learn that she is part of Tibullus' vision of rural life, indeed as poem 2 reveals to us, an essential part of his vision of rural life:
he would wish to rough it in the country, he says, provided that Delia is there. Here is the reason why the rural wish cannot be
realized: it proves to contain an incompatible element-Delia: 'But I am held a prisoner ... and take my post as keeper at her
door' (cf. 1. 55-6). In the first place this fact is offered as a reason why Tibullus cannot go on campaign with Messalla. But
clearly a man bound to an urban mistress's door cannot simultaneously be a man of country pursuits on his rural estate.
Delia precludes Tibullus' wish being realized. So we have discovered. We have also discovered a source of tension that
pervades Tibullus's life and fuels his poetry, and makes him a romantic visionary to be compared (and contrasted) with
Propertius. Propertius tried to see in Cynthia a mythical figure, an attempt doomed to fail in the face of reality. Tibullus tried
to see in Delia a figure compatible with his rural aspirations, an attempt also doomed to fail in the face of reality. And he, like
Propertius, had moments when he knew the truth only too well. Poem 5 provides the fullest description of Tibullus' rural and
erotic vision: life in the country, with Delia taking a wifely part in the harvest, and so on. But the description concludes: 'haec
mihi fingebam'-it was all a dream. Tibullus has been quoting his former vision with bitter irony, in a present mood of cruel
self-knowledge.
Tibullus, we have sensed, is concerned to be different from Propertius in the way he provokes conventional sensibility. He is
also concerned to be even more provoking. Take the question of 'servility': Propertius professes his slavery as an unwilling
burden, and has in mind psychological bondage. Tibullus talks actually of the physical humiliations meted out to slaves, and
seems masochistically willing to accept them at the hands of his mistress. Tibullus, too, moves on to a different and worse
mistress: Nemesis, harder, more rapacious, and more mercenary than Delia.
We might have thought that esteem for the country and love of his own estate were constants in Tibullus' life. Not so.
Through Nemesis Tibullus shows us that love can make the romantic abjure not only society's values but his own. In 2.3 a
rival has taken Nemesis off to a country villa, at harvest time. Tibullus' response is to curse the country's fruitfulness, to curse
what he has hitherto supremely valued. There are other instances like this-and Nemesis causes Tibullus to perform abrupt
about-turns on other cherished points as -well: for example, he will reverse his declared views on mercenariness in love, if
that is what she wants. The most poignant reversal, however, comes in 2.4. Should Nemesis want it, he would even sell off
the beloved family estate. Delia had rendered the rural aspiration unrealizable, by being part of it. Nemesis can make him
simply and completely abandon it. Such can be the destructive power of romantic love. So Tibullus suggests.
Tibullus produces yet a third lover to whom he is exclusively devoted, a boy, Marathus; and for this boy he demonstrates as
intense and abject a love as he and Propertius had for their mistresses. This is a remarkable fact. Of course, homosexual love
is often enough professed, by Horace and Catullus among others. But among the love poets it is normally considered a slight
business, a sideline, not a thing to engage emotions and passions. What we are observing is Tibullus once more upping the
stakes in the game of provocation. Not only does he profess devoted love for three lovers. He exhibits himself as the abject
romantic lover of a mere boy.
In fact the affair with Marathus presents Tibullus at perhaps his most abject- and amusing. The relationship is triangular:
Tibullus loves Marathus, while Marathus loves a girl, Pholoe; and, to ingratiate himself, Tibullus gives the boy servile and
humiliating assistance in his affair with the girl.
We need not doubt the real base of Tibullan poetry in Tibullan experience. But it is also clear that this experience is organized
and orchestrated to interest and provoke, in particular in comparison with Propertius (Propertius, similarly, had presented his
experience with an eye on Catullus): to interest and provoke- and, sometimes, to amuse. The word crept into the previous
paragraph, and humour is perhaps quite pervasive in Tibullus. The kind and degree of Tibullus' humiliations, of his
masochistic assertions, all neatly narrated, preclude total earnestness. There is hyperbole here, consideration for humorous
effect. And it is all 'neatly narrated': Tibullus' grovelling words to his lovers, and indeed his prayers to be a rustic, are dressed
in the urbanest of styles. That suggests a certain Tibullan distance from the Tibullan story, a wink in our direction.
Ovid