Aspirations and Divagations: The Poetics of Place in Propertius 2.10

That the recusatio constitutes a poetic strategy that at once challenges and yet tends to affirm the traditional hierarchy of genres is by now a familiar, if variously formulated, observation.¹ Hence a multitude of meanings in any specimen of recusatio, and the promise of internal paradox, a constellation of possibilities that holds an irresistible attraction for the modern critic, for whom genre remains a central concern and to whom (and without apology) complications and problems offer very appealing aspects of literary expression. Although in important respects it differs from other Augustan instances of its kind, Propertius 2.10 is unquestionably a recusatio.² The prospect of Propertius' turning from elegiac poetry to the composition of Augustan epic is configured in terms of what Oliver Lyne describes as "the motif of (failed) ascent," which here refers to the poet's failed metaphorical ascent of Mt. Helicon.³ The poem begins with the declaration (1)

Sed tempus lustrare aliis Helicona choreisBut now it is time to move over Helicon with other dances

and concludes with the admission (25-26)

nondum etiam Ascraeos norunt mea carmina fontes,sed modo Permessi flumine lavit Amor.

Not yet do my poems know the Ascraean springs, but Love has only bathed them in the river Permessus.

It seems clear from the literary pedigree of this final distich, about which more presently, that the poetic geography of this poem sets the Ascraeos fontes (usually identified by critics with the Hippocrene) on Helicon's peak and the Permessus at its base. Each of these waters carries obvious (if contestable) generic symbolism, organized here along the vector of (failed) ascent, and it is the nearly universal conclusion of critics that this poem situates its author, for all his efforts to rise above himself, at the base of Helicon, on the river Permessus, an elegiac love poet still. That conclusion can hardly be rejected.⁴ But perhaps a complication can be introduced, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that, although Propertius 2.10 of course wittily inscribes a failed attempt to elevate Propertian elegy from love poetry to Augustan encomium, its situation of epic at the apex of its ambitions (and of itself at the bottom) is by no means a simple or straightforward arrangement. Ascent, failed or otherwise, is not the only trajectory to be reckoned with in this poem. The poet's metaphorical representation of his epic aspirations concentrates on two very different situations: mountain peaks and epic plains. The selection of these disparate targets as symbols of epic composition, which hardly seems accidental, can be explained, as we shall see, in an examination of the poem's Virgilian background, which introduces a network of allusions that requires the reader at least to consider the implications of yet another paradigm for epic composition, the motif of successful descent, in making any assessment of the literary program delineated in Propertius 2.10. In the end, despite the poem's determination to define the genres of epic and elegy in terms of their specific locations in its own poetic landscape, 2.10 itself eludes fixed installation in Helicon's geography, depending on how one elects to read the poem's final line. This elusiveness, it is here suggested, constitutes a commentary on the resistance to generic stability and definition that is generally regarded as an essential quality of the recusatio.⁵

It is a prominent feature of Propertius 2.10 that it tends to accumulate the various methods of the recusatio. By far the most conspicuous influence is Virgil.⁶ The final couplet of Propertius 2.10, cited above, although it opens the floodgates on several currents of the literary tradition, is most obviously an allusion to Eclogue 6.64-73, in which passage Cornelius Gallus is led by a Muse from the banks of the Permessus to the Aonian mountains (viz. Helicon), where the fabulous poet Linus gives him the instrument of Ascraean Hesiod in order that he might compose aetiological poetry (an epyllion on the Grynean grove). The scene is ostentatiously derivative (it...