The Bad Exemplum in
Propertius 2.8

Sean McElroy

sic igitur prima moriere atetate, Properti?
sed morere; interitu gaudeat illa tuo!
exagitat nostros Manis, sectetur et umbras,
insultetque rogis, calcet et ossa mea !
quid? non Antigonae tumulo Boeotius Haemon
corruit ipse suo saucius ense latus,
et sua cum miserae permiscuit ossa puellae,
qua sine Thebanam noluit ire domum ?
sed non effugies : mecum moriaris oportet;
hoc eodem ferro stillet uterque cruor.
quamvis ista mihi mors est inhonesta futura:
mors inhonesta quidem, tu moriere tamen.
ille etiam abrepta desertus coniuge Achilles
cessere in tectis pertulit arma sua…

So are you just going to die like this in the prime of life, Propertius?
Hah! go ahead and die; let her delight in your ruin!
Let her harass my soul, chase after my shade,
dance on my pyre and stomp on my bones!
What is this? At Antigone’s tomb did Boeotian Haemon not fall
down dead,
wounded in the side by his own sword,
And mingle his bones with those of the poor girl
he did not want to go home without?
But no, you won’t get away: you have to die with me;
the blood of each will be stilled by the same sword.
Yes, this death will be dishonorable for me…
fine, a dishonorable death—you’ll die nonetheless!
Even Achilles himself, alone when his girl was snatched away
let his weapons sit unused in his tent…

In Propertius 2.8, the sense of what look like fairly cohesive parts of a fairly cohesive elegy [my girl has been taken away and you think I shouldn’t cry about it (1-2) / Even Achilles was put off when his girl was snatched away so how can you expect better from me? (29-40)] is disturbed in the middle by a distressingly awkward exemplum (Haemon’s suicide after the death of Antigone). It’s a chance, I think, for Propertius to examine the problems that can arise when comparison to the “world” of literature insinuates itself into the individual’s perceptions of, and governs his reactions to, the real world, which is inevitably less profound. How is that for grandiose?

The logic of the poem works—in an elegiac sort of way—until about line 21. There, Propertius (shall we just go ahead and call him Ego) seems to splash a bit of water on his face after some lines of self-pity about the miserable death he is predicting for himself. How to deal with endless despair and self-pity? In true elegiac form, per exemplum. Generally Propertius picks his exempla so that they govern the logic of the elegy fairly subtly, and aren’t really noticed unless you go back over the poem and try to figure out what on earth you just read. But here, especially with quid? (“what?”) at the beginning of the line, it seems like the exemplum has been rashly imposed on the poem.

If we step back, Haemon/Antigone is a weird fit for Ego’s situation because it requires that Ego (man) correspond to Antigone (woman). Questions of self-mocking emasculation aside, after “quid?” this is reminder #2 that this exemplum is somehow out of place or at least awkward. But the logic works, I suppose: she can’t mock me after I die; look at how sad Haemon was after Antigone died. If I am Antigone, then Cynthia’s role in this awkward emasculate poetic relationship demands that she mourn me just like Haemon. The allusion, I suppose, fits the circumstances, though Propertius stresses that it is hopelessly strained.

Then (26-7) the exemplum rather grimly takes over: “sed non effigies: mecum moriaris oportet; / hoc eodem ferro stillet uterque cruor.” (“But you won’t get away: you have to die with me; the blood of both will be stopped with the same sword.”) Ego turned to the exemplum to get himself out of self-pity by giving literary evidence of devotion after death; but it leaves him with an extreme and rather unexpected solution: Cynthia has to die too, and like it. He has resorted to allusion to help him deal with the situation, but by picking Haemon/Antigone (which did not really fit in the first place) he has trapped himself in a relationship wherein both of them have to die. This is the problem, Propertius seems to say, with processing one’s personal life through comparison to literature: life and exemplum don’t necessarily match up, which can result in a conclusion that is grossly out of sync with one’s actual circumstances.

This is creepy but sardonically funny too. Here we have the crestfallen lover bemoaning his pitiful fate and addressing it in the most grandiose literary terms. Propertius stresses the artificiality of the comparison; he throws in an extra little jab at Ego by assigning him the literary role of a woman; he shows how the lover loses control, in a way, of reality when he allows the exemplum to take over. I can’t help but laugh, though it makes me feel sort of evil. Paul Veyne thought Elegy was funny, in part because of the discrepancy between the elegiac “demimonde” and the heroic world to which the Ego compared it. But Veyne seemed to miss the other side of the joke, the tragedy of a mundane existence that is perceived by those who live it in inappropriately profound terms. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock laments the same tragedy:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’

Walkway Inside the Colliseum.

Photograph by Emily Jacobs. Used by permission.

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