Abstract

In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in the Christian poet Prudentius and his literary technique. This article wants to show that Propertius’s elegy 4.11, the so-called regina elegiarum, is a crucial intertext for Prudentius, Peristephanon 13. Numerous lexical and motivic references to the Propertian text regarding the matrone Cornelia render it plausible that Prudentius wanted his recipients to read his poem about the Carthagian martyr bishop Cyprian while bearing in mind the Propertian intertext. Furthermore, by choosing a rare metre, Prudentius might also allude to a specific Horatian poem (carm. 1.4) as another important intertext.