THE LIFE OF PROPERTIUS
publication of Book IV. But we cannot base any very strong argument on his silence from song. He may even have married and had children. Pliny the Younger (Ep. vi. 15) says that the poet Passennus Paullus counted Propertius among his ancestors. All that we can be certain of is that he died before 2 A.D., for Ovid in the Remedium Amoris (published about that year) speaks of him in language (i. 764) appropriate only to one already dead. References to Propertius in ancient writers are rare. The only reference of interest (and that an uncertain one) is found in the Epistles of Horace (ii. ii. 91), where Horace derides a bard who claims to be a second Callimachus (cp. Prop. IV. i. 64). Quintilian (x. i. 93) says that some critics ranked Propertius first among Roman elegiac poets, but that he personally prefers Tibullus.
