Latin 520 Propertius Graduate seminar: WQ 2023
MW 3:30-5:20pm (was 2:30-4:20)
Stephen Hinds
sunt qui Propertium malint (Quintilian, Inst. 10.1.93). In this graduate course we will explore the first and final books of Propertius through reading and discussion, thus acquainting ourselves with the distinctive literary ‘moment’ that is Augustan erotic elegy. The first half of the quarter will be devoted to Book 1 (the Cynthia), in which Propertius (in the wake of the almost completely lost elegies of Cornelius Gallus) plunges us into the highly personal, highly literary, and sometimes politically-charged world of an elegiac poet-lover and his domina. In the second half of the quarter we will switch our attention to Book 4 (or most of it, anyway), in which Propertius moves beyond the expectations of the genre as constructed by him in Books 1-3, in a series of bold experiments, some aetiological in the manner of Callimachus’ Aetia, greatly extending his range as a poet of Amor and of Roma alike.
We will sample throughout the rich bibliography on Propertius, exploring matters of gender, literary history, and first-century politics, and making use of articles, books, and commentaries on different scales. Our reading text and commentary for Book 1 (on the PhD reading list) will be the old 1960s Cambridge edition of W.A. Camps, still (I believe) in print and, despite its timebound limitations for matters of literary interpretation, the best philological guide for getting into Propertius’ distinctive verse style. For Book 4 (part of it on the PhD reading list) our reading text and commentary will be the more modern and more fully-rounded Cambridge edition of G.O. Hutchinson (2006), in the ‘green and yellow’ series.
Required texts (will be ordered at the University bookstore)
W.A. Camps, ed., Propertius: Elegies Book 1, Cambridge 1961 (often reprinted)
G.O. Hutchinson, ed., Propertius: Elegies Book IV, Cambridge 2006