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Updated: June 26, 2025
'As I was meditating one day in a coffee-house on the fate of my paradoxes, a little man happening to enter the room, placed himself in the box before me, and after some preliminary discourse, finding me to be a scholar, drew out a bundle of proposals, begging me to subscribe to a new edition he was going to give the world of Propertius, with notes.
Horace's "Odes" acquired their fame, no doubt, from the graces of his manner and purity of his style the chief praise of Tibullus and Propertius, who certainly cannot boast of more meaning than Horace's "Odes."
On November 27, 8 B.C., he died in his fifty-seventh year. Virgil had died eleven years before. Tibullus and Propertius soon after Virgil. Ovid, still a young man, was the only considerable poet whom he left behind; and with his death the Augustan age of Latin poetry ends. The following is the list of Horace's works arranged according to the dates which have been most plausibly fixed by scholars.
The poet Lucretius likewise paints, and Tibullus and Catullus and Propertius. One paints a fountain, and a wood close by, with Pan, the shepherd, playing a flute amongst the ewes. Another paints a shrine with nymphs around dancing.
Horace had indeed fought for Brutus; but he was no soldier, and alludes with humorous irony to his flight from the field of battle. Virgil prays that he may live without glory among the forests and streams he loves. Tibullus and Propertius assert in the strongest terms their incapacity for an active career, praying for nothing more than enjoyment of the pleasures of love and song.
Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown in ancient literature. Of his life little is known.
Mount Esquiline was called the Poets' Mount, because Mecenas having his palace on this hill, Horace, Propertius and Tibullus dwelt there also. Not far from here are the ruins of the Thermæ of Titus, and of Trajan. It is believed that Raphael took the model of his arabesques from the fresco paintings of the Thermæ of Titus. It is there, also, that was discovered the group of the Laocoon.
No two poets could be more strongly contrasted than Tibullus and Propertius, even when their subject and manner of treatment approximate most closely. In Tibullus the eagerness, the audacity, the irregular brilliance of Propertius are wholly absent; as are the feverish self-consciousness and the want of good taste and good sense which are equally characteristic of the latter.
There was the comparatively simple continuous treatment of the metre seen in Catullus and Virgil, who are content to follow the Greek rhythm, and there was the more rhetorical and pointed style first beginning to appear in Tibullus, carried a step further in Propertius, and culminating in the epigrammatic couplet of Ovid.
If Propertius were to grow rich and powerful, as the great Cicero had, and win the friendship of the old senatorial families, she could more easily adjust herself to formal intercourse with them than to meeting on equal terms such men as Tibullus and Ponticus and Bassus, and perhaps even Horace and Virgil.
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