Tibullus

Albius Tibullus, who died, probably fairly young, around 19 BCE, wrote poetry in elegiac metre. Like his contemporaries Propertius and Ovid, and his predecessor Catullus, he centres much of his work around a difficult mistress. Details of his life are sparse, inferred from the poetry itself, from two possible references to him in Horace’s work, and from a dubious ancient “Life”. His main love interest, “Delia”, is married. She is at various points hard to get, in an affair with the poet, and unfaithful both to him and to her husband. Some of the work is addressed to a boy, Marathus, also hard to get and unfaithful when won. The character of a second, shadowy mistress, Nemesis, is drawn on similar lines.

In line with poetic convention, Tibullus depicts magic and religious observance as means of predicting and securing success in love, asserts his own unfitness for warlike pursuits, privileges the pleasures and fulfilment of the country and a simple, farming life over the risk and discomfort involved in the pursuit of wealth, and harks back to legendary times of peace and plenty before the arrival of violence and war. In his country life, he presents himself as a farmer whose estate has been greatly reduced by unspecified events, seen by some as a likely reference to the confiscations of the end of the ‘40s BCE which also affected Virgil and Propertius.