1. Although a terse couplet toward the end of the poem does show Apollo doffing his arms in favor of the cithara (4.7.69–70), the vast preponderance of the poem emphasizes Apollo's militancy.

2. Cf., e.g., the comically self-possessed Apollo's perching in a tree from which he delivers a mildly deflating, but hardly unfriendly, admonition to Propertius to abandon epic ambitions and stick to erotic elegy (3.3.13–24).

3. I owe the observation of this structural correspondence between 4.6 and 4.7, and its significance for the two poems, to Marilyn Skinner.

4. Cynthia describes herself as golden (“aurea Cynthia,” 4.7.85), an epithet Apollo does not explicitly receive in 4.6; yet the poet envelops the god in a similar effulgence of fiery light (“nova flamma / luxit in obliquam ter sinuata facem,” 4.6.29–30).

5. Even his one unsuccessful attempt at faithlessness, chronicled in elegy 4.8, he carefully constructs as a reaction to Cynthia's prior offense(s): she has deserted him for a rich fop (see chapter 7).

6. E.g., Lake 1937; Lefèvre 1966, 108–19.

7. Frances Muecke (Muecke 1974) finds in the surprising assertion of fidelity an index of Cynthia's own contradictory character. William Helmbold, P. J. Enk, Jean-Paul Boucher, and Karl Jäger all believe the statement to result either from Propertius' high-minded resolution to cover up Cynthia's lapses, or from wishful thinking (Helmbold 1949, 342; Enk 1957, 30; Boucher 1965, 95; Jäger 1967, 86). The second sphere of interpretation still burdens Cynthia with a dichotomy—the split between what she is, and what she “should” be—even though it shifts the immediate responsibility for the statement's contradiction from Cynthia's character to Propertius' (altruistic or delusional) prevarication.

8. Burck 1966, 417–18.

9. See, e.g., Grimal 1952, 446; Nethercut 1968, 461–64 (though he is anxious to grant 4.1 and 4.11 almost equal weight); Pillinger 1969, 190.

10. For a judiciously comprehensive review and evaluation of previous scholarship on 4.6, see Gurval 1995, 249–78.

11. Among those who see the poem as intentionally parodic are Sweet 1972, Johnson 1973, Connor 1978, and Gurval 1995, 249–78.

12. Witness the oddity of referring to Romulus as “Trojan Romulus” (“Teucro Quirino”); by thus referring to Romulus' Eastern heritage, Propertius blurs the distinction between Rome's founder and her Egyptian (thus stereotypically oriental and effeminate) enemies, as I shall discuss in greater detail in chapter 8.

13. Prop. 4.10 might seem, at first blush, to rival 4.6 as an embodiment of masculinist poetics. Elegy 4.10 undertakes an explanation of the unrelentingly martial cult of Jupiter Feretrius (including a speculative etymology of the god's cult name), depicting the three occasions on which a Roman general slew an enemy leader in single combat and was accordingly allowed to dedicate the “best spoils” (spolia opima, stripped from the defeated enemy commander) to Jupiter Feretrius in the god's temple. Describing the victories of Romulus over Acron of Caenina, Cossus over Tolumnius of Veii, and Claudius Marcellus over the Gall Virdomarus, the elegy's patriotic tone, martial and nationalistic subject matter, and sole concentration on male achievement appear to press its claims as an instantiation of poetic masculinism. However, closer scrutiny reveals facets that cast doubt upon the very themes promoted, and that debar 4.10 from unquestioning self-assurance, which is 4.6's chief claim to masculinism. Take, for example, 4.10's terseness: the shortest poem in Book IV, it narrates each winning of the spolia opima more laconically than the last, a compression especially noticeable in the third episode. Although Propertius fleshes out Romulus' and Cossus' victories with eye-catching animadversions on the first Roman's tough, spare life (4.10.19–20) and the melancholy ruin into which Veii has fallen in Propertius' day (4.10.25–30), he concludes with a six-line perfunctory summation of Claudius' conquest, as though the subject ceased to hold interest even before the poem ended (cf. Richardson 1977, 476). In the concluding episode, only Virdomarus' description summons attention (4.10.40–43), chiefly

4.10's sad lines on Veii's contemporary decay as compared to its glorious past (25–30), when it could plausibly challenge Rome, work to similar effect; they bespeak sympathy with an ancient enemy of Rome at odds with a purely patriotic tone—especially where, as William Nethercut points out, they define Roman growth as brigandage (“necdum ultra Tiberim belli sonus, ultima praeda / Nomentum et captae iugera terna Corae,” 25–26; Nethercut 1983, 1851). Moreover, the “then … now” (tum … nunc) structure of Veii's description echoes elegy 4.1's studied contrasts between ancient pastoral Rome and the glorious city of Propertius' day (Weeber 1977, 209). The structural similarity implies that Veii's vicissitudes of fortune can also be Rome's: even a city that now rules the known world may in future again see humble times.

Assuredly the Rome that Propertius knew was already diminished by the fact that it would not soon witness again the distinct military honor of the spolia opima awarded. In 29 B.C.E., Marcus Licinius Crassus killed Deldo, the king of the Bastarnae, in single combat, yet was denied the spolia opima on the grounds that since he derived his command from Augustus, he was not truly general in his own right and was therefore ineligible. The poem's subject matter cannot but bring to the reader's mind Augustus' jealous monopolizing of military glory, a pettiness that seconds the poem's implicitly gloomy imagination of Rome's history and future. Little wonder, then, that Propertius ends his poem in doubt when he etymologizes the cult name of the god to whom the spolia opima were dedicated: perhaps we call Jupiter “Feretrius,” he says, because “helped by a sure omen, commander wounds [ ferit ] commander with his sword,” or perhaps because “they bear [ ferebant ] these defeated arms upon their shoulders” to the god's temple. The two etymologies imply different views of the Roman victories commemorated in Jupiter's temple: the first underlines the conquests' status as divinely aided (omine … certo, 4.10.45), the second preserves a diplomatic silence regarding heaven's supposed tutelage over Roman triumph. The poem's wavering between the two versions and their implied divergent Weltanschauungen, refusing to choose one over the other, aligns it with such examples of persistent “feminine” doubt as the Tarpeia elegy and the ambiguity as to which vigilans is the object of injustice in 4.4's closing lines (chapter 4).

The scant attention that scholarship has paid 4.10 ranges along a spectrum, from readings that see it as unproblematically patriotic in its ambitions to those that see it as bitterly anti-Roman; yet not even the most sanguine analysis argues that 4.10 even remotely rivals 4.6 in its realization of nationalistic tribute (the chief reflections on 4.10 within the last few decades poem are: Grimal 1952, 188–90; Burck 1966, 414–15; Nethercut 1968, 455–56; Becker 1971, 465–66; Hubbard 1974, 128–34; Weeber 1977, 203–16). In light of 4.10's details outlined above, both in themselves and in the way that they align 4.10 with the ambiguous “feminine” perspectives recorded elsewhere in Book IV, I consider elegy 4.10 too imbued with subtle self-interrogation to represent a masculinist poetics cleanly, and elegy 4.6 to stand alone as masculinism's purest representative within Book IV.

14. There are dissentient voices among the interpreters of 4.6, and these see more problematic details in the elegy than the “patriotic” interpretation will regularly allow (such as the fact that the poem ends on a note, not of martial triumph but of drunken bacchanalia,

15. Elegy 4.5 cannot make the same claim to be an epicenter as can 4.7, because (1) its order with respect to 4.6 does not reproduce the pattern of assertion followed by direct riposte established in the programmatic opening poem, 4.1, where Horos scoffs at Propertius' quasi-epic, nationalistic program, (2) Acanthis—old, foul, sick, impoverished—hardly commands the numinous power that Cynthia's ghost does, even in the courtesan's post-mortem decrepitude, and so cannot constitute a worthy match to Apollo as the divine focus of elegy 4.6.

16. Of course, elegy is far from being the only conduit for stories of “good” and “bad” women, but the genre as a whole lavishes keen attention on developing exemplary histories of women at length, especially those drawn from myth—logically so, given that its declared subject matter is love, and chiefly the love of women. See Lilja 1978, 143–55.

17. See esp. the discussion of the imagery of rape in Cornelia's speech in chapter 9, “The Urns of the Danaids.”

18. Cornelia's iron Hades in 4.11 condemns women to the extent that it can find no conceptual place for them, whereas Cynthia's Hades in 4.7 shows itself logically stymied in that it cannot seem to make good on its condemnations. Yet both the condemnation in 4.11, and the de facto suspended sentences of 4.7, rest upon jouissance, upon the same kernel of nonsense inherent in judging Woman upon an inadequate basis of thought.

19. In fact, as Theodore Papanghelis observes, Propertius suggests that, like a snake, she secretes her poisons: “arcanas tollat versuta salivas,” 37 (Papanghelis 1987, 170).

20. See Allison 1984.

21. Cf., e.g., Antonio La Penna: “Ha giudicato duramente questa elegia Giosuè Carducci: «L'elegia di Properzio è indegna del bellissimo cominciamento»; vi si sente «un paganesimo vizioso» (vedi il commento alla canzone Quando il soave mio fido conforto nelle «Rime di F. Petrarca» commentate da G. Carducci e Severino Ferrari, Firenze, Sansoni, 1924—nuova tiratura—pag. 497). È facile vedere che il giudizio critico è stato traviato dal confronto fra l'elegia properziana e la canzone petrarchesca, di ispirazione diversissima. Ma è giusta la notazione di una incongruenza estetica tra il motivo iniziale el altri motivi minori ” (La Penna 1951, 85n1; emphasis mine).

22. Serious: Postgate 1881, xxiv-xxvii; Butler-Barber 1933, xiv; Helmbold 1949; Enk 1957, 29–30; Hubbard 1974, 149–53; Lange 1979. Humorous: Lake 1937; Guillemin 1950, 189–91; Allison 1984.

23. E.g., Lefèvre 1966, 108–19; Muecke 1974; Papanghelis 1987, 145–98.

24. Margaret Hubbard observes that 4.7 takes place in “the Roman world of sordid and brutal actuality that by and large the poets prefer to neglect”; she does not, unfortunately, expand upon her observation (Hubbard 1974, 90). Jasper Griffin (Griffin 1985) makes it clear, in his careful tracing of the relationship between “real life” and poetry, that even in cases where the poets had (presumably) some knowledge of the facts, they were not averse to suppressing its more unpleasant elements (substituting an unintimidating lena for the more formidable leno [“pimp”], for example, though the latter was doubtless the more common custodian of a meretrix [“courtesan, prostitute”]).

David Konstan has elucidated a parallel instance of “voyeurism” in Greek poetry, when he discusses Herodas (Konstan 1994, 162–67). “The defining characteristic of Herodas' mimes would seem to be precisely the absence of male heads of household, or just those figures who define the social norms in official comedy” (163); with the exit of the “official,” the mime adopts a style of realism, focusing on women and other marginal figures engaged in the humbler details of life. Herodas' representation of women, however, is misogynistic, portraying women of independent status as dissolute stereotypes, whereas (I argue) Prop. 4.7 undermines such an attitude by its attention to economic constraints on women.

25. Jasper Griffin (Griffin 1985, 203–208) has traced the lineaments of comedy's stock collocation of clever slaves, irregular women, indigent young men, and upstart freedmen in the typical themes of elegy; he also provides useful references to previous scholarly explorations of this thesis.

26. E.g., Allison 1984; Warden 1980, 35; Komp 1988, 69–80.

27. Parker 1989.

28. Gutzwiller 1985, 110.

29. There are exceptions, of course, to the general picture of women's economic dependence on their lovers: Cicero, for example, virtually equates Clodia Metelli's alleged love affairs with the behavior of a meretrix (Pro Caelio 35, 38, 47–50, 57), and yet any extra-marital attachment so wealthy a woman had could not have been motivated by a need for money. If Clodia was, as so often alleged, the model for Catullus' Lesbia, that may explain why his corpus never records a question of money arising between them. At the other end of the spectrum, sex with slaves would be the master's legal right and customary prerogative, for which no remuneration would be expected; Propertius' Ponticus falls in love with his own slave (Prop. 1.9), and perhaps so does Horace's Xanthias (C. 2.4; Horace does not specify whether Xanthias owned his beloved Phyllis). Xanthias has, nonetheless, tried to ply his mistress with gifts, to which she has shown herself nobly indifferent (Horace C. 2.4.17–20). Jasper Griffin discusses the delicate question of dissimulating economics in Roman representations of “love” affairs (Griffin 1985, 112–41).

30. Amy Richlin makes a similar point in discussing the clash between the distracting aesthetic felicities and the gruesome content of Ovid's depictions of rape in the Metamor phoses (Richlin 1992b, esp. 159).

31. Cf. Tibullus 1.5.59–70 (a rich rival steals away Delia's affections); 2.3, 2.4 (a wealthy rival captures all Nemesis' attention); Propertius 1.8 (a praetor's fortune fails—just barely— to tempt Cynthia to Illyria), 2.16 (the same moneyed praetor now gains her favors); Ovid Amores 3.8 (Corinna shuts him out in favor of a rich soldier). Kathryn Gutzwiller shrewdly notes that Ovid rather gives the game away: “Ovid, who is especially good at showing the soft underside of any argument, concedes in Amores 1.10.53–56 that his mistress still needs a dives amator (‘wealthy lover’) to support her in the proper style,” so that she can supply her favors gratis to the poor poet (Gutzwiller 1985, 111).

32. Cf. Gutzwiller 1985Gutzwiller 1985, esp. 110–11. For a conspectus of the evidence on prostitution's economic realities and the literary prevarication thereof, see Griffin 1985, 112–41.

33. Papanghelis notes the anomaly, but attributes it to Propertius' indulgent affection for any dead beauty, a love that supposedly suspends the poet's judgment (Papanghelis 1987, 178–79). But Propertius does not just withhold judgment here, he makes history's assessment of these women as types of feminine vice or virtue a problem; he calls into question the standards by which they have been judged (as I shall show). That is a different, and much deeper, affair than merely turning a blind eye to the dead queens' faults, while conceding that they are faults.

34. Noted by Warden 1980, 41.

35. Warden's subtly acute observation (Warden 1980, 43).

36. Rothstein, Allison, Komp, and Dimundo, for example, blandly compare 4.7's Underworld to that of Aeneas 6 and Tibullus 1.3, ignoring the fact that both Vergil's and Tibullus' Hades are far more orderly and sensible affairs of judgment than Propertius' aspires to be. Rothstein in particular makes a brave attempt to tidy up Propertius' eschatological omissions by assuming, anterior and posterior to the glimpse of Hades' workings afforded by the poem, a Prussian efficiency in winnowing good from evil: “die Verteilung der Toten auf diese beiden Wohnsitze geschieht schon vor der Überfahrt (s. zu III 18, 31), und auf getrennten Wegen und in besonderen Schiffen werden die Seligen und die Verdammten an den Ort ihrer Bestimmung gebracht” (Rothstein 1966, ad 55; Allison 1980, 333–34; Komp 1988, 86; Dimundo 1990, ad 57–58). Warden and Papanghelis, by contrast, notice the anomalies— Warden's is a particularly acute elucidation—but both attribute them to sentiment, either for Cynthia in particular or feminine beauty in general, that sways Propertius from harsh logic (Warden 1980, 39–50; Papanghelis 1987, 170–85).

37. OLD, s.v. caudex /codex, definitions 1b and 2a.

38. Cf. e.g. 2.5.26; 2.30.39; 4.1.62. Lawrence Richardson, Jr., makes the point in his sensitive commentary on Cynthia's injunction (Richardson 1977, ad 4.7.80).

39. Noted by Warden 1980, 59.

40. Noted by Warden 1980, 46–47 (“why are they weeping? Their sufferings are over long ago, and need not pursue them into the underworld”); Papanghelis 1987, 183 (“they just gather and narrate on and on”). Warden, Allison, and Papanghelis all emphasize, too, that the heroines of Hades preserve eternally their posture and looks from life in death (Warden 1980, 43, calling attention to Andromeda's bruises; Allison 1980, 334; Papanghelis 1987, 181— “the Propertian ladies can do little else besides affecting the same posture for all eternity recounting in statuesque immobility the highlights of their earthly adventures”).

41. Enk argues on the basis of these endlessly flowing tears that the line needs emendation; obviously I disagree (Enk 1911, 336). D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Shackleton Bailey 1956, 252–53) objects that Propertius' thoughts need not be as orderly as his critic's, but I think we should be sure we have thoroughly plumbed Propertius' import before we accuse him of woolly-mindedness.

42. On the East as the mirror-inversion of Rome, see Quint 1993, 21–31.