This chapter presents a reading of Propertius 3.17. The chapter argues that this poem – an elegiac hymn to Bacchus – is at once an ostentatiously closural text for erotic elegy, and a densely allusive text that calls into question the poet’s apparent desire to leave elegy behind. The choice of a Bacchic theme involves the poem in Augustan cultural politics, especially contemporary attempts to reintegrate Bacchus within an Augustan pantheon after the god’s association with Mark Antony in the previous decade. Allusions to Horace’s Bacchic odes and to Virgil Georgic 2 emphasise the way that Propertius 3.17 maintains Bacchus’s transgressive and programmatic aspect, and so offers an ironic celebration of elegy’s independence and potency, even as the elegist declares a desire to abandon the genre.