Journal Article

Perugia and the plots of the Monobiblos

Breed, Brian W.

2009

Overview

There is, alas, no secret code or mystical number lurking in the text of Propertius' first book of elegies which, if discovered, could reveal essential truths about the book. Or at least there is none that I can claim to have found. The search for some key to unlock secrets of meaning and authorial design is a well-known phenomenon of the interpretation of Roman poetry books, and Propertius' ‘single book’ has featured prominently in such investigations. The present paper does not put forth a new structural scheme for understanding the Monobiblos or another description of numerical patternings in it, nor does it insist that a true appreciation of the book's ‘architecture’ is essential for understanding its meaning. Instead, it has the goal of considering how the book format affects the experience of reading and the interpretation of this one important work of Roman poetry in light of its generic identity and the literary-historical context in which it was produced. In particular, I am interested in describing how the book format makes available to readers of the Monobiblos a sense that even in the absence of a single narrative spanning all of the poems of the book it is nevertheless possible to supplement them so that something like a plot or story emerges. I first consider how this sense of a possible plot or plots arises in the reading process, looking also at how some previous influential studies of the Monobiblos have relied upon various ways of construing a story or plot for the book.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press,CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY