Propertius: Book I

Aris & Phillips Classical Texts

What was it like to be in love in Rome? The 22 poems of Sextus Propertius' first book of elegies (published in 28 B.C.) offer an answer. Defiantly un-Roman in his devotion to love for his Cynthia and to his art, Propertius writes with a strangely modern voice - passionate, wry, self-scrutinising and ironic. But it is a voice that has been shaped and controlled by a literary tradition already centuries old. This revised edition of Book I provides, in a verse translation which attempts to simulate the discipline and constraints of the hexameter-pentameter alternation in the elegiac couplets of the original poems, a handily self-contained Augustan poetry book- the earliest extant book of Latin love-elegy - to a readership without Latin. The Introduction and Commentary furnish the reader with explanations of the literary, mythological, historical and geographical allusions necessary for an understanding of the poems.