Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility: Elegy After 19 BC

Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility is an in-depth study of Propertius’ final collection of elegies as the earliest concerted response to the poetic career of Virgil in its totality. Seven chapters show how Propertius’ fourth book, published three or more years after Virgil’s death, enacts the canonical status of Rome’s foremost poet through an intimate conversation across a number of themes, from socio-political and historical questions centring on, for example, Rome’s evolution from rustic past to ’golden age’ superpower, gender and patriarchy, and warfare both international and internecine, to literary questions concerning the generic identity of elegy and epic, the appropriation of Callimachus, and the architecture of poetry books. Propertius’ totalizing reading reveals an elegiac Virgil as much as it does an epicizing Propertius, with a sometimes obsessive attention to detail that enlarges familiar paradigms of allusion and intertextuality and has implications for how literary and textual criticism are practised.