45 LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. SEXTUS AURELIUS PROPERTIUS was a native of that part of Umbria which borders on Etruria, but the exact date and place of his birth are unknown. We know indeed that he was a few years older than Ovid, who was born in B.C. 43. Propertius may therefore have been born in B.C. 51 or 50. He did not belong to a family of distinction, yet his father owned considerable landed property, which however was much impaired by an agrarian division-that, perhaps, which took place after the war between Octavianus and Sextus Pompeius, in в.c. 36. At that time Propertius had not assumed the dress of manhood, ―toga virilis,-i.e. he was under sixteen years of age (comp. Eleg. ii. 24, 37; iv. 1, 129). In that year his father was dead; he is conjectured to have been among the victims who perished in the famine or on the capture of Perusia. From the first elegy of his Fourth Book, it appears that Propertius was destined for the law; but, like Ovid, he abandoned it for literature, although the loss of a portion of his patrimonial estate had narrowed his means of living,- 'In tenues cogeris ipse Lares" (iv. 1, 128). He did not, like so many of the Roman literati of that period (e.g. Horace), complete his education at Athens; yet his writings prove him to have been deeply versed in Greek learning, of which indeed he is apt to make a rather ostentatious display. He was also well read in Roman archæology, as his Fourth, or, as it is sometimes reckoned, the Fifth Book of Elegies, shows. Propertius began to write verses at an early age; they attracted the notice of Mæcenas (Eleg. ii. 1, 17), and he was desired by his patron to celebrate the military achievements of Octavianus. He had however been previously noticed by L. Volcatius Tullus, one of the consuls in B.C. 33. Cynthia was the principal mistress of Propertius, and the chief object of his verse. Her real name was Hostia (Apuleius, Apolog. p. 12: : Bipont. ed.), and she was a native of Tibur (Tivoli). As Propertius alludes to Cynthia's "doctus avus," she may have been a grand-daughter of that Hostius who wrote a poem on the Histric War, i.e. the war between Rome and Illyricum, B.c. 178 (see Livy, xli.; Propert. Eleg. iii. 18). She was a highly accomplished woman, who wrote verses and was well skilled in music, dancing, needlework,—“castæ Palladis artes," and other female accomplishments. A Roman matron was seldom so gifted as Cynthia; the probability is therefore that she belonged to the numerous class of Hetæræ, a supposition strengthened by the facts that she had had at least one lover before Propertius (Eleg. iii. 20), and that she forsook him for a time, and took up with a stupid Prætor who had come back from Illyricum with a well-lined purse. The younger Pliny (Epist. vi. 15; ix. 22) mentions one Passienus Paulus as lineally descended from Propertius. He may accordingly, after Cynthia's death, have formed a legitimate connection. The date of his own decease is uncertain. Ovid mentions him twice in his 'Ars Amatoria' (iii. 333, 536); but from these passages the only sound inference is, that Propertius had then (about B.C. 15) ceased to write; it does not follow that he had ceased to live. Propertius had a house on the Esquiline Hill at Rome, near the gardens of Mæcenas. He was on good terms with contemporary poets and men of letters, e.g. with Ovid, Ponticus, Bassus, and Virgil, who seems to have read portions of his epic poem to him as to a friend (Eleg. ii. 34, 63). Tibullus he does not mention, nor Horace, though, with Propertius, he belonged to the inner circle of Mæcenas's protégés. It was the ambition of Propertius to be accounted the Callimachus or the Philetas of Rome (Eleg. iv. 1, 63), and hence perhaps the erudite character, and occasional difficulty in his writings. The Alexandrian model clothed in verse the lore which he collected in the library of the Ptolemies, and the Roman imitator deals largely also in curious mythology and archæological allusions. The advanced scholar will find in Propertius much to reward his studies. In his Elegies indeed he displays less wit, fancy, and richness of language than Ovid, less tenderness than Tibullus, and less original vigour than Catullus. Yet these several degrees of inferiority are counterbalanced by his nervous style, the occasional beauty of his images, and the skill with which he renders his learning subservient to poetry. At all |