Literature and history

Welcome. Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 58, She Caught Me With Her Eyes.

This episode is on the Roman poet Sextus Propertius, who was born in about 50 B.C.

and died sometime before 1 B.C. ye. The exact chronology is uncertain.

Propertius was one of the younger Augustine age poets.

Today he's most famous as a love poet, a more tempered successor to his predecessor,

Katullus, with a wide variety of poems written to a single addressee, but lacking, for the most part,

Catullus's ferocity and profanity.

And like Catullus, Propertius wrote more than love poems.

Propertius's four books of poems, put into circulation between 29 and 15 b.C.

include a wide assortment of themes and topics, Roman history, for instance,

contemporary social norms, mythology, and literary theory, to name just a few.

Propertius was born just before Julius Caesar's Civil War erupted in 49 BC.

Virgil, who was born in 70 BC and Horace, who was born in 70 bc. E and Horace, who was born in 65, were among the last Roman poets

to have been alive while Rome's Republican government was still operational.

Propertious, however, and after him Ovid grew to adulthood during Rome's civil wars.

Caesar against Pompey, then Octavian and the Senate against Antony.

Then Octavian and Antony against Brutus and Cassius, then Octavian against Follvia and Lucius Antonius, then Octavian against Sextus Pompeius, then Octavian against

Antney and Cleopatra.

Propertius' first two decades were witness to all these conflicts, a bloody and morally murky

period during which, as we've seen in the poetry of Horace and the echlogs and Georgics of Virgil,

...