Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown in ancient literature. Of his life little is known. Like Virgil, he lost his patrimonial property in the confiscations which followed the Civil war, but he was then a mere child. He seems to have been introduced to imperial patronage by the publication of the first book of his _Elegies_ at the age of about twenty. He died young, before he was thirty-five, if we may draw an inference from the latest allusions in his extant poems; he had then written four other books of elegiac pieces, which were probably published separately at intervals of a few years. In the last book there is a noticeable widening of range of subject, which foreshadows the further development that elegiac verse took in the hands of Ovid soon after his death. In striking contrast to Virgil or Horace, Propertius is a genius of great and, indeed, phenomenal precocity. His first book of _Elegies,_ the _Cynthia monobiblos_ of the grammarians, was a literary feat comparable to the early achievements of Keats or Byron. The boy of twenty had already mastered the secret of elegiac verse, which even Catullus had used stiffly and awkwardly, and writes it with an ease, a colour, a sumptuousness of rhythm which no later poet ever equalled. The splendid cadence of the opening couplet-- _Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus--_ must have come on its readers with the shock of a new revelation. Nothing like it had ever been written in Latin before: itself and alone it assures a great future to the Latin elegiac. His instinct for richness of sound is equally conspicuous where it is found in purely Latin phrases, as in the opening of the sixteenth elegy-- _Quae fueram magnis olim patefacta triumphis Ianua Tarpeiae nota pudicitiae Cuius inaurati celebrarunt limina currus Captorum lacrimis umida supplicibus,_ and where it depends on a lavish use of Greek ornament, as in the opening of the third-- _Qualis Thesea iacuit cedente carina Languida desertis Gnosia litoribus, Qualis et accubuit primo Cepheia somno Libera iam duris cotibus Andromede,_