Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/180



the ninth elegy of the fourth book, Propertius had promised, under the guidance and example of Mæcenas, to dedicate his Muse to grander and more national themes. He had encouraged the hope that he would some day—

and that hope he appears to have satisfied in the latter years of his life by re-editing some of his earlier Roman poems, and enlarging the list of them by added elegies. In the first half of the first elegy of his last book appears a sort of proem to a volume of Roman 'Fasti,' to which were to belong such elegies as "Vertumnus,"