Propertius, Book 1

What was it like to be in love in Rome? Th 22 poems of Sextus Propertius' first book of elegies (publisehed in 28 B.C.) offer an answer. Defiantly un-Roman in his devotion to love for his Cynthia and to his art, Propertius writes with a strangely modern voice - passionate, wry, self-scrutinising and ironic. But it is a voice that has been shaped and controlled by a literary tradition already centries old. This revised edition of Book I provides, in a verse translation which attempts to simulate the dicipline and contraints of the hetameter-pentameter alternation in the elegiac couplets of the original poems, a handily self-contained Augustan poetry book- the earliest extant book of Latin love-elegy - to a readership without Latin. The Introduction and Commentary furnish the reader with explanations of the literary, mythological, historical and geographical allusions necessary for an understanding of the poems.

Robert J. Baker has studied at Edinburgh University and at the University of New England. He has been teaching Latin, Greek and Ancient History for the last 35 years in the Universities of Tasmania and New England, and has just recently retired as Associate Professor from the latter. He is presently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Classics, History and Religion there.