Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (review)

The argument of this book and its controversial title is that, while Propertius may have struck his audience in his early elegies as a poet of significant originality, he was obviously sharing the genre of love elegy with his contemporaries, Gallus, Tibullus, Ovid, and others now lost to us; but it was in his fourth and final book that he broke away from the limits of love elegy and "reinvented" the genre by combining with it aetiology on Roman themes. This was a daring move that cost Propertius considerable effort and no doubt much satisfaction, and he boldly exposed to his audience the risks he was taking and the tensions that resulted in this new elegy.  DeBrohun herself devotes special attention to an explication of the theory that drives Propertius and this reinvention of his.

The greatest part of Propertius' literary theory emerges in DeBrohun's careful introduction and then in the two sizable chapters that she consecrates to the programmatic 4.1, a total of 117 pages, nearly half her book.  Propertius of course invited his audience to appreciate his critical problems and their ingenious solutions by making this first poem a dispute between two essentially new characters: first, a speaker who takes a hospes on a tour of Augustan Rome and spouts his enthusiasm for Rome's present and past; and then, after this speaker finally proclaims it his poetic project to sing of the rites, days, and etymologies of Rome, a freakish character interrupts him, claiming to be Horos of Egypt, possessor of extraordinary powers of prediction.  With this weird background and questionable wisdom, Horos challenges the first speaker (naming him Propertius, 71) for his goal and urges him to return to the love elegy he had produced so successfully.

Although in 4.1 this new Propertius never answers Horos, DeBrohun argues that the poet does achieve an accord between the new aetiology and the earlier love elegy, in 4.1 as well as in the other ten poems of book 4.  The stark opposition which Horos defines receives various manipulations in the individual elegies, but there is always a mediating element which she calls a "third": this "third" keeps reminding us that the aetiological topic repeatedly resorts to the language and themes we once met in Propertius' earlier love elegy.  DeBrohun sets herself a hard task because, having spent so much attention on 4.1, she limits her study primarily to 4.9 (Hercules and the Ara Maxima) and to 4.6 (Apollo and the Battle of Actium and his Palatine temple).  Even she, however, with her reinvented elegy does not make 4.6, a favorite of few readers despite its central position, convincingly successful.  This is a study of great ingenuity, designed for Propertian specialists: nobody before DeBrohun, I think, has credited the Roman poet with such a complex achievement.