Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/155

Rh Our quotation is from Mr Cranstoun's well-considered version, which in this instance embodies and represents the rearrangement of the original elegy by Mr Munro. It gives us allusions in inverted sequence to the 'Æneid,' the 'Georgics,' and the 'Eclogues,' and contains a reference to the neighbourhood of Tarentum, which draws from the editor of Lucretius the remark that Virgil may have taken refuge thereabouts in the days when he and his father lost their lands along with other Mantuans. "When I was at Tarentum some months ago, it struck me how much better the scenery, flora, and silva of these parts suited many of the 'Eclogues' than the neighbourhood of Mantua." It is needless to say that the "precepts of the Ascræan Hesiod" refer to Virgil's imitation of that poet in his 'Georgics,' whilst the names of Thyrsis, Daphnis, Corydon, and Alexis recall the 'Eclogues,' and Tityrus represents Virgil himself. Galesus, celebrated also by Horace on account of its fine-fleeced sheep, was a little river in the neighbourhood of Tarentum, apparently the locality in which some of the 'Eclogues' were written.

Amongst other less specially literary friends of Propertius, to whom his elegies introduce us, were Ælius Gallus, already mentioned as the leader of an ill-starred expedition to Arabia; Posthumus, who, according to our poet in El. IV. xii., left a faithful wife for another campaign to the East, and whose wife's laments are supposed to be described in the pleasing third elegy of the fifth book, that of Arethusa to Lycotas. Of