Disputes about Propertius.

I’m afraid it’s another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (cf. Abbots and Beavers, Textual Criticism as Rhetoric) — I just can’t resist this stuff!

Disputes about the text of Propertius involve many of the issues discussed in earlier chapters, for example, recension (specifically, disagreement over the shape of the stemma), the proper scope of conjecture, weighing of an author’s habits of expression as they can be elicited from a controversial transmission, the place to be given to interpolation. But because Propertius is agreed to be a major poet, even a great one, the disputes surrounding so many of his lines can also show how textual and literary considerations interact. That topic will be the focus of this chapter, after a brief review of Propertius’ recent editorial history.

For a few decades in the mid to late twentieth century, the text of Propertius seemed to have attained a degree of stability after a period marked by extremes of conservatism and scepticism. The most widely used text from that period is the OCT of E. A. Barber (1953, revised 1960). In producing his 1960 revision, Barber was influenced by the work of Shackleton Bailey, especially his Propertiana of 1956, a textual commentary on all of Propertius that contributed a number of brilliant conjectures but was characterized overall by restraint: confronted with an unreliable manuscript tradition and an author believed to cultivate an idiosyncratic style, Shackleton Bailey often concluded that the transmitted text might well be corrupt but that no attempt to correct it commanded assent. He was also dismissive of hypotheses that postulated widespread relocation of couplets or that bracketed large numbers of couplets as interpolations. Barber’s editorial policies followed similar lines: while accepting numerous conjectures and a smaller number of transpositions and deletions, he confined many plausible suggestions to the apparatus, producing what might be described as a moderately conservative text. The other noteworthy edition from this period, Paolo Fedeli’s Teubner of 1984, is markedly more conservative than Barber’s without displaying the extreme resistance to conjecture manifested by some editions of a century earlier.

In the same years, however, a powerful assault on the editorial vulgate began to be mounted. The opening salvo was fired in 1966 by George Goold in a long article entitled ‘Noctes Propertianae’. Goold set out to show that ‘our current texts and commentaries are shot through and through with error and misunderstanding’ and called for an edition that would embody all the true conjectures that had been made in the text of Propertius – a figure he estimated at some 2,000. Nine years later, Margaret Hubbard adduced a new argument to justify suspicion of the transmitted text. Challenging the conventional view of Propertius as ‘a poet of tormented obscurity’, Hubbard noted that the judgements of his work found in ancient sources suggested instead ‘a poet of finish, grace, and charm’. With remorseless logic, she concluded that ‘as presents us with a difficult poet whose words can sometimes hardly be forced into sense, its text is not the one known to the ancient world’. The consensus view of the text also came under attack from Stephen Heyworth in a review of Fedeli’s edition; Heyworth noted that Fedeli ‘rarely chooses readings from outside the circle prescribed by the modern vulgate. The text consequently contains much that Propertius did not write’.

In the last two decades, the sceptical onslaught has only intensified. In 1990 Goold published a revision of H. E. Butler’s Loeb edition that, although not as radical as might have been expected from his 1966 statements, still marked a major departure from the vulgate. The late James Butrica developed Hubbard’s arguments into a manifesto calling on editors to do whatever was needed to restore Propertius to his ancient description as a poet of grace and elegance. Hans-Christian Günther’s 1997 monograph Quaestiones Propertianae renewed the arguments for transposition and interpolation as major factors in the formation of the paradosis. In 2007 Stephen Heyworth published a new OCT edition and a large companion volume of textual notes entitled Cynthia. Heyworth’s text represents a fundamentally new recension of the kind called for by Goold; from almost the first line of the text to the last, Heyworth asserts his willingness to depart from the editorial vulgate. The companion volume is without doubt the most significant contribution to the study of Propertius’ text since Shackleton Bailey’s Propertiana, with which Cynthia implicitly asks to be compared and to which it often explicitly responds. Heyworth, however, does not represent the highwater mark of contemporary scepticism: that distinction goes to the late Giancarlo Giardina (1939–2014), who produced two editions in the Urbino series Testi e commenti/Texts and Commentaries (2005 and 2010). Giardina’s propensity to conjecture makes Heyworth look timid by comparison: his 2010 edition places nearly a thousand of his own suggestions in the text and mentions hundreds more in the apparatus. To describe his editions as the work of ‘Propertius and Giancarlo Giardina’ would be no exaggeration.

The sceptics now hold the field. Although they are united in their readiness to emend the transmitted text, they divide on two fundamental issues, the character of Propertius’ poetry and the reasons for the deplorable state in which they believe it has been preserved.

On the first point, Butrica occupies the most radical position, holding that ‘editors have good reason to be less tolerant of even slight awkwardness in the transmitted text’. Giardina has aligned himself with Butrica, and his editions show how that position might play out in practice. (That is not to say that Butrica would have approved of Giardina’s choices.)

Goold, on the other hand, describes Propertius as ‘an allusive and even cryptic author … given to novel and recondite ways of expressing himself’, and in a number of places Heyworth shows that he too regards Propertius as prone to daring and elliptical writing […]

The second issue is whether the corruption allegedly present in the transmitted text can be accounted for by the usual processes of transmission or whether the intervention of a reviser is required. On that question Heyworth and Giardina do not take an explicit stand. Butrica inclines to the first view: he writes that ‘the text of Propertius has been affected by the ordinary vicissitudes of copying (though now and again it seems to have gone through the hands of someone more prone to error than most)’ and ‘it may well be that one or two stages in the ancestry of our archetype were entrusted to the sort of scribe who is inclined to omit and dislocate’. Butrica also believed that interpolation had been at work at more than one stage, extending to the inclusion of entire poems by other authors in the latter part of Book 2, but he regarded the passages in question as either intruded parallels or collaborative interpolations (in my sense, cf. pp. 87–8), and was at pains to stress that he saw nothing sinister or diabolical in the process.

Not only do I find such questions fascinating in general, but Propertius is of particular interest to me — not only do I like his poetry but I got my first bookstore job by giving a fluent (if doubtless ill-informed) analysis of the differences between Pound’s and McCulloch’s translations. (I still have my copy of the lovely UC Press paperback I bought that day, inscribed “31 Mar. 1979,” and I note that McCulloch “for the most part followed the Loeb edition… to disturb tradition and mark out a new path would be to inconvenience the reader”; he gives due respect to his cantankerous precursor: “Anyone who would translate Propertius must justify doing so in the light of Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, itself a great English poem.” Good man!) I had no idea his text had become such a battlefield.