There is, as far as I know, only one editor who would not take Propertius' melancholy in 2.13 ‘entirely seriously’. Most would object to Butler and Barber's division (after Broekhuysen) of the elegy into two separate pieces (1–16 and 17–58), but few would completely reject the editors' main reason for doing so: ‘But the inconsistency of tone which exists between them, the one full of thoughts of life, the other written in deep dejection and permeated with brooding anticipation of death, precludes their union.…’ If, on the other hand, there is a reason that links the parts together, it has never been made quite clear. Rothstein's explanation is too fanciful to be true; besides taking the spicula of l. 2 more seriously than usual, one would have to suppose that the poet bleeds all the way down to 16. Both La Penna and Enk gloss over the problem by means of speciously neat summaries. Wimmel takes no special interest in the poem but in a note remarks that 2.13 is the counterpart to 2.1, and the question of its unity should therefore be decided as in that poem.