Editing Propertius (section)

== Textual problems ==
The text contains many syntactic, organizational and logical problems as it has survived. Some of these are no doubt exacerbated by Propertius' bold and occasionally unconventional use of Latin. Others have led scholars to alter and sometimes rearrange the text as preserved in the manuscripts.

A total of 146 Propertius manuscripts survive, the oldest of which dates from the 12th century. However, some of the poems in these manuscripts appear disjointed, such as I.8, which begins as a plea for Cynthia to abandon a planned sea voyage, then closes with sudden joy that the voyage has been called off. This poem has therefore been split by most scholars into a I.8a (comprising the first 26 lines) and I.8b (lines 27–46). More complicated organizational problems are presented by poems like II.26, a confusing piece in which Propertius first (1) dreams of Cynthia being shipwrecked, and then (2) praises Cynthia's faithfulness. Following this, he (3) declares that she plans to sail and he will come along, (4) shifts to the couple together on the shore, and then (5) quickly has them back on board ship, ready to face the potential dangers of the sea. The images seem to conflict logically and chronologically, and have led different commentators to rearrange the lines or assume some ''[[Lacuna (manuscripts)|lacunae]]'' in the text.

More modern critics<ref>''e.g.'' D. Thomas Benediktson - "Propertius: Modernist Poet of Antiquity", Southern Illinois University Press (1989)</ref> have pointed out that all the proposed rearrangements assume Propertius' original poetry adhered strictly to the classical literary principles as set down by [[Aristotle]], and so the apparent jumble is a result of manuscript corruptions. Another possibility is that Propertius was deliberately presenting disjointed images in violation of principles such as the [[three unities|Classical Unities]], a theory which argues for different unifying structures in Propertius' elegies. This interpretation also implies that Propertius' style represented a mild reaction against the orthodoxy of classical literary theory.  However, although these theories may have some bearing on issues of continuity in the other three surviving books of Propertius, modern philological scholarship  tends toward a consensus that the extant text  "Book Two" in fact represents the conflated remains of what were originally two books of poems.  Recent editors of Propertius -- notably Paulo Fedeli (Teubner 1984); compare G.P. Gould's 1990 revision of the Loeb text -- reflect these conclusions in their texts for "Book Two", which show it as such a conflation of two books (the second and third of an original five), with some passages lost, parts of poems and whole poems combined, and possible shuffling of fragments.  This case is well supported by the texts themselves and fits testimonial evidence about Propertius's original publication of his work:  first the "Monobiblos" (our "Book I"), then a collection of three books (our "Book II" and Book III -- the three-book elegiac format imitated by Ovid's Amores) and lastly our Book IV, very likely posthumously.