Tibullus
[1][2] Tibullus's chief friend and patron was Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, himself an orator and poet as well as a statesman and a commander.
About 30 BC Messalla was dispatched by Augustus to Gaul to quell a rising in Aquitania and restore order in the country, and Tibullus may have been in his retinue.
On a later occasion, probably in 28, he would have accompanied his friend who had been sent on a mission to the East, but he fell sick and had to stay behind in Corcyra.
[3] The loss of Tibullus's landed property is attested by himself (i.1, 19), as a farmer felicis quondam, nunc pauperis agri ("of a once fruitful, now impoverished field"; cf.
[4][5] His death made a deep impression in Rome, as is clear from his contemporary, Domitius Marsus, and from the elegy in which Ovid[6] enshrined the memory of his predecessor.
[3] Two short poems by Horace, addressed to a certain Albius (Odes 1.33 and Epistles 1.4), are believed to refer to Tibullus.
[7][8] In the first of these poems Horace advises Albius not to be excessive in singing sad elegies in memory of the cruel "Glycera" (assumed to be the same as Nemesis).
In the second poem, Horace imagines Albius, when he receives the letter, either writing poetry or wandering in the woods near Pedum.
Although J. P. Postgate challenged the identification of Albius with Tibullus, more recent scholars such as Ullman, Putnam, and Ball have argued that they are the same.
His first love, the subject of book i., is called Delia in the poems, but Apuleius[9] reveals that her real name was Plania.
[10] The three poems constitute the longest poetic project in Roman literature having homosexual love as theme.
[11] The first of these poems, 1.4, begins with an imprecation of the poet to the god Priapus, asking for advice on how to win over beautiful boys.
At first the narrator of the poem presents himself as someone who is simply asking for advice from the god on behalf of a friend Titius who has fallen in love with a boy but whose wife forbids such affairs (1.4.73).
The fifth poem is a hymn to Apollo celebrating the installation of Messalla's son as one of the fifteen priests who were guardians of the Sibylline Books (the Quindecimviri sacris faciundis).
Nemesis (like the Cynthia of Propertius) was probably a courtesan of the higher class; and she had other admirers besides Tibullus.
[3] Ovid, writing at the time of Tibullus's death, says:[14] "Sic Nemesis longum, sic Delia nomen habebunt, / altera cura recens, altera primus amor" ("Thus Nemesis and Delia will be long remembered: one Tibullus' recent love, the other his first").
[17] Lee comes to the conclusion that Lygdamus must have copied Ovid, not the reverse, and that his date may have been in the late 1st century AD.
F. Navarro Antolín comes to the same conclusion, citing among other reasons certain words that were not generally used in poetry of the time of Tibullus.
The next group (3.13–3.18) is a set of six very short elegiac poems (40 lines in all) apparently written to or about Cerinthus by Sulpicia herself.
The style and metrical handling was originally understood to be that of a novice, or a male poet appropriating female form.
[3] Radford (1923) believed it to be by Ovid, calling it an "exquisite 'imitation' of Tibullus which has itself been imitated and admired by so many English poets.
"[29] However, in a recent assessment of the poem, Stephen Heyworth (2021) believes that Tibullan authorship cannot be ruled out, and that it may even be a fragment from the lost ending of book 2.
The natural conclusion is that a collection of scattered compositions, relating to Messalla and the members of his circle, was added as an appendix to the genuine relics of Tibullus.
In Postgate's view, he was an amiable man of generous impulses and unselfish disposition, loyal to his friends to the verge of self-sacrifice (as is shown by his leaving Delia to accompany Messalla to Asia), and apparently constant to his mistresses.
His clear, finished and yet unaffected style made him a great favourite and placed him, in the judgment of Quintilian, ahead of other elegiac writers.
[3] A short Vita Tibulli (Life of Tibullus) is found at the end of the Ambrosian, Vatican and inferior manuscripts.
There is little in it that cannot be inferred from Tibullus himself and from what Horace says about Albius, though it is possible that its compiler may have taken some of his statements from Suetonius's book De Poetis.
Also excerpts from the lost Fragmentum cuiacianum, made by Scaliger, and now in the library at Leiden are of importance for their independence of A.
The Codex cuiacianus, a late manuscript containing the works of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius, is still extant.
[36] Guy Lee's edition and translation of books 1-2 (Cambridge, 1975) is based on a fresh collation of A. Francis Cairns regards Tibullus as "a good poet but not a great one";[37] Dorothea Wender similarly calls him a minor poet but argues there is "grace and polish and symmetry" to his work.
