Propertius: Elegies Book IV (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

This is a review of Gregory Hutchinson's commentary on Book 4 of Propertius for the Cambridge green and yellow series. Book 4 is the final installment of Propertius's series of elegiac poetry books. It was first published around 16 BC and consists of 11 poems ranging in length from 48 to 150 lines. Book 4, both thematically and stylistically, is a fairly sharp departure from Propertius's first three books of elegies. The first three books focus on the poet's often fraught relationship with his lover Cynthia, while the last book mainly features poems that hearken back to the aetiological elegies of Callimachus, exploring the origins of various Roman gods, temples, and cultural practices. The most emblematic of these poems is IV.6, which recounts the origins of the newly constructed Temple of Palatine Apollo and includes a famous (and very stylized) account of the Battle of Actium that features the Emperor Augustus, under whose regime Propertius wrote most if not all of his extant poetry. The Emperor Augustus and his regime are a looming presence in many other poems in Book 4 as well.This commentary consists of a 24 page introduction, just over 30 pages of Latin text, 190 pages of commentary, a 2 1/4 page general bibliography (each individual poem is also provided with its own thorough, individual bibliography), and two indexes (one general, one of Latin words). Of the many commentaries in the green and yellow series I have read, this one is by far the densest and the most complex. It is more like a one-off commentary geared to a professional audience than the student-friendly editions that constitute the bulk of the other entries in this commentary series, and indeed the only kind of reader who would get any benefit out of using this particular commentary is an advanced graduate student or scholar working on the poetry of Propertius. The commentary includes virtually no help with grammar or vocabulary, and the introduction and commentary are pitched to a professional readership that is already intimately familiar with Propertius and Latin Literature. Readers who are in their first few years of Latin study or who are reading Propertius for the first time would almost certainly find Richardson's one volume commentary on Books 1-4 or W.A. Camps's commentary on Book 4 far more accessible than this edition.The reason that I have given this commentary two stars is because even as a commentary pitched to a professional audience this book falls short in a number of respects. These shortcomings can all be encapsulated in the criticism that less would definitely have been more in the matter of providing intertextual parallels, historical and literary exegeses, and references to other primary and secondary sources. I should stress that the vast amount of material the commentator provides for individual lines and individual words often includes provocative insights and eminently useful information, but the presentation of the notes is often so dense and meandering that it becomes very difficult for the reader to differentiate essential points from relatively trivial points. There is generally just no organizing principle at work to highlight what is most important about the poetry under discussion, and this drawback also extends to the 2-3 page mini-essays that introduce each poem, which are just as overloaded with intertextual parallels, references, and sophisticated but piecemeal arguments about individual thematic aspects of the poems. The main introduction to the book as a whole is likewise really not an entry-point for the reader to become familiar with the major themes and issues at stake in Book 4 and the scholarly approaches that have been brought to bear on the poems thus far. It is really more like a scholarly article, and its argument is that the play between continuity and discontinuity is the unifying theme of Book 4. In sum, this book is indispensable as a reference book for those occasions when one wishes to get a comprehensive picture of everything that has been said or could be said about an individual word or line in Propertius, but this book simply has not been designed as an aid to reading through the entirety of Book 4 efficiently and profitably.Since the text of Propertius's poetry has been transmitted in an unusually bad state, it would perhaps be helpful for me to say something about how the commentator deals with textual problems. I am far from competent enough in the practice of textual criticism to comment on the validity of any of the commentator's editorial decisions, but it is clear that he has made some use of Heyworth's recent work on the text of Propertius and deploys far more "daggers" and marks more couplets as transposed/interpolated than Barber does in the old OCT. The commentator also provides a detailed apparatus criticus.