time may be inferred from the qualities which Horace attributes to him it might be inferred from his friendship with one of the most loyal and high-minded gentlemen whom Rome at the epoch of her highest social civilisation produced. The epigram of Domitius Marsus indicates that the sorrow felt for his premature death was like that felt for the loss of Virgil. The elegy in which Ovid, whose best quality is the candour of his appreciation of other poets, utters not so much his own sorrow as the sorrow of the whole world of culture for his loss, almost redeems the levity of the three books of the Amores. If he seems deficient in sympathy with the public virtue or the martial spirit of Rome, except in so far as he recognises their union. in his friend Messalla, this may be attributed possibly to his sympathies with the Republic and to his own choice of the 'secretum iter,' apart from any contact with public affairs, and to the character of the wars waged in his day. The battle of Actium was indeed able to arouse all that still remained of patriotic enthusiasm, as it does in Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, and to reconcile the old adherents of the Republic, as it did Messalla, to the Empire. But the wars preceding it, in which Tibullus was too young to have borne his part, though he was not too young to bear a lasting impression of them, were such as to leave on the imagination a vivid sense of all the horror and misery, and none of the glory and greatness of And those which immediately followed it, though necessary to the security and consolidation of the Empire, were to the individual rather a field for adventure and for booty than a call to patriotism, and could excite enthusiasm only in those who felt themselves identified with the success of the Empire. Tibullus alone among the poets of the age not only abstains from any words of flattery, but makes no acknowledgment of the real beneficence of the rule of Augustus. His feeling towards Messalla is the feeling of one cultivated gentleman towards another, to whom he is attached by a lifelong friendship, based on admiration for his great qualities of heart, and intellect, and character. war. He had no ambition to advance himself by his art, nor does he seek to impress the world by his originality. A delicate fastidiousness, like that of the poet Gray, made him write little and give the world only of his best. He shows no great intellectual power or large range of imagination, no recondite learning or intuitions into secrets of nature or human life which he alone is able to reveal. He holds a place, far indeed from the highest, among those poets who please every generation of readers by the attraction of their personality, the purity of their taste, the sincerity of their feeling, the music of their diction, and the adequacy of their genius to body forth pleasing pictures from nature and human life in keeping with the movement of their spirit. If he is less Roman in his moods than most of the other poets of Rome, he is thoroughly Latin in the sobriety and sanity of his imagination. By the soundest criticism of antiquity he was regarded as the greatest master of the Roman elegy. The criticism of Quintilian is: In elegy also we rival the Greeks, of which Tibullus appears to me the purest and finest representative. Some indeed prefer Propertius to him. Ovid is more licentious than either, as Gallus is harsher.' The prodigal creativeness of his imagination has gained for the poems of Ovid a greater fortune in modern times. In the present day the comparative novelty of Propertius, his irregular and daring force of conception and expression, and the ardour of his temperament, have altered the balance of admiration in his favour; still, among scholars and lovers of literature there may yet be found those who would say of themselves sunt qui Tibullum malint.' In elegiac poetry, the most subjective of all the forms of poetry, it is impossible to separate sharply the impression produced by qualities of heart and character in the writer from the effect produced by his art. The personality of Tibullus is much the most attractive, much the most admirable of the three. In his art he is the most faultless, the most perfectly harmonious. III. The other poems which have reached us in the same volume as the genuine poems of Tibullus appear in the MSS. as composing one book, but in most editions as Books iii. and iv. They are divided into three parts, and are to be assigned probably to four different authors. Their bond of union is that they emanate from the circle of Messalla. So far as they are written in elegiac verse, the influence of the art of Tibullus is predominant in their style and sentiment, though they bear traces of imitation of the language of Ovid, Propertius, and Horace. The first section, printed as Book iii. and consisting of six elegies, much inferior to those of Tibullus, is professedly the work of Lygdamus. Of him we know nothing, except what he tells us of himself. No ancient writer quotes him by name or speaks of him as an elegiac poet. The name is Greek, and occurs in Propertius as that of a slave of Cynthia. It appears to be formed from the Greek word λúydos, a white stone or marble, and has been supposed to have been assumed as an equivalent of the Latin Albius. It is certain from the statements which the author makes about himself, and as certain as any such inference can be from the inferiority of his art, that he cannot be Tibullus. There is no ground for supposing that he was a Greek or a freedman. He writes of himself as a man of good social standing; and in the directions which he gives as to the disposal of his remains after death, he begs that his bones may be placed in a marble tomb, or urn Atque in marmorea ponere sicca domo. The name Lygdamus is probably not the true name of the author. If his real name was Albius, and if he was, as has been conjectured, a younger kinsman of the poet, a sufficient motive for the assumption of the name would be the wish to mark the distinction between himself and the greater poet who bore the same gentile name. The writer fixes the date of his birth in a line which occurs also in the Tristia (iv. 10. 42)— Natalem primo nostrum videre parentes The two following lines— Quid fraudare iuvat vitem crescentibus uvis are nearly identical with two lines from the Amores of Ovid (Am. ii. 14. 43-44). It is natural to assume that in both cases the inferior poet has been the plagiarist, especially as in the latter of the two quotations the thought is both more perfectly expressed and suits the context better in Ovid than in Lygdamus. Neither author, however, could cast a stone at the other in respect to borrowing from other writers; the chief difference between them being that Ovid made more thoroughly his own and often improved what he borrowed. As the first edition of the Amores probably appeared before the poems of Lygdamus, it may be assumed that Lygdamus is the plagiarist in the two latter lines. But it is different with the line marking the date of birth. If Lygdamus did not write these lines till the fourth book of the Tristia appeared in 12 A.D. he must have been well on to the age of sixty at the time of the composition of his elegies. But he writes of himself as a young lover, and the two immediately preceding lines (in the latter of which another resemblance to Ovid is found-A. A. ii. 670) are Et nondum cani nigros laesere capillos Nec venit tardo curva senecta pede. How then are we to account for the identity of the line Cum cecidit fato consul uterque pari in both writers? If Lygdamus borrowed it from the Tristia, we must suppose that his elegies are the reminiscences of a love of his youth recalled in imagination by the poet when advanced in years, a possible though not probable supposition. Or, again, he and Ovid being exactly of the same age, living in the same circle, may have read their verses to one another, and Ovid may have made the line long before he used it for his own autobiography, or it may have lingered unconsciously in his memory, if read to him by Lygdamus. Or (as is suggested by Mr. Postgate) both may have taken it from a common and forgotten source. The line may, like the line of Ennius, or like the Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem, Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules, attributed to Naevius, have passed into common use, as marking emphatically the date of the fall of the Republic. The subject of the poems of Lygdamus is his love for Neaera. There is a difficulty in understanding his exact relation to her. She is evidently a lady of good position, the daughter of honourable parents, and belonging to a cultivated household: Nec te conceptam saeva leaena tulit, Sed culta et duris non habitanda domus, The poet writes as if he were married or betrothed to her, and as if she were his cousin, soror patruelis.' In sending her a poem on the first of March, the Matronalia, he writes, Haec tibi vir quondam, nunc frater, casta Neaera, Mittit et accipias munera parva rogat, Teque suis iurat caram magis esse medullis Sive sibi coniunx sive futura soror; Sed potius coniunx. In expressing (after Tibullus) the wish that Neaera should attend his funeral, he uses the words, Sed veniat carae matris comitata dolore; Maereat haec genero, maereat illa viro. Ultimately she refuses to be re-united to him and deserts him, |