Homeric themes in Propertius
'We have been too early acquainted with the poetical heroes to expect any pleasure from their revival; to show them as they always have been shown, is to disgust by repetition; to give them new qualities or adventures, is to offend by violating received notions. With this quotation from Samuel Johnson Professor Stanford began his masterly account of the Ulysses theme in literature. Johnson was an acute critic, but here he has gone badly astray, misled perhaps by the rationalism of his age and by his own preference for plain talk and common sense. The eighteenth century, however, was not alone in questioning the value of myth. Surprisingly there is a hint of the same attitude in Virgil (Geo. iii.3 8) and even at the height of the Romantic revival the voice of the sceptic could be heard: 'We know too that there are no Dryads in Hyde park nor Naiads in the Regent's canal.'1 Professor Stanford's book demon strated the superficiality of all such views and showed how imagi native writers have always been able to quarry new material out of the legends of the past. I have thought it appropriate, therefore, to a volume in honour of Professor Stanford to turn to this subject once more and to examine the way in which one of the most innovative of Latin poets responded to the tales of Homeric epic. On the face of it Propertius is an unlikely writer to manifest the influence of Homer. He was professedly an Alexandrian, and elegy and epic belong to different worlds of style and feeling. There can be no doubt, however, that he knew the text of Homer intimately. His debts are plain to see and they encompass half the books of the Iliad and more of the Odyssey. He could recall not only the grand scenes but even such trivial details as that Eurypylus was the Homeric king of Cos (iv.5.23) or that the name of the goddess who guarded the cattle of the Sun was Lampetie (iii. 12.29) Indeed the imitation of Homer is sometimes sufficiently close to be of use to the editor and the textual critic. A line of Iliad 21 enabled Wolff to correct the muddled manuscript reading at iii. 1.27, and there are at least three other disputed passages where the Homeric evidence, if not decisive, needs to be weighed carefully.2 As we shall see, the same is true for problems of exegesis. In the sphere of myth the extent of Propertius' debt to Homer is difficult to assess precisely. Since the Iliad and the Odyssey provided