Propertian Closure, Homosocial Epic and the Virgilian Intertext

Epic first as episodic romance and then as teleological narrative parallels the speaker’s psychological journey over the course of the first three books of Propertius, leading to the shift in orientation of the fourth.⁽¹⁾  The Aeneid haunts the culminating poems of Propertius Book Three as an intertext, not only anticipating elegy’s “reinvention” of itself as a genre but also reinforcing its problematic implication in epic’s homosocial economy. This essay explores some of the difficulties of interpretation raised by these intertextual echoes of Virgil in Propertius 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22, asking what these epic ‘traces’ suggest about the conventions of genre in relation to gender and about the symbolic sacrifices—of both women and poetics—made for elegy’s transformation. Ultimately, a stable interpretation may rest on the critic’s willingness either to read the Virgilian intertext as dominating the elegiac primary text or to view the latter as an ironic critique of the homosocial vision of the Aeneid and its relation to a teleological narrative of imperial history.

(1) On these two different models of epic, see David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 31-41.