The Poems of Tibullus and the Elegies of Sulpicia

) Pius, Later Annotations, ch. 115: "The prince of elegiac poets is, without a doubt, Albius Tibullus, because he acts the part of one who truly, not dissemblingly or obsequiously, loves, and consequently is insane. Now he is proud, now he supplicates, he nods, he refuses, he threatens, he intercedes, he disdains. What he wanted, he does not want; what he wished for, he flees, dissenting with himself, so that you would believe him to be turned upon the true wheel of Cupid." Among more recent poets, Hercules Strozza may clearly be seen to have assumed our poet's genius, in whose Amours* I have seen nothing softer or more ingenious, and I perceived a unique pleasure in comparing them with many of our passages. But Sannazarius, too, where he departs from his Propertius, expresses our poet not unsuccessfully. You could add Pontanus, if he were not too soft and loose. Among the French, the most sweet poet Lasare equals, and sometimes surpasses, the elegance of Tibullus; in his own translation of the first elegy of the first book, whatever Roman charm he removed, he seems to compensate for with French grace. I need not enumerate those who, in our own age, both among us and among the British, can be seen to have assumed the genius of Tibullus.
**) Scaliger, in Earlier Castigations on Tibullus: "All the copies of this poet, however many exist in Italy, are too recent to be considered among ancient books."

Unlike our poets, who do not possess the girl whom they celebrate as possessing, but pretend her, and do not feel the force and affection of love, but are ingenious in imitating it and expressing it plausibly.

It was therefore to be hoped that we might have more poems of this poet, who is so charming and refined in his total simplicity, or at least that those which survive had reached us intact and uncorrupted. Indeed, we have only fragments and limbs of many elegies. For chance—to which we owe the greater part of ancient writers—preserved some old manuscript, but one badly treated and truncated by the injury of time, from which those manuscripts we have flowed. Therefore, all manuscripts of Tibullus were copied in the 14th and 15th centuries.