Un'appartenenza vulnerabile. Il sentimento della storia in Properzio

The cultural heritage of mythical tales connected to real places in Rome is the core inspiration for the fourth book of Propertian elegies. But which features or attitudes lay the ground for the construction of collective memory? In this paper I will try to focus on how Propertius works on selection and removal of Roman history’s events and characters as early as in the first three books of Elegies: in the Propertian sense of history, the “belonging to” and the “distance from” the social frameworks of memory are re-examined by concepts as betrayal and vulnerability of thick relations tying together citizens, soldiers, friends.