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Born at Pedum in an equestrian family, TIBULLUS (Albius Tibullus), unlike Horace, cherished through life his rural tastes and superstition. He found a Mæcenas in M. Valerius Messalla, whom he followed on some of his military expeditions. But most of his life was spent in cheerful but refined retirement. Four books of elegies, and one or two stray poems, remain with his name; but only the first two books are authenticated.
His life, which falls within the life of Horace, was lived under the same social and political conditions, but his nobler birth, which deprived him of one of the strongest incentives to literary exertion, and his own character, combined to make his poetry very different.
In form, Tibullus is the most original of the Latin elegiac poets. Propertius, Catullus, and the rest of his brother poets, imitated or translated Callimachus, Philetas, and other Alexandrians. Tibullus took his metre from the older Greek sources, and Romanized it. His verses, without the nervous strength of more developed elegies, have an unfinished sweetness of their own. The elegies of Ovid -- the zenith of the form -- was reached by progression on the lines Tibullus had laid down. It is a form apt to express with grace, in a language like Latin, of neat turn and careful balance, thoughts of pithy and disjointed shape.
Tibullus, alone in his day, stood aloof from the Empire; but it was from carelessness rather than conviction. His position, united to his talent, gave him independence enough to survey with calm melancholy the change of freedom to unity. His song was not of empire, but of love, his household gods, and his patron, Messalla. Unlike Horace, Tibullus sang a living Delia, but, unlike his elegiac brothers, he served her with a fidgety pride, and not a passionate though short-lived devotion. His rustic piety was interwoven with his love of Nature. He did not live by faith, nor did he, like the Alexandrians and their followers, explore the details of mythology to darken his meaning with erudition. But his superstitions were a part of Nature itself, and he clung to them with the same loving association and artistic sense. He thus enforced by a new attitude of mind the lesson of the literature of the day, and "admitted the decay of religion by subjecting it to poetic treatment." He honoured Messalla with more real esteem than Mæcenas and later patrons of literature have ever received; but he was an amateur. He despised fame. Like Landor, he may be summed up as the poet of culture and leisure.
Besides his great position in the history of Latin elegiac poetry, he was specially endeared to later literature by the untimely end of his gentle talents. He is addressed in one of the Epistles of Horace and celebrated in one of the of the sweetest elegies of Ovid.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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