Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/1137

Rh TIBULLUS. the sacrifice of that household, which used to offer a calf chosen from among countless heifers. On this estate he had been brought up, as a child he had played before the simple Avooden images of the same Lares." The first elegy shows likewise Tibiillus already on intimate terms with his great patron Messala, to whom he may have owed the restoration in part of his paternal estate. But in his love of peace, and the soft enjoyments of peace, he de- clines to follow Messala to war, though that war was the strife for empire between Octavian and Antony, which closed with the battle of Actium. But when Messala immediately after that victory (in the autumn of B.C. 31), was detached by Caesar to suppress a formidable insurrection which had broken out in Aquitaine, Tibullus overcame his repugnance to arms, and accompanied his friend or patron in the honourable post of contubernalis (a kind of aide-de-camp) into Gaul. Part of the glory of the Aquitanian campaign (described by Appian, B. C. iv. 38) for which Messala four years later (b.c. 27) obtained a triumph, and which Tibullus cele- brates in language of unwonted loftiness, redounds, according to the poet, to his own fame. He was present at the battle of Atax (Aude in Languedoc), which broke the Aquitanian rebellion. Messala, it is probable, went round the province to receive the submission of all the Gaulish tribes, and was accompanied in his triumphant journey by Ti- bullus. The poet invokes, as witnesses of his fame, the Pyrenean mountains, the shores of the sea in Xaintonge, the Saone, the Garonne, and the Loire, in the country of the Carnuti (near Or- leans) {Eleg. i. 7. 9, foil.). Tn the autumn of the following year (b, c. 30) Messala, having pacified Gaul, was sent into the East to organise that part of the empire under the sole dominion of Octa- vian. Tibullus set out in his company, but was taken ill, and obliged to remain in Corcyra {Eleg. i. 3), from whence he returned to Rome. So ceased the active life of Tibullus: he retired to the peace for which he had yearned ; his life is now the chronicle of his poetry and of those tender passions which were the inspiration of his poetry. The first object of his attachment is celebrated under the poetic name of Delia ; it is supposed (ApuL Apolog. 106, but the reading is doubtful) that lier real name was Plancia or Plautia, or, as has been plausibly conjectured, Plania, of which the Greek Delia was a translation. To Delia are addressed the first six elegies of the first book. She seems to have belonged to that class of females of the middle order, not of good family, but above poverty, which answered to the Greek hetaerae. The poet's attachment to Delia had begun before he left Rome for Aquitaine. His ambition seems to have been to retire with her, as his mistress, into the country, and pass the rest of his life in quiet enjoyment. But Delia seems to have been faithless during his absence from Rome ; and aumitted other lovers. On his return from Corcyra, he found her ill, and attended her with aifectionate solicitude (Eleg. i. 5), and again hoped to induce her to retire with him into the country. But first a richer lover appears to have supplanted him with the inconstant Delia ; and afterwards there appears a husband in his way. The second book of Elegies is chiefly devoted to a new mistress named Ne- mesis. Besides these two mistresses (Christian morals command silence on another point) Tibullus TIBULLUS. 1125 was enamoured (his poems have all the signs of real, not of poetic passion) of a certain Glycera. He wrote elegies to soften that cruel beauty, whom there seems no reason to confound either with Delia, the object of his youthful attachment, or with Nemesis. Glycera, however, is not known to us from the poetry of Tibullus, but from the ode of Horace, which gently reproves him for dwelling so long in his plaintive elegies on the pitiless Glycera. Ovid, on the other hand, writing of the poetry of Tibullus, names only two objects of his passion : " Sic Nemesis longum, sic Delia nomen habebunt. Altera ciira recens, altera primus amor." Amor. iii. 9. The poetry of his contemporaries shows Tibullus as a gentle and singularly amiable man. He was beautiful in person : Horace on this point confirms the strong language of the old biographers. To Horace especially he was an object of warm attach- ment. Besides the ode which alludes to his pas- sion for Glycera (Hor. Carm. i. 33), the epistle of Horace to Tibullus gives the most full and pleasing view of his poetical retreat, and of his character : it is written by a kindred spirit. Horace does homage to that perfect purity of taste which dis- tinguishes the poetry of Tibullus ; he takes pride in the candid but favourable judgment of his own satires. The time of Tibullus he supposes to be shared between the finishing his exquisite small poems, which were to surpass even those of Cassius of Parma, up to that time the models of that kind of composition, and the enjoyment of the country. Tibullus possessed, according to his friend's no- tions, all the blessings of life — a competent fortune, favour with the great, fame, health ; and seemed to know how to enjoy all those blessings. The two first books alone of the Elegies, under the name of Tibullus, are of undoubted authen- ticity. The third is the work of another, a very inferior poet, whether Lygdamus be a real or ficti- tious name or not. This poet was much younger than Tibullus, for he was born in the year of the battle of Mutina, b, c. 43. The lines which convey this information seem necessary in their place, and cannot be considered as an interpolation. {Elcg. iii. 5. 17.) The hexameter poem on Messala, which opens the fourth book, is so bad that, although a success- ful elegiac poet may have failed when lie attempted epic verse, it cannot well be ascribed to a writer of the exquisite taste of Tibullus. The smaller elegies of the fourth book have all the inimitable grace and simplicity of Tibullus. With the ex- ception of the thirteenth (of which some lines are hardly surpassed by Tibullus himself) these poems relate to the love of a certain Sulpicia, a woman of noble birth, for Cerinthus, the real or fictitious name of a beautiful youth. Sulpicia seems to have belonged to the intimate society of Messala {Eleg. iv. 8). Nor is there any improbability in sup- posing that Tibullus may have written eleeies in the name or by the desire of Sulpicia. If Sulpicia was herself the poetess, she approached nearer to Tibullus than any other writer of elegies. The first book of Elegies alone seems to have been published during the author's life, probably soon after the triumph of Messala (a. c. 27). The birthday of that great general gives the poet an occasion' for describing all his victories in Gaul and in the East {Ekg. i. 7). In the second book he 4 c 3