The Poems of Sextus Propertius - The New York Times

“There are some people who like Propertius.” With this faint praise the Roman critic Quintilian nearly damned a major poet to eternal obscurity. But fortunately “some people” happened to include Petrarch, Goethe and Pound. The last of these gave the greatest boost to modern Propertian scholarship precisely because his notorious “Homage” aroused such hostile criticism. To prove Ezra bad, one had to prove Sextus good. The peculiar poetry commonly called Roman Love Elegy was more than a fad but less than a genre. It flourished for about a generation, roughly from 29 B.C. to 8 A.D. And paradoxically Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid were neither Roman, loving nor elegiac in the accepted senses of these terms. After all, the ancient Roman was active, affirmative, authoritarian. Virgil celebrates conquest and “beating down the proud” as quintessential “Roman arts.” But the masculine roles in the elegies are passive, submissive and groveling. I say roles because Latin Elegy is kind of sardonic th

“There are some people who like Propertius.” With this faint praise the Roman critic Quintilian nearly damned a major poet to eternal obscurity. But fortunately “some people” happened to include Petrarch, Goethe and Pound. The last of these gave the greatest boost to modern Propertian scholarship precisely because his notorious “Homage” aroused such hostile criticism. To prove Ezra bad, one had to prove Sextus good. The peculiar poetry commonly called Roman Love Elegy was more than a fad but less than a genre. It flourished for about a generation, roughly from 29 B.C. to 8 A.D. And paradoxical