Description

What was it like to be in love in Rome? Th 22 poems of Sextus Propertius' first book of elegies (publisehed 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 centries old. This revised edition of Book I provides, in a verse translation which attempts to simulate the dicipline and contraints of the hetameter-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.