Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading of Propertius' Elegies

Reading of Propertius' Elegies

Fratantuono, Lee

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismAncient Rome

ISBN10: 166697241X
ISBN13: 9781666972412
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: Feb 5 2025
Pages: 494
Weight: 1.74
Height: 1.19 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Among the surviving poets of the Age of Augustus, the elegist Propertius is an enigma. Now brooding, now buoyant, Propertius' couplets offer mesmerizing commentary on the history of Rome and the renaissance of the republic in the wake of the Augustan victory at Actium. The elusive figure who dominates the poems is Cynthia, a literate, musically-inclined, chestnut-haired Muse who calls to mind aspects of both the huntress goddess Diana and the battle goddess Minerva. Through the course of his Cynthia cycle, Propertius composes a breathtaking array of verse meditations on love and death, the nature of passion and obsession, and the quest to remain forever young. In A Reading of Propertius' Elegies, Lee Fratantuono reveals Propertius' work to be nothing less than an elegiac Aeneid, a spellbinding, intertextual edifice whose rooms both charm and terrify. Dazzling and decadent, gorgeous and ghostly, sophisticated and seductive, Propertius' Cynthia ultimately presents us with the image of wolfish Roma herself, a city that is not only an anagram of Amor, but also the mistress of the world. In a Roman empire that has beheld the drama of Cleopatra and Antony, the rites of Isis, and the madness inspired by Bacchus and the Great Mother, Propertius dispenses elegiac medicine as the horror of civil war and the aftermath of intoxicated excess give way to an Augustan remedy.

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