Il ‘tempo della bellezza’ e la legge della forza : l’epos omerico in Properzio

Through the opposition to Homer’s martial epic Propertius defines the ‘alternative’ identity of the elegy: while the former is a genre far in time, an abstract and futile representation of a fictitious world, elegy reflects the life of the poet-lover and his connected values. The polarity between the two genres and their respective worlds, however, progressively dissolves, and even in the Homeric epic Propertius traces the dominant presence of eros. Conversely, he sees in Homer’s Iliad, the ‘poem of force’, in its logic of domain and slavery, the same principle that rules the relationship between the poet-lover and his puella. Power relations, then, proves to be the common trait which binds these apparently opposite genres.