Abstract
This paper traces the history and evolution of humanist re-use of the first couplet of Propertius’s elegy 2, 2, from Gregorio Tifernate’s Poemata to the end of the Quattrocento. Continued re-use of the couplet, or of its constituent elements, make it a veritable commonplace at a time when collections of loci communi were first coming into existence as ordered and consciously prepared works. The attraction of this particular couplet from Propertius was enhanced considerably by a parallel use in the Petrarchan vernacular love poetry tradition. This poetic commonplace became so well established that its very language appears in Christian moral poetry from the period, as evidenced by an example taken from Baptista Mantuanus’s collection of eclogues entitled Adulescentia. The commonplace established by Quattrocento elegiac poets thus became a weapon in the arsenal of edifying Christian poetry, whose authors redeployed elegiac language in their criticism of mankind’s excessive devotion to earthly passions.
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Propertius, Elegie libro II. Introduzione, testo e commento, ed. P. Fedeli, Cambridge, 2005, p. 107.
Joseph Justus Scaliger, Castigationes in Catullum, Tibullum, Propertium, 2 vols, Paris, 1577, II, p. 117.
Propertius, Elegies I–IV, ed. L. Richardson, Jr, Norman OK, 1978, p. 218: ‘Scaliger’s original acute observation has gone by the board, but it was surely right; the two poems belong together as a single unit. On the other hand, there is no reason to reshuffle the couplets’.
The unity of Propertius’s second book of elegies has itself long been a subject of scholarly conjecture. Several commentators follow Lachmann’s suggestion that it was originally comprised of two distinct and separate units, the first of which ended after II.ix. Others prefer to lengthen the ‘first’ of these books (IIa) to include II.x and II.xi: see R. O. A. M. Lyne, ‘Propertius 2.10 and 11 and the Structure of Books “2a” and “2b”’, Journal of Roman Studies, 88, 1988, pp. 21–36 (23–4); O. Skutsch, ‘The Second Book of Propertius’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 79, p. 229–33 (230); Propertius, Elegie (n. 1 above), pp. 27–31; M. Hubbard, Propertius, London, 1974, pp. 41–2; or even II.xii: see S. J. Heyworth, ‘Division, Transmission, and the Editor’s Task’, in Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar, ed. R. Brock and A. J. Woodman, VIII, Leeds, 1995, p. 117–48 (167–8). Such a line of enquiry has at times led critics to consider both the disposition of the second book and the very unity of individual pieces. In what more specifically concerns elegy II.ii, the oft-cited article by J. K. King, ‘Propertius 2, 2: A Callimachean multum in parvo’, Wiener Studien, 94, 1981, pp. 169–84 (172), argues convincingly in favour of the poem’s unity as it appears in the late medieval sources, also attributing to it an explicitly programmatic character which would justify its placement among the book’s opening pieces. In this same vein, R. O. A. M. Lyne, ‘Introductory Poems in Propertius: 1.1 and 2.12’, Papers of the Cambridge Philological Society, 44, 1998, pp. 158–81 (177), aptly ascribes to it, along with II.iii, the role of ‘explanatory poem’, placed at or near the beginning of a book with a view to ‘explaining the new publication’. Independently of Scaliger’s conjecture, though, no manuscript evidence exists to support the intuition of a single text combining II.ii and II.iii. For a useful new evaluation of the textual evidence and a conversative reappraisal based on manuscript readings, see M. Dominicy, ‘L’Élégie II, 2 de Properce’, in Stylus: la parole dans ses formes. Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Jacqueline Dangel, ed. M. Baratin et al., Paris, 2010, pp. 693–704.
See, e.g. most recently Dominicy, ‘L’Élégie II, 2’ (n. 4 above), p. 701.
Propertius, Elegies, ed., and tr. G. P. Goold. Cambridge MA, 1990, p. 122 (II.ii.1–4): ‘Free I was, intending to live with an unshared bed; but in making peace Love tricked me. Why does such beauty linger on earth among mortals? Ah, Jove, I pardon your amours in days of old.’ All translations from the Latin are mine unless otherwise indicated.
P. J. Heslin, Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil: Rivalry, Allegory, and Polemic, Oxford, 2018. Heslin’s useful discussion defends anew the thematic coherence of II.2, against a strong tradition arguing in favour of significant emendations. He characterizes this enduring critical attitude with regard to the brief elegy that has so provoked the suspicion of textual critics, p. 36: ‘In fact, this elegy is held by radical editors to be nothing more than a fragment, typical of the dislocation that is claimed to exist in the first half of book two’.
A. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford, 1996, pp. 51-82.
N. Tonelli, ‘I Rerum vulgarium fragmenta e il codice elegiaco’, in L’elegia nella tradizione poetica italiana, ed. A. Comboni and A. Di Ricco, Trento, 2003, pp. 17–36 (19).
On the notion of literary genres such as the elegy as a kind of ‘ideology’, see the remarks of G. B. Conte in his noted article on Latin love elegy and the ‘limits’ of its discourse: ‘Love without Elegy: The Remedia Amoris and the Logic of a Genre’, Poetics Today, 10.3, 1989, pp. 441–69.
For a full quotation of the passage from Romans 6, see n. 59 below.
J. Fabre-Serris, ‘Generic Polemic in the Bucolics: Vergil, Gallus, and remedia amoris’, in Vergil and Elegy, ed. A. Keith and M. Y. Myers, Toronto etc., 2023, pp. 48–62; C. G. Perkell, ‘The “Dying Gallus” and the Design of Eclogue 10’, Classical Philology, 91.2, 1996, pp. 128–40.
See, e.g. the remarkable collections of Murmellius (1512) and Trepta (1583): Johannes Murmellius, Ex elegiacis trium illustrium poetarum Tibulli, Propertii ac Ovidii carminibus selecti versus: magis memorabiles atque puerorum institutioni aptiores, Deventer, 1512; Georgius Trepta, Phrasium ex Tibullo et Propertio collectarum libri tres: quibus subjecti sunt integri versus a Iacobo Furmano Libenverdensi, Leipzig, 1583.
E. MacPhail, Dancing around the Well. The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism, Leiden and Boston, 2014, p. 74.
Gregorio Tifernate, Opuscula cum aliorum opusculis, Venice, 1498, sig. Aiiir: ‘Free I lived, and tranquil, far from every throng, / fearing nobody’s ambush, the arms of none. / Length of time had brought me oblivion of amorous cares; / Forgetful of passion, forgetful of love’s flame was I. / But nothing is secure, and to injure an unsuspecting man / Is neither a great nor a difficult task. / Behold, Cupid emerged from the ambush that he had set; / Behold, a new Love was troubling my heart.’
C. E. Trinkaus, Adversity’s Noblemen. The Italian Humanists on Happiness, New York, 1940, p. 16.
S. De Beer, The Poetics of Patronage. Poetry as Self-Advancement in Giannantonio Campano, Turnhout, 2013, p. 339; P. Cecchini, Giannantonio Campano. Studi sulla produzione poetica, Urbino, 1995, pp. 15–20.
See esp. Michele Ferno’s edition of Giannantonio Campano, Omnia ... opera, Venice, 1502; the poetry begins at f. 273r, under the heading ‘Joannis Campani poetae clarissimi elegiarum epigrammatumque liber primus’.
Giannantonio Campano, Epistolae et poemata, una cum vita auctoris. ed. J. B. Mencken, Leipzig, 1707, p. 2: ‘As for me, I am nonetheless driven against my will to the Paphian flames, / Just as a sacrificial victim is carried forth to the sacred feast. / Free was I, untroubled back then by any love, / Nor was I obliged to tolerate anything against my desires. / I suffered a secret yoke, and offered my neck; / Ah, foolish I was, so easily to be captured by the silent ruse!’
De Beer, Poetics of Patronage (n. 17 above), pp. 335–6; Cecchini, Giannantonio Campano (n. 17 above), p. 11: ‘Dei suoi scritti in prosa e in versi il Campano non giunse a costituire quella raccolta organica e definitiva che era nei suoi propositi’.
Cristoforo Landino, Poems, ed., and tr. M. P. Chatfield. Cambridge MA, 2008, pp. 6–7 (Xandra, I.iii, ‘Quo tempore amore oppressus sit’, vv. 5–12): ‘Here, willingly one remembers, ah, the days of early youth, / When the heart was free from so great a love, / When I could snore away in security whole nights / And laugh if some wretched lover was at hand, / While yet no sighs disturbed a saddened heart, / And salt tears did not besmear a gloomy face. / Alas, who was I then, who am I now? Have you the right, / Brutal Cupid, to alter minds so very much?’
Ibid., pp. 80–1 (Xandra, II.v, ‘Ad Xandram’, vv. 13–18): ‘Once I might have done it, while rectitude flourished: In my upright mind, when free and whole of heart; / Now wherever love leads me, wherever it drags me, / It must be followed all the way – ah, too imperious love! / He is happy indeed, more blest than the gods themselves / Who flees your empire, pitiless Cupid.’
Ugolino Verino, Poems, ed. and tr. by A.G. Wilson, Cambridge MA, 2016, p. 183 (Fiammetta, II.xlix, ‘Ad Nicolaum Beninum et Ginevram eius amasiam’, vv. 1–8): ‘Once you were free and scoffed at my being in love, / Scorning as you did the proud tyranny of the winged god. / Now with her snowy locks flaxen-haired Ginevra has brought you low, / Leaving you downcast and blustering no more winged words, / And she has bound your arms with two hundred knots, / With no hope of freedom granted you. / Now go and scorn Cupid’s cruel bow; / Unhappy man, you will experience my plight.’
D. Coppini, ‘Properzio nella poesie d’amore degli umanisti’, in Colloquium Propertianum (secundum), ed. F. Santucci and S. Vivona, Assisi, 1981, pp. 169–210 (175); N. Tonelli, ‘Landino: la Xandra e il codice elegiaco’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 179, 2002, pp. 192–211 (194).
Naldo Naldi, Elegiarum libri III ad Laurentium Medicen, ed. L. Juhasz, Leipzig, 1934, p. 83 (I.xxiv, ‘Ad Albam’, vv. 1–10): ‘Free I was, and I contemplated renouncing my sad cares, / Which savage Love had imposed on me until that moment. / Then, seizing me against my will, just as before, solemn Cupid / Ordered that I return to his camp. / Why, cruel one, do you wish that I suffer so many of your arrows, / Or that the smoldering torches burn deep in my bones? / Had it not been enough, while my youth carried me, / Savage Cupid, often to have borne your threats? / During all of my youth, never did I leave your standards, / Wherefore do I often, sorry wretch, suffer even more grievously from the deep wound.’
Ovid, Amores, I.vi.34 and Ars amatoria, I.18.
Propertius, Elegiae, I.i.34; vii.20, 26; ix.12, 28; x.20; xix.22; II.iii.24; vi.22; viii.40; x.26; xiii.2; xxx.2; xxxiii.42; III.xxiii.16.
G. Paparelli, Callimaco Esperiente (Filippo Buonaccorsi), Salerno, 1971, pp. 97–8.
Filippo Buonaccorsi, Carmina, ed. F. Sica, Naples, 1981, p. 47 (I.ii, ‘Ad Bassum’, vv. 1–8): ‘Free was I and I thought to myself about having no loves, / Contented to be able to live in a chaste bed. / But then Love violated the treaty of a settled peace, / And orders me to submit my neck to its customary yoke. / The first was Doris to enflame my heart with foreign / Torches, and she sat on high in the citadel of my mind, / But cold stars shattered this nascent passion, / And a promising love soon perished.’
King, ‘Propertius 2,2’ (n. 4 above), pp. 351–2.
MS Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. XII, 234, f. 1r: ‘Petri Contareni Adorni Filii Veneti / Ordinis senatorii ad Gelliam Elegiarum Liber / Primus Incipit foeliciter’.
On this important Quattrocento Venetian humanist, the father of the poet and historiographer Pietro Bembo, see N. Giannetto, Bernardo Bembo umanista e politico, Florence, 1985, who cites Pietro Contarini twice (pp. 80 and 265), each time amid enumerations of authors who dedicated works to Bembo. She also nicely sums up the prestige of the Bembo family in the Venetian context, p. 89: ‘La famiglia Bembo, in particolare, è una delle più antiche della Serenissima, una di quelle che sin dalle origini fanno parte del Maggior Consiglio e si alternano nel ricoprire importanti cariche pubbliche’.
Contarini, Ad Gelliam (n. 31 above), f. 42r: ‘Ad oratorem facundissimum: juris consultumque gravissimum: et equitem splendidissimum Bernardum Bembum’ (‘So long as she flourished in the early years of verdant youth, / My Gellia pleased a great many men. / But because spiteful old age is wont to effect many changes, / It could well be that the same beauty and honour do not remain. / Nevertheless, howsoever she may be, so as not to refuse your request, / Bembo, before your eyes for inspection she now comes’).
B. Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, 2009, p. 20.
P. Frasson, ‘Contarini, Pietro’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, XXVIII, Rome, 1983, pp. 262–4 (204): ‘Delle opere del C., oltre all’orazione funebre già ricordata, c’è pervenuto un consistente gruppo di composizioni latine in distici elegiaci, spesso in forma di lettere rivolte agli amici, in lode della sua amata, Gellia. Si tratta probabilmente del lavoro che lo impegnò per tutta la vita, dove mise a frutto l’assidua lettura dei classici, e principalmente di Tibullo, Catullo et Ovidio’.
Propertius, Elegiae (n. 6 above), p. 3 (III.xxi): ‘Crescit enim assidue spectando cura puellae ... ’ (‘For my passion for the girl grows steadily with looking at her ...’; Goold’s translation, slightly modified.) Cf. Corpus tibullianum, III.xvii.1–2: ‘Estne tibi, Cerinthe, tuae pia cura puellae, / Quod mea nunc vexat corpora fessa calor ?’ (‘Cerinthus, do you have any tender thought for your girl, now that fever racks her tired frame?’; F. W. Cornish’s translation, slightly modified, in Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris, 2nd ed. rev. G. P. Goold, Cambridge MA, 1988, p. 335).
Contarini, Ad Gelliam (n. 31 above), f. 3r: ‘Free I was, and no girl problems to distress me, / For I was ignorant of Love’s torch and of his bow. / My delight was in the effort of the hunt and in laying my / Weary body at the grassy lip of a sweet stream. / To surround entire forests with the hunting-net was my joy, / And to chase the backs of hares with swift dogs. / I hoped to meet a powerful beast face-to-face / With my weapon, and inflict a wound with strong hand, / Then as by the setting sun I carried home my spoils, / Over my shoulder hung the hare I had taken.’
Propertius, Elegiae (n. 6 above), p. 64 (I.ix.21): ‘quam pueri totiens arcum sentire medullis’ (‘than feel Cupid’s bow strike to your very heart again and again’). Also, Ovid, Amores, I.xi.11: ‘credibile est et te sensisse Cupidinis arcus’ (‘One could believe that you, too, had felt the darts of Cupid’), in Ovid, Heroides and Amores, 2nd edition, rev. G. P. Goold, Cambridge MA, 1986, p. 365).
Pontano, Parthenopeus, II, iii, ‘Queritur de Baianis balneis’, vv. 57–8: ‘Arcum stringit Amor, moderatur tela Cupido / Laxandique arcus signa dat ipsa Venus’ (‘Love draws the bow, Cupid aims the darts, / Venus herself gives the sign to release the bow’s shot’).
Propertius, Elegiae, I. xiii.26; II.vii.8; IV.iii.50; IV.iv.70.
Tibullus, Elegiae, II.iv.6.
Horace, Carmina, III.iv.13.
Virgil, Aeneid, VII.106; VIII.186; XI.566.
Ovid, Amores (n. 38 above), p. 462 (III.v.5–6: ‘Area gramineo suberat viridissima prato, / Umida de guttis lene sonantis aquae’ (‘Nearby was a plot of deepest green, a grassy mead, humid with the tricklings of gently sounding water’).
Virgil, Aeneid, IV.120–2: ‘His ego nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum, / Dum trepidant alae saltusque indagine cingunt, / Desuper infundam et tonitru caelum omne ciebo’ (‘On them, while the hunters run to and fro and gird the glades with nets, I will pour down from above a black rain mingled with hail, and wake the whole sky with thunder’), in Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, rev. ed. G. P. Goold, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 431, H. R. Faircloth’s translation, slightly modified.)
Cf. Propertius Elegiae (n. 6 above), p. 105 (I.xx.3): ‘Saepe imprudenti fortuna occurrit amanti’ (‘Chance often confronts the lover when he least expects’); Tibullus, I.ii.27–8: ‘Nec sinit occurrat quisquam qui corpora ferro / Vulneret aut rapta praemia veste petat’ (‘And [Venus] lets no one cross my path to wound my body with his steel or seize my garments for his prize’).
Claudian, Epithalamium de nuptiis Honorii Augusti, vv. 1–7.
The theme is, of course, widely represented in Petrarch’s Canzoniere. See esp. poems 89, 96 and 97: ‘Ahi, bella libertà, come tu m’ai, / Partendo da me …’ The theme is introduced in the sonnet traditionally designated as the collection’s opening piece: Petrarch, Canzoniere, ed. M. Santagata, Milan, 1996, p. 5 (Rime I, vv. 1–4): ‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / Di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva il core / In sul mio primo giovenile errore / Quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’I’ sono ...’ On the dissemination of this motif (and others) through the imitation of Petrarch’s Italian imitators such as il Cariteo, Antonio Tebaldeo, Serafino de Ciminelli and Pietro Bembo, see J. Dellaneva, Unlikely Exemplars: Reading and Imitating beyond the Italian Canon in French Renaissance Poetry, Newark, 2009.
Landino, Poems (n. 21 above) pp. 130–1 (Xandra, II.xxv, vv. 77–8).
Baptista Mantuanus, The Eclogues of Mantuan, ed., and tr. L. Piepho, New York, 1989, p. 19 (Adulescentia, II, vv. 103–8): ‘When the lad saw her, he perished. Beholding her, he drank in love’s flames and swallowed down its unseen fires into his heart, fires that can be neither extinguished by water nor lessened by shade or herbs and magical murmurings. Forgetting his herd and the losses to his household, he was wholly consumed by the fires of love and spent his bitter nights in sorrow.’
Baptista Mantuanus, Bucolica seu adolescentia, in decem ęglogas divisa: ab Iodoco Badio Ascensio familiariter exposita: cum indice dictionum. ..., Strasbourg, 1510, f. 13r.
Mantuanus, Eclogues (n. 50 above), p. 169; The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, ed. W. P. Mustard, Baltimore, 1911, p. 113.
Adulescentia, II, vv. 120–30, in Mantuanus, Eclogues (n. 50 above), p. 16: ‘Ipsae etiam leges rubrisque volumina loris / clausa vetant scelus hoc et detestantur amores’ (‘Moreover, the laws themselves written in volumes enclosed by red leather bindings forbid this crime and abhor love’).
Mantuanus, Adulescentia, II, vv. 135–46, in Mantuanus, Eclogues (n. 50 above), p. 18: ‘Far and wide, this delusion, this shrewd-seeming madness reigns supreme. Man flatters himself and wants to be thought a clever creature, but heedlessly he spreads many nets for himself and tumbles into pitfalls that he himself has dug. Before now, he was free, but he fashioned a servile yoke for himself. This is the burden of those laws (for I too have seen those volumes) that neither our fathers of old could observe nor we ourselves or our children in ages to come can uphold. Behold how foolish is man’s wisdom! He hopes for heaven and trusts that there is a place for him among the stars. Perhaps when he dies, he will be changed into a bird and his spirit will rise high into the air on newly acquired wings.’
Acts 15.10: ‘Nunc ergo quid tentatis Deum, imponere jugum super cervices discipulorum quod neque patres nostri, neque nos portare potuimus?’
Baptista Mantuanus, Adulescentia, ed. and tr. A. Severi, Bologna, 2010, p. 63.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 329–31: ‘Humana malignas / Cura dedit leges, et quod natura remittit, / Invida jura negant’ (‘Human civilization has made spiteful laws, and what nature allows, the jealous laws forbid’; ed. and tr. F. J. Miller, 2nd ed. revised by G. P. Goold, II, Cambridge MA, 1984, p. 87.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.331–3: ‘Gentes tamen esse feruntut, / In quibus et nato genitrix et nata parenti / Jungitur, et pietas geminato crescit amore’ (‘And yet they say that there are tribes among whom mother and son, daughter with father mates, and natural love is increased by the double bond’; ibid., p. 89).
Romans 6.17–22: ‘But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life’.
Adulescentia, I, 48–9, in Mantuanus, Eclogues (n. 50 above), p. 6: ‘Ludit Amor sensus, oculos praestringit et aufert / Libertatem animi et mira nos fascinat arte ...’
Adulescentia, I.114–16, in ibid., p. 8: ‘Quisquis amat servit : sequitur captivus amantem, / Fert domita cervice jugum, fert verbera tergo / Dulcia, fert stimulos, trahit et bovis instar aratrum’. (‘He who loves also serves; he follows his lover as a captive, endures the yoke on his conquered neck, endures her sweet scourging and goading, and like an ox he draws the plow’).
See L. Piepho, ‘Love and Marriage in the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 55.2, 1993, pp. 245–54 (248).
Girolamo Falletti, De bello Sicambrico libri IIII. Et eiusdem alia poemata, libri VIII, Venice, 1557, ff. LIXv–LXr: ‘You should flee harlots’ lures. A woman will shamefully / Make you a servant. Will you be able to put up with these toils / And suffer her imperious command? And withdraw in misery, defeated, / Having relinquished your spoils, and obey once again an arrogant mistress? / Nothing could be more shameful, I believe that nothing is worse, than / To submit one’s neck to the yoke of miserly Venus, and to serve a lioness. / A free man, you shall become a slave; if she requires gifts, they must be given. / Otherwise, she will cast you aside with an evil look. / A woman has a fickle heart, and her ever-changing mind ranges to and fro.’
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Nassichuk, J. Liber eram. A Propertian Motif in Late Fifteenth-Century Latin Poetry. Int class trad (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-024-00662-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-024-00662-4