; ^ y THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY EDITED BY T. E. PAGE, LITT.D. E. OAPPS, PH.D., LI..D. W. H. D. ROUSE, litt.d. PROPERTIUS PKOPERTIUS WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY H. E. BUTLER, M.A. PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF liONDO.N LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS MCMXXIX First published, 1912 Heprinted, 1916, 1924, 1929 U44 Printtd in Ortat lirilain / 'i PREFACE A FEW words are necessary in connection with the text contained in tliis volume. There are a number of passages in Propcrtius Avhere it cannot be said that any certain emendation has been made. In such cases I have inserted tlie most plausible correction in the textj in order not to confuse readers of the trans- lation. I do not wish it to be supposed that I regard such corrections as certain. In some cases they are only a pis alter. Propcrtius presents such difficulties to the translator tliat an apology for its deficiencies is perhaps unnecessary. No one is more sensible of them than myself. I have attemjited, as far as pos- sible, to keep close to the Latin, even in cases— and they are not a few—where from the jioint of view of style a free paraphrase would have been in many ways preferable. H. E. BUTLER London, 1912 THE LIFE OF PROPERTIUS We know little of PropertiuSj save for what we can gather from his own poems and a few references to him in later Latin writei's. His name was Sextus Propertius. The majority of the MSS.^ with the important exception of the Codex KeapoUtanus, style him Sextus Aurelius Propertius Nauta. Nauta is demonstrably absurd. Propertius expresses the live- liest terror of the sea in his poems, and the name is accounted for by the absurd reading of the MSS. in II. XXIV. 38, quamvis navita dives eras. Aurelius is equally impossible. Both Aurelius and Propertius are nuinina gentilicia, and such names were not doubled at this period. His birth[)lace was Assisi. The position of that town suits the indications given in I. xxii. and IV. i. 61-66 and 121-126. The name Asis in the two latter passages (where some,following Lachmann,read Asisi), though not found elsewhere, seems pretty conclusive, " " while in the Umbrian lake mentioned in IV. i. I 24- we have a reference to a shallow lake in the plain below Assisi, which existed till the Middle Ages. the in his letters Finally, Pliny Younger two of (vi. 15 and IX. 22) mentions a certain Passennus Paullus, a descendant of Propertius and a citizen of the same town. An inscription bearing his name has been found at Assisi. Propertius was born in all probability between vii THE LIFE OF PROPERTIUS 54 B.C. (the earliest possible date for Tihullus' birlh) and 43 b.c. (the date of Ovid's birth). This is indi- cated by Ovid (^Trislia, iv. x. 51-54), who gives a catalogue of the elegiac poets in the following chronological order: Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid. Further, in IV. i. 127~M0 Propertius implies that he lost his f'.ither while very young, and entered on his diminished inheritance shortly after the distri- bution of land among the veterans of Octavian and Antony in 41 b.c. Furtlier, I. xxi. shows that he was old enough to be impressed by the death of a relative or neighbour in the Perusine war of 40 d.c. His birth may therefore be conjecturally placed between 50 and 48 B.c. The mention of his having worn the aiaea l)u//a(lV. i. 131-1.34) shov.s him to have been of equestrian rank (see Plin. N. H. xxxiii. 10), wiiile from the same passage we learn that he had been destined for the bar, but deserted it for poetry. Soon after his assumption of the toga virilis he fell in love with a certain Lycinna (III. xv. 3-6). How long tliis liolson lasted we caimot tell we know that his ; only meeting with Cynthia caused him to forget Lycinna but two after his first years acquaintance with love (111. xv, was the one of his life 7, 8). Cynthia deep passion ; she was tlie first woman wliom he really loved, and there is nothing to make us think that she was not the last, though in the end, no doubt after many infidelities on both sides, he broke with her (see last two elegies of Book III.). Cynthia's real name was Hostia, a fact which we learn from Apuleius' Apologia (c. x.). She was a courtesan, for II. vii. 7 shows that it was im- possible for him to marry her : the lex Papia Poppaea enacted that no man of free birth might marrv a prostitute, and the only possible interpretation of the passage in question is that the unknown law to viii THE LIFE OF PROPERTIUS similar which Propertius refers contained provisions. he was unmarried Further, the same poem shows that there can and unwiUing to marry any one else, Avhile be no doubt tliat Cynthia was unmarried, for among never makes the objects of his jealousy Propertius mention of a husband. It is possible that she may have been descended from Ilostius, an poet of the epic We second century B.C. (see III. xx. 8, note). gather she had a for from the poenis of Propertius that gift was tall and singing, dancing, and poetry, yellow- trace the haired, with black eyes. We cannot history was of the liaison with any clearness. Neither party did not run smooth. faithful, and the course of love a breach On one occasion (see III. xvi. 9) there was which lasted for a whole year. The quarrel was, of the third however, made up, and at the close with he book, where Propertius finally breaks her, claims to have been her faithful slave for five years In the fourth book is men- (III. XXV. 3). Cynthia and there tioned in only two poems (vii. viii.), though in the fifth ; the is probably a reference to her elegy seventh tells us that she died neglected and was buried near Tibur. behind him. Propertius left four books of elegies It is hard to determine the dates of their publica- about tion. It is probable that Book I. was published in 23 Book III. 26 B.c.,1 Book II. about 24 or early B.C., in 22 or 21 B.C. The fourth book was published not eleventh earlier than l6 B.C., as both the fifth and the latter poems refer to events of that year. As to It is years of Propertius' life we know nothing. after the perhaps probable that he died not long 1 It was published separately under the title Cynthia. In some of the MSS. Cp. II. III. 4 (also Martial, xiv. IS'J). of Propertius it has the title Cynthia MonobiUos. ix THE MSS. OF PROPERTIUS c. Id addition to these MSS. there are a large number of inferior fifteenth-century MSS. Among these are two MSS. which since the edition of Baehrens have appeared in the cpparalus ciilicus of modern texts. Tlicy are (l) the Codex Davenlriensis (1792); now at Deventer, and the Codex Ottuhouimw- I'alicaiius (151 i), now in the ^'^atican. Both are late- fiCteenth-century MS.S. Mr. O. L. Richmond [Journal of Philology, XXXI. iGl) lias shown that tliey do not deserve the position assigned to them by Baehrens, and that they must be ranked among tlie inferior MSS. as possessing no independent \ahic. other than v are Where MSS. N, A, F, L, ji, mentioned their catalogue reference is given. The text of Proj)ertius is undoul)tedly very corrupt. The sequence of tliought is at times so broken tliat the reader necessarily concludes that one of two things has happened : («) couplets have been lost, or (6) the order of the lines has been dislocated. While the second alternative is possible, and while various scholars (the best examjile is Professor Postgate in the new Corpus Voelarum L(iliiionim) have attempted to save the situation by wholesale transposition, as yet no scientific system of trans- position has been discovered, and no satisfactory theory has been put forward to account fur the dislocation. The first is therefore the safer course. xn NOTE ON THE DIVISION INTO BOOKS Lachmann held that Projiertius' poems should be divided mto five books, not, as the MSS. divide them, into four. His main argument is based on II. XIII. rt 25, aat mea sit magno, si ires sinl pompa lihelli. He argues that the words tres libelli show that the poem in question must have formed part of the third i)ook. He therefore made the third book begin with n. X., and treated the third and fourth books as recorded in the MSS. as fourth and fifth. But it does not seem necessary to give the words tres lihelli so literal a meaning, and it is worth noting that the grammarian Nonius, p. 1 ()f), quotes III. xxi. 1 4 as coming from the third book. 1 he division as given in our MSS. would seem, therefore, to be as old as Nonius. Lachmann's division is followed in some texts {e.g., Haupt-Vahlen and L. Miiller), and much confusion has been caused as regards references to Propertius. Birt {Das Aiitike Buchwesen, pp. 413-426) has a theory that the first book was published separately under the title of Monohihlos, and that the rest of the poems make up four books of Elegies, our present Book II.