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Propertius 1.16.38
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
To the host of suggestions I would add the sense of the passage is, ‘I have never annoyed you with petulant language, with the things the mob in the heated forum is accustomed to say, that you suffer me to… But I have often…’ His was, as line 41 explains, the language of poetry. The contrast between the language of the forum and poetry is an obvious one, and is made elsewhere by Propertius ‘turn tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo et vetat insano verba tonare foro. at tu finge elegos’ (4.1.133f.). In the present passage the contrast is between the common language typical of the angry mob and the original (‘novo’, line 41) verses of the exclusus amator. It is particularly bitter that he should be condemned to the ‘trivio’ (line 40) which, like the forum, is the very milieu of the type of language he has eschewed.
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References
1 See Smyth, W. R., Thesaurus Criticus Ad Sexti Propertii Textum (Leiden, 1970), p. 20.Google Scholar
2 Cf. Ovid, Tr. 4.10.48ff.; Quintilian (Inst. 1.8.11) compares the pleasures of verse, ‘poeticis voluptatibus’, with the roughness of forensic language, ‘forensi asperitate’.
3 For this notion of ‘vulgar language’ cf. Cicero ‘arripere verba de foro’ (Fin. 3.2.4), and ‘arripere maledictum ex trivio’ (Mur. 14).
4 My colleague Archibald Allen explains quae differently: comparing (e.g.) Prop. 1.5.17, ‘et quaecumque voles fugient tibi verba querenti’, where dicere is to be understood, he would supply dicens with ‘petulantia linguae’ to govern the ‘quae’ clause, ‘saying the things which…’
5 Passages adduced by Powell, J. G. F., Cato Maior De Seneclute (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, in his commentary on Sen. 3.7, ‘Quae Gaius Salinator, quae Spurius Albinus, homines consulares nostri fere aequales, deplorare solebant!’, where ‘quae’ is exclamatory. Powell's note (pp. 115–16) prompts me to suggest that ‘quae’ is also exclamatory at Prop. 1.18.24; there I would read ‘a tua quot’ (with the later MSS. and Housman for ‘an tua quod’) ‘peperit nobis iniuria curas! quae solum tacitis cognita sunt foribus!’, ‘What things known only to the silent doors!’
6 AJP 95 (1974), 152.Google Scholar
7 I thank the Editors and the anonymous referee of CQ for their helpful criticisms and suggestions.