Sextus propertius, praeceptor amoris: teaching love, loving poetry
<p>Propertius has been known to teach for as long as he has been read. Modern scholarship, however, has tended to privilege discussion of other aspects of his poetry, or to view him as an incidental contributor to a didactic trend among Roman love elegists that culminates in Ovid’s Ars Amatori...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English Latin |
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2021
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| Summary: | <p>Propertius has been known to teach for as long as he has been read. Modern scholarship, however, has tended to privilege discussion of other aspects of his poetry, or to view him as an incidental contributor to a didactic trend among Roman love elegists that culminates in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. This thesis, therefore, turns the spotlight squarely onto Propertius, and provides a reading of his collection that centres around his role as a praeceptor.</p>
<p>My approach is four-pronged, and derives from the themes and rhetoric common to the works of poets generally agreed to form part of the Greco-Roman didactic tradition. In the first chapter, I consider how Propertius develops his authority as a poet and teacher, and mediates it by establishing common ground with his addressee(s) through the use of the first-person plural in poems 1.1 and 1.7-9. In the second, I read Propertius’ teaching of Gallus in poems 1.5, 1.10, 1.13, and 1.20 as a single cycle to see how the addressee’s progress becomes a commentary on the instructive capabilities of the poet’s work. In the third, I examine the way in which Propertius plays with the theme of sight in the didactic narratives of poems 2.1, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 2.25, and 2.34 to indicate that he teaches from, and about, a world of our collective imagination. In the fourth, my attention turns to the poet’s articulation of his (and his work’s) trustworthiness in poems 3.1-6, 3.23-5, 4.1a/b, 4.2, and 4.5 as he reveals that his collection is shifting away from its prior focus on love.</p>
<p>In so doing, I seek neither to argue for Propertius to be viewed as one of the didactic poets nor to gauge the validity of his instruction. My concern, rather, is to show that Propertius makes teaching a fundamental characteristic of his collection by using it as a narrative device that shows his control over, and the changeability of, the elegiac world written up in his Cynthia.</p> |
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