Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/151

Rh Crassi come unbidden across the field of compliment opened by the emperor's successes in the East, but chronology satisfies the reader that poetic flourishes about vanquished India, and about "Arabia's homes, untouched before, reeling in grievous terror," could not rearrange or unsettle the order of fate, that not very long, probably, after the composition of this elegy the expedition sent against Arabia under the command of Ælius Gallus should come to unlooked-for defeat and disaster. Propertius's sounder mind falls ever back upon themes that involve no such risk of misadventure from flattery or false prophecy; and if he plumes himself for a higher flight, it is in the strain of undisguised deprecation of his daring—

It is hard to conceive with what justice, when such was the poet's deprecation of the court laureate's task (to say nothing of other inconsistencies in the theory), it can have occurred to some critics and speculators to identify Propertius with the "bore" who pestered Horace through the streets and ways, as he describes in his satire. The weight of Dean Merivale's name