This is the first of Propertius’s many poems about Cynthia. It seems to be on the conventional theme of the rejected suitor, but is it? He certainly says that his luck has been against him. Or are they an item already and he is having a hard time? That would explain why he says he wants to go far away where no woman can track him. You could argue it either way. There is more ambiguity in Propertius’s mythological example, Milanion and Atalanta. Is he being sarcastic when he says it shows that “loyalty and good deeds” will get the girl? So far, all they have achieved for Milanion is a whack on the head with a tree-trunk. Milanion won Atalanta, not by loyalty, but by cheating in a foot race, as Propertius flags up with his reference to her “speediness”. We are only on the first poem, but it already looks as though the narrator’s voice may be a bit unreliable.
The details seem vivid and spontaneous, but many have already been used by Greek poets and by Tibullus, an older Roman contemporary who wrote, like Propertius, in the new form of love elegy composed of a line in the classic metre of epic, paired with a shorter line with a break in the middle. Hylaeus was one of a brace of centaurs who had designs on Atalanta.
