This article argues that in poem 4.3, Propertius depicts Arethusa not as a citizen wife, but as a concubine or an elegiac courtesan under exclusive contract to Lycotas. The Roman lexicon of marriage was frequently used to describe relationships other than iustum con iugium, especially in love elegy. That is the situation presented in Propertius 4.3. Arethusa's anxieties are primarily sexual, and thus identify her as something new in elegy: not a wife but a faithful puella. This poem gives us the poetic voice of a loving, loyal, contracted courtesan.Propertius' Arethusa, from poem 4.3, is generally treated as a wife because she more or less claims to be such, as overtly marked in terms like marita fijides and in the several references, in lines 11-16, to her wedding ceremony, such as the wedding torch, the sprinkled water, and the bridal hairstyle. I suggest, however, that her language and concerns are characteristic not of a citizen wife,1 ) but of an elegiac courtesan under exclusive contract to a 1 ) Here I advert to the presence, in this very book of poetry, of the single indisputable and historical wife in love elegy, namely Cornelia, whose speech and concerns have nothing in common with Arethusa's. The coniunx in Amores 3.13 is not, in my view, a true wife, but a contracted courtesan (perhaps the same woman who torments the lover in the latter part of Amores 3). See also the description of Lycotas as Arethusa's "soldier-lover", in Green 2000. Knox (1995, 17) also calls Lycotas her "lover", rather than husband.