Ennius Redivivus

Propertius’ second book ended with a glimpse of the Aeneid as a work-in-progress. That passage sets the stage for the strange prominence of Ennius in the third book. Propertius did not suddenly discover an interest in annalistic epic. In the first half of his third book, he uses the Annales as a proxy for the Aeneid, mischievously implying that Virgil’s next work will be a historical epic, a continuation of Ennius’. Propertius continues to define his own constancy in contrast to Virgil’s Protean shifts in genre. In retrospect, Virgil’s pastoral poetry was actually very good; his subsequent shift to natural philosophy was perhaps a nobly motivated aspiration; but the current project of writing a national epic is a contradiction of Virgil’s own principles.