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Propertius' Cynthia considers Propertius' metapoetic and intra- and intertextual habits and their relationship with the repetitious amatory discourse that he fashions for himself with his beloved, Cynthia. Where scholarship tends to treat as separate the metaliterary and the amatory aspects of Propertius' poetry, this volume - focussed on Books 3 and 4 - argues that his discussion of his own poetry and of his relationship to it as an author-figure - his metapoetic commentary - is closely married to, and can be clearly mapped onto, his account of his relationship with Cynthia, especially in Books 1-3. Moreover, it demonstrates that the amorous discourse the elegist fashions is constituted of a poetics of repetitiousness that is apt for the articulation of an elegiac relationship that, by its nature, cannot progress. The encounters between Propertius and Cynthia are repetitive, and the poet mirrors these in his recollection of lexical and thematic aspects of earlier poems in later ones. Each poem provides a fragmentary glance at Propertius' relationship and, through repetitions with variation, the elegist shapes his readers' understanding of his amatory discourse. Furthermore, it is argued that, since his beloved is the embodiment of his poetry, Propertius' account of his changing relationship with her allows him to articulate the transformations of his elegiac corpus; this becomes most significant as the close of Book 3 appears to end their relationship and he begins a radical experimentation with the generic bounds of elegy that is expanded in Book 4, where the polyvalent Vertumnus embodies the poet's work.

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9780198940234

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Tristan Franklinos teaches at the University of Oxford, where he completed his graduate study following his first degree at St Andrews. After holding a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, he was appointed to a Lectorship in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford, is a Fellow of Wolfson College, and a Lecturer at Oriel College; he has also held an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. His work focusses on the Latin literatures of Antiquity and the Middle Ages and their transmission; he has primarily written on the Roman elegists, pseudepigrapha, and medieval Latin texts.

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