Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/144

132 49. Like his predecessors in Roman elegy, he was country born and bred: nursed in the Umbrian town of Asisium in Upper Italy, amidst the pastures of Mevania, near the source of the Clitumnus, unless in preference to his own evidence we choose to credit the comparatively modern story which connects the poet and his villa with "Spello," the modern representative of the ancient town of Hispellum in the same neighbourhood. Propertius, indeed, is tolerably circumstantial on the subject where in his fifth book he makes the old Babylonish seer, who dissuades him from attempting archæological poems about "early Rome" and the like, evince a knowledge of his antecedents by telling him—

This account, it should be observed, is consistent with the poet's direct answer to the queries of his friend Tullus concerning his native place at the end of the first book, that—

The steaming waters, which are called the Umbrian