The seventh is a poem celebrating the triumph in 27 BC of Tibullus's patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, following his victory in a military campaign against the Aquitanians.
He notes how Tibullus compared with Propertius adopts a purity of style, avoiding diminutives such as ocellus "little eye" and compound words such as liniger "linen-wearing", and only rarely using Greek borrowings.
Seneca the Elder reports that Tibullus's patron Messalla was a stickler for pure Latin: Latini ... sermonis observator diligentissimus (Contr.
[27] Delia is described as having a "husband" in poem 1.2.43, but it appears from 1.6.67 to 68 that she does not wear the headband and long dress usual for respectable married Roman women.
From poem 6 we learn that Delia has a mother who takes Tibullus's side, secretly opening the door and letting him into the house at night when the husband is asleep (6.57–64).
[29] In the view of some scholars, Marathus was possibly not a real person but a literary fiction, allowing Tibullus to explore love from a different angle.
Despite his falling for a girl, he is depicted as very effeminate, wearing make up and constantly rearranging his hair, trimming his nails, and changing his clothes (1.8.9–12), as well as prone to burst into tears (1.8.67, 1.9.37).
Unlike Catullus's Iuventius, who falls for the handsome but impecunious Furius,[30] Marathus, like Delia, takes up with an older, richer man, to Tibullus's indignation and fury.
[32] Virgil in his 2nd eclogue writes a humorous[33] song of an Arcadian shepherd Corydon who is trying unsuccessfully to woo a city boy called Alexis.
[34] Tibullus here combines some familiar themes: the contrast between the soldier and the farmer; the idealisation of the country life; the cruel girlfriend who refuses to admit her lover; and the thought that Death will come quickly.
[36] As will become clear from poems 3 and 7, Tibullus (as might be expected of a young man from an equestrian family) had already travelled abroad as part of Messalla's entourage at least twice.
[39] There is a similar passage in the Panegyricus Messallae, (a poem of disputed date and authorship which forms part of book 3 of the Tibullan corpus), where the author states that some, but not all, of his family's ancestral land had been lost.
[40] It has been inferred from Horace's Epistle 1.4.2 that Tibullus's family estate was at Pedum (believed to have been near Gallicano del Lazio, about 20 miles east of Rome).
[51] Justifying this change, Murgatroyd writes: "If a poet in one couplet wishes for a life of 'inertia' but in the next immediately speaks of the work that he will perform then (only to drop that topic promptly for another twenty lines), that deserves to be described not as a progression in thought but as an illogical jerk.
Another possibility, however, is that Tibullus is chiding himself, since, as will emerge from the next poem, he himself at one stage left Delia to accompany his patron Messalla abroad and was reluctant to do so.
[59] Another well known example is Catullus, who, along with the poet Helvius Cinna, accompanied his patron Gaius Memmius to Bithynia in 57–56 BC, but was disappointed not to be allowed to make any money there.
[67] For example, in poem 3 Tibullus claims to have committed no perjury (periuria (1.3.51); Venus will reward him and lead him to the Elysian fields (1.3.57–58), while those who violate his love will go to Tartarus (1.3.81).
:[67] Both 3 and 9 also describe an inscription on an imaginary monument, with very similar wording: Intratextual links with poems 1 and 5 are found in the description of Tartarus (lines 67–82).
In this passage, as Joshua Paul points out, verbal echoes show that the various inhabitants of Tartarus are intended to represent the different persons who have violated or thwarted Tibullus's love life.
Another characteristic found in Tibullus's central sections is that they often consist of a digression on a general subject, as here, contrasting with the poet's personal concerns that come before and after them.
The poem has been compared to Horace's Satires 1.8, in which a statue of Priapus complains about a pair of witches who have been holding ceremonies in his garden; and also to Propertius 4.2, which consists of a speech of the minor god Vertumnus.
[75] Another comparable poem is Horace's Satires 2.5, in which the ghost of the prophet Teiresias gives ironic advice to Ulysses that the best way of recouping his fortunes is by legacy-hunting.
[76] The Greek poet Callimachus too wrote a poem (only a fragment survives) in which Priapus speaks to a young man who is in love with a handsome youth.
[78] It has been noted that the activities mentioned by Priapus – horse-riding, boating, hunting – are more appropriate to aristocratic boys than the slaves who normally would be the object of attentions by Roman men.
[91] The final line 'for your boat is floating on clear water' is explained as meaning 'everything is going well for you for now (but soon things will change; the sea will grow rough)'.
[102] Timothy Moore (1989) points out that many of the elements which are treated negatively elsewhere in Tibullus (military campaigns, the invention of agriculture and seafaring, Tyrian purple, the making of roads, and so on) are praised in this poem and presented in a positive light.
[108] With its "relaxed, often ironical tone", McGann judges the poem to be "a jeu d'esprit, intended to appeal to the keen wits and worldly sophistication of the reader".
It has also been speculated that the "grey-haired lover" of poem 8.29 and the rival are the same person, that the wife is Pholoë, and the young man she sleeps with is Marathus, but this is not made explicit.
[113] According to Murgatroyd (1977), in the juxtaposition of poems 8 and 9 we see an amusing contrast between Tibullus's role as a detached adviser and the reality of his personal involvement.
[1] In Booth's judgement, the two poems "offer ample evidence of sharpness and originality in one who is conventionally regarded as the most anodyne and boring of the Latin elegists".