The Representation and Misrepresentation of Virgilian Poetry in Propertius 2.34

Abstract

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).

Two Unnarrated Stories in Horace's Roman Odes (Carm.3.2.1–12 and 3.6.21–32): Echoes of Vergil's UnfinishedAeneidand a Lowlife Epigram

“…3. Others account for the anomalies between Propertius’ elegy and Vergil's Aeneid with explanations that do not require assuming Propertius’ ignorance of the Aeneid 's larger structure: O'Rourke (2011) sees a deliberate misrepresentation of Vergil, prompted by Propertius’ sense of the ‘anxiety of influence’; Stahl (1985) 350–2 n. 19 argues that Propertius mischaracterises the Aeneid because he sees it as ‘being written for one purpose: to please the man whose final step to unrestrained power … was his victory at Actium’ and finds that purpose repugnant. Of these various proposals, the suggestion that Vergil's striking announcement in the highly marked introduction to his ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid might allude to Propertius’ rather diffuse review of Vergil's (and others’) poetry, rather than the other way around, strikes me as the least compelling.…”