distance of the present day, the hexameter as fixed by Virgil, and the
elegiac as popularised by Gallus and rapidly brought to perfection by his
immediate followers, are the only two poetical forms of real importance.

The elegiac couplet had, of course, been in use at Rome long before;
Ennius himself had employed it, and in the Ciceronian age Catullus had
written in it largely, and not without success. But its successful use
had been hitherto mainly confined to short pieces, such as would fall
within the definition of the Greek epigram. The four books of poems in
which Gallus told the story of his passion for the courtesan Cytheris
(the Lycoris of the tenth Eclogue) showed the capacities of the metre in
a new light. The fashion they set was at once followed by a crowd of
poets. The literary circles of Maecenas and Messalla had each their
elegiac poet of the first eminence; and the early death of both
Propertius and Tibullus was followed, amid the decline of the other forms
of the earlier Augustan poetry, by the consummate brilliance of Ovid.

Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in
Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is
much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal
merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown
in ancient literature. Of his life little is known. Like Virgil, he lost
his patrimonial property in the confiscations which followed the Civil
war, but he was then a mere child. He seems to have been introduced to
imperial patronage by the publication of the first book of his _Elegies_
at the age of about twenty. He died young, before he was thirty-five, if
we may draw an inference from the latest allusions in his extant poems;
he had then written four other books of elegiac pieces, which were
probably published separately at intervals of a few years. In the last
book there is a noticeable widening of range of subject, which