‘Pliny is an almost perfect type of a refined pagan gentleman.’—Cruttwell.
SEXTUS PROPERTIUS, circ. 50-15 B.C.
1. Life.
PROPERTIUS.
Of his life little or nothing is known, except what is recorded by himself. He was an Umbrian by birth, and probably a native of Asisium (Assisi), a town on the W. slope of the Apennines, not far from Perusia. Like Vergil and Tibullus, he lost his family property in the confiscation of lands by the Triumvirs in 42 B.C.; but his mother’s efforts secured for him a good education, to complete which she brought him to Rome. He entered on a course of training for the Bar, but abandoned it in favour of poetry (IV. i. 131-4).
Mox ubi bulla rudi dimissa est aurea collo,
Matris et ante deos libera sumpta toga,
Tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo
Et vetat insano verba tonare foro.
His earliest poems (Book I, Cynthia), published at the age of about twenty, brought him into notice and gained him admission to the literary circle of Maecenas. He lived in close intimacy with Vergil, Ovid, and most of his other literary contemporaries, with the remarkable exception of Horace, to whom the sensitive vanity and passionate manner of the young elegiac poet were alike distasteful. He died young, before he was thirty-five, about 15 B.C.