Cynthia

Download or read book Cynthia written by S. J. Heyworth and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-11-23 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propertius is a poet of the Augustan period, a successor of the great Hellenistic elegiac poets Callimachus and Philitas, and a precursor of Ovid. His account of his fictionalized affair with his beloved alter ego Cynthia is the purest expression of the spirit of love elegy, setting them as a pair against war, epic, and (apparently) Augustus himself. This is an author read by virtually all students of Classical Latin. Cynthia provides a lucid attempt to understand and correct the many difficulties in the transmitted text. It consists of a commentary on the whole corpus, together with a prose translation (including alternative versions of ambiguous phrasing). In its clear exposition of technical problems, the book will serve as an introduction to Latin textual criticism in the modern age, and to elegiac poetic style.