We have seen how his idiosyncracies repelled the Latin taste. This is not surprising with His abnormal a writer who carries them so far as to Latinity. raise the question, the at first sight para doxical question, whether he is writing in Latin at all. Where else in Latin shall we find sentences like these? et duo in aduersum missi per moenia currus or IV. 10 (11). 24. This is not the Appian high road of Latin; it is an untrodden and sequestered bypath of Propertius' own. its causes. His chief demerits have been already enumerated. A good many of them are summed up in the one word obscurity. Much of this His obscurity: obscurity is due to the singularity of expression which has been just exemplified. These tendencies towards what is out of the way are by no means easy to unravel. But we may be certain of one thing. They are not due to affectation. They are peculiarities deeply rooted in his genius, they appear in the most spontaneous unstudied passages, and to compare them to the strainings of a conscious pedant like Persius is to miss the whole distinction between the far-fetched and the abnormal'. Besides the singularity to which I have referred and which 1 Some have explained his peculiarities as due in part to his Umbrian origin. It is a mere conjecture. I know not how to name and the love of literary allusion which he shared with others of his age, but which is more marked in him than in them, and a certain delight in archaisms which is all his own, his difficulty and obscurity is due to other causes which may be more easily defined. directness. First and chiefly it is due to a certain vagueness and indirectness in his manner of conceiving and presenting an idea. Where Vagueness; inother poets would bring it immediately before us, Propertius indicates the region where it may be found; and often his indications are by no means sufficient to identify it. There may be other ideas within the region; and the reader is left to choose between them. To change the metaphor, the outlines of his pictures lack sharpness and precision, and the colours and even forms on his canvas tend to blend imperceptibly with each other. Thus it is the general impression that fascinates us in his poems, not the proportion and perfection of its details. It is possible theoretically to distinguish between a certain tortuousness in Propertius' way of arriving at an idea and his indefiniteness in putting it before us. But the two things are in practice so much connected that I shall not attempt to separate them in the examples. To take perhaps the most striking example of all, where another would say to 'believe' a charge, Propertius says to 'disseminate' it, IV. 23. 14 note. 'You will not be fond of changing' is nec noua quaerendo semper amicus eris 1. 13. 12; 'to love one maiden is una amare domo III. 18. 8 (16. 24); in the same poem we have v. 13 quos utinam in nobis, uita, experiare labores, and v. 30 iam tibi de timidis iste superbus erit. In Iv. 6 (7). 38 'you will rarely succeed,' ut tibi succedat, uix semel esse potest. If the other refuses me her love,' altera si quando non sinit esse locum, 111. 15 (13). 38. So in adjectives and nouns. 'The tears fell fast adown,' ex oculis multa cadebat aqua Iv. 5 (6). 10 (also of sweat III. 15 (13). 38), 'fire-breathing bulls' flagrantes tauroś IV. 10 (11). 9, 'the realms of night' caecis locis I. 19. 8 opposed to superis locis III. 26. 4 (20. 50), and other examples in the commentary'. Brevity. Sometimes the cause is a desire for brevity2. The sphere of a word or phrase is left undefined and has to be gathered from the context. III. 10 (9). 21 quin ego deminuo curam (sc. mihi), IV. 1. 36 illum post cineres auguror ipse diem (to be taken with diem (futurum), not with auguror), IV. 4 (5). 6 nec miser aera paro clade, Corinthe, pia, &c. Hence words appear in new senses, rudis a stranger to love' iv. 16 (17). 7, pugnante 'struggling' (of ivy) v. 7. 79, diuidit causes dissension' 1. 12. 10. Somewhat different are cases like tuba 'trumpet-note,' manus 'movement of the hand,' iv. 4 (5). 3 nec tamen inuiso pectus mihi carpitur auro, 'the hateful love of gold. We may place here the use 3 of common for proper names, of which he has one striking example. The Fates, the Muses, and even the Danaids are all called 'the Sisters'; III. 5. 28, 1 Other traces of the tendency may be seen in his use of quicumque, quandocumque, talis (for hic) &c.; of esse, ire, &c., for more precise words; of in with the abl. 'in the case of,' and of the abl. itself, for which see below, pages cxviii., c. 2 The most striking is where he only gives the beginning and end of a thought, omitting the intermediate links. Sometimes an intermediate step in an argument is left out: sometimes two stages of an action or two scenes in a picture are run into one. Examples of the first are in 1. 2. 27, 8. 21, II. 7. 15, &c.; see notes, and compare the use of igitur below. Examples of the second are to be found in 1. 8. 15, 9. 29, III. 3. 18 (probably), and notes, and cf. 1. 1. 3 n. See also IV. 20. (7) 17 Amor ipse suo constringet pignera signo. (The tying of letter tablets came first; cf. v. 4. 82 pacta ligat; then the sealing.) 3 Sometimes, as in this example and v. 11. 85 mutarit ianua lectum, the idea has to be corrected as well as expanded. III. 28 (22). 27; v. 11. 27. So Cupid is puer and ales; I. 19. 5, III. 28. (22). 31. Paris is pastor, II. 2. 13. The use of mater for 'stepmother,' Iv. 7 (8). 38, is surprising. Compare v. 11. 21, 59 and notes. Occasionally harsh omissions occur, especially of the personal pronouns; e. g. tu where the person is changed Iv. 10 (11). 68, te ib. 24. 6. One of the peculiarities of Propertius is the great and often disproportionate stress which he lays on a single word and that word Stress on single frequently not one of the most promi words. Incoherence. nent syntactically in the sentence II. 24 (20). 20 hanc miser implorat nauita Leucothoen 'implores her help, as now divine,' v. 6. 52 quae nisi iusta subest excutit arma pudor. See more in the notes and Hertzb. 1. p. 142. Another source of obscurity is a disposition to be spasmodic and incoherent. His poems have often the appearance of being disarranged; and thus critics have resorted to lacunae and transpositions where these aids to intelligence ought never to have been invoked. The derangement goes deeper than this and penetrates to the very heart of a sentence. What disorder is this? IV. 12 (13). 55, 56 Dislocations in a sentence. te scelus accepto Thracis Polymestoris auro or this? Iv. 3 (4). 18 et subter captos arma sedere duces. But a For more examples, see Hertzb. p. 121 sqq. sentence is comparatively fortunate if its order is only perturbed. Frequently it is not finished at all, and sometimes there is no attempt to Anacoluthon. finish it; e.g. IV. 17 (18). 1-7, 19 (18). 21, 22. Hertzberg has shewn (p. 125 sqq.) that it ing particles. is in Propertius' manner to leave his sentences without connecting particles. Where he employs them, he is not less peculiar. If he Use of connectuses igitur where others would have used nam or enim (Iv. 19 (18). l. c. tuque, o Minoa uenumdata Scylla figura, tondens purpurea regna paterna coma, hanc igitur dotem uirgo desponderat hosti; cf. II. 5. 27 n.), his nam and namque, on the other hand, appear where they add little, if anything, to the sense, III. 14 (12). 12, iv. 5 (6). 5. His use of certe is not less peculiar, II. 7. 1 n. He is fond of the violent at, where others would use sed or even et; e.g. Iv. 8 (9). 14. The connexion of sentences is often extremely loose, 1. 18. 23, 24 quot of sentences. curas...quae...cognita sunt, IV. 16 (17). 40 Loose connexion haec ego referam qualis Pindarico spiritus ore tonat, III. 13 (11). 34 ultima talis erit quae mihi prima fides. Generally we may say that he is tions. fond of abrupt transitions of thought and Violent transiconstruction. For the latter see below, p. cxxiv. The former are too common to need illustration. Sometimes on the other hand the opposites of these tendencies occasion difficulty. For ex cies. ample, instead of incoherence we find Opposite tendentoo close a coherence between the mem bers of sentences. Words which we should at first sight suppose went with the sentence generally, we find on examination are to be conExcessive substrued only with a part of it. Thus we tlty of conget a sub-construction, as it were, besides struction. a principal one; and a part of the sentence is bracketed off from the rest. Thus we have v. 3. 20 struxit querulas-rauca-per-ossa tubas, ib. 11. 29 fama-perauita-tropaca &c., I. 10. 30 qui numquam uacuopectore-liber erit &c. There are three examples in i. 13. 2-8. Sometimes a word goes equally with |