What was it like to be in love in Rome? The 22 poems of Sextus Propertius’ first book of elegies (published in 28 B.C.) offer an answer. Defiantly un-Roman in his devotion to love for his Cynthia and to his art, Propertius writes with a strangely modern voice passionate, wry, self-scrutinising and ironic. But it is a voice that has been shaped and controlled by a literary tradition already centuries old.