CHAPTER X
TIBULLUS—PROPERTIUS—THE LESSER POETS
Roman society—The amorous elegy—Cornelius Gallus, 70-27 B. C.—Gaius Valgius Rufus, consul 12 B. C.—Albius Tibullus, about 54 to about 19 B. C.—Lygdamus, born 43 B. C.—Sulpicia—Sextus Propertius, about 50 to about 15 B. C.—Domitius Marsus, about 54 to about 4 B. C.—Albinovanus Pedo—Ponticus—Macer—Grattius—Rabirius—Cornelius Severus—Gaius Melissus and the Fabula Trabeata—Manilius—The Priapea—Poems ascribed to Virgil and Ovid.
During the last century of the republic Rome had grown from a powerful Italian city to be the mistress of the world, and this growth of power had been accompanied by many changes. The wealth of the governing classes had increased enormously. Greek art and Greek literature had become familiar in the form of original works and of Roman imitations, and with the increase of wealth and luxury the growth of immorality went hand in hand. The early profligacy of Cæsar and Sallust, and the love of Catullus for a married woman have already been mentioned. These were not isolated cases, but merely examples of what was only too common. In fact, the man whose life was pure was an exception in the latter days of the republic. The condition of society. Nor were the women of the wealthier classes better than the men. The Roman matron, who was betrothed at twelve and married at fourteen years of age, naturally found herself in many instances united to a man with whom she had no sympathy, and whose distasteful society she gladly exchanged for that of a clandestine lover. Divorces were numerous, and were accompanied with little disgrace. When Augustus established his power, he brought about many reforms in the government of the city and the provinces and caused laws to be passed to ensure the sanctity of marriage and of family life, but his success in stemming the tide of immorality was slight. To be sure, the life of his chosen friends and of the court circle in general was pure, and even perhaps puritanical; but the spirit of the times was so corrupt that even his own family did not escape. The immorality of his daughter Julia became at last so notorious that she was banished from Rome and ended her life in exile. Her daughter Julia resembled her in character and met with a similar fate. In the later years of Augustus banishments for moral reasons were numerous, but it was impossible to bring order into the life of a society in which immorality had ceased to be disgraceful.
It was in and for this society that the Roman elegists composed their poems. Elegiac verse had been employed in the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. by Mimnermus, Tyrtæus, Solon, and others, for the expression of all sorts of personal sentiments, as well as for political purposes; but in the Alexandrian period it had been appropriated almost exclusively to poems of love. The elegy. This Alexandrian elegiac poetry had been introduced at Rome by some of the contemporaries of Catullus, and in the Augustan period it attained a remarkable development. The Roman elegists imitate the Alexandrians, and, like them, insert in their love poems countless mythological allusions and even mythological stories. The fashion demanded that the elegist be learned in Greek mythology. Cornelius Gallus received from the Greek Parthenius a compendium of mythological tales to aid him in selecting proper allusions to the myths. The poet’s beloved is compared to Juno, Minerva, or Venus, Antiope or Helen; the lover gazes upon his mistress as Argus gazed upon Io; faithful wives are compared with Penelope or Alcestis, faithless lovers with Ulysses who deserted Calypso, and Jason who left Medea for another wife. These and similar allusions are mingled with figures drawn from rustic life or from war. The god Amor and his mother Venus play important parts in the poems. Amor transfixes the poet’s heart with his arrows, plants his foot upon the poet’s neck, makes him his slave. The poet sings of the beauty of his mistress, designating her by a fictitious name, but one which has the same length of syllables as the real name of the woman to whom the poems are addressed. The poet is usually poor, but offers his songs as the most valuable of offerings, and is filled with indignation if his mistress seems to care for wealth or jewels. No adornments are necessary for the beautiful woman, and love of wealth is disgraceful. The woes of lovers, false promises, faithlessness, the troubles of the lover who spends whole nights waiting at the door, the torments which love inflicts upon the heart, all these are repeated over and over again. So much of all this is conventional that it is hard to tell what part of the contents of these poems has any truth. Occasionally a line is evidently intended to give information about the writer, and in general it is certain that the poems were really addressed to some particular person, but how much of the feeling expressed is genuine, and how much mere affectation, it is impossible to determine. The details—the nights spent in wind and rain before the door, the quarrels or reconciliations, the voyages and returns—may or may not be founded upon real events in the poet’s life. Whether they are to be regarded as historical or not depends upon their context; but it is evident that many details are purely imaginary.
The three chief elegists are Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Of Ovid, the youngest and most voluminous, and one of the most gifted among the Augustan poets, it will be better to treat in a separate chapter. Cornelius Gallus. Somewhat older than Tibullus and Propertius was Cornelius Gallus, whose elegies were greatly admired by his contemporaries, but of which hardly a trace remains. Gallus was born at Forum Julii (Fréjus), in 70 B. C. He was a schoolmate of Augustus, commanded some troops in the war against Antony, and held the town of Parætonium when Antony attacked it. He was afterwards prefect of Egypt, but indulged in offensive remarks about Augustus, and showed his pride by setting up statues of himself in various places in Egypt, and having his name carved upon the pyramids. When he was recalled in disgrace by Augustus his creditors brought suits against him, he was condemned to exile, and his property was confiscated. Unable to bear his troubles, he committed suicide at the age of 43 years. His greatest claim to remembrance is his friendship for Virgil, who expressed his gratitude to him in the sixth and tenth Eclogues, and, perhaps, in the original ending of the Georgics. The elegies of Gallus, in four books, were addressed to Lycoris, an actress of low birth and loose morals, whose stage name was Cytheris. In addition to his elegies, Gallus wrote translations from the Greek of Euphorion. Valgius. Another writer of elegies was Gaius Valgius Rufus, a friend of Horace, who was consul suffectus in 12 B. C. Of his elegies on a boy named Mystes little remains, but they are spoken of by Horace and admired by the author of a panegyric on Messalla. Valgius also wrote some learned works, among them a treatise on medicine and a translation of the rhetoric of Apollodorus.
Albius Tibullus was born near Pedum, in Latium, probably about 54 B. C., and was, if the “Life of Tibullus,” contained in the best manuscripts of his works, is to be trusted, of equestrian rank. Tibullus. He inherited a large property, but lost the greater part of it, perhaps in the confiscations of 41 B. C. Apparently it was restored to him by Messalla, of whom he speaks with great affection. He followed Messalla to the East soon after the battle of Actium, but was detained by illness at Corcyra. He also accompanied Messalla in his campaign in Aquitania. Nothing further is known of his life, except his love for Delia, who appears to have been a married woman of low birth (libertina), and for Nemesis, who is apparently identical with the Glycera mentioned by Horace (Od. I, xxxiii, 2). Tibullus died about 19 B. C. He was a friend of Horace and was admired by Ovid, but there is no evidence that he and Propertius knew one another.
Four books of elegies are ascribed to Tibullus, but not all of these are really his work. Apparently the collection was made in the literary circle of Messalla, and poems by less noted members of the circle were added to those of Tibullus. Elegies to Delia and Nemesis. The ten elegies of the first book, addressed to Delia and to a youth named Marathus, are undoubtedly by Tibullus, and were published during his lifetime. The six elegies of Book II, addressed to Nemesis, seem to have been written several years later. They were left unfinished by Tibullus, and were published after his death. The six elegies published as Book III are by a poet who calls himself Lygdamus. Lygdamus. No poet of that name is known, and probably this is a pseudonym. Whoever the author of these poems was, he was a member of the circle of Messalla, was born in 43 B. C., and was familiar with the poems of Tibullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. These elegies are addressed to Neæra, who was probably the poet’s cousin, and either married or betrothed to him. They are greatly inferior to those of Tibullus. They lack variety and imagination, and in technical execution they want the graceful charm for which the genuine poems of Tibullus are distinguished. The remaining poems ascribed to Tibullus are printed in most editions as Book IV, though in the manuscripts they form a part of Book III. The first of these is a Panegyric on Messalla, written in honor of his consulship, 31 B. C. This poem, which is written in hexameters, shows a lack of taste and a love of rhetorical exaggeration entirely foreign to Tibullus. Lygdamus can not be its author, for he was only twelve years old at the time of Messalla’s consulship. It was doubtless written by some member of Messalla’s circle, and included in the collection with the poems of Tibullus on account of its subject. The other poems of Book IV have for their subject the love of Messalla’s niece Sulpicia for a young Greek named Cerinthus. Sulpicia. The five elegies numbered viii-xii are by Sulpicia to Cerinthus. These are very short poems—none having more than eight lines—but they express genuine feeling in beautiful form, though without delicacy or reserve. The seventh elegy—of ten lines—seems rather to be by Tibullus than Sulpicia. Elegies ii-vi and xiii are apparently by Tibullus, and the epigram of four lines, with which the book closes, is of doubtful authorship.
The elegies of Tibullus are less learned than those of his contemporaries. They contain many mythological allusions, but these are simply expressed and do not form too large a part of the poems. The sentiments expressed are not virile or powerful, but gentle and pensive. Tibullus loves the life of the country and hates war; he feels deeply the woes that oppress the lover; the thought of death weighs upon him; but love is ever in his heart. His poems are masterpieces of expression and versification, though they lack the fire of passionate emotion. Two brief selections[73] from the third elegy of Book I may give at least some idea of the quality of his sentiment:
While you, Messalla, plough th’ Ægean sea,
O sometimes kindly deign to think of me;
Me, hapless me, Phæacian shores detain,
Unknown, unpitied, and oppressed with pain.
Yet spare me, Death, ah, spare me and retire;
No weeping mother’s here to light my pyre;
Here is no sister, with a sister’s woe,
Rich Syrian odors on the pile to throw;
But chief, my soul’s soft partner is not here,
Her locks to loose, and sorrow o’er my bier.
So the poem begins. The poet laments his enforced delay at Corcyra, where he is detained by illness. There follows a list of the bad omens that warned Tibullus not to set out from Rome, then a prayer to Isis for aid. A brief description of the Golden Age is introduced, and the poet prays that Jove may grant him life:
But, if the Sisters have pronounced my doom,
Inscribed be these upon my humble tomb:
“Lo! here inurn’d a youthful poet lies,
Far from his Delia and his native skies,
Far from the lov’d Messalla, whom to please
Tibullus followed over land and seas.”
The remainder of the poem consists of a description of the lower world and an appeal to Delia. No translation can render exactly the qualities of expression which make Tibullus one of the greatest among the lesser Roman poets. It is only after repeated reading of his poems that one learns to appreciate the lightness of touch and the technical perfection of this sweet singer of soft themes.
Sextus Propertius was born in Umbria, probably at Asisium (Assisi), about 50 B. C., for he was younger than Tibullus and older than Ovid, whose birth was in 43 B. C. Propertius. His family was of some importance and must have been wealthy, for although Propertius, whose father was already dead, lost part of his property in the confiscations of 41 B. C., enough remained to support him and give him a good education. His mother took him to Rome, where he studied law for a short time, but abandoned it for the pursuit of poetry. After the publication of the first book of his elegies, Propertius was introduced to Mæcenas, to whom he afterward addressed two poems (II, i; and III, ix). He appears, however, to have been less intimate with him than were Horace and Virgil. Propertius nowhere mentions Horace, and if Horace refers to him at all it is without mentioning his name. He was a warm admirer of Virgil and a friend of Ovid. Little is known of his life, and it is only because his poems contain no allusions to events later than 16 B. C. that his death is supposed to have taken place about 15 B. C. From two passages in the letters of the younger Pliny, in which a certain Passenus Paullus is said to be descended from Propertius, it appears that the poet married and left at least one child.
Propertius is a poet of love, who expresses as few poets have done the tender emotions of the heart. The poems of Propertius. His poems are passionate and sensual, without the pensive melancholy of Tibullus or the frivolity of Ovid. The object of his love is Cynthia, whose real name was Hostia. She was a courtesan, but educated and refined in taste, beautiful and attractive. She it was who inspired his first poems, and only in the last book does she cease to be the chief theme of his verses. The poems are handed down to us in four books, the second of which is, however, made up of two incomplete books. The appearance of the first book made Propertius famous and introduced him to the circle of Mæcenas. Naturally Mæcenas wished him to sing the praises of Augustus and the Roman Empire, and from this time Cynthia is no longer the exclusive subject of his poems. In the fourth book (the fifth in many editions) there are four poems on Roman antiquities, in imitation of the Αἴτια (Causes) of Callimachus. Love is, however, throughout the subject to which Propertius naturally turns. His poems are full of learned mythological allusions, and the situations described or depicted are doubtless for the most part imaginary, yet the passionate nature of the poet’s love is manifest through all his learning and his invention. Even though he did not pass through all the hopes and fears, the changes of love and hate, the joy and sorrow, the jealousy and the reconciliations which the poems depict with such wealth of illustration and such beauty of language, he knew as few have known them the varying passions of the lover’s heart. For the modern reader his passion is too sensuous and his erudition too obtrusive; but the genuine feeling expressed makes his poems beautiful in spite of occasional coarseness and constant display of mythological learning. Propertius is remarkable for the sonorous richness of his lines, and in the technical execution of his verse he is careful and accurate. His earlier poems admit words of three and four syllables at the end of the pentameter without scruple, but in the later poems the pentameter usually ends with a word of two syllables, showing that Propertius was disposed to follow Ovid’s rule in this particular. Like other Roman poets, Propertius is professedly an imitator of the Greeks. Those whom he claims to imitate especially are Callimachus and Philetas, both poets of the Alexandrian period.
One of the shortest of his poems, free alike from coarseness and display of learning, is the following, on Cynthia’s absence:
Why ceaselessly my fancied sloth upbraid,
As still at conscious Rome by love delay’d?
Wide as the Po from Hypanis is spread
The distance that divides her from my bed.
No more with fondling arms she folds me round,
Nor in my ear her dulcet whispers sound.
Once I was dear; nor e’er could lover burn
With such a tender and a true return.
Yes—I was envied—hath some god above
Crush’d me? or magic herb that severs love,
Gather’d on Caucasus, bewitch’d my flame?
Nymphs change by distance; I’m no more the same.
Oh, what a love has fleeted like the wind,
And left no vestige of its trace behind!
Now sad I count the ling’ring nights alone;
And my own ears are startled by my groan.
Happy! the youth who weeps, his mistress nigh;
Love with such tears has mingled ecstasy:
Blest, who, when scorned, can change his passing heat;
The pleasures of translated bonds are sweet.
I can no other love; nor hence depart;
For Cynthia, first and last, is mistress of my heart.[74]
In an age of great poets many lesser poets are sure to be found. Ovid, in one of his letters,[75] mentions twenty-three poets of the Augustan age, and his list is not exhaustive. Lesser Augustan poets. Little is known of these lesser writers, and few of their works are preserved, even in fragments. Domitius Marsus, who lived from about 54 to about 4 B. C., and belonged to the circle of Mæcenas, wrote a series of epigrams, entitled Cicuta (poisonous hemlock), which enjoyed considerable reputation, some elegies on Melænis, an epic poem on the Amazons, and a treatise De Urbanitate (on refinement of expression). Albinovanus Pedo was also an author of epigrams and an epic poet. One of his epics, the Theseis, narrated the deeds of Theseus, another gave an account of a voyage to the ocean, probably the voyage of Germanicus, in 16 B. C. A fragment of twenty-three lines contains a vivid description of the stranding of some vessels in the night, which shows that the author was a poet of some ability. Of a poem on hunting (Cynegetica) by Grattius, five hundred and forty-one hexameters are preserved, which show little poetic merit. Only a few brief fragments remain of a poem on the Egyptian war of
Augustus, by Rabirius. Cornelius Severus wrote a poem on Roman history (Res Romanæ), and perhaps other epics. The longest extant fragment consists of twenty-five lines on the death of Cicero, and shows rhetorical rather than poetic ability. Ovid’s friends, Ponticus and Macer, and several others, wrote mythological epics. Iambic verses were composed by Bassus, and other poets gained more or less reputation for various kinds of poetry.
Gaius Melissus, a freedman of Augustus, from Spoletum, was by profession a librarian. The Fabula Trabeata. He was the originator of the fabula trabeata, named from the trabea, the distinctive costume of the equestrian rank. This was a national comedy, differing from the fabula togata of Titinius and Atta (see page [29]) in the rank of the persons represented, for the fabula togata had chosen its characters from the lower classes, while the fabula trabeata was a comedy of high life. Its popularity was brief, and it disappeared, leaving hardly a trace of its existence. Melissus also made a collection of humorous tales (Ineptiæ) in one hundred and fifty books, and appears to have been the author of some learned treatises.
A poem on astronomy and astrology (Astronomica), ascribed in some of the manuscripts to an otherwise unknown Marcus or Gaius Manilius, is a didactic poem of unusual merit. Manilius. As preserved it consists of five books, the last of which is incomplete. If, as is probable, a sixth book once existed, the whole work contained about five thousand lines. Even in its present condition it is the longest didactic Latin poem except the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. The poem is, as a whole, rather uninteresting, but contains passages of great vigor, showing independence of thought and remarkable power of expression. The author has an easy mastery of hexameter verse, in which he is superior to Lucretius; but with all his skill in versification, his earnestness, his learning, and his originality, he can not entirely overcome the prosaic nature of his subject. The poem is uneven, at times prosaic, sometimes rhetorical, not often, if ever, rising to lofty heights of poetic fancy, but serious and thoughtful. A large part of it is occupied with astrology, and other portions describe the heavenly bodies. In the introductions to the several books, and in digressions, theories concerning the origin of the world, the nature of man, and the power of fate are introduced, showing that the author accepts in the main the Stoic doctrines as opposed to the Epicurean teachings of Lucretius. So he maintains that the world is not the product of blind forces but of a divine will:
Who can believe that masses of such size
Were formed from particles without God’s aid,
And that the world did blindly come to pass?
If mere Chance gave it us, let mere Chance rule.
But why do we perceive in stated turn
The constellations rise and, as it were
By order giv’n, run through their course prescribed,
Nor any hastening leave the rest behind?
Why do the selfsame stars adorn the nights
Of summer ever, and the selfsame stars
The winter nights? And why does every day
Return the world its form and leave it fixed?[76]
Various mythological tales are inserted with a view to enlivening the poem, but the author lacks narrative skill. The most elaborate of these episodes, in which the story of Perseus and Andromeda is told,[77] shows, however, good descriptive ability and lively rhetoric. Manilius is not a great poet, but he treats, not without success, a subject new to Roman poetry, and shows himself to be a man of original power of mind and of serious purpose. With all its defects, the Astronomica has also great merits.
Many Augustan poets are known by name whose works have perished. On the other hand, some poems by unknown authors are preserved. Priapea. A curious collection of eighty short poems in elegiac and lyric metres, all addressed to the god Priapus, or at least written with reference to him, belongs for the most part to this period. Statues of Priapus, the god of gardens and of fruitfulness of all sorts, were set up in public parks, in orchards, and other places, and most of the Priapea, as these short poems are called, are supposed to have been inscribed upon or affixed to such statues. Many of the poems are extremely indecent, but many are well written and witty.
Far more interesting than the Priapea are the poems falsely ascribed to Virgil, and contained in manuscripts of his works. Culex. Three of these are “epyllia,” or short epics, composed, like Virgil’s genuine works, in hexameter verse. The first, entitled Culex, “The Gnat,” tells in four hundred and fourteen lines how a herdsman, lying asleep in the noonday heat, was on the point of being killed by a poisonous serpent, when a gnat stung him, and, by arousing him to his danger, saved his life. As he awoke, the herdsman killed the gnat, whose soul afterward appears to him in a dream and reproaches him. Finally the herdsman erects a funeral mound in honor of the gnat. The poem is a mock epic, intended to be humorous, but is not very successful. In versification it shows great similarity to the genuine works of Virgil, but also in some respects to those of Ovid. A poem entitled Culex is ascribed to Virgil’s youthful days by Martial and Statius, but the metrical qualities of the existing poem show that it can not have been written until a later date. Either, therefore, Martial and Statius were mistaken, or this is not the poem to which they refer.
The second piece, entitled Ciris, is a little longer than the Culex. Ciris. This poem, evidently written by some member of the circle of Messalla, tells the story of Scylla, who caused the death of her father, Nisus, and betrayed her native town, on account of her love for Minos, the leader of an invading army. She was dragged through the water at the stern of a vessel, but the gods pitied her and changed her into a seabird called ciris. Her father was restored to life and made a sea eagle. Moretum. The third poem, the Moretum (the word denotes a sort of salad eaten by the peasants), contains only one hundred and twenty-four lines. It is a slight poem, idyllic in character, and admirably written. It describes how a poor peasant and his slave, a negress, make the moretum in the early morning. This poem is said to be an imitation of a Greek original by Parthenius. It is possible, though not probable, that it is by Virgil. Copa. The fourth poem is the Copa (barmaid), consisting of only thirty-eight lines of elegiac verse. It has to do with the barmaid of a wayside tavern, and is clever and interesting, but has none of the qualities of Virgil’s poems. It belongs, however, without doubt, to the Augustan period. The Diræ, which is also included in the manuscripts of Virgil, belongs, as has been said (page [63]), to an earlier time, and the Ætna belongs to the subsequent period. Ætna. This consists of six hundred and forty-six hexameters, describing volcanic eruptions, and attempting to account for them. It has little poetic merit, but shows that even an indifferent poet could write good hexameters. The remaining short poems ascribed to Virgil are of little interest or importance, though one of them—a comic ode in honor of an old muleteer—is an excellent parody of the poem of Catullus addressed to his old yacht.
Nux. Consolatio ad Liviam.The elegy entitled Nux (nut tree), and the Consolatio ad Liviam (Consolation to Livia), both ascribed to Ovid, are imitations by writers of a slightly later time, and have little merit. The Nux is the complaint of a tree on account of the bad treatment it receives from passers-by. The Consolatio ad Liviam purports to be addressed to Livia, wife of Augustus, on the death of her son Drusus, in 9 B. C.