Arethusa

Propertius Elegy 4.9 embodies a paradox. This version of Hercules' adventure on the site of the future Rome emphasises the impossibility of constructing fixed levels of cultural significance within the mythic and historicised Roman past, yet in the rewriting of this myth, poet, reader, and text are implicated in the process of configuring the past that the poem seeks to subvert. ¹ Propertius involves his audience in a discourse that uses Augustan mythic aetiologies to demonstrate how a burgeoning "industry" of cultural mythmaking can not only destabilise how the Romans interpret their past and present, but may even undermine their experience of the physical city through which they walk and in which they worship. Elegy 4.9 plays a central role in the poet's construction of multiple levels of aetiological referentiality throughout Book 4 and opens up another space within which the poet's self-proclaimed stance as the Roman Callimachus (4.1.64) can be acted out with engaging degrees of irony and engrossing cultural intertextuality. ² Building on Micaela Janan's study (1998), I suggest that, by [End Page 259] examining the intersections between Propertius's subversion of literature, gender, and "Augustan" religious and cultural poetics, we can gain a more engaged sense of how a variety of socio-cultural ideologies were intertwining--or perceived to be intertwining--in the Augustan era. By evoking a range of genres and mythic stories in a narrative firmly grounded in the topography of Rome past and (Augustan) present, Propertius simultaneously colludes in the rewriting or "refoundation" of Roman history and undermines the viability of all attempts to impose a monolithic version of the Roman experience. ³

In Elegy 4.9, Propertius destabilises all programmatic models of Romanness through the creation of a poetic space in which literary, historical, mythic, political, and gendered cultural icons can be deconstructed (and potentially reconstructed) at will, and this destabilisation has implications for our reading of Propertius as an "Augustan" poet. A retreat from readings that enforce a semiotic closure for Elegy 4.9 makes it available for our attempts to construe "Augustanism" and to engage more openly with the multiple cultural and political (re)constructions of late first century B.C.E. Rome. This interpretative destabilisation of the poem is focused primarily on two interconnected strategies developed by Propertius in Elegy 4.9: (1) a problematisation of the interplay between the visual and verbal registers, leading to a significatory space where definitions and demarcations are fluid and shifting, and (2) an ironising approach to Virgilian discourse that plays upon a nexus of gender, identity, and cult and provides a cultural locus in which these themes can be developed. Following Virgil, Hercules' foundation of the Ara Maxima ought to be the primary aetiological focus, yet this foundation is summarily dismissed. Furthermore, the other key aetiology--why that particular cult of Hercules excluded women--is deflated by Propertius's ironising treatment. Taken together, however, the foundation of the Ara Maxima and its exclusion of women (in opposition to the women only cult of Bona Dea), nudges the reader towards one possible "meaning" of this text. This paradigmatic exclusion can function as a model for political and cultural valorisation of gender difference in a society where gender roles [End Page 260] are predicated on male political and military engagement and female exclusion from the civic public sphere. ⁴ Perhaps this poem also questions the potentially far-reaching consequences of such separatism for the Roman state. As was the case with the tricky narrator of Elegy 4.2--Vertumnus--and the succeeding poems, the poem teaches a lesson in reading between the lines, using offbeat angles and disturbing emphases to underline instability and artificiality in Augustan representation. ⁵

Recent readings of Elegy 4.9 have begun to draw out the resonances of gender and nationality that pervade Propertius's poetic construction of Elegies Book 4, particularly poems 4 (Tarpeia) and 10 (the spolia opima...