OF TIBULLUS

But learned men did not have a sufficiently perceived grasp of the genius of the elegy. For what, I ask, is that in which it mainly dwells? Is it in some subtle position and narration of things or thoughts, exacted according to the rules of dialectics, severe and bitter? Or is it in that you expose what you have scrutinized with diligent consideration and much judgment in diligent and chastened speech? Indeed, its genius and nature are contained in this: that it expresses the senses and affections of a moved and disturbed mind, whether they are softer or have already relaxed and subsided from a graver impetus. *) In this it reigns; in this it is entirely; it takes this as the main argument to be treated by itself, and it should not be rashly called away to other things. Why that? Because, since the thought is finished in individual distichs, no thoughts can be placed in it except those that are individual and separated from one another. This is, if I perceive its nature correctly, the true cause why it is solely destined for expressing the movements of the mind. As it originally served for mourning and sadness, **) so [it served]

*) Correctly Boileau in his Art [of Poetry]:
"It is necessary that the heart alone speaks in the Elegy."

**) I said originally, following Horace in the well-known place in the Ars Poetica 75 sq., not as if elegies proceeded entirely from complaint. The older use of them was in brief ethical thoughts, gnomes, and precepts of life. Such were the elegies of Theognis, Solon, and others. Their use, also transferred to the senses and affections of the mind, was far from laments, if you remember Tyrtaeus. Simonides used elegies to render softer senses, yet without the genre of songs being sufficiently established and defined. And so, among the poets of later ages, you will see some who used the elegiac genre, and others who wrote elegies. The poets of the former kind included narratives, hymns, and other arguments in this song, which commended itself to the senses by being easily dispatched through short stanzas; although they were not sufficiently anxious about it to finish the thought with a stanza or two verses. But with the poetic art more polished and with some kind of song more accurately established from the nature of the argument and the nature of the treatment, it was understood that the softer affections of the mind were the proper subject matter of the elegy in which it was to dwell. Nor did the principal authors of the song, Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, [and] Callimachus, entirely contain themselves within its borders, as far as is understood from fragments and the studies of the Roman poets who emulated them; so that, in summary, two different kinds of songs seem to be established: one an elegiac genre, notable for its external habit and the brevity of stanzas used for different arguments, and the other, the elegy properly so-called.