# Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 10

PROPERTIUS.
CHAPTER I.
LIFE OF PROPERTIUS.
Of the youngest member of the elegiac trio it is not hard to approximate the birth-date and establish the birthplace. With reference to his full designation it will suffice to say that the name of Sextus rests on fair authority, whilst there is nothing but a copyist's blunder and confusion of our poet with Prudentius to account for the second name of "Aurelius" sometimes erroneously given to him. As to the date of our poet's birth, Ovid tells us in his "Tristia" that he was younger than Tibullus, but older than himself, so that whereas with Tibullus he had little time for intimacy, with Propertius he enjoyed a tolerably close literary acquaintance. This would enable us to place his birth somewhere betwixt B.C. 54 and 44, and there is a probability that it was about ​B.C. 49. Like his predecessors in Roman elegy, he was country born and bred: nursed in the Umbrian town of Asisium in Upper Italy, amidst the pastures of Mevania, near the source of the Clitumnus, unless in preference to his own evidence we choose to credit the comparatively modern story which connects the poet and his villa with "Spello," the modern representative of the ancient town of Hispellum in the same neighbourhood. Propertius, indeed, is tolerably circumstantial on the subject where in his fifth book he makes the old Babylonish seer, who dissuades him from attempting archæological poems about "early Rome" and the like, evince a knowledge of his antecedents by telling him—
This account, it should be observed, is consistent with the poet's direct answer to the queries of his friend Tullus concerning his native place at the end of the first book, that—
The steaming waters, which are called the Umbrian ​lake in the first passage, are doubtless the same which are credited with fertilising power in the second: the same sloping river (as the derivation imports) of Clitumnus, which a scholiast upon the word in the second book of Virgil's 'Georgics' declares to have been a lake as well as a river. The locale is of some importance, seeing that it enhances our interest if we can trace the lifelike scenes of Propertius's more natural muse to his recollections of the Umbrian home, from which he had watched the white herds of Clitumnus wind slowly stall-ward at eve, had heard the murmurs of the Apennine forests, and gazed with delight on the shining streams and pastures of moist Mevania. Scarcely less so, if we can account for the exceptionally rugged earnestness of his muse by the reference to his Umbrian blood, and the grave and masculine temperament peculiar to the old Italian races. In parentage, Propertius was of the middle class, the son of a knight or esquire who had joined the party of Lucius Antonius, and to a greater or less extent shared the fate of the garrison of Perusium, when captured by Octavius. A credible historian limits the massacre there to senators of the town and special enemies; but the elder Propertius, if he came off with his life, was certainly mulcted in his property; for whilst there are some expressions of the poet to show that his sire's death was peaceful, though premature, it is certain that a large slice of his patrimony had to go as a sop and propitiation to the veterans of Augustus. The poet's reminiscences of his early home must, like those of Tibullus, have been associated ​with the hardships of proscription and confiscation; with early orphanage and forfeited lands; with such shrunken rents and decimated acreage, as made a young man all the keener to bring his wits into the market, and perchance to develop talents which would have "died uncommended," had the stimulus of stern necessity not existed. In the same elegy already alluded to, allusion is made to the sweeping encroachments of the ruthless "government measuring-rod," which made him fain, when he assumed the manly toga, and laid aside the golden amulet worn by the children of the freeborn or "ingenui," to relieve his widowed mother of the burden which his father's premature death had devolved on her, and to repair to Rome with a view to completing his training for the bar. That he was obliged to content himself with an ordinary preparation, and to forego the higher Attic polish, is clear from an admission to his friend Tullus that he has yet at a much later period to see Athens; but further, we may guess that his keeping terms at the bar soon became only his ostensible occupation in life, and that like young Horace the treasury clerk, and Virgil the suitor, and Tibullus the claimant, the channel which led to real fame and competence was—poetry.
Of how many modern divines, and essayists, and lit- ​terateurs has not the original destination been similar, and similarly diverted! It was essential, doubtless, to Propertius's success in this divergent occupation and livelihood that he should find a patron, to become to him what Mæcenas was to Horace, and Messala to Tibullus. Later on, he got introduced to the great commoner, prime minister, and patron, whose inner circle on the Esquiline assured distinction in letters to all its members: but his first patron was Volcatius Tullus, the nephew of L. Volcatius Tullus, consul in B.C. 33 and proconsul in Asia, who was of the poet's own age, and probably his uncle's lieutenant. To this Tullus are addressed several of the elegies of the first book, and it is reasonable to think that the link between patron and client was one of equal friendship. A little of the proper pride of the Umbrian rhymer comes out in what he writes to Mæcenas, at a subsequent period, deprecating public station and prominence, and delicately suggesting that in eschewing these and loftier themes he does but imitate the retiring modesty of his patron.
Before, however, we discuss his relations with patrons and contemporary poets, it were well to glance at the sources and subjects of his trained and erudite muse. If ever epithet was fitted to a proper name, it is the epithet of "doctus" or "learned" in connection with that of Propertius. More than Catullus, infinitely more than Tibullus, Propertius was imbued with and bathed in the Alexandrian poetry and poets. Again and again he calls himself the disciple of the Coan Philetas, and his ambition was to be, what Ovid designates ​him, the "Roman Callimachus." That this ambition was detrimental at times to his originality and true genius, there is abundant proof in the perusal of his elegies. His too much learning, his stores of Alexandrian archæology, overflow upon his love-elegies in such wise as to impress the reader with the unreality of the erudite wooer's compliments, and to make him cease to wonder that Cynthia jilted him for a vulgar and loutish prætor. And this was not confined to his love-poems. Where he deals with Roman and Italian legends, he is apt to overcumber them with parallels from foreign mythland: and it may be said without controversy that where he fails in perspicuity, and induces the most irrepressible tedium, is in his unmeasured doses of Greek mythology.
It is the general opinion of scholars that the essentially Roman poems of Propertius were his first attempts in poetry, and that he took the lost "Dreams," as he styles that poet's epic, of Callimachus for his model of their style. If so, it is no less probable that the self-same themes occupied his latest muse, the mean space being given up to his erotic, and, par excellence, his Cynthian elegies. From his own showing, the brilliant and fascinating mistress who bewitched him, as Lesbia and Delia (we call all three by their poets' noms de plume) had bewitched Catullus and Tibullus, was the fount and source, the be-all and end-all, of his poetic dreams and aspirations. Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether Propertius did not give, in some of his poems on early Rome, earnests of a more erudite, if a less attractive, bal​ladic gift, than the more facile Ovid, whose 'Fasti' have cast into shade his predecessor's experiments in turning the Roman Calendar into poetry. Reserving the story of his loves for another chapter, it will be advisable that in the present we should confine ourselves to the record of his life and career, independently of that absorbing influence. It was no doubt a turning-point for him, when Propertius gained introduction and acceptance into the literary coterie of Mæcenas. Although his difference in age, and his probably less courtly manners and temper, interfered with his admission to the same close intimacy as the lively Venusian in the minister's villa and gardens on the Esquiline, there is abundant internal evidence that he was welcomed there not only for his merit as a poet, but also for the special purpose of all the introductions to that brilliant circle—namely, to nurse and raise up a meet band of celebrants of the victories and successes of Augustus. In an elegy which evinces the depth and breadth of his archæological and mythologic lore, the poet is found excusing his inability to write epics or heroics, though he adds that, could he essay such themes, it should be to commemorate the deeds of the victor at Actium, the triumphs in which golden-fettered kings were led along the Via Sacra, and the praise of his stanch friend and servant—
"In time of peace, in time of war, a faithful subject aye."
​In the same spirit is breathed the address to the same patron in the ninth elegy of the fourth book, where, deprecating heroic poetry, Propertius gracefully professes his readiness to rise to the height of that high argument, if Mæcenas will set him an example of conquering his own innate dislike to prominence, and assume his proper rank and position. If it is true of the patron that—
the poet-client insinuates that it ought to be enough for himself—
Indeed, if ever his instinctive conviction of his proper métier is shaken by the importunities of those who would have won him over to the laureateship of the imperial eagles, he speedily and wisely recurs to his first and better judgment. It may be he had discovered that to cope with such a task he needed greater plasticity of character than accorded with his Umbrian origin—that he would have to smooth over defects, and magnify partial successes. Even where in the first elegy of the third book he seems to be qualifying for the office, and preluding his task by graceful compliments to Augustus, not only do the spectres of the slaughtered ​Crassi come unbidden across the field of compliment opened by the emperor's successes in the East, but chronology satisfies the reader that poetic flourishes about vanquished India, and about "Arabia's homes, untouched before, reeling in grievous terror," could not rearrange or unsettle the order of fate, that not very long, probably, after the composition of this elegy the expedition sent against Arabia under the command of Ælius Gallus should come to unlooked-for defeat and disaster. Propertius's sounder mind falls ever back upon themes that involve no such risk of misadventure from flattery or false prophecy; and if he plumes himself for a higher flight, it is in the strain of undisguised deprecation of his daring—
It is hard to conceive with what justice, when such was the poet's deprecation of the court laureate's task (to say nothing of other inconsistencies in the theory), it can have occurred to some critics and speculators to identify Propertius with the "bore" who pestered Horace through the streets and ways, as he describes in his satire. The weight of Dean Merivale's name ​and knowledge may, it is true, impart strength to this conjecture; but assuredly a fair comparison of all the data we can collect from external and internal sources towards the life of Propertius does not lead to the conclusion that he was one to intrude himself on the great or the successful, or that lack of opportunities of introduction to the court of Augustus, or the villa and gardens of Mæcenas, drove him to annoyance and importunity of such as had the entrée to either. It has always seemed to us a strong note of difference, that Horace's babbling fop is represented as addressing his victim in short cut-and-dried interjective remarks, the very opposite of the high-sounding, learned, and perhaps stilted language which might have been expected of Propertius, a poet who, one should fancy, spoke, if he did not care to write, heroics—even as Mrs Siddons is said to have been, and talked, the queen, even off the stage. Considering the field open to him, and the invitations profusely given to him, this poet is entitled to the credit of extreme moderation as regards the incense heaped, after the fashion of his poetic contemporaries, upon the shrine of Augustus. His noted poem on the "Battle of Actium" is a fine and grand treatment of a theme upon which to have been silent would have been as much an admission of inability to hold his own as a poet, as a proof of indifference or disloyalty to the victor in that famous fight; and who of his contemporaries would have thought anything of the pretensions of a bard who did not ​embody in such glowing verse as he could compose the engrossing subject of the discomfiture and subsequent tragedy of Cleopatra? There is little heed to be paid to the inference from the name of Propertius not being mentioned by Tibullus or Horace, that either held him in contempt, the former because he resented his claiming to be the Roman Callimachus. As we have seen, Tibullus did not affect Alexandrine erudition; and Propertius is entitled to his boast without controversy on Tibullus's part, though he might have found it hard to maintain it seriously in the face of Catullus. But of that poet's fame his elegies make but a small portion; and we are to remember that what Propertius prides himself upon was the introduction of the Greek or Alexandrine elegy into Latin song. If neither Tibullus nor Horace names him, at least Ovid makes the amend for this; and the fact that the poet is equally silent as to them, need not be pressed into a proof of insignificance, or churlishness, or literary jealousy, seeing that he is proven to have known, appreciated, and mingled familiarly with other scarcely less eminent poets of the period, not to omit his generous auguries of the epic poems of his friend Virgil. With Ponticus, a writer of hexameters, and author of a lost Thebaid, he was on terms of pleasant friendship, and not of rivalry in poetry or in love. He could pay graceful compliments to the iambics of his correspondent Bassus, though not without a feigned or real suspicion that that poet's design in seeking to widen the range of his admiration for the fair sex was an interested motive of stepping into Cynthia's good ​graces. As to Virgil, Propertius, in an elegy to a tragic poet Lynceus (who probably owes the preservation of his name to his having presumed to flirt with Cynthia at a banquet), commends that great poet as being more fruitfully and worthily occupied; and commemorates his poetic achievements in strains that have not the faintest leaven of jealousy or grudge:—
​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 ​Volcatius Tullus and his patronage we have taken notice above. The poet's elegies to him affectionately speed his parting for the East, and in due course long to welcome his return to the Rome of his friends and ancestors. The first supplies, incidentally, evidence that Propertius had not, up to the date of it, visited Athens; and it is very doubtful whether—though in IV. xxi. he seems to contemplate a pilgrimage thither in the fond hope that length of voyage may make him forget his untoward loves, and though in I. xv. he gives a graphic picture of the dangers and terrors of a storm at sea—he ever really left his native shores, or indulged in foreign travel. There is much reason to agree with Mr Cranstoun that the absence of direct testimony on this point negatives the supposition; and his periodical threats of taking wing, and thrilling pictures of perils of waters, may perhaps be interpreted as only hints to his mistress to behave herself, and suggestions of desertion, which she probably valued at a cheap rate from a knowledge of her influence and attractions. Though full of the mythic lore of Greece, the poetry of Propertius betrays no eyewitness of its ancient cities or learned seats; and it is a more probable conclusion that he was a stay-at-home, though not unimaginative, traveller. His continued attachment to Cynthia—a long phase in his life-history to be treated separately—tends to this conclusion; and we know so little of him after the final rupture with her, that silence seems to confirm the unlocomotiveness of his few remaining years. ​In one so wedded to Greek traditions, a treading of classic soil must have reawakened long-banished song; but Propertius died comparatively young, like Catullus and Tibullus, and he probably ceased to write and to live about the age of thirty-four, or from that to forty. Though Pliny's gossip credits him with lineal descendants—which involves a legal union after Cynthia's death—there is everything in his extant remains to contradict such a story. He doubtless sang his mistress in strains of exaggeration for which one makes due allowance in gleaning his slender history; but substantially true was his constant averment that Cynthia was his last love, even as she was his first. It is irresistible to cling to the belief that the comparatively brief space of life he lived without her and her distracting influences was the period of his finest Roman poems, and of the philosophic studies to which his Muse in earlier strains looked forward. He is supposed to have died about B.C. 15. In his poetry he contrasts strongly with his co-mates Catullus and Tibullus. As erotic as the first, he is more refined and less coarse without being less fervent. On the other hand, he can lay no claim to the simplicity and nature-painting of Tibullus, though he introduces into his verse a pregnant and often obscure crowding of forcible thoughts, expressions, and constructions, which justify the epithet that attests his exceptional learning. In strength and vigour of verse he stands pre-eminent, unless it be when he lets this learning have its head too unrestrainedly. And though the verdict of critics would probably be that he is best in the love ​elegies, and in the less mythologic portions of these, where pathos, fervour, jealous passion supply the changing phases of his constant theme, it may be doubted if some of the more historic and Roman elegies of the fifth book do not supply as fine and memorable a sample of his Muse, which inherited from its native mountains what Dean Merivale designates "a strength and sometimes a grandeur of language which would have been highly relished in the sterner age of Lucretius." His life and morality were apparently on the same level as those of his own generation; but if a free liver, he has the refinement to draw a veil over much that Catullus or Ovid would have laid bare. And though his own attachment was less creditable than constant, that he could enter into and appreciate the beauty of wedded love, and of careful nurture on the elder Roman pattern, will be patent to those who read the lay of Arethusa to Lycotas, or peruse the touching elegy, which crowns the fifth and last of his books, of the dead Cornelia to Æmilius Paullus.
* ↑ IV. x. 51-54.
* ↑ El. i. ad fin.
* ↑ V. i. 129-134.
* ↑ I. vi. 13.
* ↑ II. i.
* ↑ Hor., Sat. I. ix. passim.
* ↑ V. vi.
* ↑ Journal of Philology, vi. 41.
* ↑ I. vi. and IV. xxii.