142
TIBULLUS.
to forget Iiis grief: the grief must be left alone, though not
fostered artificially, for this is an evil; but when the heart is
bleeding, one must let it bleed. The consequences of an op-
posite conduct are incalculably hurtful. To many a man, it has
become the cause of the lowest degradation, that he would not
carry about his grief with him. Horace, however, always
remained a noble and highly amiable man notwithstanding; his
fault was only that he formed a false conception of an unhappy
period. He lived to nearly the age of fifty-seven.
Tibullus was a contemporary of Horace ; but, while the latter
was of very low origin, Tibullus was a Boman eques, although
his property, I believe, had SuiFered much in the storms of the
time. The year of his birth is unknown ; and it is only from an
epigram ascribed to Doniitius Marsus1 that we know him to
have died soon after Virgil7, though I do not know whether
that epigram can be considered as genuine. The first two books
of the poems that have come down to us under the name of
Tibullus, are unquestionably genuine ; but the third is certainly
spurious. Lygdamus, the name given to himself by the author,
at the end of the second elegy of this book, is not his real name,
and I believe that we have here a case similar to the disguised
names in Horace.8 It is only from a spirit of party that scho-
lars will not admit the soundness of the observation of Voss,
who justly remarks that the character of the poems of the third
is totally different from that of the preceding books ; and those
who will not admit their spuriousness, do not, in my opinion,
possess either a competent knowledge of grammar or of metre.
The fifth elegy of the third book contains a distich9 which de-
scribes the birth-year of the writer as that in which Hirtius and
Pansa were Consuls, 709 ; and as this is Irreconcileable with the
chronology of Tibullus, the lines have generally been rejected
as an interpolation. But this is an altogether arbitrary pro-
ceeding founded on the assumption, which these very lines
are opposed to, viz.—that Tibullus was the author of the third
7 H. Meyer, Antliolog. Veter. Lat. Epigr. et Poetar. No. 122, p. 44.
Te qnoquo Viigilio comitem non aequa, Tihnlle,
Mors ɔuvenem campos misit in Ely¾ios≈,
Ne foret, ant elegɪs molles qui floret amores,
Ant caneret forti regia bella ρede,
β Such is also the case with names of females; as e. g. the Cynthia ol Proper-
tius, and the Delia of Tibullus, whose real names are said to have been Hostia
and Plania, respectively.—N. 9 Verse 17, foil.
CORNELIUS GALLUS — L. VARIUS.
143
book: if we admit the correctness of the view on this point
above stated, there will be no occasion to reject those lines.
The fourth book also cannot belong to Tibullus. The pane-
gyric upon Messala, with which it opens, is evidently written
by a poor person, who required protection, and not by a
Roman eques. Both the third and fourth books are the works
of poets inferior to Tibullus. With regard to the smaller poems
of the fourth book, such as those under the name of Sulpicia
and Cerinthus, their language and versification differ greatly
from those of Tibullus, and display greater energy and bold-
ness than Tibullus possessed: they are the productions of a
poet who was much superior to him. To me Tibullus is a
disagreeable poet: doleful and weeping melancholy and senti-
mentality, such as we find them in Tibullus, are always unan-
tique; they are the misunderstood tones of Mimncrmus. I
cannot bear them, and least of all in a Roman.
Cornelius Gallus was perhaps somewhat older than Horace,
and a man of rank. He was also engaged in military life, and
was appointed by Augustus governor of Egypt, in which ca-
pacity he abused his power in an unworthy manner. Virgil
was very much attached to him, which shews that there must
have been something amiable in his character. In the 4th
book of the Georgics, Virgil introduced a eulogy on him, for
which he afterwards substituted the episode about Aristaeus.
Gallus was condemned for very bad actions, and afterwards
made away with himself. He translated Euphorion, and wrote
elegies of which only a single verse is extant. He must have
been a poet of eminent talent ; but all that has come down to us
under his name is spurious, with the exception of a few frag-
ments. The epithet durior which is given to him is commonly
not well understood ; I take it to mean that his language and
versification had something of the earlier Roman poetry about
them, which Quinctilian might well call harsh.
A contemporary of these men was L. Varius, of whom only a
very few verses are extant, but whom the ancients place along
with Horace and Virgil among the greatest poets, especially on
account of his tragedy Thyestcs. This subject however was an
unfortunate one for a tragedy. I fear that his manner was too de-
clamatory, and that his Thyestes bore the same relation to the an-
cient Attic tragedies that Virgil’s Aeneid bearɔ to the Homeric
epics. Thisand allthelatertragedies of the Romanswere not, like