This chapter presents a sequential reading of Propertius 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11. The chapter argues that these poems begin a central sequence within Book 3 in which novel and particularly Augustan themes are prominent. The chapter argues further that Propertius uses these poems to offer metapoetic commentary on the evolving nature of elegy’s genre-identity, and especially on the disruptive and destabilising potential of the new thematic inclusions. In 3.9, a request from Maecenas for an Augustan epic represents an apparent imperative for the private elegist to include more public material, yet the poem (via allusions to precedents in Horace and Virgil) hedges between rejecting and acceding to the demand. In 3.10, a birthday poem for Cynthia seem to indulge a fantasy about singular erotic focus of Propertian elegy in its early poems, and yet implies that Cynthia – as elegy’s subject and surrogate – can never be held in stasis. 3.11 presents an elegiac Cleopatra, a figure in whom the ‘disgraceful’ servitium of the erotic elegist and the celebrated success of Augustan conquest come together; the poem seeks to embrace both these positions, and yet never resolves the tension between them.