[Sidenote: The elegy.] It was in and for this society that the Roman elegists composed their poems. Elegiac verse had been employed in the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. by Mimnermus, Tyrtæus, Solon, and others, for the expression of all sorts of personal sentiments, as well as for political purposes; but in the Alexandrian period it had been appropriated almost exclusively to poems of love. This Alexandrian elegiac poetry had been introduced at Rome by some of the contemporaries of Catullus, and in the Augustan period it attained a remarkable development. The Roman elegists imitate the Alexandrians, and, like them, insert in their love poems countless mythological allusions and even mythological stories. The fashion demanded that the elegist be learned in Greek mythology. Cornelius Gallus received from the Greek Parthenius a compendium of mythological tales to aid him in selecting proper allusions to the myths. The poet’s beloved is compared to Juno, Minerva, or Venus, Antiope or Helen; the lover gazes upon his mistress as Argus gazed upon Io; faithful wives are compared with Penelope or Alcestis, faithless lovers with Ulysses who deserted Calypso, and Jason who left Medea for another wife. These and similar allusions are mingled with figures drawn from rustic life or from war. The god Amor and his mother Venus play important parts in the poems. Amor transfixes the poet’s heart with his arrows, plants his foot upon the poet’s neck, makes him his slave. The poet sings of the beauty of his mistress, designating her by a fictitious name, but one which has the same length of syllables as the real name of the woman to whom the poems are addressed. The poet is usually poor, but offers his songs as the most valuable of offerings, and is filled with indignation if his mistress seems to care for wealth or jewels. No adornments are necessary for the beautiful woman, and love of wealth is disgraceful. The woes of lovers, false promises, faithlessness, the troubles of the lover who spends whole nights waiting at the door, the torments which love inflicts upon the heart, all these are repeated over and over again. So much of all this is conventional that it is hard to tell what part of the contents of these poems has any truth. Occasionally a line is evidently intended to give information about the writer, and in general it is certain that the poems were really addressed to some particular person, but how much of the feeling expressed is genuine, and how much mere affectation, it is impossible to determine. The details—the nights spent in wind and rain before the door, the quarrels or reconciliations, the voyages and returns—may or may not be founded upon real events in the poet’s life. Whether they are to be regarded as historical or not depends upon their context; but it is evident that many details are purely imaginary.