Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 12
CHAPTER III.
PROPERTIUS AS A SINGER OF NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY.
In the ninth elegy of the fourth book, Propertius had promised, under the guidance and example of Mæcenas, to dedicate his Muse to grander and more national themes. He had encouraged the hope that he would some day—
Rome's battlements made strong through Remus slain—
The royal Twins the she-wolf came to rear—
And loftier themes than these, shouldst thou ordain:
The Parthian shafts back-showered in foul retreat,
Pelusium's forts by Roman steel opprest,
And Antony's self-murder in defeat:"—C.
and that hope he appears to have satisfied in the latter years of his life by re-editing some of his earlier Roman poems, and enlarging the list of them by added elegies. In the first half of the first elegy of his last book appears a sort of proem to a volume of Roman 'Fasti,' to which were to belong such elegies as "Vertumnus," "Tarpeia," the "Ara Maxima" of Hercules, and the "Legend of Jupiter Feretrius," and the "Spolia Opima," as well as such stirring later ballads of the empire in embryo as the "Battle of Actium." It would seem that the poet was either disinclined for his task or dissatisfied with his success; for it is probable that most of those we have enumerated are but revised and retouched copies of earlier work, whilst the gems of the book, "Arethuse to Lycotas" and "Cornelia," are in another vein, of another stamp, and, as it seems to us, of a more mellow and perfect finish. That Propertius never approached the task of historic elegy with his whole heart, or even with the liveliness and versatility with which Ovid afterwards handled kindred topics in his 'Fasti,' peeps out from the abrupt cutting short of the "Early History of Rome" in the first elegy, and the supplement to it in a wholly different vein, where we are introduced to a Babylonian seer, and made acquainted with several data of the poet's personal history. The earlier portion has been ascribed to the period before his connection with Cynthia: the latter, which is not now to our purpose, belongs to his later revision-period. Perhaps it was the grandness of the programme that eventually convinced him of its intractability; yet none can regret that the poet did not burn the half-dozen proofs of what he might have achieved as a poetic annalist or legend-weaver. To take for example the first elegy—from the version of Mr Paley, who in these Roman elegies is always accurate and often not unpoetical—there is fancy and picturesqueness in the description of the olden abode of the founders of Rome on the Palatine, which was twice burnt in the reign of Augustus, but the commemoration of which was dear to the powers that were in Propertius's day:—
Brothers twain one hearthstone made a mighty principality.
By that pile, where now the senate sits in bordered robes arrayed,
Once a band of skin-clad fathers, clownish minds, their council made.
Warned by notes of shepherd's bugle there the old Quirites met;
Many a time that chosen hundred congress held in meadows wet.
O'er the theatre's wide bosom then no flapping awning swung;
O'er the stage no saffron essence cool and grateful fragrance flung.
None cared then for rites external, none did foreign gods import,
Native sacrifice the simple folk in fear and trembling sought.
No Parilia then the people kept with heaps of lighted hay,
Now with horse's blood we render lustral rites of yesterday."
—(V. i. 10-20.)
The Parilia, or Palilia, were the rural festival already described in the third chapter of the sketch of Tibullus (p. 126), and a contrast is intended here between the rude bonfire of early days and the later lustration, for which the blood of the October horse was de règle. The poet proceeds to surround early Rome with all the proud vaunts of its legendary history—its Dardan origin, its accretions from the Sabine warriors and Tuscan settlers, its glory in the legend of the she-wolf:—
Save that from the wolf that reared him wolfish blood he still retains"—
a sentiment which Lord Macaulay embodies in his "Prophecy of Capys:"—
Thy nurse will bear no load,
And woe to them that shear her,
And woe to them that goad!
Her bloody lair surrounds,
She dies in silence, biting hard,
Amid the dying hounds."
The historic part of the elegy closes with a fine rhapsody, in which its author aspires to the glories of a nobler Ennius, and repeats his less ambitious claim to rank as the Roman Callimachus. In the second elegy of this book, Vertumnus, the god of the changing year, is introduced to correct wrong notions as to his name, functions, and mythology, with an evident penchant for that infant etymology which is so marked a feature in the 'Fasti' of Ovid. In the fourth—a most beautiful and finished elegy—the love-story of Tarpeia, if an early poem, has been so retouched as to make us regret that Propertius had not resolution to go on with his rivalry of "father" Ennius. It opens with a description of the wooded dell of the Capitoline hill, beneath the Tarpeian rock where, to the native fancy, La belle Tarpeia still is to be seen at intervals, bedecked with gold and jewels, and dreaming of the Sabine leader for whose love she was content to prove traitress. To a stream or fountain which it enclosed she had been wont to repair to draw water for Vesta's service, and thence chanced to espy Titus Tatius, the Sabine leader, engaged in martial exercises. With no sordid thirst of gold, as the Tarpeia of Livy, but smitten by the kingly form, the maiden lets Vesta's fire go out in her preoccupied dreams:—
Oft to the spring she stole her locks to lave:
Oft silver lilies to the nymphs she bare,
That Roman spear that handsome face might spare:"
and so often did she brood and soliloquise over her comely knight, that at last her scheme of treachery took form and substance, and the rural festival, which was Rome's founder's holiday, afforded meet opportunity for her betrayal of the city by the secret postern, from which she found daily egress:—
The trump to cease, the camp repose to hold.
Their time is hers: Tarpeia seeks the foe,
The contract binds, herself the road to show.
The ascent was hard, the feasters feared no fraud,
The barking dogs are silenced by the sword:
Fatigue and wine brought slumber: Jove alone
Wakes that the traitress may her crime atone.
The gate is opened, passed; the fort betrayed;
The day of marriage chosen by the maid.
But Rome's proud foeman is by honour led:
'Marry,' he cried, 'climb thus my royal bed!'
He spoke: his comrades' shields upon her thrown,
She sank o'erwhelmed—meet treachery for her own.
From him, the sire, the rock received its name:
He lost a daughter, but he gained a fame."
— (V. iv, ad fin.) P.
Treachery akin to Tarpeia's is familiar to the readers of the legends of many lands; and there is in the Norman-French legend of "Fulk Fitzwarin" in our own chronicles an account of the capture of Ludlow Castle, or Dynan, through the treachery of one Marion de la Bruere, who was led to it by a secret passion for a captive knight. Sir Ernald de Lisle.[1]
We must barely glance at the two poems in which Propertius, with the same eye to early topography and to explanatory etymology, recounts the legends of Hercules and Cacus, and the origin of the title of Jupiter Feretrius. The former poem has a fine parallel in the eighth book of the 'Æneid;' the latter strikes the reader as an early effort of the poet, which would scarcely have been missed if it had not survived. With the foundation by Hercules of the Ara Maxima after his punishment of Cacus for stealing the oxen of Geryon, he connects the low part of the city called the Velabrum (where he and his oxen rested, and near which Cacus plied his nefarious trade), through the sails (vela) which the first inhabitants used to navigate the swamp. The so-called Forum Boarium of local topography is referred to the lowing herds in the verses:—
Twice sought for, twice the victor's spoil.
Give tongue, my beeves, the sounds prolong:
Hence men shall celebrate in song,
For memory of my matchless might,
The Forum from ox-pastures hight."
—(V. ix. 15-20.) P.
And the refusal of the maidens of the cell and spring of the Bona Dea to admit Hercules to approach, when athirst, the precincts which no male might enter under pain of blindness, is made the immediate cause of his dedicating a mighty altar, turning the tables on the other sex, and serving by its consecration to commemorate the hero's Sabine title of "Sancus."
It may be a fair question whether these learned etymologies are as attractive an element in Propertius's poetry as the phases of his love, or the praises of Mæcenas and Augustus, to say nothing of the laments over Pætus and young Marcellus. Of the same fibre as these last-named elegies is the "Battle of Actium," in the fifth book,—a sort of Epinician poem of a date near the end of our poet's life, on the occasion of the quinquennial Actian games established by Augustus. As if in act to sacrifice, the poet assumes the functions of a priest, and prefaces his song of triumph with all the concomitant ceremonies which Callimachus introduces into his hymns. Our quotation shall be taken from Mr Paley's translation—when it is fairly launched, a sample of descriptive poetry of high merit:—
Where pent within the Ionian wave no longer chafes and roars.
Here memories meet of Julian fleet, of deeds at Actium done,
Of safe and easy entrance oft by sailors' offerings won.
'Twas here the world's vast armies met; the pine-built galleys tall
Seemed rooted in the sea, but not one fortune favoured all.
The one Quirinus, Troy-born god, had with his curse pursued,
Nor brooked the thought of Roman fleets by woman's lance subdued.
On that side Cæsar's fleet, the sails well filled with breezes free,
And standards that in many a fight had flown victoriously.
Moved now the fleets, in crescents twain, by Nereus' self arrayed:
The sheen of arms upon the waves in dimpling flashes played.
Then Phœbus from his Delos came, and bade it wait awhile
Nor dare to move: for angry winds once bore that floating isle.
On Cæsar's ship astern he stood, and ever and anon
A wondrous sight, a wavy light as from a torch there shone.
No flowing locks adown his neck the vengeful god had brought,
Nor on the shell to wake the spell of peaceful music sought,
But as with looks of death he glared on that Pelopid king,
And caused the Greeks their dead in heaps on greedy pyres to fling;
Or when he scotched the Python-snake, and all the might disarmed
Of those huge serpent coils, which erst the unwarlike Muse alarmed."
—(V. vi. 15-36.) P.
Here, as in the address of Phœbus from the stern of Augustus's galley, the poet is quickened to a fire and enthusiasm which befits his subject, and of which the accomplished scholar from whom we have quoted is not insensible. In one line of it, the sentiment,
"It is the cause that overawes or lends the soldier might,"
is an anticipation of Shakespeare's adagial lesson,
"Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just;"
and the bard's conclusion takes the form of pervading festivity, whilst it merely glances at the principal military exploits of Augustus, and hints that he should leave some "fields to conquer" to his sons.
Yet after the taste of this heroic vein already given, it would be hard to part with Propertius upon ground where there is little room for his rare gift of pathos. And so two beautiful elegies which exhibit him at his best, and in his tenderest mood, have been kept to the last. The one is the letter of Arethuse to her husband Lycotas on a campaign; the other the imaginary appeal of the dead Cornelia to her husband, Paullus. The first is proof positive that Ovid does not deserve the credit which he claims in his 'Art of Love' of having originated the style of poetry which we know as Epistles; and Ovid never wrote anything so really pathetic and natural. Of both we are fortunate in having free yet adequate translations in graceful verse by a late scholar and man of affairs and letters, Sir Edmund W. Head, to which we give the preference in presenting them to English readers. For "Arethuse to Lycotas" it has been suggested with probability that we might read in plain prose "Ælia Galla to Postumus," since in the twelfth elegy of the fourth book Propertius has addressed verses to the latter on his leaving his wife for an expedition against the Parthians. The question is unimportant. It suffices that the love-letter in the fifth book is a copy of the lorn bride's heart-pourings, very true to nature in its struggle between the pride of a soldier's wife and the love and jealous misgivings of a doting woman:—
No longer on thy pallid face they see:
I only pray such changes in thy mien
May mark the fond regret thou feel'st for me.
I kiss thy scattered arms, and restless lie,
And toss complaining till the tardy light
Hath waked the birds that sing of morning nigh.
I wind on shuttles for thy warlike weeds;
Or study in what course Araxes flows,
And how the Parthians press their hardy steeds.
Where God hath placed the land and where the sea,
What climes are stiff with frost, what summers burn,
And guess what wind may waft thee home to me."
The simple expression of her lonely days, and the little lap-dog that whines for its master sharing her bed by night,—of her dread lest her lord should rashly provoke some single combat with a barbarian chief, and of her delight could she see him return safe, triumphant, and heart-whole,—are unmatched by anything in Propertius, unless it be the elegy on the premature death of Cornelia, in which she is supposed by the poet to console her widower husband, Æmilius Paullus, the censor and friend of Augustus. The theme had elements of grandeur in Cornelia's ancestry (she was daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio and Scribonia), and in the vindication, as from the dead, of her fair fame and due place among honoured elders, which had seemingly been unjustly assailed. Cornelia died in 16 B.C.; and if the poet's death occurred in B.C. 15, we may take this elegy, as it would be pleasant to do, as his swan's song. It is not, like many poems of Propertius, prodigal of mythology and Roman annals, yet it appeals to both with force and in season. Where the speaker proclaims her blameless life and high descent before the infernal judges, she opens with the boast—
Ancestral fame was mine on either side:
For Spain and Carthage decked with spoil the home,
Where Scipio's blood was matched with Libo's pride."
— E. W. H.
And afterwards she pleads her readiness to have subjected her character and innocence to such tests as those of the famous Vestals, Claudia and Æmilia (the former the mover of a vessel that had foundered in Tiber, the latter rekindler of Vesta's fire with her linen robe), if it needed
One in whose veins the blood of all her race
Swelled with the instinct of a conscious pride,
And bade maintain a Roman matron's place.'
In other stanzas breathes the distinctive pride of a mother who has borne sons to inherit an ancient lineage, and of a wife, who, even in death, has cherished her ambition of winning honour. But the climax of pathos is in the last verses, where she addresses her husband and children in order:—
That they may never mark the tears thus shed:
Let it suffice thyself to mourn in sleep
The wife whose spirit hovers o'er thy bed:
Address that wife as if she could reply:
Dim not our children's joys with sorrow's cloud,
But dry the tear, and check the rising sigh!
In after years a step-dame if you see,
Let no rash word offend her jealous pride,
Nor indiscreetly wound by praising me.
In widowed solitude the ills of age,
Let it be yours to prop his steps with care,
And with your gentle love those woes assuage.
Their faces clustered round: nor should I grieve
If but the span of life cut off from me
Could swell the years in store for those I leave."
—E. W. H.
It is meet to part from Propertius with this lay on his lips, which might make us fain to believe what, in truth, the facts and probabilities appear to forbid—the story of Pliny that, after Cynthia's death, the poet contracted a lawful union, and transmitted to a lawful issue the inheritance of his name and genius. It is pretty certain that the poems to Cynthia are the chief memorial and representatives of these; and indeed the sole, if we were to except the two exquisite poems last quoted, one or two others to his patrons, and a song apropos of his "Lost Tablets." His comparatively early death allows us, by the light of a brief but brilliant life, to conceive what he might have been. His extant books, and the loving pains bestowed on them by commentators and translators, have been of use in picturing, in some measure, the man and the poet as he was.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
- ↑ See Chronicle of Ralph de Coggeshall, p. 275 et seq.—Master of the Rolls' Series.
