was
probably
born
about 38-36 B.
about 38-36 B.
Ovid - 1869 - Juvenile Works and Spondaic Period
handle.
net/2027/uc2.
ark:/13960/t45q4vr7s Public Domain / http://www.
hathitrust.
org/access_use#pd
? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 153
A briefer outline, however, of the various opinions of
scholars cannot be wholly omitted here, especially as the
controversy over the Lygdamus poems constitutes one of the
most amazing chapters in the whole history of literary criti-
cism. I may begin with the so-called Messalla Collection.
This latter is a collection of famous poems emanating from
the household of the great Augustan statesman, Valerius
Messalla. In our fourteenth-century codices it forms a
single book, added to the unfinished second book of Tibullus
and apparently published, like the posthumous second book,
in 19 B. C. The Italian scholars of the fifteenth century have
wrongly divided this additional book into two, the so-called
third and fourth books of Tibullus, and for the purpose of
avoiding confusion it seems best to retain this division.
(Probably, as all the mediaeval citations show, there were
originally only ' two books of Tibullus,' and the second book
of 1 1 ii verses was first divided at the close of the Middle
Ages into the second and third books which our late codices
exhibit ; see Ullrich, op. clt. 69. ) In the six elegies of the
third book a youth apparently of eighteen or nineteen, yet
already famous as a poet and employing the pseudonym of
Lygdamus, seeks to w r in back the love of the fair Neaera,
who has divorced him. It is probable, too, that he has given
cause for the divorce, though naturally this is not admitted
and he pleads a difficult case with wonderful facility. Al-
though the poems of unhappy love easily admit. of being
turned to ridicule by an unfair critic like Voss, I know of no
juster criticism upon them than that of Teuffel, written in
mature life and before he (like Dissen) had lent an ear to the
slanders of Voss : " These elegies, through the freshness and
sincerity of the feeling and the graceful ease of the verse, do
their author no discredit. " 10 As is well known, Lygdamus
403. Although the author does not fully understand the real issues, I \vish
to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to the historical part of this fine study.
10 Quoted by Kleemann, op. cil. 17, from Pauly's Rcalcncyclopaedie, vi. 2,
1950 (1852).
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? 154 Robert S. Radford [1920
tells us the exact date of his birth (5, 18). " My parents
first beheld my birthday," he says, " in the year in which
both the consuls met an equal fate " (cum cecidit fato consul
uterque pari) he means in 43 B. C. , when Hirtius and Pansa
were both slain in battle before Mutina. Now precisely the
same pentameter (cum cecidit, etc. ) is used by Ovid, Trist.
iv, 10, 6, to give his own birth-date of 43 B. C. The Renais-
sance editors, Scaliger and Vulpius, perhaps attached less
importance to the dozen or more whole lines and half-lines
which Ovid and Lygdamus have in common, and the numerous
other amazing coincidences, but they knew well that, in the
case of different poets, the date of birth and the birth-line
cannot be borrowed. Wishing therefore to preserve the third
book for Tibullus and to prevent it from being assigned to
Ovid, they pronounced the birth-line an interpolation from
the Tristia and bracketed the whole distich. The same pro-
cedure was followed later by Broukhuysen (1708), Wunderlich
(1817), Bahrens (1876), and Ramsay (1887).
Matters remained in this state until the German peasant
poet of Mecklenburg and the great classical translator, Johann
Heinrich Voss, appeared upon the scene (1810). Voss's works
abound in homely and realistic scenes of village and country-
life, and his idyl, Luise, published in 1795, furnished Goethe
with a model for Hermann und Dorothea. He was naturally
much attracted by the simple pastoral elegy of Tibullus, and
when he came, in the third book, to the poems of Lygdamus
with their brilliant pictures of elegance and wealth, he saw
at once that this courtly city poet could not possibly be
Tibullus. He therefore removed the name of Tibullus from
the third book and substituted that of Lygdamus. So far
he showed himself an excellent critic, but he did not stop
here. He poured forth against the romanticist masquerading
under the name of the unworldly Tibullus a torrent of vitupera-
tion and of coarse abuse that is well-nigh incredible, and that
many of our editors of Tibullus and many of our orthodox
historians of Roman literature have ever since repeated in the
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 155
most credulous or most servile fashion, but naturally in lan-
guage somewhat more decorous and more restrained. 11 Al-
though Voss never possessed any great vogue in Germany at
large as a critic, his authority among classical philologians
was immense, and it is chiefly to his violent attack upon the
Lygdamus elegies that we must ascribe the hopeless con-
fusion that has since arisen among scholars and that has
made the question of the authorship of these poems an in-
soluble ' mystery. ' A part of the responsibility for the en-
tanglement belongs, however, to W. Hertzberg, the well-
known editor of Propertius. He also was possessed of great
authority in his day, although his conclusions were usually
hasty and Plessis, Etudes sur Properce, 80, charges him with
an " incurable recklessness " (une incurable legerete). Otto
Friedrich Gruppe, a critic of the first order, had just published
his standard work, Die rdmische Elegie (1838). In a brilliant
and forceful chapter of this book (pp. 105-143) he confidently
identifies Lygdamus with Ovid and Neaera with Ovid's second
wife, the " blameless spouse " of the Tristia, iv, 10, 71, who
did not, however, long remain married to the poet. Hertz-
berg at once came forward to answer Gruppe and, as Teuffel
believed (op. cit. 380), to make the identification with Ovid
forever impossible. He apparently believed that the Her aides,
which stood first in the older editions, were the earliest works
of Ovid. Naturally he experienced little difficulty in showing
that these poems consist almost entirely of dactyls, 12 and
11 Of course every classical scholar must entertain the kindliest feeling and
the greatest respect for the famous translator of the Odyssey and of the Georgics,
but no account of the Lygdamus controversy can be intelligible which fails
to bring out strongly Voss's violent prejudices and his scurrilous language.
Fuss, op. cit. 54, cites numerous examples of the latter, and protests earnestly
against such unfair methods of controversy. It appears to the present writer,
however, that greater blame attaches to Voss's obsequious followers than to
Voss himself. For Voss was a privileged character as a man of genius who
had a distinct point of view the simple life and the return to nature. Many
of the scholars, however, who have been content to take their criticism at
second hand from Voss, have no special point of view and no excuse that seems
valid.
" In his versification Ovid skips and dances, so that his hexameter, even
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? 156 Robert S. Radford [1920
show an excessive accumulation of rhetorical effects. There-
fore, he concludes, the Lygdamus elegies, which are written
in spondees and in a natural style, cannot possibly be the
work of Ovid. With the recklessness which Plessis has
justly noted, he adds : " These characteristics of the metre
are precisely those which stand out most sharply in youth. "
The truth is just the reverse, and Hultgren correctly lays
down the rule that the more the poet advances towards the
prime of life, the more the proportion of dactyls and of dactylic
beginnings increases. 13
The majority of careful students, be it said to their credit,
have never accepted the prejudiced views of Voss : thus the
elegies have been vigorously defended by Spohn (1819), by
Golbery, the Lemaire editor (1826), by Fuss (1867), and by
Cranstoun, the English translator (1872). Much more
moderate views are also to be found in Cruttwell (1877),
Ribbeck (1889), and Sellar (1892). Finally, Plessis, in his
Pocsie Latine (1909), in the chapter devoted to Lygdamus
(pp. 361-376), has at once paid a beautiful tribute to the
genuine merits of these elegies and given a noble exemplifica-
tion of the true critic's art. In his view, they proceed from
a youthful poet of rare and brilliant genius, whose native
generosity and tenderness of feeling have not yet been spoiled
by contact with the corruptions of the world.
Gruppe had made it probable that the Lygdamus elegies
are the work of Ovid, but he had not proved it. This proof
was, however, definitely rendered by S. Kleemann (1876),
who, in an elaborate dissertation, with the help of Burman's
in the more serious poems (Tristia and Fasti), has nothing but dactyls in almost
a half of the verses " (Hallische Jahrbiicher i [1839], 1024 ff. , quoted by Teuffel,
op. dt. 380 ff. , and by Kleemann, op. fit. 42 ff. ).
13 Op. fit. 29 : " Hexametri Ovidiani illustria exempla sunt, quae decent
eo magis crescere numerum dactylorum, quo magis ipse in arte procedat. . . .
Dubitari amplius nequit, quin poetarum elegiacorum poemata, minus dactylice
in principio distichi constructa, inter opera iuvenilis aetatis referenda, carmina
autem cum plurimis initiis dactylicis florenti aetati adnumeranda sint. " Klee-
mann, op. fit. 29, justly lays down the same canon for Tibullus : "arte erudita
in hexametris dactylus crebrior fit. "
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 157
Index, examined the language minutely and pronounced it
wholly Ovidian. It should be added that Kleemann used
only a part of the available material from the Index and the
Ovidian corpus perhaps not more than one-half but
even this, in my judgment, is far more than is strictly neces-
sary for purposes of valid proof. Kleemann's study was much
praised by the reviewers, but otherwise it has received little
attention. 14 The reasons for this neglect are not far to seek.
Many scholars had accepted without question and without
independent study the distorted views of Voss which came
to them in a slightly diluted form through the voluminous
commentary of Dissen ; others lay entrenched in fancied
security behind the barrier of the metre which Hertzberg
had so conveniently and so confidently provided. Strangely
enough, the Index to Ovid remained practically a closed book.
As soon as the Burman Index is used, the whole Messalla
Appendix is seen to be unmistakably the work of the youthful
Ovid, aetate eighteen to twenty-four. 15 There is complete
identity of vocabulary, and all the most characteristic Ovidian-
isms are in the Appendix, except only those which were de-
veloped later for the sake of the virtuosity and which are
conveniently enumerated by Eschenburg. The evidence
which is drawn merely from repeated tags and half-verses,
without distinctive peculiarity of usage, is of course incon-
clusive for an author like Ovid who borrows so freely from
contemporary poets, but the proof that rests upon the plain-
est and simplest idioms often recurring is one that scarcely
admits of doubt or question. The Lygdamus poems, com-
11 An honorable exception is Professor K. P. Harrington's scholarly edition
of the Roman elegiac poets (Selections, 1914). Professor Harrington com-
ments on the possible identity of Ovid and Lygdamus with complete candor
and with an open mind, although he does not commit himself definitely (Introd.
36).
15 In justice to myself, it is only fair to state that I reached my conclusions
as to the identity of Lygdamus and Ovid at a time when I was acquainted
neither with Gruppe's results nor with those of Kleemann and Ehrengruber,
but was obliged to rely upon the simple text of Ovid and Eichert's lexicon to
the Metamorphoses (Hanover, 1886).
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? 1-8 Robert S. Radford [1920
posed at eighteen or nineteen, contain about ninety specific
and striking Ovidianisms ; Kleemann gives about half of
these. The Panegyric Upon Messalla contains probably more
than a hundred Ovidianisms ; Ehrengruber has already called
attention to all of these, and in order to explain their occur-
rence, has propounded the ingenious theory that the Pane-
gyric was a school exercise composed in a later age by some
pupil of the rhetoricians who had access to all the works of
Ovid and pilfered most freely from them all. 16 Next, as the
metre shows, come the six little letters of Sulpicia, the kins-
woman of Messalla, in which this lady (with Ovid's sympa-
thetic assistance) undertakes the part of wooing the shy
youth, Cerinthus; they contain more than twelve Ovidian-
isms. About 21 B. C. , aetate twenty-two, Ovid composed the
five charming elegies giving in fuller form the story of the
same pair of happy lovers, Sulpicia and Cerinthus ; they
show more than forty Ovidianisms and 47. 4% of dactyls,
thus approaching closely to the proportion of the first Amores
(about 48. 5%). The exquisite imitation of Tibullus, Nulla
tuum nobis (iv, 13), that closes the collection, has ten Ovidian-
isms. Since Ovid edits the unfinished second book, the two
spondaic elegies, with Ovidian language and thought, are in
all probability his work, and can no longer be ascribed to
Tibullus either in whole or in part. The poem in honor of
Messalinus (n, 5) has, in fact, long occasioned difficulty, and
has been known for nearly a century as the ' suspected elegy. '
The other Ovidian elegy, n, 2, is evidently a continuation of
the Sulpicia group, and celebrates the birthday of the shy but
sorely smitten lover Cerinthus, who is now happily married
to Sulpicia and is therefore given his true name of Cornutus.
This poem is rightly assigned to the ' fourth book ' by Gruppe.
The conclusions which we have reached upon grounds of
language and metre are supported also by strong external
16 Op. cil. x, 71 ; n, 28; in, So, etc. This treatise of more than 700 pages
in all is a magnificent collection of material and, in spite of its technically
erroneous conclusion, is truly a masterly piece of work.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 159
evidence. Thus in the letters of the exile Ovid refers in
unmistakable terms to the issuance of the Appendix, when
he writes that it was Messalla who first induced him to ven-
ture upon the publication of his works. 17 He mentions
expressly the epicedion which he had composed upon the
death of his patron and which was sung in the forum (Pont.
i, 7, 29 fL), but he also refers again and again to poems which
he had composed in Messalla's honor in his early youth.
Thus he writes that not even the eldest son, Messalinus, can
remember the time when he " first began to venerate Mes-
salla " (Pont, n, 3, 79 ff. ). This last statement scarcely
applies, I think, to our Panegyric, but can be more fitly
referred to an earlier eulogy which we fortunately still possess
-I mean Catalepton ix (xi), contained in the Appendix
Vergiliana, a poem which celebrates Messalla's triumph over
Aquitania, and which was therefore written in the year
27 B. C. Ribbeck, Appendix Vergil. Proleg. 12, and Gesch.
d. rom. Die/it, u, 200, has already, on stylistic and metrical
grounds, identified the author of this elegy with ' Lygdamus,'
and both Marx (Pauly-Wissowa, i, 1326, s. v. Albius) and
Schanz, op. cit. 282, p. 233, speak approvingly of this view.
I find on examination that these judgments are strongly
supported by the language of the poem, and this elegy may
therefore be confidently regarded as the earliest extant work
of Ovid, written in his seventeenth year ; in fact, in a brief
monograph and admirable commentary which was published
some years ago, but has just come into my hands at the
moment of writing (De Ovidio elegiac in Messallam auctore,
Budapest, 1909), Nemethy, I find, has already clearly per-
ceived and, in large measure, convincingly demonstrated the
Ovidian authorship of the Catalepton. Messalinus, the eldest
son, quindecemvir 19 B. C. , consul 3 B. C. .
was probably born
about 38-36 B. C. , and can therefore scarcely have been more
than ten years of age when this eulogy was composed.
I have not yet spoken of the date of the second eulogy
17 Pont, u, 3, 75 ff. (addressed to Cotta, the younger son).
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? 160 Robert S. Radford [1920
which we possess, namely, the elaborate Panegyric of the
Messalla Collection. This brilliant and highly rhetorical
work is metrically more advanced than the Lygdamus elegies
and was certainly composed at a later date than these poems.
Undoubtedly, by an ingenious literary or artistic fiction, the
Panegyric itself purports to be written in the year of Messalla's
consulship, 31 B. C. , and the events of the years 30-27 B. C. ,
namely, the expeditions to Aquitania and the Orient, which
had already been expressly celebrated by Tibullus (i, 7) and
by the youthful Ovid (Catalepton, ix) , are nowhere mentioned
as having actually occurred. Special students of the Pane-
gyric, however, have long seen that the Gallic and Egyptian
campaigns are well known to the clever writer, and are most
skilfully introduced into the poem by way of prophecy (vati-
cinium ex eventu}. 18 The Panegyric was therefore composed
after the Lygdamus elegies, and the first draft of the poem
must have been drawn up about the year 23 B. C. ; it treats
chiefly the earlier career of Messalla, which had not previously
been made the subject of poetic encomium. We are not at
present fully in a position to state how Ovid was occupied
in the interval between the composition of the Lygdamus
poems and the Panegyric. It is true that H. de la Ville de
Mirmont confidently assumes (Jeunesse d'Ovide, 209) that
it was shortly after the two early marriages and about his
twentieth year that our poet visited Asia Minor and Sicily
in the suite of the poet Macer, and at first glance the Pane-
gyric also, in its present revised and perfected form, appears
to contain probable or possible references to Sicily (vss. 197,
200). We must carefully refrain, however, from drawing
hasty conclusions at present and must frankly admit that
we cannot at once determine the exact date of the year which
Ovid spent with Macer in Asia and Sicily (Pont, n, 10, 21 ft". ).
A brief word must be said, however, upon Ovid's relation
to the Ciris (the legend of Scylla and Nisus) in the Appendix
18 See Hartung, op. ell. 38 ff. ; Ehrengruber, op. cit. i, 7 ; x, 71 ; also Belling,
Albius Tibullus: Untersuchung, 205 ff.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 161
Vergiliana. As is well known, this poem offers special peculi-
arities and difficulties. Besides being partly a translation
from Greek sources, it everywhere closely follows the manner
of Catullus and, owing to the poet's prodigious memory, in
many passages it presents almost the appearance of a cento
compiled from Catullus and Vergil. It was composed after
the publication of the complete Aeneid (19 B. C. ), the whole
of which it imitates. The agreement therefore of the Ciris
with the usual Ovidian vocabulary is not quite so close as
we find in the other juvenile works, yet it is sufficient, I
believe, easily and conclusively to establish Ovidian author-
ship, especially when we consider that, by a species of /eeW<m
and in a purely temporary stage of his art, the poet has di-
vested himself of a part at least of his usual and natural
manner. Certain it is that the situation described in the
poem suits Ovid and Ovid alone. The work is addressed
(vss. 36 and 54) to the young " Messalla," by whom Mes-
salinus is evidently meant. The writer definitely renounces
(vss. 1-2) the public career to which he had formerly devoted
himself and of which he has now grown weary, but there is
not a word in the poem to warrant the usual assumption that
the author was a man of advanced years who had reached the
age of forty-five or fifty. 19 On the contrary, the situation is
precisely that described in Trist. iv, 10, 33-40, i. e. , the author
has held certain minor offices in the cursus honorum and now
refuses to go further in the pursuit of public honors. Hence
no one who has followed the career of Ovid with genuine
interest can read the opening lines of the Ciris without some
thrill of emotion. 20 Refusing to become a candidate for the
quaestorship and the senatorial rank at the age of twenty-
19 Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist, of Rom. Lit. , Eng. trans. 230, 2, i; Ribbeck,
Gesch. d. rb'm. Diclit. n, 355; Schanz, op. cit. 241.
20 Propertius also (in, 21, 25 ff. ) finely pictures himself as a student at
Athens in the school of Plato or the garden of Epicurus, but the scene is prob-
ably an imaginary one. At a more youthful age and with less experience of
the world, Horace too visited Athens and " sought for truth amid the groves
of the Academy " (Episl. n, 2, 45).
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? 162 Robert S. Radford [1920
six, the poet whose influence upon subsequent European
literature was to be so vast, hastens to Athens, 21 the " fair
garden of Cecrops," ! 2 and the true home of the intellectual
life, in order to drink, at the fountain source, of the ever-
living waters, and to worship at the shrine of the world's
four great Teachers. 23 With the over-sanguine temperament
of youth, he even dreams of composing at some future time
a great epic upon nature and the creation that shall rival
the sublime and majestic work of Lucretius. 24 The Ciris is
to be placed then about the middle of Ovid's spondaic period ;
it precedes the first Amores and also three or four other works
belonging to the carmina iuvenalia.
40
II. Transition from Sulpicia Elegies to Amores. Spondaic
Character of First Amores
The percentage of dactyls and of dactylic beginnings which
the juvenile poems of Ovid exhibit may be seen in a summary
form from the table below. In the case of elegiac verse the
percentage is here given for the whole distich, that is, it has
been obtained by combining the first four feet of the hex-
ameter and the first two feet of the pentameter ; in the case
of epic verse, the percentage is for the first four feet of the
hexameter. In the Lygdamus elegies, since the style of the
youthful poet is still imperfectly formed and he vacillates
between two proportions, I give the six Lygdamus elegies
first as a whole and secondly as forming two groups. It will
be found that the second group (4 and 5) gives results almost
! 1 Trist. i, 2, 77 : nee peto, quas quondam petii studiosus, Athenas.
22 Etsi me vario iactatum laudis amore
Irritaque expertum fallacis praemia vulgi
Cecropius suavis exspirans hortulus auras
Florentis viridi sophiae complectitur umbra. Ciris, 1-4.
23 Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus; cf. Ciris, 15: sapientia . . . quat-
tuor antiquis heredibus edita censors.
24 Ciris, 12-41. The plan was later fulfilled probably in the Aetna (the
language of which I have not yet examined in all its details) and in the pro-
oemium and fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses, also perhaps in the lost
Phaenomena and in parts of the Fasti.
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? Vol. li]
The Juvenile Works of Ovid
identical with the Sulpicia letters. The figures for the Pane-
gyric and the Ciris are those of Ehrengruber (op. cit. x, 5
and 21). The Aetna, which, according to every probability,
is also the work of Ovid, is omitted from the comparison
only because the exact figures are not accessible to me at the
present writing ; its proportions are. however, not very differ-
ent from those of the Ciris. There appears to be conclusive
evidence for including also the Culex, though I was long
prevented from examining the language of this poem by
erroneous impressions that I had at first formed respecting
the treatment of the caesura in this work. Finally, Pliny,
N. H. xxxii, 152, was wholly mistaken in his conjecture
(" fortassis ") that the Halieutica relates to the " fish of
the Black Sea " and was consequently written at the close
of the poet's life ; the schemata show conclusively that the
poem, wholly dependent as it is upon Greek books, belongs
to the Lygdamus and Sulpicia period.
THE JUVENILE WORKS OF OVID
Catalept.
TV
Halieut.
Lygdamus,
all six
Lygdamus,
four
Lygdamus,
two
Sulpicia
Letters,
IX.
62 vss.
130 hex.
elegies. 25
elegies,
i, 2, 3, 6.
elegies,
4i 5-
IV, 7-12.
290 vss.
1 60 vss.
130 vss.
40 vss.
SS. Dact. 2
53 44-8
222 42. 8
359 41-3
216 45. 0
144 36. 9
45 37-5
SS. Spond.
75 55--'
298 57. 2
5" 53. 7
264 55-o
246 63. 1
75 62. 5
I. 27 Dact.
46 71. 0
62 47. 7
1 66 57. 2
ioi 63. 1
65 50. 0
20 50. 0
I. Spond.
1 8 28. 1
68 52-3
124 42. 8
? ? 59 36-9
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? 164 Robert S. Radford [1920
A few words of explanation may be added to the tabular
statement. Ovid began in Catalepton, ix with a proportion
of dactyls which was wholly normal in the year 27 B. C. Thus
he has 44. 8% in the whole distich, which is as good as the
second and third books of Propertius, 28 as good also as the
eighth and third elegies of Tibullus' first book. 29 Yet he has
no limitations whatever in Catalepton, ix upon polysyllabic
endings in the pentameter; on the contrary, like Catullus
and like Propertius in his earlier work, he fairly revels in
their use (50%). In the Lygdamus elegies, however, and
in the Sulpicia letters, the ambitious and aspiring youth
seeks suddenly to pass from the longer endings to the more
elegant dissyllables of Tibullus, and is evidently preoccupied
with this problem and its difficulties. Under these conditions
throughout the Lygdamus poems he wavers greatly in his
composition, and, in one hundred and seventy verses (Lygd.
4 and 5, [Tib. ] rv, 7-12), he even sinks to the proportion of
Catullus, namely, about 37% in the distich, and to only
50% of dactylic beginnings. 30 This is of course excellent
Latin elegy, but it is not the kind that was most in vogue in
24 B. C. 31 It is only in the qualified or limited sense just ex-
28 Propertius has 44. 8% and 44. 7% in the second and third books respec-
tively. My figures are taken from Hultgren, op. cit. 23, who follows the five-
book division of Propertius.
29 Tibullus has 44. 8% in the eighth elegy (Pholoe) for the whole distich
and 45% in the third elegy. It is scarcely fanciful to see in the decline of
dactyls in the third elegy an expression of Tibullus' sadness and depression of
feeling during his illness at Corcyra ; we have the same phenomenon in Lyg-
damus' fifth elegy. My figures are taken from Cartault, Le distiqitc elegiaque
chez Tibitlle, Sulpicia, Lygdamus (Paris, 191 1), 7.
30 Figures for Catullus are given by Hultgren, op. cit. 15 ff. Catullus has
usually 58% to 6o r i of dactylic beginnings, but in Carm. 69-119 (319 vss. )
he has 36. 6^ of dactyls in the distich and only 47^ of dactylic beginnings.
31 Catullus wrote some of the best Latin elegy, and the naturalness and
directness of his style is due in part to his not exceeding the proportion named.
? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 153
A briefer outline, however, of the various opinions of
scholars cannot be wholly omitted here, especially as the
controversy over the Lygdamus poems constitutes one of the
most amazing chapters in the whole history of literary criti-
cism. I may begin with the so-called Messalla Collection.
This latter is a collection of famous poems emanating from
the household of the great Augustan statesman, Valerius
Messalla. In our fourteenth-century codices it forms a
single book, added to the unfinished second book of Tibullus
and apparently published, like the posthumous second book,
in 19 B. C. The Italian scholars of the fifteenth century have
wrongly divided this additional book into two, the so-called
third and fourth books of Tibullus, and for the purpose of
avoiding confusion it seems best to retain this division.
(Probably, as all the mediaeval citations show, there were
originally only ' two books of Tibullus,' and the second book
of 1 1 ii verses was first divided at the close of the Middle
Ages into the second and third books which our late codices
exhibit ; see Ullrich, op. clt. 69. ) In the six elegies of the
third book a youth apparently of eighteen or nineteen, yet
already famous as a poet and employing the pseudonym of
Lygdamus, seeks to w r in back the love of the fair Neaera,
who has divorced him. It is probable, too, that he has given
cause for the divorce, though naturally this is not admitted
and he pleads a difficult case with wonderful facility. Al-
though the poems of unhappy love easily admit. of being
turned to ridicule by an unfair critic like Voss, I know of no
juster criticism upon them than that of Teuffel, written in
mature life and before he (like Dissen) had lent an ear to the
slanders of Voss : " These elegies, through the freshness and
sincerity of the feeling and the graceful ease of the verse, do
their author no discredit. " 10 As is well known, Lygdamus
403. Although the author does not fully understand the real issues, I \vish
to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to the historical part of this fine study.
10 Quoted by Kleemann, op. cil. 17, from Pauly's Rcalcncyclopaedie, vi. 2,
1950 (1852).
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? 154 Robert S. Radford [1920
tells us the exact date of his birth (5, 18). " My parents
first beheld my birthday," he says, " in the year in which
both the consuls met an equal fate " (cum cecidit fato consul
uterque pari) he means in 43 B. C. , when Hirtius and Pansa
were both slain in battle before Mutina. Now precisely the
same pentameter (cum cecidit, etc. ) is used by Ovid, Trist.
iv, 10, 6, to give his own birth-date of 43 B. C. The Renais-
sance editors, Scaliger and Vulpius, perhaps attached less
importance to the dozen or more whole lines and half-lines
which Ovid and Lygdamus have in common, and the numerous
other amazing coincidences, but they knew well that, in the
case of different poets, the date of birth and the birth-line
cannot be borrowed. Wishing therefore to preserve the third
book for Tibullus and to prevent it from being assigned to
Ovid, they pronounced the birth-line an interpolation from
the Tristia and bracketed the whole distich. The same pro-
cedure was followed later by Broukhuysen (1708), Wunderlich
(1817), Bahrens (1876), and Ramsay (1887).
Matters remained in this state until the German peasant
poet of Mecklenburg and the great classical translator, Johann
Heinrich Voss, appeared upon the scene (1810). Voss's works
abound in homely and realistic scenes of village and country-
life, and his idyl, Luise, published in 1795, furnished Goethe
with a model for Hermann und Dorothea. He was naturally
much attracted by the simple pastoral elegy of Tibullus, and
when he came, in the third book, to the poems of Lygdamus
with their brilliant pictures of elegance and wealth, he saw
at once that this courtly city poet could not possibly be
Tibullus. He therefore removed the name of Tibullus from
the third book and substituted that of Lygdamus. So far
he showed himself an excellent critic, but he did not stop
here. He poured forth against the romanticist masquerading
under the name of the unworldly Tibullus a torrent of vitupera-
tion and of coarse abuse that is well-nigh incredible, and that
many of our editors of Tibullus and many of our orthodox
historians of Roman literature have ever since repeated in the
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 155
most credulous or most servile fashion, but naturally in lan-
guage somewhat more decorous and more restrained. 11 Al-
though Voss never possessed any great vogue in Germany at
large as a critic, his authority among classical philologians
was immense, and it is chiefly to his violent attack upon the
Lygdamus elegies that we must ascribe the hopeless con-
fusion that has since arisen among scholars and that has
made the question of the authorship of these poems an in-
soluble ' mystery. ' A part of the responsibility for the en-
tanglement belongs, however, to W. Hertzberg, the well-
known editor of Propertius. He also was possessed of great
authority in his day, although his conclusions were usually
hasty and Plessis, Etudes sur Properce, 80, charges him with
an " incurable recklessness " (une incurable legerete). Otto
Friedrich Gruppe, a critic of the first order, had just published
his standard work, Die rdmische Elegie (1838). In a brilliant
and forceful chapter of this book (pp. 105-143) he confidently
identifies Lygdamus with Ovid and Neaera with Ovid's second
wife, the " blameless spouse " of the Tristia, iv, 10, 71, who
did not, however, long remain married to the poet. Hertz-
berg at once came forward to answer Gruppe and, as Teuffel
believed (op. cit. 380), to make the identification with Ovid
forever impossible. He apparently believed that the Her aides,
which stood first in the older editions, were the earliest works
of Ovid. Naturally he experienced little difficulty in showing
that these poems consist almost entirely of dactyls, 12 and
11 Of course every classical scholar must entertain the kindliest feeling and
the greatest respect for the famous translator of the Odyssey and of the Georgics,
but no account of the Lygdamus controversy can be intelligible which fails
to bring out strongly Voss's violent prejudices and his scurrilous language.
Fuss, op. cit. 54, cites numerous examples of the latter, and protests earnestly
against such unfair methods of controversy. It appears to the present writer,
however, that greater blame attaches to Voss's obsequious followers than to
Voss himself. For Voss was a privileged character as a man of genius who
had a distinct point of view the simple life and the return to nature. Many
of the scholars, however, who have been content to take their criticism at
second hand from Voss, have no special point of view and no excuse that seems
valid.
" In his versification Ovid skips and dances, so that his hexameter, even
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? 156 Robert S. Radford [1920
show an excessive accumulation of rhetorical effects. There-
fore, he concludes, the Lygdamus elegies, which are written
in spondees and in a natural style, cannot possibly be the
work of Ovid. With the recklessness which Plessis has
justly noted, he adds : " These characteristics of the metre
are precisely those which stand out most sharply in youth. "
The truth is just the reverse, and Hultgren correctly lays
down the rule that the more the poet advances towards the
prime of life, the more the proportion of dactyls and of dactylic
beginnings increases. 13
The majority of careful students, be it said to their credit,
have never accepted the prejudiced views of Voss : thus the
elegies have been vigorously defended by Spohn (1819), by
Golbery, the Lemaire editor (1826), by Fuss (1867), and by
Cranstoun, the English translator (1872). Much more
moderate views are also to be found in Cruttwell (1877),
Ribbeck (1889), and Sellar (1892). Finally, Plessis, in his
Pocsie Latine (1909), in the chapter devoted to Lygdamus
(pp. 361-376), has at once paid a beautiful tribute to the
genuine merits of these elegies and given a noble exemplifica-
tion of the true critic's art. In his view, they proceed from
a youthful poet of rare and brilliant genius, whose native
generosity and tenderness of feeling have not yet been spoiled
by contact with the corruptions of the world.
Gruppe had made it probable that the Lygdamus elegies
are the work of Ovid, but he had not proved it. This proof
was, however, definitely rendered by S. Kleemann (1876),
who, in an elaborate dissertation, with the help of Burman's
in the more serious poems (Tristia and Fasti), has nothing but dactyls in almost
a half of the verses " (Hallische Jahrbiicher i [1839], 1024 ff. , quoted by Teuffel,
op. dt. 380 ff. , and by Kleemann, op. fit. 42 ff. ).
13 Op. fit. 29 : " Hexametri Ovidiani illustria exempla sunt, quae decent
eo magis crescere numerum dactylorum, quo magis ipse in arte procedat. . . .
Dubitari amplius nequit, quin poetarum elegiacorum poemata, minus dactylice
in principio distichi constructa, inter opera iuvenilis aetatis referenda, carmina
autem cum plurimis initiis dactylicis florenti aetati adnumeranda sint. " Klee-
mann, op. fit. 29, justly lays down the same canon for Tibullus : "arte erudita
in hexametris dactylus crebrior fit. "
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 157
Index, examined the language minutely and pronounced it
wholly Ovidian. It should be added that Kleemann used
only a part of the available material from the Index and the
Ovidian corpus perhaps not more than one-half but
even this, in my judgment, is far more than is strictly neces-
sary for purposes of valid proof. Kleemann's study was much
praised by the reviewers, but otherwise it has received little
attention. 14 The reasons for this neglect are not far to seek.
Many scholars had accepted without question and without
independent study the distorted views of Voss which came
to them in a slightly diluted form through the voluminous
commentary of Dissen ; others lay entrenched in fancied
security behind the barrier of the metre which Hertzberg
had so conveniently and so confidently provided. Strangely
enough, the Index to Ovid remained practically a closed book.
As soon as the Burman Index is used, the whole Messalla
Appendix is seen to be unmistakably the work of the youthful
Ovid, aetate eighteen to twenty-four. 15 There is complete
identity of vocabulary, and all the most characteristic Ovidian-
isms are in the Appendix, except only those which were de-
veloped later for the sake of the virtuosity and which are
conveniently enumerated by Eschenburg. The evidence
which is drawn merely from repeated tags and half-verses,
without distinctive peculiarity of usage, is of course incon-
clusive for an author like Ovid who borrows so freely from
contemporary poets, but the proof that rests upon the plain-
est and simplest idioms often recurring is one that scarcely
admits of doubt or question. The Lygdamus poems, com-
11 An honorable exception is Professor K. P. Harrington's scholarly edition
of the Roman elegiac poets (Selections, 1914). Professor Harrington com-
ments on the possible identity of Ovid and Lygdamus with complete candor
and with an open mind, although he does not commit himself definitely (Introd.
36).
15 In justice to myself, it is only fair to state that I reached my conclusions
as to the identity of Lygdamus and Ovid at a time when I was acquainted
neither with Gruppe's results nor with those of Kleemann and Ehrengruber,
but was obliged to rely upon the simple text of Ovid and Eichert's lexicon to
the Metamorphoses (Hanover, 1886).
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? 1-8 Robert S. Radford [1920
posed at eighteen or nineteen, contain about ninety specific
and striking Ovidianisms ; Kleemann gives about half of
these. The Panegyric Upon Messalla contains probably more
than a hundred Ovidianisms ; Ehrengruber has already called
attention to all of these, and in order to explain their occur-
rence, has propounded the ingenious theory that the Pane-
gyric was a school exercise composed in a later age by some
pupil of the rhetoricians who had access to all the works of
Ovid and pilfered most freely from them all. 16 Next, as the
metre shows, come the six little letters of Sulpicia, the kins-
woman of Messalla, in which this lady (with Ovid's sympa-
thetic assistance) undertakes the part of wooing the shy
youth, Cerinthus; they contain more than twelve Ovidian-
isms. About 21 B. C. , aetate twenty-two, Ovid composed the
five charming elegies giving in fuller form the story of the
same pair of happy lovers, Sulpicia and Cerinthus ; they
show more than forty Ovidianisms and 47. 4% of dactyls,
thus approaching closely to the proportion of the first Amores
(about 48. 5%). The exquisite imitation of Tibullus, Nulla
tuum nobis (iv, 13), that closes the collection, has ten Ovidian-
isms. Since Ovid edits the unfinished second book, the two
spondaic elegies, with Ovidian language and thought, are in
all probability his work, and can no longer be ascribed to
Tibullus either in whole or in part. The poem in honor of
Messalinus (n, 5) has, in fact, long occasioned difficulty, and
has been known for nearly a century as the ' suspected elegy. '
The other Ovidian elegy, n, 2, is evidently a continuation of
the Sulpicia group, and celebrates the birthday of the shy but
sorely smitten lover Cerinthus, who is now happily married
to Sulpicia and is therefore given his true name of Cornutus.
This poem is rightly assigned to the ' fourth book ' by Gruppe.
The conclusions which we have reached upon grounds of
language and metre are supported also by strong external
16 Op. cil. x, 71 ; n, 28; in, So, etc. This treatise of more than 700 pages
in all is a magnificent collection of material and, in spite of its technically
erroneous conclusion, is truly a masterly piece of work.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 159
evidence. Thus in the letters of the exile Ovid refers in
unmistakable terms to the issuance of the Appendix, when
he writes that it was Messalla who first induced him to ven-
ture upon the publication of his works. 17 He mentions
expressly the epicedion which he had composed upon the
death of his patron and which was sung in the forum (Pont.
i, 7, 29 fL), but he also refers again and again to poems which
he had composed in Messalla's honor in his early youth.
Thus he writes that not even the eldest son, Messalinus, can
remember the time when he " first began to venerate Mes-
salla " (Pont, n, 3, 79 ff. ). This last statement scarcely
applies, I think, to our Panegyric, but can be more fitly
referred to an earlier eulogy which we fortunately still possess
-I mean Catalepton ix (xi), contained in the Appendix
Vergiliana, a poem which celebrates Messalla's triumph over
Aquitania, and which was therefore written in the year
27 B. C. Ribbeck, Appendix Vergil. Proleg. 12, and Gesch.
d. rom. Die/it, u, 200, has already, on stylistic and metrical
grounds, identified the author of this elegy with ' Lygdamus,'
and both Marx (Pauly-Wissowa, i, 1326, s. v. Albius) and
Schanz, op. cit. 282, p. 233, speak approvingly of this view.
I find on examination that these judgments are strongly
supported by the language of the poem, and this elegy may
therefore be confidently regarded as the earliest extant work
of Ovid, written in his seventeenth year ; in fact, in a brief
monograph and admirable commentary which was published
some years ago, but has just come into my hands at the
moment of writing (De Ovidio elegiac in Messallam auctore,
Budapest, 1909), Nemethy, I find, has already clearly per-
ceived and, in large measure, convincingly demonstrated the
Ovidian authorship of the Catalepton. Messalinus, the eldest
son, quindecemvir 19 B. C. , consul 3 B. C. .
was probably born
about 38-36 B. C. , and can therefore scarcely have been more
than ten years of age when this eulogy was composed.
I have not yet spoken of the date of the second eulogy
17 Pont, u, 3, 75 ff. (addressed to Cotta, the younger son).
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? 160 Robert S. Radford [1920
which we possess, namely, the elaborate Panegyric of the
Messalla Collection. This brilliant and highly rhetorical
work is metrically more advanced than the Lygdamus elegies
and was certainly composed at a later date than these poems.
Undoubtedly, by an ingenious literary or artistic fiction, the
Panegyric itself purports to be written in the year of Messalla's
consulship, 31 B. C. , and the events of the years 30-27 B. C. ,
namely, the expeditions to Aquitania and the Orient, which
had already been expressly celebrated by Tibullus (i, 7) and
by the youthful Ovid (Catalepton, ix) , are nowhere mentioned
as having actually occurred. Special students of the Pane-
gyric, however, have long seen that the Gallic and Egyptian
campaigns are well known to the clever writer, and are most
skilfully introduced into the poem by way of prophecy (vati-
cinium ex eventu}. 18 The Panegyric was therefore composed
after the Lygdamus elegies, and the first draft of the poem
must have been drawn up about the year 23 B. C. ; it treats
chiefly the earlier career of Messalla, which had not previously
been made the subject of poetic encomium. We are not at
present fully in a position to state how Ovid was occupied
in the interval between the composition of the Lygdamus
poems and the Panegyric. It is true that H. de la Ville de
Mirmont confidently assumes (Jeunesse d'Ovide, 209) that
it was shortly after the two early marriages and about his
twentieth year that our poet visited Asia Minor and Sicily
in the suite of the poet Macer, and at first glance the Pane-
gyric also, in its present revised and perfected form, appears
to contain probable or possible references to Sicily (vss. 197,
200). We must carefully refrain, however, from drawing
hasty conclusions at present and must frankly admit that
we cannot at once determine the exact date of the year which
Ovid spent with Macer in Asia and Sicily (Pont, n, 10, 21 ft". ).
A brief word must be said, however, upon Ovid's relation
to the Ciris (the legend of Scylla and Nisus) in the Appendix
18 See Hartung, op. ell. 38 ff. ; Ehrengruber, op. cit. i, 7 ; x, 71 ; also Belling,
Albius Tibullus: Untersuchung, 205 ff.
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? Vol. li] The Juvenile Works of Ovid 161
Vergiliana. As is well known, this poem offers special peculi-
arities and difficulties. Besides being partly a translation
from Greek sources, it everywhere closely follows the manner
of Catullus and, owing to the poet's prodigious memory, in
many passages it presents almost the appearance of a cento
compiled from Catullus and Vergil. It was composed after
the publication of the complete Aeneid (19 B. C. ), the whole
of which it imitates. The agreement therefore of the Ciris
with the usual Ovidian vocabulary is not quite so close as
we find in the other juvenile works, yet it is sufficient, I
believe, easily and conclusively to establish Ovidian author-
ship, especially when we consider that, by a species of /eeW<m
and in a purely temporary stage of his art, the poet has di-
vested himself of a part at least of his usual and natural
manner. Certain it is that the situation described in the
poem suits Ovid and Ovid alone. The work is addressed
(vss. 36 and 54) to the young " Messalla," by whom Mes-
salinus is evidently meant. The writer definitely renounces
(vss. 1-2) the public career to which he had formerly devoted
himself and of which he has now grown weary, but there is
not a word in the poem to warrant the usual assumption that
the author was a man of advanced years who had reached the
age of forty-five or fifty. 19 On the contrary, the situation is
precisely that described in Trist. iv, 10, 33-40, i. e. , the author
has held certain minor offices in the cursus honorum and now
refuses to go further in the pursuit of public honors. Hence
no one who has followed the career of Ovid with genuine
interest can read the opening lines of the Ciris without some
thrill of emotion. 20 Refusing to become a candidate for the
quaestorship and the senatorial rank at the age of twenty-
19 Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist, of Rom. Lit. , Eng. trans. 230, 2, i; Ribbeck,
Gesch. d. rb'm. Diclit. n, 355; Schanz, op. cit. 241.
20 Propertius also (in, 21, 25 ff. ) finely pictures himself as a student at
Athens in the school of Plato or the garden of Epicurus, but the scene is prob-
ably an imaginary one. At a more youthful age and with less experience of
the world, Horace too visited Athens and " sought for truth amid the groves
of the Academy " (Episl. n, 2, 45).
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? 162 Robert S. Radford [1920
six, the poet whose influence upon subsequent European
literature was to be so vast, hastens to Athens, 21 the " fair
garden of Cecrops," ! 2 and the true home of the intellectual
life, in order to drink, at the fountain source, of the ever-
living waters, and to worship at the shrine of the world's
four great Teachers. 23 With the over-sanguine temperament
of youth, he even dreams of composing at some future time
a great epic upon nature and the creation that shall rival
the sublime and majestic work of Lucretius. 24 The Ciris is
to be placed then about the middle of Ovid's spondaic period ;
it precedes the first Amores and also three or four other works
belonging to the carmina iuvenalia.
40
II. Transition from Sulpicia Elegies to Amores. Spondaic
Character of First Amores
The percentage of dactyls and of dactylic beginnings which
the juvenile poems of Ovid exhibit may be seen in a summary
form from the table below. In the case of elegiac verse the
percentage is here given for the whole distich, that is, it has
been obtained by combining the first four feet of the hex-
ameter and the first two feet of the pentameter ; in the case
of epic verse, the percentage is for the first four feet of the
hexameter. In the Lygdamus elegies, since the style of the
youthful poet is still imperfectly formed and he vacillates
between two proportions, I give the six Lygdamus elegies
first as a whole and secondly as forming two groups. It will
be found that the second group (4 and 5) gives results almost
! 1 Trist. i, 2, 77 : nee peto, quas quondam petii studiosus, Athenas.
22 Etsi me vario iactatum laudis amore
Irritaque expertum fallacis praemia vulgi
Cecropius suavis exspirans hortulus auras
Florentis viridi sophiae complectitur umbra. Ciris, 1-4.
23 Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus; cf. Ciris, 15: sapientia . . . quat-
tuor antiquis heredibus edita censors.
24 Ciris, 12-41. The plan was later fulfilled probably in the Aetna (the
language of which I have not yet examined in all its details) and in the pro-
oemium and fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses, also perhaps in the lost
Phaenomena and in parts of the Fasti.
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? Vol. li]
The Juvenile Works of Ovid
identical with the Sulpicia letters. The figures for the Pane-
gyric and the Ciris are those of Ehrengruber (op. cit. x, 5
and 21). The Aetna, which, according to every probability,
is also the work of Ovid, is omitted from the comparison
only because the exact figures are not accessible to me at the
present writing ; its proportions are. however, not very differ-
ent from those of the Ciris. There appears to be conclusive
evidence for including also the Culex, though I was long
prevented from examining the language of this poem by
erroneous impressions that I had at first formed respecting
the treatment of the caesura in this work. Finally, Pliny,
N. H. xxxii, 152, was wholly mistaken in his conjecture
(" fortassis ") that the Halieutica relates to the " fish of
the Black Sea " and was consequently written at the close
of the poet's life ; the schemata show conclusively that the
poem, wholly dependent as it is upon Greek books, belongs
to the Lygdamus and Sulpicia period.
THE JUVENILE WORKS OF OVID
Catalept.
TV
Halieut.
Lygdamus,
all six
Lygdamus,
four
Lygdamus,
two
Sulpicia
Letters,
IX.
62 vss.
130 hex.
elegies. 25
elegies,
i, 2, 3, 6.
elegies,
4i 5-
IV, 7-12.
290 vss.
1 60 vss.
130 vss.
40 vss.
SS. Dact. 2
53 44-8
222 42. 8
359 41-3
216 45. 0
144 36. 9
45 37-5
SS. Spond.
75 55--'
298 57. 2
5" 53. 7
264 55-o
246 63. 1
75 62. 5
I. 27 Dact.
46 71. 0
62 47. 7
1 66 57. 2
ioi 63. 1
65 50. 0
20 50. 0
I. Spond.
1 8 28. 1
68 52-3
124 42. 8
? ? 59 36-9
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? 164 Robert S. Radford [1920
A few words of explanation may be added to the tabular
statement. Ovid began in Catalepton, ix with a proportion
of dactyls which was wholly normal in the year 27 B. C. Thus
he has 44. 8% in the whole distich, which is as good as the
second and third books of Propertius, 28 as good also as the
eighth and third elegies of Tibullus' first book. 29 Yet he has
no limitations whatever in Catalepton, ix upon polysyllabic
endings in the pentameter; on the contrary, like Catullus
and like Propertius in his earlier work, he fairly revels in
their use (50%). In the Lygdamus elegies, however, and
in the Sulpicia letters, the ambitious and aspiring youth
seeks suddenly to pass from the longer endings to the more
elegant dissyllables of Tibullus, and is evidently preoccupied
with this problem and its difficulties. Under these conditions
throughout the Lygdamus poems he wavers greatly in his
composition, and, in one hundred and seventy verses (Lygd.
4 and 5, [Tib. ] rv, 7-12), he even sinks to the proportion of
Catullus, namely, about 37% in the distich, and to only
50% of dactylic beginnings. 30 This is of course excellent
Latin elegy, but it is not the kind that was most in vogue in
24 B. C. 31 It is only in the qualified or limited sense just ex-
28 Propertius has 44. 8% and 44. 7% in the second and third books respec-
tively. My figures are taken from Hultgren, op. cit. 23, who follows the five-
book division of Propertius.
29 Tibullus has 44. 8% in the eighth elegy (Pholoe) for the whole distich
and 45% in the third elegy. It is scarcely fanciful to see in the decline of
dactyls in the third elegy an expression of Tibullus' sadness and depression of
feeling during his illness at Corcyra ; we have the same phenomenon in Lyg-
damus' fifth elegy. My figures are taken from Cartault, Le distiqitc elegiaque
chez Tibitlle, Sulpicia, Lygdamus (Paris, 191 1), 7.
30 Figures for Catullus are given by Hultgren, op. cit. 15 ff. Catullus has
usually 58% to 6o r i of dactylic beginnings, but in Carm. 69-119 (319 vss. )
he has 36. 6^ of dactyls in the distich and only 47^ of dactylic beginnings.
31 Catullus wrote some of the best Latin elegy, and the naturalness and
directness of his style is due in part to his not exceeding the proportion named.
