LETTING GO OF ONE'S PLACE
Propertius repeats this gesture of displacement when answering—or rather, not answering—Tullus' questions about his family's status and birthplace in 1.22.
| Qualis et unde genus, qui sint mihi, Tulle, Penates, | |
| quaeris pro nostra semper amicitia. | |
| si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulcra, | |
| Italiae duris funera temporibus, | |
| cum Romana suos egit discordia civis, | |
| (sic mihi praecipue, pulvis Etrusca, dolor, | |
| tu proiecta mei perpessa es membra propinqui, | |
| tu nullo miseri contegis ossa solo), | |
| proxima supposito contingens Umbria campo | |
| me genuit terris fertilis uberibus. | |
| (1.22) |
What kind of man I am as far as my family is concerned, where my family is from, who are my household gods, Tullus, you're always asking me in the name of our friendship. If the Perusine graves of our country are known to you, Italy's dead in her grim times, when Rome's own division ruled her citizens (for this reason are you especially a source of sorrow to me, dust of Etruria, because you suffered my kinsman's limbs to be scattered abroad, you cover the poor man's bones with no soil), the land that borders upon [Perusia] with its low-lying fields, fertile Umbria with her rich fields, gave birth to me.
I have previously remarked upon the oddity of Tullus' opening interrogative: Propertius quotes his first word not as qui but qualis —not “who are you?” but “what kind of a person are you with respect to your family's wealth and social standing?— and Tullus continues in this vein by asking about the family's geographical origins (unde) and present location ( penates).[68] Tullus' question offers Propertius in a most striking fashion the opportunity to locate himself (Propertius) within the symbolic network—and is refused. Propertius replies vaguely, evasively, with contingent and unspecific images such as mark his kinsman's death. He never really answers two of Tullus' questions (regarding his family and their material standing) and only hints obscurely at an answer to the third.
Note the halting, circuitous, and interrupted movement of Propertius' answer: we reach his birthplace—no, we almost reach it—through an oblique trajectory of contiguity. He begins in Perusia and lingers on its bloody history. An anacoluthon then interrupts that vignette, as he apostrophizes the “Etruscan dust” that refused to cover his kinsman's dead body.[69] The poem's leisurely course then turns toward Umbria, but only through a back-reference to Perusia's low-lying fields. Finally, the poet says “Umbria's rich fields gave birth to me”—vague help at best, since he provides no hint as to where in this extensive region his hometown might be. Propertius' unspecific geographic survey rejects a place in the symbolic network—a network defined, at least in part, by property, especially as property assumes the metaphorical power of defining one's organic relation to citizenship, to social identity. The movement of this poem skirts the borderlines of all pertinent territory, insofar as Propertius will not locate himself in a way that ratifies a center—a point of unification and reference—to the social and geographic territory his poem maps.
So much for the first two parts of my initial question, why these images of fragmentation, and why at this time? Now for the third part: why this man? Why should these poems about displacement revolve around a strongly suggested identification with Cornelius Gallus, the Egyptian prefect? To begin with, Gallus epitomizes the geographic and social displacements that Italy suffered in the years just before the principate. A novus homo from Gallia Narbonensis, he nonetheless secures his own advancement by becoming a vir militaris useful to Octavian the Triumvir. One of Gallus' early magistracies (41 B.C.E.) involved a role in the confiscation of lands and redistribution to veterans. He apparently did not divide land himself, but only exacted money from towns whose lands remained intact; nonetheless, he participated in a process that (as discussed above) unsettled the geographic bases of Roman identity.[70] Later (30 B.C.E. Octavian appoints him Egyptian prefect, whereupon Gallus unabashedly records his achievements in Africa in terms that invite comparison with the divine pharaohs.[71] While none of these facts make Gallus unique among Octavian's friends and aides-de-camp, combining them with his status as poet does. Gallus' erotic poetry earns him a place in the pantheon of elegists alongside Catullus, and others just as great, in Propertius' eyes; Propertius aspires to that status himself (Prop. 2.34.87–94). Yet Gallus paradoxically combines formidable artistic status (based, ironically, on a genre that rehearses the poet's abasement
Ultimately Gallus gains prominence in these poems because Propertius could have chosen no better way to deconstruct the concept of ideological quilting than to address Octavian's satellite at the zenith of his power and show the emperor's favored friend to be as unstable in his coherence as all the rest. Not the emperor's favor, nor even Cornelius Gallus' achievements as lover-elegist, can reliably secure him against disintegration—and Propertius makes such dissolution of the subject a problem from the very beginning of the Gallus series, in its moments of ironic bantering. Gallus will be incapacitated and disoriented if he loves Cynthia, Propertius threatens, just as Propertius himself has been: “nec poteris, qui sis aut ubi, nosse miser!” (“you won't be able to know, poor man, who or where you are!” 1.5.18); “nec iam pallorem totiens mirabere nostrum, / aut cur sim toto corpore nullus ego ” (“and now you won't so often marvel at my pallor, nor wonder why I am wasted to nothing,” 1.5.21–22). By the time we pass through the Gallus series and arrive at the sudden shock of seeing Gallus—a Gallus—a corpse in the Perusine mountains, the message is clear: Cornelius Gallus has no innate status such as his master claims as de facto monarch; he can easily be the other Gallus, Propertius' kinsman, an indistinguishable corpse lying in some mountain around Perusia; he could even be Propertius himself, divested of substance at Octavian's whim. Ironically, history proved Propertius right.