This volume brings together unpublished writings of Barbara Flaschenriem and a series of essays in her honour. It is a collection with a theoretical inflection, in which some pieces are more persuasive than others (and a couple are very successful), but each could serve as a useful introduction to the ways in which different theoretical approaches have benefitted the study of (Propertian) elegy. In less convincing pieces, there is a tendency, as is often the case in scholarship that is too married to a particular theoretical approach, to overread and slightly to misconstrue or neglect what the prima facie meaning of the Latin seems to be.

The first two chapters are by Barbara Flaschenriem and form part of a book that she left incomplete; the editor is to be commended for ensuring their publication. In the first, an exploration of 1.3, 2.29a and 2.29b, the tension between the static image created by ekphrasis and the lover’s desire to engage with his beloved object is constructively considered; this is mediated, in part, through the dreamlike assumptions made by the poeta–amator about his puella’s thoughts. Flaschenriem also argues that the direct speech afforded to the beloved functions as a corrective to the lover’s projections: such an idea is also conspicuous on a larger scale in her discussion of 4.7 in the next chapter. In both cases, not enough is done to acknowledge that, though Cynthia is given direct speech, the poeta–amator is still shaping her words, even if he seems, in doing so, to challenge or to undermine his own account and his imaginings. The second chapter treats 3.3 alongside 4.7; both poems are extended dream sequences that can be seen to draw on ekphrastic elements as regards the dwelling of the Muses in 3.3 and Cynthia’s tomb in 4.7. These are useful essays, though both could benefit from considering the probable influence of the dreamlike quality of much Tibullan elegy. The reading of 4.7, in particular, should be set against the visual qualities emphasised elsewhere in Book 4 (e.g. aspects of spectaculum in 4.8; the ekphrastic in 4.6), and the prevalence of women’s voices unsettling assumptions about Propertian elegy (e.g. Acanthis in 4.5; Cornelia in 4.11).

Andrew Feldherr’s chapter begins with a formalist reading of 2.12. He draws on the notion that the figure of Amor is an analogue for the beloved scripta puella who embodies the poet–lover’s poetic production and is simultaneously its source of inspiration (cf. 2.1.1–4). The first part of the chapter usefully shows how the careful structure of the poem and its arrangement of (implied) addressees ‘weaves together pictorial and narrative qualities [that are] to be apprehended synchronically’ by the reader through the linear progression of the elegy; a hermeneutic ‘double motion’ (89) affecting the (imagined) painting and the poetic response of a lover to it allows for a subtle exploration of the nature of literary ekphrasis. Discussion is at its strongest when it cleaves closely to the Latin, but much of the chapter is laboured in exposition and lacks lucidness; this is notably so in the second half, where Feldherr unconvincingly attempts to show how 2.12 ‘contrasts the image the poet constructs of himself as a lover with an awareness of his own extratextual status’ (90): the figure of the patron seems, to this reader at least, irrelevant to 2.12.

The articulate chapter by Ellen Greene suggestively reads 2.15 against 2.1 and demonstrates how Propertius succeeds in showing that, for the poeta–amator of Book 2, sexual violence serves as ‘the means by which the male lover may be able to achieve both erotic success and literary immortality’ (112). She plausibly elaborates on how the elegist constitutes the sphere of love-making as ‘a powerful arena for the exercise of masculinity’ (103) through his equivocal casting of himself at times as epic hero and as subservient lover.

Lowell Bowditch considers a handful of Propertius’ poems through a postcolonial lens. Most persuasive are the readings of 2.3 that explore ‘Rome’s rivalry with, and appropriation of, Greek culture within the context of Roman geographic conquest’ (123) and point to Cynthia’s embodiment of this ‘ambivalent drive [behind] Rome’s cultural imperialism’ (125). Attempts at reading Cynthia’s maquillage and clothing in the same poem as elements that point to her functioning ‘as a trope for Roman imperial conquest and ambition’ in relation to the orbis terrarum (125) are far less successful. This reader is likewise unpersuaded by attempts at parsing 1.8a, 1.11 and 1.12 as species of itineraria in which Cynthia is supposedly presented ‘as rhetorically aligned with geographic space and Roman imperial expansion’ (128). A number of plausible metaliterary readings are offered of 1.11 but the imposition of a postcolonial inflection onto an engagement with Alexandrian poetics (131–3) seems unjustified.

The penultimate chapter, by Alison Keith, is a derivative catalogue of points of contact between the extraordinary elegy, 4.1, and Vergil’s Aeneid. She asserts ‘that Propertius is newly attentive to history and [a]etiology in his final elegiac collection not solely because of his admiration of Callimachus […] but especially because of the impetus of the Aeneid’ (142): this is hardly a ground-breaking notion and little is done by Keith to show how this attentiveness transforms (Propertian) elegy into the far more confidently capacious poetic form that Ovid would go on to exploit. Propertian engagement in Book 4 with Vergil is now much more fully studied by Donncha O’Rourke in his 2024 monograph Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility; we may note that Book 3 also contains a growing exploration of Vergilian poetics — neglected by Keith — that informs Propertius’ undertaking in Book 4.

Sharon James concludes the volume with a compelling discussion of the ways in which Propertius trains his readers from the very beginning of his corpus to become what she terms ‘attentive readers’. Such a reader is alive to the intratextual markers — lexical and thematic repetitions with variation — provided by the elegist throughout his oeuvre; they cause readers to revert to earlier poems, notably those at the start of Book 1, ‘in order to puzzle out’ (171) elements that are jarring, obfuscated and inconsistent. Such a mode of iterative reading is fundamental to Propertian poetics and is prompted by the apparent unreliability and volatility of the poeta–amator’s perspective; indeed, a sound grasp of his works almost depends on the reader joining the poet in his constant challenging and reconstruing of (our reading of) his earlier elegies.