Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/127

Rh The mention of the ribbon (vitta), which confined the hair of freeborn ladies before and after marriage to distinguish them from frailer sisters, and of the stole, which was a distinctive part of the Roman matron's dress, as forming no part of Delia's attire, seems to cast a doubt upon her having even up to this time formed any legal or permanent connection; and though he hopes the contrary, it is plain that Tibullus forecasts for his Delia the fate of a fickle flirt, whose latter end is sketched at the close of the sixth elegy:—

So far as Tibullus was concerned, it would seem that his patience finally failed not very long after this was written, and biographers fill Delia's place, after the last rupture, with one who is unnamed in his poetry, and unnoticed by Ovid in his references to Tibullus's loves. The heartless Glycera's connection with him rests, in fact, on a well-known ode of Horace; nor does the allusion to her in it (Ode i. 33) amount to much more than a philosophic counsel not to take on so, because the perjured fair one has made a younger choice. Our poet seems to have met with his usual luck, perhaps because too sentimental and in earnest for the mercenary charmers with whom he came in contact. It has