All discussions of the dating of Propertius’ first book begin from the same mistaken premise.Footnote ¹ The only datable reference in the book comes in the sixth elegy, which envisions the impending departure of a friend called Tullus for a post in the province of Asia. This mission will set right the depredations of a previous provincial administration (1.6.19–20):

The general chronological context requires that the previous venal administration in the East must be that of Antony. Therefore the poem and the book to which it belongs are both universally dated after his defeat at Actium. But this inference is wrong. Common sense suggests that the watershed of Actium divides Book 1 from Book 2. Propertius’ second book opens with a poem that reviews the wars of Octavian and Antony from Mutina to Actium as a completed, self-contained series of events leading up to Octavian's triumph of 27 b.c. (2.1.25–34). In stark contrast, the first book takes its political bearings from the Perusine War, which provides the context for its final two poems. The only glimmer of light, politically speaking, is Tullus’ mission to the East, which has not yet started. The imperative quoted above implies that the vindication of the rights of Rome's allies is a job yet incomplete. If Elegy 1.6 was written after the Battle of Actium, why is its criticism of Antony's maladministration of Asia so subtle and oblique? Where is the triumphalism? Basic propriety would seem to demand that Propertius mention the epochal event that made the mission of Tullus possible. Notwithstanding the dangers of an argumentum ex silentio, if these lines were written after Actium, the omission of any allusion to that all-changing event, which would have made the liberation of Rome's allies possible, beggars belief.

I will show that Propertius’ first book predates Actium by demonstrating how the internal evidence of Elegy 1.6 fits much better in the context of the years before Actium in which tensions between Octavian and Antony were building, and specifically the events of 33 b.c. This earlier date has important consequences for the relationship between Propertius and others, especially Virgil, whose Georgics was published just after Actium. Scholars have identified several passages where there is an arguable intertextual relationship between the first book of Propertius’ elegies and the Georgics of Virgil; but these discussions are inevitably framed in terms of Propertius alluding to the Georgics.Footnote ² In the second part of this article, I will turn these arguments on their head and show that these passages make much better sense as allusions by Virgil to Propertius. I conclude by discussing another passage from the Georgics in which I argue that Virgil is referring quite explicitly to Propertius’ achievement in his first book.

I THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF PROPERTIUS 1.6

Ever since Jones published epigraphic evidence that L. Volcacius Tullus (cos. 33 b.c.) was indeed proconsul and governor of Asia, it has been agreed that this man must have been Tullus’ uncle and that the secures (19) and imperium (34) Propertius refers to in this poem point clearly to his governorship.Footnote ³ Unfortunately, we do not have a date for his term as governor. The inscription in which he is mentioned comes from around 9 b.c., and refers back to a precedent established earlier by Volcacius as proconsul, that of voting a crown to the person who had come up with the best way of honouring the emperor. It is generally and rightly assumed that a provincial governor, especially of an eastern province, could not have sponsored such an extravagant honour for Octavian before Actium. Thus, Volcacius is usually assumed to have been one of the first governors of Asia after Actium, perhaps the first, in 30/29 b.c.Footnote ⁴

The problem comes when we relate this tentative date to Propertius’ poem. Treatments of the dating of Book 1 persistently make the mistake of treating the reference to Volcacius’ governorship as though it establishes a terminus post quem for the publication of Propertius 1.Footnote ⁵ To give a typical example, Lyne says:Footnote ⁶

But all this is quite backwards. Poem 1.6 does not refer to the proconsulship as a fait accompli belonging to the past; more likely, it has yet to begin. Tullus is still in Rome with Propertius, and his trip to Asia is referred to repeatedly in the future tense (1.6.31–6):

The fact that the nephew will be pars of the imperium of someone else strongly implies that Tullus will travel to Asia as a part of his uncle's entourage.Footnote ⁷ So the dramatic date of the poem is better seen as coming before the beginning of the proconsulship of Volcacius, which thus provides a terminus ante quem, not a terminus post quem for the setting of the poem. We will return to the relation of the dramatic date of the poem to the date of publication of the book in a moment, but first we must explore the question of how far in advance Volcacius’ proconsulship would have been announced.

The assumption that implicitly underlies the arguments that Book 1 of Propertius was published after 30 b.c. is that Volcacius’ governorship must have been an appointment designated after Actium.Footnote ⁸ At first sight, the logic of this position seems to be sound: before Actium, Asia was part of Antony's half of the empire, so Octavian was hardly in a position to appoint his own loyalist there until his rival had been eliminated. We will see in a moment that this assumption is in fact not necessary at all, but first we should note that it is not very compatible with the chronology implied by Propertius 1.6. In that elegy, Propertius and Tullus are in Rome, thinking about the departure of the latter for the East. But it is clear that the soldier-nephew of Volcacius must have been present at the Battle of Actium. The campaign called for all hands on deck: tota Italia.Footnote ⁹ To counterbalance the fact that the consuls of 32 b.c. were in fact allies of Antony, Octavian presented to the world a preponderance of senior ex-magistrates. As a consular ally and high-ranking lieutenant of Octavian, Volcacius must have been by Octavian's side in 32/31 b.c. Propertius tells us that Tullus was actively following a military career under the patronage of his uncle, so it is hard to imagine that he was absent from Actium. In September of 31 b.c., Octavian did not return to Rome after the battle, but pressed on eastward into Greece and then on to Asia, where Suetonius attests that he entered into his fourth consulship on 1 January 30 b.c.Footnote ¹⁰ He based himself at Samos for the winter in order to settle affairs in the East, but in mid-winter he was compelled to make a quick trip back to Brundisium to quell a mutiny brewing among his veterans in Italy.Footnote ¹¹ Octavian stayed in Brundisium for only a month before heading back to Asia, en route to Egypt via Syria.Footnote ¹² The fact that Volcacius ended up as proconsul of Asia soon after Actium surely implies that he followed the new princeps eastward immediately after Actium. It is most unlikely that he joined him on the extremely hazardous winter trip back to Brundisium; that would have been quite unnecessary, and in any case not even Octavian returned all the way back to Rome. It is much more likely that Volcacius stayed in Asia to reorganize the government of his new province. Or perhaps his term of office did not begin until Octavian marched south toward Alexandria.

We now turn to the central problem of determining how Volcacius’ governorship could have been announced to the Roman public before Actium. The first problem is that Propertius implies that Volcacius’ proconsulship was not an ad hoc appointment as many appointments in this period seem to have been.Footnote ¹³ Instead, it was ordained and announced at some interval in advance, which was normal Republican procedure. How far in advance it might have been announced is at first unclear, since the usual procedures had been rendered moot by the triumvirate. The basic law regulating the assignment of consular provinces was the Lex Sempronia of 123 b.c., which stipulated that the two consular provinces should be announced before the election of the consuls for that year and that these two provinces should be divided between the two consuls as soon as possible after they took office, either by mutual agreement or by lot.Footnote ¹⁴ The consul would then typically set out for his province in the year after the expiry of his term of office. This picture was complicated by the Lex Pompeia of 52 b.c. This new law introduced a minimum of five years between holding the office of consul and acting as a provincial governor, but it is unclear if its terms were adhered to for very long in practice.Footnote ¹⁵ Augustus eventually found it necessary to re-implement this provision of a five-year gap as part of his first constitutional settlement.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, most scholars agree that the provisions of the Lex Pompeia were not in force in the period that concerns us.Footnote ¹⁷

In practice, none of this constitutional theory mattered much for Volcacius, since he was consul amid the rampant irregularities of the second triumvirate. Our sources for this period are poor, but it is clear enough that the triumvirs appointed the magistrates jointly and provincial governors separately.Footnote ¹⁸ Dio and Appian both attest that the triumvirs made a bargain many years in advance over the apportioning of consulships.Footnote ¹⁹ The ranks of ex-consuls and ex-praetors who were qualified to become provincial governors will have been thinned by the proscriptions, so their number was regularly supplemented in this period by appointing suffects. In contrast to the mutually-agreed consulships, governorships were in the gift of each triumvir separately, and the evidence indicates that these appointments were made on an ad hoc basis without reference to the Senate or anyone else.Footnote ²⁰ It is therefore exceedingly unlikely that the Senate carried on with the practice of designating consular provinces in this period, since it was not even pretending to make the appointments. Both the Lex Sempronia and the Lex Pompeia will therefore have fallen into abeyance.

We can now turn to the crucial problem: how could a partisan of Octavian have been designated in advance of Actium as a provincial governor in Antony's sphere of influence? In theory, the legal power of the triumvirs to make these provincial appointments was due to the imperium they wielded under the Lex Titia, but this was coming to an end. The precise date on which the triumviral powers lapsed is a notoriously vexed problem, but the majority view is that it was at the end of the year 33 b.c.Footnote ²¹ At Tarentum in 37 b.c. the triumvirate had been renewed belatedly for another five years. As per the agreement between Octavian and Antony to alternate the consulship between partisans of the two men, Antony held his second consulship in 34 b.c. along with Scribonius Libo, who had recently gone over to him from his son-in-law, Sextus Pompey.Footnote ²² The following year Octavian responded by holding his own second consulship, and he chose Volcacius as his colleague. Next was Antony's turn and accordingly the consuls-designate for 32 b.c. were his lieutenants, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus and C. Sosius. Propertius’ implication that Volcacius was a partisan of Octavian is confirmed by his place alongside Octavian, alternating with Antony and his men in the previous and subsequent years.Footnote ²³ If scholars are right in thinking that the triumvirate expired on the last day of 33 b.c., then the future, apart from the already-designated consuls, was a blank sheet. The original plan for parcelling out the consulships foresaw that Octavian and Antony would share the office in 31 b.c., each for the third time.Footnote ²⁴ But if this plan was to be enacted, the triumvirs would have to renew their power or jointly ignore its expiry as they had done in 37 b.c. Would the triumvirate be continued either implicitly or explicitly?

On 1 January 33 b.c., Octavian gave his answer. He returned to Rome from fighting in Illyricum in order to perform for the first time the solemn new-year rites for entering into the office of consul.Footnote ²⁵ Octavian will have taken the auspices, sacrificed on the Capitol, and given the traditional speech to the Senate on religious matters and on the state of the Republic.Footnote ²⁶ Having given his speech and having made his point, Octavian laid down the office of consul the very next day in favour of a suffect and returned to Illyricum.Footnote ²⁷ According to the chronology worked out by Kromeyer and endorsed by Syme, this one-day consulship must have been the occasion on which Octavian attacked Antony in public for his administration of the East for the first time.Footnote ²⁸ The centrepiece of this abuse must have been a condemnation of the so-called donations of Alexandria, news of which will recently have reached Octavian.Footnote ²⁹ In late 34 b.c., Antony had created Cleopatra's children monarchs of various areas in the East; not, to be sure, the province of Asia, but the theme of Octavian's speech was surely a wide-ranging denunciation of his fellow triumvir's administration of the eastern half of the empire. The speech to the Senate by the other consul, Volcacius, must have harmonized thematically. Since Octavian left both Rome and his magistracy immediately, he will not have addressed the People in the contio which was traditionally held by the new consuls several days afterwards.Footnote ³⁰ The duty of articulating to the People the message about Antony that Octavian had delivered to the Senate was therefore left to Volcacius and the suffect, L. Autronius Paetus. No doubt both meetings, of the Senate and of the People, were lively occasions, with many of Antony's partisans being present. In this light, the allusions to the mismanagement of Asia in Propertius 1.6 are revealed as clear echoes of what must have been the rhetoric of Octavian and Volcacius in January 33 b.c. Later in 33, Antony wrote public and private responses to Octavian's charges in which he defended his acta, and early in 32 b.c., probably again on the first day of the year, the new consul C. Sosius retaliated in like manner with an attack on Octavian in the Senate.Footnote ³¹

Under the Republic, one of the first items of business for a new consul was to organize the division of provincial governorships for the following year; this seems to have been a routine part of the first Senate meeting of the year.Footnote ³² It is entirely plausible, therefore, that in his inaugural speech of 33 b.c., Octavian proposed, in the light of the impending expiration of the triumvirate at the end of the year, that the Senate should designate his consular colleague as the governor of Asia for the following year. The point will have been to underline the expiry of the legal framework of the triumvirate at the end of 33 b.c. At the end of the year, Antony and Octavian both became, legally, ordinary citizens without the supra-consular power that entitled them to bypass the Senate and appoint provincial governors of their choosing. By re-asserting senatorial control over the provinces as of 1 January 32 b.c., the point when the powers that had been renewed in the treaty of Tarentum expired, Octavian would have been removing the fig-leaf of legal authority from both himself and Antony. Octavian and Volcacius will have claimed in their speeches that the latter would go out and put right the mismanagement of Antony and his cronies, just as Propertius says.

Octavian need not have seriously imagined that Antony would suffer Volcacius to enter and take over Asia as governor; that was not the point. Merely the designation of the province as Volcacius’ was enough to underline the imminent expiration of Antony's constitutional authority. This is similar to the manoeuvre that Caesar's enemies attempted against him when they proposed that his provinces of Gaul be assigned to the consuls of 55 b.c., the tactic against which Cicero successfully protested in his speech De provinciis consularibus. If we believe Propertius, however, Volcacius really did intend to go to Asia in order to force the issue. His arrival would have put Antony in an extremely difficult position, especially if, as has been argued, the only legal authority wielded by the triumvirs after the expiration of the triumvirate was the military and provincial imperium they continued to hold by virtue of the fact that they had not yet been relieved by a successor duly appointed by the Senate.Footnote ³³ As it turned out, Volcacius had no need to go to Asia in 32 b.c. as a provocation, for Antony provided Octavian with ample casus belli that year by his refusal to disassociate himself from Cleopatra and by the alleged contents of his will.Footnote ³⁴ Antony responded to Octavian's flaunting of the expiration of their triumviral authority at the end of 33 b.c. by ignoring it. As is well known, he continued to strike coinage calling himself a triumvir right up to Actium.Footnote ³⁵ Octavian pointedly dropped the title; his legal authority at Rome was likewise expired, but instead he could control the Senate by force. If we assume that the consul Sosius’ proposal to the Senate, which was probably delivered on the first day of 32 b.c., was to strip Octavian of his military imperium, perhaps by appointing a new governor for Illyricum, this was a mirror-image of Octavian's pre-emptive efforts to undermine Antony's post-triumviral legal authority one year previously.Footnote ³⁶ The difference is that Sosius no longer had the advantage of surprise that Octavian and Volcacius had a year before; hence his proposal was vetoed by a well-prepared tribune.Footnote ³⁷ Later in 32 b.c., the pro-Antonian consuls had to flee Rome and the Senate declared war. In 31 b.c., Octavian left Italy under arms, and inevitably Volcacius and his nephew joined him. In the aftermath of Octavian's victory Volcacius will finally have entered his designated province as governor.

We have seen that the low-key anti-Antonian rhetoric of Propertius 1.6 is perfectly compatible with the official rhetoric at Rome at the beginning of 33 b.c. and is unlikely to belong to the period of triumphalist crowing after Actium. The poem cannot have been written before 1 January 33 b.c., which is the date of the first public criticism of Antony's administration by Octavian; and, as we have seen, it is unlikely to have been written after Actium. Indeed, it surely was not written even as late as 32/31 b.c. when civil war was in clear prospect, or Tullus would have been addressed not as a man planning to go off to help govern a province, but as a man going off to fight a war. We can thus narrow down the writing of the poem to the period from the beginning of 33 to the middle of 32 b.c., most probably in the early months of 33, soon after the consular speeches of early January. But what of the date of publication? We might imagine that a poem like this with a specific dramatic date could nevertheless have been published as part of a collection some years later. But there is no evidence for any poems composed later than this one in Book 1, and the first poem to mention Actium is at the start of the next book. Furthermore, there are considerations regarding the relationship of Propertius and Tullus that make it unlikely that this poem was published much later than its date of composition. Cairns has emphasized that Tullus, as the addressee of the first poem and the last poem of the first book as well as two others in between, occupies an important position as the patron of the book as a whole.Footnote ³⁸ If the book was published after 31 b.c., when Tullus will surely have left Italy on military service with Octavian, it is strange that Propertius never mentions in any of the poems addressed to him in Book 1 that his patron is abroad. In fact, that is precisely what he does in a later elegy from his third book. In 3.22 he implores Tullus, who is still in Asia many years later (‘tam multos … annos’, 3.22.1), to come back to Rome. Propertius would have seemed out of touch to dedicate his first work to a man who was away from Rome without mentioning that fact, especially since, as it turned out, he would not return to Rome for many years. So it is reasonable to conclude that Book 1 was published not long after the dramatic date of poem 1.6, before Tullus’ departure from Italy and before the events of Actium had made the tone of the book incongruous with the tenor of the times. Virgil's Georgics provides a counter-example of a work that was substantially written before Actium, but which was revised to take it into account. Propertius’ first book shows no signs of such revision.

To conclude, there is no evidence that Propertius wrote any of the poems in his first book after Actium, and Elegy 1.6 is far too low-key in its references to Antony's administration for that to be true. Rather, its tenor fits perfectly with the beginning of Octavian's public criticism of Antony's arrangements in the East which coincided with the beginning of Volcacius’ consulship in 33 b.c. The designation of Asia as his future province would have been perfectly consistent with Octavian's deliberate provocation of Antony at this time. At that point it will not have been clear what circumstances might make the governorship a reality. It was not obvious that there would have to be a climactic struggle nor that Octavian would necessarily emerge with such an absolute victory. Thus Propertius reflects the official rhetoric of his day, but he hedged his bet with a certain degree of reserve. The praise of Volcacius and his nephew is loud and clear, but the criticism of Antony is left implicit and oblique.

II PROPERTIUS IN THE GEORGICS

Now that we have shown that Propertius could have written and published his first book in the context of the build-up to Actium, it becomes much less plausible to assume that he was in a position to allude to Virgil's Georgics, some passages of which clearly belong to a post-Actium milieu. That is not impossible, of course, given the long gestation of the Georgics and the possibility that Virgil may have recited parts of it outside Maecenas’ circle. But the likelihood now should be that, where there are intertextual links between the two texts, Virgil was alluding to Propertius rather than vice versa. Virgil was the senior poet, but that is no reason to exclude the possibility that he was responding to the work of a younger contemporary. Given that the historical evidence is so fraught with difficulty, why has there been such a reluctance to see Virgil as alluding to the early work of his younger contemporary?

One possible reason for the presumption of Propertius’ belatedness is that, as we will see, in the intertexts in question his subject matter is, as usual, not entirely serious, whereas the Virgilian passages are ones of deep philosophical import. The natural assumption might be that Propertius’ frivolous lines are a parody of the serious sentiments of Virgil. But in the case of Virgil, such an assumption that the serious intertext must be prior to the frivolous one is demonstrably unsound. Let us consider the famous case of Aeneas’ quotation from Catullus’ Lock of Berenice when he meets Dido in the Underworld.Footnote ³⁹ At a painful juncture of deadly seriousness, as Aeneas struggles to explain his actions to Dido, he spouts a line torn from a highly arch piece of courtly flattery. It has rightly been said that, if we did not know better, we might well assume that Catullus’ line, or even Callimachus’, was ‘a parody of questionable taste’ of Virgil's sombre scene.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such is our natural presumption that the frivolous is secondary to the serious. We will see that Virgil uses this same technique of repurposing another poet's lighthearted sentiment in a serious context with respect to Propertius.

The first of our intertexts is a crucial and hotly contested passage in the first book of the Georgics (1.145f.):

Batstone argued that the belated enjambment of improbus lends it a certain similarity to the beginning of the first elegy of Propertius (1.1.4–6):Footnote ⁴¹

Batstone notes, correctly, that the appearance of improbus in Virgil's lines is paradoxical and unexpected. The ocean of critical ink that has been spilt over the interpretation of this passage is testament to that.Footnote ⁴² He also argues, wrongly, that the adjective is equally unexpected in Propertius, and that it therefore constitutes a polemical reference to the Georgics. But improbus is in fact, as Shackleton Bailey called it, a ‘stock epithet’ for Amor.Footnote ⁴³ When Propertius calls Amor ‘naughty’ he is straightforwardly invoking a familiar trope of love poetry, a tradition in which Virgil's Eclogues also featured (‘improbus ille puer’, 8.50). If we are to imagine this as a reference to the Georgics, then we have to accept that Propertius has taken a striking and utterly paradoxical use of the epithet from Virgil and has reduced it to banality by injecting it back into the routine usage from whence it had come.

Why allude to love poetry in the context of describing how labor came into the world? Virgil makes the connection with elegy explicit for us. His phrase ‘labor omnia uicit — improbus’ is a startling reworking of the climactic line of the speech Virgil himself put in the mouth of Gallus in the final Eclogue (10.69): ‘omnia uincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori.’ Virgil thus announces near the beginning of the Georgics that he has turned his back on the theme of his previous work by revising its climactic motto. The poet of the Eclogues, who used to be preoccupied, like the elegists, with the workings of Amor, has turned his attention to the world of labor. From the loftier standpoint of the Hesiodic poet of the Georgics, pastoral and elegy have more in common than they are different.Footnote ⁴⁴ This line, with its paradoxical use of the epithet improbus, manages to allude to Virgil's own love poetry in Eclogue 8, to his portrait of Gallus as a lover in Eclogue 10, and to Propertius as Gallus’ heir as Rome's leading love poet. In this way, Virgil turns the page on his past not only by superseding his own earlier preoccupations, but by superseding the work of those, like Propertius, who have carried onward along the path Virgil has abandoned. We will see that this manner of casting the younger poet Propertius as the current representative of a mode of poetry that Virgil himself has outgrown is typical of the Georgics.

The next intertext concerns another famous programmatic passage in the Georgics (2.490–2):

This may have a more than coincidental relationship with a passage in which Propertius laments that the departure of Cynthia from Rome has left him miserable and unable to work (1.12.15–16):

Batstone makes a plausible case that this is more than an off-hand use of the commonplace expression felix qui, in that the two hexameters have the same structure: ‘felix qui potuit modifier-infinitive-noun’.Footnote ⁴⁵ At first glance it might seem that Propertius is parodying Virgil's serious sentiment, and this is how both Mynors and Heyworth characterize the relationship in their respective commentaries, but we saw above that this is a dangerous assumption to make with respect to Virgilian intertextuality.Footnote ⁴⁶

The pointed connection between the form of Virgil's felix qui expression and its content, the implied homage to and praise of Lucretius, lies in the fact that what the Epicurean aspires to is precisely felicitas.Footnote ⁴⁷ Effectively, Virgil is punning on the combination of the common Latin expression felix qui and the sense of felicitas as a translation of ἀταραξία.Footnote ⁴⁸ If Propertius is imitating Virgil, then he has eviscerated the phrase of its philosophical pun and limply restored the expression to the banal idiom it always was. If, on the other hand, Propertius wrote first, he was making paradoxical but not punning use of a common turn of phrase with no particular connection to Epicureanism. It was Virgil who added the pun, and by alluding to Propertius, he once again quoted the younger poet's words to underscore his own change of stripes from poet of love to poet of higher philosophical matters in the Georgics. In Propertius, the poet's only concern is to get Cynthia back again, for he is less miserable when she is around. Thus the paradox is that he will be ‘happy’ even though he is crying in her presence. Like an addict, Propertius can only think of getting his next fix as he cycles between the exquisite mixture of pain and pleasure that is being with Cynthia and the much greater misery of her being away. That senseless and false ‘happiness’ of the passionate lover, whose need can never be satisfied, is precisely the unending cycle of desire and false fulfilment that the Epicurean has escaped from. When Virgil nods at the paradoxical and ultimately empty felicitas of the elegiac lover as he pays his respects to Lucretius, he reminds us that the Epicurean sage has conquered not only the fear of death but also the disease of love. So too, Virgil has transcended the subject matter of love poetry and is striving as a didactic poet to rise to the heights of Lucretius, though he is not quite there yet (‘fortunatus et ille’, 2.493). From that vantage point, love appears not only to be a profitless sentimental attachment, as for Hesiod, but a mortal affliction. Once again, Propertius serves as a contemporary representative of a mode of poetry Virgil has abandoned in favour of higher, didactic subjects: not Hesiodic labor this time but Lucretian cosmology and ethics.

There is a further chapter to this particular intertextual nexus. The final poem of what is transmitted as the second book of Propertius includes a famous discussion of Virgil's career, including the Aeneid, which is reported as being well in progress. One peculiarity of this passage is that Propertius spends much more time discussing the Eclogues than either the Georgics or the Aeneid.Footnote ⁴⁹ He begins by referring to the characters in the first two of Virgil's Eclogues (2.34.69–4):

If this passage appeared in any other context, it would not be a noteworthy intertext for us, because, though it uses the commonplace expression felix qui twice, it shifts in part to the second person and omits the word possum and the rest of the structure of the lines we have just discussed. Nevertheless, given that this is part of an explicit discussion of Virgil by Propertius, it seems safe to recognize it as part of their ongoing exchange. Propertius responds to Virgil by turning his characterization of the difference between their two careers on its head. No longer are the Eclogues the discarded prelude to a higher, nobler calling; on Propertius’ tendentious rewriting of Virgil's career, his most important accomplishment was his love poetry.Footnote ⁵⁰ There was a long tradition of regarding both Tityrus and Corydon as semi-autobiographical characters, and the gift of ten apples seems to recall the number of the Eclogues themselves.Footnote ⁵¹ Against the background of the composition of the Aeneid, Propertius recalls a time when Virgil's poetic world was simpler and perhaps better. Whatever the difference between the successful wooing of Tityrus and the hopeless longing of Corydon, both belong to a happy and innocent pastoral milieu far removed from the concerns of state that currently preoccupy Caesar's poet. By reasserting the connection Virgil once recognized between happiness and the pursuit of love, successful or not, Propertius’ second felix qui rebuts Virgil's Epicureanizing reaction against elegiac love in the Georgics. On this rereading of Virgil's career, it does not chart a progression away from trivial themes to loftier concerns, but a sad drifting away from the love poetry that was his true gift.

The points of contact between Propertius 1 and the Georgics discussed above work better, I would argue, when the Propertian text has priority, but the point is certainly debatable. Given the long gestation of the Georgics and the importance of informal circulation of poetry before publication, it is not at all impossible that the influence was mutual. On the other hand, there is one more programmatic passage in the Georgics which alludes at one stroke to multiple aspects of Propertius’ first book, in a way that seems to imply that Virgil knew it as a unit.Footnote ⁵² In this passage the younger elegist serves once again to embody stubborn adherence to a kind of poetics which Virgil is in the process of abandoning.

At the beginning of the third book of the Georgics, Virgil famously explains his trajectory from rejecting poetry about ‘kings and battles’ (‘reges et proelia’, Ecl. 6.3) to preparing to write a poem about ‘warfare and a hero’ (‘arma virumque’, Aen. 1.1). The thrust of the argument is ingenious. He explains that the ordinary variety of Callimacheanism has become so common at Rome that in order to adhere to its spirit, it is necessary to invert the letter of its prescriptions (3.3–5):

Virgil rejects as trite the labours of Heracles and the story of Busiris, which featured in the Aetia, quoting Callimachus’ very words against his own subject matter.Footnote ⁵³ The subsequent lines bring another set of examples that seem on the surface to provide an apparently somewhat random jumble of Hellenistic mythical motifs (3.6–8):

Hylas had featured in the poetry of Theocritus and Apollonius (and probably Nicander), while Delos was the subject of poems by Callimachus and Parthenius. Pelops is a bit of an odd man out, since that myth is so strongly associated with Pindar, whose very words Virgil echoes here. Pindar is, of course, connected with Hellenistic poetry by means of the epinician links between this passage as a whole and the Victoria Berenices at the start of the third book of the Aetia.Footnote ⁵⁴ But that explanation yokes together two topics taken directly from extremely famous Hellenistic poems with a third whose connection is much more indirect.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is, however, another way of understanding the connection between these three topics: by seeing in these lines a double reference, not only to Hellenistic poetry itself but also to Rome's most recent standard-bearer for its aesthetic.

Following Servius, the commentaries tell us that cui in the phrase ‘cui non dictus Hylas puer’ must be understood as meaning a quo, and on one level that must be correct. But that sense runs contrary to the natural way of understanding the question: ‘to whom has [the story of] the lad Hylas not been told?’ Perhaps Virgil is alluding not only to the sheer number of poets who had treated this theme (a quo), but also to the success of a recent bestseller which everyone has had their slaves read out to them (in the usual sense of cui). In this light, the mention of Hylas must surely have reminded Virgil's readers immediately of Propertius’ elegy 1.20, with its memorable and extensive narrative of the Hylas myth. The next hackneyed topic in Virgil's list is Latonia Delos. These words hint at the name which is the first word and the subject-matter of the first book of Propertius, Cynthia. Cynthia was, of course, an epithet of Delos itself, and the island is so small that it is straightforward to take Mount Cynthus as standing by synecdoche for it. Pliny (NH 4.66) even records that ‘Cynthia’ was the name given to Delos by the mythographer Aglaosthenes. Mynors pointed out that Latonius is normally an epithet of Apollo or Artemis, not of Delos, so the usage here is ‘unusual’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The word Cynthius had followed the opposite trajectory, as Clausen showed, beginning as a geographical epithet of Delos, before becoming for Callimachus and Virgil an epithet of Apollo or Artemis, and ending as a proper name for Propertius.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus the pleonasm Latonia Delos suggests Cynthia as a synonym for both the adjective and the noun. The third item in Virgil's list is the story of Pelops and Hippodamia. Since Virgil is claiming that these are themes which have been done to death, it is surely relevant that this happens to be Propertius’ favourite story in Book 1; it is the only myth he employs as an exemplum in two different poems in that book. The first time is in the second elegy (1.2.19–20) and the second is in the eighth (1.8b.35–6). In the latter passage, the land of Elis is described (assuming that the emendation is correct) as ‘apta …equis’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This quasi-Homeric epithet is echoed by Virgil when he calls Pelops ‘acer equis’, a phrase emphasized by the enjambment. Where Propertius had a Latin version of the Homeric ἱππόβοτος or ἱπποτρόφος, Virgil substitutes a similar-sounding Latin version of ἱππόδαμος or ἱπποκέλευθος.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus Virgil, under the cover of a discourse about Hellenistic poetry, pays homage to the éclat of Propertius’ debut as the leading Roman exponent of Alexandrianism: with the publication of his first book, who has not been told about Hylas, Cynthia and Hippodamia?

Virgil is on one level enumerating and rejecting themes associated with Hellenistic poets: Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius. But on another, he is also enumerating and rejecting the themes of the contemporary Latin poet who best represents the traditional inheritance of Roman Alexandrianism via Gallus and the Neoterics, a tradition in which Virgil's own work has, up to now, been situated. So when Virgil rejects the vulgarity of contemporary Roman Alexandrianism as overly slavish and literal-minded, his specific target is Propertius, but he is also putting some distance between his own earlier work on the one hand and his current and future work on the other. To some extent, therefore, this passage is a palinode, a rejection of Virgil's own earlier mode of poetry in the Eclogues, which embodied a ‘slender’ Hellenistic aesthetic. In this context, Propertius functions in precisely the same way he did at other programmatic moments in the Georgics: as a symbol for the sort of poet who declines to follow Virgil in his turn away from love poetry toward epic. Thus the young Propertius served a useful polemical purpose for Virgil. He represented a continuation of the pure tradition of Gallan love elegy, with which Virgil expressed such a complex relationship in the Eclogues, and so also represented an externalization of Virgil's own past preoccupations. As such, he provided a useful foil against which Virgil articulated his own changing self-definition as a poet.