Tibullus, ALBIUS, was probably born at Gabii about 54 B.C. His prænomen and parentage are unknown; his estate was much reduced in the subsequent confiscations by which Octavian and Antony rewarded their legionaries. 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, head of a literary coterie only less attractive than that of Mæcenas. As in Queen Anne's day, literature was a direct passport to office under government, and the already marked poetic gifts of Tibullus procured him a place on the staff of Messala 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 decorations, but these could not countervail his repugnance to a soldier's life. Accordingly the close of the war found him dividing his time between the society of Rome and the retirement of Pedum at the base of the Tusculan and Sabine hills. He fell in love with a 'grass widow,' Plania by name, whose husband was on service in Cilicia. Under the sobriquet of Delia she is the heroine of his first book of elegies, but his devotion did not survive the deception she practised on him, finding as he did that he was not her only lover. It was during the earlier period of this attachment that, at Messala's instance, he started with that statesman on a mission to Asia; but, having sickened on the voyage, he got no farther than Coreyra. In his second book of elegies 'Delia' is replaced by 'Nemesis'—this innamorata being a fashionable courtesan, with many other admirers besides Tibullus, who bemoans his bondage to her and stigmatises her rapacity, but yet cannot bring himself to drop her.
Tibullus died 19 B.C., immediately after Virgil, universally deplored in Rome, and years afterwards the subject of a magnificent elegy by Ovid. Doubt has been thrown on his identity with the Albius of Horace, but we are loth 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 capacities of refined enjoyment. His character, amiable, generous, loyal to his friends and constant to the mistresses who deceived him, but wanting in strength and energy, 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 properly so called. Grace, tenderness, pathos, conveyed in verse smooth without monotony, can, however, only abate, not remove, the impression he leaves of lack of the dramatic force characteristic of Propertius or of the masterly range commanded by Ovid. The third book can hardly, even in part, be considered as his, while the fourth, also by another hand, is yet memorable for the eleven poems on the loves of Sulpicia and Cerinthus—Sulpicia's being unique as specimens of a Roman lady's passionate outburst in verse.
Till Lachmann's edition (1829) not much was done for the text of Tibullus, though his interpretation has advanced but little beyond the older Heyne. The most critical and on the whole useful edition is that of Bahrens (1878). See Ribbeck's History of Latin Poetry; the Rev. James Davies, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius ('Ancient Classics' series, 1876); Teuffel; and Sellar. The best English translation is Dr James Cranstoun's (Edin. 1872).