foreshadows the further development that elegiac verse took in the hands
of Ovid soon after his death.

In striking contrast to Virgil or Horace, Propertius is a genius of great
and, indeed, phenomenal precocity. His first book of _Elegies,_ the
_Cynthia monobiblos_ of the grammarians, was a literary feat comparable
to the early achievements of Keats or Byron. The boy of twenty had
already mastered the secret of elegiac verse, which even Catullus had
used stiffly and awkwardly, and writes it with an ease, a colour, a
sumptuousness of rhythm which no later poet ever equalled. The splendid
cadence of the opening couplet--

_Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis
Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus--_

must have come on its readers with the shock of a new revelation. Nothing
like it had ever been written in Latin before: itself and alone it
assures a great future to the Latin elegiac. His instinct for richness of
sound is equally conspicuous where it is found in purely Latin phrases,
as in the opening of the sixteenth elegy--

_Quae fueram magnis olim patefacta triumphis
Ianua Tarpeiae nota pudicitiae
Cuius inaurati celebrarunt limina currus
Captorum lacrimis umida supplicibus,_

and where it depends on a lavish use of Greek ornament, as in the opening
of the third--

_Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carina