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He was older, but Propertius's enthusiasm for him seemed unbounded. He had pored over the Georgics when they came out, and only the other day he had told her that the poet was at work on an epic that would be greater than the Iliad.
In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry: "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night " to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from Propertius's Hylas: "... manus heroum ... Mollia composita litora fronde tegit "
"Dia Minerva, semol autem tu invictus Apollo Arquitenens Latonius." His object in quoting these is to show that they were copied by Virgil. A passage in Propertius has been supposed to refer to him, "Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo," where he would presumably be the grandfather of that Hostia whom under the name of Cynthia so many of Propertius's poems celebrate.
"At any rate," he said, "you might have done worse by me than likening me to Tullus. I sometimes wish we were all like him, unplagued by imagination, innocent of Greek, quite sure of the admirableness of admirably administering the government, and of the rightness of everything Roman. What does he think of Propertius's peccadilloes, by the way? He is a friend of the family, is he not?"
And various grey-beards have done their best to make a love-sick poet pay court to wisdom. I could scarcely keep from laughing at the look of perplexity and indignation in Tullus's face when he quoted Propertius's reply. The boy actually asked them if they thought the poor flute ought to be set adrift just because swelled cheeks weren't becoming to Pallas!
In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry: As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from Propertius's Hylas: . . . manus heroum . . . Mollia composita litora fronde togit
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