Like his contemporaries Ovid and Propertius, and his predecessor Catullus, Tibullus deals in his poetry with themes including the challenges of life with a difficult mistress. Details of his life are sparse and unreliable, but there is a little more about them on his Poet page here. In this extract from the first poem in Tibullus’s first book, he has been praising the good, country life in idealised terms not dissimilar to those to be found in Virgil’s poem about farming and the land, the Georgics. Now he addresses his patron, the general and statesman Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, before concluding the poem with a vision of himself united in love with his Delia, and his own variation on the theme of “carpe diem” constructed around an imaginary deathbed scene.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play:
