Propertius

Sextus Propertius was born around 50 BC in Assisi (or nearby) in Umbria. His family lost land in the civil war confiscations, and the young Propertius came to Rome, where he fell in love with a woman he calls Cynthia — probably Hostia, a freedwoman of literary tastes and independent temperament. She became the subject and obsession of four books of elegies.

Propertius is the most intense and difficult of the Roman elegists. Where Tibullus is gentle and Ovid is witty, Propertius is passionate, learned, and syntactically tortured. His poems are dense with mythological allusion, abrupt transitions, and emotional extremes. He can move from abject devotion to bitter rage within a single couplet. His fourth book, which turns from love elegy to the legends of Rome, contains some of the most powerful poetry in Latin — including the extraordinary monologue of Cornelia from beyond the grave.

He was admired by Ezra Pound, who saw in his compressed, allusive style a precursor of modernist poetics.