Elegies
Elegiae
A simple rural life shared with a loved one is worth more than the wealth and status that military campaigning could bring, even to a poet who has himself served on campaign and knows what that wealth looks like up close.
- pastoral retirement idealized against military ambition
- gentler, more restrained tone than Propertius
- written by a poet who himself served on the campaigns he rejects in verse
- praised by Quintilian as the most polished Latin elegist
Two books of elegiac poetry, gentler and more idealizing in tone than Propertius's turbulent Cynthia poems, built around Tibullus's love for a woman he calls Delia and, in the second book, another called Nemesis, set against a recurring fantasy of quiet rural retirement that the poems repeatedly hold up against the wealth and glory available through military service under his patron Messalla, on whose campaigns Tibullus himself served. The poems' restrained diction and pastoral idealism, love and simplicity opposed to war and greed, gave Tibullus a reputation among later Roman critics, including Quintilian, as the most polished of the Latin elegists.
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