Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/112

100 to become a bard of the empire. Enough for him to be stanch to an independent Roman noble, the most virtuous of his class, and to watch his opportunities of a well-timed poetical compliment to him or his. Thus when a rural feast is kept, and all are drinking healths and making merry, the health of the absent hero, Messala, is the toast he passes as an excuse for the glass (El. lib. ii. 1). Another special and appropriate poem (ii. 5) is written in honour of the eldest son of Messala, Marcus Valerius Messalinus, and of his election into the College of Fifteen to guard and inspect the Sibylline books in the Capitol, of which books he maintains the credit by pointing to the predicted eruption of Mount Ætna and eclipse of the sun in the fated year of Julius Cæsar's assassination. We hear very little indeed of our poet from his contemporaries, and next to nothing from him of them, out of the range of the Messaline family,—a proof of that addiction to rural pursuits and privacy, which, along with his loves, formed the staple of his muse. Even his death, as pictured by Ovid, looks exceedingly like a cento made up out of his own elegies; for that poet (Amor., iii. 9) makes his mother close his eyes, his sister hang over his couch and watch his pyre with dishevelled hair, and his mistresses lay claim to his preference at that sad last ceremony, in language that may well have been framed upon a study of the language of Tibullus, when, in El. i. 111, he anticipates death afar from these last tributes at Corcyra. In the absence of testimony we may infer that he died peacefully at home—peacefully, though somewhat