4

The formation of an Augustan elegist: Empedocles and Propertius’ ‘Monobiblos’

Alex Hardie

Introduction

This essay explores the influence of Empedocles on the early work of Sextus Propertius, with particular reference to the prologue and epilogue poems of the Monobiblos. I hope to show that Propertius’ programmatic reflections on his own formation as an elegist are indebted to Empedoclean poetry (Περὶ Φύσεως/Καθαρμοί) both directly and through its extraordinary impact on republican-era epos. Ennius and Lucretius had remodelled Empedocles’ self-representation to create a Roman image of the priestly poet who could claim inspirational access to the cosmos;¹ and around the time Propertius was embarking on his career at Rome, another scientific achievement in ‘Empedoclean epos’, the Georgics, was nearing completion.² Propertius might also have been alert to Empedocles’ influence on Hellenistic poetry, including the Aetia and the erotic content of Apollonius’ Argonautica.³

That Roman elegists – Ovid in particular – were receptive to Empedoclean imagery has been argued with energy, and with some encouraging results, in several recent studies.⁴ Yet proven elegiac references to the text or doxography of Empedocles, or to his bios-tradition, are in short supply, and there is certainly room for debate as to what might be directly identifiable as ‘Empedoclean’ in any given context (as distinct, say, from reworkings of Lucretius).⁵ The Monobiblos, probably our earliest extant elegy-book, has not to date been a main focus for critical analysis in this area, and it presents a major test case for the currency and resonances of ‘Empedoclean elegeia’ in the Rome of the early 20s.

I Empedocles in the epilogue (1.22)

The epilogue to the Monobiblos (1.22) relays a series of questions as to status, family and ‘Penates’ purportedly put by Volcacius Tullus pro nostra semper amicitia (‘in virtue of the unending friendship between us’).⁶ The imagined timing of Tullus’ enquiries and affirmation of amicitia relative to the rest of the Monobiblos (before or after 1.1?) is unclear, but patron and poet have evidently established an enduring personal acquaintance. By contrast, Horace’s biographical account of his inclusion among Maecenas’ amici places the equivalent exchange a full nine months prior to the formal extension of amicitia.⁷ Questions about family and origins are of course consistent with the traditions of guest-friendship on which both poets are drawing:⁸ but in postponing his questions, rather in the manner of a princely host, Tullus has evidently accepted Propertius as amicus without prior scrutiny of family or regional origins (hence, by extension, of political allegiances). Moreover, the enquiry qui Penates tactfully offers Propertius a wide choice of response (public or private, gods of home or patria?), albeit one that potentially embraces the sensitive issue of landowners’ displacement, by confiscation, from household and hearth.⁹

Propertius vouchsafes his answer in the concluding laudes Umbriae (9–10), which, however, are prefaced by extended and vituperative treatment of a single topic of the rhetorical praise of place, ‘the near-neighbour’: in this case, Perusia and the area adjoining Umbrian Asisium.¹⁰ Perusine territory is unflatteringly defined by its civil war sepulchra (an expansion of the topic of tomb as landscape-marker; 3–5):¹¹

si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulchra,

Italiae duris funera temporibus,

cum Romana suos egit Discordia ciuis, …

If the Perusine tombs of our country are known to you, the obsequies of Italy in its era of military strife, when Discord unleashed from Rome drove on her own citizens …

First, patriae: I take this to be Italy, on the assumption that, for dramatic purposes, there has been no prior discussion of regional origins.¹² In reality, of course, Propertius knew very well that Tullus’ family was Etruscan, and patriae contains a secondary reference to that fact. Each man has two patriae, Etruria and Umbria as local components of the national Italian homeland, and Rome as the communis patria created by the extension of common ciuitas.¹³ The ciuis are the unitary citizen body split asunder by Discordia.

Whether the Volcacii Tulli were on the same (Antonian) side as the Propertii at Perusia, or hedged their bets, or gravitated towards the Caesarian cause, is not clear from external evidence.¹⁴ The internal dynamics of 1.22, including Tullus’ apparent indifference to Propertius’ past allegiances, would in my view be consistent with overt support for Octavian in 41–40, or at the latest by 37–36, when Etruria was again the scene of disturbances.¹⁵ Be that as it may, the two men were evidently, for dramatic purposes (n. 12), unknown to one another before the establishment of amicitia between them in post-war Rome. Indeed, against the receding perspective of the cataclysm of 41–40, the bonding of Etruscan and Umbrian co-evals might well stand as an illustration, at the personal and social level, of resurgent Italian unity: it is, quite precisely, a Roman risorgimento, a reversal of the former Romana discordia.

Yet Propertius’ vituperatio, denigrating puluis Etrusca (6) for failure to bury his dismembered propinquus (7), contrasts sharply with the laudes Umbriae and cuts across the positive interplay of personal amicitia and former civil discordia. These conflicting dynamics will require further comment; but first we must turn to the figure of Discordia at line 5. The personification echoes Virgil’s dispossessed Meliboeus as he relinquishes his land to milites (Eclogues 1.71–2): en quo Discordia ciuis | produxit miseros (‘look where strife has led Rome’s wretched citizens’; tr. Lee). As will be seen, through allusions to Virgil’s parallel experience (perhaps the senior contemporary poet-witness to the late 40s), Propertius invites Roman poetry readers to reflect on the land confiscations and resettlement of veterans after Philippi, the very injustices that led to the Perusine war, as a defining feature of his own formation as poet.¹⁶

Personified ‘Discord’, at its Roman literary root, was the driving force in Ennius’ treatment of the revolt of Falerii in 241 (Annales 220–26 Sk.), where it overtly represents Empedocles’ principle of ‘Strife’ (Neikos), the cosmic agent of separation and the cyclical counterpart of unifying ‘Love’ (Philia).¹⁷ Later, in a philosophical reflection on the cusp of civil war in 44, Cicero himself had explicitly acknowledged the pairing of discordia and amicitia as Empedoclean cosmic analogues for social (civic and familial) odia and amicitia (also concordia).¹⁸ This is strikingly close to Propertius’ interplay of personal amicitia and large-scale discordia, again in the context of civil war. But Empedoclean Neikos comes into closer focus in Propertius’ vituperatio, through reference to Horace’s Satires: the unburied and dismembered body (proiecta … membra propinqui, 7) recalls the quotation of Ennius’ Discordia at Satires 1.4.60–62 to illustrate the qualities of the true poeta. Horace had claimed that even if the component words of Ennius’ original Discordia sentence were to be rendered in prose, ‘you’d still find the body parts of the dismembered poet’ (inuenias etiam disiecti membra poetae). Now, Horace’s metaphor itself alludes directly to Empedocles, in that the latter had envisaged the reader dismembering his poem, a unitary composition of many parts, in order to analyse and understand it. There, philosophical reader-comprehension incorporates an analogy between analysis of the poem and dismembering of the human body, an analogy based on the Empedoclean doctrine of the coming together and separation of mortal limbs in successive cycles and under the prevailing forces of Love and Strife.¹⁹

Empedocles’ programmatic demand for analytical reception of his didactic poem thus incorporated Neikos as counterpart to the poetic excogitation inspired by the Love-aligned Muse; and a similar cycle of composition and analytical comprehension was adopted by Lucretius (n. 19). For his part, Propertius reaches through Horace to his two models: to Empedocles’ separation of body parts as an analogue for readers’ understanding of his work; and, in this Etruscan context, to Ennius’ deployment of Discordia (225–6 Sk.) in the rupture between Rome and another Etruscan town, Falerii.

The vituperatio of Etruria aligns Presocratic physics with Roman ‘poetics’ and with an evolving politico-military situation in Italy and at Rome. The laudes Umbriae take all this a stage further, presenting Propertius as the product of his native landscape as well as of historical context and literary environment (9–10):

proxima supposito contingens Umbria campo

me genuit terris fertilis uberibus

[neighbouring] Umbria, bordering [those nearest] with the plain that lies below, fertile with lush lands, gave birth to me.²⁰

The ‘derivation’ of Umbria from Greek ὄμβρος (‘rain’), recalling the ancient Umbrians’ survival of the Flood, is active here:²¹ Propertius has in view Virgil’s elemental combination of water and earth in the second Georgic (184–8) to create the fertilis ubere campus (‘the plain fertile with lushness’) with alluvial deposits washed down into river valleys.²² Additionally, Umbria campo echoes Virgil’s reference in the same passage to veteran resettlement at Mantua, qualem infelix amisit Mantua campum (198, ‘such a plain as unhappy Mantua lost’). Propertius is alluding to the confiscation of his own family lands, a loss made explicit only in Horos’ account of the poet’s vita at 4.1.127–30 (and cf. Meuania campo, 123), and he thereby focuses the implied ‘dispossession’ motif (see above, on Discordia ciuis and Eclogues 1) on his personal fortunes in the year 41. Concordant and discordant features are simultaneously in play: beyond the fertilising action of the elements lies excess (‘Umbrian’) water, and the flooding of the campus as an Empedoclean figure for cataclysm;²³ and behind the superficial exuberance of the laudes, lies land loss and displacement. Whether any of this autobiographical material connects with Empedocles’ own bios-tradition, and his reported involvement in Akragantine stasis, is quite uncertain.²⁴ But at all events, if the Empedoclean reading of interplay between discordia and amicitia in 1.22 offered here is broadly acceptable, we might well ponder its bearing on Propertius’ programmatic conception of himself as an elegiac poeta.

As a basis for addressing Empedocles’ wider presence in the Monobiblos, the next section offers an account of Propertius’ prologue-poem (1.1) and of the part played by amici in his formation as an elegist. This will involve Empedocles only at the end, in a brief comparison with 1.2; but the analysis of 1.1’s programmatic Roman amicitiae, alongside amor for Cynthia, will be central to the Empedoclean reading of Propertius’ sources of inspiration put forward later.

II Discordant amicitia (1.1)

Propertius’ prologue (1.1) dramatises his present situation, its origins, and its time span. The setting in which this ‘drama’ is enacted is, however, left undefined at the outset and must be assessed by the reader as the poem progresses.²⁵ The narrative of a young man whose blameless former lifestyle has been turned upside down by amor is reminiscent of comedic soliloquising.²⁶ But other actors are addressed at lines 9 (Tullus) and 25 (amici, the ‘friends’ who have already intervened: see below); and their presence may be signalled in the ambiguous furor hic (7), taken not (or not only) as a summation of the deterioration just described, but as a deictic reference to a physically visible condition (i.e. his pallor, implicit at line 22). Propertius, I hope to show, is explaining ‘this madness’ within a convivial setting where Tullus is host.²⁷ conuiuia were of course a standard setting for sermones among amici (exemplified by elite drinking and erotic discourse at Tullus’ residence at Rome, as represented in 1.14);²⁸ and the disclosure of a love affair is sympotic in both social origin and literary treatment.²⁹ The latter typically presents exchanges between lover and interlocutor(s), questioning as to ‘symptoms of love’, confessional response (alternatively, silence or denial) and comment and advice, sympathetic or not as the case might be.³⁰

Horace’s overtly convivial eleventh Epode offers close parallels to the situation in 1.1, perhaps the product of a common model in Gallus: the poet-lover recalls drunken indiscretions about ‘Inachia’ at an earlier conuiuium (with his host Pettius’ then admonitions), expatiates to the present company about a new boy-friend, but discounts the remedial efficacy of advice from amici.³¹ His disclosure to ‘Pettius’ (5–6) that he had broken up with Inachia three years before implies an interval since their last encounter; and Propertius’ disclosure (8) that Cynthia had captivated him a full year earlier (7) similarly implies that he has been invited back to Tullus’ house only after an interval.³² In 1.1, his amicitia with Tullus, like his amor for Cynthia, is evidently at an early stage of development.

Horace’s disclosures unfold in reported dialogue with ‘Pettius’, a dramatic treatment well documented both in explicit format, with marked changes of speaker, and in implicit format, where ‘stage directions’ are suppressed and readers must infer what has been said from actors’ reactions. In 1.1, although no other speaker directly enters the text, we learn at line 25 that the ‘friends’ have already intervened: uos, qui sero lapsum reuocatis, amici (‘you, who too late are seeking to restore one who has fallen’). This is evidently a prior but near-contemporaneous action, to be located within the dramatic frame of 1.1 itself:³³ it is best imagined as having been directed at Propertius just prior to his narrative of the affair (1–8);³⁴ and the latter is to be read as the poet’s confessional response.³⁵ For a parallel intervention, compare 1.15.25, desine iam reuocare tuis periuria uerbis, | Cynthia (‘Cynthia, cease by your words to recall your broken oaths’): there, we infer that Cynthia has just intervened, and that Propertius is summarising, and reacting to, what she has said.³⁶

In the bipartite first half (1–8, 9–16), a subjective account of the Cynthia affair indebted to Greek epigram (AP 12.101, Meleager) is followed by an objective account of a mythical affair indebted to Gallus (and probably Parthenius).³⁷ The sequence looks like a programmatic reflection on the character of Latin love elegy itself.³⁸ But while the juxtaposition is very much at home in a prologue poem, we need to ask why, following completion of a chronologically ordered narrative (prima (1),³⁹ ante (2), tum (3), donec (5), iam (7)), Propertius makes an entirely fresh start, without syntactical linkage to what precedes, and addresses Tullus with his version of Milanion, in contrasting tones and language. The reader’s own analytical intervention, I suggest, is required to supplement the poet-lover, fill in the gaps, and fully comprehend the convivial drama as it unfolds.⁴⁰

Propertius’ deployment of the Milanion myth, like his explanatory narrative, can be read as the response to a notional intervention. Its gnomic summation (tantum in amore preces et bene facta ualent, 16), addressed to Tullus, constitutes Propertius’ first piece of erotodidaxis;⁴¹ but the tone and thrust of this cryptic wisdom is elusive. My reading, necessarily conjectural in the absence of Gallus’ Amores, is premised on differences between Milanion as exemplar of φιλοπονία (labores, 9) and Propertius as an utterly passive ‘lover’: the former potuit domuisse (15), while the latter is subject to a domina (21). Thus, while Milanion is plainly a mythical analogue for Propertius qua mad lover (amens errabat, 11), in other respects he is a negative exemplum. This bears on the forward link from the gnomic summation (16) to Propertius’ situation (in me, 17), which in my view conveys rhetorical contrast and refutation rather than continuity of argument.⁴² The hypothetical scenario and sequence may be outlined as follows: Tullus has notionally intervened after Propertius’ exposition of the affair to advise that he persevere with Cynthia, by preces et bene facta; the fresh start at line 9 marks Propertius’ response, argued through Milanion as (partially) negative exemplum; and the gnomic summation (16) rehearses Tullus’ notional ‘activist’ advice, and refutes (or modifies) it.⁴³

Propertius’ line of attack, as I see it, lies through a reworking of Gallus’ treatment of Milanion as heroic analogue for the lovesick elegist and as standard exemplar of eventual success in erotic adversity. If the Gallan Milanion’s conduct can safely be inferred from the testimony of Ovid, he was fully characterised as a proto-elegiac lover and ‘wept’ about his seruitium to Atalanta.⁴⁴ By contrast, Propertius argues that it was gemitus arising from physical wounding by the Centaur that won Atalanta, and not his moaning as a proto-elegiac victim of Eros/Amor (14–15):⁴⁵ saucius … ingemuit. | ergo … potuit domuisse puellam. This lover prevailed not because percussus amore but because struck uulnere rami.⁴⁶ On this reading, tantum … ualent carries modifying force (‘that’s the extent to which …’), implying Propertius’ rejection of Milanion’s overall validity as an exemplum, hence also of the efficacy in his case of preces and bene facta.⁴⁷ Grecising expression lends spurious authenticity to all this; but the treatment lacks ancient ‘authority’, hence no ‘footnoting’ (dicitur, vel sim.).⁴⁸ Its function is to rationalise the utter passivity of this ‘lover’s’ conduct towards Cynthia.

Having rejected preces, Propertius proceeds to an indirect medium of prayer, sorcerers (19–24). These are substitute gods, addressed in precatio-format by virtue of the esoteric skills that mediate their clients’ access to the magici dei (cf. focis, 20).⁴⁹ The prayer-appeal challenges the imaginary addressees to make Cynthia madder than Propertius (palleat magis (22) looks sarcastic after magicis (20)). He adds an adynaton: he will believe in the power of witches’ carmina over stars and rivers if they can convert Cynthia’s mens [sc. to erotic furor].⁵⁰ The jibe accentuates hopelessness, but it simultaneously evokes the etymological association of carmen, mens and madness;⁵¹ and the adversarial aggression of the entire ‘prayer’ underscores this lover’s inability, in his amentia, to direct his own efficacious (i.e. persuasive) prayer-carmina to Cynthia.

Propertius now moves on to the amici and to remedia amoris. They have intervened too late (sero … reuocatis, 25), he complains, with reference to the critical requirement (below, IV(a)) for rapid remedial action against amor. Implicitly shifting responsibility towards the friends’ failure to ‘recall’ him earlier, Propertius acknowledges that he is in the grip of physiological insania requiring surgical intervention (ferrum and ignes, 27). The medical reference (confirmed in ira (28) and in an allusion to melancholia at line 30) is to unbalanced humours, leading to overheated blood and requiring medical regulation by incision and cupping.⁵² There is no indication that talk of insania or surgery reflects the terms in which the amici have intervened, and Propertius is to be understood as volunteering submission to their cura, in a further rhetorical display of passivity and hopelessness.

Commanding the subset of amici in existing relationships to remain at Rome as he affects to contemplate ‘exile’, Propertius prays (32) for permanence (semper) and symmetry (pares) in sane love (tuto … amore), warns against his own predicament, and advises against change of partner. These didactic precepts, ostensibly expressions of the frank advice that characterised true friendship, suggest anxiety about possible rivals.⁵³ Thus, while hoc … uitate malum (35) refers to the general condition brought about by Amor, malum carries secondary reference to Cynthia.⁵⁴ Again, nostra Venus (33) echoes comic styling of mistress/meretrix, and alludes to Cynthia (marked also by the echo of dominae … nostrae, 21).⁵⁵ The admonitions seem intended to deter any possible attempt to seduce Cynthia, such that ostensible amicitia masks insecurity arising from Propertius’ incompetence as lover.⁵⁶

With this ambiguous admonition, Propertius’ formation as didactic poet and praeceptor amoris is complete. Initiated (as I see it) as a corrective to Tullus’ encouraging advocacy of preces et bene facta, it is developed in adversarial reaction to the amici. There is a further twist in the final prophecy: any who fail to understand will ‘rehearse my words’ in grief (heu referet quanto uerba dolore mea! 38). Propertius predicts his interlocutors’ future quotation of his words of advice in (elegiac) grief (heu). The reversal of the advisory roles of speaker and addressees marks the culmination of Propertius’ formation as poet, prophet and teacher of ‘love’, ostensibly emerging from harmonious conuiuium, but now revealed as the product of suspicion and jealousy. 1.1, like 1.22, may thus be viewed as an exercise in what Horace (Ep. 1.12.19) was later to term concordia discors, ‘discordant harmony’.

The capacity of eros/amor to occasion strife between rival suitors reappears in 1.2, in a catalogue of contested mythical love affairs (15–20), specifically Apollo and Ida as rivals for Marpessa: Idae et cupido … discordia Phoebo (17). The Hellenistic models include Apollonius’ description of Jason’s cloak (Argonautica 1.721–67), a passage deeply influenced by Empedoclean Love/Strife and directly followed by Jason’s rejection of Atalanta’s bid to join the Argonauts: in a line which ‘could be taken as a commentary on the whole epic’, Jason ‘feared bitter quarrels on account of love’ (773): δεῖσεν δ’ ἀργαλέας ἔριδας φιλότητος ἕκητι.⁵⁷ Atalanta, as the Scholiast saw, would have attracted suitors, defended her virginity and sown discord in the harmonious ship’s company (hence implicit wordplay: ἀργαλέας/Argo). Patently Empedoclean in inspiration, Apollonius’ Atalanta can be understood as the embodiment of a paradox, Strife itself in perfect balance: νεῖκός τε ούλόμενον δίχα τῶν, ἀτάλαντον ἁπάντῃ (D-K 17.19 = 25 In., ‘destructive strife [existing] apart from these [sc. the elements], their balancing equal in all respects’).⁵⁸ Here, I suggest, is an antecedent for Propertius’ Atalanta, and by analogy for Cynthia herself.

III Tullus and concord (1.6)

Propertius emerges from the prologue-poem as a poet-prophet who vouchsafes teachings based upon personal experience to named addressees while challenging their capacity to understand his admonitions.⁵⁹ In these respects, he bears comparison with both Lucretius and Empedocles. All three address a young man of distinguished family, respectively Pausanias ‘the son of wise Anchitus’ (D-K 1 = 13 In.), C. Memmius, scion of the ‘Memmiadae’, and Tullus the nephew of a consular (cf. 1.6.19). In addition, Propertius and Empedocles address ‘friends’ (φίλοι, amici): Empedocles’ φίλοι connect with φιλία/φιλότης, his cosmic force of love and harmony, identified also with Aphrodite;⁶⁰ and the Propertian amici similarly connect with his professional interest in amor and Venus.⁶¹ For his part, in language that associates ‘love’, ‘friendship’ and Epicurean uoluptas, Lucretius is motivated to undertake the poem-labor by the ‘hoped-for pleasure of your [sc. Memmius’] amicitia’ (1.140–2).

The ‘dramatic’ origins of Propertius’ career as elegist likewise lie in amicitia, but in his case in adversarial engagement with amici (above, II). Yet the introduction of Volcacius Tullus as patron-dedicatee is by any standards abbreviated. A fuller picture is eventually vouchsafed in 1.6, Propertius’ encomiastic propempticon to Tullus as he prepares to depart for Asia, in his uncle’s entourage. Propertius had evidently accepted an invitation to accompany him (above, n. 47), but has changed his mind in the face of schetliastic storms from Cynthia and the promise of more to come. He excuses himself and goes on to encourage Tullus (19–24):

tu patrui meritas conare anteire securis

et uetera oblitis iura refer sociis.

nam tua non aetas umquam cessauit amori,

semper at armatae cura fuit patriae;

et tibi non umquam nostros puer iste labores

afferat et lacrimis omnia nota meis!

Do you strive to precede the well-earned axes of your uncle, and restore old laws to forgetful allies. For not ever has your life given way to love; but always has the fatherland under arms been your object of care. And may that lad not ever inflict on you my burdens, and all that is known by my tears.

I take lines 23–4 as a figurative reference to the elegist’s love-poems as lacrimae, and to the labores that have informed them.⁶² Tullus is evidently an auditor, to whom Propertius’ travails are all ‘known’ (nota) by/through his ‘tear-elegies’.⁶³ These retain their apotreptic function as warnings against Amor (puer iste, i.e. κοῦρος in the bilingual sound-sequence here marked by underlining), to whom/which Tullus has hitherto proved immune, such is his cura patriae.⁶⁴ His future state service in Asia is concordant in character: he is to engage in benign ‘strife’, an intra-familial ‘rivalry’ as civilian magistrate and legislator, with his uncle’s symbols of office, the homophone (thus, ‘harmonised’) patrui securis; and he is to focus on the return of ‘allies’ (sociis, ἐπίκουροι) to former allegiances, and on the harmonious reunification of the Roman world after civil strife.⁶⁵ His new cura will be iura; and he will be pars … accepti imperii (34), a component both of a concordant family partnership in ‘received’ imperium and of Roman imperium restored with allied ‘acceptance’.

Propertius has Lucretius and Memmius in view.⁶⁶ The latter is committed to state service and patria (1.41–3), but Lucretius seeks his release from public affairs so that he can attend to the poet’s teachings: he prays in aid Memmius’ favoured relationship with Venus, who is asked to replace the present tempus iniquum (‘period of disequilibrium’) with peace (38–43); and he pleads his own inability to compose aequo animo (42). Poet and patron are aligned in a didactic endeavour contingent on progression from bellum to pax, which is itself figured (31–40) as the coming together of Venus and Mars; and this tableau is generally, in my view rightly, understood to allude to Empedocles’ cyclical alternation of ‘Love’ and ‘Strife’.⁶⁷

Propertius, by contrast, is speaking when Lucretius’ desiderated epochal shift from war to peace has materialised. But in his haste to distinguish Tullus’ lifestyle as non-lover from his own, Propertius reveals that his patron’s personal aetas (21) is at risk of conflicting both with the new aetas of peace, and with his parallel career transition from arma to civilian law-giving:⁶⁸ nam tua non aetas umquam cessauit amori (21) implies that, in resisting personal amor thus far, Tullus is an exception to the alternating cycle of labor and cessatio.⁶⁹ The interplay of ‘cyclical’ motifs at the personal, state and ‘cosmic’ levels is sustained in fixed-term magisterial cura (22) and imperium (34).⁷⁰ It is then applied in the private sphere (35) tum tibi si qua mei ueniet non immemor hora (‘then perchance should there come to you some hour not unmindful of me’) with reference to the circling horae (Tullus’ concordant memoria will have respite from state service in recalling his amicitia with Propertius).⁷¹ And within the encomiastic prophecy that closes the poem, uiuere me duro sidere certus eris (36, ‘you’ll be certain I’m living under a harsh star’) alludes to the circling zodiac as cosmic emblem of cyclical progression: for the poet, of course, living (and dying) permanently in longinquo amore (27), there can be no ‘cyclical progression’ beyond the durum sidus; but we are also to recall the topic of revolving celestial renewal in the laudes (cf. laudi, 29) of magistrates entering upon office, its origins in Alexander-panegyric, and its close association with global peace-making.⁷²

Empedocles had deployed entry into public office as a figure for the cyclical process whereby ascendant Strife replaces Love (D-K 30.2 = 35 In.): ἐς τιμάς τ’ ἀνόρουσε [sc. νεῖκος] τελειομένοιο χρόνοιο (‘and strife leapt up to its honours in the fulfilment of time’); and so it may be that Propertius is looking back to a comparable analogue for ascendant Love. Yet (subject to further consideration of Propertius’ quasi-eschatological reflections on the cyclical return of his soul to ‘final nequitia’ (25–8)), this might be one case where core analysis of cyclical concord and discord can be taken no further back than Lucretius.

IV Love, madness and recovery (1.1 and 3.24+25)

(a) Amor as god and state of mind

Towards the end of 1.1, Propertius draws this distinction between the concepts divinised and personified as ‘Venus’ and ‘Amor’ (33–4):

in me nostra Venus noctes exercet amaras

et nullo uacuus tempore defit Amor

Our/my Venus torments me the bitter night long, and at no time is Amor idle or absent.

‘Venus’ alludes to physical lovemaking at night (Propertius’ final, oblique, admission that the relationship is unconsummated) whereas Amor denotes the state of mind that unremittingly (day and night) afflicts him. A similar distinction between sex and mental condition is offered by Lucretius in the diatribe against amor (4.1030–1287). But whereas Lucretius advises the pursuit of promiscuous sex (uoluiuaga Venus, 1071) as a strategy for avoiding the mental anguish (dolor, 1067) arising from amor for a single partner, Propertius positively insists on single partnerships, including those in easily won (i.e. casual) relationships.⁷³ Reversal of Lucretius is signalled in the challenge to the sorcerers to ‘turn the mind’ (mentem conuertite) of his domina (21), subverting Lucretius’ advice to lovers to ‘turn their mind elsewhere’ (1064 alio conuertere mentem).⁷⁴ Yet when he observes that the friends’ intervention is ‘too late’ (sero, 25), he is in tactical alignment with Lucretius’ insistence (1068–72) on rapid curative action to combat incipient amor for a single beloved. Now, Lucretius had explicated this doctrine in a sustained medical metaphor (amor as physical sore, causing furor and requiring rapid surgical treatment to forestall a chronic condition).⁷⁵ Propertius’ condition, however, is already one year old without remission, and he himself speaks of clinical insania. Even so, consistent with his passivity, the victim insists on external, divine causation: Amor is the ‘god’ (cf. deus, 31) responsible for his condition (4–5; 17–18; 34), implicitly refuting the Lucretian view (1058–60) that emotional love and physical sex are merely projected as gods (Amor and Venus) by man. How, then, will this central interplay between external god and internal mental condition be played out?

(b) Gods, madness and the poet

Propertius’ account of his own condition in 1.1, including his madness and powerless inertia, reflects a range of philosophical sources.⁷⁶ Among them, as I hope to show, is Empedoclean teaching on madness.

Propertius concludes his confession of love with a lament about ‘hostile gods’ (7–8):

et mihi iam toto furor hic non deficit anno

cum tamen aduersos cogor habere deos.

and now in a full year, this madness has given me no respite, while yet I’m compelled to have the gods as enemies.

habere deos plus epithet (faciles, inimicos, vel sim.) means to be in good or bad standing with the gods in general, the condition arising from an enterprise or pattern of conduct which prompts the gods’ support or, as supposed here, their enmity.⁷⁷ cogor reflects the Greek association of Eros and ἀνάγκη, picks up Amor’s enforced ‘teaching’ (3 –4) and implies that the gods, in Propertius’ own estimation, are offended.⁷⁸ This conventional complaint is given philosophical colouring by the distinctively Lucretian combination cum tamen (‘while yet’).⁷⁹ It implies that in Propertius’ view the pairing of aduersi dei and unremitting furor presents a theological paradox: ‘this madness’, he implies, might instead be assumed to accompany divine favour. He is referring to the Platonic doctrine whereby certain types of madness (prophetic, telestic, musical and erotic) are the products not of clinical insanity, but of divine gift;⁸⁰ and he thereby characterises himself as a philosophical novice, possessing some knowledge of Athenian philosophy, but incapable as yet of applying it to himself in an appropriate way.⁸¹ Yet the reader is encouraged to consider the sources and resonances of his treatment of Amor as god (external causation) and amor as state of mind (internal causation), and the relationship between each of them and furor.

Plato summarises the distinction between divine and clinical madness thus (Phaedrus 265a): μανίας δέ γε εἴδη δυό, τὴν μὲν ὑπὸ νοσημάτων ἀνθρωπίνων, τὴν δὲ ὑπὸ θείας ἐξαλλαγῆς τῶν εἰωθότων νομίμων γιγνομένην (‘[and we said that there were] two sorts of madness, the one arising under the influence of human maladies and the other from a divinely caused reversal of customary norms of behaviour.’). This dual theory appears to have been anticipated by Empedocles. A Roman medical writer, Caelius Aurelianus, attributes this formulation to his ‘followers’: ‘one [form of madness] proceeds from purification of the soul and another from alienation of the mind arising from a corporeal cause or imbalance …; the Greeks call this mania.’⁸² This testimony was accepted by Delatte and Guthrie as an authentic Empedoclean doctrine which embraced elemental imbalance as a source of clinical insanity, and anticipated Plato’s ‘blessings of madness’ in a way consistent with the figurative ‘purifying’ mission embodied in the transmitted poem title ‘Purifications’ (Katharmoi).⁸³

There is no evidence that Empedocles anticipated Democritus and Plato in developing a separate theory of ‘poetic madness’; but there are good reasons for thinking that his general (dual) theory of madness embraced the production of poetry about the cosmos in ways consistent with the general integration of his ‘poetics’ into his cosmic and physiological doctrines.⁸⁴ This may help explain his later mixed reputation, as divinely inspired on one view, and as ‘mad’ on another.⁸⁵ Horace, who took a close interest in the subject of madness (both divine and pathological) and poetry, catches this ambivalence in caricaturing Empedocles’ suicidal leap into Aetna at the end of the Ars Poetica (463–6).⁸⁶ He is there portrayed as victim of clinical madness.⁸⁷ Moreover, he proceeds to a burlesque on θεία μανία as the product of pollution and divine retribution (470–2), thereby satirising precisely that Empedoclean ‘purification’ madness attested by Caelius.⁸⁸ And so the question to be addressed in the remainder of this section and in the next is this: what bearing might Empedocles’ ‘madness’ have had on Propertius’ furor as the determinant condition of his utterances as poet?

(c) Mens Bona and Propertius’ ‘salvation’

Another epilogue poem, the ‘end of affair’ sequel to Cynthia prima at 3.24+25, casts additional light on Propertius’ madness. It opens with a ‘palinode’ in which former laudes of Cynthia’s forma are retracted as false, and repudiation of the relationship is correlated with return to sanity (resipiscimus, 17).⁸⁹ It recalls (9–11) the ineffectual tactics and remedies trailed in 1.1. The affair is projected as a mental shipwreck, with associated figures of pollution and failed purification by ‘vast sea’, followed by final anchorage in a safe harbour. Of course, arrival in port is a metaphor for completion, and an end to poetry about Cynthia. But there is also much that is strikingly reminiscent of language associated with mystery initiation, a context to which reference will be made later.⁹⁰

Propertius’ dedication to ‘Mens Bona’ calls for immediate comment (19–20):

Mens Bona, si qua dea es[t], tua me in sacraria dono!

exciderant surdo tot mea uota Ioui.

Mens Bona, if goddess indeed you be, I dedicate myself to your shrine! So many prayers of mine have escaped the deaf Jupiter.

‘Mens Bona’ is generally taken to be Roman Mens, enshrined on the Capitol close to Iuppiter O. M. and identified with the conferral of bona (or mala) mens on young males. Yet Capitoline Mens did not carry the epiclesis Bona, and the primary reference of Propertius’ two-word designation must lie elsewhere.⁹¹ I would suggest that he has the Empedoclean incorporeal supreme entity Φρὴν ἱερή (‘Sacred Mind’) in view, and that the distinction between her, as a philosophical construct, and the Roman divinity is marked by the speculative si qua dea es.⁹² The sacraria of Mens Bona, plainly figurative, alludes to Empedoclean ἱερή, whereas surdo evokes the (corporeal) ears of the image in the Capitoline shrine of Jupiter. General support for this reading is available in Aeneid 6: in the catalogue of Underworld personifications, Discordia demens (280, Empedocles’ Νεῖκος μαινομένον) is located just two lines after mala mentis | Gaudia, in a context which recalls Ennius’ ‘Empedoclean’ Discordia opening the gates of war (above, II), and which foreshadows the same action in the following book (7.622).⁹³ This glimpse of mala mens (as Servius read the phrasing) in Tartarus is matched later in the same book by its cosmic counterpart, the ‘mind’ of the universe, in Anchises’ exposition of the purification of souls (Aeneid 6.726 –7): infusa per artus | mens (‘the divine mind, spread through its members’, tr. Horsfall).⁹⁴

To substantiate an Empedoclean reference in ‘Mens Bona’ we need to consider the surrounding context. In physiological terms, the absence of surgery (non ferro, non igne coactus, 11) as a component of Propertius’ claimed recovery implies that the regulation of disordered blood, and thus the restoration of the balanced mix of four elements required for sound reasoning and acute thought processes, has been achieved by means other than the cupping/bleeding trailed at 1.1.27 (above (a)). Rather, the key to Propertius’ salvation lies in his passage to ‘safe anchorage’, through experiences that represent a sequence of the four physical elements, encountered one by one: first, the aqua of the shipwreck (12); then the ‘air’ (wind) implicit in correptus (13; cf. Lucretius 5.1232 (same sedes), of death from wind-storm at sea); then fire implicit in torrebar, the heating of ‘Venus’ cauldron’; and finally, the deceptive sand-Syrtes surmounted.⁹⁵ The overall reference is to the doctrine of purgation by the four elements, prominently deployed in Anchises’ account (Aeneid 6.724–51, at 739–42) of the purification of souls that originate in, and ultimately return to, the celestial mens.⁹⁶ The earliest attestation of the doctrine is in Empedocles: the fallen poet, ‘exile from the divine, a wanderer whose faith has been placed in maddened strife’, has also passed through each of the four elements, from sky to sea, sea to land, land to sun (sc. fire).⁹⁷ This major antecedent, taken together with ‘Mens Bona’, suggests that one further Empedoclean reference may be in play, in Propertius’ portus, his safe anchorage (15–16): the ‘harbour’ proceeds immediately from the roasting in ‘Venus’ cauldron’ (Veneris … aeno 13), and it is tempting to suppose a creative variation of Empedocles’ ‘perfect harbours of Aphrodite’ as a figure for the coalescence of the four elements, in more or less equal proportions, to produce blood (and other forms of flesh), hence rational thought.⁹⁸ It is in his version of this ‘haven’, the physiological capacity for reason, I suggest, that Propertius dedicates himself to Mens Bona (Φρὴν ἱερή).

Ovid offers a subversive commentary in Amores 1.2. He parades Mens Bona, hands bound, in the triumph of Amor, with Furor (from Propertius 1.1) and Error in attendance (31, 35). In addition, the scenario subverts Virgil’s Furor, chained up in the temple of Janus, itself a figure for civil war with close affinities to Empedocles’ Νεῖκος μαινόμενον (Aeneid 1.294–6).⁹⁹ The value of Ovid’s poem for present purposes lies in its reworking of Propertian elements within an Empedoclean programmatic frame where Amor is both inspiring god and the external agent of the elegist’s ‘madness’.

V Inspiration (1.1)

In this final section, I consider Propertius’ sources of poetic inspiration. Our firsthand knowledge of Empedocles’ programme in this area, it must be acknowledged, is far from complete; but his imprint on the inspirational formation of the poet in De rerum natura and the Georgics has been placed beyond doubt (see below), and we can, I think, be confident that the approach adopted here would not have struck a contemporary critic as wrongheaded in any fundamental way.¹⁰⁰

In contrast to his flattery of Cynthia as recipient of Apollo’s songs and Calliope’s lyre (1.2.27–8), and to his own salute to the Apolline Muses as he wins over Cynthia in 1.8 (41–2), Propertius does not acknowledge any conventional source of poetic inspiration in 1.1. His claim to have been taught by Amor ‘to hate pure girls’ (castas odisse puellas, 5) has been interpreted as a direct reference to the Muses;¹⁰¹ but the primary function of that claim is to underline the reversal of his former conduct, and it implies a former ‘hatred’ of sexually available girls.¹⁰² Yet a secondary reference, or subtext, is not to be ruled out, and indeed there do appear to be good grounds (summarised in note 103) for reading castas puellas as a covert, or secondary, allusion to Gallus’ deployment of quasi-inspirational virgin deities termed puellae.¹⁰³ If that is correct, the phrase will signal an integral connection between Propertius’ furor and the issue of ‘inspiration’, while underlining that in this area, as in others, conventional sacral norms are to be turned on their head. At this point, however, it should be observed that alienation from the Muses as a corollary of clinical imbalance and madness, together with the requirement for confinement by ‘friends’ (φίλοι), features in the critical attack on the poet in Callimachus’ thirteenth Iamb.¹⁰⁴ Unsurprisingly, then, the intervention of Propertius’ amici would appear to carry Hellenistic programmatic colouring; but we are still left to identify a distinctive conceptual frame for his mental condition, qua Roman elegist.

This question can best be approached through Propertius’ two attacks on Amor:

(a) 5–6: donec me docuit [sc. Amor] castas odisse puellas | improbus, … (‘until he [Amor] taught me to hate pure girls, the wretch, …’); and

(b) 17–18: in me tardus Amor non [n]ullas cogitat artes, | nec meminit notas, ut prius, ire uias (‘In my case, tardy Amor excogitates no devices; nor does he remember to proceed, as before, by the known ways’).

In passage (a) Amor is attacked for the teaching (docuit) that provides the basis for the poet’s own erotodidaxis; and this links forward to passage (b) by way of an allusion to Eros’ (benign) instruction of the Callimachean Acontius (Aetia fr. 67.1–3 Harder):¹⁰⁵ αὐτὸς Ἔρως ἐδίδαξεν Ἀκόντιον … τέχνην (‘Eros himself taught Acontius … the device …’). In (b), Amor is also credited with two cognitive functions, memory and excogitation (17–18), each of which is deficient in Propertius’ case. These deficits prepare the way for the conditions he later attaches to submission to surgery or exile: his iter is to be ‘known’ (norit) by no woman (30), echoing notas … ire uias (18); and ‘freedom to say whatever Ira [personified Anger, in view of uelit 28] desires’ adds an etymological echo of ire.¹⁰⁶ Thus Amor not only teaches ‘hatred’ (odisse, 5), but sets up a commitment to ‘Anger’ as Propertius’ guiding passion as speaker.¹⁰⁷ For his part, the poet fails to recognise that the angry man cannot be ‘free’ in any philosophical sense, and indeed that he is subordinating himself to the ‘will’ (uelit) of Anger.

Amor has (allegedly) brought about a mental condition directly antithetical to the Muses’ benign occupation of a poet’s mind, a programmatic stance which can be assessed, in part, as a variant of Eros as Muse-substitute. Eros proverbially ‘teaches’ the hitherto ‘Muse-less’ (ἄμουσος) non-poet lover (i.e. inspires him to sing).¹⁰⁸ Conversely, as in Ovid Amores 1.1, Amor/Eros may usurp the Muses’ domain and compel a non-lover poet to fall in love and to write poetry about love: Amor there imposes the elegiac metre, and in 1.1 with ‘implanted feet’ figuratively performs the same function in subduing Propertius (impositis … pedibus, 4).¹⁰⁹ Again, in an epigram by Posidippus (AP 12.98), Eros dislodges the Muses as patronesses of philosophy, leads the new lover to neglect his books and inspires him instead to compose poetry (which, as in 1.1, includes disparagement of Eros).

Yet this cannot be the whole story, for Amor’s explicit combination of memory and excogitation is no part of the god’s conventional apparatus as Muse-substitute. We must look elsewhere for antecedents, and Empedocles appears to offer a plausible candidate. I have tried to show elsewhere that his virgin Muse is the musical aspect of the Φρὴν ἱερή (‘Sacred Mind’), and the ally of Love against the madness of Strife.¹¹⁰ She attends, indeed represents, the intellectual gestation of the poet’s work within his thought processes, where the latter are the product of balanced elements in the pericardial blood; and through her physiological agency alone can a ‘good account’ (ἀγαθὸς λόγος) of the gods be excogitated and articulated, in contrast to the blasphemous accounts of Empedocles’ predecessors. The latter are products of ‘madness’ (μανίη) arising from elemental imbalance in the blood.¹¹¹ The Muse is also ‘much remembering’ (πολυμνήστη), representing the power of the initiated individual to recall his fall from grace, exile from reason, and wandering until such time as he might be reunited with the gods.

Lucretius reworks the Empedoclean Muse’s alignment with Love in parallelism between his Calliope and Venus (6.94), requies hominum diuumque uoluptas (‘a rest for men and a pleasure for gods’, echoing 1.1).¹¹² He and Virgil reworked Empedocles’ inspired sublimity in the ecstatic amor Musarum (‘love of the Muses’) that gave access to universal reason; and Virgil’s acceptability to the cosmic Muses is explicitly contingent on the correct elemental balance in the pericardial blood, very much on the Empedoclean model.¹¹³ Empedocles’ critique of his predecessors’ blasphemy, however, offered an antithesis grounded in ‘madness’ (μανίη) of the clinical (‘unbalanced’) variety, precisely the condition that Horace imputes to Empedocles himself (above, n. 87); and indeed the philosopher himself experienced the cycle of fall, exile from the gods, madness and elemental purgation (above, IV(c)). Propertius, I suggest, has gravitated towards this insane counter-model in his erotic madness, anger and jealousy. Such a framework would explain the evident elemental imbalance in Propertius’ blood supply; the ‘counter-Empedoclean’ condition would produce both the blasphemous attacks on his gods, Amor and Venus, and the untrue (eventually retracted) laudes of Cynthia’s forma (3.24); and it would be from this state that the poet is restored to sanity and allegiance to Mens Bona (Φρὴν ἱερή).

It is time to draw some of the strands together. The focal point of 1.1 is the elegist’s mens, even though he refers only to amens Milanion (11) and to the domina Cynthia’s mens as a desirable target of the sorcerers’ carmina (21, 24). The latter brings the standard Roman association of mens and carmen (from carere mentem) into play, plainly with implications for Propertius’ own mens and carmina (above, II). This utterly passive ‘lover’ is on the defensive: he is incapable of effective elegiac utterance (carmina/preces), and he projects his own ‘slow-wittedness’ on to the ‘god’ Amor, and putatively also on to his audience of (rival) amici (tardus/tardas, above, nn. 59; 87).¹¹⁴ By contrast, the discordant Atalanta, fomenter of conflicted rivalry (II) and mythical analogue for Cynthia, is said to be ‘swift’ (15, uelocem … domuisse puellam): the primary reference is to the agile huntress and devotee of Diana;¹¹⁵ yet Atalanta too is implicitly brought to bear on the poet’s programme through parallelism with the ‘counter-inspirational’ odisse puellas (n. 103). At this point, the reader might well feel the need for a thread to link these fragmented, but echoing, phrases (odisse puellas, domuisse puellam, dominae mentem), their negative subtextual resonances for elegiac inspiration, and the juxtaposition of ‘swift’ and ‘tardy’, in a coherent programme; and here again I believe Empedocles offers a potentially useful line of approach.

The incorporeal Φρὴν ἱερή is encountered ‘darting through the entire cosmos with swift thoughts’ (D-K 134.4–5 = 110 In. Φρὴν ἱερή … | φροντίσι κόσμον ἅπαντα καταίσσουσα θοῇισιν). Roman familiarity with this fast-moving entity, as Philip Hardie has observed, is evident in Horace’s animus sine corpore uelox, in an explicitly Presocratic context (Epistles 1.12.13).¹¹⁶ Empedoclean ‘speed’ reappears in the Muse’s encouragement to the young poet (D-K 3.8 = 14.3 In., as I read this much-debated text):¹¹⁷ θάρσει καὶ τότε δὴ σοφίης ἔπ’ ἄκροισι θοαάζε (‘take heart, and then speed upon the heights of wisdom’); and then personified ‘Speed’ (Θόωσα) is paired antithetically with ‘Delay’ (Δηναίη).¹¹⁸ Further work is called for to clarify the post-Empedoclean interplay of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’; but on this outline basis, I would conclude that if Empedocles’ Muse is the musical aspect of the swift Φρὴν ἱερή (above), Propertius’ ‘sluggish’ Amor is her terrestrial antithesis, the counter-inspirational force that leaves this discordant ‘lover’ bereft of the power to utter carmina that are either true or persuasive.¹¹⁹

A fuller treatment of the Empedoclean dimension might extend beyond Propertius’ early programme poems, and it would certainly explore how the Presocratic material relates to other philosophical influences within the collection.¹²⁰ But perhaps enough has been said to underline how the creative interplay of reason and the irrational in early Augustan poetry can be illuminated from an Empedoclean perspective.¹²¹ At all events (perhaps aware of the old derivation of ἔλεγος from ἐλεγαίνειν (‘to be deranged’)), Propertius is indeed a ‘mad elegist’.¹²² That he turns Empedocles’ Muse-poetics on their head does not of course imply any ideological antipathy towards the philosopher’s champions at Rome: his record of deep and creative engagement with the texts of his senior contemporaries tells a very different story. Rather, the Empedoclean strand in the Monobiblos offers additional evidence of the young Umbrian’s public alignment, however ‘contrarian’ at first blush, with the post-war regime and within the newly emerging era of ‘Love’.

Endnote: Perusia, ‘Gallus’ and Apollo (1.21, 1.22 and 4.1)

Propertius’ elegiac ‘formation’, I have argued, is rooted in personal experience of civil war through land confiscation in Umbria, an experience reflected in aggressive conduct as frustrated lover towards Tullus’ amici a decade or so later in post-war Rome. The intrusion of Propertius’ morbid dolor (6) at the non-burial of the ossa of ‘my propinquus’ in 1.22 is plainly the contemporary sequel to the speech of the dead/dying ‘Gallus’, ‘quoted’ verbatim in 1.21; less obviously, ‘quotation’ and dolor together anticipate Propertius’ warning in 1.1 (37–8) that those amici who fail to comprehend Propertius’ monita will later quote his uerba, with dolor.¹²³

In a recent study of civil war references in Books 1 and 2, Brian Breed observes that Propertius uses ‘the high stakes of recent events for a self-reflexive positioning of himself and his genre’;¹²⁴ and he highlights interplay between evocations of civil war and erotic rivalry and conflict. A further possibility deserves consideration, namely that Propertius’ personal experience of civil war extended to his participation in hostilities.¹²⁵ The evidence for this suggestion lies in the very fact that he is in a position to quote the dead/dying Gallus’ utterances, with the implication that they were actually addressed to his younger self. Propertius, on this reading of the logic, is to be identified with the person addressed as tu qui … properas (21.1).¹²⁶ A scenario in which the dispossessed teenager participates at Perusia, is wounded (saucius, 21.2), flees, and is entrusted by Gallus with his funerary ἐλεγεῖον, has powerful attractions:¹²⁷ at the level of human experience, it illuminates Propertius’ defensive emphasis on the physical wounding of Milanion (uulnere, saucius, 1.13–14), and his gemitus (1.14, cf. 21.3); and at the programmatic level, it supplies a (fictional) first exercise in the vicarious transmission of tearful (lacrimis, 21.6; cf. 6.24) elegi. The ‘Empedoclean’ analogue between the proiecta membra of Gallus (sc. as propinquus) and poet/poetry, would thus be fully integrated into the battlefield origins of Propertius’ own elegeia.¹²⁸

That Propertius’ late-career perspective on 1.21 and 22 in 4.1 (Horos’ account of his early vita at 121–46) does not mention him fighting is not fatal for this suggestion. Horos includes (again in verbatim quotation!) Apollo’s address to Propertius at his assumption of the toga praetexta, and this should be read as a (notionally) contemporary sequel to Gallus’ address in 1.21. Apollo’s injunction at tu finge elegos, fallax opus – haec tua castra (135, ‘but do you fashion elegies, work of deception – this is your campaign camp’) implies that ‘real warfare’ is in some sense an alternative, thus consistent, in dramatic context, with allusion to the civil hostilities of 1.21. Again in context, the command to embrace the militia of Venus (137) revisits the explorations of civil-war militia in the Monobiblos, including most immediately Gallus’ reference to uestra militia (21.4).¹²⁹ Apollo’s intervention, as quoted by Horos, might thus be read as a commentary on Propertius’ career progression from the Perusine militia of 1.21 to the erotic militia that he proclaims to Volcacius Tullus (1.6.30).¹³⁰

David West, fellow Aberdonian and Grammarian, was truly ‘formative’ over many years as teacher, writer and friend; happily for this memorial contribution, his copy of Rothstein’s Propertius, now in my possession, is inscribed ‘lest you forget’.

¹Norden (1915) 10–18; P. Hardie (1986) esp. 18–22; id. (1995); Sedley (1998) esp. 1–34; Nelis (2001) 96–112; 346–64; Garani (2007) esp. 1–28.

²A. Hardie (2002), esp. 203–5; Nelis (2004).

³Apollonius: Nelis (2001) 96–112; 345–64. Aetia: A. Hardie (2013) 220.

⁴Ham (2013) offers a large-scale reading of Empedoclean influence on Ovid’s erotic poetry and the Fasti (my thanks to Damien Nelis for drawing this thesis to my attention); Fabre-Serris (2014); O’Rourke (2014). Cf. also Garani (2011) on Prop. 4.4.

⁵Cf. Farrell (2014). On claimed intertexts, cf. also Gladhill (2009); I accept, however, Garani’s view ((2007) 17) of ‘simultaneous allusions to Empedocles and Lucretius’.

⁶Citations of P. are from Fedeli’s Teubner edition of 1984.

⁷Hor. Sat. 1.6.52–62, drawing on Bion’s response to Antigonus’ questions as to parentage and city, cited from Odyssey 1.170 (Diog. Laert. 4.46–7); Gowers (2012) 216, 222, 234–5. The setting (morning levée?) and Maecenas’ questions are left implicit: Armstrong (1986) 259–60 and below, II.

⁸For the Homeric conventions, Reece (1993) 25–8.

⁹Penates, private and public: Dubourdieu (1989) 35–56; and cf. Prop. 4.1.121 Umbria te notis antiqua Penatibus edit. ‘Hearth’: App. BC 5.12 (Italiotes’ complaints in 41): … ἀνίστασθαι γῆς τε καὶ ἑστίας οἷα δορίληπτοι.

¹⁰Laudes of Umbria: Cairns (2006) 54–5; with effusive tone, cf. Catul. 67.32–4 Brixia Cycneae supposita speculae | … | Brixia Veronae mater amata meae.

¹¹Tombs/landscape: cf. e.g. Hipponax fr. 42 W.; Theocr. Id. 7.10–11; 16.75; Apoll. Arg. 4.517; Virg. Ecl. 9.59–60. Cf. Pearce (1983).

¹²Heyworth (2007) 101–2. Fedeli (1980) 501, ‘I sepolcri della nostra patria a Perugia’. No discussion: P. could not have denigrated puluis Etrusca (6) had he ‘known’ it (sc. in dramatic terms) to be his patron’s patria.

¹³Syme (1979) 603–4 and Cairns (2006) 44 argue for Perusia as patria: but see Hubbard (1974) 24, n. 1. Octavian’s reduction of Perusine territory is relevant: Dio 48.14.5; Spadoni and Benedetti (2010) 223. Dual patria: Cic. Leg. 2.3–5, with Dyck (2004).

¹⁴Volcacii Tulli: cf. Heyworth (2007) 101–2; Spadoni and Benedetti (2010) 223, 224. Contra: Du Quesnay (1992) 78; Cairns (2006) 46–50.

¹⁵Dio 49.15.1.

¹⁶Personified Discordia as agent: Fedeli (1980) 502, citing Fraenkel (1966) 150. Virgil: for the resonances, Du Quesnay (1992) 82. P. returns to the passage at 4.1.130 (his own land loss) abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes, where Hutchinson (2006) cites Ecl. 1.70 impius haec miles tam culta noualia habebit. Cf. with Breed (2010) 244, 2.16.25–6 (of a rival) barbarus … nunc mea regna tenet with 70, barbarus, and 72, mea regna; for Hor. Epist. 1.12, below, n. 116.

¹⁷Norden (1915) 10–18; Skutsch (1985) 392–405; Gowers (2007) 22–7; Ham (2013) 90–94; 453–6; Farrell (2014) para 4; and esp. P. Hardie (2009) 99–102; 103–9; 119–22. With Skutsch, I take the locus of the revolt to be Etruria/Falerii and not Sardinia.

¹⁸Cic. Amic. 23–4 quanta uis amicitiae concordiaeque sit, ex dissensionibus atque ex discordiis perspici potest. quae enim domus tam stabilis, quae tam firma ciuitas est, quae non odiis et discidiis funditus possit euerti? ex quo quantum boni sit in amicitia, iudicari potest. Agrigentinum quidem doctum quendam uirum [i.e. Empedocles] carminibus Graecis uaticinatum ferunt, quae in rerum natura totoque mundo constarent, quaeque mouerentur, ea contrahere amicitiam, dissipare discordiam.

¹⁹See Wright (1981) 194, on D-K 31 B 20 (hereafter cited as D-K plus number). My analysis is close to, but independent of, P. Hardie (2009) 119–20; for Empedoclean ‘reader theory’ and its influence on Lucretius (5.102–3), A. Hardie (2013) 228–9 with n. 77; the key texts for the analogue are D-K 4.3 = 3 In. διατμηθέντος ἐνὶ σπλάγχνοισι λόγοιο with D-K 20.4 = 38 In. κακῇσι διατμηθέντ’ Ἔριδεσσι [sc. γυῖα]. Plato applies a modified image of logos, body (parts) and cutting up (διατέμνω), to the ‘divisions’ and ‘collections’ of dialectic in the Phaedrus (264c, 265e–266b). Also relevant to disiecti/proiecta … membra is Emped. D-K 101 = 107 In. κέρματα θηρείων μελέων … ἐρευνῶν (‘seeking the fragments of wild animals’ limbs’), of dogs following spoor, possibly in a further analogue for reader analysis (Garani (2007) 24–5).

²⁰For the bracketed readings (proxima acc. neut. pl., of sepulchra), cf. Sen. Phaed. 1057–8 uia | uicina tangens spatia suppositi maris.

²¹Maltby (1991) s.vv. ‘Umbri’, ‘Umbria’; cf. Cairns (2006) 5–6.

²²For a different reading, Parker (1992). For the elemental physics, Ross (1987) 131–4.

²³ὄμβρος (Latin imber) of elemental water is Empedoclean: Simp. in Ph. 32.3 (D-K 21); Skutsch (1985) on Enn. Ann. 221. For campus as elemental terra, Ham (2013) 404–5, 408. Cairns (2006) 55–9 locates the Propertian confiscations along the flood plains on the western boundary of Asisinate territory: cf., therefore, Emped. D-K A 66b (early disorderly movement of elements, with periodic supremacy of fire or water): … ὁτὲ δὲ τῆς ὑδατώδους ὑπερβλυζούσης καὶ κατακλυζούσης ἐπιρροῆς. Garani (2007) 62.

²⁴Diog. Laert. 8.66, 72. Garani (2007) 70 goes far beyond quoted textual evidence; but (ibid. 63) she well adduces Plutarch’s analogue (Demetr. 5) of warfare between contiguous territories and Empedocles’ theory of elemental ‘war’: μᾶλλον δὲ τοῖς [στοιχείοις] ἀλλήλων ἁπτομένοις καὶ πελάζουσιν (cf., perhaps, P.’s proxima … contingens, with his discordant attack on Etruria).

²⁵I assume our text is complete, at 38 lines: Cairns (1974a) 94–9 = (2007) 1–7; Zetzel (1996) 87 n. 31 = (2012) 217 n. 32. Contra: Heyworth (2007) 6–7.

²⁶Cf. Pl. Mos. 84–156; Men. Mis. 796–7 τὰ πρόσθ’ γενό[μεν’ ἀ]νατ[ρέπει | τὸ ζῆν.

²⁷The sorcerers are not present: see below for P.’s preces. For sympotic address to amici and host/symposiarch, cf. Hor. Epod. 13.3, 6 with Watson’s (2003) notes.

²⁸Amici: cf. Cic. Cato 45 (conuiuium named from accubitio amicorum and uitae coniunctio).

²⁹Origins: cf. Cairns (1970) 38–41.

³⁰Jacoby (1914); for the literary genre, see also Cairns 1977 = (2012) 262–83; cf. Nisbet-Hubbard (1978) –8; Giangrande (1968) 120 –21. Disclosure in drink: Watson (1983) 232–3. Basic elements such as setting, symptoms and questioning may be supplied by the reader’s imagination: Jacoby (1914) 405 n. 2; Cairns (1977) 122, 131–2, 134–5 = (2012) 262, 270–1, 273.

³¹Gallus: Luck (1976); cf. Watson (1983) 231 with n. 13; id. (2003) 359–60; Woodman (2016).

³²Cf., perhaps, Propertius’ address to the amici (25) uos, qui sero lapsum reuocatis with Hor. Sat. 1.6.61–2 abeo, et reuocas nono post mense iubesque | esse in amicorum numero. In Epod. 11, Horace parades his ‘courting’ by Amor, qui me praeter omnis expetit (2–3), in contrast to Pettius’ implied neglect.

³³The apostrophe and its two companions (19, 31) (uos, delineation of the group in relative clause, then imperative) echoes drama: cf. Naev. trag. 21–4; Pl. Capt. 15–16.

³⁴For the imaginary situation at line 1, cf. the retrospective (3.24+25.21) risus eram positis inter conuiuia mensis. In 1.22, imaginary questions are quoted, whereas in 1.1 they are not.

³⁵‘Confessional response’ is consistent with wordplay on (neglected?) magisterial fasti in fastus (3) and toto … anno (7): cf. Paul. Fest. p. 87 L. fastorum libri appellantur, in quibus totius anni fit descriptio. Cf. Virg. Ecl. 4.61 longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses (recalling Pollio’s entry into consulship; 11–12); Auson. Grat. Act. 27 (of Domitian) pagina fastorum suorum, immo fastidiorum.

³⁶Fedeli (1980) 351–3. The notional entry of other uoces is marked etymologically in reuocatis/reuocare; cf. A. Hardie (2015) 260–1.

³⁷Meleager: Fedeli (1980) 62–3. Cairns (2015) 148–9 catalogues significant differences between AP 12.101 and Prop. 1.1.1–4, and hypothesizes imitation of a Meleagrian companion epigram, now lost. Gallus/ Parthenius: Ross (1975) 59–70; Rosen and Farrell (1986); Cairns (2006) 110–12.

³⁸Cf. Cairns (1979) 214–30.

³⁹Prima (1) can be adverbial (TLL 10.2.1348–9) = primum (start of narrative) and adjectival.

⁴⁰For sympotic ‘teasing’ in archaic Greek treatments of eros, Bowie (2013). For P. signposting ‘un contesto più ampio’, Fedeli (1980) 170 on 1.6.1. Observe that Tullus’ imaginary questions are explicit at 1.22.1–2, whereas their counterparts at Hor. Sat. 1.6.56–60, and their social context, must be supplied by the reader: see above, n. 7.

⁴¹As at 1.14.20 (sympotic), delayed address to Tullus (9) introduces erotic ‘advice’.

⁴²Φιλοπονία: Xen. Cyn. 1.7. Cf. esp. Ael. VH 13.1 (Atalanta) οὐδεὶς ἂν αὐτὴν ἰδὼν ἠράσθη ῥᾴθυμος ἄνθρωπος: P. is, precisely, ῥᾴθυμος. Difference (on separate grounds): Zetzel (1996) 87–8 = (2012) 217–19; contrast Cairns (1974a) 98–9 = (2007) 6–7; (2006) 89.

⁴³A further possible implication, that Tullus has himself cited Milanion, is not pursued here.

⁴⁴Milanion as standard exemplum: Theogn. 1287–94; Ov. Ars 2.185–96 (illustrates advice perfer et obdura, 178). Gallus/Ovid: cf. Ars 2.187–8, saepe suos casus nec mitia facta puellae | flesse … Milaniona ferunt (ferunt ‘footnotes’ allusion, surely to Gallus); cf. also nec mitia facta (Milanion’s seruitium) with P.’s bene facta. Gallus and tears: Cairns (2006) 228.

⁴⁵For the read-across between Centaur and Amor, cf. Ov. Ars 2.191–2 sensit et Hylaei contentum saucius arcum; sed tamen hoc arcu notior alter [sc. Amor’s] erat; also Ars 1.169 (Amor strikes the spectator at a gladiatorial contest) saucius ingemuit telumque uolatile sensit, bridging physical and erotic wound. For Eros and Centaurs, LIMC viii.1.697, s.v. ‘Kentauroi et Kentaurides’ nos. 303–8.

⁴⁶For the corollary (Milanion no proto-elegist) contrast Virg. Georg. 4.476 (Muses) quarum ingenti percussus amore (from Lucr. 1.922–5); cf. also Hor. Epod. 11.2 (of failure to write verses when amore percussum graui), with Woodman (2016) 677–8.

⁴⁷For implicit quotation and rejection of Tullus, cf. also 1.6.13–14, where the touristic tone of an mihi sit tanti [cf. tantum] doctas cognoscere Athenas (Cairns (1974b) 154 = (2007) 97) reflects Tullus’ notional invitation to accompany (below, III); cf. O’Rourke (2016) 204.

⁴⁸Tränkle (1960) 12–16; Cairns (1986); (1987). ‘Footnoting’: n. 44, and cf. Horsfall (1990).

⁴⁹Prayer formulae: Cairns (1974a) 99–100 = (2007) 7–8. Cf. Hor. Epod. 17.1–7 (prayer (oro, 2, parce, 6) to Canidia, evoking her deities); see the comments of Watson (2003) at lines 6 and 45. Cf. Tib. 1.2.63–6, for orabam of prayer to the witch conducting sacrificial ritual.

⁵⁰For the sceptical tone, Zetzel (1996) 91–2 = (2012) 222; cf. Dickie (2001) 175–6.

⁵¹carmen and carere mentem: A. Hardie (2005), esp. 87–8 on incantations; below, V.

⁵²For insanum pectus and blood, cf. Ov. Pont. 1.3.12 and 19; Sen. Phaed. 640–5; 1193 with 1197–8; Ciris 343. non sani may also distinguish intermittent furor from insania: Cairns (1974a) 103–4 = (2007) 11–12 on furor hic non deficit (7). Cupping: Cairns ibid. 106/15 citing Cels. 3.18.16. Melancholia: Cairns ibid. 106–7/15–16, citing Ar. Pl. 903 and Schol ad loc.

⁵³For frank advice and amicitia in Horace’s Satires, see Du Quesnay (1984) 33.

⁵⁴For malum of persons, TLL 8.229.16–31; and of puella, Ov. Am. 2.5.4; 2.9.26; cf. Theoc. Id. 14.36 ἐμὸν κακόν. Contra, but without argument, Fedeli (1980) 86–7.

⁵⁵Pl. fr. inc. 38.2 Venus uentura est nostra; Cur. 192; cf. Lucr. 4.1185, with Brown (1987) ad loc.; Virg. Ecl. 3.68; Hor. Carm. 1.27.14, 1.33.13. Also comedic (and ironic) is exercitet: Pl. Bacch. 26 (a meretrix) quae sodalem atque me exercitos habet.

⁵⁶For social congregation in Lucretius as ‘allusion to Empedocles’ socio-political imagery’, Garani (2007) 52. Incompetent lover: Cairns (1989/90) 4–5, 9–13 = (2007) 123–4, 127–30.

⁵⁷Quotation from Nelis (2001) 107 (96–112 treat the interplay of erotic passion and strife in Apollonius and the Aeneid); for the cloak, ibid. 350–52. With P.’s Hippodamia, cf. Arg. 1.752–8; for Idas and Apollo, ibid. 462–91; Kyriakou (1994) 314. ἀργαλέας: D-K 115.8 = 11 In.; ἔριδας: D-K 124.2 = 118 In.; 20.4 = 38 In.

⁵⁸Aratus (Phaen. 22) applies ἀτάλαντον ἁπάντῃ to the earth’s axis, with play on ‘Atlas’: P. Hardie (1983) 223 n.17; Atlas and Atalanta are also etymologically akin through Greek ἀ-τλα- (‘highly enduring’): Ross (1975) 62; Cairns (1986) 33 = (2007) 31.

⁵⁹Challenge: 1.1.37–8 quod si quis monitis tardas aduerterit auris …, where tardas signifies intellectual dullness (OLD 5b), the reverse of purae/purgatae aures of cognitive acuity (2.13.12): Lloyd-Jones (1963) 81. Cf. Emped. D-K 114.2–3 = 2 In.; 2.7–10 = 8 In.; 110 = 16 In.; 11.1 = 23 In.; Lucr. 1.50–53; 4.912–15. Empedocles’ addressees: Obbink (1993).

⁶⁰Stehle (2005) 261.

⁶¹Maltby (1991) s.vv. ‘amicitia’ and ‘amicus’. Cf. also Cic. Leg. 2.3–4; Hor. Epod. 11.2–3, 21, 25.

⁶²For lacrimae as ‘poems’, Fedeli (1980) 196 on 1.7.18, flebis; cf. 1.10.2 (uestris … lacrimis, to Gallus); also 1.21.6, Ov. Her. 4.175–6; Cairns (2006) 228; Heyworth (2007) 429.

⁶³Schmeisser (1972) 417 rightly takes lacrimis as ablative, as, e.g., at 2.34.87–8, scripta Catulli, | Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena).

⁶⁴Eros as κοῦρος: AP 5.303.3; 9.784.2; cf. 12.54.3–4 (Meleager).

⁶⁵For the post-civil war scenario, joint magisterial commission and imperium, and etymological reference of anteire to praetorian responsibilities, see Cairns (1974b) 156–63 = (2007) 99–103. I do not accept the re-dating of 1.6 to 33/32 proposed by Heslin (2010), which (among other issues) does not make sense of the civilian roles of the Volcacii Tulli.

⁶⁶With 23–4 labores afferat, cf. Lucr. 1.140 –42 tua me uirtus … quemuis efferre laborem | suadet.

⁶⁷Garani (2007) 37–43; Ham (2013) 95–8; 196–7; 302–3; O’Rourke (2014), paras 1–8, with bibl. Empedoclean cyclical ‘coming together’ is keyed by reicit (34): contrast disicio of cosmic/atomic scattering (e.g. 1.651, 1.1020, 2.939, 3.928, 5.403); Mars (regularly) casts himself back to physical enclosure by, and unity with, Venus.

⁶⁸For aetas as personal ‘age’ and ‘era’, cf. 1.7.8 cogor et aetatis tempora dura queri; also Virg. Ecl. 4.4 (cyclical), 37 firmata aetas (personal, and cf. ἔμπεδος αἰών, Emped. D-K 17.11 = 25 In.). Tullus’ military service: Cairns (1974b) 158–9 = (2007) 100.

⁶⁹For cessatio and uacatio of relaxation from public service, cf. Cic. Leg. 1.10, with Dyck (2004); Ov. Her. 4.87–92 (Phaedra-Hippolytus), esp. 89 quod caret alterna requie, durabile non est.

⁷⁰For a separate (non-Empedoclean) figure from magisterial cura within constitutional ἀνακύκλωσις, Hor. Carm. 1.12.50–51, with A. Hardie (2003) 401.

⁷¹For ὥραι and cyclical αἰών, see Dunbar (1995) 443 on Birds 696.

⁷²Cf. e.g. Theocr. Id. 16.71–2; Virg. Aen. 6.790, 795–7 with Horsfall (2013); Stat. Silv. 4.1.3–4; and cf. esp. Du Quesnay (1977) 45–6.

⁷³31, uos … quibus facili deus adnuit aure hints both at ‘benign’, listening god (the reverse of the aduersos … deos of line 8) and at readily available partners: Hor. Sat. 1.2.119 parabilem amo Venerem facilemque. Cf. 2.34.71 uilis … amores, with Cairns (2006) 314. For the influence of Lucretius’ diatribe on Ovidian elegy, see Ham (2013) 161–76; 184–97.

⁷⁴Caston (2006) 285; O’Rourke (2016) 204.

⁷⁵For the medical imagery, see Brown (1987) 208–16. P.’s allusion is guaranteed by 1.10.17 (P. advises Gallus) et possum alterius curas sanare recentis, echoing Lucr. 4.1070–1 uolnera … ante recentia cures; cf. Fabre-Serris (2014) n. 57.

⁷⁶See the account of P. as (Aristotelian) ‘acratic lover’ in O’Rourke (2016) 202–6.

⁷⁷Fedeli (1980) cites Catul. 76.11–12 (dis inuitis); Hor. Carm. 1.5.6 (mutatos … deos). Cf. Ov. Tr. 4.1.46 ille [sc. spiritus] nec iratos sentit habere deos; Ep. 16.282; Met. 5.559; Sen. Ep. 110.2.

⁷⁸Rothstein (1920–24) 1.57. For cogor and erotic furor, cf. also Catul. 64.197. Love and compulsion: Winkler (1991) esp. 222, offers a good account of compulsion, divinely sent eros and eros as physiological condition.

⁷⁹For the conventional complaint in comedy, Pl. Poen. 452–62; Mos. 563; cf. Mil. 314. cum tamen: Lucr. 1.825 (= 2.690); 2.29; 3.107; 6.140.

⁸⁰The reference to Phaedrus is noted by Cairns (1974a) 104 = (2007) 12, without development. Cairns (2015) 148–9, however, argues that Meleager’s reference to earlier philosophical interests (σκηπτροφόρου σοφίας, 4) has no counterpart in Prop. 1.1. As I see it, Meleager supplies the explicit hinterland to P.’s. implied acquaintance with Plato.

⁸¹For P.’s education, see Cairns (2006) 26–7. For ‘doctrinally shaky’ philosophical (Epicurean) teaching in 2.34, ibid. 305–7.

⁸²D-K 31 A 98 (Caelius Aurelianus Morb. Chron. 1.5) Empedoclem sequentes alium [sc. furorem] dicunt ex animi purgamento fieri, alium alienatione mentis ex corporis causa siue iniquitate …; quem Graeci … adpellant μανίαν.

⁸³Delatte (1934) 21–5; Guthrie (1965) 227–8.

⁸⁴A. Hardie (2013) esp. 240; below, V.

⁸⁵Cic. Luc. 14 et tamen isti physici raro admodum … exclamant quasi mente incitati –Empedocles quidem ut interdum mihi furere uideatur – abstrusa esse omnia …; ibid. 74 furere tibi Empedocles uidetur, at mihi dignissimum rebus iis de quibus loquitur sonum fundere.

⁸⁶Cf. also Ep. 2.1.118–19 (on the Roman obsession with writing poetry) hic error tamen et levis haec insania quantas | uirtutes habeat sic collige …, where (as Brink (1982) ad loc. observes) the vocabulary of pathological insanity is juxtaposed with poetic inspiration.

⁸⁷At 465–6, ardentem frigidus Aetnam | insiluit, frigidus satirises Empedocles’ ‘madness’ as elemental imbalance (Caelius’ alienatio mentis arising from corporis iniquitas), which he seeks to correct by jumping into the volcanic fire: Brink (1969), commenting on ps-Acro ad loc., Empedocles enim dicebat tarda ingenia frigido circa praecordia sanguine impediri; but frigidus may also comment on the quality of E.’s poetry: cf. Dunbar (1995) 535–6, on Ar. Birds 935.

⁸⁸The Aetna-leap is elsewhere treated as self-purification (i.e. purgamentum) by fire (Diog. Laert. 8.75; Kingsley (1995) 252–5).

⁸⁹Palinode: with falsa est ista… (1), cf. Stesichorus ap. Pl. Phdr. 243a οὐκ ἔστ’ ἔτυμος … οὗτος. Cf. also naufragus, 12 in secondary sense ‘ship-breaker’, with Aesch. Agam. 681–98, where Stesichorus’ palinode is reversed with attack on ἀμφινεικῆ Ἑλέναν etymologised as ἑλέναυς. On 3.24, cf. Ogle (1920) 250. For separate generic documentation of palinode, see Cairns (1978) esp. 548.

⁹⁰Harbour after labores/πόνοι: Eur. Bacch. 902–3; Apul. Met. 11.15; Proc. H. 6.11–12. Bonner (1941); Seaford (1994) 283; Van den Berg (2001) 51–6.

⁹¹Mens Bona does appear in later provincial worship: Latte (1960) 239–40, with n. 3. For Mens and (non-sacral) mens bona, see Maltby (1991) s.v. ‘Mens’, citing i.a. August. CD p. 276.31 D. posuerunt … Mentem deam, quae faciat pueris bonam mentem; Tert. Nat. 2.11 habent deam e et malam.

⁹²D-K 134.4–5 = 110 In. Φρὴν ἱερή … | φροντίσι κόσμον ἅπαντα καταίσσουσα θοῇσιν. si qua signals speculation; contrast 3.15.21 (Jupiter) si deus es. For the philosophical nuance, cf. Pl. Phdr. 242e εἰ δ’ ἔστιν, ὥσπερ οὖν ἔστιν, θεὸς ἢ τι θεῖον ὁ Ἔρως, οὐδὲν ἂν κακὸν εἴη.

⁹³Servius comments ac si diceret malae mentis gaudia.

⁹⁴See Horsfall (2013) 488–90 for the varied sources, including Stoic νοῦς. For per artus Horsfall rightly cites Servius (Empedoclean) per elementa quae membra sunt mundi, with Manil. 1.138; cf. also Arundel (1963–4) 29, citing Empedocles.

⁹⁵For such representations of the four elements in Empedocles and Lucretius, Garani (2007) 14–15. Sand-Syrtes as elemental ‘land’ (Aen. 1.111–12), Nelis (2001) 348 n. 86. With P.’s figurative binding, cf. Var. L. 5.61–2: etymology of Venus from uincire (cf. uinctus, 14) as binding force for elemental fire and water; plus corona and the other two elements, tellus and caelum (cf. coronatae … carinae, 15). uinctus eram uersas in mea terga manus (14), connects with the ship at anchor (etymological connection of ancora with manus: Maltby (1991) s.v. ‘ancora’ (cf. Ov. Tr. 3.9.14; Stat. Theb. 4.25–6)).

⁹⁶Norden (1957) 28 (on Aen. 6.740–42); P. Hardie (1986) 325–7; Nelis (2001) 349. See now Herrero de Jáuregui (2013).

⁹⁷D-K 115.13–14 = 11 In.: φυγὰς θεόθεν καὶ ἀλήτης, | νείκει μαινομένῳ πίσυνος. Cf. Apul. Met. 11.23 accessi ad confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia uectus elementa remeaui …, with Seaford (1986); and for land, sea, winds and sun, leading to the (sc. Empedoclean) ‘harbour of piety’ (cf. n. 90), Proc. H. 6.6–12, with Van den Berg (2001) 267–73.

⁹⁸D-K 98 = 98 In. ἥ δὲ χθὼν τούτοισιν ἴση συνέκυρσε μάλιστα | … | Κύπριδος ὁρμισθεῖσα τελείοις ἐν λιμένεσσιν | … | ἐκ τῶν αἷμα τ’ ἔγεντο καὶ ἄλλης εἴδεα σαρκός. Wright (1981) 73–4; 237–8.

⁹⁹See McKeown (1989) 48–9, 31–36; P. Hardie (2016b) 12–13. Ham (2013) 110–13 offers an Empedoclean reading of Am. 1.2 with reference to Propertian and Virgilian furor, and with ironic play on pax Augusta.

¹⁰⁰A. Hardie (2013). For poetic furor in Catul. 50 and Phaedrus, see Buchheit (1976) 172–80.

¹⁰¹Heyworth (2007) 4–6. Cairns (2015) 160, with n. 45, rightly rejects the suggested direct reference to the Muses, but does not consider possible secondary allusion.

¹⁰²Cf. Steidle (1962) 111–13. For ‘hatred’ (μῖσος) in this context, and μισητός of one ‘hated for sexual incontinence’, see Barrett (1964) on Eur. Hipp. 407–9; Dunbar (1995) 726 on Birds 1620.

¹⁰³Covert allusion to Gallus: (1) puellae as Muses, plus evidence that Gallus favoured the term both of Muses and of countryside deities as Muse substitutes: Prop. 3.3.33; 3.10.3; cf. Juv. 4.35–6; and as countryside deities: Virg. Ecl. 5.59; 10.9–10; Culex 117. Cairns (2006) Index II (Gallan Words and Concepts) s.v. ‘Puella/puella (of Dryads, Muses, Naiads)’. (2) Juxtaposition of perfect infinitive and puella at 5 and 15: well attested in elegy (Propertius, x 7; Tibullus, x 1; Ovid, x 13), otherwise only twice (both Juvenal) of which one is addressed to Muses (4.36 dixisse puellas). (3) odisse puellas only at Ov. Ep. 4.173–4 (Phaedra-Hippolytus) with cross reference between Nymphs and ‘Gallan’ country deities (Kennedy (1982) 387, n. 89): tibi dent [sc. aquam] Nymphae, quamuis odisse puellas | diceris.

¹⁰⁴agnati or gentiles (not amici) were legally responsible for curatio of the insane at Rome: Cairns (1974a) 105 = (2007) 14. Call. Iamb. 13.19 –21 οἱ φίλοι σε δήσους[ι | κ[ἢ]ν νοῦν ἔχωσιν, ἐγχέουσι τὴν [κρᾶσιν | ὡς ὑγιείης οὐδὲ τᾤνυχι ψαύεις (followed by fragmentary reference to Muses): Acosta-Hughes (2002) 79–80.

¹⁰⁵Heyworth (2007) 8.

¹⁰⁶For ira and Amor’s failure to ‘go’ (ire), see Maltby (1991) s.v. ‘ira’, citing Donatus on Ter. Ad. 794 ira ab eo quod est ire dicitur, quod a se eat qui irascitur et furit.

¹⁰⁷Hor. Epod. 11.15–16 ‘quod si meis inaestuet praecordiis | libera bilis …’, where physiological factors are ‘freely’ at work around the praecordia, rendering the poet speechless: Woodman (2016) 678–81.

¹⁰⁸McKeown (1989) 8–10 (on Amores 1.1) cites Prop. 2.10.25–6 and 2.13.1–8. Cf. esp. Ov. Am. 1.1.24, ‘quod’que ‘canas, uates, accipe’, dixit, ‘opus’ [= πούς!].

¹⁰⁹Metre: cf. 2.1.9–10; 2.34.79–80. Maltby (1991) s.v. ‘pes’, citing Isid. Orig. 1.17.1 pedes dicti eo, quod per ipsos metra ambulent.

¹¹⁰A. Hardie (2013). For preservation of Presocratic ideas in Proclus’ hymn to the Muses (H. 3), Mansfeld (1992) 224–5.

¹¹¹D-K 3.1–2 = 9 In. ἀλλὰ θεοὶ τῶν μὲν μανίην ἀποτρέψατε γλώσσης, | ἐκ δ’ ὁσίων στομάτων καθαρὴν ὀχετεύσατε πηγήν.

¹¹²Gale (1994) 68.

¹¹³A. Hardie (2002) 184–92; (2013) 223–4, 226 n. 66, 228–9, 235, 238–9, 241.

¹¹⁴A deus/θεός is intrinsically ‘swift’: Maltby (1991) s.v. ‘deus’; Haywood (1983).

¹¹⁵Cf. Hor. Carm. 3.28.12 celeris spicula Cynthiae (!); Ciris 297; Ov. Met. 4.304.

¹¹⁶P. Hardie (forthcoming). The poem includes: allusion (12–13) to Virgilian Meliboeus (Ecl. 1.69–70, 74; above, II); concordia discors (19, above II); and ‘Empedocles’ (20).

¹¹⁷A. Hardie (2013) 238–9. Herrero de Jáuregui (2016) 38–41 (with n. 90) has also concluded, independently, that the Muse addresses Empedocles.

¹¹⁸122.3 D-K = 120 In.

¹¹⁹For ‘swift mind’ transformed into its fractured antithesis, and inarticulate aporia, in discordant amor, compare the amens Aeneas, following divine command to abandon Dido (Aen. 4.284–6): quae prima exordia sumat? | atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc | in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat. Cf. also Aen. 8.18–25; Apoll. Arg. 3.755–60.

¹²⁰Cf. esp. O’Rourke (2016).

¹²¹See P. Hardie (2016a).

¹²²Etym. Magn. p. 327 K. (cf. p. 122 K.); cf. Suda e 773.

¹²³I take dispersa … ossa (1.21.9) to be the proiecta … membra and ossa of 1.22.7–8: Cairns (2006) 49–50. Contra: Du Quesnay (1992) 75–6.

¹²⁴Breed (2010) 241–2.

¹²⁵P., born 58–55 (Cairns (2006) 25), was not too young: Cicero’s son, aged 16, commanded a cavalry ala at Pharsalus (Off. 2.45).

¹²⁶Name-play: see Marquis (1974) 500 on 4.2.59 properanti falce (I owe this to Donncha O’Rourke); cf. Virg. Aen. 4.310 (Dido’s ‘Propertian’ schetliasmos: Fedeli (1980) 208 on 1.8a.1–6) properas … ire per altum; Luc. 1.471 properantis nuntia belli with Propertian Meuania campis (cf. 4.1.123) at 473; see also next n., deproperare. For other views on the addressee of 1.21, Nicholson (1998–9) 149–51.

¹²⁷Horace’s Pompeius ode (2.7), with explicit flight from Philippi (9–10), has much in common: cf. quis te redonauit Quiritem | dis patriis Italoque caelo (3–4) with Prop. 1.22 (above II); and observe especially deproperare (24; cf. n. 126); furere, 28; Edonis (27, cf. Prop. 1.3.5).

¹²⁸P.’s wish for his own cradle death, comparing the hypothetical killing of Nestor by †Gallicus† Iliacis miles in aggeribus (2.13.43–4, 48) plainly echoes 1.21.2, but its precise significance is hard to read.

¹²⁹Cf. esp. Ponticus’ Thebaid (1.7.2) armaque fraternae tristia militiae; Breed (2010) 234–5; 238; cf. O’Rourke (2016) 206. militia does not appear in Books 2 and 3.

¹³⁰I am most grateful to Philip Hardie and to Donncha O’Rourke for comment on this paper and advance sight of forthcoming articles. Warm thanks also to Ian Du Quesnay for material improvements to argument and presentation. My title reflects a general debt to Francis Cairns’ account of P.’s origins and career. The conclusions are advanced on my own responsibility.