The elegiac persona and sincerity in Propertius

Abstract

This article proposes to discuss the construction of the elegiac persona in Propertius, starting from the understanding of what elegiac love would be and how the elegiac poets had a systematic elaboration to sing about this feeling. For this system to work, two characters were fundamental: the passionate lover and a beloved woman, here, Propertius and Cynthia, respectively. The creation of these characters results in what Paul Veyne presents as an “elegiac game”, this game is fundamentally anchored in the notion ofpersona and mainly in verisimilitude and rhetorical sincerity. Therefore, the elegiac game is guided by the ambiguous relationship between what appears to be real and what is certainly fictional, and this is configured solely as a matter of style necessary for the systematics of elegiac love to take effect. In this way, both Propertius and Cynthia can be read as  personae and poetic artifice.