Achilles Surrenders Briseis to the emissaries of Agamemnon: Pompeian painting (between A.D. 62 and 79) from the House of
the Tragic Poet, probably based on a Greek masterpiece of the late fourth century B.C. Achilles' loss of his favourite mistress
provoked the bitter quarrel which is the subject of Homer's Iliad and provided Propertius with a model for an elegy on his
loss of Cynthia.
In Book 4, which dates from the second Augustan period, we see the signs of Augustus' direct patronage. While Horace was
induced to write a fourth book of Odes, the 'Callimachean' Propertius felt it prudent or compulsory to produce something
rather more genuinely Callimachean-and patriotic. Poems on the causes or origins of institutions had absorbed Callimachus,
and Propertius in his fourth book produces poems on the causes and origins of Roman institutions: he now styles himself the
'Roman Callimachus' explicitly, and with some justification. The time was of course no longer propitious for oppositional
tactics of the type seen in Book 3; yet Propertius still preserves his integrity and sense of humour. For example, one 'origin'
leads into a narrative of the battle of Actium, and it is told, not parodically (as some think), but exactly as a Roman
Callimachus should tell it; the exotic, rococo result would have caused Propertius much pleasure and the Emperor no pain. It