Albius Tibullus (c. 54–19 BCE) was a Roman poet and almost-contemporary of Ovid. Not much is known of him. Nonetheless, the preceding link from Britannica and this Wikipedia page (as usual handle with care) do tell us quite a bit. Tibullus shared with Ovid their patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (also on Wikipedia). Tibullus' genre was the Elegy (see Latin literature). His extant works can be found online:
The Elegies of Tibullus at The Latin Library
Works by Tibullus at Project Gutenberg
English translation only: Selections from Tibullus
Tibullus in print. In the visual arts, the British painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one of the foremost painters depicting classical antiquity of his age, painted
Tibullus at Delia's
1866 Oil on Wood, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
from the Wikimedia Commons
Stoa Poikile has Tibullus: the poet of love and melancholy.
Ovid wrote an Elegy for the Dead Tibullus (Amores, Book III, IX)
If his mother grieved for Memnon: his mother for Achilles,
and sad fate thus can touch the great goddesses,
weep, Elegy, and loose your tight-bound hair!
ah, only too truly from this was your name taken! –
Tibullus, your own poet, your own glory,
burns, a worthless corpse, on the tall pyre.
Look, Venus’s boy carries an upturned quiver,
his bow is broken, his torch without its flame:
see, how he goes sadly with drooping wings,
and how he beats his naked breast with fierce hand!
His tears are caught in the hair scattered about his neck,
and break in resounding sobs from his mouth.
So he looked, they say, at his brother Aeneas’s funeral,
when it left your palace, glorious Iulus:
and Venus is no less grieved by Tibullus’s death,
than when the wild boar gashed Adonis’s thigh.
And poets are called sacred, and beloved of the gods:
there are also those who grant us divine inspiration.
Yet greedy death profanes all sacred things:
of all things his shadowy hands take possession!
What help were his divine parents to Thracian Orpheus,
or his songs that overcame the astonished creatures?
And Apollo, father of Linus also, in the deep woods,
cried ‘aelinon!’ they say, as he struck the reluctant lyre.
And Homer, by whom poet’s mouths are moistened
as if by an eternal stream from the Muse’s fountains –
he also at day’s end sank down to dark Avernus.
Poetry alone escapes the greedy pyre:
The poets works survive, the tale of Troy’s sufferings
and the nocturnal guile that un-wove the tardy web.
So Nemesis, and Delia, will have a name forever,
the last your recent worship, the other your former love.
What use are your rituals? What use the Egyptian
sistrum? What use those nights sleeping in an empty bed?
When evil fate drags down the good – forgive my words! –
it incites me to believe there are no gods.
Live piously – you die: obey the rites piously, obeying
death drags you from the temple’s echo to the hollow tomb:
Place your faith in poetry’s truth – look, there, Tibullus lies:
of all there hardly remains what might fill a little urn!
Did the funeral fires consume you, sacred poet,
that had no fear of feeding on your heart?
Flames that could commit such wickedness
would burn the golden shrines of the sacred gods!
Venus, who holds the heights of Eryx turned away her face:
some say she could not hold back her tears.
But still it is better so, than that Corfu’s earth
had covered you, unknown, with common soil.
Here, your mother closed your wet eyes in death
and paid the last rites to your ashes:
Here your sister, with torn and unkempt hair,
came to share her sorrowing mother’s grief,
Your Delia said: ‘I am lucky, to have been loved by you,’
stepping from the pyre: ‘you lived when I was your flame.’
while Nemesis said: ‘Why is my hurt your grief?
His failing hand held me as he died.’
Yet if anything is left of us but a shadow and a name
Tibullus lives in some valley of Elysium.
You come to meet him, ivy wreathing your young brows,
learned Catullus, with your Calvus:
and you, also, Gallus, too free with your blood and life,
if that charge is false of violating Caesar’s friendship.
Your spirit will accompany them: if the body ends as spirit,
gracious Tibullus, added to the numbers of the blessed.
I pray that your bones rest, at peace, in their protecting urn,
and that the earth lies lightly on your grave!
Translation and e-text courtesy A.S. Kline
A 17th century translation (George Stepney)
