ABSTRACT
Certainly, there are physical features here which could easily belong to a real live woman. But this Cynthia is also constructed in exceptionally literary terms, as a collage of goddesses and heroines of mythology, in a series of more or less learned references which cast Propertius himself in the role of a god or a hero. Even her name speaks volumes, with its reference to one of the cult-titles of the god of poetry, ‘Cynthian’ Apollo (after Mount Cynthus on the island of Delos, which was Apollo’s birthplace).
