Very little is known respecting the life and personal history of Propertius beyond the few facts which may be gleaned from his poems. He was a native of the border country of Umbria, and was probably born not earlier than A. U. C. 703,[[720]] or later than 700.[[721]] This period will sufficiently agree with the statement of Ovid respecting their relative ages.[[722]] His family had not produced any distinguished member, but possessed a competent estate. Like Virgil and Tibullus, he was a sufferer by the consequences of war; for the establishment of a military colony reduced him from comfort to straitened circumstances.[[723]]
Like most young Romans of genius and education, he was intended for the bar;[[724]] but poetry had greater charms for him than severe studies, and he became nothing more than a literary man. He inhabited a house in the now fashionable quarter of the Esquiline, and was on intimate terms with Gallus, Ovid, Bassus, and Virgil. Cynthia, his amour with whom inspired so large a portion of his elegies, was not only a beautiful but an accomplished woman. She was his first love; and it appears to have been some time before she yielded to his solicitations,[[725]] nor was she even then always faithful to him.[[726]] She could write verses and play upon the lyre,[[727]] and was a graceful dancer.[[728]] She owed to him, says Martial, her immortality; whilst he owed to his love for her the inspiration which immortalized himself:—
Cynthia, facundi carmen juvenile Properti,
Accepit famam nec minus illa dedit.
The date of the poet’s death is unknown, but the probability is that he died young.
Although Propertius was a contemporary and friend of the Augustan poets, he may be considered as belonging to a somewhat different school of poetry. His taste, like theirs, was educated by a study of Greek literature; but the Greek poets whose works he took for his model belonged to a later age. Horace, Virgil and Tibullus imitated and tried to rival the Greek classical poets of the noblest ages: they transferred into their native tongue the ideas of Homer, Pindar, and the old lyric poets. Their taste was formed after the purest and most perfect models. Propertius, on the other hand, was content with a lower flight. He attempted nothing more than to imitate the graceful but feeble strains of the Alexandrian poets, and to become a second Callimachus or Philetas.[[729]] Roman perseverance in the pursuit of learning, and the spirit of investigation in the wide field of Greek literature, had raised up this new standard of taste, which was by no means an improvement upon that which had been hitherto established.
The imitations of Propertius are too studied and apparent to permit him to lay claim to great natural genius. Nature alone could give the touching tenderness of Tibullus or the facility of Ovid—in both of which, notwithstanding his grace and elegance, he is deficient. The absence of original fancy is concealed by minute attention to the outward form of the poetry which he admired. His pentameters are often inharmonious, because they adopt so continually the Greek rules of construction; awkward Greek idioms, and a studious display of his learning, which was undoubtedly great, destroy that greatest charm of style, perspicuity.
According to Quintilian,[[730]] the critics of his day somewhat overrated his merits, for they could scarcely decide the question of superiority between him and Tibullus. This, however, is to be expected in an age of affected rhetoric and grammatical pedantry, when nothing was considered beautiful in poetry except that which was in accordance with the arbitrary rules of cold criticism. They appreciated his correctness, and did not miss the warm heart of his rival. His poetry is not so polluted with indelicacy as that of Ovid, but still it is often sensual and licentious.
It is worthy of remark that the fourth elegy of the third book, entitled “Arethusa to Lycotas,” deprives Ovid of the credit of being the inventor of the elegiac epistle.