Sextus Propertius

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Sextus Aurelius Propertius was a Latin elegiac poet born in 50 BC in or near Mevania, who died in around 16 BC.

Like Virgil and Ovid, Propertius was also a member of the poetic circle of neoteric poets which collected around Maecenas. He became a close personal friend of Ovid, and spent most of his life in Rome. Little more is known of his life.

Propertius's surviving work consists of four books of Elegies.

Propertius is considered, by some, to have been subversive in his poetry. In a cohort of poets charged by Maecanas to promote Augustan social and political programs - a cohort that included Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, and eventually Ovid - Propertius insisted on the eloquence of his elegiac genre. In this regard, he fashioned himself as a "Roman Callimachus" (4.1A) and sought to evoke themes and literary tropes from the most famous Hellenistic poets such as Philetas of Cos and Callimachus himself.

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