Poems Page 19

The nine Wenches: The Muses.

  Bacchic staffs: Known as thyrsi, they were ‘fennel rods tipped with pine cones carried by the followers of Bacchus, god of wine, but also of drama’ (Heyworth & Morwood).

  Swan-drawn carriage: The swan has been a symbol of the poet until at least as recently as Mallarmé; it was also not infrequently said by poets to draw Venus’ chariot, and thus served as a symbol of love.

  Marius: See note to II.1 for his victories over German tribes.

  Philitas: See note to II.34.

  III.4

  Divine Caesar: Augustus. He had been known as the son of a god since his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was deified in 44 BC. Augustus himself received divine honours in the eastern empire after the Battle of Actium. On the projected Parthian campaign, see note to II.10. This poem evidently was written before the diplomatic solution was implemented in 20 BC.

  Vesta: The fire in this goddess’ temple in Rome was tended by the famous Vestal Virgins, who were required to keep it perpetually burning – otherwise the gods might be thought to have withdrawn their favour. See also note to II.29b.

  Your descendant: Julius Caesar’s family claimed descent from Aeneas, the refugee from Troy and legendary ancestor of the Romans. His arrival in Italy is recounted in Vergil’s Aeneid. In Greek mythology, Aeneas was the son of Aphrodite (Venus).

  III.5

  Bronzes smelted in the sack of Corinth: The Romans captured the Greek city of Corinth in 144 BC. According to one story, fires caused the melting together of quantities of gold, silver and bronze, creating ‘an alloy of enormous value’ (Heyworth & Morwood).

  Prometheus: Credited with having created the human race. See also note to II.1.

  Acheron: A river of the underworld.

  Jugurtha … Marius: Apart from his victories over the Germans (see note to II.1), the Roman commander Marius, after a seven-year struggle, also defeated Jugurtha, king of Numidia in North Africa, in 105 BC. Jugurtha was paraded in Marius’ triumphal procession in Rome, then killed, as was the normal fate of captured enemy leaders.

  Croesus … Irus: Croesus, sixth-century-BC king of Lydia in Asia Minor, was fabled for his wealth. Irus was a (mythological) beggar in Ithaca mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. He abused the returning Odysseus (Ulysses), who responded by beating him up.

  Mount Pindus: In Greece. It is not known whether Propertius had a particular earthquake in mind.

  Ploughman: Propertius is alluding to the constellation known as the Plough or Great Bear. It is described as slow because it is visible for ten months of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

  Pleiades: Also a constellation. According to Greek myth, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione.

  Wheels and rocks, and thirst: A reference to the respective punishments of Ixion, Sisyphus and Tantalus in the underworld.

  Alcmaeon …: Pursued by the Furies for killing his mother. Phineus was ‘punished (for revealing too much in his prophecies) by the bird-like Harpies, who foul his food every time he tries to eat’ (Heyworth & Morwood). Tisiphone was one of the Furies, portrayed as having snakes for hair.

  Cerberus: The many-headed dog said to guard the underworld. On Tityus, see note to II.20.

  Some fiction: As argued by Lucretius in his poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), which expounds the ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

  Standards of Crassus: See note to II.10.

  III.6

  No interpretation completely ties up all loose ends in the poem, but I have accepted the Oxford Text presentation, in the absence of quotation marks in the manuscripts. This implies: a) that there are three speakers – Propertius (who opens and closes the poem), Lygdamus, and Cynthia, whose statement is included in Lygdamus’ report; b) that there is something missing in the text at the start of Lygdamus’ speech, which otherwise begins too abruptly (and in the Latin ungrammatically); and c) that Lygdamus is – as in IV.8 and apparently IV.7 – the slave of Propertius, not of Cynthia. There is, however, a probable play on the double meaning of the Latin word ‘domina’ (the same as that in its English translation, ‘mistress’). Since Propertius is, in his turn, the ‘slave’ of Cynthia, Lygdamus is in a sense the servant of two masters – or a master and a mistress. This may explain why Propertius says at the end that Lygdamus could win his freedom ‘if it’s down to me’ – implying that Cynthia may also have a say, and might not agree. At all events, the conniving slave is a staple of ancient comedy.

  Herbs: The ancients believed that herbal brews could induce – or banish – love. Cynthia goes on to list magic devices and ingredients worthy of the witches in Macbeth.

  III.7

  Paetus: The poem, of the type known by the Greek word epikedeion, is one of the few in the Propertian collection that can truly be described as an elegy in the modern sense, being a lament for a certain Paetus, lost at sea. We have no independent information on him, although men of that name crop up sporadically at other periods of Roman history. It has been suggested that he may have been a relative of the poet. Scholars have not questioned the basic facts in the poem, indicating that the dead man was a young merchant whose ship capsized in a storm on the way to Alexandria, Egypt, possibly dragged by gales off its moorings at some Aegean harbour en route. The perils of seafaring were a commonplace of ancient poetry.

  Kafireas’ reefs: Referring to the wreck of the Greek fleet returning from Troy, on which see note to II.26b.

  Nereus: A marine deity. One of his sea-nymph daughters was Thetis, mother of Achilles.

  North Wind: Anthropomorphised by the ancients variously as Boreas and Aquilo. On his abduction of Orithyia, see note to II.26b.

  III.9

  Maecenas: The poem revisits the themes of II.1 (qv) and is again addressed to Maecenas, whom Propertius calls his ‘fautor’, meaning something like promoter. In this further ‘recusatio’, the poet argues that he is in effect copying Maecenas, who despite boasting Etruscan royal descent preferred to shun the limelight and did not hold top public offices. This, of course, did not diminish his power. When Octavian was away from Rome in 31–29 BC, he left Maecenas in charge of the city. Propertius notes that Maecenas was an ‘eques’ – literally a knight but with different connotations from the English term and signifying the second tier in the Roman status pecking order (after senatorial rank).

  Lysippus …: Propertius cites four pairs of famous Greek artists, stressing how their styles differed, just as his style differs from that of the epic writer. Lysippus was a fourth-century-BC sculptor from Sicyon in the northern Peloponnese, working in bronze. Calamis dated from the fifth century BC; none of his work survives. On Apelles, see note to I.2. Parrhasius came from Ephesus and his work was characterised by a fine attention to detail. Mentor (fourth century BC) and Mys (fifth century BC) were both silversmiths. Phidias’ fifth-century-BC gold and ivory statue of Jupiter at Olympia (the temple there is mentioned in III.2) was renowned, but has not survived. Praxiteles, from the fourth century BC, was also an Athenian and worked sometimes in local marble.

  Camillus: The famed Roman military leader was a private citizen in exile when he was called back to service to save Rome from the invasion of the Gauls in 387 BC.

  Thebes: See note to I.7 on the failed attack by the ‘Seven Against Thebes’. The sons of the Seven, however, later returned and sacked Thebes.

  Ploughed over: In ancient times, ploughing over the walls of a defeated city symbolised its annihilation. In a condensation of the story of Troy, Propertius portrays the ploughing as done by the famed wooden horse, which had enabled the Greeks to infiltrate the city. Minerva, goddess of carpentry, helped build the horse.

  Callimachus … Philitas: See notes to II.1 and II.34.

  My youth: Propertius was probably in his early thirties when Book Three was published. A Roman man was considered a ‘iuuenis’ (youth) until the age of about forty.

  If you showed the way …: As in II.1, Propertius declares himself ready in theory to write on Greek mythology and Roma
n history, but now makes this contingent on Maecenas adopting a high-profile position, which he knows will not happen. The war between the gods and the giants was also mentioned in II.1. Cattle grazing on the Palatine Hill, which would become Rome’s historical centre, signify the pre-history of the city. Remus was killed by his brother Romulus when he derisively jumped over the nascent walls of Rome, which Romulus was building. Propertius then goes backwards in time to speak of the suckling of the twins by a she-wolf.

  Parthians’ crafty flight: See note to II.10.

  Egyptian bastions: Propertius refers to the capture of Pelusium in the Nile delta, which in fact was not stormed but surrendered to Octavian in 30 BC.

  Antony’s death: Mark Antony committed suicide at Alexandria in 30 BC following his defeat by Octavian at Actium the previous year.

  III.10

  Niobe’s rock: See note to II.20.

  Halcyons … nightingale: Propertius refers to two bird-related Greek myths. In one, Alcyone’s husband died in a shipwreck, and when his body was washed ashore, she was transformed into a halcyon, or kingfisher, to fly to meet him. The other relates how Procne was married to King Tereus and bore him a son named Itys, but when Tereus raped her sister Philomela, the two women killed Itys and served him as food for Tereus. When he realised what had happened he pursued them, but all three were changed into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe, and the sisters into a nightingale and a swallow. Ancient writers portrayed the nightingale’s song as a lament for Itys.

  III.11

  While moving a step closer to ‘regime poetry’, Propertius still feels it necessary to preface adulation of Augustus with the perfunctory context of a love poem introducing the theme of female power, from the strong heroines of Greek mythology to Cleopatra.

  Medea: See also notes to II.4 and II.16b. In order to help Jason take the Golden Fleece from her homeland, she used her magic powers to enable him to yoke fire-breathing bulls and sow the ground with dragon’s teeth, from which armed men sprang. She also lulled the dragon that guarded the fleece.

  Penthesilea: An Amazon queen from the northern coast of the Black Sea who fought at Troy and was killed by Achilles. When he saw her beauty after her death, he fell in love with her.

  Omphale: Queen of Lydia in Asia Minor, with whom Hercules fell in love. She forced him to serve as her slave, wear women’s clothing and spin wool. Propertius refers to what is now Lake Marmara in western Turkey, linking it with the nearby gold-bearing Pactolus River (see note to I.6) to imply that her beauty came from its waters. The Pillars of Hercules are the rocks of Gibraltar and Ceuta on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar, portrayed as victory monuments set up by Hercules to mark his liberation of the world from monsters.

  Semiramis: Queen of Nineveh, in what is now Iraq, in the ninth century BC. She turns up in Dante’s Inferno as a woman guilty of lust.

  Jupiter: The king of the gods’ philandering is further proof of the power of women.

  Him who blotted …: Mark Antony.

  That Woman: Cleopatra, whose actual name, commentators note, is never used by Augustan poets. Propertius’ description of her as ‘trita’ (literally ‘worn out’ but with a clear sexual connotation) by her male slaves is the closest the poet comes to obscene language in any of his extant poems. Her Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt was descended from the kings of Macedon, best known of whom were Philip and Alexander (the Great). She had a relationship with Julius Caesar, producing a son, and was living in Rome when he was assassinated in 44 BC. Her later famous liaison with Antony resulted in three children. Her son by Julius, Caesarion, was proclaimed pharaoh after her death in 30 BC, but was quickly killed on Augustus’ orders, after which Egypt became a Roman province. Cleopatra was thus effectively the last pharaoh. Propertius’ rhetoric about her supposed hopes of imposing Egyptian culture on Rome reads like far-fetched xenophobia, but many Romans will have wondered what would have happened had Antony defeated Octavian in the concluding phase of the Republic’s civil wars.

  Pompey: Pompey the Great (106–48 BC) became the principal rival of Julius Caesar. The three triumphs Propertius refers to were his victories over the faction supporting Marius (see note to II.1) in Africa in 81 BC, over the forces of Quintus Sertorius, another rival commander, in Spain in 72 BC, and over Mithridates, king of Pontus on the Black Sea, in 65 BC (mentioned later in this poem in a reference to standards captured at the Bosphorus). Pompey was defeated by Caesar at Pharsalus in Greece in 48 BC. He fled to Egypt but was murdered on a boat near the coast. During an attempted reconciliation in 59 BC, Pompey had married Julia, daughter of Caesar, who was thus his father-in-law.

  Anubis: A dog-headed Egyptian god.

  Tambourine: Propertius refers to the sistrum, a rattle employed in the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis. The instrument is still used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and features in the opera Les Troyens by the nineteenth-century French composer Hector Berlioz.

  Felucca poles: Some commentators have assumed a reference to the barge of Cleopatra made famous in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne / Burn’d on the water.’ Shakespeare probably took his description from the Life of Antony by the Greek historian Plutarch, writing about a century after Propertius. I have preferred a reference to more humble craft, which seems consistent with the Greek word ‘baris’ used by Propertius.

  Tarpeian Rock: A crag on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, from which traitors were thrown to their deaths. See also note to IV.4.

  Tarquin: Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was the last of Rome’s seven kings, driven out in the late sixth century BC, according to tradition, because of his tyrannical behaviour and that of his son.

  Sacred asps: Cleopatra reputedly committed suicide by snake-bite in Egypt after she and Antony were defeated by Octavian at Actium.

  Such a leader: Augustus.

  Scipio: Scipio Africanus ended the Second Punic War against the Carthaginians by finally defeating Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in North Africa in 202 BC. His adoptive grandson Scipio Aemilianus (also dubbed Africanus) defeated Carthage in the Third Punic War and destroyed the city in 146 BC.

  Camillus: See note to III.9.

  Syphax: The king of Numidia in North Africa was an ally of Carthage.

  Pyrrhus: The king of Epirus (north-west Greece) was defeated by the Romans at Benevento, southern Italy, in 275 BC.

  Curtius: According to legend, Marcus Curtius ‘leapt on horseback, armed, into a chasm which had opened in the forum, because the soothsayers declared that such a sacrifice would ensure the perpetuity of the Roman state’ (Camps).

  Decius: There is confusion over which of two men named Publius Decius Mus, father and son, supposedly carried out this feat in the fourth or third century BC, and which battle was involved.

  Horatius: The Roman hero who ‘kept the bridge’, as immortalised in the most famous of the Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Macaulay (1800–59). According to the story, Horatius Cocles defended the western approach to the Sublician Bridge over the Tiber against an attacking Etruscan army in 508 BC. While he held off the enemy, Roman soldiers destroyed the bridge behind him, thus saving the city. The wounded Horatius managed to swim back across the river.

  Corvinus: Marcus Valerius received this additional name after a crow (‘coruus’ in Latin) perched on his helmet and harried a Gaul he was fighting during a battle in 348 BC.

  Levkas: Propertius is apparently referring to a temple of Apollo on the Greek island of Levkas, from which the flight of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s ships after the Battle of Actium would have been visible.

  One day’s war: Heyworth & Morwood say the phrase ‘implies that a single day has not only brought warfare to an end; it has destroyed the potential for military epic. All that is possible now is the composition of Augustan panegyric.’

  III.12

  Postumus: Postumus and Galla were common names in ancient Rome. Some have seen a possible reference to Caius Propertius Postumus, a politician of the d
ay who may have been a relative of the poet. At all events, Propertius, after his encomium for Augustus in the previous poem, here returns to a favourite theme – the superiority of the life of love to military adventures. He will develop the theme of the abandoned military wife at greater length in IV.3.

  Parthian spoils: See note to II.10.

  Gold-diggers: Propertius takes it as read that the motives for going on campaign included not just glory but self-enrichment from captured booty.

  Aras: A river known in ancient times as the Araxes, flowing through what are now Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran.

  Ten years’ war: There follows a rapid summary of the Odyssey, although Ulysses’ adventures on the way back from Troy are not listed exactly in Homer’s order. Ulysses began by capturing the town of Ismara in Thrace, northeastern Greece, and slaughtering the Cicones, a people who lived there. He and his men later burnt out with a heated staff the single eye of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who had taken them captive. Elsewhere, he dallied with the witch Circe and evaded the influence of the lotus, a fruit that took away the will to travel on. For Scylla and Charybdis, see note to II.26b. The nymph Lampetie was a daughter of the Sun god, whose cattle she tended. Ulysses’ hungry men sacrilegiously killed the animals, which continued to low even when being roasted. On Calypso, see note to I.15. Ulysses swam through the sea for two days and nights after being shipwrecked, and also visited the land of the dead in the far west of the world. He stopped up the ears of his crewmen with wax to prevent them being lured to their doom by the music of the Sirens. He finally made it home to the island of Ithaca, where he killed the suitors who had been wooing his wife Penelope.

  III.13

  Indian miner-ants: The fifth-century-BC Greek historian Herodotus reported that in India giant ants dug up gold-rich sand from the desert.