Latin Love Poetry

  Like Tibullus, Propertius incorporates the temple of Apollo on the Palatine into his love poetry in dramatic fashion. As we shall see, Propertius probes more critically the temple’s connections to the events at Actium in Book 4; here he focuses primarily on the physical appearance of the temple and its environs. Propertius begins the poem by explaining that he is running late because ‘the golden portico of Apollo was opened by great Caesar [Augustus]’ (2.31.1–2).44 The poem then gives a detailed account of the whole complex, taking the reader by stages into the temple’s interior, that is, through the colonnade decorated with the Danaids,45 past the statue of Apollo in the courtyard and the altar, through the doors of the temple, and finally to the cult statues themselves (3–16). Throughout Propertius’ account, a number of themes stand out: the associations of Apollo with poetry, the geographic mastery of Rome under Augustus (portrayed in the specification of various building materials brought from every corner of the Roman world) and the domination of art over nature.46 In all, the superiority of the Augustan structure can be summed up by Propertius’ claim that the god actually prefers the Roman temple to his own homeland (10).

  In the next section, which modern editors have often treated as a separate poem, Propertius calls attention to Cynthia’s conspicuous absence (2.32.1–10). Chiding her with the accusation that her reputation is in danger throughout the whole city (23–24), Propertius once again highlights Cynthia’s incessant departure from Rome, proposing that ‘it is not the city, mad one, but my eyes that you are running from!’ (18). Propertius soon turns to another recurring theme involving the city: the scandalous behaviours taking place there. Rome is fortunate, Propertius asserts, if one woman acts contrary to the day’s fashion (43–44). In an earlier poem, Propertius goes even further in blaming Romulus himself for the current state of morals: ‘You, nurtured by the harsh milk of the she-wolf, were the author of such crime, Romulus, you taught how to rape the virginal Sabines with impunity; because of you, Love dares whatever it wants at Rome’ (2.6.19–22). Such attitudes anticipate Propertius’ turn to another claim involving the city: the necessity of defending it vigorously, especially from women, a group whose desires make them increasingly foreign, a threat to both Rome and its male citizens.

  Defending the City

  As we discussed in Chapter 3, Propertius rejoices at a night of love with Cynthia in poem 2.15; in explaining his good fortune, Propertius soon makes an abrupt turn to quite a serious topic, professing:

  But if everyone wished to live such a life

  and rest their limbs weighed down by wine,

  there would not be cruel iron or a warlike fleet,

  nor would the Actian sea toss our bones,

  nor, continually besieged by her own triumphs,

  would exhausted Rome let down her hair in mourning.

  This, at least, they will rightly be able to praise:

  my cups have injured no gods.

  (41–48)

  In these lines, Propertius explicitly sets his self-proclaimed lifestyle as a lover against the militaristic activities and ambitions that produced the civil wars, presenting Actium as a national tragedy, an affront to the gods, while personifying Rome itself as a woman given over to grief. Propertius’ critique is complex, including where exactly his indictment falls. On the one hand, he seems to be condemning Augustus’ victory, even refuting the idea of a golden age with his subtle reference to ‘cruel iron’.47 But, on the other hand, does Propertius specify ‘my’ cups precisely to draw a distinction between himself and Antony, given the latter’s highly publicized predilection for wine and women? Regardless of whether he means to take sides, the passage powerfully insinuates that Rome needs to be protected from the ‘wrong’ kind of men, a forceful rebuttal to any assumption that the love poets’ refusal of public life involves a lack of concern for the state’s welfare.

  Throughout his work, Propertius also steadfastly places his puella in opposition to the city, either because she is not where she should be (perhaps aligned with the world of nature) or because she is causing dismay to its residents, including himself. But Cynthia also remains eminently urbane – both a product of the city and an ardent consumer of its many delights, and that quality is equally disconcerting to Propertius. Unlike Ovid, as we have seen, Propertius professes a preference for Cynthia in her ‘natural’ state, one unmarred by cosmetics or elaborate adornment (e.g. 1.2). While such a conceit serves a range of purposes, for Propertius it also hints at a topic that will grow in importance: Roman women’s dangerous susceptibility to luxury and foreign merchandise, making the city with its prosperous economy a site of their potential undoing.

  Propertius begins to map the spatial dimensions of Cynthia’s alleged avarice in 2.16. Accusing Cynthia of being interested in a rival (a praetor returning from Illyria),48 Propertius chortles that she cares not about a lover’s position, but only about the size of his wallet (2.16b.11–12). Lamenting to Jupiter that his puella ‘is ruining herself for an unworthy price’ (16), Propertius further charges that she ‘always sends me to the ocean to seek jewels and orders me to bring gifts from Tyre’ (17–18), a new and more insidious reason for masculine departure from the city, one driven by female greed.49 Playfully evoking the image of Rome’s simpler past, Propertius wishes that no one at Rome was rich and that the Roman leader lived only in a hut, an allusion to the alleged remains of Romulus’ hut still visible on the Palatine (19–20).50

  The potential dangers of female insatiability and ‘shameful love’ become even more apparent in the next part of the poem when Propertius raises the spectre of Antony, ‘the leader who filled the waters of Actium with the empty shouting of his doomed soldiers’ (37–38). More damningly, as Propertius intimates, while ‘scandalous’ love forced Antony to seek the ends of the earth, it was in retreat from battle, not in pursuit of lavish presents (39–40). Propertius then closes his comparison with overt praise for Augustus, who, Propertius claims, by the same hand both conquered and set aside weapons (41–42). This final endorsement of Augustus is jarring, especially given the previous poem, but, as we shall see, it contributes to an emerging image of Augustus as the purveyor of a very particular mode of order.

  In the remainder of the poem, Propertius warns Cynthia that Jupiter may yet rain down (literally) on her expensive clothing and, shortly after, Propertius’ anxieties over the dynamics of female consumption become even more apparent when he accuses Cynthia of ‘madness’ in using foreign dyes and cosmetics (2.18.23–24). Reiterating that nature’s way is best, Propertius calls a ‘Belgian rouge disgraceful to a Roman face’ (25–26), a claim that reveals a kind of nationalistic fervour or perhaps panic: can Cynthia’s foreign accoutrements mask or even erode her Roman identity? Later, in response to Propertius, Ovid appears more sanguine about female boundaries and cosmetics (not least because, as we shall see, he so heartily endorses the latter) and he carefully closes off any possibility of permanent damage from Corinna’s misguided toilet, proposing that she can make do with a wig from the hair of German slaves until the ‘native’ hair that she has scorched grows back (1.14.45–56). Ovid’s callous prescription is obviously made possible by the ‘goods’ (including slaves) emanating from Roman imperial expansion, and the path of such ‘products’ into Rome is directly named in Propertius. For even as the Sacred Way connotes the route of triumph, a homage to masculine enterprise, Propertius also identifies it as the place both to purchase luxury goods (2.24.13–14) and to participate in a related form of commercial traffic, one in women, meaning prostitutes brought from the east (2.23.15–22).

  Propertius further intimates the association of Roman women with foreign commodities when he complains about Cynthia’s worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis in poem 2.33,51 a poem replete with geographic symbolism.52 Insisting that the Roman city remains at odds with such female outsiders, Propertius warns Isis that ‘the Nile does not find favour with the Tiber’ (2.33a.20). In the line preceding, Propertius even threatens that he will expel
her from ‘our city’ altogether – a claim that allows the poet, even if only in his fantasy, to assume the role of princeps since Augustus in 28 BCE ‘debarred the practice of the Isis cult from within the boundaries of the pomerium and, in 21 BC, from within the first milestone of the city’.53 Cleopatra was perhaps Isis’ most notorious worshipper, and Propertius uses the Egyptian queen to drive his most forceful illustration of women’s perilous incompatibility with the city in poem 3.11.

  Propertius begins 3.11 by asking why anyone should be amazed that a woman has taken him under her control, an opening that leans heavily on the trope of servitium amoris; he then offers a series of historical and mythological exempla to illustrate his dilemma, concluding with ‘the one who lately fastened disgrace on our weapons’ (29). While avoiding direct mention of Antony, Propertius graphically associates Cleopatra with various vices, including drunkenness and promiscuity, in the lines that follow.54 Still, it is Propertius’ focus on her threat to Rome that predominates, proclaiming at one point that Cleopatra demanded Rome’s walls as her dowry (31–32). The drama is heightened even further when Cleopatra suddenly seems to penetrate the city itself, daring to stretch mosquito nets across the Tarpeian rock and to give verdicts among the statues and weapons of Marius (45–46).55 What does it matter to have shaken off the rule of Tarquin the Proud – an event that led to the start of the Republic – Propertius mutters, ‘if a woman is to be endured’ (49)?

  Propertius next addresses Rome directly, calling on the city to take triumph and grant long life to Augustus (49–50). Turning to Cleopatra, the poet reminds her of her own flight to the Nile and that she ‘accepted the shackles of Romulus’ (51–52). Reiterating the value placed on the Roman triumph, Propertius describes seeing Cleopatra’s body displayed on the streets of the city (although sources attest an effigy was actually put on show).56 Yet, in her dying moment, Cleopatra finds her own voice and speaks directly to Rome, affirming its absolute victory over her because of its leader: ‘You had no need to fear me, Rome, with such a citizen!’ (55). As we have seen, the female voice is noteworthy in Propertius, and here it is used to record Cleopatra’s complete capitulation. A couplet plagued by uncertain reading follows, which may emphasize again the threat of a woman to the city that presides over the entire world (57).57

  Modern scholars have long weighed Propertius’ seeming identification with Antony in this poem and elsewhere in trying to assess the poet’s ‘politics’.58 But, as this poem suggests, Propertius’ antagonistic pairing of Cleopatra and Augustus may in fact be more salient than any affiliation with Antony. For Propertius progressively appropriates Augustus’ defeat of Cleopatra as a model in shaping the aspirations of his own ego, a gesture that claims the authority of the princeps in managing his own romantic affairs while also simultaneously eroticizing the very encounter that initiated Augustus’ rise to power. Whether Propertius can ultimately ‘be’ Augustus in relation to Cynthia’s Cleopatra is, of course, doubtful (so, too, whether we can take his valourization of the princeps in this context as any straightforward political statement), but the strategy nonetheless makes provocative use not of classical myth, but rather an event central to Augustan self-narrative in providing a powerful exemplum of the inexorable male conquest of woman’s threatening difference.

  In the two poems following, Propertius elaborates not only the dangers faced by women in the imperial city, but also the danger they present to it. In poem 3.12, he exhorts the soldier Postumus not to abandon his wife Galla, dreading what may happen to her once she is left alone (17–18), while in 3.13 the temptations of the city’s economy have a more personal consequence: they make Roman woman greedy, and women, in turn, drive up their own prices for a night of love.59 In poem 3.16, Propertius renders the city in more everyday terms, expressing his nervousness at being called out at night, but hoping that, as a lover, he will be kept safe on the city’s dark streets. Soon after, the book comes to a close, and with it Propertius’ primary focus on his ego’s romantic adventures. It remains now only to look at the role of the city in Book 4, where, as part of his turn to Roman aetiology, Propertius uses the topography of Rome to pore over the meaning of Rome’s past and the Augustan present.

  Writing the City

  Book 4 presents a palpable change for Propertius in terms of his overall project. Jeri DeBrohun argues that ‘Propertius knew that his decision to increase the thematic range of his elegy with Roman aetia would create a conflict with his own earlier definition of elegy as exclusively amatory’; she adds, ‘Propertius planned from the outset of Book 4 to make this conflict an integral part of his new elegiac program.’60 Although ‘greatest Rome’ (maxima Roma) might seem to displace Cynthia as the poet’s main theme in 4.1, DeBrohun sees throughout Book 4 a persistent tension between private love (amor) and public patriotism (Roma).61 In literary terms – taking each term as representative of elegy and epic respectively – there is a kind of ‘bipolar poetics’ in Book 4, a push-and-pull already contained in the alternating lines of the elegiac couplet itself.62

  The overall flow of Book 4 is puzzling, and just as scholars have difficulty in pinning down Propertius’ intentions in Book 4 – the shape-shifting Vertumnus of 4.2 serving as a nice symbol of the book’s many twists and turns63 – many have argued that his representations of Roman aetiology and landscape communicate a similar ambiguity. Tara Welch has gone further in arguing that Propertius sees the Augustan city as coercive, its monuments shaping ‘morality, identity, and behaviour into forms more in tune with the state’.64 She later expands: ‘The elegies in Book 4 make audible the process of self-expression, individuation, and even defection all but drowned out by the overwhelming – and persuasively symphonic – legacy of Augustus’ city of marble.’65 To put it another way, living among the Augustan monuments is perhaps not as easy as admiring them. In assessing the specific contribution Propertius makes to contemporary conversations about the city, we want to focus on three themes that emerge from poems not yet considered: the residual tensions Propertius perceives in Roman identity as witnessed in the landscape (4.1); the promotion of a violent view of Rome’s past rather than a nostalgic one (4.10); and the ultimate role of poetry, rather than Augustan monuments, in defining Rome (4.6).

  As we saw in Chapter 4, poem 4.1 opens with Propertius’ announcement that he plans to change his style of poetry (4.1a.1–70) and now write in service to Rome (60). In the second half of the poem, however, his proposed plans are immediately rebuffed by the astrologer Horos, who orders Propertius to continue writing erotic elegy (4.1b.71–150). Significantly, Propertius opens the poem with an explicit contrast of the Roman past and present: ‘All you see here, stranger, where greatest Rome is, was hill and grass before Phrygian Aeneas’ (1a.1–2); he continues that the cattle of Evander once rested where the temple of Apollo on the Palatine stands (3–4), a clear allusion to the passage in Aeneid 8. Propertius then proceeds to scan other sites and note their relation to the past, including Remus’ house, where the two brothers once shared a single hearth (10).66 He calls attention to the simple warfare of olden times and the various groups making up Rome’s early population, observing provocatively that ‘the Roman foster child has nothing except the name from his ancestry: he would not believe that a she-wolf was the nurse of his bloodline’ (37–38).

  The general terms of Propertius’ vision have been much debated, not least which version of Rome he holds in higher regard, if either.67 Hans-Peter Stahl argues that the panorama of Rome relies on the speaker’s standing on the Palatine, which for Stahl suggests a perspective in accordance with that of the princeps.68 Yet Welch proposes that Propertius’ striking assertion about contemporary Romans’ attitudes to the she-wolf (who was credited in Roman myth with nurturing Romulus and Remus as infants) suggests, ‘in temporal terms, the Roman foster child is alienated from his own past’.69 Moreover, Propertius’ own latent alienation is expressed in other parts of the poem as a disjunction between Rome and Umbria. Crediting the she-wolf wi
th having walls grow from her milk and proclaiming that he in turn will attempt to ‘lay down walls with pious verse’ (55–57), Propertius pointedly defines the rewards of his poetry in terms of his homeland: ‘Bacchus, give me leaves of your ivy so that proud Umbria might swell with my books: Umbria, home of the Roman Callimachus!’ (62–64). Perhaps trying to reconcile the two opposing geographic sites, he later exhorts, ‘Rome, smile, this work rises for you’ (67).

  In his response, Horos again calls attention to Umbria as a competing source of Propertius’ identifications, reminding the poet that Umbria bore him and also reminding him of the suffering he endured there, including gathering his father’s bones long before the appropriate time (1b.121–130). Such images allude to the brutal conflicts waged on Italian soil and ‘open the possibility for variations across Italy in ways of viewing Rome’.70 More fundamentally, ‘these recollections of the elegist’s early life serve as further reminders to the poet that his own sorrowful personal circumstances have rendered him ill-equipped for the kind of large-scale, patriotic Roman undertaking he has proposed.’71 Thus, while Rome may have relied on the assimilation of outside groups from its earliest times – yielding a population of ‘foster children’ in Propertius’ phrasing – it does not mean that the violence in such encounters was easily forgotten. Propertius’ unsettling poems at the end of Book 1 attest to the persistent scars of the Perusine War, and Propertius makes his interlocutor in 4.1 a hospes – a ‘stranger’ or ‘visitor’ – to Rome, while other figures in Book 4, such as Vertumnus with his Etruscan origins, are also distinguished by their outsider status.72