Virgil created the ideal poetic career, an upwards progression within the range of hexameter poetry, pastoral to didactic to epic. He marked this movement in ways obvious and less obvious: he gets up from the shepherd's sitting position at the close of the Eclogues; at the end of the second Georgic he regrets both the loss of pastoral innocence and his inability to write Lucretian natural philosophy; at the start of the third Georgic he looks ahead to an Augustan epic of sacred importance; in each work he presents an emblematic vision of the nymph Arethusa. Subsequently Ovid produces his own more ambitious versions of the ideal career, going from love elegy to tragedy to the universal epic of the Metamorphoses, and within elegy itself advancing from personal love elegy through the didactic of the Ars to the sacred and aetiological narratives of the Fasti. Each cycle then returns to the personal elegy of lamentation in the Tristia; but even in exile Ovid expands his range with the curse poem Ibis, and more letters.

What of Propertius, Ovid's predecessor as love elegist? Does he show a similar reaction to the Virgilian pattern? Ovid's poetry repeatedly builds on Propertian models, and there is a temptation to see the elegiac books as describing a similar arc to that from the Amores to the Ars and the Fasti, with the personal material of Books 1 and 2 opening out to more general material, discursive and moral in 3, aetiological in 4.