THE LIFE OF PROPERTIUS
54 B.C. (the earliest possible date for Tibullus' birth) and 43 B.C. (the date of Ovid's birth). This is indicated by Ovid (Tristia, iv. x. 51–54), who gives a catalogue of the elegiac poets in the following chronological order: Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid. Further, in IV. i. 127–140 Propertius implies that he lost his father while very young, and entered on his diminished inheritance shortly after the distribution of land among the veterans of Octavian and Antony in 41 B.C. Further. I. xxi, shows that he was old enough to be impressed by the death of a relative or neighbour in the Perusine war of 40 B.C.. His birth may therefore be conjecturally placed between 50 and 48 B.C.. The mention of his having worn the aurea bulla (IV. i. 131–134) shows him to have been of equestrian rank (see Plin. N. H. xxxiii. 10), while from the same passage we learn that he had been destined for the bar, but deserted it for poetry. Soon after his assumption of the toga virilis he fell in love with a certain Lycinna (III. xv. 3–6). How long this liaison lasted we cannot tell; we only know that his meeting with Cynthia caused him to forget Lycinna but two years after his first acquaintance with love (III. xv. 7, 8). Cynthia was the one deep passion of his life; she was the first woman whom he really loved, and there is nothing to make us think that she was not the last, though in the end, no doubt after many infidelities on both sides, he broke with her (see last two elegies of Book III.). Cynthia's real name was Hostia, a fact which we learn from Apuleius' Apologia (c. x.). She was a courtesan, for II. vii. 7 shows that it was impossible for him to marry her: the lex Papia Poppaea enacted that no man of free birth might marry a prostitute, and the only possible interpretation of the passage in question is that the unknown law to
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