Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 7
TIBULLUS.
CHAPTER I.
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS.
Although Catullus, as we have seen, lays some claim to the credit of acclimatising the elegy as well as other Greek types of poetry at Rome, the neatness and finish of that form of verse may be attributed to Albius Tibullus, a Roman of equestrian family, whose birthplace was Pedum, perhaps the modern village of Gallicano, and in his day so ruined and insignificant that it survived rather as the name of a district than as an ancient and once famous Latin city. Tradition has not preserved the poet's prænomen; but his birthdate was probably B.C. 54: and, like the two other tuneful brethren with whom we associate him, his life and career were brief. He is supposed to have died B.C. 18, according to an epigram of Domitius Marsus only a few months later than Virgil. As is the case with Catullus and Propertius, the data for a life of Tibullus are scant and shadowy, and consist chiefly of an elegy of Ovid, an epistle of Horace, and a less authoritative life by an old grammarian, with the internal evidence to be extracted from the poet's acknowledged remains. As he nowhere names his sire, it is inferred that he died whilst he was yet a youth; but there are frequent and loving notices of his mother and sister. Apparently his family estates had been confiscated at the time of Cæsar's death, and his fortunes had undergone the same partial collapse which befell his poetic contemporaries, Horace and Virgil; but, like them, he clearly succeeded in recovering at least a portion of his patrimony, and this apparently by the good offices of his great patron, M. Valerius Messala, a chief of the ancient aristocracy, who, after the fashion of Mæcenas and Agrippa, kept up a retinue and mimic court of versifiers, and, it must be allowed, exacted no more of them than was his honest due. It was at Pedum, on his patrimonial estate between Tibur and Præneste, some nineteen miles from Rome, that he passed the best portion of his brief but mainly placid life, amidst such scenes and employments as best fitted his rural tastes, indifferent health, and simple, contemplative, affectionate nature. In his very first elegy, he describes himself in strict keeping with his eminently religious spirit—which, it has been well remarked, bade him fold his hands in resignation rather than open them in hope—wreathing the god Terminus at the cross-roads, paying first-fruits to Ceres, setting up a Priapus to scare bird-pirates from his orchards, and honouring the Lares with the offering of a lambkin, the substitution of which for the fatted calf of earlier days betrays the diminution of his fortunes. As Mr Cranstoun translates, the poet's admission runs thus:—
Ye Lares! still my gift your wardship cheers;
A fatted calf did then your altars stain,
To purify innumerable steers.
From the few fields that still I reckon mine,
Shall fall for you while rustic voices sing:
'Oh grant the harvests, grant the generous wine!'"
—(C. i. l. 45, &c.)
The probable dates of his allusions to changed fortunes, in the first book of elegies, forbid the conjecture of some of his biographers that these arose from his lavish expenditure on his mistresses; and it is certainly not so much of a dilapidated roué as of one who lived simply and within his income and means, that the shrewd-judging Horace wrote in Epistle iv. (Book I.)—
Wealth, wit to use it, Heaven vouchsafes you these.
What could fond nurse wish more for her sweet pet,
Than friends, good looks, and health without a let,
A shrewd clear head, a tongue to speak his mind,
A seemly household, and a purse well lined?"
—Conington.
Judging of him by his writings, and those of his friends, Tibullus, then, would strike us as a genial, cheery, refined, but not foppish Roman knight; not overbearing, from having been very early his own master, but, for a Roman in his condition, of a singularly domestic character. It is clear that the court and livery of Augustus had no charms for him in comparison with the independence of his Pedan country-life, although an introduction to the former might have been had for the asking. His tone is that of an old-fashioned Conservative, disinclined to violent changes, holding the persuasion that "the old is better," and prepared to do battle for the good Saturnian times, before there were roads or ships, implements of husbandry or weapons of war. Nothing in his poems justifies the impression that his own meddling in politics had to do with whatever amount of confiscation befell him: indeed it may reasonably be assumed that, in pleading for restitution or compensation, his patron may have found his manifest aversion to politics as well as war very much in his favour. With Messala, who had fought against the Triumvirs under Cassius at Philippi, but had distinguished himself eminently at Actium on the side of Augustus, Tibullus had been early intimate, though he declined to accompany him to this decisive war in B.C. 31. Less than a year later, however, he did accompany him as aide-de-camp, or perhaps more probably as the bard of his prospective exploits, on a campaign to Aquitania, and was present at the battle of Atax (Ande in Languedoc), in which the rebel tribes were effectually quelled. In the seventh elegy of his first book, on the subject of Messala's birthday, the poet gives, partly from eyewitness and partly from report (for he did not get further than Corcyra in B.C. 30, on his voyage with his patron on his Asiatic expedition), a sketch of the localities of Messala's victories, which may thus be represented in English:—
Pyrene's heights, and shore of Santon sea:
Arar, swift Rhone, Garumna's mighty stream,
Yellow Carnutes, and Loire of azure gleam:
Or shall calm Cydnus rather claim my song,
Transparent shallows smoothly borne along?
How peaks of Taurus into cloudland peer,
Nor yet its snow the rough Cilicians fear?
Why need I tell how scatheless through the sky
O'er Syrian towns the sacred white doves fly?
How Tyre, with barks the first to trust the breeze,
Keeps from her towers an outlook o'er the seas?
Or in what sort, when Sirius cracks the fields,
The plenteous Nile its summer moisture yields."
—(Book I. C. vii. 9-22.) D.
It was ill-health of a serious kind, if we may judge from his misgivings in the opening of the third elegy of the first book, which cut short his second campaign at Corcyra; and there may probably have been as much justification for his step in a natural delicacy of constitution, as predisposition to it in his singularly unwarlike tendencies. At any rate, when he turned his back upon Corcyra, it was to say adieu for ever to the profession of arms; and thenceforth, though mentally following his patron's fortunes with affectionate interest, which often finds vent in song, he seems to have given up all campaigns, except in the congenial fields of love and literature. No doubt, he had no objection on occasion to fight his few battles over again; and, as the broken soldier in Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village,'
"Shouldered his crutch and showed how fields were won,"—
so our poet was quite at home in telling as well as hearing the soldier's tale, with the aid of the wine-flask to map out the battle-fields with miost finger on the table. But Peace approved herself so much more to his mind that we find him constantly attributing to it the whole cycle of blessings; amongst others—
That the sire's jar his offspring's soul should cheer;"
and it is with perhaps more heartfelt enthusiasm than that which he bestowed on the Gallic or Asiatic campaigns that he commemorates on Messala's birthday, already referred to, the peaceful services of that general to his country in reconstructing a portion of the Flaminian way out of the spoils which he had captured from the enemy. The lines in the original indicate that this great work was in course of construction when the seventh elegy was written; and it is not an uninteresting note that, as in our day, so of old, the road-maker was esteemed a public benefactor and the pioneer of civilisation. "Be thine," ends the poet—
And, gathering round thine age, swell honour's meed.
Frascati's youth and glistening Alba's son
Tell out the civil work thine hand hath done.
Thy wealth it is the gritty rock conveys,
The gravel strews, the jointed stones o'erlays:
Hence, since no more he stumbles home from town,
Hence, of thy road oft brags belated clown.
Come then for many a year, blest birthday, come,
And brighten each year more Messala's home!"—D.
In truth, the lot of Tibullus was fitter to be cast in such peaceful surroundings than in the wars and battlefields of Rome, for empire far renowned. And therefore, with the exception of the sole warlike episode we have noticed, his subjects are mostly peaceful, and the poems, which are the chronicle of his life, pretty equally divided between praise of the country and commemoration of rustic festivals and holidays, and the praises or reproaches which he pours forth to his mistresses; for it does not seem that he exactly parallels his co-mates Catullus and Propertius in exalting his Delia to the same unapproached throne as Lesbia or Cynthia. Still the history of his loves demands quite as distinct a commemoration and illustration as that of those of his fellows; and it will therefore be convenient to reserve it to another chapter, gathering up into this present sketch what little remains to tell of the poet's biography distinct from these. If we may take Ovid's contributions to the record, it will be found in his "Tristia" that the fates allowed them no time for intimacy, but that Tibullus was read and known and popular in the reign of Augustus,—not, however, through any special cultivation of an imperial patron, whom he invariably ignores, though not because he had had no overtures to become a bard of the empire. Enough for him to be stanch to an independent Roman noble, the most virtuous of his class, and to watch his opportunities of a well-timed poetical compliment to him or his. Thus when a rural feast is kept, and all are drinking healths and making merry, the health of the absent hero, Messala, is the toast he passes as an excuse for the glass (El. lib. ii. 1). Another special and appropriate poem (ii. 5) is written in honour of the eldest son of Messala, Marcus Valerius Messalinus, and of his election into the College of Fifteen to guard and inspect the Sibylline books in the Capitol, of which books he maintains the credit by pointing to the predicted eruption of Mount Ætna and eclipse of the sun in the fated year of Julius Cæsar's assassination. We hear very little indeed of our poet from his contemporaries, and next to nothing from him of them, out of the range of the Messaline family,—a proof of that addiction to rural pursuits and privacy, which, along with his loves, formed the staple of his muse. Even his death, as pictured by Ovid, looks exceedingly like a cento made up out of his own elegies; for that poet (Amor., iii. 9) makes his mother close his eyes, his sister hang over his couch and watch his pyre with dishevelled hair, and his mistresses lay claim to his preference at that sad last ceremony, in language that may well have been framed upon a study of the language of Tibullus, when, in El. i. 111, he anticipates death afar from these last tributes at Corcyra. In the absence of testimony we may infer that he died peacefully at home—peacefully, though somewhat immaturely. Domitius Marsus reappears in Mr Cranstoun's quatrain—
To roam with Virgil o'er Elysium's plains,
That none might longer breathe soft love's lament,
Or sing of royal wars in martial strains;"
and it is but fair to add, from Professor Nichol's admirable version of the " Mors Tibulli," Ovid's graceful asseveration that "Albius is not dead;" but that, if aught remains beyond the Stygian flood—
Living in calm communion with the blest;
In peaceful urn thy quiet bones repose:
May earth lie lightly where thine ashes rest!"
—(Am. iii. 9.)
The present may be a convenient place for stating briefly that that portion of the Elegies attributed to Tibullus which is unquestionably authentic is limited to the first and second books; and that the first alone, in all probability, had the advantage of his own revision and preparation for the press. Amongst the arguments against the authenticity of the third and fourth books, there are some which can hardly be met by the cleverest special pleading, though we confess that Mr Cranstoun has shown considerable ingenuity in his conservative view of the question. It is, however, more probable that the elegies of the third book, which treat of the loves of Lygdamus and Neæra for the most part, and which perceptibly lack the spirit of Tibullus, whilst they evince quite a different talent, where they exhibit any, were the work of some other poet in Messala's circle, whose name, or else nom de plume, may have been Lygdamus. As to the elegies of the fourth book (apart from the first poem, which is epic or heroic, and is panegyrical of Messala, though, for the most part, a raw and juvenile production, not worthy of Tibullus's genius), the general view is that they are worthier of Tibullus than the third book, but more probably the work of a female hand; and with one or two exceptions, that of the Sulpicia, a woman of noble birth, and of Messala's circle, whose love for Cerinthus or Cornutus is their chief feature. One thing is certain, that the range of the two earlier books will furnish abundant samples of each characteristic vein of the genuine Tibullus, who, though Dr Arnold coupled him as a bad poet with Propertius, and Niebuhr charged him with sentimentality, is nevertheless a poet of singular sweetness of versification, though unequal to his later elegiac brother in force and strength. Perhaps the adverse criticisms made upon him are due to the narrow range of his themes; but he is worth a study, no less for the independence of his mind and muse, than for the almost utter absence of any Alexandrine influence on his style, syntax, and language. Of pure taste and great finish, his genius is Italian to the core; and whilst he may lack the various graces of other poets of the empire before and after him, he is second to none in a tender simplicity and a transparent terseness, which are peculiarly his own. It may not be amiss to close this chapter with the just eulogium of this poet by Mr Cranstoun, the most appreciative, and, on the whole, the most successful of Tibullus's translators. "His love of home and friends, his enjoyment of the country, of hills and dales, of shepherds and sheepfolds, of smiling meadows and murmuring rivulets, of purple vineyards and yellow corn-fields, and of the innocence and simplicity of earlier days, combined with that tender melancholy which ever, cloud-like, threw a shadow o'er his brow, gives him an almost romantic interest in the eyes of modern readers; and will always secure for him, with lovers of rural scenes, one of the most enviable positions among the sons of ancient song."