Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 8
CHAPTER II.
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES.
With his domestic qualities, his plaintive tone, and predisposition to contented enjoyment of rural happiness, Tibullus, under other conditions and another creed, might have found the ideal which he sought; but subjected to the caprices and inconstancy of one mistress after another, his life was alloyed by a series of unprosperous loves. If the third book, as has been stated, is in all probability the work of another hand, the sole attachment that promised a consummation in marriage, that with the compatible but uncertain Neæra, did not come upon the list of his loves. It was Delia, or, as her true name appears to have been, Plania (which the poet altered to affect the Greek), who first seriously engaged Tibullus's affections, and secured the tribute of his most perfect elegies. In condition, she appears to have been, like the Cynthia of Propertius, a hetæra, but of respectable parentage; and in some passages she is spoken of as if a married woman. The poet, at any rate, found a bar to marriage with her of some kind; and probably the inducement of a richer as well as a more permanent connection, induced her to transfer herself to the wealthy spouse whom Tibullus pictures in his sixth elegy (Book i.) as deceived and outraged by her infidelities. But we ought to take Delia's self as painted in our poet's first and happiest colours. The first six elegies of the first book (with the exception of the fourth) tell more or less of his love for her, and are amongst the highest developments of his poetic power. His allusion in the fifth elegy to the beginning of her influence affords, at the same time, some clue to her personal charms. In declaring that her spell is so potent that, though they have quarrelled, he cannot forget Delia amidst other charmers, he analyses the nature of her ascendancy. Was it—
And golden locks, she lit this witching flame;
Lovely as to Hæmonian Peleus' arms,
On bridled fish the Nereid Thetis came."
There are indications, too, that she could be kindly and affectionate, and possessed such influence over him through her tenderness, albeit short-lived and inconstant, as to make him sit light on hopes of advancement from a patron, and rather disposed to spend his days with her in silken dalliance and in rural quietude. Ecce signum:—
While to our breast the one beloved we strain;
Or, when the cold South's sleety torrents pour,
To sleep secure, lulled by the plashing rain!
Who braves the wrathful sea and tempests drear;
Oh, rather perish gold and gems, than e'er
One fair one for my absence shed a tear!
To deck thy home with warfare's spoils—'tis well;
Me here a lovely maiden's charms enchain,
At her hard door a sleepless sentinel.
Let men cry lout and clown—I'll bear the brand:
In my last moments let me gaze on thee,
And dying, clasp thee with my faltering hand."
—(i. 45-60.) C.
It is a characteristic of Tibullus, beyond almost any other of his elegiac brotherhood, that a tender melancholy breathes constantly through his poetry, and that the most pleasing pictures of serene content are anon overclouded by a tinge of sad forecast. Indeed, he makes the uncertain but lowering future an argument for using the present opportunities of enjoyment. Thus, in the close of the elegy from which we have just quoted, he mingles gay and grave:—
Gloom-shrouded Death will soon draw nigh our door.
Dull age creeps on. Love's honeyed flatteries grow
Out of all season, where the locks are hoar "—D.
but seemingly in the end allows the gay spirit to predominate. Next apparently in order to the above elegy comes one composed by Tibullus on his sickbed in Corcyra (El. iii., bk. 1), and nominally addressed to Messala, though the burden of it first and last is Delia, and Delia only. Out of it we glean not a few notices of Roman customs—e.g., the resort of Delia to the luck of the dice-box to ascertain, before he started, the prospects her lover had of safe return, in spite of the favourable nature of which she had wept oft and ominously; the misgivings of the poet himself, based on ill omens; and the procrastination of his voyage, of which he laid the fault on the Jew's Sabbath being ill-starred for beginning a journey. Delia too consulted, we find, the fashionable goddess of Roman ladies of her period, Egyptian Isis, and clanged the brazen sistra, wherewith she was worshipped, with as much devout enthusiasm as the best of them. The poet assures himself that if her vows are heard, and the goddess answers her prayers, homage, and offerings, he shall rise from this bed of sickness, and, better than all, eschew war and its fatigues and alarms for the rest of his life-span. These, he suggests, are the indirect cause of his present serious illness; and some fine couplets contrast, in Tibullus's own view, the reigns of peaceful Saturn and his war-and-death-loving son. In a strain of mild depression he goes on to write his own epitaph as prefatory to an unfavourable termination to his malady; but it is amusing to note that he counts upon Elysium in the after-world on the score of his true love and stanchness in the present life:—
Will Venus waft to blest Elysium's plains,
Where dance and song resound, and every grove
Rings with clear-throated warblers' dulcet strains.
Here sweetest cassia all untended grows—
With lavish lap the earth, in every field,
Outpours the blossom of the fragrant rose.
In love's sweet lures, and pay the untiring vow;
Here reigns the lover, slain in youthhood's prime,
With myrtle garland round his honoured brow."
—(El. iii.) C.
It does not become directly obvious why after this happy prospect the poet goes off at a tangent to another and less inviting portion of the after-world, the abode of the guilty in Tartarus, where Tisiphone shakes her snaky tresses, and Ixion, Tityos, Tantalus, and the daughters of Danaus atone their treasons against Juno, Jove, and Venus. But the clue to the riddle is a little jealousy on the poet's part. He undisguisedly suggests that with these "convicts undergoing sentence" is the best place for a certain lover of Delia's, who took an undue interest in Tibullus's foreign service, and wished in his heart that it might be of long duration (iii. 21, 22). Too polite and too affectionate to hint that such ought to be her destination also, if untrue to her vows to himself, the poet adroitly bids her fence about her chastity with the company of her trusty duenna or nurse, to tell her stories, and beguile the hours of lamplight with the distaff and the thread. Taking heart from this pretty picture, which his fancy has wrought upon a pattern of Lucretian precedent, not out of date it would seem in good Roman houses, though it might be imaginative to connect it with Delia's, Tibullus seems to change his mind about leaving his bones in Corcyra, or winging his spirit's flight to Elysium, and to prepare his mistress for his unexpected return:—
And prone to sleep, their task by turns remit,
Upon thee, as by Heaven's commission sent,
Come suddenly, with none to herald it.
Barefoot to meet thy lover, Delia, run!
Goddess of morn, with rosy steeds, I pray,
Bring on betimes that all-auspicious sun."—D.
Whether thus unheralded or not, Tibullus certainly realised his desire of a safe return to home and Delia. The second elegy in the printed order appears to suit the date of the year after this return—B.C. 29, and discovers our poet in anything but the happiest relations with his mistress. Shut out, as was too often the lover's portion in the experience of the writers of Latin elegy, from his mistress's doors, and forestalled, it should seem, by a lover more favoured for the moment, he describes himself as solacing his chagrin in cups, and in prayers to Delia to have recourse to Venus for courage to elude her keepers. The goddess of good fortune is Venus, and "Venus helps the brave." Under her auspices, and in her service, the poet makes light of his dangerous and unseasonable vigils:—
Ope, and her fingers snapt my entrance bid.
'Twere well, though, that each sex to pry forbore;
For Venus wills her laches to be hid."—D.
But lest such encouragements should not suffice to influence his coy inamorata, or her fears of offending the so-called "husband," who withholds her from him, should become confirmed, Tibullus adduces the assurances of a witch whom he has lately consulted to show that a way may be smoothed for their interviews as heretofore. Of this witch Tibullus gives a highly poetic description:—
The rapid river's course by spells to turn,
Cleave graves, bid bones descend from pyres still warm,
Or coax the Manes forth from silent urn.
Hell's rabble now she calls with magic scream,
Now bids them milk-sprent to their homes below:
At will lights cloudy skies with sunshine's gleam,
At will 'neath summer orbs collects the snow.
Alone she holds Medea's magic lore:
None else, 'tis said, hath power Hell's dogs to tame:
She taught me chaunts, that wondrous glamour pour,
If, spitting thrice, we thrice rehearse the same."
—(El. ii. 43-55) D.
The services of this functionary Tibullus professes to have secured to throw dust in his rival's eyes, though for the matter of that he lets fall a hint that, had he preferred it, she could have given him a spell that would enable him to forget her. But that was not his wish, the earnest desire rather of a lasting and mutual love. It would seem to be with a covert reference to his rival, a soldier probably, enriched with spoils and loot, and divided as occasion suited betwixt the fields of Venus and of Mars, that Tibullus drew the counterpart pictures of peace and war that follow, and wondered why, as his desires were so simple, some adverse god denied him their fruition. He cannot tax his memory with sacrilege or slight to Venus, and protests that if he can have done any wrong unwittingly, he is ready to make full atonement. Possessed, however, of a conviction at whose door the estrangement of Delia is to be laid, he ends his elegy with a warning to the successful lover that his turn is to follow. This warning illustrates the fate of the trifler with affection and mocker of love, who in his old age succumbs to its chains himself, and whom his neighbours see—
And trim with trembling hands his hoary hair;
Lounge at the dear one's threshold, blind to shame,
And stop her handmaids in the thoroughfare.
Each spitting on his own soft breast in turn—
But spare me, Venus, spare thy bounden slave!
Why dost thou ruthlessly thy harvests burn?"
This spitting into the bosom, a coarse and superstitious deprecation of evil or distasteful objects and consequences, common to the ancients, and still common among the Greeks, means in this case contempt for the old lover caught in his own toils, and may possibly be meant to convey a sly hint to Delia that
May make her to be loved by none."
By the next year apparently, the date of the fifth elegy, matters are worse between Tibullus and Delia; but the poet has abandoned his professed unconcern, and, in his distraction at lengthened separation, describes himself in a bad way:—
Keep spinning round upon a level floor."
—(El. v.A 3, 4.)
He descends from his vantage-ground of complaint, and makes a plenary recantation, enumerating at the same time arguments of services rendered, such as nursing her through a long and serious illness, and consulting enchantresses and approaching altars with a view to her recovery. Fondly, he adds, he had dreamed that the first-fruits of this would be the return of her attachment, a reconciliation which would enable him to carry out a scheme of rural happiness for the rest of their lives on his estate at Pedum, in which each should perform their appropriate household duties, and Delia's province should be undisputed rule over all the slaves born in the house, himself included as the merest cipher. She was to discharge votive offerings to the rural god, to pay tithe and first-fruit for the folds and crops, and, when the conquering hero Messala deigned to visit their retreat, to pluck him the sweetest apples from the choicest trees, and herself to wait upon him with a befitting banquet. The pretty domestic picture includes a vision of teeming baskets of grapes, and the same vats of pressed must which we read of in the ballad of Horatius as foaming "round the white feet of laughing girls." But, sighs Tibullus, this fancy sketch has come to nought. East and south winds even now are bearing the fond dream away. Another is blest, and reaps the fruit of his own vows and solicitude. In a companion elegy, which recent editors have seen fit to distinguish from that on which we have just touched, the failure of his endeavours to console himself with some other fair one, or drown care in the wine-cup, is vividly described; and Delia's infatuation with her wealthier admirer attributed to the hired services of a witch, against whom Tibullus pours out a highly poetical volley of imprecations. Such a character, described as heralded by the screech-owl's hoot, and hungrily gnawing the bones which the wolves have discarded in the cemeteries, reminds one of the 'Pharmaceutria' in the Idylls of Theocritus, and Eclogues of Virgil,—or, more familiarly, of the Ghoules in the Arabian Nights. Still, however, there are harder words for all others than Delia, whose accessibility to the "golden key" is lightly noticed, while upon the successful rival is lavished a highly-drawn picture of the prospect awaiting him in the wheel of chance:—
An anxious lover stops and prowls; nay, more,
Looks round, pretends to pass, returns again,
And stands and coughs before her very door.
He works by stealth: but now enjoy thy dream,
While Fate permits to worship and adore;
Thy boat is gliding on a glassy stream."
—(V.B 71-76.) C.
Still less satisfactory are the relations of Delia and Tibullus when next we meet them in the sixth elegy; for now a year more has flown, and the poet is changing his tactics, and twitting the present possessor of Delia's affections with her inconsistency, of which no one has had more experience. She is now apparently married to her rich admirer; but Tibullus has no idea of letting him have an easy pillow—if, indeed, the elegy is meant for his perusal, and not rather as banter for the fickle mistress who has given the poet up. The tone, in either case, is not such as to present the poet in a pleasant or natural light, when he mockingly, and in a style reminding us of Ovid in his 'Art of Love,' enumerates his own past devices to gain access to Delia, and to foil her guards and duennas, and quotes his experience as worth buying, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief. As, however, in such loves, it would be quite out of course to know one's own mind, it is not a surprise to find the poet, in another poem of the same year, evidently clinging to the hope of a reconciliation, even after what should have seemed an unpardonable affront and insult; and striving to ingratiate himself with Delia by favourable mention of her mother—"a golden old woman," because she has always looked kindly on his addresses—who, he hopes, may live many years, and with whom he would be quite content to go halves in the residue of years yet in store for him—though not, we conclude, in the sense of spending them with her. At any rate, he goes the length of saying that he shall always love her, and her daughter for her sake, though he would be glad if she could teach that daughter to behave herself. The mention of the ribbon (vitta), which confined the hair of freeborn ladies before and after marriage to distinguish them from frailer sisters, and of the stole, which was a distinctive part of the Roman matron's dress, as forming no part of Delia's attire, seems to cast a doubt upon her having even up to this time formed any legal or permanent connection; and though he hopes the contrary, it is plain that Tibullus forecasts for his Delia the fate of a fickle flirt, whose latter end is sketched at the close of the sixth elegy:—
Draws out with trembling hand the twisted thread,
And forms of warp and woof her weary piece,
Biting the tufts from off the snowy fleece,
While bands of youth behold her, overjoyed,
And swear she's marvellously well employed;
Venus on high disdains her every tear,
And warns the faithless she can be severe."—C.
So far as Tibullus was concerned, it would seem that his patience finally failed not very long after this was written, and biographers fill Delia's place, after the last rupture, with one who is unnamed in his poetry, and unnoticed by Ovid in his references to Tibullus's loves. The heartless Glycera's connection with him rests, in fact, on a well-known ode of Horace; nor does the allusion to her in it (Ode i. 33) amount to much more than a philosophic counsel not to take on so, because the perjured fair one has made a younger choice. Our poet seems to have met with his usual luck, perhaps because too sentimental and in earnest for the mercenary charmers with whom he came in contact. It has been supposed that the thirteenth elegy of the fourth book may be a sample of the "miserable or dolorous elegies" which he wrote to her, and to which Horace alludes; but if so, it "protests too much," exhibits too little independence, and rests too seriously upon Glycera for his happiness, to be likely to hold her affections. Women of her class are not really of one mind with the love-sick wooer who wishes "the desert were his dwelling-place, with one sweet spirit for his minister;" or, as Tibullus's mode of expressing the same sentiment is Englished—
Life's loved asylum the sequestered wood:
Thou art the rest of cares: in murky night
A radiant star, a crowd in solitude."—C.
Glycera must have preferred a crowd of a more normal character, for ere long (it would seem within four or five years after the rupture with Delia) he is found in the toils of the mercenary and avaricious Nemesis, to whom he addressed the love elegies of the second book. If his amour with Glycera may be dated B.C. 24 or 23, the connection with Nemesis, who saw the last of him, began about the year B.C. 21. It does not seem to have had the excuse of such attractions as were possessed by Delia, for the poet is silent as to her personal beauty, although she exercised that influence over him, and made those exacting demands on his finances, which bespeak a fascination quite as overmastering. When we first hear of her, she has left him for the country (El. iii. bk. 2), and as he puts in the most exquisite of vignettes—
And Love is taking lessons at the plough"—C.
of course he needs must follow her, content to perform the most menial of peasant's duties, if only he may bask in her sunshine. A precedent for such a course is adduced in the mythic servitude of Apollo in the halls of Admetus—
Nor aught availed his lyre and locks unshorn;
No herbs could soothe his soul or dry his tears,
The powers of medicine were all outworn.
Curdled the milk, and when his task was done,
Of pliant osiers wove the wicker sieve,
Leaving chance holes through which the whey might run.
To see him bear a calf across the plain!
And oft as in the deepening dell he sang,
The lowing oxen broke the hallowed strain."—C.
"Happy days of old," sighs the poet, "when the gods were not ashamed of undisguised bondage to Love;" though, as he adds—
Would rather be a jest than loveless god."
A tirade which follows in this poem against war and lust of gain leads to the suspicion that now, as probably with Delia, some richer mercantile or military rival is in the poet's thoughts. The picture drawn of the spoils of land and sea, the foreign stone imported to Italy and dragged along Roman thoroughfares, and the moles, which stem hitherto resistless seas, and protect the fish against the sway of winter, is set over against the simplicity of Tibullus's ménage and primitive establishment; but, as if he knew beforehand that her taste would repudiate such simplicity, he affirms that if luxury and expense be the penchant of Nemesis, he will turn his thoughts to pillage and rapine, to procure her the means of it. His own tastes recoil from fashion and finery, and go back to the pastoral way of their ancestors, but he is prepared to sink his tastes—
Eyed of all eyes, for those rich gifts of mine—
The Coan maidens' gauze-spun robes and veil,
Inwrought and streaked with many a golden line."
—D.
Such promises and professions were no doubt the condition of his retaining even a share in her favour, but a misgiving arises that he competes at unequal odds with a richer upstart, of whom he bitterly hints—
Whom oft of old the slave-mart's rule compelled
To lift to view, imported from abroad,
The foot-soles which a tell-tale chalk-mark held."
—D.
Professions, however, in Nemesis's school, are nothing without practice. The more she exacts, the faster becomes his bondage; and he is not long in finding that it was a delusion to dream that songs and love-ditties would countervail more substantial presents—
"With hollowed palm she ever craves for gold."
My household gods, my all for her resign."
After this protestation, addressed to such as Nemesis, it was simply a poetical surplusage to profess to be ready to drink any number of love-potions; and it is satisfactory to be able to think that even the sacrifice of his patrimony came to no more than the figure of speech that it was. Nemesis is incidentally mentioned in the complimentary "Elegy to M. Valerius Messalinus," of which mention has been made already, and of which the date was about B.C. 20, in terms that bespeak her influence over the poet's mind and muse, and imply that if he is to live to celebrate in verse the family of Messala, it will be through happy relations with her, his latest love. A year after—the year before that of his death—another elegy (vi. B. ii.) represents him bent on following his friend and brother poet, Macer, to the wars, by way of escaping Nemesis's caprices. Till now he has allowed hope of better treatment to sustain him, and even now he lays the blame on a false and odious go-between, who pleads her mistress's illness or absence from home, when her voice gives the lie to the excuse. It is characteristic of Tibullus that he finds it almost impossible to think any evil of his unscrupulous enslavers, and always creates a deputy, in the person of whom they receive his reproaches and curses. In the year B.C. 18, it would appear, Tibullus succumbed to repeated inroads on a health always delicate, and died, as we learn from Ovid, with his hand clasped in that of Nemesis. The picture of his obsequies drawn by the author of the 'Amores' may be in part a fancy sketch, where, for example, it represents Delia and Nemesis embracing at the funeral pyre, and the newer love waving the earlier off with assurances that—
"Dying, he clasped his failing hand in mine;"
whilst Delia faltered out that, in her reign, death and failing health were not so much as thought of; but it is consistent enough that the avaricious Nemesis may have closed his eyes, and taken the slight needful pains to keep her ascendancy to the end. Whilst the chapter of Tibullus's "generally unprosperous loves" cannot be regarded as in all respects edifying, it is essentially part and parcel of his life and poetry, and, all things considered, redounds far more—in what has been seen—to his credit and goodness of heart than to that of his successive paramours.