Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/369

Rh acquaintance of his first love, Delia. This is what he calls her in his poems; but we learn from Apuleius that her real name was Plania. Delia seems to have been a woman of middle station. It is impossible to give an exact account of the intimacy. The poems which refer to her are arranged in no chronological order. She appears now as single, now as married; but we do not hear anything either of her marriage or of her husband's death. It is clear, however, that it was the absence of her husband on military service in Cilicia which gave Tibullus the opportunity of making or renewing the acquaintance. It was not dropped when he returned, probably with Messala in 27. It was not a difficult task to deceive the simple soldier; and Delia was an apt pupil in the school of deception, too apt, as Tibullus saw with dismay when he found that he was not the only lover. His entreaties and appeals were of no avail; and after the first book we hear no more of Delia. It was during the earlier period of this attachment and probably in the spring of 28 that, yielding to his friend's earnest and repeated requests, Tibullus left Delia to accompany Messala on a mission to Asia. He fell ill, however, and could not get farther than Corcyra. In the second book the place of Delia is taken by Nemesis, which is also a fictitious name. Nemesis (like the Cynthia of Propertius) was a courtesan of the higher class; and she had other admirers besides Tibullus. He complains bitterly of his bondage, and of her rapacity and hardheartedness. In spite of all, however, she seems to have retained her hold on him until his death. Tibullus died prematurely, probably in 19, and almost immediately after Virgil, in order, as their contemporary Domitius Marsus pathetically puts it,

The character of Tibullus is reflected in his poems. Though not an admirable it is certainly an amiable one. He was a man of generous impulses and a gentle unselfish disposition. He was loyal to his friends to the verge of self-sacrifice, as is shown by his leaving Delia to accompany Messala to Asia, and constant to his mistresses with a constancy but ill deserved. His tenderness towards them is enhanced by a refinement and delicacy of feeling which are very rare amongst the ancients. Horace and the rest taunt the cruel fair with the retribution that is coming with the years, when they will exult over the decay of the once imperious beauty. If Tibullus refers to such a fate, he does it by way of warning and not in any petty spirit of triumph or revenge. Cruelly though he may have been treated by his love, he does not invoke curses upon her head. He goes to her little sister's grave, hung so often with his garlands and wet with his tears, and bemoans his fate to the dumb ashes there. Tibullus has no leanings to an active life: his ideal is a quiet retirement in the country with the loved one at his side. He has no ambition and not even the poet's yearning for immortality. His muse may go packing if it cannot propitiate the fair. As Tibullus loved the country life, its round of simple duties and innocent recreations, so he clung to its faiths, and in an age of crude materialism and the grossest superstition he was religious in the old Roman way. A simple, gentle, affectionate nature such as his could not fail to win esteem; and his early death caused deep regret in Rome. Tibullus was remarkable, his biographer tells us, for his good looks and the care that he bestowed upon his person. As a poet he reminds us in many respects of the English Collins. His clear, finished, and yet unaffected style made him a great favourite with his countrymen and placed him, in the judgment of Quintilian, at the head of their elegiac writers. And certainly within his own range he has no Roman rival. For natural grace and tenderness, for exquisiteness of feeling and expression, he stands alone. He has far fewer faults than Propertius, and in particular he never overloads his lines with Alexandrian learning. But, for all that, his range is limited; and in power and compass of imagination, in vigour and originality of conception, in richness and variety of poetical treatment, he is much his inferior. The same differences are perceptible in the way the two poets handle their metre. Tibullus is smoother and more musical but liable to be come monotonous; Propertius, with occasional harshnesses, is more vigorous and varied. It need only be added that in many of Tibullus's poems a symmetrical composition is obvious, although the symmetry must never be reduced to a fixed and unelastic scheme.

It is probable that we have lost some of the genuine poems of Tibullus. On the other hand, much has come down to us under his name which must certainly be assigned to others. Only the first and second books of the usual order, or about 1240 verses, can claim his authorship. The first book consists of poems written at various times between 30 and 26. It was probably published about 25 or 24. The second book seems to have been a posthumous publication. It is very short, containing only 428 verses, and is evidently incomplete. In both books occur poems which give evidence of internal disorder; but scholars cannot agree upon the remedies to be applied.

The third book, which contains 290 verses, is by a much inferior hand. The writer calls himself Lygdamus and the fair that he sings of Neæra. He was born in the same year as Ovid, in the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa; but there is nothing Ovidian about his work. He has very little poetical power, and his style is meagre and jejune. He has a good many reminiscences and imitations of Tibullus and Propertius; and they are not always happy. The separation of the fourth book from the third has no ancient authority. They form one in the best MSS., and are quoted as one in the anthologies of the Middle Ages. The division dates from the revival of letters, and is due to the Italian scholars of the 15th century. The fourth book consists of poems of very different quality. The first is a composition in 211 hexameters on the achievements of Messala; and very poor stuff it is. The author is unknown; but he was certainly not Tibullus. The poem itself was written in 31, the year of Messala's consulship. The next eleven poems relate to the loves of Sulpicia and Cerinthus. Sulpicia was a Roman lady of high station and the daughter of Valeria, Messala's sister. She had fallen violently in love with Cerinthus, about whom we know nothing but what the poet tells us; and he soon reciprocated her feelings. The Sulpicia elegies divide into two groups. The first comprises iv. 2-6, containing ninety-four lines, in which the theme of the attachment is worked up into four graceful poems composed for Sulpicia and Cerinthus alternately. The second, iv. 8-12 (to which seven should be added), consists of Sulpicia's own letters. They are very short, only forty lines in all; but they have a quite unique interest as being the only love poems by a Roman woman that have escaped the ravages of time. Their frank and passionate outpourings remind us of Catullus. The style and metrical handling betray the novice in poetical writing; and the Latinity is "feminine." The thirteenth poem (twenty-four lines) claims to be by Tibullus; but it is a miserable forgery. It is little more than a cento from Tibullus and Propertius. The fourteenth is a little epigram of four lines. There is nothing to determine its authorship. Last of all comes the epigram of Domitius Marsus already referred to. To sum up: the third and fourth books appear in the oldest tradition as a single book; if separated, they would contain only 290 and 373 lines respectively, as against 812 of the first book and 428 of the incomplete second; and they comprise pieces by different authors and in very different styles, none of which can be assigned to Tibullus with any certainty. The natural conclusion of this is that we have here a collection of scattered compositions relating to Messala and the members of his circle which has been added as an appendix to the genuine relics of Tibullus. When this collection was made cannot be exactly determined; but it was certainly not till after the death of Tibullus, and probably not till after Messala's. Besides the foregoing, two pieces in the collection called Priapea have been attributed to Tibullus; but there is very little external and no internal evidence of his authorship. The text of Tibullus is, on the whole, better preserved than that of Catullus, and still more so than that of Propertius. But it still contains many corruptions and several lacunae, besides the disarrangements already referred to.

The value of the short Vita Tibulli, which is found at the end of the Ambrosian and Vatican, also of inferior, MSS., has been much discussed. E. Baehreus maintains that it is genuine, and possibly an abstract from the book of Suetonius, De Poetis, a conjecture supported by the fact that even in so short a piece of writing more than one Suetonian phrase occurs (Baehr., Tibullische Bldtt., p. 4 sq.), while Schulze (Ztschr. f. d. Gymnasialwesen, Berlin, xxxii. 658) regards it as a mere rifacimento of Horace, Ep., i. 4, and various passages in Tibullus. E. Hiller (Rhein. Mus., xviii. 350) thinks it genuine, but assigns it to the late classical period, a view quite consistent with an ultimate Suetonian origin. It is as follows:—"Albius Tibullus, eques R. e Gabiis [Baehrens's ingenious conjecture for the MS. eques regalis, R. being the customary abbreviation for Jlomanus], insignis forma cultuque corporis observabilis, ante alios Corvinum Messalam ob ingenium [so Baehr., MSS. originem, others oratoreni] dilexit, cuius et contubernalis Aquitanico bello militaribus donis donatus est. Hie multorum iudicio principem inter elegiographos optinet locum. Epistulse quoque eius, quamquam breves, omnino utiles suiit [so the MSS.; Baehrens reads subtiles. The letters referred to are Sulpicia's]. Obiit adulesceus, ut indicat epigramma superscriptum " (i.e., the one ascribed to Domitius Marsus. These words seem to be a later addition to the Life}. Another moot question of some importance is whether our poet should be identified with the Albius of Horace (Od., i. 33; Epist., i. 4), as is done by the commentator Porphyrio (200-