6. ELEGY.--Tibullus (b. 54 B.C.) was the father of the Roman elegy. He was a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. The style of his poems and their tone of thought are like his character, deficient in vigor and manliness, but sweet, smooth, polished, tender, and never disfigured by bad taste. He passed his short life in peaceful retirement, and died soon after Virgil. The poems ascribed to Tibullus consist of four books, of which only two are genuine.
Propertius (b. 150 B.C.), although a contemporary and friend of the Augustan poets, may be considered as belonging to a somewhat different school of poetry. While Horace, Virgil, and Tibullus imitated the noblest poets of the Greek age, Propertius, like the minor Roman poets, aspired to nothing more than the imitation of the graceful, but feeble strains of the Alexandrian poets. If he excels Tibullus in vigor of fancy, expression, and coloring, he is inferior to him in grace, spontaneity, and delicacy; he cannot, also, be compared with Catullus, who greatly surpasses him in his easy and effective style.
Ovid (43 B.C.-6 A.D.), the most fertile of the Latin poets, not only in elegy, but also in other kinds of poetry, was enabled by his rank, fortune, and talents to cultivate the society of men of congenial tastes. A skeptic and an epicurean, he lived a life of continual indulgence and intrigue. He was a universal admirer of the female sex, and a favorite among women. He was popular as a poet, successful in society, and possessed all the enjoyments that wealth could bestow; but later in life he incurred the anger of Augustus, and was banished to the very frontier of the Roman empire, where he lingered for a few years and died in great misery. The "Epistles to and from Women of the Heroic Age" are a series of love-letters; with the exception of the "Metamorphoses," they have been greater favorites than any other of his works. Love, in the days of Ovid, had in it nothing pure or chivalrous. The age in which he lived was morally polluted, and he was neither better nor worse than his contemporaries; hence grossness is the characteristic of his "Art of Love." His "Metamorphoses" contain a series of mythological narratives from the earliest times to the translation of the soul of Julius Caesar from earth to heaven, and his metamorphosis into a star. In this poem especially may be traced that study and learning by which the Roman poets made all the treasures of Greek literature their own. "The Fasti," a poem on the Roman calendar, is a beautiful specimen of simple narrative in verse, and displays, more than any of his works, his power of telling a story without the slightest effort, in poetry as well as prose. The five books of the "Tristia," and the "Epistles from Pontus," were the outpourings of his sorrowful heart during the gloomy evening of his days.