Drink, suspicion and comedy in Propertius 1.3

Abstract

Propertius 1.3 famously begins with the drunken poet returning from a night out to find hispuellaCynthia asleep. The sleeping Cynthia is then apparently idealised by the poet through a series of comparisons with mythological heroines, until she wakes up and shows her true and less elevated character, shrewishly nagging the poet for staying out late with another woman, and thereby destroying his illusions. Some of the wit and irony of the situation has been pointed out in previous accounts of the poem; this treatment takes a closer look at the text, especially at the mythical analogues for Cynthia applied at the beginning of the poem, and argues that part of the wit and amusement of the poem derives from its articulation of the poet's suspicions of Cynthia's infidelity. This is not a tragic or dramatic effect, but rather a clever and amusing comedy; the amusing self-characterisation of the poet as a drunken bumbler racked with lust and suspicion is fully consistent with the kind of elegist envisaged by Paul Veyne, who rightly stresses that Roman love-elegy has much more to do with literary entertainment than with the intense analysis of passion. The scene is being narrated by the poet with retrospective wit and irony against himself; to use the convenient terms employed by Winkler in his book on Apuleius, the poet asauctor(writer of the poem) provides an entertaining view of the poet asactor(character in the poem's story).