It seems to be becoming a fable convenue that Propertius opened his most elaborate book with a poem of hopeless illogicality. Shackleton Bailey complains on 3. 1. 25, ‘nam quis perhaps = quisnam as in Virg. Georg. 4. 445; see on 3. 11. 27. Even so, the absence of logical sequence from the theme of 21–4 to that of 25–32 is noteworthy and characteristic… In 33 the poet becomes conscious of having lost his way and uses Homer as a bridge (...) back to the earlier motif.’. (shrink)

I suppose we have all at some time been puzzled by Horace's substitution of boulders for the iron mass that the Phocaeans threw into the sea when they took their oath, and have wondered what poetical purpose the boulders could serve that iron could not. Would not iron in fact better cohere as an image with all the civil war that fills the poem's opening lines and with the agreeable absence of plough-shares and pruning-hooks from the Blessed Isles? Most of (...) all, would it not cohere better with the poem's closing lines? (shrink)