SOURCE: "The Emotions of Patriotism: Propertius 4.6," California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 6, 1974, pp. 171-80.

In the following excerpt, Johnson explains the importance of considering the Augustan age in order to place Propertius's works in their proper context.

… The chief and the abiding problem for critics of Augustan poetry is the gentleman with the frank and terrifying blue eyes who succeeded where everyone else had failed and whose signet ring was, appropriately, a sphinx.¹⁹ In the years of his dominance miracle crowded on miracle, but for his contemporaries and his successors and perhaps even for himself the central miracle was Augustus, a combination of brains, looks, luck, stamina, ruthlessness, prudence, egotism and style that beggared even the achievements of Pericles, Alexander and Julius and that transformed the ancient world utterly. His contemporaries could not fail to be impressed and baffled, and we who know more about this portent than...