Comments on Bryn Mawr Classical Review: 2008.08.31

Many thanks to Michael Hendry for the information ...

2009-07-02T14:41:35.833-04:00

Many thanks to Michael Hendry for the information about the portrait!

And to 'anonymous': the central point of my review was precisely that the Companion is not inclusive enough: not that it does not take account of my own interests, but that it does not take adequate account of the field of Propertian studies.

The reviewer seems in places to be damning the boo...

2008-09-08T15:36:00.000-04:00

The reviewer seems in places to be damning the book for not being what she would have written. 1.3 is a complicated poem, with a massive amount written about it, but Manuwald's discussion of it fails (I agree it is weak) because she doesn't see fit to mention the latest metapoetical reading: "... does not continue to show how it sets Cynthia up as an alternative, poetic voice -- following, indeed, the hints given at the end of 1.2, and foreshadowing 2.1, 3.24-5, and 4.7-8 (among others)." Of course it is now a fact that all ancient literature is about literature, the authors having nothing else worth paying attention to. Then Syndikus is in trouble because "He demonstrates little or no skepticism about the historical "information" in the poems." But little of this information has been proven wrong, and none can be proven to be intentionally (as oppposed to carelessly) misrepresented by Propertius, and Syndikus has the right to accept the particular interpretative view that accepts the basic historicity of the events mentioned by Propertius, or at least not accept unproven arguments agaist most of it. It is just supposed to be wrong because there are no historical facts, and Propertius anyway was too busy worrying about poetry to bother knowing what was going on around him. Similarly, with all that has been written about book four, and the multitude of decisions Gunther had to make about what to include and what to omit, he is damned because he did not mention one recent (and very interesting) critical concern that must be one of the reviewer's pet interests: "I found it almost unbelievable, however, that a piece designed to be an overview of Book 4 could so systematically ignore any of the recent work on Roman topography and the poems: no Welch, no DeBrohun,4 no Wiseman, not even any Richardson..."
This review is sadly exemplary of the pettiness that dominates academics these days.

I don't know who first created the 'portrait' of P...

2008-08-17T18:41:00.000-04:00

I don't know who first created the 'portrait' of Propertius on the cover of the Brill Companion, but it is the frontispiece of the 1822 Turin edition 'ex recensione C. T. Kuinoel', from which I scanned it for my web-texts of Propertius (now sadly out of date) around 10 years ago. Whether this is a reprint of Kuinoel's 1805 edition, the one in most Propertius bibliographies, I do not know. The only label in the 1822 edition is 'S. A. Propertius / ex antiquo desumtum' (sic).

I've always assumed from the nose that the portrait was originally supposed to be Ovid. There is an even more unlikely portrait of 'Juvenal' in the 1906 Temple Greek and Latin Classics edition by A. F. Cole. It can be seen here, and professes to be from Valpy's 1831 edition.