In the first elegy in his first Book, the first century BCE poet Tibullus has been extolling the virtues of a simple farming life in the country to Delia, his difficult mistress. By way of a sentimental imaginary deathbed scene, he draws the threads together with a reminder of the inevitability of ageing and death, and suggests that he and she should enjoy love and each other while the times still allow.
Hear Tibullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is the opening of a fifth-century manuscript in the Vatican of the Eclogues of Virgil, another poet who sang the virtues of country living there and in his work on farming, the Georgics.
