Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure (review)

There is a modern debate that pits “poetry” against “poem” as the critical lens through which we should read, write, and analyze this privileged literary creature. Alison Keith’s Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure treats Propertius conclusively as a collection—as poetry—rather than as a series of individual poems. What emerges is a dazzling study of the intricacy of Propertius’ oeuvre, presented in five thematic chapters that read the oeuvre through the lens of Roman rhetoric, Alexandrian poetics, the elegiac puella, elite male relationships, and empire. It is a volume of immense learning, filled with gems about Propertius’ poetry and replete with reference to various outliers (e.g., Maecenas’ poetry), nuanced with theory (Edward Saïd appears prominently), written gracefully, and accessible and useful for graduate students and scholars.

The series of which the book is part, “Classical Literature and Society,” aims to consider ancient literature “... primarily in relation to genre and theme. It also aims to place writer and original addressee in their social context” (back cover). Keith’s book admirably lives up to this promise and easily transcends Hubbard and Sullivan in its complexity and subtlety. Two conclusions emerge powerfully from reading this book-of-many-theses: first, that Propertius’ poems are to be read in toto, or at least book by book, rather than individually. Many themes in a given poem only emerge in dialogue with other poems. Second, Propertius is foremost a literary artist, a text-smith if you will, who masterfully includes and transforms literary tropes, prior texts, metaliterary language, generic conventions, and even people to his own purpose. Propertius the poet thus trumps Propertius the lover or (if he was one) dissident. This deliberate and pervasive literariness is somewhat at odds with the idea of Propertius in his social context (and those chapters which stress social context), but rather than detract from Keith’s book this tension exerts productive pressure on our understanding of the poetry. This productive pressure will be clear, I hope, from the chapter descriptions that follow.

Following a chapter that outlines (clearly and in great detail) all we can know about Propertius the man, in Chapter 2 Keith turns to the poetry’s participation in the pervasive rhetoricity of the Augustan age. While Keith concludes that there is little overt engagement with the rhetorical tradition in Propertius’ poetry, her study illuminates the almost countless instances of legal language, sententiae/epigram, declamatory techniques such as ekphrasis and comparison, and more extended rhetorical structures such as controversiae and the like. Keith’s primary contribution here is to defamiliarize these techniques for her modern readers, who are steeped enough in similar rhetorical patterns not to notice them at play in Propertius’ poetry.

Chapter 3 explodes any pat notion of Propertius as Callimachus Romanus. Keith deftly locates Propertius’ nods to the poems of Homer, Meleager, Philetas, Gallus, Mimnermus, Philodemus, Tibullus, Catullus, Horace, Vergil, etc., most of which nods are blended in an intertextual “hall of mirrors” in which Keith retains remarkably clear vision. One admirable example is her treatment of water in several Propertian poems, not as a simple allusion to Callimachus’ pure poetics but as a complex reworking of multiple poetic sources, among them the prominence of the spring Burina in Philitas’ Hymn to Demeter (77–83 for Callimachus and Philetas together). One caveat I suggest for readers of this chapter is that, when Keith treats the Gallus of the Monobiblos, she assumes two distinct personae—Gallus the poet addressee of 1.5, 10, 13, and 20, and Gallus the poet’s kinsman of 1.21 and 22; other recent critics have seen a slippage in the signifier Gallus that defies the pure historicity or literariness of the figure (Janan 2001, Pincus 2004). The broader questions Gallus poses in the text are elsewhere treated in Chapter 5, but it is wise to keep them in mind here as well.

The fourth chapter examines Cynthia and concludes that, whatever sort of real person might have lain...