This article highlights the extent and significance of the intertextual relationship between reception-narratives in Virgil's Aeneid (Aeneas and Evander) and Callimachus' Aetia (Heracles and Molorcus) and Hecale (Theseus and Hecale). Encompassing Aeneas' succession to Hercules as Evander's guest, his failed pledge to his host, and his acquisition of a shield on which his historical successor, Augustus, is depicted, Callimachean intertextuality informs the narrative of the Aeneid in its widest sweep. As the archetypal scene of Homeric hospitality (Odysseus and Eumaeus) is received from Callimachus by the new Homer of Augustan Rome, the narrative of reception becomes one of intertextual and cultural appropriation, the dynamic s of which are far from those of amicable exchange. 'The new poem both needs the old texts and must destroy them. It is both parasitical on them, feeding ungraciously on their substance, and at the same time it is the sinister host which unmans them by inviting them into its home, as the Green Knight invites Gawain.' J. Hillis Miller 1
Abstract. Scholarly comment on Propertius 2.34 stretches back to antiquity, but there is more to learn from its salient intertext, the growing corpus of Virgilian epos, about the elegy's difficult text and interpretation, and inversely about contemporary knowledge and opinion of that intertext. Propertius synopsises each of Virgil's works, including the inchoate Aeneid, accurately in terms of form but tendentiously in terms of content. Propertius' "optimistic" readings suggest that, with the "anxiety of influence," he recognised in Virgil the elegiac sensibility his synopsis emulously erases. Structural (including "stichometric") allusions militate against Ribbeck's transposition of lines 77-80 and recommend Barth's division at line 25 (without at the same time severing thematic continuities that also make a unitary reading of the elegy meaningful).
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Hoc quodcumque uides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est, ante Phrygem Aenean collis et herba fuit, atque ubi Nauali stant sacra Palatia Phoebo, Euandri profugae concubuere boues. (Propertius 4.1.1-4) 1 Whatever you see here, stranger, where Rome the greatest is, was hill and grass before Phrygian Aeneas, and where the Palatine sacred to Phoebus of our Navy stands, Evander's fugitive cattle bedded together. 2 * Preliminary research for this paper was supported by a postgraduate scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS); I am grateful also to M.R. Gale, F. Mac Góráin, and the CQ anonymous reader for advice at various stages. 1 Citations from Propertius are taken from S.J. Heyworth, Sexti Properti Elegi (Oxford, 2007). 2 The translations in this article (in some sense original, though familiarity with/consultation of existing models may have led to some duplication) attempt to parallel in English the lexical sharing relevant to this discussion. 3 See D.F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993), 83. 4 For similar reflections on the opening hexameter, see J.B. DeBrohun, Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (Michigan, 2003), 37. For the sustained pretence of heroic diction and metrics until the et (the metrical 'point of recognition') in the pentameter, see L. Morgan, 'Getting the measure of heroes: the dactylic hexameter and its detractors', in M.R. Gale (ed.), Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry: Genre, Tradition and Individuality (Swansea, 2004), 1-26, at 6, in an article which shows how non-heroic genres (including those written in dactylic hexameter) use metre self-consciously to construct themselves as not-epic; more generally on the same topic, see
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