SOURCE: "Vision and Reality in Propertius 1.3," Yale Classical Studies, Vol. 19, 1966, pp. 189-207.

In the following essay, Curran examines Propertius's syntax and explores how his use of parallelism, proper adjectives, synecdoche, colloquialisms, and other literary techniques led to the achievement of his desired literary effect.

Two Distinctive characteristics of Propertian elegy, as has often been observed, are mythological allusion and a language marked by a mixture of the elevated and solemn and the colloquial. It is sometimes assumed in criticism that the mythological learning is merely decorative or, worse, a pedantic display of erudition, and many of his critics have decided that the language simply suffers from regrettable lapses from the linguistic propriety one has come to expect of an Augustan poet. In both judgments it is implied that we are dealing with elements separable from the meaning or content of the poems in which they occur. In some...