Four books of elegies are ascribed to Tibullus, but not all of these are really his work. Apparently the collection was made in the literary circle of Messalla, and poems by less noted members of the circle were added to those of Tibullus. [Sidenote: Elegies to Delia and Nemesis.] The ten elegies of the first book, addressed to Delia and to a youth named Marathus, are undoubtedly by Tibullus, and were published during his lifetime. The six elegies of Book II, addressed to Nemesis, seem to have been written several years later. They were left unfinished by Tibullus, and were published after his death. [Sidenote: Lygdamus.] The six elegies published as Book III are by a poet who calls himself Lygdamus. No poet of that name is known, and probably this is a pseudonym. Whoever the author of these poems was, he was a member of the circle of Messalla, was born in 43 B. C., and was familiar with the poems of Tibullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. These elegies are addressed to Neæra, who was probably the poet’s cousin, and either married or betrothed to him. They are greatly inferior to those of Tibullus. They lack variety and imagination, and in technical execution they want the graceful charm for which the genuine poems of Tibullus are distinguished. The remaining poems ascribed to Tibullus are printed in most editions as Book IV, though in the manuscripts they form a part of Book III. The first of these is a _Panegyric on Messalla_, written in honor of his consulship, 31 B. C. This poem, which is written in hexameters, shows a lack of taste and a love of rhetorical exaggeration entirely foreign to Tibullus. Lygdamus can not be its author, for he was only twelve years old at the time of Messalla’s consulship. It was doubtless written by some member of Messalla’s circle, and included in the collection with the poems of Tibullus on account of its subject. [Sidenote: Sulpicia.] The other poems of Book IV have for their subject the love of Messalla’s niece Sulpicia for a young Greek named Cerinthus. The five elegies numbered viii-xii are by Sulpicia to Cerinthus. These are very short poems—none having more than eight lines—but they express genuine feeling in beautiful form, though without delicacy or reserve. The seventh elegy—of ten lines—seems rather to be by Tibullus than Sulpicia. Elegies ii-vi and xiii are apparently by Tibullus, and the epigram of four lines, with which the book closes, is of doubtful authorship.