Abstract

In his very valuable study of generic patterns in ancient poetry Francis Cairns assigns Propertius 2.28, [Tib.] 3.10 , and Ovid Am. 2.13 to the genre Soteria, that is works of congratulation and thanksgiving on the recovery from illness of a friend, and he sees the resemblances between the poems as due to the elegists’ attempts to produce ‘dramatized’ examples of the genre, with the situation developing from the girl's illness at the beginning of the poem to her recovery at the end , pp.153–7). Cairns's arguments and interpretation of the poems should, I feel, be scrutinized carefully, especially since his classification of the poems has been accepted recently without demur by at least one scholar , 118 and n.50)