In the second poem of Propertius’ fourth book, the form-shifting deity Vertumnus claims that he is suited to any role that he is associated with because he can appear convincingly as a girl or a man: indue me Cois: fiam non dura puella; / meque uirum sumpta quis neget esse toga? (‘dress me in Coan silk, I shall be a gentle maiden: and who would say that I am not a man when I don the toga?’, 4.2.23–4).Footnote 1 Later in Propertius 4.9, another gender ambiguous character, Hercules, while trying to gain entry into the shrine of the Bona Dea, boasts that he had woven and performed a handmaiden's service (4.9.47–50):Footnote 2
Scholars have noted that the language used by Propertius to depict gender inversion in these episodes has profound implications for understanding the generic complexity of the poet's new, more aetiological, fourth book. DeBrohun points out that, when Hercules recalls the soft (mollis) breastband on his hairy (hirsutum) chest – a contrast further substantiated by his claim that he had become a puella with rough hands (manibus duris) – the hero ‘softens’ his appearance in terms that resonate strongly with the Augustan poets’ expression of the terminology of Callimachean poetics, thus allowing readers to interpret this scene as an act of generic realignment that symbolizes Book 4's attempt to accommodate both grand topics and erotic narratives.Footnote 3
Similarly, the Coan silk (Cois, 4.2.23) worn by Vertumnus, which enables him to become a non dura puella (4.2.23), brings to mind Propertius’ previous love elegies in which the poet pledges allegiance to the aesthetics of the poetry of Philetas and Callimachus (see Prop. 1.2.2; 2.1.5–6; 3.1.1);Footnote 4 by contrast, the god's appearance as a uir togatus in the next line (4.2.24) conveys more than just a change of costume, but also the kind of poetry associated with the symbol of the toga and manhood, such as epic.Footnote 5 Indeed, it has become commonly accepted in Propertian scholarship to see Vertumnus as a metapoetic figure, whose ancient origin and ability to effect self-transformation encapsulate the poet's claim of changing the direction of his poetry in Book 4 by composing more patriotic aetiological poetry.Footnote 6 The gender switch of Vertumnus, much like his assertion that he can steal the guise of either Bacchus or Apollo (cinge caput mitra: speciem furabor Iacchi; / furabor Phoebi, si modo plectra dabis, 4.2.31–2) – the two ‘rival’ deities mentioned in the programmatic poem of Book 4 (mi folia ex hedera porrige, Bacche, tua, ‘Bacchus, grant me your leaves of ivy’, 4.1a.62; auersus cantat Apollo; / poscis ab inuita uerba pigenda lyra, ‘Apollo sings unfavourably; you request from a reluctant lyre words that will cause distress’, 4.1b.73–4) – is a transformative conceit firmly grounded in the poetic sphere,Footnote 7 signalling the book's oscillation between the poetry of Roman history and erotic love elegy, and continuing the alternating ‘epic’ and ‘elegiac’ movements putatively established by Propertius 4.1.Footnote 8
The present study focuses on two other instances of gender inversion in Propertius 4, both of which are enacted by female characters, namely Arethusa in 4.3 and Tarpeia in 4.4. My chief aim is to suggest that these two episodes of female gender inversion, like those enacted by Vertumnus and Hercules, also figuratively perform the generic dynamics of the poetry book; but they do so with specific and sustained references to the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid, which itself is fraught with gendered and generic tensions. By establishing a dialogue with Aeneid 4, the story of Dido and Aeneas, as will be seen, becomes a foil for the gender relations and generic patterns of Propertius 4.3 and 4.4. When these two elegies are read in conjunction, the gender inversions of Arethusa and Tarpeia constitute a metaphor for Propertian love elegy's attempt to enact self-change and make an incursion into the non-elegiac world; and the interpretation of Propertius 4.4, especially, benefits from an examination of the poem's dialogue with both 4.3 and Aeneid 4. Furthermore, it will be argued that the representation of the arma and uiri in the stories of Arethusa and Tarpeia not only identifies Propertius 4.3 and 4.4 as a unitary and provocative response to Aeneid 4, but also draws attention to the extent to which Propertius is recomposing Virgilian material in these poems and, through them, redefining the dynamic between love elegy and epic in a post-Aeneid literary world.
The justifications for treating Propertius 4.3 and 4.4 together are twofold. First, the juxtaposition of these two poems, both of which depict a woman's love in time of war, naturally invite comparison and unitary reading – just as later in the collection the pairing of 4.7 and 4.8, which focus on the relationship between Cynthia and the poet-narrator, demands mutual reflection.Footnote 9 Indeed, the notion that two distinct poetic movements can combine to explore a single subject matter inaugurates the fourth book of Propertius, regardless of whether one chooses to divide 4.1 into two separate poems.Footnote 10 Second, while elegies 4.6 and 4.9 have been the focal point of the study of Virgilian–Propertian intertextuality,Footnote 11 critics have shown that the depictions of Arethusa and Tarpeia share similarities with several female characters in the Aeneid, such as Dido, Camilla, and Allecto. In his commentary on Propertius 4.3, Hutchinson has identified points of contact between the actions of Arethusa and those of Dido, and has suggested, quite reasonably, that the fate of the Carthaginian queen spells out for the reader one potential outcome for the Propertian puella, an idea which this article will explore further.Footnote 12 Scholars have also identified some Virgilian voices in the portrayal of the frenzy of Tarpeia in Propertius 4.4;Footnote 13 Warden in particular has established parallels between Propertius’ depiction of Tarpeia as an Amazonian Bacchant (4.4.71–2) and Virgil's ‘dual representation’ of Dido as warrior queen (Aen. 1.490–3) and frenzied Maenad (Aen. 4.300–3).Footnote 14 Building on the observations of Warden, critics such as Janan and Welch, who have approached the poem from perspectives informed by contemporary psychoanalytic theory and feminist criticism, have since argued that the portrayal of Tarpeia as an Amazonian Bacchant draws attention to the poem's overall discourse of transgression.Footnote 15 Readings of this kind, as well as intertextual connections between Propertius 4 and Aeneid 4, will form the basis of my discussion. Where the present study differs from previous treatments is its focus on the theme of female gender inversion, and its central argument that Propertius 4.3 and 4.4 together make use of this motif to draw out the generic complexity of Propertian elegy and its relation to Virgil's epic.
I. Gender and genre in Aeneid 4 and Propertius 4
The various and well-attested generic affiliations of Dido's character in the Aeneid intersect with the different gender roles she takes on in the first four books of the poem, during which she undergoes (broadly speaking) a dramatic inversion from a competent, powerful ruler to an emotionally charged and increasingly helpless woman wounded by love.Footnote 16 The interactions between arma and amor in the sequence of events centred on Dido and Aeneas, especially in Book 4, are bound up with Virgil's depiction of her as a character who transgresses gender roles and generic conventions. The poem's first extended description of the Carthaginian queen ostensibly emphasizes her masculinity, as Venus tells Aeneas that ‘Dido rules over an empire’ (imperium Dido…regit, 1.340) and that, despite being a woman, she once singularly took charge of the operation of leaving Tyre and founding Carthage (dux femina facti, ‘the leader of the enterprise a woman’, 1.364). When Dido emerges in person (1.496–7), her majestic appearance pointedly follows on from a portrait of Penthesilea – a bellatrix (‘warrior woman’) and Amazonian queen daring to challenge men (bellatrix, audetque uiris concurrere uirgo, 1.493) – depicted on the city's temple to Juno.Footnote 17 Dido's status as a capable leader and builder of a nation receives further attention when she is next seen surrounded by ‘weapons’ while implementing laws and rulings on ‘men’ (saepta armis solioque alte subnixa resedit. / iura dabat legesque uiris, 1.506–7). The positioning of armis and uiris, here enclosing (saepta) a statesman-like Dido within, underlines that her inversion of gender is strongly associated with the poem's metadiscourse on genre.
Book 4 of the Aeneid further reasserts the gender identity of Dido as it tells the story of her illicit desire, questionable marriage, abandonment by Aeneas, and eventual death. Within this narrative arch one can detect a sustained interplay between features of elegy, epic, and aetiology, among others. The opening movement of the book (4.1–89) is dominated by the language and imagery of love elegy as Dido is consumed by the burning amor she feels for Aeneas (see especially 4.1–2, 22–3, 54, 66–7).Footnote 18 Both her growing status as the city-founding heroine responsible for the emergence of Carthage as a military force, and the progress of the Aeneid as an epic poem, are suspended, as the passage below shows (4.86–9, note especially the words in emphasis):
Yet the image of Dido in Book 4 is not simply that of a tragic woman suffering from love; rather she continues to exhibit elements of epic masculinity as well as elegiac femininity, and the book itself stages amor and arma as being in constant tension. In the scene which describes the appearance of Dido and Aeneas as they set out for hunting, critics have noted that Dido's outfit and weaponry (4.136–9) are virtually identical to those of Camilla in the catalogue of Italian forces (7.814–7); and that Camilla herself, another bellatrix (7.805), is compared to the Amazon warrior queens, Hippolyta and Penthesilea (11.661–2) – the latter, as shown above, prefiguring Dido's own appearance in Book 1.Footnote 19 Through this series of connections the reader is reminded of Dido's masculinity and transgressive nature; yet this image of Dido in arms is set in contrast with the way she is introduced in this scene (4.133–4): reginam thalamo cunctantem ad limina primi / Poenorum exspectant (‘the queen was lingering in her chamber and the Carthaginian leaders waited at her door’). The notion of a woman delaying to meet men who eagerly wait outside her bedroom (thalamo) evokes the familiar trope of a puella being courted by the exclusus amator (shut-out lover) from Latin love elegy. Dido's eventual crossing of the threshold (limina) thus symbolizes a transgression that is at once generic and gendered.Footnote 20
Amid the interplay between the epic and elegiac elements in Dido's characterization lies the important fact that Aeneid 4 is also clearly meant to be aetiological. The union between Dido and Aeneas in the cave is referred to as the causa of her death and misfortunes (ille dies primus leti primusque malorum / causa fuit, ‘this day was the beginning of her death, the first cause of all her sufferings’, 4.169–70); and the suicide of the Carthaginian queen, precipitated by the breakdown of her relationship with Aeneas, proleptically engenders an aetion for the Punic Wars (4.625), a subject of Ennius’ arma. The tension between amor and arma in this aetiologically charged book of the Aeneid is also expressed through the semantic pluralism of the word foedus, which at first denotes a legitimate matrimonial contract to which Aeneas claims to have given no personal agreement (nec coniugis umquam / praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera ueni, ‘nor have I ever held out the marriage torch, or entered into that contract’, 4.338–9), despite the contrary view of Dido (tum, si quod non aequo foedere amantis / curae numen habet iustumque memorque, precatur, ‘then she prayed to whatever just and mindful power there is that watches over lovers who have been betrayed’, 4.520–1);Footnote 21 but later the same word is used by Dido in her curse of the Trojans, demanding her descendants not to forge an alliance with those of Aeneas: nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto (‘let there be no love or treaties between our peoples’, 4.624).Footnote 22 As foedus changes in meaning, and the context of its usage shifts from a confrontation between former lovers to an impending war between two future enemies, the expression nullus amor in Dido's final speech can be construed as the resumption of arma at the end of Book 4 of the Aeneid.Footnote 23 Set against the book's aetiological background, amor and arma are constantly placed as opposites in tension, and their relation is explored through the changing gendered characteristics and generic affiliations of Dido. By thus depicting the female protagonist of the most elegiac book of his epic, Virgil presents Dido and Aeneid 4 as the focal point of intergeneric dialogue and the gendering of poetic forms.
The fourth book of Propertius engages with the Aeneid from its outset. The opening four lines of the programmatic poem set up a contrast between the present-day maxima Roma (Prop. 4.1.1), whose pre-eminence is symbolized by the Palatine Temple of Apollo (4.1.3), and the site's primitive state in the days of Aeneas and Evander (ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit, ‘before Phrygian Aeneas was hill and grass’, 4.1.2; Euandri profugae concubuere boues, ‘the migrant cattle of Evander once lay together’, 4.1.4). The mention of these two characters from Virgil's epic as Propertius contemplates the rise of Rome from a minor settlement to a dominant Weltstadt not only foregrounds the new aetiological focus of his poetry but also anticipates further interactions between the present poetry book and Virgil's Aeneid, which can be seen clearly in poem 4.6. Here Propertian elegy takes on a theme that occupies central place in the ekphrasis of the shield of Aeneas in Book 8 of the Aeneid, namely the battle of Actium (Aen. 8.675–728).Footnote 24 The Propertian poem explicitly identifies itself as a reinvention of epic narrative in accordance with the Callimachean aesthetic principles of refinement and light verse (see 4.6.3–5, 10),Footnote 25 and presents the events at Actium as (among other things) a battle of the sexes.Footnote 26 The poem firmly underscores the idea that Cleopatra is a woman who dared to challenge the authority of a man and was punished for it (en, nimium remis audent prope: turpe Latinos / principe te fluctus regia uela pati, ‘look, they dare too close with their oars: it is shameful that Roman waves endure royal sails when you are the first citizen’, 4.6.45–6; dat femina poenas, ‘the woman pays the penalty’, 4.6.57), while at the same time questioning whether a victory over a woman is truly worthy, as the thinly veiled sarcasm at verses 65–6 seems to attest (di melius! quantus mulier foret una triumphus, / ductus erat per quas ante Iugurtha uias!; ‘Thank heaven! What a triumph a single woman would have been in the streets through which Jugurtha was led in the past!’).Footnote 27
Throughout Propertius’ reworking of the Virgilian material in elegy 4.6, inversions of gender and genre are never far from the surface. For example, the vitriolic description of Cleopatra's fleet, pilaque femineae turpiter apta manu (‘javelins were shamefully fitted into a female hand’, 4.6.22), operates on the (horrific!) idea that a woman is taking on the masculine role of a soldier,Footnote 28 while the juxtaposition of pilaque femineae, when viewed within the broader context of the poem's intertextual dialogue with the Aeneid, would seem most likely to be an inversion of Virgil's Arma uirumque. Thus the implication of this line seems be: neither weaponry nor epic is suited to a feminine hand. The connection between gender and genre established by Propertius in his arguably most thoroughgoing engagement with Virgil's Aeneid should therefore encourage us to inquire into whether the dynamics of gender in elegies 4.3 and 4.4, which clearly respond to Aeneid 4, have any significant bearing on the generic relationship between Book 4 of Propertius and Virgil's epic.
II. Propertius 4.3
Elegy 4.3 takes on the form of a letter written and narrated by Arethusa to her husband, Lycotas, who is campaigning abroad (4.3.1–4); the poem's engagement with the romantic plot of Aeneid 4 can be detected from the outset. The opening of the letter immediately throws their marriage into doubt, as the continued absence of Lycotas makes Arethusa wonder whether they are really married at all (cum totiens absis, si potes esse meus, ‘if, when you are so often away, you can be mine’, 4.3.2), even prompting her to recall their wedding as a funeral (4.3.13–16) and claiming that the light of the marriage torch was drawn from a pyre (illa / traxit ab euerso lumina nigra rogo, 4.3.13–14).Footnote 29 This dramatic opening, in which Arethusa appears as an abandoned wife trapped in an uncertain and moribund marriage, already evokes Virgil's Dido. Verses 23–30 then bring into focus the poem's disruption of gender and genre as Arethusa's description of her husband calls into question just how masculine and soldierly Lycotas really is.Footnote 30 His delicate shoulders (teneros…lacertos, 4.3.23) and unwarlike hands (imbelles…manus, 4.3.24), as well as Arethusa's fear of a rival attracting her husband's attention (4.3.25–6), all suggest that Lycotas is more suited to erotic rather than military engagement.
By contrast, Arethusa's life appears as much wrapped up in the military as is any soldier's: at mihi cum noctes induxit uesper amaras, / si qua relicta iacent, osculor arma tua (‘as for me, when evening brings on the bitterness of night, I kiss your arms, any that lie there, left behind’, 4.3.29–30). The ‘bitter nights’ (noctes…amaras, 4.3.29) endured by Arethusa recall those of the exclusus amator, the ‘soldier’ of the elegiac world (see Prop. 1.16.21–4);Footnote 31 and Arethusa's amor militis is such that she is even desirous of weapons.Footnote 32 However, the image of an abandoned wife kissing the arma (4.3.30) that had been left behind (relicta, 4.3.30) by her departed husband recalls the moment in Aeneid 4 when Dido instructs Anna to put the weapons left by Aeneas on what will become her own funeral pyre (Aen. 4.495–7):Footnote 33
Arethusa's earlier recollection of her moribund marriage to Lycotas now finds echoes in Dido's ominous pronouncement of having given up her life on the nuptial bed (lectumque iugalem / quo perii).Footnote 34 Even the whiff of militia amoris in the Virgilian phrase arma uiri thalamo (4.495) is picked up by the Propertian expression osculor arma tua (4.3.30), which flirts with Latin sexual vocabulary.Footnote 35 As the elegy almost reaches its halfway point, the reader, confronted with numerous parallels between Arethusa and Dido, is left to wonder whether this Propertian puella can break out of the mould of her Virgilian predecessor.
Evocations of Aeneid 4 surface again later in Propertius’ poem when Arethusa suddenly expresses her wish to join the ranks of the army in order to accompany her husband (4.3.43–6):
Arethusa's desire to transform herself from an unhappy Dido-esque figure (cf. infelix Dido, Aen.1.749; 4.68, 450, 596) to a felix Hippolyte (Prop. 4.3.43) is bound up with the poem's discourse on gender and genre. The femininity of Hippolyta is clearly indicated by nuda…papilla; her gender inversion is represented as the abandonment of mollia in favour of arma, two words also conventionally considered as the markers of elegy and epic respectively.Footnote 36 Furthermore, the contrast between the barbarity (barbara) of Hippolyta and the self-identification of Arethusa as a puella Romana suggests that there is something un-Roman about a woman assuming the role of a soldier. Unable to become a felix Hippolyte, Arethusa must therefore remain outside the military camp of her husband, denied access to the world of arma and (her) uir. This puella Romana is forbidden from making an infiltration into the male domain of war, for Rome is defined by the demarcations of mollitia and arma, puella and uir, elegy and epic.
The conclusion of 4.3 not only extends the generic connotations of the poem's focus on gender roles, but also crystallizes the meaning of its engagement with Virgil's epic (Prop. 4.3.67–72):
The word foedera (4.3.69) continues the poem's sustained dialogue with Aeneid 4 in which the breakdown of the foedus between Dido and Aeneas sets in motion the lack of a foedus between the Carthaginians and the Romans. Here in Propertius’ poem the dynamic is reversed: the lack of a military foedus between the Roman army and its enemy is set to undo the matrimonial foedus between Arethusa and her husband.Footnote 37 Indeed, the presence of the Aeneid in the elegy's final couplet, which is enclosed by armaque (4.3.71) and uiro (4.3.72), demands that readers consider the extent to which this Propertian poem is incorporating and refashioning Book 4 of the Aeneid. Propertius’ elegy takes on a theme closely modelled on Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas; but in the course of the poem the female protagonist aspires to break out of the mould of infelix Dido, and her desire to enact gender inversion more than flirts with the idea of the transfiguration of love elegy into a higher literary genre. However, in the end this elegiac puella is unable to ‘arm’ herself and break into the world of (her) man. In contrast to Hippolyta, who is felix because she could ‘take up’ weapons (tulit arma, 4.3.43), Arethusa will only be happy once she has ‘given up’ weapons (armaque…tulero, 4.3.71): the puella figure representative of love elegy must remain unchanged.
The poem's epigraphical ending, which constitutes an aetion for an object (4.3.72), reworks another important aspect of Aeneid 4 – the aetiology for the Punic Wars deriving from the enmity between Dido and Aeneas.Footnote 38 If it can be said that the loss of amor between Dido and Aeneas leads to an aetion of war and the renewal of arma, then the conclusion of Propertius 4.3 proposes an opposite dynamic, where the ending of Rome's war with Parthia and the giving up of arma would conceive an aetion for an object that commemorates the amor between a husband and wife.Footnote 39 From this perspective then, Propertius’ poem can be seen as an idealized elegization, or an unarming, of Virgil's epic. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of puella and uiro in Arethusa's proposed inscription (4.6.72) looks ahead to a happy reunion of husband and wife, an event which is never realized in the Aeneid. Therefore, the potentially elusive epitaph at the end of Propertius 4.3 also casts doubt on whether the present poem can pass as an aetion, and, combined with the image of Arethusa's failure to ‘arm’ herself, the poem as a whole tacitly undermines the idea that Propertian love elegy can transfigure itself into a new form of writing.
III. Propertius 4.4
That the Propertian motif of female gender inversion can be construed as a metaphor for love elegy's self-transfiguration and transgression of literary genres finds further support in the book's next poem, in which Propertius recounts the story of the crime of Tarpeia and the origin of the allocation of her name to the Capitoline hill. The plot of the Propertian poem bears some similarities to one version of the events which Livy dismisses as fabula (1.11.8).Footnote 40 While Livy reports that some believed that Tarpeia betrayed Rome because she wanted the golden jewellery worn by the Sabines on their left arms, in Propertius’ poem Tarpeia appears as a Vestal virgin who falls in love with the Sabine king, Tatius, when she catches sight of him practising manoeuvres and wielding weapons (uidit…Tatium… / pictaque per flauas arma leuare iubas, ‘She saw Tatius…raising arms decorated by means of golden plumes’, Prop. 4.4.19–20; obstipuit regis facie et regalibus armis, ‘she was struck with amazement by the appearance of the king and his kingly arms’, 4.4.21), and so fervently pursues a marriage to a disastrous end (4.4.55–62).Footnote 41
As a Vestal virgin and eager bride, the Propertian Tarpeia is therefore similar to Arethusa in (at least) two respects: she too desires an unlikely marital union, and she too is confined within Rome.Footnote 42 That the portrayal of Tarpeia in this poem is in some ways an intensification of Arethusa's image in the previous elegy can be seen most clearly in the Vestal virgin's nocturnal monologue (4.4.31–8):
Tarpeia's wish at lines 33–4 may be compared to Arethusa's desire to enter the military camp (Romanis utinam patuissent castra puellis, ‘How I wish that camps were open to Roman girls’, 4.3.45), but hers is more extreme, as Tarpeia wants the horrifying role of female prisoner-of-war. Not only is the metaphor of seruitium amoris (the slavery of love) now made real,Footnote 43 but the gender dynamics of this metaphor – which usually has the male amator playing the part of the ‘slave of love’ – are now turned on their head. Similarly, verse 37 uses the military language of love ‘in a way that totally negates the metaphorical way of describing love in the language of soldiery’;Footnote 44 but yet again the elegiac trope of militia amoris, which has already been given a literal interpretation by Arethusa in the previous poem, now conveys a woman's desire to be physically present in a military camp.
The convergence of the literalization of metaphorical tropes and the inversion of gender roles in Tarpeia's speech enables us to read her actions in multiple ways. On one level, she is a woman, a virgin, and an entity circumscribed by Rome, who is attempting to do things that she is not allowed to (namely arranging her own marriage and going outside the city); so her actions are a form of transgression of social and gendered boundaries.Footnote 45 On another level, because Tarpeia's proposed activities violate all the ‘rules’ of conventional elegiac tropes, she is also transgressing some boundaries of genre; in this case, both her attraction to Tatius’ arma and her desire to relocate her amores to a literal military castra are open to a different, more metapoetic, reading. There is a sense that the bold desires and brazen activities of Tarpeia may be seen to exemplify Propertian love elegy's attempt to disrupt literary conventions and transgress into the non-elegiac world.Footnote 46
In the next part of her soliloquy Tarpeia cites the stories of Scylla and Ariadne, who betrayed their family and city for love, to justify her own illicit desire (4.4.39–42); her mentioning of these exempla then initiates a series of images which gradually bring the figure of Dido to the surface of the poem. Some of the parallels between the Propertian Tarpeia and the Virgilian Dido have already been noted by critics;Footnote 47 others are discussed in detail for the first time here. For example, at verses 55–6 Tarpeia imagines herself speaking to Tatius and demanding a marriage: dic, hospes: spatierne tua regina sub aula? / dos tibi non humilis prodita Roma uenit (‘tell me, stranger, am I to walk as queen in your court? Rome betrayed comes as no lowly dowry to you’, 4.4.55–6). In referring to herself as regina and Tatius as hospes, Tarpeia's words may evoke the opening of Aeneid 4 where Dido and Aeneas appear as regina and hospes respectively (Verg. Aen. 4.1, 10). And the idea that a marriage between this regina-to-be and her hospes would threaten Rome (prodita Roma) further substantiates the link between Tarpeia and Dido.Footnote 48 Against this background, Tarpeia's fanciful suggestion three lines later that her marriage could bring about a peace treaty between the Sabines and the Romans – commissas acies ego possum soluere nupta: / uos medium palla foedus inite mea (‘as a bride I can part joined lines of battle: you should all enter upon a treaty mediated by my wedding gown’, 4.4.59–60) – plays on the double-meaning of foedus, which, as we have seen, has precedents in Aeneid 4.Footnote 49
This quick succession of evocations of Virgil's Dido not only casts Tarpeia in the role of an epic heroine (who is about to embark on a disastrous course similar to that of the Carthaginian queen), but also lends us reason to interpret Tarpeia's claim that ‘my bed will end the harshness of your arms’ (uestra meus molliet arma torus, 4.4.62) as a pointed reference to the poem's attempt to render Virgil's epic elegiac.Footnote 50 Hutchinson suggests that the ‘strong generic associations of mollis and arma compel the reader to question the poet-narrator's own activity’.Footnote 51 But I would put it in stronger terms: the poet-narrator does not so much invite a questioning of his literary operation as make a claim that Propertian love elegy is taking on material associated with epic.Footnote 52
In the final part of the poem, not only does Propertius engage more intensely with the Aeneid, but the motif of gender inversion also comes back into focus as a metaphor for generic interactions. Following her nocturnal monologue, Tarpeia's mental and emotional state are described in terms that allude to the maddening of Amata by Allecto on the one hand (nescia se furiis accubuisse nouis, ‘not realizing that she had lain with strange furies’, 4.4.68; cf. Verg. Aen. 7.341–405, 456–7), and Dido's moral and psychological dilapidation on the other (nam Venus, Iliacae felix tutela fauillae, / culpam alit et plures condit in ossa faces, ‘for Venus, happy guardian of the Trojan embers, feeds her sin and stores more torches in her bones’, 4.4.69–70; cf. uulnus alit, ‘she nurtures her fault’, Verg. Aen. 4.2; culpae, Verg. Aen. 4.19, 172).Footnote 53 The image of torches (faces, 4.4.70), moreover, extends the association of marriage torches with death made by Arethusa in the previous poem; their burning of Tarpeia's desire now foreshadows her own demise.Footnote 54
The poem's next simile, which compares the frenzied passion of the Vestal virgin to ‘a Thracian Bacchant beside the swift Thermodon, her clothes torn to reveal her breast’ (illa furit qualis celerem prope Thermodonta / Strymonis abscisso pectus aperta sinu, 4.4.71–2), then establishes important connections between Tarpeia, Dido, and Arethusa. At Aeneid 4.300–3 Dido too is likened to a manic Bacchant; and, as Warden argues, the juxtaposition of Thermodonta and Strymonis here in Propertius’ poem alludes to Virgil's ‘dual representation’ of Dido as a Penthesilea-like warrior queen and a frenzied Maenad (see Aen. 1.490–3; 4.300–1).Footnote 55 However, mentioning the river Thermodon also evokes the image of an Amazon (cf. Prop. 3.14.14; Verg. Aen. 11.659–60), whose strong association with virginity and military life are mirrored in Propertius’ portrayal of Tarpeia as a Vestal virgin attracted to arma.Footnote 56 Therefore the simile also reinforces the resemblance between Tarpeia and Arethusa – since the latter, as we have seen in 4.3, is envious of the Amazon Hippolyta and eager to get out of the city, take up arma, and join the military camp of her husband.Footnote 57 It has been argued by Heyworth that Propertius’ simile captures how ‘the Vestal Virgin fired by Venus is like an Amazon become a raving Maenad’.Footnote 58 I would add to his observation by suggesting that this simile, in the context of the evocations of both Dido and Arethusa in the preceding lines, also underlines Tarpeia's transformation from an Arethusa-figure to a Dido-figure. Like Arethusa, Tarpeia's yearning for a uir and her attraction to his arma lead her to fantasize (masochistically) about military life (4.4.31–8). But unlike Arethusa, who does not and cannot act on her wish, Tarpeia, maddened by desire and behaving in a manner reminiscent of Virgil's Dido, makes arrangements for her own marriage and attempts to broker a peace treaty (hoc Tarpeia suum tempus rata conuenit hostem: / pacta ligat, pactis ipsa futura comes, ‘Tarpeia reckoned this her moment and met the enemy: she seals the agreement, herself to come along as part of the agreement’, 4.4.81–2). Janan points out that, even were Tarpeia not a Roman woman and a Vestal virgin consecrated to chastity, these prerogatives would be her father's and Romulus’ respectively rather than hers.Footnote 59 Therefore, as Tarpeia takes on tasks conventionally performed by men, she undergoes a symbolic gender inversion; and the expression conuenit hostem (4.4.81), especially, casts this Propertian puella in a light that is usually shone on an epic hero.
The transformation of Tarpeia from an elegiac puella to an audacious heroine of epic proportions draws attention to the discourse of genre with which the poem concludes. The reader is told that, when the Sabines are eventually let in by Tarpeia, Tatius kills her with deadly brutality as he crushes her with the weight of weapons (ingestis comitum super obruit armis, 4.4.91). The arma and the violence of the outsized intruder, as DeBrohun succinctly puts it, suddenly ‘take over both the poetic and “real” worlds of the poem’.Footnote 60 Conspicuously, Tatius is here referred to as hostis (4.4.89), and the combination of hostis and arma suggestively implies that epic – specifically the Aeneid – is a problematic force in Propertian love elegy. Tarpeia, like Arethusa, cannot breach the camp of her beloved, and her own gender inversion ends in disaster. By contrast, Tatius is able to enter Rome, break into the world of Tarpeia, and kill the puella. As the transgressive power of the arma and uir marks the incursion of the Aeneid into Propertian elegy, the meaning of the motif of female gender inversion also changes: having begun as a metaphor for Propertian elegy's self-transfiguration, the thwarted attempt of Arethusa and the death of Tarpeia invert even this metaphor, as poems 4.3 and 4.4 combine to underline the loss of love elegy in the course of its transformation.
The ending of Propertius 4.4 also provokes reflections on the nature of Virgil's arma and uir. The occasion of Tarpeia's betrayal, according to Propertius’ poem, is the celebration of the Parilia, a rural festival that had over time become associated with the foundation of Rome (4.4.73–80; see also Ov. Fast. 4. 721–862);Footnote 61 the fact that Tarpeia seeks to undermine Rome on its birthday makes her a force that threatens the existence of Rome, like Dido in the Aeneid. Moreover, the final moment of Tarpeia's life – especially the image of Tarpeia approaching what is touted as her nuptial couch (‘nube’ ait ‘et regni scande cubile mei!’, ‘Marry, and climb the bed of my kingdom’, 4.4.90) but instead suffering a death by arma at the hands of the man whom she desires – recalls the tragic demise of Dido: the Queen of Carthage dies by the sword which once belonged to Aeneas (ensemque recludit / Dardanium ‘and [she] unsheathes the Dardan sword’, Verg. Aen. 4.646–7; illam…ferro / conlapsam aspiciunt comites, ‘her handmaids see her fallen on the sword’, 4.663–4), and her marital bed forms part of the funeral pyre (conscendit furibunda rogos, ‘she climbs the high pyre in a frenzy’, 4.646; notumque cubile / conspexit, ‘she saw the familiar bed’, 4.648–9; incubuitque toro, ‘she threw herself on the couch’, 4.650).Footnote 62
In light of these parallels, there is sufficient reason to see the final scene of Propertius 4.4 as a recomposition of Virgil's account of the death of Dido; and through this recomposition, which vividly brings out the force of arma and Tatius, the poem calls into question Virgil's Arma uirumque and all that it stands for. Of course, the portrayal of Tarpeia as one who betrayed her city for the sake of marriage casts an unfavourable light on Dido, encouraging the reader to view the Carthaginian queen through the distorting lens of the story of Tarpeia. But, despite all her faults, Tarpeia's death hardly glorifies Tatius.Footnote 63 In a manner similar to Propertius 4.6, wherein the poet seems to question whether Augustus’ victory over a woman (namely Cleopatra) is truly heroic (4.6.65–6), the depiction of Tatius’ murder of Tarpeia here in 4.4 strips the arma and the uir of their culminating glory. Indeed, by closing this poem with an image of a Dido-esque victim destroyed by arms and a man, it is implicitly suggested that the suppression of illicit desire and punishment of female transgression have been written into the foundational myth of Rome by Virgil. The overwhelming power that Propertius attributes to arma and uir in his poem about Rome's past thus problematizes Virgil's epic and its entanglement in the rewriting of Roman history.
On the other hand, a poem that purports to be an aetiological account of the origin of the Tarpeian Rock evidently engages in a similar creative activity as the Aeneid, which traces the origin of contemporary Rome back to Trojan Aeneas. By highlighting the unstoppable force of arma and uir in the story of Tarpeia, Propertius’ poem also embeds an originary masculine power into the physical formation of Rome, and retrojects a narrative of the restitution of sexual order onto the very fabric of Roman history, as well as Book 4 of the Aeneid. Indeed, Propertius’ account of the punishment of Tarpeia also retrospectively underlines a moral message latent within the story of Arethusa, who, as we have seen, fails to transgress and cannot be anything but a faithful Roman wife. Given that Propertius 4 was probably published only a few years after the passing of the Augustan marriage legislation in 18–17 bc, it would hardly be seen as an inconvenience by Augustus that Propertius is writing the failure of female sexual transgression into the history of Rome.Footnote 64
IV. Conclusions
Propertius 4.3 and 4.4, as this article has argued, encourage the reader both to interpret them through the lens of Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid and to interpret the Aeneid through them. The gender inversions of Arethusa and Tarpeia not only fall within a pattern of similar motifs seen throughout Book 4 of Propertius which figuratively perform the apparent generic elevation Propertian love elegy (see, for example, Roma, faue: tibi surgit opus, ‘Rome, give your backing: the work rises for you’, 4.1a.67), but also thoroughly engage in a dialogue with the tension between amor and arma encapsulated in the Dido episode of the Aeneid. In this way, the transgressive drama of Propertius 4.3 and 4.4 first underlines the extent to which the reinvention of love elegy as something grander is affected by the gendered opposition between amor and arma in Virgil's epic. Secondly, and more intriguingly in my view, by depicting Arethusa and Tarpeia as Roman reincarnations of the Virgilian Dido, and by framing 4.3 and 4.4 as a pair of corresponding and self-conscious explorations of what would happen when arma stand in the way between the desiring female subject and the uir wanted by her, Propertius characterizes Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid as the paradigmatic poetic text with which to explore the opposition between arma/uir and amor/femina. Seen against this background, Propertius’ presentation of his female protagonists as ultimately unsuccessful Dido-types – circumscribed both by the limitations placed on their gender and by the conventions which demarcate epic and elegy – pointedly reasserts Book 4 of the Aeneid as the cultural symbol of the prevailing authority of arma and uiri.
The depiction of Arethusa as a present-day Dido, and Tarpeia as a Roman equivalent to the Queen of Carthage, further suggest that, in the course of these two elegies, Propertius seeks to present Aeneid 4 as a text which has effected a change in the way that women throughout Roman history are understood. Propertius connects the fate of both Arethusa and Tarpeia to the survival and eventual triumph of Rome in a manner strongly reminiscent of Virgil's treatment of Dido. In the Aeneid, Dido threatens to derail Aeneas’ progress towards Italy; she and her descendants are the fatalities of the unstoppable rise of Rome. Correspondingly, Arethusa is presented by Propertius as an unfortunate human consequence of the expansion of the Augustan empire, which takes her husband away from her: so Arethusa suffers because Rome must pacify the world (see 4.3.7–10, 35–6, 63–9). The death of Tarpeia, on the other hand, as Propertius is surely aware, paves the way for a truce between the Romans and the Sabines which eventually joins the two peoples into one; her fate, in Propertius’ poem at least, testifies to the triumph of the sanctity of Vesta/Rome. By thus presenting the reader with two more Didos – one in the contemporary Roman society of Augustus, another in the time of Romulus – Propertius retrospectively locates a universal ‘truth’ about the women of Rome's past and present in Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, retrojecting a gendered reading of the history of Rome onto Book 4 of the Aeneid. Through this pair of elegies’ engagement with Virgil's epic, the poet thus implies that, as long as there is a Rome, and as long as there are arma and uiri, there will always be another Dido.
The unitary and bi-directional reading of Aeneid 4 and Propertius 4.3 and 4.4 also has implications for the understanding of Ovid's Heroides 7, the letter from Dido to Aeneas, as an early instance of the reception of not only Virgil's Dido but also Propertius’ reading of Virgil's Dido. Recent Ovidian scholarship generally accepts that the composer of the Heroides was aware of Propertius’ poetry; indeed, a number of critics are inclined to see the Ovidian Dido epistle as formally indebted to the Propertian Arethusa epistle, even though the relative dating of the fourth book of Propertius and Ovid's Heroides remains uncertain.Footnote 65 My interpretation of Propertius 4.3, which argues that this elegiac epistle reworks elements of Aeneid 4 and depicts Arethusa as another Dido, would in this case foreground the link between Dido and Arethusa in Ovid's elegiac epistle, and point to the possibility that Ovid saw a connection between Virgil's Dido and Propertius’ Arethusa.
The Ovidian epistle concludes with Dido asking Aeneas to visualize her distraught appearance as she writes the letter with tears streaming down her face (perque genas lacrimae strictum labuntur in ensem, Ov. Her. 7.185) – an image reminiscent of Arethusa's self-portrayal in the opening of Propertius’ poem (si qua tamen tibi lecturo pars oblita derit, / haec erit e lacrimis facta litura meis, ‘if any part is blotted out and missing as you read it, this will be a blot caused by my tears’, Prop. 4.3.3–4). The correspondence between the two characters is reinforced when Ovid's Dido ends her letter in the same way as Arethusa does – with an imagined inscription (Ov. Her. 7.193–6):
Even if one chooses not to see the word causam (Her. 7.195) in the Ovidian Dido's epitaph – later replicated verbatim in Ovid's own poem about causae at Fasti 3.549–50 – as a nod to the aetion of an object embedded in the final couplet of Propertius’ elegy (armaque cum tulero portae uotiua Capenae, / subscribam SALVO SALVA PVELLA VIRO, 4.3.71–2), the parallel between the Ovidian Dido and the Propertian Arethusa is still evident.Footnote 66 Given that critics have long suggested that the women of Ovid's Heroides, and Dido especially, often come across as astute readers of other stories in which they appear,Footnote 67 it would not seem inconceivable that Ovid's Dido has read about her own appearance in Propertius’ story about Arethusa-as-another-Virgilian-Dido.
