The first book of Propertius' elegies is a convenient book for separate study. It appeared as a separate unit in the first place. It contains some of Propertius' best poetry. It represents a distinct and interesting phase of his poetical activity. It affords by itself sufficient evidence for the assessment of his place in the history of the Latin love elegy. It provides an instructive example of the way in which an Augustan ‘book’ was arranged. Moreover, it is comparatively free from major textual problems of the kind that arise all too often elsewhere in Propertius' works.

In making this edition I have referred constantly to the editions of Propertius' complete works by Paley (1872) and by Butler and Barber (1933); to Postgate's edition of some selected elegies (1884); to D. R. Shackleton Bailey's Propertiana (1956); and of course to P. J. Enk's big Latin-annotated edition (1946) of Book 1 itself. (My debt to Rothstein's admirable commentary (1920) is indirect, for I did not read it till my own was in all essentials complete.) The present work is not merely a compilation. But it could not have been produced at all without the help of the authors named above. Still less could it have been produced without the help of three Cambridge friends, Mr Sandbach, Mr Wilkinson and Mr Lee, who between them have removed so many errors and suggested so many improvements that this book, apart from its deficiencies, is by now almost as much theirs as mine.