SOURCE: "Propertius: Life and Personal Characteristics" and "The Art and Genius of Propertius" in The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1892, pp. 260-323.

[In the following essay, Sellar examines Propertius's life and personal characteristics, analyzes the merits of his verse and, with certain exceptions, declares him a great poet.]

Propertius: Life and Personal Characteristics.

There is a greater difference of opinion about the literary position of Propertius than about that of any other Roman poet. The place of Lucretius and Virgil, of Horace and Catullus, in the first rank of Latin authors and among the great poets of the world, has been generally conceded. A similar position would have been allowed to Ovid in any century before the present. The rank of Tibullus as a classic of the second order is also undisputed. Propertius, on the other hand, has, within the present generation, emerged from comparative neglect to the place of chief favourite among the elegiac poets. Quintilian informs us that he had, in the ancient Roman world, his admirers who preferred him to Tibullus and Ovid; and the younger Pliny, in speaking of a poet of his day who claimed to be descended from him, writes appreciatively of him. Ovid, a just as well as a generous critic of his contemporaries and predecessors, by the words 'ignes' and 'blandique Propertius oris' shows his appreciation of the ardour as well as the musical charm of his verse. Martial includes the Cynthia Monobiblos among the gift-books for which he wrote inscriptions, and Juvenal mentions Cynthia along with her

             cuius
Turbavit nitidos exstinctus passer ocellos

as an instance of the degeneracy of Roman morals from the old Sabellian ideal. Statius also includes him in a common appreciative notice with Philetas and Callimachus, Ovid and Tibullus. But there is no indication that in ancient times he enjoyed the popularity of Tibullus, or exercised the same influence on later literature as was exercised by Ovid.

The imperfection of the text, and the late era to which the MSS., with perhaps one exception, belong, may, in the absence of any notices of the knowledge of his writings, be taken as evidence that Propertius was not much read between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the revival of letters. With the recovery of ancient literature, his poems attracted the attention of scholars and were for a time imitated by the modern writers of Latin verse in Italy: but from that time till about the middle of the present century, though not altogether neglected, they do not seem to have been held in high esteem. He was for a long time spoken of as a writer whose poetry was overlaid and whose passion was chilled by a pedantic display of learning. Gibbon in the last century, the late Professor W. Ramsay and Dean Merivale in the present, may be taken as fair representatives of the opinion of scholars on his merits. More sympathetic readers in recent times who recognise the desperate sincerity and intensity of his passion, the penetrating and creative force of his imagination, and the new and more distinctively Roman movement which he has imparted to his metre, are repelled by the abnormal difficulty of his style, and by the monotony with which he harps on the single theme which through the best part of his poetical activity absorbed all his thought and passion, and constituted all the joy and all the torment of his life. Though love is one of the perennial sources of poetry, the interest of its poetical treatment depends not solely on the sincerity and intensity of the feeling, or the imaginative power with which it is presented, but to some extent on the personal impression made by the writer and on the ideal charm with which he has invested the object of it. Among the more sympathetic students of Propertius in the present day some perhaps might be willing to address him in his own line—

Ardoris nostri magne poeta iaces.

Other admirers of his genius, who feel neither his own personality nor that which he has imparted to Cynthia very congenial, and that it is possible to have too much of the 'amantium irae' and the 'amoris integratio,' may be more inclined to apply to the record of his sorrows another motto from his own verses,

Maxima de nihilo nascitur historia.

Even those who may regard him as at least potentially one of the greatest of Roman poets, may still think that if Cynthia first awakened his poetical faculty, she also did much to mar its full development. Like some modern poets, he enjoys rather the devotion of a few warm admirers, to whom his talent has revealed itself as something new and unexpected in ancient literature, than the position of a great classic whose thought and experience have 'enriched the blood of the world.' Perhaps he gains more by the novelty of the impression which he produces, and by his freedom from the conventional associations of classical literature, than he loses by the demand which he makes for a serious effort to penetrate to his meaning.

For the circumstances of his life, and his personal characteristics, we depend almost solely on the evidence of his own writings; and his style of writing is often so indirect and allusive, that we have to be satisfied with more or less doubtful inferences on some important points, such as the date of his birth, his exact birthplace, the time of the publication of his various books, and the duration of his liaison with Cynthia. Of his relations to his more eminent contemporaries, we learn from Ovid that a bond of comradeship existed between the two poets, but Ovid tells us nothing to confirm or modify the impression of his personal qualities derived from what he consciously or unconsciously reveals of himself. Perhaps the silence of Ovid, in general so appreciative of the personal as well as the literary qualities of others, may be regarded as a confirmation of the impression produced by the manner of Propertius in writing to and of his associates, that he was too much absorbed in himself and his passion either to form warm attachments to other men, or to attach them to himself by strong bonds of sympathy. That his society was uncongenial to one eminent contemporary seems certain from the passage in the second Epistle of the second book of Horace, which is as palpably a stricture on the vanity and self-assertion of the 'Roman Callimachus,' as the fourth Epistle of the first book is a tribute to the gentle and modest character of Tibullus.

The name by which he speaks of himself, and which is applied to him by Ovid, Statius, Pliny, and Martial, is simply Propertius, without the adjunct of praenomen or cognomen. That his praenomen was Sextus rests on the evidence of the grammarian Donatus. The additional names of Aurelius Nauta, which appear in the old editions of the poet, are now universally rejected.

The dates of his birth and of the composition of the various books into which his poems are divided have to be determined by internal evidence, and have been much disputed. Editors are divided in opinion also as to whether the number of books left by him was four or five. As this latter question has no bearing on the enquiry as to the circumstances of his life or personal characteristics, any reference to it may be left till the consideration of the artistic composition of his poems is reached. In the meantime it is only necessary to state that in references to passages quoted from the poems the division into four books is presupposed. A question as interesting though perhaps not so important as that of the date of the poet's birth and of the composition of his works, is that of his birthplace, about which an old controversy, which appeared to have died out, has been recently revived by Sr. Giulio Urbini in his treatise on 'La Patria di Propertio.' Though it can make no difference in our estimate of the man or our enjoyment of his poetry to know whether he was born at Spello or Assisi, yet an attempt to solve the question by a comparison of the sites of these towns with the three passages in which the poet describes or alludes to his birthplace will bring us into the presence of scenes of natural beauty and places of historic interest which were familiar to him both in his childhood and in his later life, and may thus help us to realise some of the influences which acted on his imagination.

The passage of Ovid already referred to (Trist. iv. 10) as mentioning the four recognised elegiac poets in their order, establishes the fact that Propertius came after Tibullus and before Ovid in the list. Does this necessarily imply that his elegies appeared later than those of Tibullus, or only that he was a younger man? The evidence of his poems clearly establishes the latter point: it leaves it doubtful whether, though the earlier elegies of Tibullus were written two or three years before the earlier ones of Propertius, the first book of Propertius may not have appeared either before or not long after the elegies of the first book of Tibullus were collected and published together. In their first works neither poet can be shown to have influenced the other, nor is there any evidence that they were acquainted with one another. Tibullus was apparently a man 'paucorum hominum,' and though it may be assumed that he did not leave the Cynthia Monobiblos unread and unappreciated, he was probably not intimate with Propertius any more than with his younger contemporary Ovid, whom he may have met occasionally in the circle of Messalla.

Propertius tells us that his love for Cynthia, his first and only serious passion, was preceded by a liaison with Lycinna, apparently her slave, which began shortly after his assumption of the toga virilis. His relations with Cynthia may thus be assumed to have begun when he was about eighteen or nineteen years of age. The first book was finished about a year and a half or two years after the commencement of the liaison, during a time of estrangement which, from the evidence of a later passage (iii. 16. 9), is inferred to have lasted a year.

Propertius, in his opening poem, written in a state of extreme despondency, and probably after the composition of all the other elegies in the book, says of his passion, or the reckless condition to which it reduced him,

Et mihi iam toto furor hic non deficit anno,
   Cum tamen adversos cogor habere deos.

Does 'hic furor' refer to the whole period of his passion for Cynthia, the time of rapture as well as of torment, preceding the date of the composition of this poem? Or is it limited to that phase of it when owing to her cruelty he lived this reckless and disorderly life? The last is the view generally adopted, though the words hic furor might perfectly apply to the happy as well as the unhappy stage of his infatuation. The only year to which the words

Peccaram semel et totum sum pulsus in annum

seem applicable is that during which this and some of the other elegies of Book i. were written. It may therefore be taken as probable that when Book i. was finished a period of at least a year and a half had elapsed since the beginning of his connexion with Cynthia, and of not more than three years since his assumption of the toga virilis. If that was assumed about the age of seventeen, he was probably in his twentieth or twenty-first year when the book was finished. If we could determine the date when the first book was finished we should be able to fix the date of Propertius' birth approximately to about twenty years earlier. There is only one poem, the sixth in the first book, to which a possible date can be attached. The Tullus who is represented as inviting Propertius to accompany him to the Province of Asia, and to whom the words

Tu patrui meritas conare anteire secures,
   Et vetera oblitis iura refer sociis

are addressed, is supposed to be a nephew of L. Volcatius Tullus, who having been Consul in 33 B.C. might in accordance with the Lex Pompeia be entering on his proconsular government of Asia in 27 B.C. but not earlier. If this were accepted as the date of the poem, and if the year of estrangement after that date is allowed for, the book would have been finished and given to the world probably in 26 B.C., and this seems to fit in with the allusions contained in the later books, with one important exception. The thirty-first poem of the second book describes the opening of the temple of the Palatine Apollo in the latter part of 28 B.C. This at first sight suggests the inference that the first book was finished and given to the world before that date. But the poem may well have been written in the earlier stage of the liaison, and may not have been included in the series selected to form the Cynthia Monobiblos, as not being in harmony with the dominant mood of which that book is a record. Or it may have been written some considerable time after the event referred to. The only motive of it is to give a description of the artistic beauties of the portico. It has really nothing to do with the love of Cynthia, and its tone is more disinterested and unimpassioned than that of any poem referring to the earlier phases of his love. Two other dates may be fixed approximately in connexion with Book ii. The seventh poem speaks of a repeal of one of the laws, enacted in the year B.C. 28, by which Augustus endeavoured to force marriage on the wealthier celibates. The law was repealed shortly after its enactment, probably within a year or two, i.e. about 27 or 26 B.C. In the tenth poem Caesar is spoken of by the name Augustus, first bestowed on him in 27 B.C., and is represented as contemplating an expedition to the East to avenge the defeat of Crassus. The line

Et domus intactae te tremit Arabiae

marks the period referred to as anterior to the unfortunate expedition of Aelius Gallus in 24 B.C. The conclusion of M. Plessis that the year 25 B.C. is the year indicated seems as nearly certain as any such conclusions can be. The poems of Book ii. would therefore seem to range over a period of about two years, or two years and a half, either between 28 B.C. and the beginning of 25 B.C. or more probably from the beginning of 26 till the end of 24 B.C. During all that time the relation to Cynthia—which is indeed the burden of the whole book, with the single exception of the tenth poem—went on. In Book iii. one definite date is fixed to the latter part of the year 23 B.C. by the eighteenth elegy, which is a lament over the death of the young Marcellus. But there is nothing in the poem to imply that the poet's relation to Cynthia still continued. Another poem, the fourth, is written in immediate anticipation of an Eastern expedition, and is referred to the year 22 B.C., when preparations were made for the expedition which brought about the restoration of the standards by the Parthians. There is no word of Cynthia in the poem, though in anticipation of the future triumph the poet writes,

Inque sinu carae nixus spectare puellae
   Incipiam, et titulis oppida capta legam.

If the 'puella' there spoken of is Cynthia, the only conclusion we can come to is that after what seemed a final renunciation, declared in poems 24 and 25, the poet had again renewed his relations with his first love, and the evidence of Book iv. renders that not improbable. But though the word 'puella' when used by Pro-pertius during the continuation of his liaison can only refer to Cynthia, there is no need so to limit its use after their rupture. The most important statement of all for determining the dates relating to the life of Pro-pertius occurs in iii. 25, in which he seems finally to renounce his mistress, in the line

Quinque tibi potui servire fideliter annos.

He had been her faithful slave for five years. But here again a question is raised. Do these five years include or exclude the years of estrangement? Do they begin with the actual origin of his passion, or with the renewal of the intimacy after an estrangement of a year? The conclusion of M. Plessis here also is probably right; that the five years are meant to include the whole period from the first awakening of his love till his renunciation of it. He was still her faithful slave during all the year of her estrangement.

The poems of Book iii. seem to embrace the time from about 24 to 22 or 21 B.C. One year may be allowed for the poems of this book written before the renunciation, two years and a half for those contained in Book ii, one year and a half for those in Book i. The time of his liaison with Cynthia, the one important event in the life of Propertius, may be thus approximately fixed either to the years between 29 and 25 B.C. (inclusive) or more probably to those between 27 and 23 B.C. Assuming that it began about a year or a year and a half after his assumption of the toga virilis, the birth of the poet may be brought back to some time between the years 48 and 46 B.C. The completion of Book i. may be assigned with most probability to the early part or middle of 26 B.C. when the poet could not have been more than twenty years of age. One date in his life can be fixed with certainty. The eleventh poem of Book iv. proves that he lived and wrote in the year 16 B.C., the year in which a Cornelius Scipio, brother of the Cornelia in honour of whom the poem is composed, was Consul.

The next point to determine is what is the particular town or place in Umbria which Propertius designates as his home or birth-place.

The three well-known passages in which the riddle is proposed are: (1) the short epilogue subjoined to the book by which Propertius first introduced himself to the world; and (2 and 3) two passages from the long introductory poem to the fourth book, in the first of which (iv. 1. 65-66), in his own name, he describes in two lines the characteristic features of his native town, in the second of which (iv. 1. 121-6), by the voice of the astrologer Horos, he repeats, with a slight alteration, that description, and adds two lines introducing two familiar landmarks visible from or in the immediate neighbourhood of the town.

The first passage, which professes to be an answer to the enquiries of his friend or patron Tullus, to whom the book is dedicated, determines the locality only by its neighbourhood to Perusia, a town only too well known as associated with the most tragic events of the Civil Wars. The lines

Proxima supposito contingens Umbria campo
   Me genuit, terris fertilis uberibus

define the 'patria' of Propertius as a town the territory of which lay beneath it, and extended to the border of the territory of Perusia. This passage, if taken alone, might suggest the inference that he was born in a country-house situated in the rich plain, extending from the foot of the mountain-range, on two spurs of which Assisi and Spello are built, to the Tiber, forming the boundary between Umbria and Etruria. If Assisi possessed any territory at all it is difficult to conceive where it could have been, if it was not part of this plain extending in the direction of Perusia till it met the river.

The second passage (iv. 1. 63-66)—

Ut nostris tumefacta superbiat Umbria libris,
   Umbria Romani patria Callimachi,
Scandentes quisquis cernit de vallibus arces,
   Ingenio muros aestimet ille meo—

associates his poetic fame more definitely with a town of Umbria, situated on a steep height. There are two ambiguities of expression in line 65. Are we to translate 'arces' 'heights' or 'battlements'? and are we to take 'de vallibus' after 'cernit' or after 'scandentes'? Is the whole passage to be translated 'Whoever marks the battlements (or heights) climbing up steeply from the valleys,' or is it "Whoever from the valleys beneath marks the battlements (or heights) towering upwards'? The position of the words does not determine which interpretation is right. Reasons will be given later for holding that the latter is required by the only locality to which the words can apply.

In the next passage the town is still more definitely marked by its neighbourhood to two places, one of which at least is perfectly well known—

Umbria te notis antiqua Penatibus edit.
  Mentior? an patriae tangitur ora tuae,
Qua nebulosa cavo rorat Mevania campo,
  Et lacus aestivis intepet Umber aquis,
Scandentisque Asis (arcis?) consurgit vertice
 murus,
  Murus ab ingenio notior ille tuo?

In this passage there are more serious uncertainties both of interpretation and reading.

Do the words noti Penates apply to the family residence of Propertius or to his native town? It is argued that they cannot apply to the former because Propertius tells us that he was neither of noble birth nor of a particularly rich family (non ita dives). But 'noti' does not mean either 'rich' or 'noble,' but 'respectable'; and that is exactly what the parentage of Propertius was. He was not of knightly birth like Tibullus and Ovid, but he was a member of a good provincial family possessing a considerable estate—

Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci,
  Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes.

Penates might be used of his native town, but not necessarily or even naturally. When Catullus writes to Verannius

Venistine domum ad tuos Penates?

we do not naturally think of Rome, or any town of Italy, which may have been the home of Verannius. This point is of some importance, as one of the chief arguments urged in favour of Spello is that Hispellum was, or became after it was turned into a military colony, a much more important place than Assisium. But even if we were constrained to regard Penates as indicative of the town, though Hispellum may have been more famous, Assisium may yet have enjoyed a certain repute which would justify the use of the word noti. Had he meant to imply any greater distinction the poet would probably have used some such word as clari or insignes.

What, next, is the meaning of 'patriae tangitur ora tuae'? Does Propertius mean to define the exact boundaries of the territory attached to his native town as being Mevania on the one side and the 'lacus Umber' on the other? Or is it sufficient to regard these two places, the 'Umbrian lake' and Mevania in its low-lying plain, with the mists from the Clitumnus rising over it, as conspicuous landmarks in the neighbourhood? This question becomes of great importance if the ordinary interpretation of the words 'lacus Umber' is accepted. The territory lying between Bevagna and the sources of the Clitumnus may have formed part of the territory of Spello, but it could not possibly have been that of Assisi, nor could it in any sense be described as the part of Umbria nearest to Perusia. But Sr. Urbini raises here an important question, his answer to which really seems to tell against his own contention in favour of Spello. Is the interpretation of 'lacus Umber' as 'the broad pool formed by the sources of the Clitumnus' really right? It is said that a scholiast on Virgil (Georgics ii. 147) applies the word lacus to the Clitumnus, and Pliny, in the well-known passage of his Letters in which he gives an account of his visit to its sources, describes the pool of running water in which these various sources meet as 'gurgitem qui lato gremio patescit.' But does not the word 'gurges' almost exclude the notion of a lake in the natural sense of the word, and still more of a lake to which the words 'aestivis intepet aquis' are applied? But the characteristic of the water at and near these sources to which Pliny and other ancient writers draw emphatic attention is their extreme coldness, and the truth of their statement may be verified by any one who visits them in the present day¹. If this 'gurges' ever extended to the dimensions of a lake, it has now shrunk to the dimensions of a moderately sized pool, overgrown with weeds, through which however the 'divini fontes' still flow in a clear stream, 'splendidior vitro.' It is impossible to conceive a description less applicable in every way than the line

Et lacus aestivis intepet Umber aquis

to the clear-flowing cold stream of the Clitumnus, of which the charm was so great in the eyes of those accustomed to the muddy streams of central Italy as to be deemed worthy of a temple to mark the sanctity attached to it. How then is the line to be explained? The words point to a sheet of water of considerable size, which would be a conspicuous object from the town, whether it was Hispellum or Assisium. But no such lake is visible in the neighbourhood of Perugia, Assisi, or Spello, nor indeed anywhere in what was the ancient territory of Umbria. It seems to follow that either the text is corrupt—and that has been suggested, though on no sufficient grounds—or that what was once a lake has disappeared and become part of the rich flat plain which stretches between the Tiber and the hill on which Assisi is built. Sr. Urbini states that in a medieval document the modern Bastia, which is the first station after crossing the Tiber on the railway between Perugia and Assisi, is spoken of as an island², and its inhabitants are called 'Isolani³.' Bastia is situated at the confluence of two considerable streams, the Chiascio and the Tescio, which flow into the Popino, of which the Clitumnus also is an affluent: and their united waters empty themselves into the Tiber about fifteen miles from Perugia. The flat plain above and below Bastia looks as if it might have been at no very distant date covered by the waters of a shallow lake, to which the two streams mentioned above may have contributed their waters. From its vicinity to the frontier it might naturally receive the general name of the 'Umbrian lake,' not being of sufficient size or importance to receive a distinctive name, like the Thrasimene lake, the lake Vadimon, or the lake Velinus. The disappearance of a shallow sheet of water, by natural causes or by drainage, in a well-cultivated territory, is not an unusual occurrence. Thus, for instance, the waters of the 'Nor-loch,' familiar to readers of the 'Fortunes of Nigel,' have been replaced within recent memory by the Princes Street Gardens that separate the old and new town of Edinburgh. The existence of such a lake in the neighbourhood of Bastia can, of course, only be a matter of more or less probable conjecture, based partly on the fact that the land on which it stands was at one time known as 'the island' and its inhabitants as 'the islanders,' and partly on the appearance of the district. There is certainly no such difficulty in admitting this conjecture as there is in supposing that Propertius, or any other poet, or any person of sane judgment, should have selected the 'steaming warmth of its summer waves' as the special characteristic of the pool of clear, cold, running water, in which the sources of the Clitumnus meet, a few feet below the spot where they issue 'ab Umbro tramite⁴.'

It remains to ask which of the two walls or walled towns described as 'climbing up a steep height' answers best to the description given in

Scandentes quisquis cernit de vallibus arces,

and

Scandentisque Asis (arcis?) consurgit vertice
 murus.

Assisi and Spello are situated on two spurs, which jut out into the plain at each extremity of the long range of Subasio, a bare mountain running in a direction from north to south, and rising to a height of about 3600 feet. These spurs are about six miles from one another. Assisi is on the northern, that nearest to Perugia. The height on which Spello is built is considerably smaller and lower than that occupied by Assisi. The modern town of Spello rises at once out of the plain and climbs up the face and two sides of a kind of promontory, sufficiently detached to have the appearance of a separate hill, though connected with the main range by a narrow ridge. Assisi, on the other hand, does not rise out of the plain, but begins about halfway up the height, and the town does not rise on any side to the top of this height. It is to be noted that in both the passages Propertius fixes our attention not on the towns themselves but on their walls:—

Ingenio muros aestimet ille meo.—
Murus ab ingenio notior ille tuo.—

Sr. Urbini remarks that as the wall of Assisi does not begin to rise out of the plain, while that of Spello does, the description can only apply to the latter. But can 'de vallibus' possibly mean the same thing as 'de campo'? There are no valleys nor any single valley lying below the height on which Spello is built; unless those words can be intended to denote the whole of the broad plain lying between the Monte Subasio—the name given to the whole range rising above both Assisi and Spello—and the low range which separates the waters of the Clitumnus and the Popino from the valley of the Tiber. Professor Ramsay decides that the town meant cannot be Assisi, because it is situated not on the top (vertice) but on the side of the height. To any one looking at Assisi in front, from the 'campo supposito,' or walking through the town itself, there is nothing within sight to correspond with either the 'valleys' or with 'the wall rising on the summit of the height.' The first impression of any one looking at the two places will be that on the whole Spello deviates less from the actual description given. But if he climbs up to what was the old citadel and returns by the back of the hill, on which there are no houses built, the two conspicuous objects which fix his attention, as he makes his way to the town gate, are the turns and windings of the deep valley of the Tescio below him, and the great ancient wall which climbs up from that part of the hill on which the church of St. Francis is built, past the gate which rises above and to the right of the church, till it reaches the citadel and then continues to run along the summit of the ridge, by which the Monte Subasio joins the outlying spur on which the town is built. The wall, though not so ancient as that running up the height on which Cortona stands, has all the appearance of the workmanship of the old Roman times. If then we translate the first passage 'whoever from the valleys below observes the battlements rising one above the other,' and the second 'and a wall rises up along the summit of the steep height,' or 'the steep Asis,' we shall find no difficulty in identifying the description with what any one may see who goes out of the gate, above and to the right of the famous church, and walks along the hill at the back of the town till he reaches the old citadel. The distinct statement of Propertius that his native district was that part of Umbria nearest to Perusia is thus confirmed by his description of striking characteristics of the site of the town to which that territory was attached. The number of inscriptions of the Propertii found at or near Assisi affords confirmation of this. If 'Asis' is the reading in line 125, it is difficult to see how it can apply to Spello. Sr. Urbini supposes that this was the name for the whole range of Monte Subasio. But in that case he is obliged to translate 'vertice' not 'the summit,' but 'a height,' certainly an unusual use of the word. If the 'lacus Umber' is to be sought in the neighbourhood of Bastia, it was within a short distance of Assisi, and may have formed one boundary of its territory. The neighbourhood of Mevania may have formed its southern extremity. In any case the town of Mevania, which was a much more considerable place in ancient than in modern times⁵—as is testified by the remains of an amphitheatre—and the mists rising over it from the valley of the Clitumnus, would be conspicuous objects from the heights on which Assisi is built. In the opposite direction the most conspicuous objects were the hill and town of Perusia, so fraught with tragic memories for Propertius.

The conclusion therefore to which we come is that Propertius was born about the year 46 B.C., either in the town of Assisi, or possibly in a country house in the territory attached to it. He belonged to a good though not a noble or equestrian family, which, as we learn on the authority of the younger Pliny, continued to be connected with that district for more than a century afterwards. He lost his father in his childhood, and about the same time was reduced to poverty by the assignment of part or the whole of his lands to the soldiers of Octavianus:

Ossaque legisti non illa aetate legenda
   Patris, et in tenues cogeris ipse Lares:
Nam tua cum multi versarent rura iuvenci,
  Abstulit excultas pertica tristis opes
(iv. 1,127).

The territory of the neighbouring town of Hispellum was enlarged in the interests of the military colony settled there, and it is natural to infer that what Hispellum gained in territory, Assisi lost. There is nothing to indicate that Propertius retained any part of his hereditary estate; but there are passages (i. 18, ii. 19) in his poems which show that he returned, at least on two occasions, to some place in the neighbourhood of the sources of the Clitumnus.

The event which made the deepest impression on his imagination while he was still a child was the siege of Perusia in the year 41 B.C., with all its accompanying horrors. This impression has stamped itself on various passages of his poems, but especially on the two short and closely connected pieces which form the epilogue of Book i. His sombre and melancholy temper, perhaps too the precocity with which his nature and talent developed themselves, may have owed their origin to the experiences of his childhood, as the melancholy of Lucretius may have been partly induced by his experiences during the reign of terror established by Marius and Cinna. The horrors of the siege followed immediately after the miseries of the confiscations; and one near kinsman, who may not improbably have been his mother's brother, and his own natural guardian⁶, took part in the siege, and after making his escape through the Caesarian lines, perished by the hands of brigands. Among the many vivid pictures painted by the imagination of Propertius, none arrests the attention more forcibly than that of the dying Gallus giving his last message to the wounded soldier to bear the tidings of his death to his sister:

Tu qui consortem properas evadere casum
   Miles ab Etruscis saucius aggeribus
Quid nostro gemitu turgentia lumina torques?

Not only was this incident stamped on his imagination as he may have heard it told by the wounded soldier himself, or as it may have been brought home to him by the grief of his mother, but it sank deeply into his heart. The solemnity and pathos of his reference to his loss in the following poem—

Si Perusina tibi patriae sunt nota sepulcra,
   Italiae duris funera temporibus,
Cum Romana suos egit discordia cives—
  Sit mihi praecipue, pulvis Etrusca, dolor:
Tu proiecta mei perpessa es membra propinqui
   Tu nullo miseri contegis ossa solo—

show that the memory of this early sorrow was a lasting one. Virgil, Horace, and even Tibullus had a sterner experience in their earlier manhood than anything which Propertius had to encounter. But no other Roman poet, except perhaps Lucretius, had, in the impressible years of childhood, been so powerfully and deeply affected by the sufferings and tragedies of the civil wars.

After the loss of his lands he seems to have been taken to Rome by his mother, with what still remained of his inheritance—

Aspice me cui parva domi fortuna relicta est
(ii. 34. 55)—

and educated under the grammarians and teachers of literature there. He remained under his mother's charge till he entered on manhood:

Matris et ante deos libera sumpta toga
(iv. 1. 132).

She was still alive when the eleventh poem of the first book was written (i. 11. 21), but had died before the composition of the twentieth poem of the second book (ii. 20. 15). On the rare occasions in which he mentions her, he does so with the piety habitual to an Italian. We hear of no other members of his family, but he speaks of 'friends of his father⁷,' who took an interest in his career, and did what they could to divert him from his fatal passion. His boyhood must have been unusually studious: in the beginning of his poetic career, which commenced soon after the assumption of the toga virilis, he shows not only extraordinary precocity of talent, but a remarkable familiarity with the Alexandrian literature. The words in which he describes himself before his passion for Cynthia changed his nature—

Tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus,
 Et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus
(i. 1. 3) -

are indicative of a virtuous and somewhat secluded training; and the ardour and unrestraint with which he yielded to his passion are suggestive of that inexperience of the world and want of other interests in life natural to a homebred poet, absorbed in himself and in the study of a literature which supplied few subjects of thought, but fed the natural inflammability of his temperament. On entering on manhood he, like Ovid, determined to have nothing to do with the uncongenial career of an advocate, but to devote himself to poetry:

Mox ubi bulla rudi dimissa est aurea collo,
  Matris et ante deos libera sumpta toga,
Tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo,
  Et vetat insano verba tonare foro.

Among the friends of his youth, the one whom he seems to have valued most and to whom his first book is dedicated is Tullus, a nephew apparently of Volcatius Tullus, consul in 33 B.C. He was a man of wealth (i. 14) as well as noble birth, and is commended by Propertius for his devotion to the service of his country, and his indifference to the life of pleasure, followed so generally by the youth of Rome:

Nam tua non aetas umquam cessavit amori,
 Semper at armatae cura fuit patriae.…

Me sine quem semper voluit fortuna iacere
 Hanc animam extremae reddere nequitiae
(i. 6. 21, 25).

Tullus was anxious to take him abroad with him, but he was unable to detach him from his 'bondage' to Cynthia. Propertius feels the intellectual attraction of the cities of Greece and Asia by which Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid were at different stages of their career drawn to visit them, but whether fortunately or unfortunately for the full development of his genius, his intellectual ambition at this period of his career was too feeble to resist the more immediate claims of passion:

An mihi sit tanti doctas cognoscere Athenas
   Atque Asiae veteres cemere divitias,
Ut mihi deducta faciat convicia puppi
   Cynthia et insanis ora notet manibus?
(i. 6. 13).

That he was not unmoved by this ambition may be inferred from a later poem (iii. 21), written apparently just after the spell is broken, when he proposes, as the only means of escape, to repair to Athens and devote himself to the study of the great masters of philosophy, of oratory, and of wise and witty intercourse with the world:

Illic aut studiis animum emendare Platonis
  Incipiam aut hortis, docte Epicure, tuis:
Persequar aut studium linguae, Demosthenis
 arma,
   Librorumque tuos, docte Menandre, sales.

If, as he so often tells us, Propertius was fitted by nature only to be the poet of love, it may be that his genius would never have received its first powerful impulse had he sacrificed the ardours of his early passion to a larger and more liberal culture, and to that wider knowledge of men which a more ambitious career would have opened up to him. But if, as some of his poems indicate, he had capacities and aspirations which never obtained their full realisation, the doubt may at least suggest itself whether the world would not have had in him a more complete poet had the studies of his boyhood been crowned by the philosophical culture of Athens, and his character disciplined and strengthened by some larger contact with life.

His other friends in Rome of whom we read were young men devoted to poetry, Bassus and Lynceus, writers of tragedy, and Ponticus, who was engaged on an epic poem on the war of Thebes; his kinsman Gallus, and Paetus a young merchant, whose untimely death he laments in a later elegy. Propertius does not seem to have had for them the cordial appreciation which Catullus and Horace feel for their friends. He writes of them or characterises them in the critical and captious spirit of one asserting his superiority, with nothing of the bonhomie with which Ovid treats everyone, or the affection and tenderness with which Tibullus writes of Cornutus and Macer. The not unfrequent notices of Bacchanalian indulgences bear no record of lively or genial boon-companionship. Though the life of Propertius is almost entirely passed in Rome, we hear scarcely anything of the open air life and sports of the Campus Martius⁸, which were part of the training as well as the pleasure of Roman youth. His extreme paleness and the slightness of his figure—

Nec jam pallorem totiens mirabere nostrum
   Aut cur sim toto corpore nullus ego
(i. 5. 21)

were the signs of a constitution unfitting, or at least disinclining him for any of the more manly amusements of youth. He prides himself on his effeminacy and on his unfitness for anything else except to love Cynthia and gain her favour by his poetry. He thinks it worth recording that he gave much thought to the adornment of his person, and affected a stately and leisurely mode of walking:

Nequiquam perfusa meis unguenta capillis,
  Ibat et expenso planta morata gradu
(ii. 4. 5).

All other interests in life, except the art which celebrated and ministered to his passion, were sacrificed to it during the longest and most active part of his poetical career.

The heroine of the love poetry of Propertius is no idealised creation of his fancy, or typical representative of the class to which she belonged. She has a very real and marked individuality, which her lover is constrained to describe, as he describes his own weakness and infatuation, with the desperate sincerity and truthfulness of a man making the full confession of his life to the world. On the same authority as that from which we learn that Lesbia was Clodia, and that the true name of Delia was Plania, we learn that the real name of Cynthia was Hostia. There is no reason to suppose that she was a freedwoman, though she belonged to the class which was largely recruited from freedwomen; nor any ground for doubting that, in the line (iii. 20. 8),

Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo,

Hostius, one of the early annalistic poets in the style of Ennius, who wrote on the Istrian war, is referred to as her grandfather. Her original home was Tibur; and she was buried in the Tiburtine territory, near the banks of the Anio. When she appears to Propertius after death, she is represented as asking to have this inscription engraved on a column raised above her tomb:

Hic Tiburtina iacet aurea Cynthia terra:
 Accessit ripae laus, Aniene, tuae
(iv. 7. 85).

We hear of her being at Tibur on one occasion during her lifetime, and summoning Propertius to come and see her there. Her house in Rome was in the Subura; and at the time of her death she appears to have had a considerable establishment of slaves in her household.

Among the many lovers who supplied the means for her extravagance, we hear more than once of a praetor, whom, in a very early stage of her liaison with Propertius, she is preparing to accompany to his province of Illyria. She is finally induced to stay 'not by gold nor precious gifts,' but 'by the soft persuasive influence of poetry,' 'blandi carminis obsequio.' It is probable that she was considerably older than Propertius, as after their relations had lasted for some three or four years he reminds her that she will at no distant date be an old woman:

At tu etiam iuvenem odisti me, perfida, cum
 sis
  Ipsa anus haut longa curva futura die
(ii. 18. 19).

He tells us that the first advances came from her—

Cum te tam multi peterent, tu me una petisti
(ii. 20. 27);

and, as in the case of Catullus and Clodia, they were drawn together by literary sympathy. He often speaks of her devotion to poetry—

Carmina tam sancte nulla puella colit
(ii. 26. 26).

She admired his elegies and was proud to be their theme—

Gaudet laudatis ire superba comis
(ii. i. 8).

The thought which after death moves her spirit to forgive his coldness is of the proud place which she had held in his poetry:

Longa mea in libris regna fuere tuis
(iv. 7. 50).

She was not only appreciative of genius, but was herself an accomplished poetess, and claimed to rival the Greek Corinna. Propertius describes her beauty and accomplishments in many passages. He compares her on the ground of her personal attractions to the early heroines; and in a different mood and on other grounds, to the Lais, the Thais, and the Phryne of later Greek story. He ascribes to her the dark auburn hair, so much admired by Roman poets and Venetian painters; dark and glowing eyes, which in one of his happier moods he describes as

geminae, sidera nostra, faces;

a complexion which he compares to 'rose leaves floating in milk,' but which in a less flattering mood, when his illusion was passing away, he declares was not 'ingenuus,' but artifical:

Et color est totiens roseo collatus Eoo
   Cum tibi quaesitus candor in ore foret
(iii. 24. 7).

He records also the charm of her long hands, of her tall and Juno-like figure, and her stately movements:

Fulva coma est iongaeque manus et maxima
 toto
  Corpore et incedit vel love digna soror
(ii. 2. 5).

He praises her accomplishments as much as her gifts of personal beauty. She was a graceful dancer and a skilful musician, and her conversation had a singular charm:

Unica nec desit iucundis gratia verbis
(i. 2. 29).

She had not only all the graces, but also skill in the useful arts cultivated by women in ancient times:

Omnia quaeque Venus quaeque Minerva
 probat
(i. 2. 30).

The intellectual gifts and accomplishments attributed to her explain how members of the class to which she belonged enjoyed so much distinction and played so important a part in Greek and Roman life. The attributes of character with which he endows her are drawn with evidently more truthfulness than flattery; and they help to explain the domination she exercised over him. That domination was the action of a strong and imperious on a weak and submissive nature, which she alternately fascinated by capricious fondness, and drove to despair by hardness and inconstancy. He stands in awe of her even after death; and the words of tenderness, which in imagination he hears her ghost address to him, are mixed with others which show her angry spirit still untamed by the funeral fires.

The part played by Propertius in this tragi-comedy seems to realise that attributed to the lover in Roman comedy and satire. Like Phaedria in the Eunuchus he vows repeatedly that he will break the spell, and as often breaks the vow⁹. He too experiences the 'amari aliquid' in the thought that the wit exercised by his mistress was at his expense:

Quin etiam multo duxistis pocula risu,
   Forsitan et de me verba fuere mala
(ii. 9. 21).

The passion of Propertius for Cynthia is more interesting as a psychological study than as a romance of love. It has not the charm of the earlier phase of the love of Catullus and Lesbia, or the love of Tibullus and Delia, or Sulpicia and Cerinthus. It would be difficult even if it were worth while to follow him closely through all its vicissitudes. But it is necessary for the right understanding of his poetry to keep in mind the main outlines of the story, if that can be called a story which is often a mere alternation of passionate moods. Yet a certain though irregular movement may be traced in the process of change from the 'ardours' of the first book, through the tumults of the second to the comparative indifference of the third, till the final stage of disillusion is reached at the close of that book.

The first book exhibits two distinct stages in the development of his passion. The elegies from 2 to 10 represent him as during the first months of their union happy and elated by this new experience in his life, boasting of it to his friends who endeavoured to detach him from it, but at the same time yielding to that luxurious sense of pain—the 'dolor' following the 'gravis ardor' of which Catullus speaks—which is a condition of violent emotion:

Me dolor et lacrimae merito fecere peritum:
   Atque utinam posito dicar amore rudis
(i. 9. 7).

The first sign of any serious rift in his happiness is in the eleventh poem, addressed to Cynthia, who had quitted Rome for Baiae; but it is not till the seventeenth and eighteenth poems that the signs of serious estrangement appear. What the cause of the estrangement was is not directly stated. In a poem written long afterwards (iii. 16), when he is hesitating whether he should obey her summons to Tibur, he uses the words

Peccaram semel, et totum sum pulsus in
 annum,

and in the introductory elegy he describes himself as having been unhappy in his love, and driven by his unhappiness to reckless courses during a whole year:

Et mihi iam toto furor hic non deficit anno
   Cum tamen adversos cogor habere deos
(i. 1.7).

In the fifteenth poem he writes as if he were contemplating a voyage, and reproaches Cynthia for her indifference to the danger which he might have to encounter. The seventeenth poem describes vividly a scene in which he appears in actual danger of shipwreck; and in that poem he reproaches himself for having left her. The poem begins abruptly with the line

Et merito quoniam potui fugisse puellam.

Whether this intended voyage was the cause or the consequence of the quarrel is not stated. But the eighteenth, one of the finest of all the elegies of Propertius, is a true love elegy written in the deepest despair among the solitudes by the sources of the Clitumnus. His comparison in the first elegy of his own sufferings to those of Milanion among the caverns and rocks of Arcadia leads us to think that he may have retired for some time to the neighbourhood of his first home, and there finished and arranged for publication the elegies of the first book, to which he gave the title of Cynthia. In the first line of the introductory poem,

Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis,

he strikes the key-note not only of this book, but of nearly all the poems of which Cynthia is the subject. He is a born self-tormentor, and even in the poem which he long afterwards recurs to as a record of his happiest time—

Quid iuvat omato procedere, vita, capillo?
(i. 2. 1: cf. iv. 5. 55)—

there is a note of discontent.

The publication of this book at once established his fame. It procured him the favour of Maecenas. It effected his reconciliation with Cynthia, who, if she was tired of his reproaches and self-tormentings, was proud of gaining celebrity through his poetry. Within a month of the publication of his first book he was writing some of the elegies of the second:

Vix unum potes infelix requiescere mensem,
   Et turpis de te iam liber alter erit
(ii. 3. 3).

In the third poem of the new series he tells us that he had hoped to cure his passion and to devote himself to serious study, 'studiis vigilare severis,' but that after he had made his peace with Cynthia his infatuation returned with greater force than ever. The thirty-four poems of this book are with scarcely an exception devoted to the record of the next stage in the development of his passion. Raptures and reproaches, protestations of his own devotion and complaints of her infidelities, follow one another with irregular alternations. Cynthia acts according to her metier; is sometimes kind and gracious, more often hard and faithless. He compares the number of her lovers to those of Lais or Phryne. At last he learns the lesson that it is best to wink at her infidelities as 'the way of the world:'

Qui quaerit Tatios veteres durosque Sabinos,
   Hic posuit nostra nuper in urbe pedem
(ii. 32. 47).

The third book represents his gradual disillusion, ending in renunciation. The happiest poems in connexion with Cynthia are those which are the record of past, not of present emotion. He is able to devote himself to other subjects. He is more possessed with the thought of his art and his fame, of the crowd of poets who imitate, and of maids who admire him, than with his passion. The motive of his writing is no longer the desire to gain the favour of Cynthia, but the hope that his book may be the favourite reading of every lady waiting for her lover:

Ut tuus in scamno iactetur saepe libellus
   Quem legat exspectans sola puella virum
(iii. 3. 19).

He contemplates devoting his future years to the great subjects which Lucretius had treated before him; and proposes to make a voyage to Athens to complete that literary education which had been interrupted by his career of passion. The two latest poems proclaim his disillusion and emancipation. He anticipates for Cynthia the future which Horace anticipates for Lydia, and saw realised in Lyce. The unlovely severance of a not very lovely union is proclaimed in the last lines of the book:

Has tibi fatalis cecinit mea pagina diras,
  Eventum formae disce timere tuae.

But were these not very chivalrous words the end of the story? The last two poems of the book indicate a permanent change of feeling, and they seem to hint that the advancing years of Cynthia had something to do with the change. But the opening poem of the fourth book, in which by the voice of the astrologer Horos he gives an outline of his own career, hints that though the illusion was over the old domination was resumed:

Et bene cum fixum mento discusseris uncum,
   Nil erit hoc; rostro te premet ansa suo.

In the poem in which Cynthia's ghost appears before him soon after her burial (iv. 7) he introduces himself as bewailing his now lonely life—

Et quererer lecti frigida regna mei—

and the commands which Cynthia lays upon him imply that he exercised the rights of a master over her household. The following poem, a light comedy succeeding the tragedy of the seventh, could hardly have been written during the continuance of the serious passion. It seems to be a record of a time when she still exercised a sway over him, but when he could think of her imperious and violent temper as a subject for amusement rather than for tears. The passion which begins with joy, not unmixed with morbid complaints and repinings, runs its troubled course, growing gradually quieter and colder, till it disappears for a time, reveals itself again for a moment in the record of a disorderly debauch, and re-asserts its original intensity in the tragic sense of remorse and awe with which he recalls the memory of her who had been, as he so often calls her, his 'life,' and in a sense also his death; who, if she first inspired his poetry, marred the full development of his nature and genius.

In the poem written after the death of Cynthia he anticipates that his own end is near at hand. The elegy on Cornelia, the last poem of Book iv and probably the last finished by Propertius, proves that he lived till the year 16 B.C., but there are no grounds for supposing that he long survived that year. All through his poems, from first to last, he writes as if anticipating an early death. The passionate excitability of his temperament, so unlike the healthy sensuousness of Ovid, the extreme paleness, 'pallor amantium,' the index of that excitability, and the slightness of frame suggested in such phrases as 'exiles tenuatus in artus' (ii. 22. 21), point to a constitution not naturally fit to cope successfully with the vehement pleasures and pains of his existence. His last book was probably left unfinished at his death. The second book also gives the impression that, in its present shape at least, it was not finally arranged by himself. The passages in Pliny (Ep. vi. 15, ix. 22) which speak of the elegiac poet who claimed descent from him, leave a doubt whether, after his rupture with Cynthia and the passing of the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus,—the law characterised by Horace in the prosaic phraseology of the Carmen Seculare as 'prolis novae feraci'—he did not marry and leave descendants. Though the words 'inter majores numerat' might perhaps be used by one who counted him as a kinsman, the phrase 'a quo genus ducit,' seems to point to direct descent.

The only passion which vies in intensity with his love for Cynthia is his passion for fame as a poet. The two passions feed one another. The greatness of his love gives life to his poetry: through the power of his poetry he hopes to win and keep the favour of his mistress. No Roman poet is more self-conscious, and none is more confident of his immortality. He anticipates his renown before he is known to the world:

Tum me non humilem mirabere saepe poetam:
  Tunc ego Romanis praeferar ingeniis
(i. 7. 21).

After the publication of his first book, he writes of his glory as

ad hibernos lata Borysthenidas
(ii. 7. 18).

He is the high priest initiated in the rites of Philetas and Callimachus, whose triumphal car is to be followed by all the other poets of love. As the fame of Homer has grown with years, so will his own fame gather strength from time:

Meque inter seros laudabit Roma nepotes:
  Ilium post cineres auguror ipse diem
(iii. 1. 35).

It is the proud boast of Umbria that it has given birth to him; and even the wall that climbs up along the hill on which his native town is built has derived new renown from his genius. It is not by the delight in his art, 'the sweet love of the Muses,' but by the desire of recognition, that he professes to be influenced.

He expresses a genuine admiration for Virgil, but though he has some words of recognition for his predecessors in amatory poetry, Varro, Catullus, Calvus and Gallus, he has none for his eminent contemporaries, Tibullus and Ovid, with the latter of whom at least he was united by literary sympathy. He is preoccupied with his own eminence in the field which he has selected. Neither does Propertius make any allusion to Horace, though in the second poem of Book iii he has imitated more than one passage in the Odes. Horace however has left us a study of him, which, whether true or not, is not flattering. The lines of the second epistle of Book ii. 91-101,

Carmina compono, hic elegos, &c.

are clearly written in reference to him. Mr. Postgate has pointed out how such phrases in this passage as 'caelatumque novem Musis opus,' 'quanto cum fastu quanto molimine,' 'vacuam Romanis vatibus aedem,' are characteristic of the straining after strong expression, the self-consciousness and self-assertion of him who regarded it as the chief honour of his native district that it gave birth to the Roman Callimachus, and who proclaims that Mimnermus is a greater master in love than Homer:

Plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero.

The admiration expressed by Propertius for Virgil has a genuine ring; but the compliment paid to a contemporary poet, Ponticus—

Primo contendis Homero
(i. 7. 3) -

if it is not ironical, can only be attributed to that insatiable love of praise which Horace notes among the characteristics of the mutual admiration cliques of the day. As Propertius more than realises the weakness of the lover satirised by Horace, so too he is a living embodiment of the sensitive vanity of the poet, which the satirist has drawn from life in his Epistles. There is no ground for imputing to Horace any jealousy of the favour bestowed on a rival poet by Maecenas. The language of Propertius, though it testifies to the kindliness of the great patron of literature, to his appreciation of genius and his desire to give it a worthy direction, implies that he himself was not within the inner circle of his intimate friends, as Horace was and as Virgil and Varius had been. But though Horace may not have been of a jealous, he was of a quietly disdainful temper; and as we can understand how Tibullus, the gentle friend and comrade of the cultivated and high-minded Messalla, was attractive to Horace by his personal and social qualities, so we can understand how both the character and the art of Propertius were distasteful to him, especially after his adoption of the ideal of a philosophic attitude towards life, and after he came to regard the wise understanding of life as the true foundation of the highest literary art. He never seems to have lost his interest in or sympathy with younger men who combined gracefully a love of pleasure with a love of literature; but Propertius was not one who could take his pleasure lightly in the spirit of Horace's earlier maxims,

          nec dulces amores
Sperne puer, neque tu choreas.

As the chief representative of Alexandrianism, he must have been antagonistic to the taste of Horace for the older masters; and the admiration for his poems must have run counter to the direction into which Horace wished to guide the taste of his contemporaries. Even the exceptional and irregular force of expression in Propertius, and the vividness of his imagination, were not likely to be appreciated by so consistent a follower of the rule of moderation in art as in conduct.

While therefore attaching its proper weight to the contemporary testimony of Horace as to the personality of Propertius, we have to qualify it by a consideration of the temper of the critic and the probable grounds of the antagonism between the two poets. The offence given to Horace's common sense and social tact as a man of the world probably made him less just in his appreciation of the genius of Propertius, than he was to the young men on the staff of Tiberius. Yet the fact that Propertius is singled out for the encounter of wit and ironical compliment, seems to be a recognition that he occupies, in Horace's view, a different position from the mere herd of imitators who both irritated and amused him.

The secret of the weakness and unhappiness of Propertius, and partly also of the imperfection of his art, was that his imagination was so much stronger and more elevated than his character. An ideal of an intenser love, a more intellectual life, a happier realisation of the pleasures of art and imagination, is always conflicting with and marred by the actual disorder of his career. The exceptional precocity of his genius, and the early age at which his great passion began, have also to be taken into account in estimating the work which he produced. He began writing before he had any knowledge of life except that taught him by his passion; and he never afterwards succeeded in rising permanently out of the narrow groove of interests in which his life first ran. It is his concentrated devotion to Cynthia through the long period of his 'bondage' which gives a kind of unity and consistency both to his career and his art. His premature death prevented him from fully accomplishing what his genius was capable of, after the horizon of his intellectual interests was widened. His work remains as evidence how passionately, how blindly, and how unhappily an Italian of that age could love, and sacrifice all other claims and interests of life to that absorbing emotion.

Thle Art and Genius of Propertius.

Propertius, in the opening poem of the third book, claims to be 'a high priest from a pure source of poetry, who first bore the sacred symbols of Italy through the movements of the Greek dance.' In language less strained, he claims to be the first interpreter of the passions of Italy in the forms of Greek art. In making this boast he seems to forget the claims of Calvus and Catullus, of Varro and Gallus, which he had just conceded in the last poem of the second book. He is here consciously or unconsciously repeating the claim expressed by Horace in simpler language—

        carmina non prius
Audita Musarum sacerdos
  Virginibus puerisque canto—

as in the following poem he recalls more than one thought of the 'Exegi monumentum.' But the claim made by Horace is better warranted than that of Propertius. Not only had those four poets celebrated their loves in Greek forms and metres, but the contemporary poet Tibullus had at least an equal claim with Propertius to have brought the elegy to perfection. The words of Propertius, taken along with his claim to be the Roman Callimachus, and with the two opening lines of this poem—

Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philetae,
   In vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus—

are to be interpreted as meaning that he was the first Roman poet who reproduced the art of Alexandria in Latin literature. The claim is justifiable to this extent, that he was probably a much closer imitator of the manner and matter of his originals than any of the other elegiac poets. But as these originals are lost we can only form vague inferences as to their art. All evidence points to the supreme importance which they attached not only to diction and metrical effect, but to the composition of their separate pieces, and also to the arrangement of the several pieces in each book so as to produce the impression of an artistic whole, 'simplex et unum¹⁰.'

How far has their professed imitator followed their example in the arrangement of the several books, so as to produce in each a distinct unity of impression? The answer to this question is that this object seems to have been prominently before his mind; that he has completely realised it in the first book; partially, if not completely, in the third; that for some reason or other the second book fails to produce the impression of completeness or arrangement on any principle; and that in the fourth book, there are two independent currents of interest, which were probably never intended to form one continuous stream.

The first book, which was known and prized in later times as a separate work under the name of Cynthia Monobiblos, brings before us, with no more intrusion of alien themes than is sufficient at once to vary and deepen the impression of the whole, the two earliest phases of his passion, the one of the brightest sunshine, the other of the deepest gloom. The opening poem, written in the darkest night of his trouble, but just before a new and more stormy day broke on him, indicates the dominant spirit in which his passion is treated by Propertius. The elegy is with him, even more than with Tibullus, a 'querimonia.' 'Flere' is used by him as equivalent to 'canere,' and 'lacrimae' to 'carmina.' This introductory poem is immediately followed by the brightest in the whole series, full of the 'new life' which this 'new love' brought into his existence. In this poem alone his happiness appears almost unmixed with any feeling of regret or self-reproach, of gratified vanity or querulous complaint. From the second to the tenth, the poems are so arranged as to bring out the pride which, under the plea of justifying his love, moves him to boast of it, and the joy which enables him to sympathise with a similar joy of one of his friends. The little rift which declares itself first in the eighth poem, ends before the poem is completed in a more tumultuous 'amoris integratio.' From the eleventh to the fifteenth, supposed to be written during Cynthia's absence in Baiae, the feeling is more troubled and anxious, and his sympathy with his friend's amour is changed to a complaint of his heartless indifference. The fourteenth poem, addressed to Tullus, which introduces a pause into the development of the story, is, in the main, bright and cheerful. The fifteenth is written with forebodings of the approaching estrangement. The sixteenth, which in its subject recalls the 'Janua' of Catullus—a common theme of elegiac satire—adds nothing to the development of the situation, but serves as a pause before the feelings of desolation expressed in the two most powerful poems of the book, the seventeenth and eighteenth, and the more melancholy resignation in the nineteenth—states of mind apparently leading to that year of reckless irregularity of which the first poem bears evidence. The twentieth is a poem of more disinterested art than any other in the book, and, though the tone of it is plaintive, serves to relieve the gloom by presenting outward nature and a story of the Greek mythology in their most picturesque combination. The dominant note of melancholy in the two short poems which form the epilogue of the whole book, especially that vivid reproduction in the twenty-first of a tragic scene stamped on his childish imagination, seems an augury of the gloom and trouble of the passion which consumed his life.

It may be said therefore that the first book, finished before he was much past twenty years of age, shews artistic composition and arrangement, unity of subject, variety of treatment, and deepening impressiveness. Had this been the only record of the passion of Propertius, the artistic excellence of his work would have been more generally acknowledged, and he would have left a happier impression of himself as a man and a lover.

Editors from the time of Lachmann have been about equally divided in opinion as to whether that which in the MSS. is numbered Book ii originally formed one or two books, and should be printed as ii, or as ii and iii. The arguments urged in favour of the subdivision into two books are based on the unusual length of the book; the appearance of a new beginning in the tenth poem—

Sed tempus lustrare aliis Helicona choreis—

and the lines (13. 25-26) written, like so many others, in anticipation of death—

Sat mea sat magna est si tres sint pompa
 libelli,
   Quos ego Persephonae maxima dona
    feram.

There is no reason to suppose that Book iii, which belongs to a later stage in his liaison, was either composed or in his thoughts when that line was written. Still, in a book bearing the marks of so much incompleteness and irregularity, both as a collected whole and in its several elegies, it would be unsafe, on the strength of a single passage, to accept this conclusion against the evidence of the MSS. If it were not for the existence of the more orderly third book, it would be difficult to resist Munro's conclusion, to which M. Plessis indicates his adherence, that the first book alone was published in a finished shape by Propertius. It is difficult to believe that so careful an artist as the author of the Cynthia Monobiblos could have regarded the arrangement of the poems in Book ii as final. They are not arranged according to chronological order. Thus the thirty-first poem refers to an event of the year 28 B.C., which took place either immediately after or possibly a year before the publication of Book i. The poem or series of poems (28 a, b, c) referring to the dangerous illness of Cynthia must have been written before the ninth, in which Propertius recalls his vows for her recovery. And if there is nothing like chronological order observed, it is difficult to detect any other principle of artistic arrangement. Attempts to re-arrange the book, like most of the attempts to re-arrange single poems, succeed only in satisfying the artistic sense of the restorer, and leave on other editors or critics the sense of deepened confusion. Another possible explanation of the condition in which the book is left suggests itself—that there may have been originally two books referring to this phase of the liaison, but that Propertius contemplated recasting them and reducing them to one, as Ovid recast and reduced his five books of Amores to three, and that death overtook him while his task was still incomplete. It is certainly desirable, for purposes of reference, that editors should come to an agreement on the subject.

The thirty-four poems of this book, with scarcely any exception, represent the alternations of experience and feeling during the years which followed the renewal of his passion. A fit motto for the book, and for the life of the poet at the time when the elegies composing it were written, might be taken from the twelfth poem, in which, guided by the teaching of his own experience, he analyses the meaning of the painter who represented the god of love as a winged boy:

Scilicet altema quoniam iactamur in unda,
   Nostraque non ullis permanet aura locis.

The fluctuations of passion, between joy, despair, and anger, follow one another without an indication of any change of circumstances to account for them. The disorder of the book is a symbol of the agitation under which it was composed. He seems to have written under the impulse of the moment, and never afterwards to have been able to shape the record of his varying moods into a coherent whole. A certain change in the development of his humour may indeed be traced towards the end of the book. Two of the least moody poems in the book are the nineteenth—'Etsi me invito discedis, Cynthia, Roma'—and the thirty-second—'Qui videt, is peccat.' In the first he is fully conscious of Cynthia's frequent infidelities: in the second he is reconciled to them. The first and the last poems serve as a prologue and epilogue to the book. They are both apologies for his art, and are interesting as expressive of his just appreciation of the character of Maecenas and of the genius of Virgil.

The third book, though it also brings before us violent alternations of mood, dependent on the capricious favours, the imperious exactions, and the frequent infidelities of Cynthia, and repeated struggles to emancipate himself and to rise into a higher range of intellectual life, has more the character of a consistent whole. The opening poems, in which he invokes the shade of Callimachus and the sacred relics of Philetas, indicate a change of mood, and a mind more occupied with his fame than with his past or present miseries. His love is now more a theme for his art than the torment of his life. He can deal with it in an easier style, as in the sixth poem, in which he questions her slave Lygdamus about his mistress's feelings towards him, and he is more inspired by the memories of past favours, as in the poem on the 'lost tablets,' and that in which he begs Cynthia to wear the dress in which she first captivated him. He deals with his passion more as an artist than a lover. The most serious expression of his personal feelings is in the two final poems in which he renounces his love. The poems of which Cynthia is the theme alternate with others dealing with the interests of public and private life. The spell which she had exercised over him reminds him now not only of some of the famous heroines of old, but of one who has become a heroine to modern poets, the 'incesti meretrix regina Canopi,' whose ambitious hopes and tragic end he has described with more power than any other Roman poet. In another he expresses the hope that under the patronage of Maecenas his genius may gather strength to celebrate the beginnings of Rome, and the great events of contemporary history. He writes, too, in anticipation of the triumph of the expedition to the East, meditated by Augustus on leaving Rome in the year 22 B.C. He deals also with the passion of love in a more disinterested spirit, and presents a worthier ideal of it than that realised in his own troubled experience, in his remonstrance with Postumus (12) for leaving his bride Galla to follow the arms of Augustus. In the following poem, the love of luxury and rage for wealth, the motive both of the soldier's and the merchant's career, are contrasted with an ideal of a primitive life when the Gods of the country mingled freely and genially among men, a note of the survival of that purer and more tranquil ideal of life which was realised by Tibullus, and which agitated Propertius and made him, unlike Ovid, restless and unhappy amid the constant excitements and pleasures of the town. It is apparently the secret longing for rest to his restless spirit, that makes the thought of death so vividly present in all his poetry. In this book the thought is not associated solely with himself, but is vividly brought home to him by the shipwreck in which his young and adventurous friend Paetus perished (7), and by the great national calamity of the untimely death of the young Marcellus (18).

If the first book is most artistic in its treatment of the chief phases of the poet's passion, the third has the advantage of greater variety of subject and a more disinterested treatment. Even the poems inspired by Cynthia gain artistically as being the record of emotions recalled by the imagination after the passion has cooled, instead of being the immediate outpouring of the turmoil of incongruous emotions. No irregularity or disorder is apparent in the composition of this book. Except for the inexplicable condition in which the second book has been left, there would be no reason to doubt that the third was given to the world in its present shape about the year 21 B.C., and helped to enhance the poet's claim to be the Roman Callimachus.

There appear to be two incongruous motives in the fourth book. The original intention, as indicated in the introductory poem, was to carry out the idea already hinted at (iii. 9) of a series of poems on the origins and antiquities of Rome and on Roman rites and customs, suggested apparently by… Callimachus. But in this introductory poem, of which the most interesting parts are the notices of his life already discussed, he describes a struggle in his mind between the ambition to write of this subject in the spirit of Ennius, and what he knew to be his true calling, which is declared to him in the words of the astrologer Horos—

At tu finge elegos, fallax opus, haec tua
 castra,
   Scribat ut exemplo cetera turba tuo.

Poems 2, 4, 9, and 10 are written on the plan contemplated in the first poem. It is obvious that he either did not live to complete the plan, or that, like Virgil with the subject of the 'Alban kings,' he became 'offensus materia.' Some editors have supposed that these poems were his earliest compositions. But the evidence of the former books proves that Cynthia was the first inspirer of his elegy. The lines in iii. 9. 49-52,

Celsaque Romanis decerpta Palatia tauris
   Ordiar et caeso moenia firma Remo,
Eductosque pares silvestri ex ubere reges,
   Crescet et ingenium sub tua iussa meum,

imply that this was a later enterprise urged on him by Maecenas. Even the vanity of Propertius could scarcely have claimed that the wall around his native town had become more famous owing to his genius, before the composition of the Cynthia poems. And the words of Horos (iv. 1. 137-144) can only refer to the love for Cynthia and the poems commemorating it. Further, the technical structure of the verse, in which the disyllabic ending of the pentameter is nearly as uniform as in Ovid, leaves no doubt that these poems are in his later manner.

The other seven poems of the book are elegies unconnected with one another, on various subjects of personal, private, and public interest, and all are among the most powerful products of his art and genius. Two are on the old subject of Cynthia, but written no longer under the spell of her visible fascination. In the first of these, the two most potent influences of his poetry, love and death, are united in the most tragic association. The remorse for his past coldness, and that foreboding of early death to which, in the reaction from the feverish excitement of his life, he was so liable, are both aroused by a vivid vision of the ghost of Cynthia appearing to him immediately after her burial. The following poem betrays not only the levity which so strangely intermingles with the sombre gloom of his temperament, but also an unexpected vein of humour in recalling the violent temper and capricious imperiousness of the former object of his idolatry. It could only have been written after his imagination was completely disillusioned. The sanity and vivid realism with which the situation is presented confirms the impression derived from some other poems of this book, that he would have been a more attractive poet if he could more frequently have assumed a more objective and less impassioned attitude to his own experience, or to the personages and incidents which moved his imagination in the art and poetry of the past. A third poem, in the vein of Archilochus rather than Mimnermus, addressed to a 'lena,' shows that in the ashes of his extinct love there survived the hate of the agent of her infidelities. A happier and more disinterested utterance of the Muse who inspires the poetry of love is recognised in the epistle of Arethusa to Lycotas, which may have first suggested the epistolary form of Ovid, as the poems on Roman rites and the legends connected with them may have suggested the subject of the Fasti. This epistle is more interesting than any of the Heroides, as its substance is taken not from remote legends, but from the real experience of the Augustan age. It is interesting as presenting a purer ideal of womanhood than is usual in the elegiac poets; and, further, as evidence how the love of adventure or the hope of booty acted even on the effeminate spirits of the time—

Dic mihi, num teneros urit lorica lacertos?
   Num gravis imbelles atterit hasta manus?

The sixth poem was written for a public occasion, the celebration of the games which commemorated the victory of Actium. The terror and hatred inspired by Cleopatra add a new testimony to the dangerous fascination exercised by woman in that age, of which the earlier books of Propertius afford the most living record. The last poem of the series, probably the last written by Propertius, is, if not the most inspired and spontaneous, certainly the noblest of his elegiacs. It reminds us that if there was a Cleopatra, whose fascination and ambition brought about one of the great decisive struggles of the world, and if there were many Cynthias, by whom private lives were wrecked, the ideal of Roman matronhood still survived, and was sometimes realised amid the general corruption. The elegy professes to be the 'apology for her life,' uttered by Cornelia, a member of the great house of Scipio, connected with the imperial family through her mother Scribonia, and the wife of Paullus Aemilius Lepidus.

The image presented of her may be more a creature of the imagination than a true likeness, but it is a high ideal of the dignity of manner, the greatness of sentiment, and the loyalty of womanhood, realised in some of the women of the great Roman families, of which traces survive in some of the busts which have come down from the earliest and best years of the Empire. It is an ideal not only of a great Roman lady, ennobled by the memories of her own family and of that into which she had married, so closely connected with her own in the day when each produced its greatest men, but also of a loyal and devoted wife, a pious and devoted mother. From this poem, the latest impression we form of Propertius is of capacities unused and latent through the long years of his entanglement. It adds to the regret that after having sufficiently sung of his love, he did not live to produce more mature work, bearing testimony to his appreciation of the enduring nobleness in Roman life.

The union of two incongruous objects in this book suggests the inference that the poet was carrying on two separate works at the same time, that neither was left complete, and that his friends after his death published what they found in his 'scrinia' in what seemed to them the order most conducive to variety of interest. As to his first design, the astrologer was probably a true prophet, in indicating that the rôle of Ennius could not be taken up by him in elegiac verse. Nor had he, as Ovid had, the lightness of touch required to make tales of romance or amusing adventure out of the aetiological myths associated with ancient temples and ritual. There is an element of pedantry in the way in which Propertius deals with Roman antiquities, as there sometimes is in the way in which he deals with Greek mythology. The other subjects are sufficiently varied between those purely personal and those of general human interest. The tone also is sufficiently varied from tragedy to comedy, from indignation to tenderness or noble pathos, to make us feel that, under other conditions, his art might have vied with that of Horace in its power of finding shape and expression for the imaginative sentiment of the time, and that he was even capable of striking a more powerful note than any struck by Horace. Though by the loss of any considerable portion of his work, we should have been in danger of losing some of his most sincere and passionate utterances, yet perhaps he would have been more popular as a poet, and ranked more highly as an artist, if we had possessed only the Cynthia Monobiblos, a very few of the poems of the second book, nearly the whole of the third book, and of the fourth book all except those in which he attempts to elicit a spring of poetry out of the dryness of aetiological myths. We should thus have been spared much of the iteration, the sense of unrelieved misery and weakness, the pedantry, the obscurity and confusion, which mar the pleasure of reading Propertius as a whole.

The structure of the single elegies is different in Propertius from what it is in the other elegiac poets. We feel in him the impulsive rush of passion, not the rise and fall of tender sentiment as in Tibullus, or the lively movement of fancy and curiosity as in Ovid. He often, as is remarked by M. Plessis, begins abruptly, as if after long brooding the expression of what was uppermost in his mind at the moment was forced from him. Instances of this startling abruptness are seen in i. 17:

Et merito, quoniam potui fugisse puellam;

i. 18:

Haec certe deserta loca et taciturna querenti;

i. 21:

Tu qui consortem properas evadere casum;

iii. 7:

Ergo sollicitae tu causa, pecunia, vitae.

In most of the elegies the passion appears immediately in its utmost intensity, but does not maintain itself at the same pitch. The feeling seems to burst forth without warning and to force a way for itself, but as it advances it seems to check itself, and follow the guidance of a fancy overladen with mythological learning, till it cannot recover its first impetuous speed. One striking instance of this is iii. 12—

Postume, plorantem potuisti linquere Gallam—

where the tender beauty of the first twenty-two lines, ending

Pendebit collo Galla pudica tuo,

is certainly not enhanced by the sixteen lines which give a summary of the adventures of Ulysses to prove that

Vincet Penelopes Aelia Galla fidem.

The charm even of i. 2, which grows in intensity till line 14 by all the illustrations of the unadorned beauty of natural things, seems to fade away in the irrelevant learning of lines 15-20. In some of the finest elegies of Book i, as 17 and 18, the flow of feeling knows no check; and one cause of the greater artistic charm of the first book is that the poems in it do not exceed the length during which one strong emotion is able to run without impediment.

The passion and feeling of the moment seems to force out and shape the language and metre suitable for the expression of his thought. He is always striving to vivify the objects of nature of which he speaks, and to present his thought in some picture or image. Often his figures of speech seem to be suggested by works of art, such as pictures or other artistic representations of the God of Love. The strange and almost grotesque phrase,

Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros,

recalls those works of art in which Apollo is represented as joining with the Muses in their sacred dance. He frequently strikes out new Latin combinations of words as the equivalents of striking phrases in the Greek authors whom he studied, Philetas and Callimachus, Theocritus, Apollonius, Meleager, and Leonidas of Tarentum. Possibly if we possessed the lost elegies of the Alexandrians, we should understand better much that seems forced and unidiomatic in the diction of Propertius. Occasionally we are reminded of native poets, Catullus, Virgil, and Horace—more however in the sentiment and thought than in the diction—but on the whole no poet seems to have kept himself more free from the facile abuse of the conventional language of poetry. Each single phrase seems the mintage of his own mind, and it is the endeavour to make his language independent of the ordinary repertory of poetical art, that makes it often forced and obscure. We feel always the presence of an energetic 'forgetive' mind in his diction. We feel it in his novel word-formations, as in

Cogar et undisonos nunc prece adire deos
(iii. 21. 18);

in such revivals of archaic words as in

Illa mihi totis argutat noctibus ignes
(i. 6. 7);

in the transitive meaning given to intransitive verbs, as in

Frigidaque Eoo me dolet aura gelu
(i. 16. 24);

in the attribution of a living personality to natural objects—

et invito gurgite fecit iter
(i. 17. 14).

He forces the Latin language from its ordinary sobriety of phrase and ordinary obedience to grammatical law to be the medium of an imagination working powerfully, incessantly, and irregularly under the influence of powerful, unceasing, and irregular emotion. The language of Propertius is the idealised monologue of an introspective mind, making its meaning vividly present to itself, as that of Ovid is the language of idealised conversation addressed to a pleasure-loving, refined, and quick-witted society. Propertius is seldom gay, natural, easy and familiar, as Ovid always is, There are few continuous passages of six or eight lines in which the diction is simple and direct, as it is for instance in the passage i. 2. 9-14—

Aspice, quos summittat humus, &c.

In the thirteenth line the word persuadent, for which no tolerable substitute has been suggested, cannot be said to convey the idea corresponding to it simply or naturally. It is very seldom that we come on even four lines together, in which we detect so little sign of effort, of that straining for success which Horace indicates in the word torquebitur, as in the lines I. 11. 23-26—

Tu mihi sola domus, tu, Cynthia, sola
 parentes,
   Omnia tu nostrae tempora laetitiae.
Seu tristis veniam seu contra laetus amicis,
   Quidquid ero, dicam: Cynthia causa fuit.

The most powerful effects of the language of Propertius are associated with his power over his metre. The energy of his imagination shows itself in the vividness and novelty of the imagery by which he symbolises his thought: his capacity of imaginative feeling shows itself in his susceptibility to the grander or more solemn and to the more soothing and voluptuous effects of the sound of words and their combinations. In his metre also we seem to feel as if the music of single lines and couplets was slowly beat out by conscious effort. The lines seem intended to be dwelt on singly, and to bring out their full musical effect they have to be read with a certain 'lenocinium' of the voice. The lines and couplets arrest the attention and sink deeply into the mind; but no single poem of Propertius carries us on with the facile flow of Ovid or the equable movement of Tibullus. In Tibullus and Ovid we find a continuous and connected movement of thoughts, each complete in the couplet, and either passing into one another by gentle transition, or indicating their relation to one another by a rapid and perpetual flow of lively and witty antithesis. In Propertius we find long continuous passages, in which there is scarcely any pause, and in which the sense frequently runs on into the third line. But the great difference in their rhythmical movement is that in Ovid and Tibullus the rise of the feeling in the first line is followed by its 'falling in melody back' in the second; in Propertius there is more frequently a culminating than a subsiding effect in the second line of the couplet. The pentameter instead of being a weaker echo of the hexameter is the stronger line of the two, and has a weightier movement. In Ovid the dactylic movement predominates in the first as in the second half of the pentameter. In Propertius two spondees in the first half of the line are more common than two dactyls. He is fond of the long vowel sound of o and u in his pentameters:

Quam cito de tanto nomine rumor eris
(i. 5. 26).

In the first book Propertius adhered to the old Greek practice of ending the pentameter with words of three, four, and five syllables. In the later books he yielded to the new taste fostered by Ovid for a uniform disyllabic ending. It may be doubted whether he did not lose more by thus limiting the range of his instrument, than he gained in smoothness. Horace in his employment of the Sapphic metre, beginning with a strict uniformity of movement, seems to have felt its monotony and tameness, and reverted to the freer movement of the Greeks; and in this he seems to have been more happily guided. The elision of final syllables is more frequent in Propertius, and this sometimes produces a sense of crude harshness in his lines, as in

Quaerere: non impune illa rogata venit
(i. 5. 32).

Sometimes, however, a kind of rugged grandeur, harmonising with the thought, is thus imparted to a line, as in

Nunc tibi pro tumulo Carpathium omne mare est
(iii. 7. 12).

The effect of the verse and diction of Propertius is especially manifest in their power of vaguely impressing the imagination and awakening emotions of awe and solemnity. The power of the pentameter in evoking the solemn feelings associated with death (with a similar effect to that of the third line in the Horatian Alcaic) is seen in such lines as

Brachia spectavi sacris admorsa colubris,
   Et trahere occultum membra soporis iter
(iii. H. 53)

     Est mala, sed cunctis ista terenda via est
(iii. 18. 22);

     Nec nostra Actiacum verteret ossa mare
(ii. 15. 44);

     Murmur ad extremae nuper humata viae
(iv. 7. 4).

There is a grandeur as well as solemnity imparted to the thought of love triumphing over fate and death in

Traicit et fati litora magnus amor
(i. 19. 12);

while all the tender regrets associated with death are touched by the contrast between the spirit of youthful adventure and the pathetic memories suggested by the funeral urn—

Sic redeunt, illis qui cecidere locis
(iii. 12. 14).

Great historic and legendary associations are evoked in such weighty lines as

Consule cum Mario, capte lugurtha,
   sedes
(iii. 5. 16)

Cimbrorumque minas et benefacta Mari
(ii. 1. 24);

Curia, praetexto quae nunc nitet alta senatu,
        Pellitos habuit, rustica corda, patres
(iv. i. 11);

and more recent associations, solemn or serious, in these—

lura dare et statuas inter et arma Mari
(iii. 11. 46),

and

Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides
(iii. 9. 34).

The awe inspired by the blind forces of nature and their cruelty finds a natural voice in such lines as

Aspice, quam saevas increpat aura minas
(i. 17. 6),

or

Alternante vorans vasta Charybdis aqua
(ii. 26. 54).

But his language and rhythm express not only the Roman sense of awe and solemnity in presence of the thoughts, memories, and aspects of nature which rouse these emotions. They are pervaded also by the Italian 'mollitia,' a susceptibility to the sweet and musical sound of language in harmony with a luxurious and voluptuous sentiment, often not unmixed with melancholy, awakened by the thought of the tender joys of love, the softer influences of nature, the musical charm of poetry and song. Here too the charm of sound and sense is in the pentameter—

Omnia si dederis oscula, pauca dabis
(fi. 15. 50);

Ulla dedit collo dulcia vincla meo
(iij. IS. IO);

Non oculi, geminae, sidera nostra, faces
(fi. 3. 14);

Sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae
(i. 8. 18).

So, too, in the descriptions of nature, how the sound is suggestive of the sparkling of a running brook in the line

Et sciat indociles currere lympha vias
(i. 2. 12);

of a rich and tender beauty and of its transitoriness in

Vidi ego odoratum victura rosaria Paestum,
     Sub matutino cocta iacere Noto
(iv. 5. 61);

of all the softer charm of nature in

Muclet ubi Elysias aura beata rosas
(iv. 7. 60),

or

Luna moraturis sedula luminibus
(i. 3. 32),

and of its more picturesque aspects in—

Nec vaga muscosis flumina fusa iugis
(ii. 19. 30).

Again, how the slumberous charm of the occupation is suggested by these lines—

Nam modo purpureo fallebam stamine
 somnum,
  Rursus et Orpheae carmine, fessa, lyrae
(i. 3. 41).

How the musical sweetness of poetry is heard in

Sed potui blandi carminis obsequio
(i. 8. 39),

and in the reference to the poems of which that musical sweetness is the principal charm—

Tu canis umbrosi subter pineta Galaesi
   Thyrsin et attritis Daphnin arundinibus
(ii. 34. 67).

If the rank of a poet were to be assigned by the weight and power of single lines and phrases, no Roman poet would be more worthy than Propertius to be placed beside Lucretius and Virgil. No others show in their language so much energy and variety of imagination, so vivid a susceptibility to powerful emotions, so much capacity of receiving and interpreting certain aspects of beauty in art, in nature, and in human passions. Yet not only have his poems as a whole failed to gain the ear of the world, as the Odes of Horace and the short lyrics and iambics of Catullus have gained it, but there is no single poem of his which is stamped throughout with the classical perfection of many of the poems of these two great artists. It is not that Propertius was indifferent to art. He is ever straining after perfection of execution, but the full torrent of his emotion and conception constantly overflows or strays from the channel into which he wishes to direct it. There is, if not a narrower range of interests, a greater monotony of mood in Propertius. Yet it would be a wrong impression to form of him that he is solely the poet of his own love for Cynthia, or that he is not a powerful interpreter of other moods, and other aspects of life and nature, which are the material of poets of all ages. His first claim to distinction is that he is pre-eminently the poet of passionate love. From no other ancient poet do we realise so completely the daemonic spell which this passion could exercise on the whole life, its power for joy and grief, its power to exalt and to paralyse the energies of life, to inspire poetry and yet to subdue to its own service the gifts and aspirations which raise the poet into a higher and purer region of feeling and contemplation. He claims to be for the young lovers of both sexes the interpreter of their feelings. In some of his poems he tries to express his sympathy with the love affairs of his friends, but in the earlier stage of his passion he is too self-absorbed to rise to the disinterested joy in another's joy which Catullus makes us feel in the Acme and Septimius, and in the ringing Glyconics of the Epithalamium of Manlius and Vinia. But after the fervour of his own love has cooled, he exhibits in the remonstrance with Postumus and in the epistle of Arethusa to Lycotas a higher ideal of the love of woman than anything else which we find in the other amatory poets. It is to the credit of Propertius that neither his own experience of infidelity nor the irregularity of his life destroyed his faith in this ideal. He becomes neither cynical nor blasé. The sentiment expressed in the epistle of Arethusa,

Omnis amor magnus, sed aperto in coniuge
 malor,

is in direct antagonism to the philosophy fashionable among the votaries of pleasure, of whom Ovid was the high priest—

dos est uxoria lites
(A. A. ii. 155).

There is more strength and reality of feeling, and a truer insight into the human heart in this epistle, vivid with all the actual experiences of the present, than in the creations of fancy in which Ovid reproduces the imaginary sorrows of his heroines.

The thought of death is vividly present to many of the Roman poets, as a reminder, in the midst of all their luxury or violent pleasure, of the transitoriness of their enjoyment. But more than any, Propertius broods on the idea and on all its accessories with a morbid intensity of feeling. He is haunted by the foreboding that it is his doom and his glory to die of love—

Laus in amore mori
(ii. 1. 47).

Perhaps the most powerful lines in which this foreboding is expressed, mingling as they do a feeling of tragic awe with the imaginative sense of a mysterious invisible agency, are these from the fourth poem of Book ii—

Quippe ubi nec causas nec apertos cernimus
 ictus,
   Unde tamen veniant tot mala caeca via est.
Non eget hic medicis, non lectis mollibus
 aeger,
   Huic nullum caeli tempus et aura nocet:
Ambulat, et subito mirantur funus amici:
  Sic est incautum quidquid habetur amor.

This sense of the imminence of death sometimes suggests to him, as to Catullus, the lesson of the more passionate enjoyment of the present:

Quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes:
  Non satis est ullo tempore longus amor
(i. 19. 25).

But he can think also of the strength of love surviving the funeral pyre, and recalls the tale of Protesilaus as a testimony of this enduring love—

Illic Phylacides incundae coniugis heros
   Non potuit caecis immemor esse locis
(ibid. 7).

The elegy on the death of Paetus (iii. 7), one of the truest elegies in the Latin language, realises with all the vividness of Lucretius the shock caused to surviving friends by the premature cutting short of a young and adventurous life, the horror, more natural in ancient than in modern times, of perishing at sea—

Paete, quid aetatem numeras? quid cara natanti
   Mater in ore tibi est? non habet unda
  deos—

the contrast between the delicate frame and the pitiless cruelty of the waves which it had to encounter—

Huic fluctus vivo radicitus abstulit ungues,
 Et miseri invisam traxit hiatus aquam—

the contrast between the familiar resting-place among his kinsmen and the 'vast and wandering grave' which received him—

Nunc tibi pro tumulo Carpathium omne mare
 est.

This poem naturally suggests a comparison with another lament for the loss of a young friend by shipwreck. Both the lament for Paetus and the lament for Lycidas are powerful and musical elegies over the extinction of youthful promise. The actual details of the shipwreck are more vividly realised by the Latin poet, but perhaps it is a higher art to soften all these accessories by the delicate use of pastoral and mythological imagery, as is done by the English poet, than to present them in such grim realism as

Et nova longinquis piscibus esca natat.

Even in the use of the ancient mythology the modern shows his superiority to the ancient poet, whose

Infelix Aquilo, raptae timor Orithyiae

and

Sunt Agamemnonias testantia litora curas,

simply check the feeling of pathos without mitigating the horror of the situation. The lines

'Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding
 seas,' &c.

reveal richer and more powerful imagination than the single line, weighty in its vague suggestiveness,

Nunc tibi pro tumulo, &c.

Propertius expresses powerfully the common sorrow for the common lot. There is the true feeling of Italian piety in the complaint addressed to Neptune—

Portabat sanctos alveus ille viros—

and in the longing of the dying Paetus to be borne to the shores of Italy, and to be restored even in death to his mother's care—

At saltem Italiae regionibus advehat aestus:
   Hoc de me sat erit si modo matris erit.

The sorrow for Lycidas is for one cut off from a richer and nobler life than that which falls to the common lot. The spiritual piety of the English poet; if somewhat marred by the polemical passion of the time, affords a grander ideal than the piety of simple affection. But the truest note of difference between the modern and the ancient poet is struck in the last lines of their respective poems; in the sense of pastoral peacefulness and the thought of the consistent dignity of life, in the close of Lycidas—

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new—

and the sense of almost heartless levity, and the thought of a marred and restless life which are left on us by Propertius:—

At tu, saeve Aquilo, numquam mea vela
 videbis:
   Ante fores ḋominae condar oportet iners.

Milton's great saying, 'that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem,' never received more confirmation than in the art and life of Propertius. What prevented him from bringing his great powers of genius into perfect harmony so as to realise his great aspirations, was that he could not harmonise his life.

The lament for the young Marcellus (iii. 18) is a real elegy, but rather of imagination than of feeling. The thought is the commonplace one of the vanity of all earthly state, the unavailingness of worldly greatness and popular favour to avert the common doom; but it is expressed with great pomp and solemnity of language and rhythmical movement—

I nunc, tolle animos et tecum finge triumphos,
   Stantiaque in plausum tota theatra iuvent.
Attalicas supera vestes, atque omnia magnis
   Gemmea sint ludis: ignibus ista dabis.

The same thought of death as the universal leveller is expressed with the solemnity of Lucretius in an earlier elegy (iii. 5. 13-16)—

Haut ullas portabis opes Acherontis ad undas,
Nudus at inferna, stulte, vehere rate.
Victor cum victis pariter miscebitur umbris:
Consule cum Mario, capte lugurtha, sedes.

In the poem in which Cynthia's ghost appears to him, she tells him that there is a separation in the world below between those who have kept faith and those who have violated it. This is the one human relation rewarded or punished. In the thought of a future life we recognise no definite belief, but the vague influence of old religious traditions and the ghostly terrors of the supernatural world, blending sometimes with the happier dreams of poets. We find a lingering survival of the primitive belief in the presence of the spirit in or near the grave, and still retaining the feelings of suffering or terror of which a living being would be conscious. It is this survival of belief which imparts such a grim horror to the curse invoked on the 'lena'—

Terra tuum spinis obducat, lena, sepulcrum—

and to that which Cynthia invokes on herself, if she has been untrue (iv. 7. 53)—

               Si fallo, vipera nostris
Sibilet in tumulis et super ossa cubet.

The feeling with which Propertius realises the thought of death and what comes after it has nothing of the austere fortitude with which Lucretius, or the quiet resignation with which Horace looks it in the face, nor anything of the gentle charm of poetical fancy with which Tibullus eludes it, but is rather the natural foreboding of a restless and melancholy nature, whose restlessness and melancholy are intensified by vivid imagination and uncontrolled by consistency of thought or character.

Though in common with all the other Italian poets he feels deeply the power of certain aspects of nature over the imagination, he does not seem to derive from them the sense of peace or consolation which Virgil and Lucretius, Horace and Tibullus, find in such refuges from melancholy thoughts, or from the cares and distractions of life. He seems to have keenly enjoyed the spectacle which Rome presented in her porticoes, temples, theatres, and triumphal processions. He has left a vivid account of the artistic glories revealed at the dedication of the temple of the Palatine Apollo (ii. 31), the columns of marble, the figures of the daughters of Danaus, the statue of the god himself, the four cattle of Myro—

Quattuor artificis, vivida signa, boves—

the ivory gates of the temple on which the avenging power of the god was made visible in the representation of the Gauls driven from Delphi, and of the punishment of Niobe. In the poem (iii. 21) in which he expresses his intention of visiting Athens, he anticipates the delight to the eye from the art of the painter and sculptor—

Aut certe tabulae capient mea lumina pictae,
  Sive ebore exactae, seu magis aere manus.

He has a great feeling of the beauty of gems, of robes of Coan silk, and other ornaments of luxury. When he describes a familiar scene from nature, it is that of the Tiber, with the boats passing up and down its waters, as seen from a wooded villa overhanging them. There are few traces in his poems of his having moved often from his home on the Esquiline. In one of his fits of despair, during the year of estrangement, he takes refuge among the solitudes around the sources of the Clitumnus, and pours out his sorrows to the woods and lonely rocks—

Sed qualiscumque es, resonent mihi Cynthia
 silvae,
 Nec deserta tuo nomine saxa vacent
(i. 18. 31).

In a happier mood and in one of the most charming of the poems of the second book, he writes from Rome to Cynthia, who had gone before him to spend some time among those lonely scenes—

Sola eris et solos spectabis, Cynthia, montes
     Et pecus et fines pauperis agricolae
(ii. 19. 7)—

and contrasts the primitive innocence and piety of the country with the temptations and luxury of the town—

Illic te nulli poterunt corrumpere ludi
   Fanaque peccatis plurima causa tuis;
Illic assidue tauros spectabis arantes
   Et vitem docta ponere falce comas;
Atque ibi rara feres inculto tura sacello,
   Haedus ubi agrestes corruet ante focos¹¹.

He looks forward to joining her there in a few days and enjoying the tamer sports of the field—

Qua formosa suo Clitumnus flumina luco
  Integit, et niveos abluit unda boves.

As it is among the wilder scenes of nature that he seeks refuge in his despair, so it is among them that he would fain return with the object of his love to a more natural and simple life. He feels the charm of natural beauty as it reveals itself in wild and lonely places—

Surgat et in solis formosius arbutus antris
(i. 2. 11);

and it is in some quiet spot remote from men, beneath the shade of trees, that he desires to be buried—

Me tegat arborea devia terra coma
(iii. 16. 28).

It is from the same impressibility to the solemn sights and mysterious agencies of nature, and the sombre feelings produced by them, that he represents so powerfully the effect of the blind fury of the sea ('vesani murmura ponti') and the loneliness of night on the imagination, as in the seventeenth poem of the first book, in which the situation and feelings of one in danger of shipwreck in a stormy night, and descrying in the late evening or early dawn the woods of an unknown shore—

ignotis circumdata litora silvis—

are vividly brought before the eye and mind. The terror of the sea is the principal motive of more than one of his most powerful pieces,—of the lament for Paetus, in which the darkness of the night adds to the terror of the conflict of the elements with the helplessness of man, and the dream (ii. 26) in which he sees the shipwrecked Cynthia—

lonio lassas ducere rore manus.

The loneliness of the natural scenes which surround them heightens the romance of the illustrations and tales from mythology introduced into his poems. The first are indeed often brought in irrelevantly or in greater abundance than is needed. In one or two instances the heroines are degraded (though not so often or with the same cynicism as in Ovid) by being identified with the realism of Roman passion. But in other cases the romance of ancient story enhances, without in any way suffering degradation, the passion of the actual situation. Thus the despair of Propertius, driving him into the solitudes of the bare Umbrian hillside, gains a certain glory from its association with the romantic tale of Milanion's sufferings among the wild Arcadian mountains. And no actual description of her personal beauties would affect the imagination of contemporaries familiar with the paintings and sculpture of the time so powerfully as the comparison (i. 3) of the sleeping Cynthia to Ariadne, just after the departure of Theseus,

Languida desertis Gnosia litoribus;

to Andromeda,

Libera iam duris cotibus Andromede;

and to the Bacchante, when, wearied with the wild revelry of the dance, she has sunk to sleep on the grassy bank of the Apidanus.

The most powerful union of a tale of adventure and terror in combination with the solitariness, the wild forces, and mysterious agencies of Nature, is seen in the treatment of a subject which had been famous in the Greek and Roman drama, and in many works of art, the escape of Antiope from the jealous tyranny of Dirce, and her recognition by her sons Zethus and Amphion (iii. 15)—

Inde Cithaeronis timido pede currit in arces.
   Nox erat, et sparso triste cubile gelu.
Saepe vaga Asopi sonitu permota fluentis
   Credebat dominae pone venire pedes,
Et durum Zethum et lacrimis Amphiona
 mollem
   Experta est stabulis mater abacta suis.

The comparison that follows—

Ac veluti, magnos cum ponunt aequora motus,
   Eurus ubi adverso desinit ire Noto,
Litore sic tacito sonitus rarescit harenae,
   Sic cadit inflexo lapsa puella genu—

illustrates the power, not only of his meaning but of the movement of his verse, to stir the imagination with a vague sense of the analogy between the rise and subsidence of the stormy forces of nature and the forces of human passion, similar to the effect produced by the passionate lines of Shelley—

Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean
 knows …
 Thou in the grave shalt rest.

He is appreciative of the softer beauties as well as the sterner and more majestic aspects of nature. But these too appear in her solitudes, owing nothing to the care of man. The most elaborate description of a beautiful scene is presented in union with the adventures of the lonely wanderer Hylas (i. 20. 33)—

Hic erat Arganthi Pege sub vertice montis
   Grata domus Nymphis umida Thyniasin,
Quam supra nullae pendebant debita curae
  Roscida desertis poma sub arboribus,
Et circum irriguo surgebant lilia prato—
   Candida purpureis mixta papaveribus.

His general treatment of mythology is merely allusive. Though it not infrequently seems frigid and pedantic to modern readers, yet it had a vital meaning in his own day for those who had not only the works of the Greek poets in their hands, but before their eyes the innumerable works of art inspired by them. In telling the tale of Hylas, or the flight of Antiope, or in recalling the kindly communing of Pan with the kindly and uncorrupted people of primitive times (iii. 13. 25-50), he shows a deeper insight into the romance and the tragic significance of the tales of the the old mythology, a deeper love for nature, and a worthier sense of her influence on the heart and imagination, than the poet who by his power of narrative, and the facile working of a vividly pictorial imagination, has been the chief medium by which the romance of early Greece has passed into the imagination of the modern world.

The public events of his own time or within recent memory which made the most impression on his imagination, were the victories of Marius over the Cimbri, the death of Pompey, the horrors of the siege of Perusia, the career of Cleopatra, the danger with which she threatened Rome, and the sense of indignity which she left on the Roman mind¹²; the power of her fascination, and the tragedy of her death. And generally it is by the tragic issues of the time, more than its peaceful or warlike glories, that his imagination is moved. Yet he has a just appreciation of the exceptional part played by Maecenas ip history, of his prudence, his loyalty, his suppression of all personal ambition. He feels the magnitude of the issue involved in the battle of Actium—

Huc mundi coiere manus—

and he avails himself happily of the resources of poetry, mythology and sculpture, to glorify the part which the patron God of Augustus is supposed to take in the struggle—

Non ille attulerat crines in colla solutos
   Aut testudineae carmen inerme lyrae,
Sed quale aspexit Pelopeum Agamemnona
 vultu,
  , Egessitque avidis Dorica castra rogis,
Aut qualis flexos solvit Pythona per orbes
   Serpentem, imbelles quem timuere lyrae
(iv. 6. 31).

We recognise a powerful stroke of the individualising power of his imagination in the suggestion of the whole spectacle of a Roman triumph by the vivid presentment of a single incident in it—

Ad vulgi plausus saepe resistere equos
(fli. 4. 14);

just as in a previous poem (ii. 1) he enables us to realise the regret which Maecenas may feel for his untimely death by the picture which he calls up before the mind, of Maecenas stopping his carriage as he drives past the tomb of the poet—

Si te forte meo ducet via proxima busto,
   Esseda caelatis siste Britanna iugis.

Had he not thought it his greatest glory to be the poet of passion, or had his mind developed more slowly to its full maturity, instead of working with precocious intensity on his own feelings, he might, in all probability, have been valued, not only as the most powerful and sincere of the subjective poets of Rome, but in the first rank of the higher artists who give objective expression both to the great interests and the trivial incidents of their age.

In another sphere of objective art his success is not so great. The subjects which he chose from Roman ritual were not favourable for poetical treatment. Roman myths and Roman worship arose out of the most prosaic and utilitarian superstition. No poetry could be elicited from such an abstraction of the understanding as the god Vertumnus, or it was so mixed with prose as to leave no consistent poetical impression on the mind. The idea of the site of Rome, of the bare Tarpeian rock, and of the river, familiar to his childhood in its upper reaches, passing by these lonely pastures as a stranger, does indeed elicit two lines of powerful poetry,

Tarpeiusque pater nuda de rupe tonabat,
 Et Tiberis nostris advena bubus erat
(iv. 1. 7);

and he recalls the life of its rude inhabitants with the realistic fidelity of Lucretius. The site of Veii also, reduced to its primitive condition from a powerful and warlike town, naturally stirs the imagination:

Nunc intra muros pastoris bucina lenti
 Cantat, et in vestris ossibus arva metunt
(iv. 10. 29).

The martial memories of earlier Roman history are sometimes evoked with a power which shews that his literary sympathy with the genius of Ennius, which he indicates more than once, was more genuine than that of any other Roman poet except Virgil and Lucretius. Yet the poems dealing with these subjects are in diction and metre tamer and more prosaic than any of the others. Nor is their composition more artistically perfect. Such lines as

Acron Herculeus Caenina ductor ab arce
 Roma tuis quondam finibus horror erat
(iv. 10. 9),

and

Incola Cacus erat, metuendo raptor ab antro
 Per tria partitos qui dabat ora sonos
(iv. 9. 9),

are more in the manner of Ennius than of the Augustan age, nor are they redeemed by anything of the greater spirit of Ennius. The attempt to give life and artistic form to the national rites and belief, notwithstanding the occasional gleams of genuine poetry resting on this 'inculto tramite,' must be pronounced a failure. It will be seen later how far Ovid succeeded where Propertius failed. Virgil alone solved the problem by assimilating these materials with the life of the great national epic. The Aeneid is full of rites and aetiological myths even of the most prosaic kind, as the symbol of the white sow, the practice of eating the cakes on which the sacrificial feast was placed, etc. It is one of the greatest triumphs of Virgil's art so to fuse these and other heterogeneous materials in the elaborate workmanship of the Aeneid, as to make it the representative poem of Rome at all times.

This consideration of the art and genius of Propertius leaves us with the feeling that he was one of the most genuine and most poetical forces in Roman literature; that his poetry everywhere betrays the glow of a most ardent temperament and the energy of a vivid imagination; that he is original and forcible in his diction, and elicits at once a deep and a soft music from his metre; that besides his acknowledged familiarity with all the conflicting elements of human passion and the deeper sources of melancholy in human life, he has more than almost any ancient poet a sympathy with nature in her lonely desolate scenes, with her tempestuous forces, and with some aspects of her softness and beauty; and that he was capable of dealing with the tragic issues of his time and some of the events of the national history, and with the deeper personal experience of private life, in a more serious and sympathetic spirit than any of the other elegiac poets. Neither did he want altogether the faculty of dealing with the lighter comedy of life. He was no careless artist, but took assiduous pains and felt great joy in the effort to produce the effect described by him in the lines

Exactus tenui pumice versus eat.

Yet with greater powers of imagination and feeling and a higher ideal of art than any of the other elegiac poets, he fails to produce the same harmonious effects. How far this failure is due to the fact that the larger part of his work never received the form and finish which he was capable of giving to it, it is impossible to say. The power of his imagination, both active and receptive, revealed in the energy of his diction and the solemn or softer cadences of his verse, must always exercise a spell over the lovers of poetry who master the difficulties, and are not repelled by the signs, if not of affectation, yet of straining after effect, by his irrevelant mythology, and above all by the iteration with which he harps on a single theme. He has the seriousness of mood which Ovid lacks, yet there is a want of a really masculine tone in his seriousness. In his frequent alternations of mood when he rises out of the depression indicated in the line

Me sine, quem voluit semper fortuna iacere,

it is rather levity than cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirit that he betrays. He remains a great poet—a poet potentially greater than Ovid and Tibullus, not inferior to, in some ways greater than Horace or Catullus—but more than any other classic poet marred by irregularity and incompleteness, occasional want of taste, the inability to conceal the struggles to produce a great effect, the failure in the last accomplishment of art, absolutely harmonious composition.

Notes

¹ The waters were found to be pleasantly cold both to the taste and touch in a hot day of May, 1890.

² He quotes from a document of the twelfth century: 'Una petia de terra cum vinea quae posita est infra comitatum Assisinatum in loco qui dicitur de insula Romanesca.'

³ 'Nel 1053, ch'è, per quanto si sappia, la più antica data sotto cui se ne faccia ricordo, gli abitanti erano chiamati, per la natura del luogo, isolani semplicemente.'

⁴ Propert, iii. 22. 23-4:

Hic Anio Tibume fluis, Clitumnus ab Umbro
Tramite.

Compare i. 18. 27-28:

Pro quo divini fontes et frigida rupes
   Et datur inculto tramite dura quies.

The use of the word tramite in both these passages suggests that the 'divini fontes' are the sources of the Clitumnus, and that the 'deserta loca et taciturna querenti,' to which Propertius retired in his despair, are the same scene as that which he describes in a happier mood in ii. 19, where he proposes joining Cynthia in a few days, and enjoying such field sports as he was capable of—

Qua formosa suo Clitumnus flumina luco
  Integit, et niveos abluit unda boves.

The lines

Sola eris et solos spectabis Cynthia montes
   Et pecus et fines pauperis agricolae

will at once occur to any reader of Propertius as he looks towards the amphitheatre of hills immediately to the south of the sources. But what is the exact meaning of tramite in these two passages and in iii. 13. 43-44—

Et leporem, quicunque venis, venaberis
 hospes,
   Et si forte meo tramite quaeris avem?

Hertzberg points out that these last two lines are a translation of two Greek lines of Leonidas of Tarentum.…

Can we translate, in i. 18. 28, 'inculto tramite' 'wild hill-side,' like 'the cold hill-side' in Keats's 'La belle Dame sans Merci,' a poem expressive of a mood not remote from the mood of this, one of the grandest of all the Elegies of Propertius? In Virgil's

Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis
(Georg. i. 108)

the word must be used in the same sense as in Propertius. Dr. Kennedy translates it 'from the brow of a cross-lying slope,' and in all these passages something much nearer the notion of a 'hill' than a 'channel' or 'cross-way' is wanted. The bare range or hillside at the foot of which, close to the road, the Clitumnus rises, runs across and forms one boundary of the plain, through which the stream flows in a northerly direction.

⁵ Mentioned in Tacitus, Histories iii. 59, as evidently a place of importance: 'Ut terrorem Italiae possessa Mevania ac velut renatum ex integro bellum intulerat.'

⁶ Cf. i. 21. 6:

Haec soror acta tuis sentiat e lacrimis.

The dying Gallus sends his last message specially to his sister. This would have made a vivid impression on the memory and heart of the child if that sister of Gallus was his own mother.

⁷ Was his father the Sextius Propertius mentioned by Cicero, pro Domo sua 19?

⁸ Cf. ii. 16. 33:

Tot iam abiere dies cum me nec cura theatri
  Nec tetigit campi nec mea musa iuvat.

⁹ Cf. ii. 5. 9:

Nunc est ira recens, nunc est discedere
 tempus:
  Si dolor abfuerit, crede, redibit amor.

¹⁰ The importance attached to the arrangement of the different pieces so as to produce the impression at once of unity and variety, is a marked feature in the Eclogues of Virgil, the Odes of Horace (who to this extent was an Alexandrian), the Elegies of Tibullus, the Amores of Ovid, and also, though the traces are more difficult to follow, in the collected poems of Catullus.

¹¹ The loneliness of the place is not much changed in the present day. The words

Sola eris et solos spectabis, Cynthia, montes

will recur to any one familiar with Propertius, as he looks on the amphitheatre of hills to the south.

¹² Cf. p. 124, supra.