SOURCE: "Gallus, Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia" in The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Horace and the Elegiac Poets, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899, pp. 223-51.

[In the following excerpt, Sellar provides an overview of Tibullus, dismisses questions about his identity, discusses his love affairs, and compares and contrasts his contributions to the elegy with those of Horace and other poets.]

Albius Tibullus, the next to Gallus in order of time, was a considerably younger man, although the exact date of his birth is uncertain. The evidence of his epitaph by Domitius Marsus—

Te quoque Vergilio comitem non aequa
 Tibulle
  Mors iuvenem campos misit in Elysios,
Ne foret aut elegis molles qui fleret amores
   Aut caneret forti regia bella pede—

shows that he died, while still a young man, shortly after the death of Virgil, who died late in the year 19 B.C. This is certainly the interpretation put on the word iuvenem by the author of the short life of him, most probably based on that of Suetonius, to which this epigram is prefixed. The words with which the life ends are 'obiit adolescens, ut indicat epigramma supra positum.' The lament of Ovid (Amores iii. 9) is a testimony to the affection and admiration which he inspired in younger men of genius, and the whole tone of that elegy, as of the epigram, implies that he died prematurely. Ovid mentions the presence of his mother at his death and funeral; he compares the sorrow for his death to that of Aurora for her son Memnon, of Thetis for Achilles, and of Venus for the young Adonis; and he represents him as met in the valley of Elysium by 'Catullus with his youthful temples bound with ivy.' The earliest fact known about him from external testimony and from his own writings is that he accompanied Messalla in his Aquitanian campaign, the date of which is probably 30 B.C. It is nearly certain that he was not born before the year 54 B.C., the year which the latest critics assign to his birth, though the date is put five years earlier by Dissen, who supposes that his first military service was in 42 B.C.

The life referred to above is comprised in five or six lines, and in these five lines there are at least two serious corruptions of the text. It is to this effect: 'Albius Tibullus, a Roman knight, a man singularly handsome, and remarkable for the care he bestowed on the adornment of his person, was the devoted friend of Corvinus Messalla the orator, and was a member of his staff in the Aquitanian war, and received orders of distinction for his services. In the opinion of many he holds the first place among the elegiac poets. His amatory epistles, although short, are quite "utiles." He died a young man, as the epigram quoted above indicates.' The two corruptions of the text are the words 'regalis' after 'eques,' and 'originem' after 'Messallam.' These had been corrected into 'Romanus' and 'oratorem.' But Baehrens (Tibullische Blätter) points out, with force, that these words are too remote from the words in the text to admit of their having been corrupted into them. He proposes to read eques R. (i.e. Romanus) e Gabis = Gabiis, and for 'originem' 'ob ingenium.' He also suggests 'dulces' instead of 'utiles,' as the epithet applied to the 'epistolae amatoriae.' The only change of importance is the e Gabis. In the Augustan age Gabii is spoken of as a typical instance of a town almost deserted¹. it may, however, still have been the most important place in that part of Latium and have given its name to the district round about it. Horace, in the epistle addressed to Albius, writes to him, as living on his country estate, 'in regione Pedana.' The old towns of Pedum and Gabii were within a short distance of one another; and the home of Tibullus may have been somewhere in the district lying between them.

A much more important question is whether the poet Tibullus is the Albius addressed by Horace in the thirty-third Ode of Book i—

Albi ne doleas plus nimio memor
Immitis Glycerae—

and of the fourth Epistle of Book i. From the time of the scholiast Porphyrion and the old grammarian Diomedes², this identity has hardly been doubted till quite recently. But it is argued by Baehrens³ that the language both of the Ode and the Epistle is irreconcilable with what is known of Tibullus from his own writings, and must have been addressed to another Albius, also an author of love-elegies. He argues that the words of the Ode do not apply to Tibullus, who complains, not of the infidelity of an 'ungentle Glycera,' but of Delia and Nemesis, and who nowhere hints that a younger rival was preferred to him—

         neu miserablies
Decantes elegos cur tibi iunior
    Laesa praeniteat fide.

This difficulty has occurred to others, and it has been conjectured that Tibullus had another mistress named Glycera, on whom he wrote elegies which have been lost; or that Horace substitutes the name Glycera for Nemesis, as (for instance) he substitutes Licymnia for Terentia. To this the answer is that Ovid when he wrote his elegy on the death of Tibullus knew only of Delia and Nemesis; that there could be no reason in the case of Nemesis for the adoption of a false name; and further, that the word Glycera would not in every position in a line—e.g. when the next word began with a consonant—fulfil the conditions as to the quantity of the syllables forming the name which are invariably observed when one name is substituted for another by the poets. The Ode must have been written before the connexion between Tibullus and Nemesis, which did not exist till the last years of the poet's life.

Further, Tibullus makes no complaint of younger, but only of richer rivals. But, it may be asked, is there any reason to suppose that Horace, in rallying his friends on their love affairs, adheres more closely to actual facts or to the actual names of their mistresses, than he does in writing of his own? The heroines of his Odes are more or less imaginary beings, idealised under some Greek name, suggestive of some characteristic charm of beauty or grace, of nature or manner. Glycera is a name used by him of one of the many objects of his own volatile attachments. In the combination of the words 'immitis Glycerae,' 'the ungentle sweet one,' do we not recognise his partiality for the figure oxymoron? The Ode probably was written—as nearly all of those in the first book were—before the publication of the Elegies on Delia. Horace may not have known or cared to know—or, if he knew, to reveal—the circumstances of the relation of Tibullus to Delia. He rallies him on treating too seriously the faithlessness of a mistress. The moral of the poem is that all love should be regarded as pastime and as a matter of caprice over which no man has any control, 'the sport of Venus'—

          cui placet impares
Formas atque animos sub iuga aënea
   Saevo mittere cum ioco.

A similar remonstrance, though written with more serious sympathy, is addressed to another elegiac poet belonging to the circle of Messalla, Valgius, who is exhorted to cease lamenting his lost Mystes and to rouse himself to sing of the fresh trophies of Augustus. The one thing clear about the Albius addressed in the thirty-third Ode of Book i. is that he was a poet who wrote love-elegies on his mistress.

It may be assumed that the Albius of the Odes is the same as the Albius of the Epistles, and it is objected that the latter is, in his personal attributes and circumstances, unlike the Tibullus known to us in the elegies; and further, that he is not recognised by Horace as the accomplished poet that his works and the reputation which he enjoyed in antiquity prove him to have been. Horace applies to him the words

Curantem quicquid dignum sapiente bonoque;

and certainly the characteristic of the poetry of Tibullus is not philosophical reflexion. The wealth and health and capacity for enjoyment attributed to him—

Di tibi divitias dederunt artemque fruendi—

appear to be contradicted by statements of his own regarding his circumstances and by the plaintive tone of his elegies. It is but a poor compliment to say of the author of the elegies on Delia that he may be engaged in writing something superior to the 'opuscula' of Cassius of Parma, which were so insignificant that nothing more is known of them. Further, Cassius is known as the author of tragedies, not of elegies. Had Horace been writing to the well-known elegiac poet Tibullus, he would, it is urged, have hinted at his superiority not to Cassius of Parma, but to Cornelius Gallus⁴.

These considerations, suggesting further doubt as to the identity of the poet with the friend addressed by Horace, are not convincing. Horace does not say that he was a philosopher, but that he was leading a good and philosophic life. In the mood in which Horace wrote the Epistles he would regard one who was so indifferent to wealth and ambition, who loved the country and lived simply, as one who understood the secret of a philosophic life; and as his object in the Epistles was to uphold this philosophic ideal, he draws attention to it, in connexion with Tibullus, in that work; as in the Odes, which reproduce the emotional side of life, he writes of him as a lover and poet. We need not suppose that we find the whole nature of Tibullus expressed in his Elegies. In them he dwells on the two aspects of his life that gave it an ideal charm for himself, his love for Delia and Nemesis, and the deep enjoyment which he derived from his home in the country. To Horace, who does not appear to be especially intimate with him, he would naturally be best known as a refined and cultivated gentleman, living on his hereditary estate. Though Tibullus says that he no longer enjoys the large estates of his ancestors, and complains that he is supplanted by a richer rival, yet he adds that he has enough for his wants—

ego composito securus acervo,
Despiciam dites despiciamque famem—

and that he has learned or is rapidly learning 'contentus vivere parvo.' He speaks of receiving Messalla as an honoured guest, and of producing old Falernian and Chian wine on festive occasions. The whole tone of the first elegy of Book ii, and especially the lines

Turbaque vemarum, saturi bona signa coloni,
Ludet et ex virgis exstruet ante casas,

is that of a fairly prosperous man, living on the proceeds of his estate, and with many people dependent upon him. This statement of his position exactly corresponds with the

mundus victus, non deficiente crumena

ascribed to him; and it is a doctrine of Horace, inculcated in Odes, Satires, and Epistles, almost to satiety, that the truly rich man is he whose wants are moderate and who has enough to satisfy them. It is true that the cloud of impending death seems to cast a shadow over his happiness, though not the deep gloom which it casts over that of Propertius. His reference to his 'slight limbs' and 'tender hands' (ii. 3. 9) may be suggestive rather of the beauty attributed to him than of robust health; and his serious illness at Corcyra and his premature death may confirm what we should infer from the gentle strain of his verse, that he was not endowed with that vigorous vitality which beats in every line of Ovid. Yet we must remember that it is part of the delicate art of Horace, in the Epistles, to play the part of a physician and to hint to each person what is the matter with him; and as we saw how he did this to those whom he deemed too easily satisfied with themselves, so he would address words of cheering to such as may have seemed to him too prone to despondency. The words 'silvas inter reptare salubres' and the concluding advice as to the secret of true enjoyment,

Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremam:
Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora,

may have been intended as hints to one who appeared to him, as he himself may have appeared to others, over-regardful of his health and over-apprehensive of death⁵. His intimacy with Maecenas made Horace too familiar with such a state of mind. Other expressions in the Epistles correspond with the impression which we derive of Tibullus from his poems. The 'regio Pedana,' a district in Latium, between Praeneste and Tibur, where the Campagna rises up towards the Sabine and Æquian hills, suits exactly the notion we form of the estate of Tibullus, as one adapted for flocks and herds, as well as corn-crops and vineyards: and the ceremony of purifying the fields, described in the first elegy of Book ii, is an old rite of the Latin husbandmen. In the line

An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,

the word 'reptare' is suggestive of the gentle nature of the man, in contrast to the excitability of Propertius and the pleasure-loving vivacity of Ovid. We may compare the epithet 'tacitum,' and the reference to his 'facundia,' his 'gift of expression,' in the words 'fari quae sentiat,' to the words in which Martial (viii. 70) characterises Nerva, whom he calls the Tibullus of his time—

Quanta quies placidi, tanta est facundia
 Nervae.

The 'gratia' attributed to him applies well to the favoured friend of Messalla.

Even the slight allusion to his literary work is appropriate to the writer of elegies or epigrams. Horace could not have applied the term 'opuscula' to the tragedies of Cassius, but his use of the word indicates the same feeling which suggests the epithet 'exiguos' applied to the elegies in the 'Ars Poetica.' This Epistle may have been written before the first book of Elegies was published, and Horace may have known by report only of Tibullus as a writer of elegies. He addresses him as the 'candid critic of his Satires.' Had the Odes been given to the world when the Epistle was written, he would certainly have valued his favourable opinion of them more than of his 'sermones.' It was natural that Horace, writing perhaps about the year 25 or 26 B.C., should avoid the name of Gallus, who had so recently fallen into disgrace. It is somewhat remarkable that among the names of those who are mentioned by him in the tenth Satire of Book i. as the critics for whose favour he wrote, almost every name eminent in the literature of the age is mentioned, except that of Gallus. After his career in Egypt, Gallus must have been an especial object of suspicion to Maecenas, whose position required him to observe and watch all who might be dangerous to the Empire. Dion (liii. 24) records as a signal proof of the disgrace of Gallus, the disgust which Proculeius, so intimately connected with Maecenas, and mentioned by Horace as a type of all that was most respectable in that age, shewed when he met him. Cassius of Parma had been a leading man in the army of Brutus and Cassius, and may thus have been known to Horace personally. If it is necessary to account for the omission of the name of Gallus and the presence of that of Cassius of Parma, explanations may be given quite consistent with the identity of Albius with the author of the Elegies.

There seems therefore no reason to doubt that Albius, the friend of Horace, is Albius Tibullus the poet. The gentleness and loyalty of the cultivated friend of Messalla would naturally attract Horace, as the vanity and self-assertion of the unwelcome intruder into the circle of Maecenas repelled him. The pictures of the two contemporary elegiac poets, Tibullus and Propertius, as they are painted in the first and second books of the Epistles, bear the test of a close comparison with the impression of themselves unconsciously left by those authors on their works, and confirm the opinion that in his Epistles Horace is a true and subtle, if not always indulgent discerner of character. The picture of Tibullus not only confirms but completes our knowledge of the man, and makes us better understand how worthy he was to be the comrade and friend of Messalla, the lover of philosophy no less than of literature.

But for all the details of the circumstances, tastes, interests of the poet, we must trust to the small volume which has reached us under his name. Of the three or, according to a division adopted in modern times, four books, contained in the volume, the first two only, those of which the prominent motive is the love of Delia and of Nemesis, can with certainty be ascribed to him. It is most likely that the first book only, consisting of ten elegies, was given to the world by the author, probably about 25 or 26 B.C., and that the second, consisting of six elegies, one of which is only twenty-two lines in length, was left incomplete, not finally revised by the author, and published soon after his death by some of the members of the circle of Messalla.

The first six elegies of the third book are the work of Lygdamus, a younger poet, and an evident imitator not only of Tibullus but of Ovid and Propertius⁶. The hexameter poem, a panegyric on Messalla written in the year of his Consulship, 31 B.C., which intervenes between the elegies of Lygdamus and the concluding elegies of the book, is the composition of some member of the same literary circle. Most of the remaining elegies are devoted to the love-story of Sulpicia and an otherwise unknown Cerinthus. The last six of these are the composition of Sulpicia herself. The earlier elegies, introducing these, are not unworthy of Tibullus, and may have been written by him in sympathy with a daughter of the house, who from her intellectual gifts no less than her personal charms (iii. 8) may well have excited a warm and kindly interest in all the members of the circle, from her guardian Messalla to the poets and other friends who frequented his house.

The main story of the life of Tibullus, and the record of his feelings which is the most interesting part of it, are to be gathered from a rapid survey of the elegies composing the first two books. He was born about the year 54 B.C. (more probably after than before that date) and died still a young man in the year 18 B.C. He was of equestrian rank, and belonged to an old Latin family, settled in the neighbourhood of the towns of Pedum and Gabii. His estate had been handed down to him through a long line of ancestors (ii. 1. 2), but had since their time been much diminished (i. 1. 19-22). It is generally supposed that, as in the case of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, his losses were due to the confiscations that followed the battle of Philippi. But Tibullus does not, as he might naturally have done, assign this as the cause of his losses; and landed property is diminished by other causes besides confiscation, acting through several generations. No town in Latium is mentioned by Appian among those whose lands were assigned for that purpose. Tibullus was born into the position, the most fortunate in that age for a man of culture, of the inheritor of a country estate, endeared to him by old family memories and associations, and, though much reduced from its ancient dimensions, yet sufficient to give him all the really desirable advantages of life.

He is first introduced to us as living in his country-house, where he had lived happily as a child (i. 10. 15)—

Sed patrii servate lares: aluistis et idem
Cursarem vestros cum tener ante pedes—

and where his ancestors had lived from immemorial times; and contemplating with strong reluctance and some natural fears the prospect of his first campaign. That was probably in the year 30 or 29 B.C., when he shared the tent and served on the staff of Messalla, in his Aquitanian campaign. He is said to have gained 'orders of distinction,' 'militaria dona,' by his services; and he gained the more solid advantage of the permanent friendship of his chief. In the poem referred to above, probably his earliest, though he indicates his susceptibility to love, he hints at no definite attachment rendering him more reluctant to incur the dangers of the expedition, as his attachment to Delia a year or two later makes him reluctant to accompany Messalla again on his mission to the East.

Probably in the winter following his return from the Aquitanian campaign he became the lover of Plania, who, under the name of Delia, is the heroine of his first book of Elegies. Her position is ambiguous. He speaks of her as if she were a married woman, whose husband was absent as a soldier in Cilicia, but he says also that she did not wear the 'head-dress' or the 'long robe' characteristic of a Roman matron; and in a later poem he speaks of a 'lena' who was the agent of her later intrigues⁷. Probably she was united to her vir by some of the less binding relations which did not entitle her to wear the 'vitta.' She is a more shadowy personage than the Cynthia of Propertius, but there can be no doubt that in the first three Elegies of the book we are reading a genuine story of mutual love, probably the first deep affection of both their lives. Five poems only, out of the ten composing the first book, are devoted to the love of Delia. The second appears to be the earliest in date, and is in the form of a … complaint uttered before her closed door. It is evidently written in Rome, and in the winter succeeding the Aquitanian campaign—

Non mihi pigra nocent hibernae frigora noctis,
  Non mihi cum multa decidit imber aqua—

but while still in Rome, he longs to be in the country with Delia, tending his flocks on the familiar hill:

Ipse boves mea si tecum modo Delia possim
   Iungere, et in solito pascere monte pecus.

In the first Elegy the love of his home is as prominent a motive as the love of Delia. It is written to excuse himself to Messalla for not again accompanying him on foreign service. He urges that he has no need nor wish to enrich himself, and that he cannot tear himself from the 'formosae vincla puellae.' The line

Et sedeo duras ianitor ante fores

and the lines

Nunc levis est tractanda Venus, dum frangere
 postes
  Non pudet et rixas inseruisse iuvat,

indicate, what we should not have supposed from the thoroughly idyllic character of the first half of the poem, that it was probably written in the city, though under the influence of the quieter thoughts of his country home.

The third Elegy, written later in the same year, informs us that he had started with Messalla on his mission to the East. It represents Tibullus as detained in Corcyra by a dangerous illness, from which he is still suffering or just recovering. After expressing in the two opening lines his affection for Messalla and his comrades, he devotes the rest of his poem to the longing for Delia and for his home, and to the thoughts suggested by his recent danger. None of his poems is so full of tender beauty as this. His whole feeling is exalted and purified by absence and the prospect of death. There are few passages in ancient poetry so perfect as a picture from life and an expression of feeling as the lines in which he anticipates his unexpected and unannounced arrival before Delia, engaged with her handmaids on their evening tasks:

Tunc veniam subito nec quisquam nuntiet
 ante,
  Sed videar caelo missus adesse tibi:
Tunc mihi, qualis eris, longos turbata capillos,
   Obvia nudato, Delia, curre pede.

His return, however, did not fulfil his hopes. In the fifth poem he appears again in Rome. Delia had been dangerously ill; and Tibullus believes that he has saved her life by his prayers and ceremonial observances. He had dreamed of a happy life in which he should share with her the congenial labours of the farm. But she is no longer unsophisticated as when he parted from her. She has applied the arts of intrigue, which he reproaches himself with having taught her, and through the agency of a 'lena' has sold herself to a richer lover. In the following poem the husband has returned from the wars. Tibullus appeals to him to guard Delia from his rival. He appeals to her old mother, who had always favoured their love; he entreats Delia to be chaste, not from fear, 'sed mente fideli,' and ends with the prayer,

         nos Delia amoris
Exemplum cana simus uterque fide.

If it is true that the love of Cynthia made Propertius a poet, the love of Delia inspires the happiest poetry of Tibullus. Fortunately we know this passion only in its short-lived bloom, and not, like that of Propertius, also in its decay, and through the stormy seasons preceding its decay. Though her infidelity produced its natural effect in separation, he allows no words of scorn or coldness to mar the beauty of his past.

Three other poems of this book, the fourth, the eighth, and the ninth, are of a sentimental character, of a much less pleasing sort. The subject of them is a beautiful youth, Marathus; and they indicate at least a sympathy with that aberration of feeling which is the chief stain on ancient civilisation. It is generally assumed that these poems are later than those written in connexion with Delia. But there is no evidence for this presumption. It is as likely that they are the record of an earlier state of feeling, before his deeper nature was stirred by his love for Delia and his friendship for Messalla. The tone of these poems is less gentle and kindly than in his other elegies.⁸ They not only show little of his purer affection, but they bear no traces, or only the faintest, of his life in his country estate, or of his devotion to Messalla.

One poem, the seventh, not yet noticed, gives the worthiest expression to these feelings of devotion to his friend. It was written in honour of the birthday of Messalla, which happened to be the anniversary of his great victory on the river Atax, and celebrates at the same time the triumph awarded to him in the year 27 B. C. It recalls the memory of the campaign in which he himself had borne his part, and gives a rapid survey of the wonders of the lands which Messalla visited in the course of his Eastern mission. The tone of the whole poem is thoroughly genial, and the concluding lines bring Messalla before us, as happy in his family life, and as beneficent in the works of peace, as he had been distinguished in war.

Several years must have elapsed between the composition of the Elegies of the first and those of the second book. He seems to have been roused to write only when under the influence of some strong attachment; and his love for Nemesis, which is the principa subject of this book, belongs to the last years of his life.⁹ That book was left unfinished and must have been published after his death. The fifth poem certainly could not have obtained the final revision of the author. This book brings him before us in the same relations as the earlier book,—as a lover, and the poet of love, as living happily on his estate, feeling a lively sympathy with the homely pursuits and joys of the country people, and with the ancient ceremonies of rural life; and as the friend of Messalla devoting his art to celebrate the entrance of Messalla's son on public duties, and led on by this new theme, to find, like the other elegiac poets, inspiration for the last effort of his genius in the ancient memories of Rome.

The love for Nemesis has more the nature of a 'bondage' than that for Delia. She seems to exercise over him something of the spell which Cynthia exercises over Propertius. She tortures him by her infidelities, and threatens to ruin him by her rapacity. He even faces the contingency of having to part with his old home, the source of so much of his happiness and inspiration:

Quin etiam sedes iubeat si vendere avitas,
  Ite sub imperium sub titulumque, Lares
(ii. 4. 53).

These are the slight and simple materials out of which the texture of his poems is woven. Love is the chief inspirer and the chief motive of his poetry:

Ad dominam faciles aditus per carmina
 quaero:
   Ite procul Musae si nihil ista valent
(ii. 4. 19).

He is as indifferent to fame as to wealth:

Non ego laudari cupio, mea Delia; tecum
  Dum modo sim, quaeso segnis inersque
 vocer
(i. 1. 57-58).

If his love has less ardour than that of Propertius, it has more tenderness and self-abnegation. Virgil alone among ancient poets is capable of such feeling and such sympathy with feeling as that expressed in the line,

Non ego sum tanti ploret ut illa semel;

and of the self-forgetfulness of

At iuvet in tota me nihil esse domo.

He feels strongly the sanctity of love, and says of him who violates it,

e caelo deripit ille does.

As Virgil finds a place for 'pii vates' and 'casti sacerdotes' in Elysium, Tibullus finds there a place for faithful and gentle lovers. His ideal of happiness is a permanent union ending only with death, of which the pain should be mitigated by the sympathy of the loved object—

Te teneam moriens deficiente manu.

Affection and dependence on affection, tinged with melancholy, are the predominant sentiments in his love for Delia and Nemesis. He expresses also affection for those nearly connected with them, as in his grateful remembrance of her mother after Delia had proved faithless—

Vive diu mihi dulcis anus: proprios ego
 tecum,
   Sit modo fas, annos contribuisse velim:
Te semper natamque tuam te propter amabo:
   Quidquid agit, sanguis est tamen illa tuus
(i. 6. 63)—

and in his tender recollection of the young sister of Nemesis—

Parce per immatura tuae precor ossa sororis:
   Sic bene sub tenera parva quiescat humo.
Illa mihi sancta est, illius dona sepulcro
    Et madefacta meis serta feram lacrimis:
Illius ad tumulum fugiam supplexque sedebo,
    Et mea cum muto fata querar cinere
(ii. 6. 29).

His elegy is the true elegy of love, expressive of its sorrows rather than its joys, sorrows arising from separation and desertion, and, even when the happiness is most complete—'in ipsis floribus'—from the sense of its transitoriness. No poet has given more refined expression to the charm of youth and beauty and to the speed with which it passes away. The lesson which he draws is that drawn, lightly or sadly, by so many other Epicurean singers of the joys of life:

Interea dum fata sinunt iungamus amores:
    lam veniet tenebris mors adoperta caput.

Love with him, as with Catullus and other poets, ancient and modem, 'spices his fair banquet with the dust of death.'

If the sentimental mood of Tibullus appears alien to the more masculine Roman temper, no other poet, with the exception of Virgil, is so possessed by the spirit of Italy, the love of the country and of the labour of the fields, and the piety associated with that sentiment. To the life of the country and the teaching of the rural gods he attributes the origin of civilisation, of poetry and of love, and it is in the actual labours of the field, not in the 'latis otia fundis,' that he finds the chief charm of country life. Like Virgil, he associates this charm with the love of Rome and all the homely joys of life, the joys of the poor no less than those of his own condition:

Quam potius laudandus hic est, quem prole
 parata
  Occupat in parva pigra senecta casa:
Ipse suas sectatur oves, at filius agnos,
   Et calidam fesso comparat uxor aquam
(i. 10. 39).

Part of the horror of death is to pass from the sight of cornfields and vineyards to 'the sunless land' where

Non seges est infra, non vinea culta (i. 10. 35) .

He remembers and acts on the precept

Imprimis venerare deos,

and believes that all the success of his labours is due to his reverence for the ancient objects and ceremonials of religion (i. 1. 9-14). In one of the latest passages which he wrote, he associates the rude mirth of the shepherds' festival with the genial influence of family affection:

Et fetus matrona dabit, natusque parenti
   Oscula comprensis auribus eripiet,
Nec taedebit avum parvo advigilare nepoti
   Balbaque cum puero dicere verba senem
(ii. 5. 91).

As in Virgil, the love of the country creates an idealising longing for the restoration of the innocence and happiness of the Saturnian age (i. 3. 35). While he writes in the spirit of the Georgics, and must have deeply felt the influence of that poem, which was first given to the world about the time when he was composing his Elegies, he is no servile copyist of it. None perhaps of his contemporaries was so well fitted by his life and tastes to assimilate all the feeling with which that poem is saturated. Yet both in his art and in his love of the country Tibullus is quite independent. The expression of his feeling is more purely idyllic, less tinged with reflexion, than that of Virgil. The large admixture of an idyllic element in his elegies distinguishes Tibullus from his more powerful and more brilliant rivals in elegiac poetry, who are essentially poets of the passions and pleasures of the town.

Closely connected with his love of home and the country is his love of peace. He writes under the influence of a strong reaction which followed the thirty years of civil strife, dating from the consulship of Metellus. He does not, like the poets of the circle of Maecenas, express his sympathy with the success of the national cause in the war against Antony and Cleopatra, nor any interest in the later wars carried on for the consolidation and security of the Empire, except in so far as they brought distinction to Messalla. He thinks about war as affecting individual happiness; and idealises peace as the fosterer of love and the homely joys of life (i. 10. 49 ff.). His horror of war is enhanced by his melancholy foreboding of death:

Quis furor est atram bellis arcessere mortem?
   Imminet et tacito clam venit illa pede
(ibid. 33).

The thought has not for him the grim fascination which it has for the imagination of Propertius; he does not fight against it by familiarising himself with it as Horace does; still less does he encounter it with the austere submission of Lucretius. As Virgil seeks his consolation in the vague hopes of a spiritual philosophy, so Tibullus finds his in the vague fancies of the perpetuation in a purified and exalted state of what was to him the chief poetic charm of this life (i. 3. 57-66).

He is also the idealising poet of a friendship as loyal as that of Horace for Maecenas, as fervent as that of Catullus for Calvus and Verannius. His affection for Messalla mingles with all his joys, interests, and cares. In his dream of happiness when he thinks of Delia living with him, and sharing the pleasant toils of the farm, the crowning joy was to be the visits of Messalla—

Huc veniet Messalla meus, cui dulcia poma
  Delia selectis detrahat arboribus;
Et tantum venerata virum, hunc sedula curet,
   Huic paret atque epulas ipsa ministra gerat.
Haec mihi fingebam quae nunc Eurusque
 Notusque
  lactat odoratos vota per Armenios
(i. 5. 31).

In the festival of the purification of the fields it is to the health of Messalla that every one is called to drink (ii. 1. 31-32). In anticipation of death he desires that this shall be inscribed on his tomb:

Hic iacet immiti consumptus morte Tibullus
   Messallam terra dum sequiturque mari
(i. 3. 55).

He is moved by the military and civil distinctions of Messalla, but above all his sympathies with him are roused on the occasion of the assumption of the first public duties by his son Messalinus, and he anticipates the pride which the father will feel in the triumphs which await his future career:

Tunc Messalla meus pia det spectacula turbae
Et plaudat curru praetereunte pater
(ii. 5. 119).

The public office bestowed on the young Messalinus was that of one of the Quindecemviri who had charge of the Sibylline books; and the poem was apparently composed in connexion with the festival of Apollo, preceding the celebration of the Secular Games, for which Horace also composed the sixth Ode of the fourth book. Through his interest in the function performed by Messalinus, the voice of Tibullus becomes for the moment the organ of national feeling, and gives picturesque expression to the contrast between the magnificence of Rome in the Augustan Age and the pastoral loneliness of the seven hills in early times:

Carpite nunc tauri de septem montibus herbas.

From this he passes by natural transition to the thought of the imperial mission of Rome:

Roma, tuum nomen terris fatale regendis,
  Qua sua de caelo prospicit arva Ceres.

There is no mention of, nor apparently any allusion to Augustus in this expression of national feeling. But his silence on an occasion which might almost seem to have demanded an expression of sympathy with the dominant sentiment of the hour, need not be attributed to antagonism to the court. It is rather indicative of one who lived much apart from the world, indifferent to favour, popularity, and advancement, and acting consistently on the principle involved in the line

Nec vixit male qui moriens natusque fefellit.

But though there is no recognition of the dominant sentiment of the hour, there are clear traces of the influence of the great poem which is its monumental embodiment. In earlier poems we are reminded of the sentiment and language of the Bucolics and the Georgics; in the references to Aeneas and to Turnus we feel the immediate presence of the Aeneid. The only poet between whom and Tibullus we can trace a distinct affinity is Virgil. They are alike in their human affection and their piety, in their capacity of tender and self-forgetful love, in their delight in the labours of the field, and their sympathy with the herdsman and the objects of his care. They have the same delicate sense of art and cultivated fastidiousness of expression. Tibullus does not profess to make any Greek poet his model: nor does his culture display itself in recondite allusions to Greek mythology, although he varies his idyllic pictures of natural scenes and of incidents in human life with one or two reproductions of the stories more familiar to art and poetry, such as that of Apollo feeding the flocks of Admetus. Neither does he make such use of Greek idioms and modes of expression as Virgil and Horace. That he was familiar with the Alexandrians may be assumed; but the influence of their art, as it appears in their professed imitator Propertius, and their translator Catullus, is not distinctly traceable in his elegies. Too little is known of Philetas to justify any judgment on the relation of Tibullus to him. From the similarity of sentiment in passages in which Tibullus laments the transitoriness of youth and beauty, to some of the fragments of Mimnermus¹⁰, it seems not unlikely that Tibullus may, like Horace, have drawn from the older sources of Greek poetry, rather than the Alexandrian reservoirs. His own vein, though not abundant, is thoroughly 'ingenuus,' thoroughly his own. He guides it carefully but never exhausts it. He is satisfied with the one channel that was fitted to convey his moods of peaceful happiness or pensive melancholy, and has no need for the more varied outlets demanded by the more mobile temperament and active intellect of Horace.

That he profited by the advance made in composition, metre, and diction by his predecessors in elegiac poetry may be assumed: but to him belongs the distinction of having given artistic perfection to the Roman elegy. The structure of the several elegies exemplifies that delicate art which conceals the labour and thought bestowed upon it. There is at once unity and variety in every elegy—the unity of a dominant sentiment, the variety of thoughts and pictures in keeping with it, arranged in groups corresponding with one another, and succeeding one another by gentle and natural transition. Thus the third poem is written to give utterance to his feelings when lying ill of fever and apprehensive of death in Corcyra. What gives unity to the poem is his memory of the love of Delia in the past, and his longing for her in the immediate future. But with this feeling is blended his love of home; and a vivid contrast is drawn between the perils of war and foreign adventure, and the ideal happiness of the Saturnian age. From these perils he passes to the thought of his own imminent danger, and from that to describe the joys of the blessed in Elysium and the tortures of the damned in Tartarus: among them he mentions last the punishment of the daughters of Danaus, 'Danai proles Veneris quae numina laesit.' This thought leads him back by the force of contrast to the brightest picture which his imagination can paint in the world of the living, that of Delia spinning among her handmaids and of his own unexpected return. There is no mechanical arrangement, but rather a harmonious combination of his materials, their succession being regulated sometimes by the suggestions of similarity, sometimes of contrast. The peaceful joys of the country are, in many of the elegies, set over against the dangers and the rough life of the soldier, and the joy of youth and love is made more intense by the thought of death. There is nothing forced or strained in his manner of treatment; no undue emphasis or exaggeration of colouring. He is impressive by the truth and simplicity of his separate pictures, and their harmony with the moods to which he wishes to give expression.

As he was the first to perfect the form of the elegy, he was the first also to impart to the elegiac metre that smooth and liquid flow which Virgil imparted to the hexameter in his pastoral poetry, the charm of sound that befits the 'Muses who delight in the country' as well as the Muse of tender emotion. He avoids altogether the long continuous passages without any break in the sense, and the long compound sentences out of which the more elaborate elegies of Catullus are composed. The sense of each distich is complete in itself. The clauses are direct and simple, expressive often of a wish or prayer, or making a plain statement of fact; and follow each other, either without any connecting word, or with a conjunction co-ordinating them with one another, or more rarely marking the dependence of one thought on another. The connexion between one distich and another is felt but seldom expressed. Sometimes emphasis is given to it by repeating the word which is the key to the thought in the previous line, or more usually, by placing first in the couplet the word that indicates the connexion. There is an equable rise and fall in the metre; an equable balance between the hexameter and the pentameter, and between the first and second half of the pentameter. Yet he avoids the extreme monotony of movement which would result from a uniformity of pause at the end of the first line, as is the case with the English decasyllabic couplet. There is frequently more than one pause in the couplet. Sometimes the principal pause is in the middle of the fourth foot of the hexameter; more frequently at the end of the first foot of the pentameter. The balance between the two halves of the pentameter is often maintained by the position of an epithet at the end of the first half and of the substantive which it qualifies at the end of the second half, as

Et teneat culti iugera multa soli.

He varies the ordinary iambic ending of the pentameter by occasional but not too frequent trisyllabic or quadrisyllabic endings. To a modern ear the movement of the verse is smoother than that of the Ovidian elegiac with its rapid succession of epigrammatic antithesis: while it never leaves the impression of strain and labour, as if the single lines and couplets were beat out by separate efforts, which is often left by the metre of Propertius. As in the structure of the whole poem there is an equable and varied onward movement, so the rise and fall in the metre is at once equable and varied. He fully recognises its limits, and its inadequacy to the expression of consecutive thought. Poetry with him returns to something like its original function before it was used as the organ of action and thought. It becomes in a great measure again the simple expression of feeling in the form of a prayer, a wish, or a regret.

There is great beauty and delicacy also in his diction. It has not the vivacity and sparkling wit of that of Ovid: neither is it boldly inventive and creative like that of Propertius. But it is never forced or artificial, and, though always simple, it is never trivial nor superfluous. The active power of his imagination is perceptible rather in the collocation of his words than in figures of speech, as in the line which vividly contrasts the steadfast agency by which ships are guided in their course with their own instability—

Ducunt instabiles sidera certa rates.

Much oftener he produces his effects by the natural use of the simplest words, as for instance in

Sic bene sub tenera parva quiescat humo—

or

Non ego sum tanti ploret ut illa semel—

or

Te teneam moriens deficiente manu.

The often expressed contrast between past happiness and present pain is brought out, partly by the position of the two epithets in the hexameter, partly by the direct simplicity of the last words of the pentameter, in the lines

Saepe ego cum dominae dulces a limine duro
   Agnosco voces, haec negat esse domi.

He has, like most of the Latin poets, the power of moving feeling by the vague suggestions of musical sound in his language, as in the lines

Haec mihi fingebam, quae nunc Eurusque
 Notusque
  lactat odoratos vota per Armenios.

All the charm of youth lingers in the movement as in the meaning of the line

Solis aetema est Baccho Phoeboque iuventas;

and the pathos of the transitoriness of all beautiful things is profoundly felt in the movement and meaning of these:

Quam cito purpureos deperdit terra colores,
  Quam cito formosas populus alta comas.

There is no laborious search for mythological parallels, no facile enumeration of obvious generalisations from the processes of nature or the operations of human industry, as in Propertius and Ovid, to adorn or illustrate his subject. Picturesque and beautiful forms and scenes from human life and outward nature present themselves to his imagination, in perfect harmony with the feeling that moves him. Such is the picture already referred to of Delia running to meet him on his unexpected return:

Tunc mihi qualis eris, longos turbata capillos,
   Obvia nudato Delia curre pede.

Such is that of the maid, going through the darkness to meet her lover:

Et pedibus praetemptat iter suspensa timore,
   Explorat caecas cui man us ante vias.

Such is that of the soldier, telling his battles over again—

Ut mihi potanti possit sua dicere facta
   Miles, et in mensa pingere castra mero—

and this, which along with its playfulness mingles some of the tenderness of the most pathetic passage in Lucretius,

            natusque parenti
Oscula comprensis auribus eripiet.

The sight of corn-fields and vineyards, of hills and plains, with the added charm of animal life, gives him the pleasure which it gives to Virgil and Lucretius, and to Horace in his more idyllic moods; and the elegies abound with evidence that those were the sights most constantly before him, and those which sank into his heart. Other aspects of nature which move the imagination more powerfully are also to be found in these elegies. Such is that, in the account of the purification of the fields, of the night succeeding the evening mirth and festivities, which followed the celebration of the religious rite:

Ludite: iam nox iungit equos, currumque
 sequuntur
  Matris lascivo sidera fulva choro;
Postque venit tacitus fuscis circumdatus alis
   Somnus et incerto somnia nigra pede.

Though he missed seeing the strange Eastern lands through which Messalla's mission led him, he yet realises in imagination the natural and historic wonder of the prospect from the place where

   maris vastum prospectet turribus aequor
Prima ratem ventis credere docta Tyros.

Tibullus is one of those poets who inspire affection by the personal impression which they have left stamped on their writings, an affection rising from the recognition of a simple, tender, and loyal nature, free from all taint of vanity, envy, or malevolence. That this was the feeling inspired in his lifetime may be inferred from the qualities which Horace attributes to him: it might be inferred from his friendship with one of the most loyal and high-minded gentlemen whom Rome at the epoch of her highest social civilisation produced. The epigram of Domitius Marsus indicates that the sorrow felt for his premature death was like that felt for the loss of Virgil. The elegy in which Ovid, whose best quality is the candour of his appreciation of other poets, utters not so much his own sorrow as the sorrow of the whole world of culture for his loss, almost redeems the levity of the three books of the Amores. If he seems deficient in sympathy with the public virtue or the martial spirit of Rome, except in so far as he recognises their union in his friend Messalla, this may be attributed possibly to his sympathies with the Republic and to his own choice of the 'secretum iter,' apart from any contact with public affairs, and to the character of the wars waged in his day. The battle of Actium was indeed able to arouse all that still remained of patriotic enthusiasm, as it does in Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, and to reconcile the old adherents of the Republic, as it did Messalla, to the Empire. But the wars preceding it, in which Tibullus was too young to have borne his part, though he was not too young to bear a lasting impression of them, were such as to leave on the imagination a vivid sense of all the horror and misery, and none of the glory and greatness of war. And those which immediately followed it, though necessary to the security and consolidation of the Empire, were to the individual rather a field for adventure and for booty than a call to patriotism, and could excite enthusiasm only in those who felt themselves identified with the success of the Empire. Tibullus alone among the poets of the age not only abstains from any words of flattery, but makes no acknowledgment of the real beneficence of the rule of Augustus. His feeling towards Messalla is the feeling of one cultivated gentleman towards another, to whom he is attached by a lifelong friendship, based on admiration for his great qualities of heart, and intellect, and character.

He had no ambition to advance himself by his art, nor does he seek to impress the world by his originality. A delicate fastidiousness, like that of the poet Gray, made him write little and give the world only of his best. He shows no great intellectual power or large range of imagination, no recondite learning or intuitions into secrets of nature or human life which he alone is able to reveal. He holds a place, far indeed from the highest, among those poets who please every generation of readers by the attraction of their personality, the purity of their taste, the sincerity of their feeling, the music of their diction, and the adequacy of their genius to body forth pleasing pictures from nature and human life in keeping with the movement of their spirit. If he is less Roman in his moods than most of the other poets of Rome, he is thoroughly Latin in the sobriety and sanity of his imagination. By the soundest criticism of antiquity he was regarded as the greatest master of the Roman elegy. The criticism of Quintilian is: 'In elegy also we rival the Greeks, of which Tibullus appears to me the purest and finest representative. Some indeed prefer Propertius to him. Ovid is more licentious than either, as Gallus is harsher.' The prodigal creativeness of his imagination has gained for the poems of Ovid a greater fortune in modern times. In the present day the comparative novelty of Propertius, his irregular and daring force of conception and expression, and the ardour of his temperament, have altered the balance of admiration in his favour; still, among scholars and lovers of literature there may yet be found those who would say of themselves 'sunt qui Tibullum malint.' In elegiac poetry, the most subjective of all the forms of poetry, it is impossible to separate sharply the impression produced by qualities of heart and character in the writer from the effect produced by his art. The personality of Tibullus is much the most attractive, much the most admirable of the three. In his art he is the most faultless, the most perfectly harmonious.

Notes

¹

Gabiis desertior atque
Fidenis vicus
(Hor. Ep. i. I11. 7).

² Cui opinioni consentire videtur Horatius, cum ad Albium Tibullum elegiarum auctorem scribens, etc.

³ Tibullische Bläatter, pp. 7-11.

⁴ Cf. Baehrens, Tibullische Blatter, pp. 10-11.

⁵ This remark and one or two others in this examination of the Epistle were suggested by Kiessling's notes on the passage: 'aber Tibull ist Hypochonder und qualt sich mit Todesgedanken.'

⁶ As Lygdamus is not mentioned by Ovid or any of the ancients among the poets of the Augustan age, it is supposed by Birt ('Das antike Buchwesen') that his elegies were at an early period comprised in one volume with the short second book of Tibullus, and that thus they came to be cited in the middle ages as from the second book of Tibullus. No third or fourth book is referred to in the anthologies which existed in the middle ages.

7 Haec nocuere mihi quod adest huic dives
amator:
 Venit in exitium callida lena meum
(i. 5. 47).

He proceeds to denounce the 'lena' in terms that recall, though there is no touch of humour in them, Horace's denunciations of Canidia.

⁸ Cf. especially 9. 45-76.

⁹Cf. ii. 5. 109-112—

         iaceo cum saucius annum,
   Et faveo morbo, cum iuvat ipse dolor,
Usque cano Nemesim sine qua versus mihi
 nullus
  Verba potest iustos aut reperire pedes.

Ovid writes as if the love of Tibullus for Nemesis had endured till his death. This poem was written in 18 b. c.

¹⁰ Noticed by Gruppe and referred to by M. Plessis.