The most passionate, individual, and controversial of the Latin love elegists, Propertius in Book 3 covers a broad range of subject matter and a vast geographical reach. After books focused on
his mistress Cynthia, he maintains his elegiac role but expands his range to provide a lover's commentary on life, discussing luxury, nudity, art, the empire, and the dangers of travel for
profit and war. This detailed commentary uses the text recently published in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and sets out to build on the richness of the material in the book by providing
clear introductions to the genres the poems explore - the Greek elegy of Callimachus, epic, tragedy, hymn and epigram - and to topics such as patronage, philosophy, and the images of love as
slavery and as warfare.
