Reading Cynthia and Sexual Difference in the Poems of Propertius

‘she is always and never the same’(advertising slogan for ‘Contradiction’, a ‘fragrance for women’ by Calvin Klein, 1999)In the first poem of his second book, Propertius presents an emphatic declaration of his status as a love poet, slyly incorporating a detailedrecusatioto Maecenas, who he claims has requested that he compose epic instead. Later in the poem, Propertius' preference for elegy over epic seems to be echoed by the predilections of his lover Cynthia, who, as Propertius insists, finds the entireIliaddistasteful. According to Propertius, Cynthia's aversion to the poem emerges from a very specific source: the epic's primary female protagonist, Helen. For, as Propertius recalls it, Cynthia disapproves of the whole epic precisely because she finds fault with its ‘leuis’ heroine:si memini, solet ilia leuis culpare puellas,/et totam ex Helena non probat Iliada(‘If I remember, she is accustomed to castigate mutable women and does not approve of the wholeIliadbecause of Helen’, 2.1.49f.).