Propertius' difficulties are usually all too real, but here, I think, a fairly straightforward passage has been perplexed by over-subtle interpretation. Under the governance of Amor improbus (a stock epithet: Virg. Eel. 8. 49, Aen. 4. 412, Ov. Fast. 2. 331, Stat. Silu. 1. 2. 75) the lover cares for nothing but the satisfaction of desire. Chastity in women becomes for him a mere obstruction {odisse, as often, is feebler than ‘hate’ or even ‘dislike’) and his worldly prudence goes the way of his moral sense. The poet speaks as the type of a disappointed suitor, and his words, though in form a personal narrative, really relate to general experience. They should not be pressed for implications concerning Cynthia irrelevant to the purport of the elegy. Doubtless she was not in strictness casta puella, but that, for the present, concerns neither poet nor reader (the latter, indeed, could hardly be expected to know it); she was uncompliant (dura, 1.7.6).

Most modern commentators (Paley, content as usual with the obvious, is a happy exception) have been zealous to find in castas odisse paellas a more special application. On this path trouble arises at every turn. Lachmann wrested the whole poem from its plain intent to maintain that the writer spent a year (toto anno 7), not in unprofitable pursuit of Cynthia, but in promiscuous adventure (‘uiles quaerere et sine consilio uiuere’), connecting this with the year of separation apparently indicated by 3.16. 9 (where the reading pulsus is, however, far from certain), furor hie in 7 then becomes, not the poet's love (cf. Cic. Tusc. 4. 75 furor amoris), but his infidelity, an impossible supposition in view of 8. Even as regards 5-6 this explanation is untenable in a piece which contains ‘no hint of anything except helpless passion’ (BB.), though Housman, Postgate, Rothstein, Butler, and Enk commend it.