"Although strength should fail, the effort will deserve praise. In great enterprises the attempt is enough"
About this Quote
Even in translation, Propertius sounds like a poet trying to rescue ambition from the humiliations of reality. The line carries a Roman sting: strength is finite, bodies falter, politics turn, lovers leave. Yet he insists the attempt itself can earn honor. That’s not motivational-poster optimism; it’s a hard-nosed recalibration of value in a culture obsessed with outcomes, victory, and public proof.
Propertius lived at the hinge of the late Republic and Augustus’s new order, when “great enterprises” weren’t abstract self-help goals but empire-building projects, careers at court, and the precarious performance of masculinity under a regime that rewarded spectacle and punished missteps. Elegy, his chosen form, is already a genre of strategic surrender: he writes about love and refusal while Rome celebrates conquest. Praising effort when strength fails smuggles a counter-ethic into an achievement culture. It defends the loser, the exhausted, the diverted - and, by extension, the poet, whose labor can’t be measured in captured territory.
The subtext is also a quiet bid for moral authority. By framing praise as something “deserved,” Propertius turns failure into a kind of integrity: you can be defeated without being diminished. “Attempt is enough” doubles as self-justification (for the risks he takes in art and desire) and as critique: a society that only crowns winners misunderstands what greatness costs. The wit is in the stoic shrug of it all - not triumph, but audacity, is the real metric.
Propertius lived at the hinge of the late Republic and Augustus’s new order, when “great enterprises” weren’t abstract self-help goals but empire-building projects, careers at court, and the precarious performance of masculinity under a regime that rewarded spectacle and punished missteps. Elegy, his chosen form, is already a genre of strategic surrender: he writes about love and refusal while Rome celebrates conquest. Praising effort when strength fails smuggles a counter-ethic into an achievement culture. It defends the loser, the exhausted, the diverted - and, by extension, the poet, whose labor can’t be measured in captured territory.
The subtext is also a quiet bid for moral authority. By framing praise as something “deserved,” Propertius turns failure into a kind of integrity: you can be defeated without being diminished. “Attempt is enough” doubles as self-justification (for the risks he takes in art and desire) and as critique: a society that only crowns winners misunderstands what greatness costs. The wit is in the stoic shrug of it all - not triumph, but audacity, is the real metric.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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