics that must reorient itself subsequently in his second and third collections, as Virgil changes his generic direction with the Georgics and the Aeneid. H.’s argument has a certain totalising quality, with any enigmatic mythological reference falling into place once understood within the narrative of the intertextual rivalry that spans Propertius 1–3 (the fourth book is omitted from consideration). However, such is the clarity and persuasive vigour of this interpretation that one of the headiest periods of Western literary history takes on a seductive immediacy in the point-counterpoint contest, here revealed in Propertius’ poems, for the inherited mantle of Alexandrianism.
With six chapters and a conclusion, Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil devotes the first three to developing a methodology through close readings of interpretative cruxes and allegorically rich elegies of the Monobiblos, and the latter three to applying the approach to other poems of the first three books in which the elegist polemically situates his aesthetic in relation to his rival's successive genres – pastoral, didactic and epic. H. carefully prepares the reader with frequent summaries of how his argument develops and copious pointers to where it is leading. Indeed, although the complexity of intertextual reference requires the interpretative nuance of numerous details of variant versions of a myth, H. throughout ensures that the forest is not lost for the trees.
The first chapter, ‘The Lover's Mockumentary’, serves as the introduction, laying out the direction of argument and the fundamental premises on which it is based: not only an earlier publication date for the Monobiblos than generally accepted, but a similarly earlier one for the Eclogues – 33 and 35 bce respectively; the identification of the poet Cornelius Gallus with the ‘Galli’ of Propertius’ first book and, at the least, with the Gallus of Prop. 1.20, a consensus view; and that the Augustan regime solicited an Ennian-style annalistic national epic, an assumption with aesthetic implications that drive Propertius’ critiques of Virgil in the later elegies of Books 2 and 3. Crucial to his argument, H. parts company with those who assert that Gallus’ lost work drives seeming common allusions in Propertius’ first book and Virgil's Eclogues. Rather, with the revised dating narrowing the time between the two authors’ first publications, he argues that the elegist polemically responds to Virgil's representation of Roman love elegy encoded in the figure of Gallus in the tenth eclogue. Thus begins a rivalrous exchange of alternating defence and critique between the two poets, conducted through a veiled code of proper names and Greek myth, with Virgil constantly moving the target as he changes genre.
While the introductory chapter provides convincing readings (of Prop. 2.2 and 2.22) to illustrate H.’s methodology – privileging interpretation over emendation as a response to Propertius’ mythological aporia –, it is not until Chapter 2, ‘Programmatics’, that the approach begins to illuminate the metapoetic dialogue in which Propertius engages with other genres. The first three poems of the Monobiblos present myth as functioning programmatically, serving, in the case of 1.1, to lay the groundwork of elegy's polemic with pastoral. Thus, competing for Atalanta's hand, the figure of Milanion, famously persistent as the model for the elegiac lover, not only contrasts with the suppressed but more common version of Hippomenes, emblematic of pastoral, but also constitutes a Gallus figure that responds to Virgil's own version of the elegiac poet in Arcadia. Readings of 1.2 and 1.3 similarly demonstrate that a deep grasp of the intertextual web of mythological reference yields meanings that resolve what initially appears as, in H.’s terminology, ‘deviant exemplarity’.
This is a book of close readings, with an Alexandrian attention to arcane detail that mirrors the poems that are its subject. Chapter 3, ‘Myth and Genre’, continues in this vein, with interpretations of nine more poems from the Monobiblos, all involving Propertian elegy's self-defining counterpoint with iambic, epic and Gallan elegy. The pseudonymous or allegorical names of Bassus and Ponticus, addressees that contain allusions to genre, set up a seeming ad hominem drama of poetics. And with sporadically catchy sub-titles, such as ‘Medea and the Mayfly’ (on 1.12), ‘Nasty Nereids’ (on 1.17), ‘Love and Death’ (on 1.19) or ‘The Real Gallus’ (1.13), H. examines how Propertius manipulates mythological variants to assert the values of his own elegy as supreme. Interpretation requires extensive knowledge of the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, with the ideal reader, for example, tuned in to the versions of the tale of Protesilaus and Laodamia in Homer, Euripides and Catullus, in order to grasp Propertius’ own challenge to mythic exemplarity in 1.19.
Chapter 4, ‘Against Pastoral’, initiates the deep dive into Propertius’ specific rivalry with Virgil. Building on previous scholarship, H. examines Propertius 1.8 and 1.18 as responses to Virgil's Gallus (rather than to a lost Gallan original) and as an elegiac reappropriation of Callimachus’ Acontius from Virgilian pastoral. After a brief (and somewhat jaggedly inserted) discussion of 2.4, distinguishing the availability of alternate loves as a pastoral mode alien to elegy's fixation on a single puella, H. returns to the climactic attack on pastoral in the Monobiblos, Propertius’ Theocritean framing of the story of Hylas, abducted by nymphs, in 1.20, a cautionary tale to Gallus of the deceptive seductions posed by Virgilian pastoral.
In H.’s literary history of an encoded rivalry of poetics, the events of political history impinge more overtly with the Georgics, a post-Actium response to Propertius’ genre polemics in the Monobiblos. Chapter 5, ‘The Return of Orpheus’, picks up on the final pages of Chapter 4 and engagingly explores Propertius’ second book of elegies as a critique and inversion of Virgil's choice between the solipsistic elegiac lover (Orpheus as figure for both Gallus and Propertius) and the common man of dutiful action (Aristaeus). Propertius’ characterisation of Virgil's intention to write epic as mercenary and following in the Ennian annalistic tradition retorts, in turn, to the proem of Book 3 of the Georgics, with 2.1 understood as an anti-anti-recusatio in response to Virgil's anti-recusatio promising to build Octavian a temple. Chapter 6, ‘Ennius Redivivus’, extending Chapter 5's earlier analyses of Propertius’ Ennian polemics in 2.10 and 2.34, examines the programmatic elegies of his third book for their further implicit portrait of Virgil as selling out his Alexandrian principles by climbing the hierarchical ladder of genre.
This is a dense and learned book that pursues its argument with single-minded conviction. H.’s deep-dig approach to Propertius’ often opaque mythological exempla and seeming illogic leads to compelling if totalising readings that minimise the need for emendation. Curiously, for a book that assiduously focuses on the text, the overarching narrative that drives its interpretation – an intense literary rivalry of aesthetic principles – necessarily evokes a biographical feel, despite H.’s assurances that it is impossible to know what Propertius really thought about Virgil's decision to write a national epic. Regardless, H.’s own labour yields a fascinating dialogue of poetics and genre, conclusively revealing that Propertius’ Callimachean arcana have a much deeper purpose than showy erudition.
