Properzio. Elegie Libro II. Introduzione, testo e commento
Paolo Fedeli
ARCA 45. ISBN 978-0-905205-42-7. x+1072 pp. Cloth. 2005.
The Augustan elegiac poet Sextus Propertius composed four books of elegies, erotic, political, and personal, in the first two decades of the reign of the emperor Augustus. Propertius’ unique combination of passionate commitment to love and life with profound Hellenistic learning and wit has endowed his elegies with a vividness and variety which still fascinates after two thousand years.
Of the four books of Propertius, Book 2 has always presented the most, and the most impenetrable, difficulties of text and interpretation. Paolo Fedeli’s major commentary on the book, written in lucid and elegant Italian, brings to bear on it the learning and judgement acquired in a lifetime of engagement with and experience of the work of Propertius. Its thorough and detailed treatments of the elegies of Book 2 will greatly improve the accessibility of these complex and tantalising poems to both scholars and students.
Properzio Elegie Libro II. Introduzione, testo e commento contains detailed analytic indexes, and an extensive bibliography of major works cited.
Paolo Fedeli has been Professor of Latin at the University of Bari (Italy) since 1974; he was previously Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Freiburg (Switzerland). He has published widely on Cicero, and on Latin poets of the late republic and early empire — Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and, most extensively, Propertius, on whom he is the world’s leading commentator and textual scholar. His earlier contributions to Propertian scholarship include commentaries on Book 4 (Bari 1965), Book 1 (Florence 1980) and Book 3 (Bari 1985), and his Teubner text of Propertius (Stuttgart 1984), generally regarded as the most reliable ever constituted.
REVIEWS
Euphrosyne 34 (2006), 408-9 (Aires A. Nascimento).
BMCR 2006.03.25 (J.L. Butrica).
Latomus 77 (2008) 228-9 (Antonio Ramírez de Verger). “Sin embargo, la edición y comentario de F. al libro II de la Elegías de Propercio será una obra de obligada referencia para los estudiosos de Propercio y una guía magnífica para estudiantes posgraduados y amantes del gran poeta de Asís. - El volumen, excelentemente editado, se cierra con una serie de índices muy útiles ...”
Gnomon 81 (2009) 395-407 (H.-C. Günther).
Classical World 101 (2007) 105-6 (Alessandro Barchiesi). “This is both a fundamental reference work and an interim report on ongoing controversies about the structure and ordering of Propertius' elegies. The production of the work by Francis Cairns Ltd. is excellent …”