TIBULLUS, ALERTS, a Roman ele• giac poet; born presumably in Gabii, about 54 B. C. His prmnomen and par entage are unknown, though he was cer tainly born to a considerable estate. His father seems to have died early, but his mother and sister survived him. While still a youth he acquired the friendship of the orator, poet, and statesman, M. Valerius Messala, on whose staff he was commissioned by Augustus, 30 B. C., to crush a revolt in Aquitania. In this campaign the poet displayed capacity enough to win him distinction and dec orations, but he disliked a soldier's life and spent his time after the war in Ro man society and in retirement at Pe durn. He fell in love with Plania, whose husband was on service in Cilicia. Un der the sobriquet of Delia she is the heroine of his first book of elegies, but his devotion did not survive the discovery that he was not her only lover. In his second book of elegies Delia is replaced by Nemesis — this inamorata being a fashionable courtesan, with many other admirers besides Tibullus.
Tibullus died in 19 B. c., immediately after Vergil, universally deplored in Rome, and years afterward the subject of a magnificent elegy by Ovid. Doubt has been thrown on his identity with the Albius of Horace, but we are loath to part with the picture that poet gives of him, pacing pensively his woodland walks at Pedum, blessed with fortune, with personal beauty, and with all the ca pacities of refined enjoyment. His char acter, amiable, generous, loyal to his friends, is reflected in his poems, which, "most musical, most melancholy," by their limpid clearness and their unaffected finish still justify Quintilian in placing him at the head of Roman elegy prop erly so called. The third book can hard ly, even in part, be considered as his, while the fourth, also by another hand, is yet memorable for the 11 poems on the loves of Sulpicia and Cerinthus—Sul picia's being unique as specimens of a Roman lady's passionate outburst in verse.