at banquets, &c. A set of ivory tibiae of cylindrical bore found at Pompeii in a good state of preservation are in the museum at Naples.
TIBULLUS, ALBIUS (c. 54–19 B.C.), Latin elegiac poet. The information which we possess about him is extremely meagre.
Besides the poems themselves—that is to say, the first and second books—we have only a few references in later writers and a short Life of doubtful authority. We do not know his praenomen; his gentile name has been questioned; nor is his birthplace ascertained. His station was not improbably that of a Roman knight (so the Life affirms); and he had inherited a very considerable estate. But, like Virgil, Horace and Propertius, he seems to have lost the greater part of it in 41 amongst the confiscations which Antony and Octavian found expedient to satisfy the rapacity of their victorious soldiery. Tibullus’s chief friend and patron was M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, himself an orator and poet as well as a statesman and a commander. Messalla, like Maecenas, was the centre of a literary circle in Rome; but the bond between its members was that of literature alone. They stood in no relations to the court; and the name of Augustus is not once to be found in the writings of
Tibullus. About 30 B.C. Messalla was despatched by Augustus
to Gaul to quell a rising in Aquitania and restore order in the country, and Tibullus may have been in his retinue. On a later occasion, probably in 28, he would have accompanied his friend who had been sent on a mission to the East, but he fell sick and had to stay behind in Corcyra. Tibullus had no liking for war, and though his life seems to have been divided between Rome and his country estate, his own preferences were wholly for the country life. His first love, the subject of book i., is called Delia in the poems, but we learn from Apuleius (Apol. 10) that her real name was Plania. Delia seems to have been a woman of middle station. It is impossible to give an exact account of the intimacy. The poems which refer to her are arranged
in no chronological order. Now she appears as single, now as married; but we do not hear anything either of her marriage or of her husband’s death. It is clear, however, that it was the absence of her husband on military service in Cilicia which gave Tibullus the opportunity of making or renewing the acquaintance. It was not dropped when he returned. It was not difficult to deceive the simple soldier; and Delia was an apt pupil in deception—too apt, as Tibullus saw with dismay when he found that he was not the only lover. His entreaties and appeals were of no avail; and after the first book we hear no more of Delia. In the second book the place of Delia is taken by Nemesis, which is also a fictitious name. Nemesis (like the Cynthia of Propertius) was a courtesan of the higher class; and she had other admirers besides Tibullus. He complains bitterly of his bondage, and of her rapacity and hardheartedness. In spite of all, however, she seems to have retained
her hold on him until his death. Tibullus died prematurely, probably in 19, and almost immediately after Virgil. His death made a deep impression in Rome, as we learn from his contemporary Domitius Marsus and from the elegy in which Ovid (Amores, iii. 19) has enshrined the memory of his predecessor.
The character of Tibullus is reflected in his poems. Though not an admirable it is certainly an amiable one. He was a man of generous impulses and a gentle unselfish disposition. He was loyal to his friends to the verge of self-sacrifice, as is shown by bis leaving Delia to accompany Messalla to Asia, and constant to his mistresses with a constancy but ill deserved. His tenderness towards them is enhanced by a refinement and delicacy which are rare among the ancients. Horace and the rest taunt the cruel fair with the retribution which is coming with the years. If Tibullus refers to such a fate, he does it by way of warning and not in any petty spirit of triumph or revenge. Cruelly though he may have been treated by his love, he does not invoke curses upon her head. He goes to her little sister’s grave, hung so often with his garlands and wet with his tears, and bemoans his fate to the dumb ashes there. Tibullus has no leanings to an active life: his ideal is a quiet retirement in the country with the loved one at his side. He has no ambition and not even the poet’s yearning for immortality. As Tibullus loved the country life so he clung to its faiths, and in an age of crude materialism and the grossest superstition, he was religious in the old Roman way. As a poet he reminds us of Collins and Longfellow. His clear, finished and yet unaffected style made him a great favourite with his countrymen and placed him, in the judgment of Quintilian, at the head of their elegiac writers. And certainly within his own range be has no Roman rival. For natural grace and tenderness, for exquisiteness of feeling and expression, he stands alone. He has far fewer faults than Propertius, and in particular he rarely overloads his lines with Alexandrian learning. But, for all that, his range is limited; and in power and compass of imagination, in vigour and originality of conception, in richness and variety of poetical treatment, he is much his rival’s inferior. The same differences are perceptible in the way the two poets handle their metre. Tibullus is smoother and more musical, but liable to become monotonous; Propertius, with occasional harshnesses, is more vigorous and varied. It may be added that in many of Tibullus’s poems a symmetrical composition can be traced, although the symmetry must never be forced into a fixed and unelastic scheme.
It is probable that we have lost some of the genuine poems of Tibullus. On the other hand, much has come down to us under his name which must certainly be assigned to others. Only the first and second books can claim his authorship. The first book consists of poems written at various times between 30 and 26. About the second book we can only say that in all likelihood it was published before the poet’s death in 19. It is very short, containing only 428 verses, and apparently incomplete. In both books occur poems which give evidence of internal disorder; but scholars cannot agree upon the remedies to be applied.
The third book, which contains 290 verses, is by a much inferior hand. The writer calls himself Lygdamus and the fair that he sings of Neaera. He was born in the same year as Ovid, but there is nothing Ovidian about his work. He has little poetical power, and his style is meagre and jejune. He has a good many reminiscences and imitations of Tibullus and Propertius; and they are not always happy. The separation of the fourth book from the third has no ancient authority. It dates from the revival of letters, and is due to the Italian scholars of the 15th century. The fourth book consists of poems of very different quality. The first is a composition in 211 hexameters on the achievements of Messalla, and is very poor. The author is unknown; but he was certainly not Tibullus. The poem itself was written in 31, the year of Messalla’s consulship. The next eleven poems relate to the loves of Sulpicia and Cerinthus. Sulpicia was a Roman lady of high station and, according to Haupt’s probable conjecture, the daughter of Valeria, Messalla’s sister. She had fallen violently in love with Cerinthus, about whom we know nothing but what the poet tells us, and he soon reciprocated her feelings. The Sulpicia elegies divide into two groups. The first comprises iv. 2–6, containing ninety-four lines, in which the theme of the attachment is worked up into five graceful poems. The second, iv. 8–12 (to which 7 should be added), consists of Sulpicia’s own letters. They are very short, only forty lines in all; but they have a unique interest as being the only love poems by a Roman woman that have escaped the ravages of time. Their frank and passionate outpourings remind us of Catullus. The style and metrical handling betray a novice in poetical writing. The thirteenth poem (twenty-four lines) claims to be by Tibullus ; but it is hardly more than a cento from Tibullus and Propertius. The fourteenth is a little epigram of four lines with nothing to determine its authorship. Last of all comes the epigram or fragment of Domitius Marsus already referred to. To sum up: the third and fourth books appear in the oldest tradition as a single book, and they comprise pieces by different authors in different styles, none of which can be assigned to Tibullus with any certainty. The natural conclusion is that we have here a collection of scattered compositions, relating to Messalla and the members of his circle, which has been added as an appendix to the genuine relics of Tibullus. When this “Messalla collection” was made cannot be exactly determined ; but it was not till after the death of Tibullus, 19 B.C., and probably between 15 and B.C. Besides the foregoing, two pieces in the collection called Priapea (one an epigram and the other a Jonger piece in iambics) have been attributed to Tibullus; but there is little external and no internal evidence of his authorship (see Hiller in Hermes, xviii. 343–349).
The value of the short Vita Tibulli, found at the end of the Ambrosian, Vatican and inferior MSS., has been much discussed. There is little in it that we could not at once infer from Tibullus himself and from what Horace says about Albius, though it is
