Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/153

Rh embody in such glowing verse as he could compose the engrossing subject of the discomfiture and subsequent tragedy of Cleopatra? There is little heed to be paid to the inference from the name of Propertius not being mentioned by Tibullus or Horace, that either held him in contempt, the former because he resented his claiming to be the Roman Callimachus. As we have seen, Tibullus did not affect Alexandrine erudition; and Propertius is entitled to his boast without controversy on Tibullus's part, though he might have found it hard to maintain it seriously in the face of Catullus. But of that poet's fame his elegies make but a small portion; and we are to remember that what Propertius prides himself upon was the introduction of the Greek or Alexandrine elegy into Latin song. If neither Tibullus nor Horace names him, at least Ovid makes the amend for this; and the fact that the poet is equally silent as to them, need not be pressed into a proof of insignificance, or churlishness, or literary jealousy, seeing that he is proven to have known, appreciated, and mingled familiarly with other scarcely less eminent poets of the period, not to omit his generous auguries of the epic poems of his friend Virgil. With Ponticus, a writer of hexameters, and author of a lost Thebaid, he was on terms of pleasant friendship, and not of rivalry in poetry or in love. He could pay graceful compliments to the iambics of his correspondent Bassus, though not without a feigned or real suspicion that that poet's design in seeking to widen the range of his admiration for the fair sex was an interested motive of stepping into Cynthia's good