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SEXTUS PROPERTIUS: THE AUGUSTAN ELEGIST. BY FRANCIS CAIRNS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 492.
EXCESS AND RESTRAINT: PROPERTIUS, HORACE, AND OVID'S ARSAMATORIA. By ROY K. GIBSON. London: Institute of Classical Studies (BICS Supplement 89). 2007. Pp. ix, 168.
PROPERTIUS, ELEGIES BOOK IV. Edited by Gregory Hutchinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics). 2006. Pp. xi, 258.
EACH OF THE THREE valuable scholarly contributions here reviewed focuses in its own way on poetic variation within the elegiac corpus. Francis Cairns's Sextus Propertius: The Augustan Elegist elucidates the specific influences of Cornelius Gallus upon Propertius and speculates on the changes wrought upon the poet's verse by his increasing attachment to the Augustan regime. Roy K. Gibson's Excess and Restraint analyses Ovid's generically and socially subversive innovation of an ethic of moderation in the Ars Amatoria. Gregory Hutchinson's commentary on Propertius 4 highlights the deliberate and calculated surprise engendered by the poet's sequential renegotiation of generic conventions.
Cairns's work attends particularly to the effect of patronage on the form and content of Propertius' poems. Cairns employs a biographical and prosopographical approach to investigate Propertius' family background (Chapter One) and to speculate, with an increasingly expanding margin of error, on the poet's social and literary engagement, first with possible early patrons Tullus (Chapter Two) and Gallus (Chapters Three to Seven), and then with later patrons Maecenas (Chapters Eight and Nine) and Augustus (Chapters Ten to Twelve). Cairns's scholarship is grounded in a methodology which will not be to the liking of all. The book features a combination of the type of historical reading of Propertius which has long been out of style and Cairns's familiar brand of philological analysis, which focuses on compositional techniques and relegates other aspects of poetics to an almost incidental concern. By no means should one dismiss this volume on the basis that its methods are not currently in vogue, for there is much of value to be found here and much potential for rewarding critical interaction with other methods. Unfortunately, Cairns denies himself the opportunity for such interaction within his book by excluding much scholarship which is not to his own liking: "some other approaches and certain magna nomina currently in vogue in Roman elegiac studies are little, if...