The elegy, in its calm movement, seems to have begun to lose currency when the ecstasy of emotion was more successfully interpreted by the various rhythmic and dithyrambic inventions of the Aeolic lyrists. The elegy, however, rose again to the highest level of merit in Alexandrian times. It was reintroduced by Philetas in the 3rd cent. B.C., and was carried to extreme perfection by Callimachus. Other later Greek elegists of high reputation were Asclepiades and Euphorion. But it is curious to notice that all the elegies of these poets were of an amatory nature, and that antiquity styled the funeral dirges of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus--which are to us the types of elegy--not elegies at all, but idylls. When the poets of Rome began their imitative study of Alexandrian models, it was natural that the elegies of writers such as Callimachus should tempt them to immediate imitation. Gallus, whose works are unhappily lost, is known to have produced a great sensation in Rome by publishing his translation of the poems of Euphorion; and he passed on to the composition of erotic elegies of his own, which were the earliest in the Latin language. If we possessed his once-famous _Cytheris_, we should be able to decide the question of how much Propertius, who is now the leading figure among Roman elegists, owed to the example of Gallus. His brilliantly emotional _Cynthia_, with its rich and unexampled employment of that alternation of hexameter and pentameter which had now come to be known as the elegiac measure, seems, however, to have settled the type of Latin elegy. Tibullus is always named in conjunction with Propertius, who was his contemporary, although in their style they were violently contrasted. The sweetness of Tibullus was the object of admiration and constant imitation by the Latin poets of the Renaissance, although Propertius has more austerely pleased a later taste. Finally, Ovid wrote elegies of great variety in subject, but all in the same form, and his dexterous easy metre closed the tradition of elegiac poetry among the ancients. What remains in the decline of Latin literature is all founded on a study of those masters of the Golden Age.