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: 11 February 2009
In classical antiquity Propertius' eloquence was renowned. His successor Ovid referred to the blandi praecepta Properti (Trist. 2.465) and to blandi…Propertius oris (ibid. 5.1.15). Quintilian (10.1.93) stated that to his taste the most tersus and elegans Latin elegist was Tibullus, but sunt qui Propertium malint. Martial (14.189) mentioned the facundi carmen iuuenale Properti.
Turn now from the opinions of ancient authors to those of some modern commentators as they try to elucidate various passages as presented in the extant manuscripts, and you encounter not the adjectives blandus, tersus, elegans, and facundus, but ‘strange’, ‘obscure’, ‘odd’, ‘slovenly’, and the like.
A major reason for such striking differences of opinion should be evident. Ovid, to whom Propertius was blandi oris, read a text separated from Propertius' autograph by at most a few decades. Modern scholars, however, must form their text from a few relatively late manuscripts, none earlier than c. 1200, in which Propertius' eloquence has been obscured by over twelve centuries of careless blundering and deliberate interpolation by a succession of scribes.
A generally accepted example of deliberate interpolation in the Propertian archetype is found at 2.32.3-6:
nam quid Praenesti dubias, o Cynthia, sortes,
quid petis Aeaei moenia Telegoni?
cur tua te Herculeum deportant esseda Tibur?
Appia cur totiens te uia †ducit anum†?
(ducit FLP, dicit N), where the name of some neighbouring town is required in the fourth verse to balance Praeneste, Tusculum, and Herculeum in the preceding three.
1 I regularly cite N = Guelferbytanus Gudianus 224 (c. 1200), A = Leidensis Vossianus 38 (c. 1250), F = Laurentianus plut. 36.49 (c. 1380), L = Holkhamicus 333 (a. 1421), and P = Parisinus lat. 7989 (a. 1423). For the readings of these and later manuscripts I have used R. Hanslik's 1979 Teubner edition, and to control its unreliability (cf. Butrica, J., The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius [Toronto, 1984], 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar) I have also consulted Birt, T.'s facsimile of N (Codex Guelferbytanus Gudianus 224 olim Neapolitanus phototypice editus (Leiden, 1911))Google Scholar and microfilms of F, L, and P, which were kindly provided by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Bodleian Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
2 Hubbard, Margaret, Propertius (London, 1974), 1ff.Google Scholar, makes this point well in her protest against the tendency of most modern editors to attribute obscurities and odd expressions to Propertius rather than to the mediaeval scribes who copied his manuscripts. Interestingly enough, the same phenomenon occurs among twentieth-century critics of modern English poetry, who sometimes fail to recognise a misprint and attribute to the author the resulting incoherence, which they consider deliberate artistry. See Bowers, F., Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1959), 23–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a variety of examples.
3 The requirement of the name of a town tells against Shackleton Bailey's effort (p. 126) to defend the ducit anus offered by the late manuscript Leidensis Vossianus 117; moreover, Enk, P. J., Sex. Propertii Elegiarum Liber Secundus (Leiden, 1962), 406Google Scholar, has refuted his attempt to reject the objection raised by Hartman, J. J., Mnem. 49 (1921), 315Google Scholar, and 50 (1922), 109, that uia ducit aliquem ‘omni carere sensu nisi quo ducat addatur’. Shackleton Bailey's defence of the readings of the manuscripts was necessitated by his belief, articulated in his introduction (pp. xf.), that the archetype was free of interpolation. The archetype would be incriminated no less by Shackleton Bailey's own emendation of 1.2.13, where for persuadent he proposes the emendation ‘sua gaudent, reduced to suadent and then expanded, metri causa, to persuadent (see Housman, , Manilius, I, pref. pp. lixff.Google Scholar)’.
4 Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern, (London, 1731), i.253ff.Google Scholar, which to this day remains a useful discussion.
5 JPh 21 (1893), 120Google Scholar. Richardson advocates his own conjecture Ariciam on the grounds of palaeographical facility, but ariciā bears only a marginal resemblance to ducit; moreover, Ariciam anus in unmetrical, for elegists elide only a short open vowel, and possibly only -ĕ, at this point in the pentameter; cf. Platnauer, M., Latin Elegiac Verse (Cambridge, 1951), 87 and 90Google Scholar, to whose examples should be added Propertius 3.11.22, as noted by Getty, R. J., CPh 48 (1953), 191 n. 3Google Scholar.
6 I have no desire to slay the slain, so I shall only remark that anyone unlucky enough to stumble across the defence of Gallicus by Birt, T., RhM 51 (1896), 505ff.Google Scholar, can restore his mental equilibrium by consulting Housman, A. E., M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primus (London, 1903), xlvf.Google Scholar
7 Apud Burman, ad loc.
8 PCPhS 172–4 (1940), 7Google Scholar.
9 Caricus comes closest, and what little can be said in its favour has been presented by Enk, P. J., Sex. Propertii Elegiarum Liber Secundus (Leiden, 1962), 199Google Scholar; but the Carians played a very peripheral role in the Trojan War. They appear only twice in the Iliad; at 2.867 they are briefly mentioned along with the other Trojan allies, and at 10.428 they are sleeping πρ⋯ς μ⋯ν ⋯λός. The proverb adduced by Shackleton Bailey (apud Enk), to the effect that Carians were contemptible, is of minimal relevance.
10 It has been suggested to me that Propertius might have used Iliacis … in aggeribus metaphorically, like the English ‘in the trenches’, to denote the fighting in the Trojan plain; however, there seems to be no evidence that Romans ever used in aggeribus in this figurative sense, and in any event in aggeribus would be a pretty strange way of indicating the mobile warfare in the Trojan plain. At least for me, the meaning of ‘si…minuisset fata…Iliacis miles in aggeribus’ is established by the fact that Propertius is clearly imitating Catullus 68.86 ‘si miles muros isset ad Iliacos’.
11 Miscellaneae Observationes in Auctores Veteres et Recentiores (Amsterdam, 1733), iii.435Google Scholar. Smyth attributes the same interpretation to F. Puccius.
12 In place of Gallicus Kindscher, F., RhM 17 (1862), 216f.Google Scholar, conjectured Quiuis, which is not hard palaeographically (Quiuis → Gaiius → Gallicus), but the adjective required is not ‘whichever you choose’ = quiuis but ‘some’ = aliquis.
13 E.g. see Thompson, E. M., An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography (Oxford, 1912)Google Scholar, Facsimile 97. The same error of g for s is found in the manuscripts of Caesar at B.G. 1.53.7, where the β manuscripts correctly have ter sortibus and the α manuscripts have the corruption tergoribus. Other instances, from Manilius and Vergil, were presented by Housman, , CR 17 (1903), 343Google Scholar. A corruption at least partially due to the similarity of g and s in mixed uncials has occurred at Propertius 1.2.13–14:
litora natiuis †persuadent† picta lapillis,
et uolucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.
We cannot be sure precisely what Propertius wrote in place of the inappropriate persuadent, but I am certain that it was either praegaudent (Otto, A., in Commentationes Woelffinianae (Leipzig, 1891), 147Google Scholar, citing Silius Italicus 15.306) or pergaudent (Enk, P. J., Mnemosyne 3 (1935–1936), 152f.Google Scholar; cf. Cicero, , Q, Fr. 3.1.9)Google Scholar or sua gaudent (Shackleton Bailey, ad loc.) To illustrate this use of gaudere Enk adduced Propertius 3.14.9 ‘ad caestum gaudentia bracchia’, Vergil, , Georg. 4.120–1Google Scholar ‘quoque modo putis gauderent intiba riuis | et uirides apio ripae’, and Statius, , Silv. 1.3.55–6Google Scholar ‘uarias ubi picta per artes | gaudet humus’, and Shackleton Bailey cited Petronius 120.74–5 ‘saxa | gaudent ferali circum tumulata cupressu’; I may add Vergil, , Ecl. 9.48Google Scholar ‘segetes gauderent frugibus’ and Lydia 16–17’ gaudebunt siluae, gaudebunt mollia prata | et gelidi fontes, auiumque silentia fient’.
14 M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primus (London, 1903), pp. lxviff.Google Scholar
15 Housman, , JPh 18 (1890), 26Google Scholar.
16 Opera Omnia, quae ad Criticam proprie spectant (Leiden, 1596), 57Google Scholar.
17 Sexti Propertii Elegiarum Libri (London, 1880)Google Scholar, ad loc.
18 CR 9 (1895), 352Google Scholar.
19 In fairness to Camps, I should say that after reading a draft of this article he wrote to me ‘I'm [now] much less confident than I was in the reasoning in the note I provided on that passage’.
20 M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Primus (London, 1903), p. lixGoogle Scholar.
21 See Erbse, H., Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem III (Berlin, 1974)Google Scholar, ad 14.114.
22 None of these passages seems to have been cited by any commentator on Propertius.
23 See Schober, F., RE 5A (1934), cols. 1443–5Google Scholar and the map in cols. 1425–6, s.v. Thebai, for the sites of the pyres and the tombs indicated by the Thebans.
24 Broukhusius, J., Sex. Aurelii Propertii Elegiarum Libri Quatuor (Amsterdam, 1727), 300Google Scholar, ad loc.; ThLL IV (1907), col. 435.67–71Google Scholar, s.v. consido. These passages are of considerably more relevance to 3.9.37 than the alleged imitation cited by Shackleton Bailey (p. 301) from Dracontius, , Laud. Dei 3.454–5Google Scholar ‘sic Numantini pro libertate cremati | in cineres iacuere suos cum moenibus urbis’, where, as Hudson-Williams, A., CQ 41 (1947), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar, had observed, in cineres is governed by cremati and suos should be corrected to suae.
25 Postgate, , CR 15 (1901), 408Google Scholar, n., refuted Housman, 's attempt, CR 9 (1895), 352Google Scholar, to make cineres …paternos mean ‘the ashes of the former defenders’ of Thebes.
26 Postgate, , Select Elegies of Propertius (London, 1881)Google Scholar, ad loc.; Sexti Propertii Carmina (Corpus Poetarum Latinorum I) (London, 1894)Google Scholar, ad loc.; CR 15 (1901), 408Google Scholar. Butler and Barber refute Postgate's interpretation.
27 Other examples of the inversion of four letters were provided by Housman, , JPh 18 (1890), 17f.Google Scholar, to which should be added ‘latias’ → ‘italas’ at Manilius 4.661 cited by him at M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Quintus (London, 1930), 108Google Scholar. Housman's examples include ‘et integras’ for ‘et nigras’ in the Propertian archetype at 3.5.24. The corruption of ‘septem’ to ‘semper’ in the pentameter is the rearrangement of four letters with the change of one.
28 The referee has suggested to me the alternative tepentes and has adduced in its support Ovid, , Met. 14.575Google Scholar ‘tepida latuerunt tecta fauilla’ [of the ruins of Ardea], 8.241 ‘tepidum cinerem dimouit’ [of a hearth], and Statius, , Silv. 3.3.181–2Google Scholar ‘tepentes | adfatur cineres’ [of a funeral pyre]. His proposal yields good sense, and tepentes might easily have become first petentes (or patentes; Housman, , JPh 18 (1890), 17Google Scholar, notes that tepet is altered to patet at Horace, , Serm. 1.4.30Google Scholar) and then paternos; at 4.2.2 our very manuscripts of Propertius have paterna N rightly, petenda FLP. I slightly prefer perustam to tepentes because the former seems the more dramatic word and I do seem to detect an echo of ‘sedisse perustam’ in Lucan's ‘sede perusta’, but in any event one or the other is surely right. Previously we had no satisfactory emendation of paternos; now we have not just one but two. This surely is progress, although an element of uncertainty must remain.
29 JPh 16 (1888), 13Google Scholar, with a justification at M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Quartus (London, 1920), 75f.Google Scholar (ad 4.602), to which Shackleton Bailey (p. 230) has drawn attention.
30 A possible explanation of the omission of the phrase in N and its corruption in FLP is that it was barely legible in the archetype.
31 JPh 21 (1893), 161f.Google Scholar Shackleton Bailey, who seems to have overlooked Ovid's iterauerit ortus cited by Housman, asks ‘what is amiss with “the much-traversed East”?’ A problem with this rendering, or any other in which per ortus = ‘throughout the East’, is that a phrase of such sweeping geographical extent is hardly appropriate to an event which occurred at a single city.
32 CPh 8 (1913), 331Google Scholar.
33 An example of this very easy type of corruption occurs at Tibullus 1.3.38, where various s. XV manuscripts correctly have uētis (= uentis), which in the s. XIV codex Ambrosianus has been corrupted to ue 
is (= ueteris).
34 Parthians: 2.10.14, 2.14.23, 2.27.5, 3.9.54, 3.12.3, 4.3.67, 4.6.79; Persians: 3.11.21; Medes: 3.9.25, 3.12.11; Indians: 2.9.29, 2.10.15, 2.18.11, 3.4.1, 3.17.22, 4.3.10.
35 Q. Horatius Flaccus… (Zurich, 1843)Google Scholar, ad loc.
36 A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book I (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, ad loc. Cf. the scholiast's comment ‘Serica gens enim est Parthis uicina, sagittandi arte famosa, a qua et Sericum uocatur’, Keller, O., Pseudacronis Scholia in Horatium Vetustiora [Leipzig, 1902]Google Scholar, ad loc.).
37 Enk, P. J., Ad Propertii Carmina Commentarius Criticus (Zutphen, 1911), 306Google Scholar, adduced in support of Sericus the coupling of the Seres with Bactra at Horace, , Carm, 3.29.27–8Google Scholar
quid Seres et regnata Cyro
Bactra parent Tanaisque discors,
but this passage does not alleviate the incongruity of a Chinese cataphract.
Since Arethusa is lamenting Lycotas' long travels in the East, it may be worth adducing Euripides, Bacch. 14–15, where Dionysus has wandered throughout the East but has now left the Περσ⋯ν θ' ⋯λιοβλήτους πλάκας | Βάκτριά τε τείχη (cf. Propertius 4.3.63 ascensis … Bactris). In any event, the Persians and the Bactrians were often coupled by ancient writers; as representative examples I may adduce Tacitus, Ann. 2.60.4 Persis et Bactriano and Appian, Syr. 55 Περσ⋯ν κα⋯ Παρθυαίων κα⋯ Βακτρίων. Furthermore, the phrase equitata Bactra Parthis from Sidonius, , Carm. 23.249Google Scholar, at least illustrates the appropriateness of pairing Bactra with a Persian or Parthian cataphract.
Rothstein defends Jacob's Neuricus by referring to Cassius Dio 54.20, but this campaign by the Romans on the lower Danube against the Sarmatians, who were Scythians, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Neuri, who were proto-Balto-Slavs and lived on the upper Dnepr, over 500 miles away. A better conjecture is Postgate's ferreus (op. cit. 331f.), which is palaeographically easy and quite appropriate; Postgate himself adduced the ferreus … cataphractus at 3.12.12. However, an ethnic adjective would better suit the context of 4.3.7–10, where we find the sequence Bactra, †hericus†, Getae, Britannia, Indus.
38 In Catullum, Tibullum, Propertium Coniectanea & Notae (Leiden, 1592), 122Google Scholar, ad 4.3.8.
39 The latest citation which I have been able to find in a critical edition or a commentary is in the 1822 Delphin edition of Propertius, where the notes of the younger Dousa were reprinted intact.
40 HSCP 71 (1966), 66f.Google Scholar
41 Nordisk Tidskrift for Filologi, N.R. 5 (1880–1882), 276Google Scholar.
42 JPh 21 (1893), 148Google Scholar.
43 Sexti Propertii Carmina (Corpus Poetarum Latinorum, I) (London, 1894)Google Scholar, ad loc.
44 Even the differences exhibit Propertius' influence on Ovid. Propertius refers to Hymen's absence with ‘nupsi non comitante deo’; Ovid says ‘adfuit et sertis tempora uinctus Hymen’.
45 Apud Burman, ad loc.
46 Of the MSS on which Riese bases his text, T (s. IX), V (s. IX), and B (s. X/XI) have uinxit, P (s. IX) has fixit, and C (s. X/XI) has iungit, which is probably just a corruption, like its Quadratis cogit for Qua ratis egit in the hexameter, due to the preceding egit…iuncto. So far as I can tell, iungere is not elsewhere used to describe the freezing of water, whereas the use of uincire is frequent. The superiority of some s. XVIII critics to various s. XIX/XX editors is well illustrated by contrasting Riese's passive acceptance of iunxit from the corruption iungit with Burman, 's note on this same passage in his Anthologia Veterum Latinorum Epigrammatum et Poematum, siue Catalecta Poetarum Latinorum (Amsterdam, 1773), ii.377Google Scholar, ad loc.: ‘…recte N. Heinsius in suo codice, & Muncker. ad Hygin. fab. 120. corrigunt uinxit. quod firmatur a cod. Vossiano, & utraque ed. Aldina. & sic Francius & Tollius in margin ed. Scalig. emendaverant. praecedenti enim versu junto bove & hoc loco junxit aquas inconcinniora sunt. & sic alibi saepissime. vide N. Heins. ad Claudian. Epigr. x. mirusque latex quod flumina vinxit. & Graevii Lect. Hesiod. cap. xiv. pag. 70…’
47 Cf. ThLL i (1904), col. 1684.26–42Google Scholar, s.v. alligo; ibid. II (1903), col. 961.9–43, s.v. astringo; see Anth. Lat. 568.4 cited above for nectere, and for uincire add Ovid, , Ex Pont. 2.2.26Google Scholar and 3.1.15 and Trist. 3.10.25 to the passages in n. 46 cited by Burman.
48 The construction aliquid duratur in aliquid is found at [Tibullus] 3.7.156, Seneca, , Nat. Qu. 4.12Google Scholar, Pliny, , N.H. 12.94Google Scholar, and Hyginus, , Fab. 154Google Scholar cited in the ThLL V. 1 (1934), col. 2294.1–29, but durare does not mean ‘to bind’.
49 This anachronism of course is not historical; see my remark in AJA 87 (1983), 27, n. 25Google Scholar. I can now supply Lucan's source for his next two lines ‘uixque habitura locum dextras ac tela mouendi | constiterat gladiosque suos compressa timebat’. It is Vergil, , Aen. 10.432–3Google Scholar ‘extremi addensent acies nec turba moueri | tela manusque sinit’, as was noted by Servius ad loc.
50 Specimen criticum inaugurale, exhibens Observations criticas in Propertii librum quartum (Groningen, 1818), 32Google Scholar. Van Eldik (apud Burman) had already conjectured adstrictas.
51 Here tmesis has its conventional meaning ‘the splitting of a word’.
52 Questa, C., BPEC 24 (1976), 126Google Scholar, n. 12, defends perque lauet by adducing various passages in postclassical authors where the manuscripts present forms of perlauare and perlauere, namely: (i) perlauatur (for which M. Ihm reads perluatur) which is the reading of the codex unicus (a. 1485) of Pelagonius (s. IV2) at Veterin. 26; (ii) perlauerint in two s. VII in. and s. IX codices of the s. VI Regula Magistri at 30.4; (iii) perlaues in the s. VIII manuscript which preserves the s. VI Latin translation of Dioscorides; (iv) perlauit in a s. X translation of Oribasius. After citing these passages, which may well establish perlauo in Later Latin but hardly show that Propertius knew the verb, Questa proceeds to call lexicographers ‘male informati’ for choosing the manuscript reading proleuabit over perlauabit at Tertullian, de Paen. 4.3, but it is Questa himself who is at fault for ignoring the context: ‘ergo paenitentia uita est, cum praeponitur morti. eam tu peccator, mei similis…, ita inuade, ita amplexare, ut naufragus alicuius tabulae fidem. Haec te peccatorem fluctibus mersum proleuabit et in portum diuinae clementiae protelabit’. What a shipwrecked man wants is not a bath (perlauabit) but something like a plank (alicuius tabulae) to buoy him up (proleuabit) and convey him to safety. Towards the end of his note Questa says ‘personalmente attendo con una certa curiosità il prossimo fascicolo dell' Oxford Latin Dict.’, which it turns out has no entry for perlauo, I presume because its compilers used Barber's 1953 O.C.T. of Propertius, and Questa then heartily thanked ‘per controlli di testi e utili informazioni…il dr. Peter Flury, “Generalredaktor” del ThLL’. Hence I in turn await with interest the publication of the fascicle of the ThLL which will cover perlauo, for whether the ThLL attributes this verb to Propertius and Tertullian will provide a measure of how far the critical judgement of its compilers has progressed since the early 1900s.
Fedefi, P., Properzio, Elegie, Libro IV (Bari, 1965), 185Google Scholar, had already attributed perque lauet to Propertius and perlauabit to Tertullian, and in Sexti Properti Elegiarum Libri IV (Stuttgart, 1984)Google Scholar, ad loc., he refers to Questa's note and seriously suggests that the unparalleled tmesis confers dignitas on the postclassical perlauare. Besides mentioning the old maxim ‘two wrongs don't make a right’, I wonder how many certainly corrupt readings elsewhere could be ‘dignified’ in a similar manner.
53 Tyrrell, R. Y., The Correspondence of M. Tullius Cicero 2 (London, 1885), i.69, nGoogle Scholar.
