Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/190

178 The simple expression of her lonely days, and the little lap-dog that whines for its master sharing her bed by night,—of her dread lest her lord should rashly provoke some single combat with a barbarian chief, and of her delight could she see him return safe, triumphant, and heart-whole,—are unmatched by anything in Propertius, unless it be the elegy on the premature death of Cornelia, in which she is supposed by the poet to console her widower husband, Æmilius Paullus, the censor and friend of Augustus. The theme had elements of grandeur in Cornelia's ancestry (she was daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio and Scribonia), and in the vindication, as from the dead, of her fair fame and due place among honoured elders, which had seemingly been unjustly assailed. Cornelia died in 16 ; and if the poet's death occurred in 15, we may take this elegy, as it would be pleasant to do, as his swan's song. It is not, like many poems of Propertius, prodigal of mythology and Roman annals, yet it appeals to both with force and in season. Where the speaker proclaims her blameless life and high descent before the infernal judges, she opens with the boast—

And afterwards she pleads her readiness to have subjected her character and innocence to such tests as