There has recently been a lot of interest in the overlap between epic and elegy[1] and those of us who are ‘consumers of intertextual carrion’ (p.12) will find much to love in this book. O’Rourke approaches the text of Propertius 4 from five main angles—pastoral, female, historical, Hellenistic and ‘architextural’—and manages (mirabile dictu) to go over the same texts many times without excessive repetition. In the introductory chapter O’Rourke treads carefully in the minefield of positivistic Quellenforschung, of authorial intention, and of intertextuality: and does so in language which is both lucid and fair to the competing views. Propertius presents characters which would (one might think) struggle to find a place in Virgil’s oeuvre: nonetheless, Virgil exerted a ‘gravitational pull’ (p.11) even when Propertius looked like he was seeking to escape his orbit.
In Chapter two O’Rourke looks at Virgilian pastoral in Propertius. Veyne neatly defined elegy as ‘pastoral in city clothes’: Propertius writes elegy in rustic clothes (p.66). The pastoral setting of Aeneid 8 interrogates whether Aeneas’ arrival is the start of civilisation but the end of pristine Italy, but ‘Propertius’ bucolic proto-Rome encourages a supercilious view of primitive simplicity when read from the perspective of the present’ (p.79). Propertius the elegist gives Tarpeia in 4.4 erotic rather than financial motives for her betrayal—he came, she saw, he conquered—in a ‘pastoral world besieged by epic’ (p.97). The least Virgilian of poems, 4.8, is a ‘pantomimic elegy’ with Cynthia now ‘urban virago’ rather than ‘country virgo’ (p.104), taking militia amoris all too literally—but the poem is also showing a ‘swerve away from pastoral otium and back to elegiac furor in the monumental centre of Augustan Rome’ (p.108). 4.9 shows Propertius turning what for Virgil was ‘cattle-rustling elevated to the heroic stage’ (p.109) into elegy, with the heroic Hercules seen as an exclusus amator and more like the ‘rustic clod and monstrous Cyclops’ of Theocritus 3 and 11. Elegy 4.10 might seem the ‘most epicizing poem’ in its celebration of the spolia opima but pastoral is (literally) below the surface as Cossus razes Veii to the ground (27–30) and modern farmers plough up the bones of the dead (a nod to Georgics 1.489–97): the poem exposes a common Roman trope of ‘nostalgia for an irretrievably lost pastoral world’ (p.117).
Chapter three looks at the varied group of women who appear in Propertius 4. These women speak (and write), so that the scripta puella becomes puella scribens in Arethusa’ tear-stained writing in 4.3.3–4 and in the passionate post-mortem speeches of Cynthia in 4.7 or Cornelia in 4.11. Is Propertius ‘an age-old misogynist, more womanizer than woman’ with a Cynthia who is ‘more dominated than domina’ (p.126)? The answer is not simple. The instability of gender found in (e.g.) Virgil’s Euryalus or Camilla is found here in the surprisingly macho figure of Hercules (4.9.47–50), but transgression underscores the essentialism which it critiques, and while Camilla fails in an androcentric context, Hercules succeeds in a gynocentric context. Women are often airbrushed out of Roman history in the Aeneid: Creusa has to go (and she accepts it), and Rhea Silvia is sidelined by the lupa. Arethusa in 4.3, who admonishes Lycotas for leaving her for militia, can be read as a reluctant Dido or a would-be Amazon—but she comes over most as a maman au foyer, a Roman matron bewailing her absent lover: similarly Cornelia in 4.11 portrays traditional Roman marriage and could be seen as a renunciation of elegiac feminism (p. 190). Cornelia is Eurydice to her locked-out lover Paullus, Alcestis to Paullus’ Admetus—but also a Creusa figure who lets her Aeneas remarry. Both Cornelia and Creusa are ‘the kind of women celebrated and effaced by the dominant voice of epic discourse’ (p.194) and so while their death ‘might be said to trigger a mechanism of closure and restore masculine order to the work’, the text also shows that ‘women’s histories can never be fully erased’ (p.199). Acanthis in 4.5 may be a stock elegiac lena, but her death (pallor, cruor and all) is like that of Dido, and O’Rourke wisely concludes that ‘the poet and the procuress select and deselect the Virgilian intertexts that suit their respective agendas’ (p.159). Cleopatra is problematic for both poets. Downsizing Actium to a battle between the masculine west and the effeminate east (Aeneid 8.678–688) can make it less of a civil war but also a ‘less-than-heroic victory over a woman’ (p.160). Cleopatra is aligned with Dido, Camilla and Amazons in Virgil and Propertius, with the nagging question hanging over all of how glorious a triumph over a woman can be (4.6.65) leading to the (to us) disturbing conclusion that Augustus ‘does not balk at killing a woman’ (p.168). 4.7 is a ‘confection of epic’s greatest hits, reconfigured in the elegiac demi-monde’ (p.169) and is a wonderful psychological study of grief and memory. In intertextual terms Cynthia plays Patroclus to Propertius’ Achilles as well as being Creusa and Dido to Propertius’ Aeneas. Cynthia ‘inverts everything Propertius has told us about her fickleness’ and ‘upholds the elegiac ideals of monogamy and fidelity’ (p.172), thus showing herself more of a Sychaeus than a Dido. Dido’s promise to haunt Aeneas (Aeneid 4.386) allows Propertius to rehash Dido’s words: and Propertius the poet is recalling echoes of the racy earlier poems (e.g. 2.15) such as when Cynthia tells of their nocturnal sexual escapades (4.7.15-20), and the mixture of literature and life is a perfect recreation of the sort of dream a bereaved lover (who is also a poet) might well have. After the false closure of 4.7, 4.8 has Cynthia alive as an Odysseus figure reclaiming her spouse and kingdom. Cynthia is seen now to conquer Propertius as she ‘replays the hyper-epic masculinity of Pyrrhus as well as the gender-bending violence of Allecto and Juturna’ (p.186) and the poem ends (with reference to the end of the Aeneid) with a petit mort (p.188).
Chapter 4 examines Propertius’ handling of traditionally epic themes of reges et proelia. O’Rourke discusses how 4.6 is less ‘kinetic’ than its ‘action-packed counterpart’ in the ecphrasis of Aeneas’ shield in the Aeneid (8.675–728). Virgil produces a twice-removed representation of a representation, while 4.6 describes a ‘sea-battle proper’ but with ecphrastic markers and a fragmentary series of elaborate miniatures. In 4.10, Propertius tells three tales of military derring-do concerning the spolia opima. This was a hot topic in view of the ‘propaganda crisis’ in 29BC, and the poet upholds the ‘imperially certified teleology according to which there were no more than three instantiations of spolia opima’ (p.223). O’Rourke skilfully traces the links to Virgil here, through the theme of single combat and the details of nomenclature which (for instance) finds Romulus’ foe Acron in Mezentius’s foe Acron, so that ‘Propertius’ fearsome Acron shades into his effeminate Virgilian namesake and the historical Antony, while Romulus finds an uneasy partnership with both Mezentius and the historical Augustus’ (p.227). Cossus similarly kills a Tolumnius whose Virgilian namesake breaks the truce and ‘falls’ (cadit) in one word (Aeneid 12.460). Elegy 4.10 adopts a linear and teleological framework which also points to the cyclic nature of history, where things recur again and again. Propertius shows that Rome nearly did not make it when it was saved by the geese from the invading Gauls (p.240): meanwhile both poets show that cities rise and fall, all resisting any teleological trajectory in favour of instability and mutability.
Chapter 5 looks at Propertius’ claim (4.1.63–64) to the title of Roman Callimachus and starts with the key question of exactly what Callimachus was sanctioning in the Aetia prologue. Horos (in 4.1) as a ‘vicar of Apollo’ reduces the issue to one of generic/metrical unsuitability of ‘kings and battles’ in elegy, but O’Rourke insists that the argument is about style and length (and not genre), and that Callimachus is rejecting ‘dreary catalogue poems’. Horos invokes a ‘narrower and more restrictive definition of Roman Callimacheanism’, and claims to quote Apollo telling Propertius to write elegy (4.1.119-36)—but Horos ends up being the narrow-minded critic lampooned by Callimachus in Iambus 13, the butt of his own critique and a Polonius to Propertius’ Laertes. Elegy 4.6 is a good test case of epic content and ‘Callimachean style’ in the shadow of Virgil, where the ‘aesthetic politics of the Callimachean Apollo’ are seen to ‘repercuss in the working out of the narrative in the definitive moment of Roman supremacy over the Hellenistic world at Actium’ (p.286). Virgil shows both a world made politically safe for Callimachean song and a way for poets to write poetry in an age where the emperor has divine associations: he is ‘repackaging Hellenistic panegyric for the Palatine court’ (p.297). Virgil’s use of hospitality as played by Callimachus makes up the subject of 4.9: the ‘good goddess’ is inhospitable to Hercules, in contrast to the ‘open-door’ policy of Callimachus’ Hecale (Hecale fr. 231), but Propertius’ priestess is also Athena to Hercules’ Teiresias in Callimachus (5.57–130), complete with some gender-bending. Poets liked to play with their intertexts: Cynthia’s (4.8.21) chariot may rework Virgil’s Juturna but the source is burlesqued with Cynthia’s hairless sidekick and the double-entendre of temo. O’Rourke is convincing in his discussion of Actius Apollo: a title which is toponymic but also suggestive of the ray of light (aktis) of the sun god and/or linked to akte (‘of the shore’: cf. Apollonius 1.403–404) and finally to the Actian games revived by Augustus. ‘The Actian Apollo who oversaw the launch of Greek overseas exploration and expansion in the Argonutica and Aetia has become, for the Roman Callimachus, the god whose Actian shafts downed the last ships of the Ptolemaic empire’ (p.325).
Chapter 6 looks at Propertius 4 as a coherent unit: 4.6 is clearly the central orb around which a blend of erotic and aetiological poems circulate, but Propertius will not be reduced to poetry by numbers. O’Rourke (pp.336–337) takes us through some remarkable numerological patterns without risking his reputation on any of them, but he also stresses the theme of unpredictability and instability as shown in Vertumnus in 4.2 whose eloquent mutability reflects and refracts Propertius’ Protean poetry, a statue which emerges ‘as a complete figure for its transformative Virgilian intertextuality’ (p.367).
The Conclusion draws together the themes of this wide-ranging and deep-sounding study. O’Rourke ends with some excellent judgements on the need to revise our view of Callimachean poetics and addresses the controversy between the ‘fundamentalist intertextualist’ and the ‘textual critic’ (who seeks to reconstruct the author’s intended text). We should—he rightly urges—celebrate the diversity of interpretation which this fine book exemplifies on every page. Some of his allusive patterns may seem a stretch, but they are all born of deep engagement with (and passion for) these two monumental poets and the reader is carried along by the exuberant brilliance of O’Rourke’s writing style as much as by the absorbing content of these pages.
There are only a tiny number of printing errors—the most engaging of which was the Joycean coinage of ‘Artistotelian’ for ‘Aristotelian’ on p.304—and the book is lavishly produced and well-edited, with an Index Locorum and a general index. Fifty-three pages of bibliography show the Stakhanovite efforts of which this book is the fruit and the use of footnotes (rather than endnotes) allows the reader to follow the scholarly trail without breaking the pace of the argument.
Notes
[1] See e.g. Sarah L. McCallum Elegiac love and death in Vergil’s Aeneid (Oxford 2024) and Alison Keith, Micah Y. Myers Vergil and elegy (Toronto 2023)