War & Peace Quote by Sextus Propertius

Spite has rarely sounded this elegant. Propertius flips the usual Roman macho script by turning sexual taste into a political sorting hat: if you’re against me, go on, love women; if you’re with me, celebrate men. It lands as an insult and a wink at once, because the “straight” option is framed as the loser’s consolation prize, while desire for men becomes a badge of in-group sophistication.

That inversion matters in Propertius’s world. Late Republican and early Augustan Rome policed masculinity less by the gender of your partner than by who held power in the act. Elite men could pursue male lovers and still be “properly” Roman, as long as they stayed on the dominant side of the hierarchy. Propertius, a poet of sharp social antennae, exploits that code. He’s not delivering a modern manifesto about orientation; he’s weaponizing erotic preference as a proxy for status, wit, and loyalty. “Rejoice in men” reads like a toast, the kind of campy bravado that lets a literary circle feel smarter than the crowd.

The subtext is also about the poet’s own precarious position. Propertius writes from the margins of politics, where the sharpest blade available is language. So he makes friendship intimate and adversaries banal. If enemies get women, friends get transgressive pleasure, secret knowledge, a shared joke. In a culture obsessed with public honor, he privatizes allegiance and eroticizes it, implying that real solidarity isn’t proved in the forum; it’s proved in what you dare to enjoy.