Propertius, Maecenas, and Cynthia triumphant

AbstractThis chapter considers poems 3.8–10. Read alongside one another, and against the background of Propertius’ earlier poems in Book 3 and previous books, this group of elegies underscores his continued rôle as a poeta–amator. Poems 3.8 (on a lovers’ rixa) and 3.10 (on Cynthia’s birthday) are shown to engage intratextually in a poetics of repetitiveness that reinforces Propertius’ ongoing implication in an amorous discourse; night as an important time for the elegist throughout his corpus is discussed. 3.8 and 3.10, celebrating Propertius’ and Cynthia’s continued amatory and metapoetic relationship, frame 3.9. This poem, addressed to Maecenas, implies that the poet’s ethical choice to live as a lover and to write of love is married to his composition of elegiac poetry; this is articulated through seafaring imagery that combines the onward progress of poetic composition familiar from didactic verse with the Callimachean poetics of water, already explored in 3.3.