Tibullus book 1
work by Albius Tibullus
Tibullus book 1 is the first of two books of poems by the Roman poet Tibullus (c. 56–c.19 BC). It contains ten poems written in Latin elegiac couplets, and is thought to have been published about 27 or 26 BC.
Five of the poems (1, 2, 3, 5, 6) speak of Tibullus's love for a woman called Delia; three (4, 8 and 9) of his love for a boy called Marathus. The seventh is a poem celebrating the triumph in 27 BC of Tibullus's patron Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, following his victory in a military campaign against the Aquitanians. In 1, 5, and 10 he also writes of his deep love for life in the countryside and his dislike of war, a theme which both begins and ends the book.
The elegies of Tibullus are famous for the beauty of their Latin. Of the four great love-elegists of ancient Rome (the other three were Cornelius Gallus, Propertius, and Ovid), the rhetorician Quintillian praised him for being "the most polished and elegant". Modern critics have found him "enigmatic" and psychologically complex.
The structure of book 1
Book 1 of Tibullus has ten poems, the same number as Virgil's Eclogues and Horace's Satires 1, which were published within the same decade. The average length of the poems in book 1 (c.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tibullus book 1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.