We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
On the surface, Propertius 1.2 seems to propound a traditional thesis, the superiority of unadorned beauty to artifice, and to scold Cynthia for not living up to this ideal of the natural. I believe that the ideal actually asserted is more complex than mere natural beauty and in fact paradoxically entails a large measure of artifice. Artifice itself becomes the central theme of the poem as its value is radically reinterpreted.
Part of the complexity comes from the fact that the ideal embraces more than physical appearance, whether adorned or not. A Catullan Parallel will illustrate. Propertius is here building upon and rivalling a Catullan poem, in a manner which has the effect of emphasizing the non-physical elements in his definition of ideal beauty. A poem on the nature of true female beauty in which the beloved is contrasted with other women and which attempts to define what is truly formosus (‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’; cf. the insistent repetition of: forma 8 and 24, formosa 9, formosius 11) would immediately be recognized by the Roman reader as a challenge to Catullus 86, which centers on the word formosa.
1. Allen, A. W., ‘Sunt qui Propertium malint,’ in Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy, ed. Sullivan, J. P., 1962, 139–142Google Scholar. J. P. Elder, ‘Tibullus: Tersus atque elegans,’ also in Sullivan, 75.
2. Levin, D. N., ‘Concerning Propertius 1.2,’ CB 35 (1959) 69–70Google Scholar, stresses the artificiality of piling exemplum upon exemplum and recognizes the ironic ‘disharmony’ between the theme of simplicity and the manner of treatment. But I think he goes too far in saying that the passage ‘verges on the ludicrous’ and in implying that Propertius here writes tasteless verse as a counterpart to Cynthia’s tasteless appearance. Propertius, a poet of artifice par excellence, holds no brief for the natural; the attack upon certain kinds of artifice made here is a part of the strategy of this particular poem. Nor does Levin comment on the irony of using Apelles’ artistic technique as the standard of naturalness.
3. Evenus’ name also suggests horsemanship (henia, ‘reins’) and Castor and Pollux are intimately associated with horses.
4. In a count of dactyls and spondees (ignoring the last two feet of the hexameter and the second half of the pentameter) we find that here the dactyls are outnumbered nearly 3 to 1 by spondees (8d, 22s) whereas elsewhere the dactyls equal or slightly exceed the spondees.
5. Pliny, N.H. 35.97.
6. Coa (2) may be an anticipatory allusion to Apelles: Ovid, for example, calls him artifex Cous (Pont. 4.1.29). That Coan silk was a standard item of luxuria does not destroy the possibility of an additional allusion to Apelles. The ‘Coan Venus,’ Apelles’ most famous work was very well known in Rome; see Pease ad Cicero de nat. deor. 1.75 for allusions to it in Cicero and other Latin authors. Knowledge of it and interest in it would certainly have increased vastly when Augustus brought it to Rome and dedicated it in the temple of Julius.
7. Or, if Apelles’ varnish had the opposite effect from what I believe and toned colors down, the contrast would be between Cynthia’s vulgar attempt to gild the lily and Apelles’ success in rendering garish colors more subtle and subdued.
8. For the sense ‘court,’ see for example, Martial 2.55. For cultus applied to a woman in the sense ‘cherished by a man,’ cf. inculta in Catullus 62.56. In 2.22.22 culta has a sexual sense: haud usquam est culta labore Venus. Cf. Ovid Ars 1.722. There may be an obscene pun in our passage, for culta can mean cultivated fields (so several times in the Georgics).
9. Edwards, Mark W., ‘Intensification of Meaning in Propertius and Others,’ TAPA 92 (1961), 135Google Scholar, has noted the ambiguity of culta in 26 (‘adorned,’ ‘cherished,’ ‘cultured’) and observed ‘thus in the single word are united the themes of Cynthia’s excessive love of adornment, her disquieting desire to attract other men, and the value of her intellectual charms.’ To these three we must now add a fourth: ‘cultivated,’ like a field.
10. The generous gifts of Phoebus and Calliope (donet … libens 27–28) recall the opening lines by way of invidious contrast with bought finery (mercato … cultu, ‘store-bought adornment,’ 5) and gifts (muneribus, ‘merchandise,’ 4, with vendere, ‘sell,’ presents the giving of gifts by lover to mistress under its more sordid aspect).
11. Pliny 35.79, Quintilian 12.10.2, Plutarch Demetrius 22. It is true that in 35.75 Pliny translates charts as Venus (Venerem quam Graeci Charita vocant), but elsewhere gratia is the normal Latin translation of charis, the Quintilian reference to Apelles’ distinctive quality translates it as gratia, and Pliny himself, in another contrast with diligentia which is exactly parallel, uses not venus but gratia (34.92). We need not suppose acquaintance on Propertius’ part with Apelles’ or any other painter’s technical treatises, even though it is well known that the poet’s works show a remarkable interest in the visual arts. The making and understanding of an allusion like this would require knowledge no more specialized than that of any educated person, not trained in art, who, today, could easily speak of Michelangelo’s distortion of anatomical proportion in his David or Pollock’s manipulation of paint.
12. Ovid, for example, uses luxurior in a comparison of a woman with a crop: mens erit capi tunc, cum laetissima reruin, / ut seges in pinguis luxuriabit humo (Ars 1.359).
13. For luxuria of much more radical immorality than extravagance compare Sallust’s use of the word; cf. B.C. 11.4 and 12.5. Luxuria was a central theme in Latin historiography and not only in Sallust. The stress on foreignness in the opening lines [note the decline from the exotic and romantic Coa and Orontea to the prosy, matter-of-fact peregrinus (only here in Propertius) ] would perhaps already suggest to the Roman reader the cliché of foreign luxury and its generally demoralizing effect. Its currency as a historical commonplace thus is a further link between Propertius’ two themes of ostentation and promiscuity. Cf. also the climactic position of luxuries in the catalogue of Piso’s vices in Cicero in Pisonem 67; Cicero here and in de Finibus 2.23 distinguishes between two types of luxuria in the moral sphere, but even his grosser form is more limited in application, I think, than is Sallust’s or Propertius’ third sense. Juvenal 6.292–305 uses luxuria-luxus in this broad sense (note the connection with sexual excess); cf. Martial 9.67.6.
14. Vulgo conquirere amantes (‘collecting lovers wholesale’) has very unpleasant connotations. Compare the phrase Terence uses (victum volgo quaerere, Heaut. 447) in place of the more familiar legal definition of prostitution (palam corpore quaestum facere).
15. The word is further emphasized by the occurrence of its final diphthong seven times in the last three lines of the poem (usually in emphatic position: in anaphora in 30, as the last syllable of 31, as the first syllable in the line, the last before a diaeresis, and the final syllable in 32). That this is deliberate follows from the fact that the diphthong occurs only two other times in the second half of the poem.
16. Otis, Brooks, ‘Propertius’ Single Book’, HSCP 70 (1965) 15 ff.Google Scholar, calls the elegy ‘a dialogue’, dramatic in the sense that there is an ‘advance’ which ‘consists in a sort of ironical understanding between Cynthia and the poet … Propertius and Cynthia are ironically but unassailably present in the poems.’ It seems to me that in addition we can correctly call it dramatic in a more limited and literal sense of the word.
17. The dramatic character of the elegy is not an irrelevant enrichment but is linked with two other aspects. It is another reflection of its programmatic function: the dramatic is to be a conspicuous feature of Propertian elegy and it is only appropriate for it to make its appearance here. But there is also a special relevance for the present poem: the dialectic of art and nature goes quite naturally with the give and take of a dramatic situation.
