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Updated: May 14, 2025
On the hill, most easily discernible, and of most accessible ascent, Virgil, surrounded by Menander, Tibullus, Terence, Fenelon, would occupy himself in discoursing with them with great charm and divine enchantment: his gentle countenance would shine with an inner light, and be tinged with modesty; as on the day when entering the theatre at Rome, just as they finished reciting his verses, he saw the people rise with an unanimous movement and pay to him the same homage as to Augustus.
Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen caressed her chimera. The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed, the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
"When I am dying," says Tibullus to Delia, "may I be gazing at you; may my last grasp hold your hand." Propertius tells Cynthia that she stands to him in lieu of home and parents, and all the joys of life. "Whether he be sad with his friends or happy, Cynthia does it all."
Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily need. At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so advantageous a price, that I could not let it go; yet to buy it meant pangs of famine. My Heyne's Tibullus was grasped at such a moment.
And you must forget all attentions, and neglect all civilities. And you must appear absent, and distrait and réveur; especially while your fate hangs in some suspense. And you must read Petrarch, and repeat Tibullus, and write sonnets. And when you are spoken to, you must not listen.
There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth or Shelley or Ruskin.
We, however, who worship at the shrine of letters will crave your indulgence, Caesar, for not passing the subject by in silence, and will at least bear witness, as Virgil says, 'That ivy wreathes the laurels of your crown. "In elegy, too, we challenge the Greeks. The tersest and most elegant author of it is in my opinion Tibullus. Others prefer Propertius.
One of her most celebrated spiritual songs differs in nothing from those which might have been written by Ovid or Tibullus. Its burden is this:— Cubridme de flores, Que muero de amores.
If a man must take the love-sickness, so Messer Brunetto argued, and must needs express the perfidious folly in words, what better vehicle could he have for his salacious fancy than the forms and modes and moods which contented the amorous Ovidius, and the sprightly Tibullus, and the hot-headed, hot-hearted Catullus, and the tuneful Petronius, and so on, to much the same purpose, through a string of ancient amorists?
They praised each other's beauties ingenuously, spending treasures of language on these secret idylls, inventing soft exaggerations and more diminutives than the ancient muse of Tibullus, or the poesies of Italy. On their lips and in their hearts love flowed ever, like the liquid fringes of the sea upon the sands of the shore, all alike, all dissimilar. Joyous, eternal fidelity!
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