MAXIMA ROMA IN PROPERTIUS, VIRGIL AND GALLUS

Abstract

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