is perhaps one of his best compositions. In another fine poem the moral story of Tarpeia is given an erotic motive-again
pleasure for Propertius and not much pain for the emperor. In fact Book 4 contains much very good writing. Pressure, if it is
not completely totalitarian, can inspire artists to creative ingenuity.
The final poem of the book is notable. It is a funeral elegy for a Roman lady, celebrating indirectly many of the moral virtues
that Augustus was trying to inculcate. It should, we might think, bore, cloy, or irritate. It does not. In fact it is moving, and,
for the reader of the entire Propertian collection, moving in a particular way. The dead lady speaks in the poem, and affirms
how faithful, loving, and loyal she had been to her husband throughout her life-precisely the devotion that Propertius had
sought and failed to find in Cynthia. Propertius' monument to an impeccable Roman lady is also therefore, by contrast, a
monument to his own failure and sorrow: a pathetic irony. The poem provides a suggestive and moving end to the Propertian
corpus.
Tibullus
I have touched upon Tibullus as the quasi-panegyrist of Messalla and his family. Beyond this, he hardly interests himself in
national affairs, nor feels the need to explain his non-attention-a fact interesting in itself: imperial influence need not extend
beyond the imperial circle. Nor is Tibullus interested in describing his role as poet, or his place in literary history. In
discursive, associative elegies addressed mostly to the reader he writes of the country and his life of love.
Tibullus displays the same blinkered and slightly romantic love of the country as Virgil. But the feeling is none the less
genuine, and a poem such as 2. 1, a celebration of an annual rural festival, largely depends upon it. So indeed does much of
Tibullus' poetry. Tibullus would in fact like to live in the country-so he says.
The first forty-four lines of the first poem of the first book are devoted to an expression of this wish. Exactly what the wish
comprised should be identified. To begin with it sounds as if Tibullus actually wants to be a small-holding and labouring
farmer ('Let me as a farmer set vines in the early season'). This is revealed to be a humorously intended feint. What he
actually wants to do is to dabble with work, to be a dilettante, to live a life of, in fact, leisure in rural simplicity on his own
estate. He sketches this estate for us in the first poem and subsequently. It has been reduced in size, perhaps in confiscations,
but it is still sufficient, with slaves to run it. Tibullus therefore, like Propertius, wants-shocking fact-a life committed to
leisure, a 'life of inaction', uita iners, as he actually terms it; and, like Propertius, he scorns military and mercantile activity.
But unlike the urban and urbane Propertius he wants to spend his life of leisure in the country. This dissimilarity between
them is one among many that Tibullus wishes us to discern.
Forty-four lines express this Tibullan wish. What, we might ask, of love? Where is its place? And why, we might also ask,
does Tibullus not just up and go to his estate, instead of moaning elegiacally in Rome? The basic reason is- love.
Here is how the expression of Tibullus' rural dream continues:
parua seges satis est, satis est requiescere lecto
si licet et solito membra leuare toro.
quam iuuat immites uentos audire cubantem
et dominant tenero continuisse sinu(I. 1.43-6)
A small crop is enough, it is enough if it is possible to rest in a bed and lighten the limbs on a familiar couch. How pleasant it
is lying there to listen to wild winds, and to hold my mistress in tender embrace.
By 'mistress', domina, Tibullus means the woman to whom he as lover is slave (as Propertius was to Cynthia), and he has in
mind the one he calls Delia. The exact social status of Delia can, like Cynthia's, be argued about. But she is not dissimilar to
Cynthia, probably a freedwoman, and presented to us as highly materialistic and of course essentially urban. And yet we now