In the 30s b.c.e., the Roman world convulsed under an intense rivalry between two talented and visionary men who struggled not only to control Rome's future but also to define, honour and protect its heritage. Their rivalry erupted at flashpoints throughout the decade and pulled in many other prominent figures. Peter Heslin's new book on the rivalry between Vergil and Propertius reads like Syme's Roman Revolution. The two poets, H. argues, vied for the right to claim the literary inheritance of Alexandria and establish its Roman legacy — Vergil through pastoral, then didactic poetry, and eventually epic, and Propertius through subjective first-person elegy. This rivalry informs and clarifies an aspect of Propertius’ poetry that has eluded our understanding: its abstruse and learned mythological references, often ill-fitted to the rhetoric of the poems in which they sit.

In six chapters, H. shows how Propertius’ mythological references probe the contours of his poetic project — sometimes against broad and faceless foils such as epic or iambic poetry, but more often and more pervasively against whatever Vergil was doing at the time. Three substantial introductory chapters establish Propertius’ careful use of myths as markers for programmatics and explorations of genre. In ch. 4 (Against Pastoral), the book picks up the timeline thus: Vergil wrote the Eclogues, into which he subsumed elegy via the quasi-mythical dying Gallus of Eclogues 10. Propertius then wrote the Monobiblos, several of whose mythical exempla call attention to the inadequacy of the pastoral world and reclaim Gallus’ legacy for elegy. Ch. 5 (The Return of Orpheus) takes us to the years around Actium, when Vergil switched to didactic poetry in the Georgics, a poem with plenty to say about poetics and genre. Propertius responded with a second book of elegies whose mythical exempla challenge Vergil's poetics, particularly the Mantuan's characterisation of elegy through Orpheus as solipsistic. Finally, as Vergil was composing the Aeneid in the 20s, Propertius penned a third book of poetry whose embedded myths and intertextual references took direct aim at laudatory epic poetry (ch 6: Ennius Redivivus). With some thirty poems subject to close intertextual readings, H.'s study amounts to no less than a complete reading of Propertius’ first three books as a charged and focused apology for love elegy. Propertius emerges victorious as the Roman Callimachus.

It is a convincing book, written with mastery of mythological intertexts and clarity of purpose and expression. H. offers satisfying analyses of individual poems, but the chief strength of the book is the cumulative effect of minutiae across the range of Books 1–3. The sustained exploration of Orpheus as a figure for poetic debate is especially powerful. Across the rivalry, Orpheus stands in for the ‘beautiful and tragic but self-absorbed and undisciplined’ elegist Gallus (Eclogues 6; H. 223); for Propertius, whose own elegy is irresistible and powerful (Elegy 1.9) or futile and solipsistic (Georgics 4) or immortalising (Elegy 2.27); or for Vergil, who had sadly renounced love and love poetry (Elegy 3.2). These roles are elaborated in the poetry by contrast with Amphion as epic poet, Adonis resurrected by love, instructive Aristaeus and trans-generic Polyphemus.

The book is not for the newcomer. H.'s very premise — that Propertius’ mythical references go against the grain of the surface reading of any poem — inevitably and rightly makes little space for the surface reading. The reader must be able to track a complex and subtle plot that involves the two poetic stars and two supporting players (Gallus and Ennius) plus a host of mythological intertexts, particularly for those poems in chs 1–3 that involve Propertius and Greek myth, but not Vergil. H.'s clear and engaging prose is a great help in this respect, as are superb paratexts in the form of sub-titles, indices, and prefaces and conclusions.

Two aspects of the book leave a lingering disquiet. First, Propertius reacts not only to the poetry Vergil wrote, but also to what he thought or pretended Vergil was writing. Though H. cautions his readers to set aside our hindsight about the magnificence of the Aeneid, it is difficult to embrace the argument of ch. 6 (Ennius Redivivus) that Propertius relentlessly characterised the epic-in-progress as a disaster of Ennian proportions — not least because Propertius’ scorn for Ennius was not the prevailing opinion of his day. Second is the seductive pull of having a hermeneutic key to Propertius’ poetry. All the details make sense and confirm each other in this book, but if we take any one poem and add the surface reading, political implications, gender inversions and non-mythological intertexts, the rivalry with Vergil is harder to see.

But make no mistake, the disquiet is productive in both cases. H. has uncovered something remarkable: poetry in the making, rather than poetry made. His book is an invitation for others to recontextualise Propertius’ — and Vergil's — poetry in the political, social, and philosophical landscape of the 30s and 20s b.c.e. I am eager to reread this book with Horace's Satires by my side, for example, to explore how Epicureanism contributes to notions of poetry as socially productive or solipsistic, and to revisit other pre-publication nods to the Aeneid. This book has changed the interpretive landscape.