1. Of the major Latin poets, only Catullus suffers from a worse attested and later manuscript tradition, as Margaret Hubbard notes (Hubbard 1974, 5).

2. Od. 9.534 (translation based on Richmond Lattimore's).

3. Butrica 1984, 4, quoting Lachmann 1829, ad 1.9.9 (Lachmann's 1.10.9): “9 DUCERE CARMEN. 21 TOTIS ] Immerito obtrusas Propertio elegantias his ostentant exemplaria. Alterius commenti TOTIS MEDULLIS auctor exstat Janus Dousa filius: DUCERE CARMEN Ant. Volscus jam dedit MCCCCLXXXII, non obsequente Beroaldo. Scripti omnes, ne uno quidem dempto, habent:

Quid tibi nunc misero prodest grave Dicere carmen?

Quam pueri TOTIENS arcum sentire medullas

Quis jure impugnet? quis tanti ducat defendere.”

4. E.g., Williams 1968, 557–59 (“This is the world in which Propertius sets his love-poetry: it is created out of a tension between the real world of politics and the private microcosm

5. Stahl 1985 well exemplifies this dichotomy between the erotic and the political, though the sensitivity of his readings often overcomes what I regard as oversimplistic theoretical premises.

6. Thomas Benediktson notes that “there is an almost direct correlation between the classicism of an age and its ability to understand Propertius,” meaning a negative correlation: the poet reacts against classical language and structure, depending instead upon vivid imagery to create an associative logic in his poetry. While Propertius was enthusiastically taken up by Renaissance writers, “they read him as though he were Tibullus or Ovid and consequently allude to his themes and even to passages, but without really seeing what he represented”; the even more glaring “enlightenment” of the eighteenth-century shrinks Propertian allusions almost to nothing. But Benediktson makes clear that he includes in his definition of “classicism” the confidence in reason that founds the chief ideal models of the polity in ancient and modern times, so that misunderstanding of, and disaffection from, Propertius correlates to prevailing political as well as literary thought (Benediktson 1989, 129–30).

7. The subject is split by

1. the orders of existence Lacan calls the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. He elaborates their relations in SXXII, but they are present in Lacan's thought long before that seminar. (See Macey 1988, 228–29 for a brief account of the order's definitive emergence in the course of Lacan's career; for an explanation of the orders themselves, see Janan 1994, 16–21).
2. language—self-evident in the fact that the subject who speaks is never exactly coincident with the subject of the speech. The person who says “I laughed” may or may not be laughing at the moment she speaks, and thus obviously differs from the subject, the “I,” of the sentence (Cf. SXI, 127–30/138–42, where Lacan illustrates this concept by means of the Liar's Paradox; I discuss this passage from SXI more fully in chapter 5.)

The polarity Conscious/Unconscious overlies both modes of division, but not such that any one realm can be said to be completely coterminous either with the Conscious or Unconscious.

8. Écrits 793–827/292–325. See also Žižek 1989.

9. Cf. e.g. RG 8.5.

10. Under “social upheaval,” I include the relatively peaceful, but nonetheless profound and unsettling, changes the early Empire wrought at the largest institutional levels (in the courts, the Senate, and, of course, the government itself, as it changed from republic to principate).

11. J. P. Postgate (Postgate 1881, liii-liv), seconded by P. H. Damsté (Damsté 1928, 214–19) both propose the “weak” and the “strong” theory of Book IV's oddity (i.e., as “posthumously edited” and “the work of a later poetaster” respectively), with Damsté inclined particularly to the latter belief. Léon Herrmann (Herrmann 1951, 137–65) elaborates on Damsté's conviction that Book IV is fraudulent by naming a suspect for the crime (“Passennus Paullus Propertius, qui les a conçues sous Titus,” 168).

12. Both Rothstein and Camps construe prisca closely with sacra diesque as well as cogno mina, even though grammatically it only modifies the latter: these will be “ancient” rites and

13. E.g., literary epistle (4.3), epicedion (4.11), hymn (4.6, 4.9), satire (4.8). For general discussion of Callimachus' influence on Propertius, see e.g. Boucher 1965, 194–203; Pillinger 1969, 171–99; Miller 1982, 380–96.

14. Gutzwiller 1992.

15. Berenike and Ptolemy were, in fact, cousins, but the lock describes Berenike's sorrow at her husband's departure as owed to a sisterly regard for her “brother,” according to the evidence of Catullus 66.21–22. For Catullus' poem as reliable witness to the content of Callimachus' (now only fragmentarily extant) poem, see Marinone 1984, 45–76.

16. Vertumnus claims, for example, the ability to emulate that quintessential object of amorous interest, a non dura puella (4.2.23).

17. Wyke 1987a, 154.

18. Evocatio: the ritual whereby the gods of a conquered city were induced to leave it with the promise of a cult in Rome at least as good as that offered by the enemy city.

19. Pinotti 1983.

20. 4.6: Apollo quickly tires of bellicosity at Actium and doffs his military gear in favor of a drinking party; 4.10: the discussion of the spolia opima treads the burning coals, not only of Rome's military abuse of the Etruscans again (at Veii), but of Augustus' petty refusal of the spolia opima to M. Licinius Crassus on the sophistical grounds that his (Crassus') command derived from Augustus and so Augustus alone deserved the honor (Cassius Dio 51.24.4). See below, chapter 6, “Double Vision,” and note 13.

21. On 4.1's double agenda, see, e.g., Grimal 1952; Nethercut 1968; Wyke 1987a.

22. Deremetz 1986, 130. He draws attention to ancient interest in etymology as veridical instrument—a claim that Plato's Cratylus passionately argues (see, e.g., Crat. 383a). Varro also attests that—for a later era in Rome—etymology strongly engaged the serious attention of philosophers (LL V.1–3).

23. 4.4: Propertius plays on the homoiophony between the traitorous Tarpeia's name— eventually bequeathed to the Tarpeian Rock—and turpe, “shameful.”

24. Bing 1988, 70–71; Zanker 1986, 121–23.

25. Tissol 1997, 201–202; cf. Edwards 1996, 16–18.

26. Though 1.22 does not explicitly say that its subject, Propertius' dead propinquus, is the same as the “Gallus” of 1.21, the majority of scholars accepts the identification. H.-P. Stahl includes a useful survey of previous opinion in his discussion of this issue (Stahl 1985, 111–12).

27. King 1980, Cairns 1983.

28. See Ross 1975, 82–84, King 1980, Cairns 1983.

29. Tränkle 1960, 23. Ross and Cairns follow suit (Ross 1975, 68n3, 83, 95n3; Cairns 1983, 85).

30. The most extensive analyses of Propertius as anti-Augustan are Commager 1974; Sullivan 1976, esp. 54–73; Stahl 1985. Nethercut 1983, 1836–52 and Viparelli 1987, 20–28 usefully survey scholarship on the question of Propertius' Augustanism.

31. Benediktson draws attention to the influence of nineteenth-century intellectual revolution on the appreciation of Propertius (Benediktson 1989, 130).

32. Livy eloquently expresses this despair: “haec tempora quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus,” Ab Urbe Condita, Praefatio 9. He echoes Sallust's despondency over Rome's seemingly irremediable corruption by “primo pecuniae, deinde imperi cupido” (BC

Even Ovid, generally a cheerful advocate of his times, sometimes paints a sour picture of modernity (e.g., the contemporary rule of wealth, especially that wrested by violence, depicted in Amores 3.8.53–56). The elegists may invoke the theme of deterioration in the present age more lightly than other writers, but their frequent recurrence to it shows that the topos had currency for a contemporary audience.

33. To speak only of the plastic arts: B. A. Kellum stresses the way in which Augustus shaped his building program—the Aedes Concordiae Augustae being the particular example— to reflect a putative “new world order” of harmony and prosperity (Kellum 1990, esp. 279–80). W. Mierse extends the conspectus to the provinces brought within the scope of “the newly established political unity of the West” via imperial building projects that visibly symbolized unity and integration (Mierse 1990).

34. Cf. Williams 1990.

35. Propertius was hardly blind to Augustus' failings, and neither should we be. I only wish to emphasize that the structure and purpose of the princeps' and poet's enterprises mirror one another.

36. In my account of this problem, I have relied heavily on Joan Copjec's eloquently lucid exposition of it (Copjec 1994, 205).

37. See Saussure 1983, [159–69], [176–84] (page numbers in square brackets refer to the standardized pagination of the French editions from 1922 onwards, printed in the margins of most modern editions and translations).

38. Plato Timaeus 42b5–6;Ar. GA 737a28; Cic. Tusc. 2.43; Val. Max. 5.3.1; Sen. Ad Helv. 16.

39. Lloyd 1984 3.

40. Lacan 1975, 31.

41. Žižek 1991a, 112. Throughout this book, I have availed myself not only of Lacan's work per se, but of that of his most brilliant disciples—such as Žižek, Joan Copjec, and Luce Irigaray—wherever I felt their writings could help either shed light on an obscure sector of Lacan's legacy or extend the trajectory of his reflection on critical problems beyond where it stood at the time of his death in 1981. The writings I have used from these authors are extensions of Lacan's thought that are nonetheless compatible with its fundamental principles.

42. On Cynthia's guises in the Monobiblos, cf. Richardson 1977, 3–4 (quoted below in full in chapter 7).

43. Lacan 1975, 35.

44. Cf. Slavoj Žižek on the concept of nationality (Žižek 1991a, 109–10). Žižek's discussion draws upon Hegel (principally the Wissenschaft der Logik) as Hegel rethinks both Fichte (Wissenschaftslehre) and Kant.

45. I capitalize Law in order to emphasize its status in my arguments as the principle of imposing constraint upon the subject rather than as a particular set of juridical codes; obviously, though, Law-as-the-idea-of-constraint subsumes its own more concrete articulations in particular statutes.

46. Frier 1985, esp. xi-xvi, 185–96.

47. A premise principally elaborated in SVII, esp. 197–209/167–78 (“Tout exercice de la jouissance comporte quelque chose qui s'inscrit au Livre de la dette dans la Loi,” 208).

48. On Cynthia as conqueror, note the references to her initial furious burst through his doors as being “no less astonishing a sight than when a city is captured” (“spectaclum capta nec minus urbe fuit,” 4.8.56); her rejoicing in the “spoils” (“exuviis”) she tears from Phyllis and Teia (63); Propertius' description of himself as a “captive” (“captus eram,” 70); his begging for a “treaty” (“foedera,” 71) and her imperiously dictating (and his accepting) “terms” (“formula legis,” 74; “ ‘legibus utar,’” 81); her rejoicing in the “command” yielded her (“imperio … dato,” 82).

49. Freedom of will is a central problem for ancient philosophy, with which Aristotle, Epicurus, Carneades, and the Stoics wrestled. For Aristotle, see Irwin 1980; for Epicurus (and Aristotle as a witness to his thought) see Englert 1987 and Long 1986, 56–61;for Carneades and the Stoics, see Long 1986, 101–104, 167–68.

50. Ronald Syme sums up succinctly the Roman emphasis on freedom (libertas)—as well as the cynical uses to which this catchphrase was put in both Republic and Empire (Syme 1939, 154–56).

51. Lacan 1998, 69. (The French reads: “C'est une façon tout à fait raffinée de suppléer à l'absence de rapport sexuel, en feignant que c'est nous qui y mettons obstacle,” Lacan 1975, 65.)

52. “Sexuation” is Lacan's coinage, and means “the assumption of the position of Man or Woman solely as a relation to a signifier (i.e., to the phallus)”—which is, according to Lacan, the only way the subject can assume either gender position.

53. Commentaries on Books II and III succeeded the initial two efforts in 1966.

54. Camps 1965, v.

55. Nethercut 1983, 1850–52.

56. Nethercut 1983, 1852.

57. Not that Acanthis confines herself entirely to criticism of Book I, but that that book is paradigmatic of the “bad faith” she finds at the heart of Propertius' elegiac doctrine. Laura Celentano, for example, has noticed that Acanthis implicitly taxes Propertius with not extrapolating the logical consequences of his own precepts: the lena 's observations on the ephemerality of the roses at Paestum echoes the vivid image of dying rose petals that summarizes mortality in 2.15.51–54. Propertius concludes from this that lovers should make love while they can; Acanthis sees that while dalliance with a poor man may make youth interesting, it will do nothing to provide for her charge's comfortable old age (Celentano 1956, 56–57).

58. Many scholars have accepted and expanded upon Propertius' invitation, implied in Acanthis' skepticism, to reread his work with an alertness to questions of gender, and none more so than feminist classicists. Recently, Maria Wyke has supplied an excellent overview and genealogy of feminist work on Propertius that has appeared within the last three decades

About two decades later, Barbara Gold redevelops Hallett's idea of elegy crossing gender boundaries in the context of Alice Jardine's “gynesis,” paying strict attention to the way that Woman is produced as a sign. Gynesis names a methodology through which Jardine sought a way to analyze texts that combined the idea of Woman as a process that disrupts symbolic structures with attention to ethics, practice, and sexual identity; building upon this concept, Gold argues that the Propertian corpus consistently puts into play the concepts of Woman and the feminine as problematic, and consequently opens up a space in which one can question anew the representations of women in these texts (Gold 1993a). Wyke herself has brought into feminist discussions of Propertius the idea that the beloved girl ( puella) of elegiac poetry is discursively produced and symbolizes specifically the act of writing itself. That allegorical reading of the puella has its roots in non-feminist criticism of the early seventies, such as Steele Commager's Prolegomenon to Propertius (Commager 1974, 3–12, 21–24), although it has proven useful to feminists who wish to emphasize the gap between representations of women in elegiac poetry and the historical lives of actual Roman women (Kathleen McNamee, for example, attacks the problem of the Monobiblos' inconsistent representations of Cynthia by exhaustively analyzing them as symbols for writing [McNamee 1993]). Such emphasis is necessary because the “romantic” tendency to assimilate fiction to fact lives on, especially in the service of ferreting out a real woman's history behind the puella (Wyke cites the recent efforts of Oliver Lyne and Jasper Griffin as evidence; she could with justice have added Hans Peter Stahl's Propertius, wherein “Cynthia's” status as a married woman of noble rank actually named Hostia is firmly asserted [Stahl 1985, 28, 143–48]).

However, though Wyke's emphasis on the puella's discursive production aligns her with Gold's methodology, she is far from entertaining Gold's—or Hallett's—optimism as regards the first three books of the Propertian corpus. Rather, Wyke cites with approval the work of Paul Veyne and Duncan Kennedy, a “pessimistic” strand of Propertius analysis that, while not explicitly declaring itself feminist, holds interest for those who read from a feminist perspective (Veyne 1988, Kennedy 1993); Veyne and Kennedy see the dynamics of love elegy (Propertius' being no exception) as reducing the female beloved to a passive object. Much of Wyke's own work has also striven to elucidate the various ways in which the poet-narrator of the Propertian corpus exerts discursive mastery over the beloved (Wyke 1987b, 1989a, 1989b). Nonetheless, in passing from an analysis of Propertius Books I-III to Book IV's anomalous array of female speakers who seemingly wrest the narrative away from the male poet-narrator's exclusive control, Wyke moves away from a purely “pessimistic” viewpoint and towards agreement with Gold's and Hallett's optimism, albeit with some reservations (Wyke 1987a, 1994). She can say of Book IV both that “when the elegiac poet gives a point of view and a voice to female characters, he still exercises discursive mastery over them” and that

My own work on Propertius, as represented in this book, has most in common with Gold's theoretical perspective; even though she works from Jardine's “gynesis,” and I from a Lacanian perspective, we share the idea that Woman in elegy is constructed from signifying practices and has nothing necessarily to do with anatomy or historical women, that even the male poet-narrator may assume the position of Woman; both of us press the analysis of Woman-as-sign beyond reading Her as an allegory for writing elegiac verse. I hope to build upon Gold's insights into Propertius by applying in a principled fashion the Lacanian idea of Woman where it exceeds any reference to historical women, or anatomy or biology, and refers tout simple to the gaps in any logical system; analyzing the Propertian text will not then be limited to problematizing and questioning representations of women. Lacan's broad concept of Woman is crucially relevant to, say, the logical incompatibilities that prevent us from assimilating the Gallus poems of the Monobiblos either to one coherent Gallus or many Galluses (as I shall show in chapter 1), even though representations of elegiac puellae fade into the background in these elegies.

I also incline toward Gold's (and Hallett's) optimism. Although Wyke rightly draws attention to Acanthis' mocking quote from the Monobiblos, and reads it (as do I) as Propertius' implicit command to reevaluate his own earlier work with skepticism, I cannot agree with her that the entire first three books exemplify Propertius' exercise of “discursive mastery” over the elegiac puella. For one thing, I doubt that complete “discursive mastery” is possible. Lacan's persuasive development of the idea that every system has its point of logical breakdown—an idea upon which his conceptualizations of jouissance, Woman, and objet a center—undermines the premise that anyone can assume the position of Master with complete effectiveness, especially mastery of a signifying system. Even in theory, gaps and resistances would be expected in the most carefully premeditated stratagem of domination; in practice, I find more in Books I-III that disturbs and resists the dominant Roman ideology of gender than can easily be assimilated to the idea of the poet's “discursive mastery” (such as Cynthia's dramatic disruption of his fantasies about her in Prop. 1.3).

However, my differences with Wyke are more of degree than of kind. I agree with her reading of Propertius that sees him, in Book IV, questioning his own work, and elegy in general, along lines of interest to feminists; I simply do not consider this to be grounds for reading Books I-III as though they were devoid of such questioning.