Focusing on the first-person speaker's representation as a unified as well as unifying and thus constitutive aspect of the text, this study will stimulate further discussion of an ‘old’ question that poses itself sooner or later to scholars of Propertius or Tibullus or both: How should one conceive of the persona that Propertius adopts in his fourth book of elegies? How many different speakers does Tibullus feature in his two-book collection?
The analysis is based on Karl Bühler's organon model (Sprachtheorie (1965)), a linguistic approach that differentiates the expressive, representative and conative (i.e. appealing) functions or roles of communication. Applied to the poetry of Propertius and Tibullus, this theoretical framework is used for identifying the role or roles (e.g. faithful/unfaithful lover, rich/poor, poet, magister amoris) that the first-person speaker takes on over the course of a poem, a book and the entire oeuvre of each elegist. The compiled list of seventeen different manifestations draws on the findings of R. Müller (Motivkatalog der römischen Elegie (1952)), U. Wenzel (Properz: Hauptmotive seiner Dichtung (1969)) and M. Henniges (Utopie und Gesellschaftskritik bei Tibull (1978)).
Roughly two thirds of the study are devoted to teasing out the evolving profile of the elegiac ‘I’ in Propertius’ four-book collection. Shifting the attention to the two books of Tibullus, the last third not only demonstrates the applicability of the chosen approach to another Roman elegist but also casts in relief more visibly a number of aspects peculiar to the poetry of Propertius. A conclusion, a bibliography and an index contribute to the volume's well-wrought composition in formal terms.
Supported substantially by scholarship that dates to more as well as less recent times (e.g. F. Focke, Hermes 58 (1923), 327–68; F.-H. Mutschler, Die poetische Kunst Tibulls (1985); N. Holzberg, Die r ömische Liebeselegie (1990); H. P. Syndikus, Die Elegien des Properz (2010)), the author's analysis has to be commended for its painstakingly methodical approach to the material as well as diligent organisation of the information presented. Her application of Bühler's organon model to both poets results in a number of interesting observations and heightens the awareness that the first-person speaker's representation is indeed a constitutive aspect of each author's text.
Not surprisingly, it is Propertius’ fourth book of elegies as a whole, and Elegy 4.7 in particular, that poses a challenge to this conceptualised approach and the execution thereof. How does A. Wallace-Hadrill's conceptualisation of the Augustan revolution's impact on the nobility (in K. Galinsky (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (2005), 55–84) compare to the fixed set of roles attributed to the first-person speaker? How could P. A. Miller's notion of the subject's displacement in Book 4 (Subjecting Verses (2004), 184–209) further the study's approach to and selection of elegies for discussion? Could a different, more diversified and larger selection of poems from Book 3 contribute to making a more persuasive case for a unified and unifying first-person speaker in Book 4? It is left to future scholarship to make this plain.
