Poems Page 20

  Tyre: See note to II.16b. The expensive dye was extracted from a vein of the whelk, a type of shellfish.

  Felicitous funeral law: The Indian practice of suttee, in which a widow threw herself onto her husband’s burning funeral pyre, and which only died out in the nineteenth century, was a source of fascination for Roman writers.

  Evadne: See note to I.15.

  Seeing goddesses naked: The reference is to myths like that of the hunter Actaeon, who stumbled on the goddess Diana bathing in the nude, was changed by her into a stag and was torn to pieces by his own hounds.

  ‘Out for hares …: The next four lines are a fairly close translation of an epigram by Leonidas of Taranto, who wrote in Greek in southern Italy in the third century BC.

  Pan: See note to I.18.

  Brennus: Leader of the Gauls who attacked the temple of Apollo at Delphi in 278 BC. The implication is that he was driven by love of booty. Ancient writers say the attackers were overwhelmed by a blizzard, although Propertius suggests some kind of landslip caused by an earth tremor.

  Polymestor: King Priam of Troy, foreseeing the fall of the city, sent his youngest son Polydorus to King Polymestor of Thrace for safety, along with a quantity of gold. Polymestor seized the gold and killed Polydorus.

  Amphiaraus … Eriphyla: See notes to II.16b and II.34.

  Cassandra: Daughter of Priam. In an attempt to seduce her, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she rebuffed him, he decreed that her (correct) predictions would never be believed. The horse is the Trojan Horse, mentioned also in III.9, left as a ‘gift’ to Troy but full of Greek warriors who stormed the city when it was rolled inside.

  III.14

  Sparta: Ancient Sparta, in the Greek Peloponnese, was a militaristic society. But under statutes attributed to the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, women were said to enjoy greater equality with men than did their sisters in other Greek cities, such as Athens. According to ancient writers, this included them taking part in sports – in the nude, as men did (the Greek word ‘gymnos’, root of our ‘gymnasium’, means ‘naked’). Propertius was not the only male classical author to fantasise about this notion, which was picked up in more recent times by Edgar Degas in his 1860 painting Young Spartans Exercising. The aim of the practice, however, seems to have been to help women produce healthy sons to serve in the army. Praise of women’s athletics is expanded in the poem into general acclamation of what Propertius says was Sparta’s more free-and-easy relationship between the sexes than that in first-century-BC Rome. Scholars are divided on whether young Spartan women really did exercise naked, or at least semi-naked. One recent discussion, by Francis Cairns, concludes that the idea ‘cannot be dismissed as impossible’ and that Propertius’ description of women’s status in general ‘sticks fairly closely to ancient belief about Sparta and indeed to the facts’.

  Amazons: These mythical female warriors were reputed to come from around the River Thermodon, now the Terme, which flows into the Black Sea in northern Turkey. Propertius depicts them as bare-breasted but does not mention the story that they had one breast removed to enable them to draw their bows more easily.

  Taygetus, Eurotas: Respectively, a mountain and a river near Sparta.

  Castor and Pollux: In mythology, twin sons of Leda, wife of Spartan King Tyndareus (see also note to I.13). Castor was a noted horseman, Pollux a pugilist. Their sister was Helen (of Troy). The Greek myths differ as to which of Leda’s children were sired by Tyndareus and which by the god Jupiter.

  III.15

  Boyhood clothing: At the age of around seventeen, upper-class Roman boys gave up the purple-edged ‘toga praetexta’ in favour of the plain white ‘toga virilis’.

  Lycinna: After insisting from the start of Book One that Cynthia was ‘first’, Propertius (that is, the figure portrayed in the poems, not necessarily the historical man) now reveals that he actually lost his virginity to another woman. The name is not found elsewhere in his work, but suggests a slavegirl. He speaks of her with affection, while maintaining that Cynthia was his only real love.

  Dirce … Antiope: The convoluted myth of Antiope would have been familiar to readers from a play by Euripides, small parts of which survive today. She was the daughter of Nycteus, a king in the Greek region of Boeotia, her beauty catching the attention of Jupiter, who made her pregnant. She gave birth to twin boys, Zethus and Amphion, leaving them on Mount Cithaeron, near Thebes, where they were brought up by a shepherd. Angry at her behaviour, her dying father asked his brother, Lycus, to punish her, leading to her being taken as a slave by Lycus’ wife, Dirce, who maltreated her as recounted by Propertius. Escaping, she made her way to the hut on Cithaeron where her now grown-up sons lived. They at first turned her away, failing to recognise her until the old shepherd intervened. The sons then killed the pursuing Dirce by tying her to the horns of a bull (a massive Hellenistic sculpture of the dramatic scene is kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples). The poem only makes sense, however, under a version of the myth in which Antiope also had a previous relationship with Lycus, explaining Dirce’s antipathy to her, which is compared to Cynthia’s jealousy of Lycinna.

  Amphion: His lyre-playing is also mentioned in I.9 – qv and note.

  Aracynthus: Another mountain near Thebes.

  III.16

  White-roofed towers: Propertius’ ‘geminas turres’ translates literally as ‘twin towers’ – a phrase hopelessly compromised since September 11, 2001. I have taken it to denote buildings on either side of the Aniene falls, with their 100-metre drop, in the beauty spot of Tivoli, east of Rome. In IV.7, Tivoli is mentioned as Cynthia’s burial place.

  Sciron: A mythical bandit who lived near the Greek city of Megara. After killing many wayfarers by pushing them over a cliff, he was eventually dealt with in similar fashion by Theseus.

  Scythia: The area north of the Black Sea, often used by the Romans to denote a distant, foreign land inhabited by dangerous barbarians.

  III.17

  This poem, which has been interpreted as one of several (others are III.21 and III.23) building up to the ‘final’ farewell to Cynthia (and by implication to love poetry) in III.24–25, is cast as a hymn to Bacchus. Hymns were common in classical poetry, and Roman readers will perhaps have recalled the one to the same deity in Sophocles’ Antigone, where the chorus pleads for Thebes’ salvation. Many scholars, however, have detected irony, even humour, in Propertius’ version – in the end, all he asks for is alcoholic oblivion from his affair with Cynthia. Others have detected a more serious purpose, suggesting he wanted to reclaim for Augustus a god who had been adopted as a sponsor by Mark Antony, as well as to promote viticulture.

  Ariadne: See also notes to I.3 and II.3. After Bacchus rescued her from Naxos (the island is mentioned later in the poem), he took her ‘to heaven as his bride, and made her crown into a constellation’ (Camps).

  Lightning bolts: Bacchus was born prematurely when his mother Semele was burnt up after persuading her lover Jupiter to appear to her in his full effulgence (see note to II.28). He was saved by being sewn into Jupiter’s thigh until his term was due. Later he travelled in the east with his followers, who put to flight all opponents.

  Lycurgus: A Thracian king who opposed worship of Bacchus. He was driven mad, cut off his own legs and killed his son, thinking he was chopping down vines.

  Pentheus: Another foe of Bacchus who came to grief, as recounted in Euripides’ Bacchae. He was torn to pieces by his mother and aunts, who had become maenads.

  Tendrilled vessel: ‘Bacchus in human form was travelling on a ship, and the crew plotted to sell him as a slave. When he disclosed himself, the sailors went mad and leapt into the sea, becoming dolphins, and the ship was suddenly overgrown with vines.’ (Camps).

  I’ll drape you …: Propertius’ pledge to promote worship of Bacchus dwells on the oriental and effeminate (the two concepts were synonymous to Romans) aspect of the god. Cybele was a mother-goddess whose cult originated in Anatolia but was im
ported to Italy at the end of the third century BC. She was also identified as a defender of cities and was depicted in ancient art with a mural crown.

  Pindar: The great Greek lyric poet (518 – 438 BC), best known for his still extant odes celebrating victors in the Olympic and other Panhellenic games. This is another of Propertius’ promises to adopt a loftier tone in future.

  III.18

  An elegy for Marcus Claudius Marcellus, son of Augustus’ sister Octavia. He married the emperor’s daughter, his first cousin Julia, and was seen as heir apparent, but fell ill and died in Baia, on the Gulf of Naples, in 23 BC at the age of nineteen. His death is also treated in a passage of the Aeneid, which, when Vergil recited it at the imperial court, is said to have caused Octavia to faint. The name of Marcellus does not appear in the transmitted Latin text, but would have been obvious to Propertius’ audience. I have inserted it in the translation to help the modern reader.

  Averno: Apparently another reference to the port built by Augustus’ lieutenant Agrippa, which allowed the sea into Lake Averno, an area also renowned for being a portal to the underworld. See, in general, the note to I.11. There, Baia is denounced as a place where Cynthia is likely to be unfaithful; here as the site of Marcellus’ death. There is also a reference to Baia’s volcanic springs.

  Aeneas’ trumpeter: Misenus, who fell to his death from cliffs at Cuma after challenging the sea-god Triton to a trumpeting competition, as mentioned in the Aeneid. The headland at the north-west end of the Gulf of Naples is still called Cape Miseno.

  Hercules’ road: See note to I.11.

  Bacchus: A trip to Italy by the wine-god is mentioned only by Propertius.

  Crowd at the stadium: Shortly before his death, Marcellus had staged spectacular games in Rome.

  Dog’s mouths: A reference to the underworld hound Cerberus. See note to III.5. The grim greybeard is Charon, who ferried dead souls across the Styx.

  Nireus: Famed as the most handsome of the Greeks who went to Troy.

  Pactolus: See note to I.6. The river’s gold contributed to the fabled wealth of the Lydian king Croesus.

  The sailor: Presumably a further reference to Charon. But these closing lines take us to the limits of our knowledge of Roman eschatology. The one thing that seems clear is that the poet hopes Marcellus will follow the path of Julius Caesar, who was believed by the populace to have become a god when a comet appeared in the sky a few months after his assassination in 44 BC. Propertius, alone among Roman authors, attributes the same destiny to Marcellus’ ancestor, Claudius Marcellus, who had captured Syracuse in Sicily for Rome during the war with Hannibal in 211 BC. But scholars are divided – and have emended the text accordingly – on whether the poet is praying that Marcellus’ body will go to the Elysian Fields in the underworld, and his soul to heaven, or vice versa. I have followed the latter interpretation.

  III.19

  Sirt: The name of what is now a Libyan city was applied in ancient times to dangerous offshore sandbanks. Malea, on the southern tip of the Peloponnese, in Greece, was also a notorious graveyard of shipping.

  Her whose love …: Pasiphae, on whom see note to II.28.

  Tyro: See note to I.13.

  Medea: See also notes to II.4, II.16b and III.11. In the famous drama by Euripides, Medea, abandoned by Jason, killed their two sons.

  That adultery: After King Agamemnon of Mycenae left for the Trojan War, his wife Clytemnestra took Aegisthus as a lover. Together, they murdered Agamemnon on his return.

  Myrrha: A Cypriot princess who deceived her father into incest. While fleeing his wrath she was turned into a myrrh tree.

  Scylla: This final mythological example of female sexual perversion records how King Minos of Crete attacked the mainland Greek city of Megara. Its king, Nisus, was kept safe by a magic lock of purple hair, but his daughter Scylla, enamoured of Minos, cut it off, causing Nisus’ death and the fall of the city. Instead of rewarding her, Minos tied her to the stern of his ship and dragged her to her death in the sea for treachery to her father. Propertius says that because of this act of justice, Minos was rightly appointed after his death to be a judge of the underworld (where he shows up, in monstrous form, in Dante).

  III.20

  The poem purports to be written to a woman whose boyfriend has dumped her to take up a lucrative assignment in the province of Africa, presumably on Roman government service. The writer offers himself as a replacement. Some have found the transition to a discourse on the need for a relationship contract to be too abrupt and proposed to split the poem in two. There has also been much debate on whether the addressee is Cynthia (who is not named in the poem, but then neither is she in several others generally acknowledged to be addressed to her) or to another woman. A majority of recent commentators have inclined to the second view, largely because Propertius talks of a ‘new’ relationship, hardly appropriate for Cynthia near the end of his third book of verse about her.

  The skills of chaste Minerva: Ovid lists the accomplishments of the goddess Minerva as including learning, spinning, weaving, dyeing, shoemaking, carpentry, medicine, teaching, sculpture and painting.

  A learned ancestor: This phrase has set the literary historiographers off on a trail of speculation. Some have said it proves the recipient is not Cynthia, who is portrayed in some poems as a courtesan and therefore unlikely to have had a distinguished ancestor. Others have said that if Apuleius was correct in identifying Cynthia as a certain Hostia (see Afterword), then the second-century-BC poet Hostius could have been her ancestor.

  Ariadne’s starry crown: See note to III.17.

  III.21

  Grand tour to Athens: The idea of foreign travel to get away from a love affair is an established one in classical literature. But Athens was indeed a frequent destination for young upper-class Romans, thanks to its traditions of philosophy, culture and art, recalling the role played by the ‘grand tour’ to Italy for well-to-do Englishmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is no other evidence that Propertius visited Athens and his avowed intention to do so is more likely simply to prepare the reader for the farewell poem III.24–25. His pledge to improve himself with the study of Greek philosophers, orators and playwrights during a stay possibly lasting years is hard to take at face value. The ironic tone is very different from the anguish of Catullus’ ‘it’s over’ in Poem 8.

  Turn of marine deities: Instead of the love deities Propertius has hitherto prayed to.

  Corinth port: A journey to Athens would have involved a sea voyage to Corinth, then (the Corinth canal having not yet been constructed) land travel across the isthmus to the port on the eastern side where the traveller would again have boarded ship to reach Piraeus – then, as now, the port for Athens, some seven miles away.

  Epicurus: The Greek philosopher (341–270 BC) taught that pleasure was the highest good, but also attacked the idea of love as a serious emotion. His theories had recently formed the basis of the Roman writer Lucretius’ scientific poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe).

  Demosthenes: Regarded as the greatest of the Greek orators, he lived from 384–322 BC. His political speeches aimed mainly to counter the southward expansion of the kingdom of Macedonia, and we still have the word ‘philippic’ to remind us of his tirades against Philip of Macedon. Demosthenes’ efforts ultimately failed and he committed suicide rather than be apprehended by Macedonian representatives.

  Menander: The master of Greek ‘new comedy’ (see also note to II.6). His refined plays contrast with the rumbustious and often rude fantasies of ‘old comedy’, as seen in the extant plays of Aristophanes.

  III.22

  Cyzicus: A once important town on what was originally an island of the same name in the Sea of Marmara but later became a peninsula, now known as Kapidag and located in Turkey. Ruined by a series of earthquakes in the Middle Ages, the town survives as an archaeological site. The nearest modern city is Erdek.

  Tullus: His first appearance since Book One, where he wa
s introduced (see notes to I.1 and I.6) as Propertius’ dedicatee. Evidently he stayed for years in Asia Minor for reasons we can only guess at. Here, Propertius appeals to him to come home and pursue the career of the typical upper-class Roman, but the tone is hard to gauge. The praise of Italy echoes passages of Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneid, but some critics have suggested parody. We do not know how Tullus reacted, and nothing further is heard of him.

  Cybele: See note to III.17. Cyzicus was one of several places associated with her cult.

  Pluto: Known to the Romans as Dis, the king of the underworld famously abducted Persephone (or Proserpina) to be his bride, an event more commonly located in Sicily.

  Cayster: A river a little further south in western Turkey, now called the Küçük Menderes.

  Maeander: See note to II.30.

  Atlas: Depicted as a giant who supported the sky on his shoulders, and identified with the Atlas Mountains in what is now Morocco. This is the first of a series of potential sights set in the west of the then known world.

  Medusa: The Gorgon’s face turned people to stone (so hardly something Tullus would want to look at), but Perseus slew her using his shield as a mirror.

  Geryon: A three-bodied king living on an island beyond the Straits of Gibraltar (and another classical monster who appears in Dante’s Inferno). Hercules killed him and seized his oxen as one of his labours. The next two references are also to Hercules, who out-wrestled the giant Antaeus in Libya and stole golden apples from the garden of Hesperus’ daughters, guarded by a dragon, in the far west (see note to II.24b).

  Colchis: Propertius now turns his attention to the east, with the voyage of the Argo to the Black Sea.