Propertius

Sextus Propertius was born in Umbria about 50 BC, and his family lost land in the confiscations that followed the civil wars of the 40s. He made his career in Rome, where he joined the circle around Maecenas and wrote four books of love elegies. Book I, the "Monobiblos", centres on his turbulent affair with the woman he calls Cynthia, and it won him his standing among the Roman elegists.

His later books grow in range, with poems on poetry and patronage, on the Augustan regime, and, in Book IV, on the origins of Roman cults, places and legends, ending with the dead matron Cornelia speaking from the tomb. He is thought to have died by about 15 BC. The translations here are H. E. Butler's prose version for the Loeb Classical Library (1912), which gives each elegy as paragraphs of English.