This chapter presents a sequential reading of Propertius 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3. The chapter argues that this opening sequence advertises a newly confident identity for Roman elegy which inverts elegy’s ‘traditional’ hierarchy between Amor and Roma. These opening poems also establish two fundamental programmes for Book 3. First, Propertius competitively engages his direct contemporaries Virgil and Horace, seeking to place elegy alongside epic and lyric as a principal Augustan genre. Second, Propertius looks back critically at his own early erotic verse, seeking to give renewed relevance to the persona of the elegiac lover by positioning this persona (and the poetry that houses it) now inclusively in a contemporary social context. Finally these poems foreground a tension that will continue right through the collections between elegy’s proposed new direction and a nostalgia for the way elegy used to be.