A Propertius Reader: Eleven Selected Elegies

P. Lowell Bowditch

Aug 2014 · Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers

About this ebook

The erotic elegy of Propertius reveals the work of a consummate artist, one who deftly weaves public themes into the emotional experiences of a first-person narrator. The poems in this selection reflect an evolution from a private focus on erotic love to more public and political themes, charting a gradual if ambiguous accommodation to the interests of the Augustan regime. Compelling portraits of passion are entwined with varied features of Rome’s momentous historical transition from republic to empire: the trauma of recent civil wars, nostalgia for an irrecoverable past, the stirrings of social legislation, and the opulence of foreign luxuries from trade and conquest. Selections also display Propertius’s innovative treatment of gender and the psychology of desire, and provide insight into the origins of Western attitudes toward erotic feeling.

Bowditch’s commentary aims to make Propertian elegy—with its challenging syntax, wide-ranging use of myth, and novel use of diction—accessible to more readers, and reveals Propertius as a poet who defined a uniquely Roman genre of literature.

Special Features

• Introduction to Propertius, his style, and his elegy’s social and political context and its place within the genre

• 606 lines of unadapted Latin text of eleven complete Propertian elegies from all four volumes of his work: 1.1, 1.3, 2.1, 2.10, 2.16, 2.31, 2.32, 3.3, 3.11, 4.8, 4.9

• Notes at the back and complete vocabulary

• Two maps and five illustrations

• Suggested reading

About the author

 P. Lowell Bowditch teaches a wide range of language and literature courses on epic, tragedy, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and the Augustan era at the University of Oregon. Bowditch received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley and her PhD in comparative literature from Brown University. Her research focuses on the interface between literature and socio-political relations, with a particular emphasis on literary patronage and issues of gender and sexuality in the Augustan poets. Bowditch is the author of Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 2001), A Propertius Reader: Eleven Selected Elegies (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2014) and of articles on Ovid, Propertius, Horace and issues of translation.