Cynthia: A Companion to the Text of Propertius by S. J. Heyworth (review)

Cynthia represents the hypomnemata to the edition of Propertius by Stephen Heyworth. It is an indispensable tool for readers of the new Oxford Classical Text of Propertius and for this reason the contemporary publication of both books has been extremely important. The text edited by Heyworth is so innovative that it was necessary to explain and discuss the editor’s choices. Cynthia is a long dialogue with the reader: Heyworth exposes reflections that are the fruits of decades of engagement with the text of Propertius, and one feels that he speaks with authority.

The Preface is brief, but it summarizes the method followed in the book and places the critic in his appropriate setting, where he acknowledges his debts to scholars like J. L. Butrica and G. P. Goold. The true introduction is the one to the edition in the OCT: in fact it is one work in two volumes. The bulk of the book consists of a discussion of passages from the entire work of the Latin poet. Before each elegy there is an essential bibliography. Then follows a quotation (in the vulgate form of the text) of the passage under discussion; in most cases it is accompanied by the critical apparatus of the OCT edition, with some modifications. All the passages examined are included because of textual problems, even if sometimes one gets the impression of being confronted with purely literary aspects of the text. There is no introduction to any elegy, and it is not in fact necessary: we grasp only what is problematic, and following Heyworth’s guidance we are taken through a stimulating experience. After 512 pages of Propertiana (D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s model is unquestionable), there is a complete translation of the text proposed by the editor, which is particularly useful. His policy is not to avoid any problem but to discuss it honestly without preconceptions. At the end there are rich indexes, which offer easy access to the wealth of linguistic and stylistic observations that are disseminated over the commentary. They also include the preface to the edition in the OCT.

It is impossible to deal in a detailed manner with the hundreds of proposals and hypotheses. The editor offers us a completely different Propertius from the poet we have been accustomed to know from the more important editions of the twentieth century (deemed as conservative until the edition by Goold [Cambridge, Mass. 1990]). Following the wishes of Butrica, the elegies of Propertius are now consistent with the judgments of ancient critics, who valued in Propertius “a poet of finish, grace and charm” (M. Hubbard, Propertius [London 1974]:3). The text has undergone a massive restoration and it is readable and fluent: no more the work of an “expressionistic” poet (E. Pasoli) with his idiosyncratic language, but of a contemporary of Tibullus and an immediate predecessor of Ovid. The severe corruptions of the text are no longer visible in its linguistic texture, but in its fragmentation, which characterizes in particular the second book. In the others there are not so many ruins, but for lacunae and expunged distichs. The decision not only to bracket them, but to put them at the end of each elegy, is rhetorically astute: if one sees these couplets out of their context, one will certainly damn them, since they usually are a proverbial thought or an item of a catalogue.

The text of the OCT exhibits a smooth surface that derives from a complex work of restoration. Butrica had told us that most editors of Propertius are like those who had loved the smoke deposited during the centuries onto the frescoes by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel (“Editing Propertius.” CQ 47 [1997]:208). The Propertian frescoes have now been restored: parts which were severely damaged are even better than the original; others, whose authenticity we do not trust, have been detached and put aside. The result is a piece...