SOURCE: "Tibullus" in Romance in the Latin Elegiac Poets, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932, pp. 52-80.

[In the following excerpt, Haight provides an overview of Tibullus, describing his life, background, poems, including those written to Marathus and to Sulpicia, and his role in the development of the Latin erotic elegy.]

The Poet¹

Thou too, companion to Vergil,
 By death most unjust was remanded
In youth to the valley Elysian,
 Tibullus, that no one thereafter
Should tearfully sing elegiacs
 Of love or chant wars in strains martial.
[Domitius Marsus]

Albius Tibullus is a very different figure from the brilliant, dashing Cornelius Gallus, with his meteor career as warrior and governor and his flair for posing as the shepherd in love. Tibullus hated war, had no military ambition except for success in the jousts of love, had a genuine devotion to quiet country scenes, and was frail enough in physique to have a melancholy tinge of neuroticism dim his poetic ardours.

The few facts of his life which can be culled from his own poems and allusions in ancient writers are these. He was a knight (eques) and his family was well-to-do. He had a fond mother and sister. He lived on a country estate. He saw some war service. He was completely devoted to a great patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He was elegant in person and gentle in temperament. He wrote love elegiacs celebrating two or possibly three ladies and one lad. He died when still a young man in the year Vergil died, 19 B.C.

When we try to picture the environment of Tibullus, we must go to the poet's ancestral estate in the region of Pedum, near the Sabine hills, and to Messalla's house on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Tibullus was one of the few great Roman poets born near Rome, that is in Latium. Horace in his Epistle to Albius (I. 4) describes the poet in the region of Pedum strolling quietly through the health-giving woods. Pedum was an old Latin town on the Via Labicana between Tibur and Praeneste, near the Sabine hills. Tibullus as a country boy thus knew the country scenes and festivals which he describes in his poems: turning of soil with hoe, ploughing of fields with oxen, sowing and reaping of the corn, care of vines, vintage, treading of grapes for wine, planting of orchards, care of flocks, the carrying home of some weary youngling of the flock, lamb or kid. And with these operations of the farm Tibullus pictures religious ceremonies: offer of garland to old tree-trunk or to boundary stone, wreath of grain to Ceres, milk to Pales, vows to Priapus, lamb to the Lares, wine, perfume, garlands, incense, cakes to the Birthday Spirit or Genius, and then great country festival for the purification of the farm with procession and sacrifice. All these works of the farm and the religion of the farmer are pictured from intimate knowledge and there are more personal touches: how the poet loves to escape heat in shade of tree near murmuring stream; or at night when storm is raging, to lie safe indoors, his love in his arms, the wind their lullaby. The region of Pedum gave Tibullus that genuine love of the country which characterizes his earliest poems and makes him write: rura cano rurisque deos, "The country and the country gods I sing."

The poet's life in Rome must have been very different from the idyllic setting of Pedum. Messalla was a distinguished aristocrat and a great patron. As he was a dominating influence in Tibullus' life we must try to revivify him. After his education in Athens, he was affiliated with the senatorial party and especially attached to Cassius, so that after Caesar's death (in which he had no share as he was absent from Rome) he followed Cassius into Asia. He was one of the officers of the Republican army and at Philippi on the first day's battle he turned Octavian's wing, raided his camp and nearly took Octavian prisoner. After the death of Brutus and Cassius, Messalla persuaded the fugitive army which had elected him commander to accept honorable terms from Antony. He himself joined Antony's forces and allied his fortunes with his until Cleopatra's domination of his general alienated him. He then joined Octavian and served in wars in Sicily (36 B.C.) and against the Salassi (34 B.C.). Finally he was appointed consul in 31 B.C. in place of Antony, and at Actium commanded the center of the fleet. Plutarch relates (Brut. LIII) how Octavian remarked that at Actium Messalla had fought as well for him as at Philippi he had fought against him. To which Messalla replied: "I have always taken the best and justest side." His new allegiance to Octavian was shown again in 30 B.C. when in behalf of the Senate he proposed the title of pater patriae for him. Suetonius says (Aug. LVIII) that he has reported the very words of the mover of the motion and Augustus' reply. Sir James Frazer (Fasti II. pp. 308-9) says that "such an assurance is rare, perhaps unique in ancient history."

I translate Suetonius' Life of Augustus, chapter LVIII.

All suddenly with great unanimity conferred on him the title "Father of his Country": first the people, sending a delegation to Antium; next because he did not accept it, when he entered the games at Rome, the people in great numbers, laurel-crowned [again offered the title]. Presently the Senate in the senate-house bestowed it, not by a decree or by acclamation, but through Valerius Messalla. He representing all said: "Blessing and prosperity be upon thee and upon thy house, Caesar Augustus! For under those conditions we think we pray for happiness and blessings for this city. The Senate in agreement with the Roman people salute thee as Father of thy Country." Augustus with tears replied to him in these words. (For I have quoted the very words as I did those of Messalla.) "My prayers are answered, Conscript Fathers, and what else have I to pray for from the immortal gods except that I may carry this approbation of yours through to the end of my life."

After this public manifestation of his allegiance to the head of the Roman state, Messalla served his proconsulship (28-27) in Aquitania, whither Tibullus accompanied him, and was given a triumph for his conquest of the province. In 27 B.C. he was made praefectus urbi but resigned the office in a few days and withdrew from all public duties except the augurship. He lived for twenty-four or thirty years more, a distinguished figure in Rome, as a patron of literature, and a writer who was at work on commentaries on the civil wars and grammatical treatises. He was a friend of Horace as well as of Tibullus and directed Ovid's early studies. (P. II. 3, 75-8). It was clearly a very distinguished house that Tibullus frequented. Other poets in the circle were Valgius Rufus and Aemilius Macer whose works are lost; Lygdamus and Sulpicia whose poems are published in the Corpus Tibullianum, a collection of poems by writers in Messalla's circle.

Kirby Flower Smith has a telling paragraph on Messalla's qualities as a literary patron.² "A Roman gentleman of the highest and best type, and fastidious in all things, he was sane and sensible, and possessed the unconventional ease of assured position and of more than sixteen generations of gentle blood. He was also a keen though kindly critic whose standards of taste had been moulded by a stern discipline in the domain of language and style. Quintilian for example (X. 5, 2) tells us that, like Cicero, Crassus, and the elder generation of pleaders, Messalla, simply to train himself in the resources of his own tongue, had made written translations of speech after speech of the Greek orators … And we are told by the Elder Seneca (Cont. II. 4, 8) that he was 'exactissimi ingenii in omnes studiorum partes, Latini utique sermonis observator diligentissimus,"' "of the most painstaking nature for every branch of studies and most punctilious in his care for preserving Latin style."

Tibullus was completely devoted to his patron, as his constant references to him show, and the nature of these references. With the exception of his allusions to his loves and one poem about Macer, Tibullus celebrates no other person of his time except Messalla and his son. He refers to Messalla's campaigns in Aquitania and the East, the trophies on his house door, the triumph celebrated in Rome and his own modest part in helping Messalla conquer Aquitania. He refers too to Messalla as road-builder. He celebrates the entrance of his son, Messalinus, into the college of quindecimviri and hopes that on some future day the father may see this son celebrating some great triumph. There are more personal touches when he dreams of his Messalla coming to visit him and Delia in the country, or arriving for a country festival where everyone will greet him with a toast of "bene, Messallam," and he begs Messalla to be present and inspire his song.

The social life in the Rome of the time and in the Palatine palaces was of course determined in large part by the character of the women who were leaders in society or conspicuous figures in the demimonde. In the new morality which Augustus was trying to establish for his age, by marriage laws and exhortation, the older ladies of his own family were exemplars. Livia, his wife, an aristocrat descended from two great families, the Claudii and the Livii, was a model of domesticity, weaving her husband's robes, maintaining a simple table in his palace, but she evidently aimed at political influence, for little by little she secured power for her sons, Tiberius and Drusus, and her persuasiveness was such that Augustus adopted the plan of writing down any line of argument which he intended to pursue with her. Octavia, sister of the Emperor and wife of Antony, was another model type. Married to Antony for diplomatic ends, she endeavoured to hold her husband from the lure of the East by her faithfulness and to help his campaigns with the resources of her brother, but when Cleopatra's fascination made Antony twice send his wife back from the East to Rome, she devoted herself to educating children. She must have brought up at least eight for she herself had three children by her first husband Marcellus (Marcellus, Marcella maior and Marcella minor) and two by Antony (Antonia maior and Antonia minor) and she brought up also lulus Antonius, son of Antony and his first wife Fulvia, and the twins of Antony and Cleopatra, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. lulus Antonius did not come out well as he was executed for adultery, and Marcus Marcellus died in 23 B.C., disappointing Octavian's hopes of a worthy heir. But the other children in this strange family married well and Cleopatra as the wife of Juba II was a reigning queen in Mauretania. So noble was Octavia's career that when she died in 11 B.C. she was buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus, where her stone was recently found, and Augustus himself delivered her funeral oration.

Other great ladies, however, were not encircled with such an aura of saintliness as these. In the century before, Cleopatra had come from Egypt with her boy husband to stay in Julius Caesar's palace and gossip's tongues had wagged. Clodia had been not only the Lesbia of Catullus' poetry and heart, but the mistress of one young Roman after another until her poet rejected her as a common prostitute. And in Augustus' own time and family, his daughter Julia and his granddaughter Julia so threw off the reins of morality that first one, then the other was sent into final exile by the Emperor himself. And in that gay society of the Julias which Ovid pictures there were young women of noble rank who were seeking a very modern freedom (a Neobule or a Sulpicia), and on the side were freedwomen who were accomplished courtesans and whose charms brought to their social circles the elite of Roman youth. The elegiac poets of the times give us vivid pictures of the social atmosphere of the fashionable fast set and of the gaieties of the demimonde: their flirtations, their art of coquetry, their elegancies, and their faithlessness.

Against such backgrounds as these Tibullus' own personality shines in his poems and is reflected also in the poems of his friends, Horace and Ovid. Horace in his Ode to Tibullus tries to lash him out of his mourning over a faithless Fair.

A truce to grief, my Albius,
 Though Glycera be cruel!
Your elegies are boring us
 And She's not worth a duel.
[C. I. 33]

Horace's poetic epistle to Tibullus is as charming a picture of the young poet, darling of the gods, as was Vergil's tribute to Gallus.

O Albius, of my verses fairest judge,
What dost thou now in Pedum's countryside?
Art writing what 'will make Cassius seem
 nought,
Or silently dost stroll through balmy woods,
With thoughts befitting one both wise and
 good?
Thou never wast a body without soul.
To thee the gods gave beauty, riches, joy.
What more would fond nurse pray for foster
 son,
Whose thought and feeling have found winged
 words,
Who has abundant store of charm, fame,
 health,
And wealth enough in never-failing pouch?
'Twixt hope and care, 'twixt chilling fears and
 loves
Believe each day that dawns may be thy last,
For happier so the hour that comes unhoped.
When laughter is your quest, pray come and
 call
On this fat friend, now grown so sleek and
 smug
That you will dub me Epicurus' hog!
[Ep. I. 4]

Tibullus living inspired these two poems, one playful, teasing, one a serious tribute couched with some selfirony. Tibullus dead called forth exquisite epigram and long elegiac dirge. A contemporary of the Augustan Age, Domitius Marsus, wrote the epigram.

Thou too, companion to Vergil,
 By death most unjust was remanded
In youth to the Valley Elysian,
 Tibullus, that no one thereafter
Should tearfully sing elegiacs
 Of love or chant wars in strains martial.

Ovid's Amores III. 9 is a magnificent dirge, full of Tibullus' own phrases, decorated with the beautiful figures of the women who inspired his verse. Elegy herself is invoked to mourn her dead son. Cupid comes with quiver empty, bow broken, torch quenched, sorrowing as much as he did for his great brother, Aeneas, Venus too grieves as for Adonis. Only the poet can give the dead life everlasting. Homer the bard has perished, but the tales of Troy divine and of Penelope's ravelled web live on. So from Tibullus' poetry, Nemesis and Delia will have famous names.

Piety saves no life. And even the poet becomes a handful of dust in a little urn. Yet here his loved ones, his mother and sister mourn him; and those rival beauties of his verses, Delia and Nemesis, haunt his grave. And it may be well with him, for perhaps in the Elysian vale even now ivy-crowned Catullus with his Calvus, and Gallus are coming to meet him. Ovid ends:

To them is thy shade a companion.
 If shade remain from the body,
Then thou art one of the pious,
 O dear and cultured Tibullus.
Safe rest in thy urn's blessed quiet.
 And light be the earth on thy ashes.

Tibullus and the Poetic Novella

Tibullus is first of all a poet of love. To be sure he did write a few poems on the country and country festivals, on war and peace, on Messalla and his family. But his epitaph might be his loves alone. He is remembered as an elegiac singer of passion.

His love poems do not form one sequence for a mastering emotion as did Catullus' lyrics written in several meters, but on one theme, and as Gallus' elegiacs apparently did. Tibullus' love poems fall into four groups, addressed to four different persons. These four are of very different types and around each centers a short poetic romance,—a little love story, not episodical, but psychological, a tale of moods and shades of swiftly changing emotion. The persons addressed in these four groups are Delia, Nemesis, Marathus and Sulpicia. Delia is a beautiful freedwoman of the better type. Nemesis is of the same social position but is a rapacious courtesan (rapax meretrix). Marathus is a boy favourite (puer delicatus). And Sulpicia is a learned young lady of high family (docta puella). Their characteristics will be seen from a study of each group.

The Delia group includes poems 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 of Book I. The real name of the lady addressed according to Apuleius (Apol. 10) was Plania. The name Delia may have been chosen to suggest "the Delian," Diana, beautiful and chaste goddess, or there may be a subtle play on words in its choice since Plania is to Delia as planus is to [delos]. No gens Plania is known and Delia is certainly of the class of freedwomen for in I. 6, 67-8, Tibullus says that she does not wear the fillet or the robe (stola) of matronae, married women of rank. She has an aged mother who has forwarded Tibullus' love affairs, and who is begged to teach Delia to be chaste even though she is not a matron. And she has what Kirby Flower Smith calls an "elegiac husband" for, he remarks that coniunx is "often, as here, a euphemism for the man who at the time happens to be furnishing the mistress of the elegiac lover with a house door."³

Other stock characters who appear in this and other elegiac stories are the rich lover (dives amator), the poor lover or poet, the chaperon (custos, sedula anus), the procuress or go-between (lena) who is often a witch (saga) and the elegiac dog who barks inopportunely at the stranger.

Poem I is an idyl of country life and gives the pastoral tone to romantic elegy. The keynote of the setting is

Content with little ever may I live,
iam mihi, iam possim contentus vivere parvo.

A long description of rural life and rural worship starts the poem. Love is not mentioned until line 45. And the dedication to Messalla comes in 53-4, with the assurance that the military life is suitable for him and for his proud House. Then Tibullus first mentions Delia in his assurance that he cares naught for fame. A passage follows which is one of the most famous in Tibullus, partly because Ovid used it in his elegy on the poet's death, partly because it is peculiarly typical of a poet who like Keats saw

 "Joy with hand ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."

Thee may I see when the last moment has come. Dying thee may I hold

Close with my faltering hand, Delia dear. Tears shall there be in thine eyes.

Me on the funeral pyre, fit for the flames, thou, 0 Delia, shalt place.

Sorrowfully then thou shalt give kisses with tears, mingled in one last gift.

The climax of the poem follows in two poignant lines:

So while the fates allow, Delia mine, love let
 us give for love.
Soon will come dark Death, head veiled in
 shades. Quickly
  will come dark Death.

These moods of joy and dread alternate in this poem and in many by Tibullus, his feeling changing quickly, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, or rolling in as Vahlen noted like gentle waves, "now forward, now backward, yet from time to time the crest of some succeeding billow carries us insensibly a little farther on."⁴

The second poem is an elegy of the closed door. The unfeeling door which keeps the poet's love from him is apostrophized. Delia is urged to escape her guards cleverly and boldly. A witch has performed magic rites for her safety so that her husband will believe no gossip about her and Tibullus. The poet has sought the aid of magic that his love may be returned. Yet there is the closed door. Venus is unfriendly. Another lover enjoys Delia. But soon the old libertine will be the laughing stock of virile lads. Venus should befriend one worthy of her aid.

The fifth poem is similar in motive to the second, for it too is an elegy of the closed door. The faithless fair has gone to a rich lover. The poet muses on her past favours and his past attentions, especially in her illness when he performed magic rites for her. He dreams of life in the country with Delia and a visit from his dear Messalla to them both. He has tried to forget Delia with another girl,—in vain. Curses on the go-between, the witch who has led Delia astray. Delia is urged to return to her poet, and her present lover is roundly cursed.

The third poem is very different. Tibullus who had started with Messalla on an expedition to the East has fallen ill and had to be left behind at Phaeacia. These lines are reflections from a sick-bed. Farewell to Messalla. I the poet never should have come on this campaign. Delia's goddess, Isis, does not help me in spite of all Delia's worship. Good it was in the golden days of King Saturn when there were no long journeys and no wars. I must prepare to die so here's my epitaph.

Here lies Tibullus felled by Death's stern
 hand,
When following Messalla over sea and land.

I shall go to the Elysian fields where lovers live forever. The dark abode of the wicked will be the eternal home of those who have profaned my love. Dear girl, keep chaste. May thy good old chaperon ever haunt thy side. At night when lamps are set, let her tell thee old wives' tales, while the maids around thee twist the wool on their distaffs. Then in the drowsy hour I'll suddenly appear all unannounced as if sent down from heaven. Thou wilt spring up, my Delia, long hair all down, bare foot out of sandal, and run to meet me. This is a lover's dream.

Typical features of elegiacs appear in this poem: the conventional figure of the chaperon, the epitaph of the lover, the picture of Elysium as the reward of the faithful, the lover's dream of a pure and loyal sweetheart.

The sixth poem is the other side of the dream,—disillusion, realism. Delia through the lessons learned from Tibullus has proved false now with a third lover. There is a vivid picture of the little arts of coquetry: the quick nod, the word written in wine on the table, robe slipping off shoulder, hand held under pretence of looking at ring, the softly opened door, the escape to the lover.

The fierce priestess of Bellona who sheds her own blood has called down curses for Tibullus on the man who profanes his Lady. Delia herself perhaps will not be spared. Yet Tibullus will be merciful for her good old mother's sake. Only he begs Delia to remember the final lot of the aged courtesan who has been faithful to no one. Poor, bent, shaking, she has to labour hard at the wool as a hireling with the young laughing at her.

Others, 0 Delia, may such doom o'ertake.
May we be lovers aye, for love's dear sake.

This rapid analysis of the first elegiac love poems of Tibullus, the Delia group, has shown the stock characters, the Lady loved, her elegiac husband, the rich lover, the poor lover, the chaperon, the go-between, the goddess worshipped, the witch employed. The poems are rich in varied background: idyllic country life or Elysian fields, the closed door with its implication of rejection, the magic rites employed to win love back, the worship of Isis or Bellona by love's votaries, genre pictures of home scenes,—of a faithful and pure Lady at work among her maids, or of a wrinkled, hard-worked hireling foredone by dissipation, despised by youth. Conspicuous in the moods of the poems is the alternation of bright and dark, hope and fear, faithfulness and fickleness, youth and old age, rural peace and war's alarms, Elysium and Tartarus, love and death, dreams and despair.

The group of poems addressed to Nemesis (II. 3-6) is as different as Nemesis is from Delia. The lady's name itself suggests that Tibullus selected it for vengeance on Delia and that she is perhaps the sweetheart with whom he said he tried to forget his first love. Nemesis is the sordid type of greedy courtesan, venal, vain, avaricious. The lover who takes her away from the poet is wealthy but coarse, had once been a slave, and in boorishness belongs in the Iron Age, at least so the poet who is the exclusus amator thinks. If the poet is to rival such a man, he must seek money to buy the Lady emeralds and pearls, Coan silks, African fabrics and Tyrian purple, even Indian slaves. He will do it, he will even sell his ancestral estate if necessary to satisfy her pleasures. He must get gifts for her even by crimes. His songs avail naught. He will drink poison if Nemesis will give him one kind look.

The poet is a changed person in this group of poems. The country has nothing idyllic for him. He regrets that Nemesis is imprisoned there by her wealthy lover. He will even sell his country estates to buy gifts for her. And his abandonment and degradation are so complete that crime and suicide for her are nothing. Yet he cannot escape her thralldom. When he celebrates Messallinus' entry into the college of Quindecimviri, Nemesis must be the inspiration of his verse and when Macer is off to the wars, the poet cannot accompany him, for Nemesis' closed door has ruined his courage. He is a uomo finito, a man whose life is in the past and whose hope is gone. He is the slave of a degrading passion for an unworthy object, and realizes his state of mind. Yet his last note is one of tenderness rather than bitterness as he begs Nemesis in the name of her little dead sister to come back to him and as he swears that it is the wicked procuress who has ruined his Lady's character.

These poems to Nemesis are full of violent passion, diatribes against avarice, and a sense of despair. Many of the devices (the rich lover, the closed door, the family appeal, the wicked go-between) are like those of the other poems, but Tibullus here pictures himself as a harder nature and Poem II. 4 has a tone of recklessness. The contrast between the Nemesis group and the Delia group raises the question as to whether these elegiacs are poetic experiments in expressing different types of passion, or are the genuine experiences of a poet who gave all to love and was undermined by it. In other words, is Tibullus a psychological poet, or a pathological case? Perhaps we can answer this question with more conviction after looking at two other groups of poems.

There are three poems written to a boy named Marathus. (I. 4, 8, 9.) He is a typical puer delicatus (boy favourite) with elaborate, feminine dress, elegant coiffure, womanish ways. He is young, beautiful, venal and corrupt. The paederastic sentiment was a favourite subject of Hellenistic literature and was often sublimated to an idealistic relation by the poets. Modern taste has condemned it as a subject for verse. In these Latin elegiacs, Tibullus seems to be toying with the Greek theme and treating it dramatically and satirically. The poems are full of fire and immensely clever in their irony.

The humorous tone of treatment is set in the first poem (I. 4) by the fact that Priapus appears as a magister amoris. Priapus was a garden god of fertility, worshipped originally near the Hellespont. He was virile, coarse, farcical and fond of a vulgar jest. His broad humour is best exhibited in Horace's Satire I. 8 where the god, speaking a dramatic monologue, admits that he was once a mere tree-trunk, until a carpenter who was thinking of making a foot-stool out of the log of wood decided instead on a god. So here he stands in Maecenas' gardens, and not only god but scarecrow for a reed on his head, waving, frightens birds off from the newly sown seeds. Ovid in the Fasti (I. 389-440) tells a wanton story of the god's amour which was frustrated by the braying of an ass (the reason why asses are sacrificed to Priapus), and there again the god is a comic figure. He appeared in literature in the Alexandrian Age and was the subject of many Priapea or Greek epigrams (The Greek Anth. in Bks. VI, X, XVI) and of Latin imitations. He was a strange figure for Tibullus to select as a lecturer on love, but the satire involved in the selection is clear. And the didactic instruction given in I. 4 by Priapus is the sure forerunner of Ovid's Ars Amatoria.

Priapus pompously gives specific directions on how to win a lad's love, urging persistency, promises even if they cannot be kept, rapid wooing, compliance in his wishes, gifts. He admits that gentle boys ought to value poems above all gold. Tibullus declares that he procured these precepts from Priapus for his friend Titius, but Titius has a wife who forbids him to con them. So the poet sings the lesson for lovers all. And then with a sudden surprise for the reader and characteristic self-irony he admits that his own love for Marathus is torturing him and no art avails to help him.

The next poem (I. 8) is to a girl, Pholoe, about Marathus who is in love with her. Tibullus knows Marathus is in love from his studied care in dressing. But neither garb nor magic can win love as can youth and beauty: Pholoe should accept these the gifts of the gods, nor demand presents from a lad so fair. Some old lover can enrich her. She should not torture Marathus.

Then Tibullus lets the vain, baffled boy speak for himself: boast of his knowledge of the arts of love; and, bewildered, lament the obduracy of the girl. Whereupon Tibullus slyly reminds Marathus that he too has laughed at a lover's tears and kept a lover waiting so that the god of vengeance is now punishing him. And the moral for both is: "Gather ye roses while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying." As the background of I. 4 was the worship of the Hellespontic deity, Priapus, so the background of this poem is the use of love charms and magic rites: pallor-causing herbs, incantations which can transfer crops, charm serpents, call down moon, direct love. The dramatic character is produced by actual dialogue.

Kirby Flower Smith's comments on the poem are as usual indispensable. "The scene here as in the fourth is very dramatic,—in fact, nowhere are the manifold relations between the elegy and comedy more clearly displayed than in this particular type which with its blending of sentiment and satire, and with its somewhat nearer approach to the language of everyday life reflects the mood of the Hellenistic epigram."⁵ "As Tibullus contemplates the pair there is a decided twinkle in his eye. In fact it would be hard to find a poem in which real kindliness and the thorough appreciation of an amusing situation are so perfectly tempered by a certain suggestion of the detachment belonging to an onlooker, and to one who never forgets the difference between a Roman gentleman and a couple of irresponsible slaves from the East."⁶

The third and last poem of the group (I. 9) is ugly reading. Marathus has broken all his vows to the poet and for the sake of gain has become the favourite of an old roue. There is a diatribe against avarice, and a warning to Marathus that in such dissipation as his, beauty goes. Tibullus reproaches Marathus for his treachery, avarice and ingratitude, reminding him of all, he did to help him in his amours with his lady. Then he curses the old libertine who has won his lad and prays that his wife may be utterly corrupt and constantly deceive him. The poet finally threatens Marathus that he will transfer his love to another lad and he renounces his affection in a votive inscription to Venus to accompany a dedication of a golden palm-branch.

Tibullus, freed from treacherous love,
 Here dedicates to thee,
O queen of love, a golden branch,
 Since thou hast made him free.
He dedicates to thee this branch
 And prays that he may find
In time to come thy deity
 Full friendly and full kind.

Now such a votive inscription is as much a feature of elegiac poetry as is the epitaph which the despairing lover writes for himself. But in spite of its convention, it concludes the group of poems with a moral for lovers, such as it is! For the first morality of love is faithfulness and the second is generosity, in contrast to venality. The highly artificial character of these three poems, the mock-heroic, satirical use of the garden god as a praeceptor amoris, the fact that the situations described carry out completely the precepts of Priapus' discourse, the conventional use of magic rites, of the diatribe against avarice, of the praise of youthful beauty, the conclusion in the votive inscription, all go to substantiate the conviction that in this group of poems Tibullus is working over a Hellenistic theme as a daring tour de force in his erotic elegiacs. He is simply adding to Roman elegiacs one of the conventional themes of the lost Greek elegiac poets.

The corpus Tibullianum published with Tibullus' poems as third and fourth books in the collection contains a set of poems by Lygdamus (whose identity is unproved) to Neaera, a Panegyric of Messalla whose author is unknown, and eleven elegies (IV. 2-12) about two young lovers, Cerinthus and Sulpicia. Since the last group adds a new type of person addressed to our studies and since I believe that the poet who wrote part of the group was Tibullus, the Sulpieia poems are included in this study.

Sulpicia is a jeune fille of a noble family, the daughter of Servius Sulpicius, undoubtedly the son of Cicero's friend and probably of Messalla's sister, Valeria. She seems to have been brought up by her uncle, was a veritable docta puella, and so modern that when she fell violently in love she could both express her emotion in lyrics and give herself to her lover. She inevitably reminds a reader of Augustan poetry of Horace's Neobule, into whose mouth he puts a dramatic monologue of lament:

It is the lot of every wretched maid
  Never to happy love to give free play,
  Never with wine to drive dull care away,
Always of uncle's wrath to be afraid.
[C. III. 12, 1-3]

The identity of Cerinthus remains a mystery. The Greek name cannot conceal a Greek freedman for the young hero indulges in boar-hunting, the sport of a Roman gentleman, and he is evidently on intimate terms with the members of Messalla's household. He has been identified with the Cornutus of Tibullus II. 2 and 3 by those who would like to have this romantic idyl of young love end happily and who can find some consoling evidence of such a denouement from this identification. The character of both young men in the poems (Cerinthus and Cornutus) is the same, diffident, inexpressive, unable to write poetry for himself, but there is no more ground than this and the corresponding rhythm of the two names for the identification.

The poems about Sulpicia fall into two groups, for IV. 2-6 were written by some poet-friend, and IV. 7-12 by Sulpicia herself, as Gruppe pointed out. The basis of this whole cycle of eleven poems known as "Sulpicia's Garland" is the series of six short, impassioned lyrics which Sulpicia wrote herself. The other five poems were written around these, partly for the same occasions (Sulpicia's birthday, Sulpicia's illness, Cerinthus' faithlessness), and phrases in the five poems echo phrases in Sulpicia's six (the appellation "light of my life," mea lux, IV. 3, 15 and 12, 1, the thought that the young lovers are worthy of each other, IV. 6, 9 and 7, 10). In the first group three poems are written by the poet himself, IV. 2, in praise of Sulpicia's beauty on the festival of the Matronalia, IV. 4, in lament for Sulpicia's illness, and IV. 6, on Sulpicia's birthday. Two which alternate with the others are written as if by Sulpicia, IV. 3, a prayer to spare Cerinthus who has gone on a boar-hunt, and IV. 5, on Cerinthus' birthday. That is, a poet friend is writing for the inexpressive lover poems to correspond to Sulpicia's outpourings.

The poems by Sulpicia herself were clearly not published in chronological order for the one that stands first is the climax of the series. They are very brief, like tiny notes rushed off in sealed tablets to her lover. They are so surcharged with emotion that the expression is stiff where the feeling is most intense, but absolutely simple. None of the rhetorical balance of phrases, repetition of words and fanciful conceits of the first group appears. They are unique in being the only Latin literature extant from a woman's hand. Since the cycle is the most genuine love story of the Tibullan poems, I am going to include here my translations of the eleven poems, before discussing them further.

I To Sulpicia on the Festival of the Matronalia, March First

Great Mars, for thee Sulpicia is arrayed,
For thee and for thy holy day. Come down
From heaven in person if thou be wise God
To see the sight. Venus will pardon this.
Only, fierce warrior, be upon thy guard
Lest, startled at the girl, thy weapons fall
In shameful clatter. From Sulpicia's eyes,
When Amor wishes to inflame the gods,
He lights his torches twain. The maid herself
Whate'er she does, where'er she turns her step
Aye walks in beauty, Beauty by her side.
Let her locks flow, then Grace has flowing
 hair.
Her coiffure high, she's praised for high
 coiffure.
She kindles fire if she wears Tyrian red,
She kindles fire, shining in snowy white.
So on Olympus the blessed God of Change,
Vertumnus, has a thousand different garbs
Yet always pleases in his thousand ways.
This maid alone is worthy to receive
Soft robes dipped twice in costly Tyrian dyes.
This maid alone is worthy to possess
Each perfume that rich Araby can yield
From fragrant fields. Yea, hers be all the
 pearls
Dark Indians gather at the Dawn's red shores.
O Muses, sing the maid this festal day.
Proud Phoebus, hymn her to thy lyric shell.
Year after year Sulpicia shall be hymned.
No maid is worthier of thy choir's song.

II To Cerinthus on His Going Hunting

O boar, that haunts fair pastures in the plain
Or pathless lairs of shady mountainside,
Pray spare my lad. Whet not thy tusks for
 him.
May Love, his squire, keep him safe for me.
Yet Diane leads him far away to hunt.
A plague on woods, death to all hunting
 hounds!
What madness this! What sense to wish to
 hurt
Soft hands in spreading toils round wooded
 hills?
What joy is it to enter stealthily
Lairs of wild beasts, or bruise on barbed
 briers
Thy shining limbs, Cerinthus? Natheless
But let me go with thee and I myself
Will bear across the hills the twisted nets.
Myself will track swift deer. Myself will strike
The iron collar from swift-footed dogs.
Then, then would forests be a joy, my Life,
Shouldst thou embrace me near the very nets.
Then to the snares the boar may boldly course
And leave, unharmed, so he break not our
 joys.
Now love not, if thou love not me, my Love.
But chaste, with chaste hand, cast Diana's
 nets.
If any girl steal up to steal my Love,
May she be torn by the wild beasts and die.
Cerinthus, leave thy sire the joys of the chase,
And speed thee back full tilt into my arms.

III On Sulpicia's Illness

Come hither, Phoebus, proud of thy long
 locks,
Come hither, God, and heal a tender maid.
Make haste. Believe me, Phoebus. Thous wilt
 not
Regret to have touched Beauty with healight
 hand.
Let not such loveliness grow pale and wane,
Nor jaundiced hue spread o'er her weakened
 limbs.
Whate'er her woe, whatever ill we fear,
Let river bear to sea on rapid stream.
Come, holy God, and bring whatever draughts,
Whatever songs may lighten weary frames.
Rack not the lad who fears fate for the maid,
And for his Lady proffers countless vows.
But now he prays, but now, because she
 faints,
He hurls harsh words against the eternal gods.
Fear not, Cerinthus. God saves lovers all.
Only love always and thy maid is safe.
No need of tears. A fitter time for those
Will come if e'er the girl is wroth with thee.
All thine she is now and thinks on thee alone.
In vain fond suitors sit about her door.
A blessing, Phoebus! Great praise will be
 thine
If in one body thou shalt save two souls.
When two glad hearts make vying sacrifice
Upon thy altar pure, joy in thy fame.
Then all the goodly band of gods will cry
That thou art blessed and envy thee thy
 arts.

IV On Cerinthus' Birthday

Holy to me thy natal day shall be,
Cerinthus, and a festival alway,
Thy natal day which gave thee to myself.
'Twas at thy birth the Fates foretold for maids
New slavery and gave to thee proud power.
'Tis I who burn with love beyond them all
And yet rejoice, Cerinthus, that I burn
If equal flame is kindled in thy heart.
Let love match love. I pray thee by thine
 eyes,
By stolen kisses, by thy other self,
Thy Birth-Sprite, Genius of thy Life and
 Days.
Great Genius, gladly take the incense due
And grant my prayers that when he thinks of
 me
Cerinthus may be fired with love's own flame.
But if perchance he seeks another love,
Then, holy Sprite, desert his faithless hearth.
Be just, 0 Venus. Let us both alike
Serve 'neath thy yoke or strike my fetters off.
Ah! Rather may we both be bound with
 chains
So stout that time can never loose their links.
This boon the Lad too craves, but finds no
 voice,
For shame forbids his lips to speak these
  words.
But thou, Birth-Sprite, who godlike knoweth
 all,
Fulfill our hopes. It matters naught to thee
Whether his prayer be voiced or only thought.

V On Sulpicia's Birthday

O Juno, Birthday Goddess of all Girls,
Receive the holy piles of incense rare
That learned maid presents with tender hand.
Today the maid is wholly thine. For thee
She joyfully arrays herself to stand
All fair before thy altar's fire. For thee
She claims, forsooth, she has adorned herself.
But yet there's one whom secretly she'd
 please.
Thy blessing, holy goddess, on them both.
Let no one part true lovers, this I pray.
Cast o'er the youth chains binding as the
 girl's,
So thou wilt make them one and both well-
 matched.
May no stern guardian surprise their tryst.
May Love instruct them in a thousand wiles.
A blessing, Juno! Come in shining robe.
Thrice, holy goddess, they are offering thee
Libation of pure wine and thrice the cakes.
The eager mother words her daughter's prayer.
The maiden prays another without words.
She flames as on thy altars leap swift fires,
Nor wishes to be healed although she may.
Be kind, 0 Juno, and when next year comes,
May Love, grown old, reward again their
 prayers.

Sulpicia's Garland

I

My birthday they have made me hate.
 Without Cerinthus must it pass,
 A'frolicking on country grass,
My love at Rome disconsolate.

What dearer can there be than Rome?
 Is villa fitter for a girl,
 Or frigid stream whose waters curl
Across the Tuscan meadows' loam?

O Uncle overzealous, rest
 From making ill-timed holiday.
 You take Sulpicia far away
But here her soul has built its nest.

II

Hast heard that sorry journey is lifted from
 my heart?
From Rome upon my birthday I need not
 depart!
Let all of us together celebrate my day,
Though you, Cerinthus, little dreamed that it
 would pass your
   way.

III

Hast thou no tender care, Cerinthus, for thy
 Maid,
 Who wastes with fever now, and weariness?
Ah! Know of mortal pain she's not afraid
 Unless condemned by thee to lone duress.
For what avails for me to vanquish death,
If thou canst bear my ills with even breath?

IV

No more, my Light, may your high passion
 burn
 So white as when it scathed you days ago,
If aught in my whole youth wakes more
   concern

 Within my heart, more overpowering woe
Than what I did last night in leaving you
 alone,—
Desiring to dissemble a love I dared not own.

V

My humble thanks, 0 Light-of-Heart,
 That for me you commit such deeds
Lest I succumb to Cupid's darts
 And weakly fall before your needs!
Be all your thought of some poor wench
 Who sins by night and spins by day!
A harlot may your passion quench,
 But that is not Sulpicia's way.
Pray know, our friends feel anxious dread
Lest I with cause forswear your bed.

VI

Now Love has come and such a love, I wis,
That shame would fain announce, not hide, his
 kiss.
Venus benignly harkening to my songs,
Has laid him in my arms to end my wrongs.
Let all who may not their own joys confess
Make mine the symbol of true happiness.
Not in sealed tablets would I dare to tell
What only Love should know to Love befell.
Yet were that sin, then sin were joy, I ween,
It irks me to assume false Virtue's mien!
Let future maids and lads all dare aver:
Sulpicia worthy was of Love, and Love of
 her.

The reading of the poems themselves shows that here we have in miniature a poetic idyl of young love. Rome is the setting, but it is a setting only in name. The episodes are the simplest: a birthday, the gossip about Cerinthus' faithlessness, Sulpicia's illness, her hesitation and her regrets, her surrender to love. The girl's ardour, pride and intensity breathe through her verse. Of Cerinthus we know less, though his Lady and his poet friend have invested his shy, elusive figure with charm.

The poet who wrote the elegiacs of the first group can hardly to my mind be anyone but Tibullus. The geniality and sympathy of tone, the melodious music of the verse are like Tibullus' own. Some poet of Messalla's circle must have written them since the author knew intimately the love-affairs of Messalla's niece. It seems a reductio ad absurdum to postulate as their author a second poet of Messalla's circle, no less distinguished than Tibullus and with the same qualities. The puzzle as to why they are separated from his first two books of poems is easily explained by the fact that they are written around Sulpicia's own poems and that Tibullus was willing to augment the glory of Messalla's niece by letting his poems about her stand anonymously with her own in the collection of poems by other members of Messalla's literary circle. Whoever was the author of the firsf group of Sulpicia poems (and I shall call him Tibullus), the whole cycle of the two groups constitutes another elegiac romance about the young girl of noble rank in her first love.

A word in conclusion on what this study of Tibullus has contributed to our knowledge of the development of the Latin erotic elegy. I find in Tibullus four literary or poetic love romances, novelle, written about four different types of character: first, the young courtesan in her early career before her bloom has gone, when she still has a chance of being considered casta and unworldly and when her proper setting is in simple rural scenes so that her romance verges on the pastoral; second, the experienced and accomplished courtesan who is thoroughly meretricious and venal, who is taken to the country only to keep her away from other lovers, whose proper setting is the city and the luxurious surroundings and trappings that only wealth can give, whose coquetry leads to employment of magic, poisons, and crime; third, the boy favourite who is not a complete homosexual type, but is on the way to become so, since he sells his favours to old men who are the highest bidders for them and in garb and mien he is showing the resulting effeminacy; and fourth, the young girl of noble family, highly educated and inexperienced, who gives all to one love.

These varied literary love stories of Tibullus picture situations which were probably largely imaginary in imitation of Greek elegiac motives. Since the Greek elegiac poets are lost we cannot know how fully developed the Greek elegiac romance was. Korte thinks that the influence of the Greek elegists on the Romans has been overestimated, and affirms: "Actually the Romans changed the content of elegy into something quite new—a detailed treatment of individual love experiences. The Hellenistic epigram may have offered them a score of effective motifs; but we have thus far no evidence of the existence of long poems of subjectively erotic content among the Alexandrians, and it is very likely that they never existed."⁷

Certainly Tibullus, whatever his debt to the Greeks, was following Gallus in developing the type of erotic elegiacs. So in the Augustan Age Horace says Fundanius was working on comedy, Pollio on tragedy, Varius on the epic, Vergil on the pastoral and he himself on satire. (Sat. I. 10, 40-8.) The fields of activity shifted somewhat later when Vergil devoted himself to epic, Horace to odes and Propertius to elegy. But it is clear that the writers of the time were busy in adapting Greek forms to Latin strains and were recognized as occupied with such definite and conscious literary work. Horace possibly in C. I. 33 having recognized that Tibullus was becoming more absorbed in the subject of his erotic elegy than in literary creation urged him not to grieve too much over one faithless woman. And in Epistle I. 4 he praised his work that might surpass that of Cassius Parmensis and was inspired by health-giving, sylvan scenes and thoughts that befit the wise and good. Horace's admonitions probably recognized that Tibullus' neuroticism and delicate health tended to swamp the artist in emotion, that city life and luxury might be the ruin of his literary work. So the best sanity of the Epicurean philosophy is presented for his guidance.

Certainly Tibullus stopped chanting doleful regrets over Delia and varied his themes. Nemesis and Marathus may be like Horace's Lydia, Lalage, Pyrrha and Ligurinus, "nothing but names." Certainly Horace's poem about Ligurinus (C. IV. 1) is so closely paralleled in the surprise and self-irony of the ending to Tibullus' Marathus poems, that the comparison suggests that both poets were merely experimenting with the Hellenistic theme of the paederastic sentiment.

Ovid's elegy on the death of Tibullus with its invocation of Elegeia, the Muse of Elegy herself, and its picture of the rivalry of Delia and Nemesis in the very grave of the poet is too fantastic to allow us to believe that Delia and Nemesis were any more real ladies than was Elegeia herself. Otherwise their wrangle at the tomb would be too intolerably grotesque. Some real women probably contributed much to the emotional colouring that went into Tibullus' poetry, but I see his elegies as definite literary experiments in writing short psychological love-romances in elegiac poems.

Notes

¹ This chapter is largely indebted to Kirby Flower Smith, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus.

²Op. cit., Introd., 37.

³Op. cit., p. 45.

⁴ K. F. Smith, op. cit., p. 92.

⁵Op. cit., p. 340.

⁶op. cit., p. 52.

⁷Hellenistic Poetry, by Alfred Korte, translated by J. Hammer and M. Hadas, pp. 149-150.

Works Cited

Cartault, A., Tibulle et les auteurs du corpus Tibullianum. Paris, 1909.

Cornish, F. W., Postgate, J. P., Mackail, J. W., Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, Translation with Latin text, in The Loeb Classical Library. New York, 1924.

Kroll, W., "Sulpicia" 114, in Pauli-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie, IV A I, 1931.

Postgate, J. P. (editor), Selections from Tibullus and Others. 2d ed. rev. London, 1910.

Schuster, Mauriz, Tibull-Studien: Beitrage zur Erklarung und Kritik Tibulls und des Corpus Tibullianum. Wien, 1930.

Smith, K. F. (editor), The Elegies of Albius Tibullus. New York, 1913.