developed their full genius. But the perpetual recurrence in the later
poems of that brooding over death, which had already marked his juvenile
work, indicates increasing exhaustion of power. Even the sparkling elegy
on the perils of a lover's rapid night journey from Rome to Tibur passes
at the end into a sombre imagination of his own grave; and the fine and
remarkable poem (beginning with the famous _Sunt aliquid Manes_) in which
the ghost of Cynthia visits him, is full of the same morbid dwelling on
the world of shadows, where the "golden girl" awaits her forgetful lover.
_Atque hoc sollicitum vince sopore caput_ had become the sum of his
prayers. But a little while afterwards the restless brain of the poet
found the sleep that it desired.

At a time when literary criticism was so powerful at Rome, and poetry was
ruled by somewhat rigid canons of taste, it is not surprising that more
stress was laid on the defects than on the merits of Propertius' poetry.
It evidently annoyed Horace; and in later times Propertius remained the
favourite of a minority, while general taste preferred the more
faultless, if less powerfully original, elegiacs of his contemporary,
Albius Tibullus. This pleasing and graceful poet was a few years older
than Propertius, and, like him, died at the age of about thirty-five. He
did not belong to the group of court poets who formed the circle of
Maecenas, but to a smaller school under the patronage of Marcus Valerius
Messalla, a distinguished member of the old aristocracy, who, though
accepting the new government and loyal in his service to the Emperor,
held somewhat aloof from the court, and lived in a small literary world
of his own. Tibullus published in his lifetime two books of elegiac
poems; after his death a third volume was published, containing a few of
his posthumous pieces, together with poems by other members of the same
circle. Of these, six are elegies by a young poet of the upper class,
writing under the name of Lygdamus, and plausibly conjectured to have