Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 11
CHAPTER II.
CYNTHIA'S POET.
As with Catullus and Tibullus, there would be scant remains of the poetry of Propertius—scant materials for a biography of him—if his loves and the story of them were swept out of the midst. With the poets of his school Love was the prime motive of song; and he was truly a sedulous example of his own profession:—
Oh, may I live and love, then die as they!
Too weak for fame, too slight for war's stern rule,
Fate bade me learn in only Love's soft school."
—(I. vi. 27.) M.
Yet it must be confessed that, however forcible and fervid the verse in which he commemorates this love, the results fail to impress us with the same reality and earnestness as his predecessors, partly perhaps because "he makes love by book," and ransacks the Greek poets and mythologists for meet comparisons with his mistress; and partly because occasionally his verses betray the fickleness of a man of pleasure and gallantry, whose expressions and protestations are to be taken only at their worth. Famous as the elegies to Cynthia have become in after-time, and customary as it is to regard Propertius as the sympathetic friend of ill-used lovers, we fear that Cynthia had too much justification for her inconstancy in his behaviour; and that however tragic his threats and resolutions, his passion for her was much less absorbing and earnest than that of Catullus for Lesbia, or Tibullus for Delia. His own confession (IV. xv. 6) acquaints us with an early love-passage for a slave-girl, Lycinna, before he was out of his teens; and though he assures Cynthia that she has no cause for uneasiness lest this passion should revive, a number of casual allusions make it manifest that at no period was he exclusively Cynthia's, though her spell no doubt was strongest and most enduring. Who, then, was this lovely provocative of song, to whom love-elegy is so much beholden? It seems agreed that the name of Cynthia is a complimentary disguise, like those of Delia and Lesbia: and according to Apuleius, the lady's real name was Hostia, derived from Hostius, a sire or grandsire of some poetic repute, and not improbably an actor or stage-musician,—an origin which would explain her position as born of parents of the freedman class. It would be consistent too with the tradition of her accomplishments and cultivation, which we find from Propertius to have been various and considerable, as indeed they had need to be, to appreciate the compliments of a bard whose escritoire must have teemed with classical and mythological parallels for her every whim and humour, for every grace of her form and every charm of her mind. To borrow his manner of speech, Phœbus had gifted her with song, Calliope with the Aonian lyre: she excelled in attractive conversation, and combined the characteristics of Venus and Minerva. It cannot have been in empty compliment that Propertius styles her "his clever maid," and prides himself on his success in pleasing her in encounters of wit and raillery, or regards her appreciation of "music's gentle charms" as the secret of his favour in her eyes. The whole tone of his poetic tributes bespeaks a recognition of her equality as to wit and intellect, and we may fairly credit her with the mental endowments of the famous Greek hetæræ. Amongst her other attractions was a skill in music and dancing, commemorated by the poet in II. iii. 9-22:—
(Less fair the lily than my love: as snows
Of Scythia with Iberian vermil vie;
As float in milk the petals of the rose);
Nor eyes—my stars—twin lamps with love aglow;
Nor if in silk of Araby she gleam
(I prize not baubles), does she thrill me so
The mazy dance, and moves before my view,
Graceful as blooming Ariadne led
The choral revels of the Bacchic crew;
To music worthy of the immortal Nine,
And challenges renowned Corinna's skill,
And rates her own above Erinna's line."—C.
The quatrains above quoted express the two-fold charm of intellectual and physical grace, and, with lover-like caution, weigh warily the preponderance of compliment to either side of the balance. If Cynthia's dancing is graceful as Ariadne's, and her music recalls the chief female names in Greek lyric poetry, Propertius introduces a subtle and parenthetic make-weight in praise of her exquisite complexion (which he likens, after Anacreon and Virgil, to rose-leaves in contact with milk, or "vermilion from Spain on snow"), her flowing ringlets, and her star-like eyes. Elsewhere he sings explicitly of her form and figure:—
The form and carriage as Jove's sister's, grand;"—D.
or again twits the winged god, Cupid, with the loss to the world he will inflict if he smite him with his arrows:—
Thy glory, though the champion be but slight,
Who praises now her locks and fingers slim,
Her footfall soft, her eyes as dark as night?"—D.
With these and many more hints for a portrait of his lady-love, to be gleaned from Propertius's impassioned description, it is no marvel that he was so plain-spoken in declining solicitations of Mæcenas to exchange the elegy for the epic. To quote Mr Cranstoun on this subject in his version of the first elegy of the second book:—
But from my own sweet lady-love my inspiration springs.
I'll fill a portly volume with the Coan garment's praise:
Or if her truant tresses wreathe her forehead with caresses,
The tresses of her queenly brow demand her poet's lays.
I marvel how those nimble fingers run the chords along;
Or if above her slumber-drooping eyes a shadow lingers,
My trancèd mind is sure to find a thousand themes of song.
Oh! I could write an Iliad of our sallies and alarms;
If anything at all she's done—if any word she's spoken—
From out of nothing rise at once innumerable charms."
A charmer with so perfect a tout ensemble was certain to command the passionate admiration of so inflammable a lover; and hence the history of his erotic poetry consists in an alternation of his raptures, his remonstrances, his despairs, according as Cynthia was kind, or volatile, or cruel. And to tell the truth, a lover of Cynthia could have had little smooth sailing on a sea where the winds of jealousy were evermore rising to a hurricane. He may not have been worthy of ideal fidelity, but certainly from the traits we have of Cynthia's faulty character, she must have given her bard and lover only too much cause for uneasiness. Fitful in her fancies, alike jealous and inconstant, she was expensive in her tastes, extravagant in her addiction to dress, unguents, and ornaments; and a victim to the indulgence of the wine-cup, though the poet does not seem to have found so much fault with this, as with her partiality for the foreign worship of Isis, for which it will be recollected that Delia also had a weakness. All these proclivities suggest the costliness of such a union as that which, as far as we can judge, subsisted between Propertius and Cynthia,—not a union recognised by law, but a connection occupying the borderland between recognised respectability and open vice. Whilst a touching elegy (II. vii.) congratulates Cynthia on the throwing out or postponement of a law which would have obliged Propertius to take a wife and to desert his mistress, it is obvious that he enjoyed his immunity at a very costly price, to say nothing of her keen eye to the main chance, which made him justly fearful of the approach of richer admirers. Mr Cranstoun infers from the twentieth elegy of the fourth book "that a marriage of some sort existed between Propertius and Cynthia, in which the rights and duties of the contracting parties were laid down and ratified;" and doubtless such compacts were really made at Rome, even where, as in this case, legal matrimony was out of the question. But the bond was of a shifting and elastic nature; and if Propertius hugged his chain, it must have been with a grim sense at times of the cost and disquiet which it entailed upon him. Cynthia was dressy and extravagant, and if she took the air, loved to tire her hair in the newest fashion, wear the diaphanous silk fabrics of Cos, and to indulge in perfumes from the banks of the Syrian Orontes. Her poet perhaps may have had a doubt whether these adornments were all for his single sake, and this may have given a point to the praises of simplicity and beauty unadorned, which in several elegies gem his poetry. Thus in El. ii., B. I.:—
Nor let thy form on its own charms depend?
No borrowed arts can mend thy beauteous face:
No artist's skill will naked Love befriend.
See of all hues the winsome earth upsends,
How ivy with no training blooms the best!
How rarest grace and growth the arbute blends
In mountain dells remotest, loneliest!
And streams that glide in wild unstudied ways,
And shores with native pebbles glistering,
Outvie the attempts of art: no tutored lays
Sound half so sweet as wild bird's carolling."—D.
It is indeed hardly to be wondered that poetry of so didactic a strain had slight influence upon a lady of Cynthia's proclivities. "Whilst there were others, if Propertius failed her, who, if they could not dower her with song or elegy, had purse-strings to relax at her bidding, when
Now asks a crystal ball to cool her hands;
Begs me, grown wroth, to cheapen ivory dice,
And Sacra Via's glittering trash"—
and were fain to win her smiles by lavish presents from the fancy-ware shops of that frequented lounge,—it was labour lost in the poet to preach to one, who weighed her lovers by their purses, of Romulean simplicity, or to sigh—
Could be content in straw-built hut to dwell!
Our girls would then ne'er barter charms for pelf,
But every home of hoary virtue tell."
—(III. vii.) C.
Yet he could not forbear to address her ever and anon in verses, now complimentary, now spiteful, and not seldom a mixture of both in pretty equal proportions. One of his complaints against her is that she dyes her hair and paints her face; for which causes, in an exaggerated strain of fault-finding, he likens her to the "woad-stained Britons."[1] Where in the same passage he vows vengeance against those "who dye their own or wear another's hair," he testifies to the prevalence of a mistaken resort to hair-dyes on the part of the fair sex in all ages, as well as, we may add, to the consensus of the lords of the creation against such disfigurement of nature's gifts; yet it is just possible, from several hints here and there in the Elegies, that Cynthia was driven by the inroads of time to these resorts. According to one reading of El. xxiv. 6 in the third book, her poet represents her as "treading with aging foot the Appian Way;" and there are several other passages which render it probable that she was older than Propertius, whom we know that she predeceased: if so, it was in keeping with her character and avocations that she should repair the ravages of time, and seek to disguise her grey hairs and her crow's-feet. Whatever her years, however, her spell must have been more than commonly lasting; for seldom have a lover's verses recorded so many and diverse endeavours to win, retain, or recover his mistress's good graces, as the first four books of the Elegies of Propertius. And this in spite of several drawbacks which usually estrange or impair love. Though he had saws and instances by the score to quote against the abuse of wine, Cynthia is an exception to the general rule:—
Though wine will make a girl her love forget,
Ah! how unchanged by cups this maid of mine!
Unspoilt! unhurt! drink on, thou'rt beauteous yet!
And with unsteady voice thou read'st my lay,
Still may the ripe Falernian glad thy soul,
And froth in chalice mellower every day."
—(III. xxv.) D.
Though he is ever more or less a prey to jealousy not without foundations, and suffers no slight pangs from stumbling upon her in company with those convenient "cousins" whom all flirts from time immemorial have "loved in a sisterly way"—
As cousins always have a right to do;"
—(II. vi. 7, 8.)
or, worse still, from learning that he is excluded for the sake of a rich and stupid prætor from Illyria, of whom he writes—
Your friend the prætor has returned, I learn,
To you a fruitful source of welcome prey,
To me of inexpressible concern.
·······
Yet reap the proffered harvest, if you're wise—
And fleece, while thick his wool, the silly sheep;
And when at last in beggary he lies,
For new Illyrias bid him cross the deep—"
—(III. vii.) C.
in spite of these provoking rebuffs and infidelities, the poet still courts and sighs for his inconstant charmer and whether she be near or far, follows her in fancy and with the breath of cultivated song. Allowance must of course be made for the change of winds in the course of a love which could not be said even by courtesy to run smooth. It is a rare phenomenon to find Propertius in such bliss and rapture as the following lines betoken:—
Or spend the livelong day in dalliance fain,
I see Pactolus' waters round me sweep,
And gather jewels from the Indian main.
May these abide till Fate shall close my day!
Who cares for wealth, if love still adverse be?
If Venus frown, be riches far away!"
Much oftener he is (if we are to believe him, and not to set down his desperate threats and bemoanings to an appeal for pity) on the eve of a voyage, to put the sea between himself and the faithless one. There is strong reason to suspect that these voyages never came off, and that the poet's lively pictures of shipwreck were drawn from imagination rather than experience. But it was a telling appeal to herald his departure, picture his perils, and reproach the fair one with her indifference:—
And leisurely with tireless hands thy person dost adorn;"
and not less effective to return to the subject, after the supposed disaster had occurred, with a slight infusion of generous blame towards himself. There would have been infinite pathos in the elegy which follows, if only it had been founded on facts. But it was a dissuasive to Cynthia's fickleness, not the description of a fait accompli:—
To the lone halcyons here I make my moan:
Nor shall my keel its wonted port draw nigh—
Adrift on thankless shore my vows are thrown.
Lo! in rude gusts how fiercely chides the gale!
Will no sweet Peace o'er yon wild tempest ride?
Must these few sands to hide my corpse avail?
Let night on yonder shoals my pardon buy.
Thou wilt not brook to leave unurned my bones:
Thou wilt not face my loss with tearless eye.
The whirlpools of a hostile deep essayed!
Liefer I'd let my Cynthia's whims prevail,
And tarried with a hard, yet matchless, maid—
And strain mine eyes the welcome Twins to sight.
At home had Fate but stilled my bosom's hurt,
And one last stone o'er buried love lain light,
And laid my bones to rest on cushioned rose,
Called the dear name above the dust of doom,
And bade me 'neath the sod uncrushed repose.
Unfurl the white sail with propitious hand;
If e'er sly Love did 'neath your waters creep,
Oh! grant a fellow-slave a kindly strand."
—(I. xvii.) D.
Perhaps upon the principle of omne ignotum pro magnifico, the theme of shipwreck was a favourite one with Propertius, who elsewhere vouchsafes to Cynthia an elegy depicting his dream of such a fate betiding her in the Ionian sea:—
Thy weary hands for succour upward thrown,
Confessing all the falsehoods thou hadst told,
While o'er thy matted hair the waters rolled."
It will be seen in the third line that he was not above administering a covert reproof in the midst of poetic compliments; but the latter certainly predominate, as he declares that in her extremity, as it seemed, he often feared lest
Sailors should tell thy tale, and weep for thee;"
and lest, if Glaucus had beheld her bright eyes as she sued for help—
And jealous Nereids would he chiding thee,
Nisæa fair, and green Cymothoë."
The dream, says the poet, became so painful, that he awoke amidst the imaginary operation of taking a header. But in his waking thoughts, and in contemplation of a real voyage, he volunteers to bear her company, with protestations that
Jove with his blazing bolt our ship may burn:
Naked, we'll toss upon the self-same shore—
The wave may waft me, if thou'rt covered o'er."
—(III. xviii.) C.
In another elegy of the same book we learn that her poet clearly believed that his mistress's destiny after such a catastrophe would be that of a goddess or a heroine. When an autumn and winter at Rome had endangered her life with malaria, he contemplates her apotheosis with the satisfaction of thinking of the company she will hereafter keep:—
Who by experience taught will trust thy tale;
Queen-crowned 'mid Homer's heroines thou'lt reign,
Nor one thy proud prerogative assail."
—(III. xx.)
On the whole, the round of topics of which Propertius avails himself for the poetic service of his lady-love is extensive enough to furnish the most assiduous lover's vade-mecum. He has songs for her going out and coming in. He has serenades for her door at Rome, which remind us of the famous Irish lover; he has soliloquies on her cruelty, addressed to the winds, and woods, and forest-birds; he has appeals from a sick-bed, and the near prospect of death, out of which he anon recovers, and proposes, after the manner of lovers in all time—
Love's longest term flits all too fast away."
—(I. xix. 25.)
And there is one elegy in which he descends to threats of suicide, and another where he gives directions for his funeral, and prescribes the style and wording of his epitaph:—
While fragrant Syrian nard—one box—thou'lt burn;
And when the blazing pile has done the rest,
Consign my relics to one little urn.
To shade my tomb, and these two lines engrave:
Here, loathsome ashes, lies the bard to-day,
Who of one love was aye the faithful slave."—(III. iv.)
More amusing, perhaps, than most of his expressions of poetic solicitude for this volatile flame of his, is the elegy he indites to her, when she has taken it into her head to run down to the fashionable watering-place of Baiæ, where his jealousy no doubt saw rocks ahead, though he is careful to disown any suspicions as to her conduct, and only urges in general terms that the place is dangerous. Here is his delicate caution in the eleventh elegy of the first book:—
Near road first tracked by toiling Hercules,
Admiring now Thesprotus' old domain,
Now famed Misenum, hanging o'er the seas;
In thy love's corner hast thou room to spare?
Or have my lays from thy remembrance flown,
Some treacherous stranger finding harbour there?
Thou guidest slender skiff in Lucrine wave;
Or in a sheltered creek, by Teuthras' shore,
Dost cleave thy bath, as in lone ocean cave,
Reclining softly on the silent sand,
And mutual gods clean banish from thy mind,
As flirt is wont, no chaperon near at hand.
Yet in thy fond behalf all court I fear,
Ah! pardon if my verse thy choler stir,
Blame but my jealous care for one so dear.
Cynthia to me is home, relations, bliss;
Come I to friends with bright or downcast eyes—
'Tis Cynthia's mood is the sole cause of this.
Oft from its gay parades do quarrels spring,
And shores that oft have made true love untrue:
A curse on them, for lovers' hearts they wring."—D.
In contrast to his disquietude at her sojourn by the seaside should be read his calmer contemplation of her proposal to rusticate in the country—a poem which evinces an exceptional appreciation of the beauties of nature, to say nothing of a rare vein of tenderness. Here she is out of the way of tempters and beguilers by day and by night, afar from fashionable resorts, and the fanes and rites which cloak so many intrigues:—
A kid before the rustic altar fall;
With naked ankle trip it on the lea,
Safe from the strange and prying eyes of all.
To enter on Diana's service now.
Awhile I must abandon Venus' rites,
And pay to Artemis the bounden vow.
The antlers hang, and urge the daring hound;
Yet no huge lion in his lair I'll rouse,
Nor 'gainst the boar with rapid onset bound.
And with the wingèd arrow pierce the bird,
Where sweet Clitumnus hides its waters fair,
'Neath mantling shades, and laves the snow-white herd."
Yet even into this quiet picture creeps the alloy of jealousy. The poet concludes his brief idyll with a note of misgiving:—
I'll come to thee ere many days be o'er;
But neither shall the lonely woods and streams,
That down the mossy crags meandering pour,
That makes my restless tongue for ever run
'Tween thy sweet name and this love-bitter strain:
'None but would wish to harm the absent one.'"
—(III. x.) C.
Without professing to note the stages of Propertius's cooling process—a process bound to begin sooner or later with such flames as that which Cynthia inspired—we cannot but foresee it in his blushing to be the slave of a coquette, in his twitting her with her age and wrinkles, nay, even in the bitterness with which he reminds her that one of her lovers, Panthus, has broken loose from her toils, and commenced a lasting bond with a lawful wife. According to Mr Cranstoun's calculation, the attachment between Propertius and Cynthia began in the summer of B.C. 30, and lasted, with one or more serious interruptions, for five years. The first book which he dignified with her name, was published in the middle of B.C. 28. The others, and among them the fourth, which records the decline of the poet's affections, were left unfinished at his death. In the last two elegies of the fourth book, it is simply painful to read the bitter palinodes addressed to her whom he had so belauded. He is not ashamed to own that—
In thee I lauded every various grace"—
and to declare his emancipation in the language of metaphor:—
And my old scars are quite skin-whole again."
—(IV. xxiv.)
And one sees rupture imminent when he indites such taunting words as follow:—
And whoso chose might point a gibe at me;
Full five years didst thou my staunch service test,
Now shalt thou bite thy nails to find me free.
Cynthia, thy tears from artful motives flow;
I weep to part, but wrongs o'er sobs prevail;
'Tis thou hast dealt love's yoke its crushing blow.
And door that took no hurt from angered hand;
But thee, false woman, may the inroads press
Of years, whose wrack in vain wilt thou withstand.
Lo, how the mirror chides thy wrinkled face!
Now is thy turn to reap pride's bitter fruit,
And find thyself in the despised one's place:
And, what thou didst in bloom, when sere lament:
Such doom to thee foretells my fateful strain;
Hear, then, and fear, thy beauty's punishment."
—(IV. 25.) D.
After this, one should have said there was scant opening for reconciliation; yet Mr Cranstoun, with some probability, adduces the seventh elegy of the last book in proof that Cynthia, if separated at all, must have been reunited to her poet before her death. In it Propertius represents himself as visited in the night-season by Cynthia's ghost, so lately laid to rest beside the murmuring Anio, and at the extremity of the Tiburtine Way, as the manner of the Romans was to bury. Whether he was in a penitent frame there might be some doubt, if the ghost's means of information were correct; but certainly his testimony with regard to her—
Those eyes—though scorched the tunic on her side"—
points to his presence at her death and obsequies, and, presumably, to his reconciliation, prior to that event. Not, indeed, that the ghost's upbraidings testify to much care or tenderness, on her lover's part, before or after. She hints that she was poisoned by her slave Lygdamus, and that Propertius neither stayed her parting breath, nor wept over her bier:—
If through the city gates you feared to go."
But the truth was, another and a more vulgar mistress had stepped into her place:—
Now sweeps the ground, in spangled shawl arrayed,
And each poor girl who dares my face to praise,
With double task of wool-work she repays.
My poor old Petale, who used to bring
Wreaths to my tomb, is tied with clog and ring.
Should Lalage to ask a favour dare,
In Cynthia's name, she's flogged with whips of hair:
My gold-set portrait—well the theft you knew,—
An ill-starred dowry from my pyre she drew."
To cruelty towards her predecessor's servants the new mistress has added, it seems, the appropriation of her gold brooch. As Mr Cranstoun acutely notes, Cynthia must have died under Propertius's roof, or care, for him to have had the disposal of her personal ornaments; and the inference is that death alone, as the poet had often vowed in the days of his early devotion, finally and effectually severed a union so famous in song. Even the ghost, whose apparition and whose claims on her surviving lover we have given from Mr Paley's version of the fifth book, seems to rely upon an influence over him not quite extinct, where she enjoins him—
Of straggling stems my gentle bones retains.
Where orchards drip with Anio's misty dew,
And sulphur springs preserve the ivory's hue,
Write a brief verse, that travellers may read,
As past my tombstone on their way they speed,
'In Tibur's earth here golden Cynthia lies;
Thy banks, O Anio, all the more we prize.'"
—(V. vii.) P.
And she vanishes with a fond assurance that, whoever may fill her place now, in a short time both will be together, and "his bones shall chafe beside her bones." We have slight data as to the fulfilment of this prophecy—none, in fact, except the tradition of his early death. It is pleasant to assume that his latter years were free from the distractions, heart-aches, and recklessness of his youth, and that, as time sped, he wrapt himself more and more in the cultivation of loftier themes of song, inspired by stirring history and divine philosophy. And yet, the world of song would have lost no little had Cynthia's charms not bidden him attune his lyre to erotic subjects, and taught him how powerful "for the delineation of the master-passion in its various phases of tenderness, ecstasy, grief, jealousy, and despair, was the elegiac instrument, which he wielded with a force, earnestness, pathos, and originality most entirely his own."
- ↑ III. ix. 6.