Classical World

At 1,070 pages, this may well be one of the longest single-volume commentaries ever on a classical text. It is also one of the most necessary. Propertius book 2 (if it is indeed one book) is perhaps the most difficult text of Augustan poetry and also, not by chance, one of the very few to have entered the third millennium without a full-scale commentary. This is not even a lengthy or diffuse scholarly work. There are 1,362 lines of poetry, and difficulties span all imaginable levels of the text: transmission, language and style, book number and structure, poem division, lacunae, and patterns of thought and argument, plus the familiar complexity of the poet's learning.

The overall effect resembles more a major commentary on a fragmentary author than a standard commentary on, let us say, Horace or Ovid. Fedeli has now achieved a complete coverage of the text, but he himself considers book 2 as a companion piece to his books 1 (Florence 1980) and 3 (Bari 1985), while his book 4 (Bari 1965), not even listed in the consolidated bibliography, was a juvenile work, not a monumental commentary. Book 4 is now accessible in English through the commentary by G. O. Hutchinson (Cambridge 2006). The dynamics of recent research on Propertius is best summarized when one realizes that Fedeli 2005 has changed his mind in no fewer than 150 places vis-à-vis his Teubner text of 1984 (Stuttgart), whose title (Elegiarum libri IV) is now itself problematic, since Fedeli 2005 does not believe that the sequence of poems belongs to an individual book. It is sobering to see a monumental resource like this volume being shot through by recurring (and fully justified) doubts about the stability and reliability of the text as transmitted.

The commentary, in spite of its size, is more readable and easily accessible than Fedeli 1980 and 1985: the author has given attention to issues of [End Page 105] selectivity, signposting, and organization. He still offers the strengths of his previous work, especially full coverage of topoi and a double focus on the Latin and the Greek literary background, but he has also improved on the format, adapting his segmentation of the text to the difficult progression of poetic discourse and imagery and offering lucid summaries of every individual poem or fragment before detailed analysis begins. His Italian style is as accessible and user-friendly as it can be for English-speaking users. This is both a fundamental reference work and an interim report on ongoing controversies about the structure and ordering of Propertius' elegies. The production of the work by Francis Cairns Ltd. is excellent, and Francis Cairns himself is to be congratulated (cf. ix) for what Fedeli calls (with implicit allusion to 2.1.2 unde meus veniat mollis in ora liber) his haud mollia iussa. Soft or tough, book 2 (or whatever the 1,362 lines represent) will now receive much more attention than before. It is likely that Stephen Heyworth's important, long-awaited critical edition is also approaching completion: there will be no shortage of lively discussion in the near future about editorial choices in Propertius.