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Updated: June 26, 2025
Nothing more is known with certainty, than that Propertius lost his father at an early age, and being deprived of a great part of his patrimony, betook himself to Rome, where his genius soon recommended him to public notice, and he obtained the patronage of Mecaenas.
And my committee is postponed, chairman ill. People who get ill should not go into the House of Commons. So here I am looking into Propertius: Parr is right; not so elegant a writer as Tibullus. But what the deuce are you about? why don't you sit down? Humph! you look grave; you have something to say, say it!"
His matchless wit and transcendent elegance of style have been admired by every scholar for nearly two thousand years. Propertius and Tibullus, and Ovid, also adorned this age, never afterward equaled by the labors of men of genius. Literature and morals went hand in hand as corruption accomplished its work.
Apart from his single tragedy, from a few didactic or mock-didactic pieces, imitated from Alexandrian originals, and from his great poem of the Metamorphoses, the whole of Ovid's work was executed in the elegiac couplet. His earliest poems closely approximate in their management of this metre to the later work of Propertius.
As the application to Propertius cannot have taken place until after Augustus had been amply celebrated by the superior abilities of Virgil and Horace, there seems to be some reason for ascribing Mecaenas's request to a political motive. Caius and Lucius, the emperor's grandsons by his daughter Julia, were still living, and both young.
In one poem of a few lines nor that, alas! transmitted to us complete she has given a picture of the effect of love upon one who loves, to which volumes of the most eloquent description could scarcely add a single new touch of natural pathos so subtle is it, yet so simple. Mimnermus is a principal model of the Latin elegiac writers and Propertius compares his love verses with those of Homer.
Only a few fragments are left; but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make his readers see it clearly also.
Latin might still seem the fittest language for oratory, sixteen hundred years after Cicero was dead; those old Roman pontiffs, draped grandly, sat in the stalls of the choir; Propertius made love to Cynthia in the raiment of the foppish Amadee; they played Terence, and it was but a play within a play.
Ovid was the most brilliant figure in a gay circle of erotic and epic poets, many of whom he has handed down in his Epistles, others have transmitted a few fragments by which we can estimate their power. The eldest was PONTICUS, who is also mentioned by Propertius as an epic writer of some pretensions.
Surely your far-famed Propertius says, 'Love is benefited by many things, a faithful nature and resolute persistence. Believe me, doctor, even without the counsel of your experienced Roman, I should have kept faith with the lovely child at home. From my boyhood, Katharina was to me the woman, the one above all others, the worthy Tryphon, my teacher of Greek in Bologna, would have said.
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