As these words nearly reappear in Ovid, fixing the date of his own birth, [8] some critics have supposed them to be spurious here. But there is no occasion for this. The elegy in which they occur is certainly not by Tibullus, and may well be the work of some contemporary of Ovid. They point to the battle of Mutina, 43 B.C., in which Hirtius and Pansa lost their lives. The poet's death is fixed to 19 B.C. by the epigram of Domitius just quoted. Tibullus was a Roman knight, and inherited a large fortune. This, however, he lost by the triumviral proscriptions, [9] excepting a poor remnant of his estate near Pedum which, small as it was, seems to have sufficed for his moderate wants. At a later period Horace, writing to him in retirement, speaks as though he were possessed of considerable wealth [10]-- "Di tibi divitias dederunt artemque fruendi." It is possible that Augustus, at the intercession of Messala, restored the poet's patrimony. It was as much the fashion among the Augustan writers to affect a humble but contented poverty, as it had been among the libertines of the Caesarean age to pretend to sanctity of life--another form of that unreality which, after all, is ineradicable from Latin poetry. Ovid is far more unaffected. He asserts plainly that the pleasures and refinements of his time were altogether to his taste, and that no other age would have suited him half so well. [11] Tibullus is a melancholy effeminate spirit. Horace exactly hits him when he bids him "chant no more woeful elegies," [12] because a young and perjured rival has been preferred to him. He seems to have had no ambition and no energy, but his position obliged him to see some military service, and we find that he went on no less than three expeditions with his patron. This patron, or rather friend, for he was above needing a patron, was the great Messala, whom the poet loved with a warmth and constancy testified by some beautiful elegies, the finest perhaps being those where the general's victories are celebrated. [13] But the chief theme of his verse is the love, ill-requited it would seem, which he lavished first on Delia and afterwards on Nemesis. Each mistress gives the subject to a book. Delia's real name as we learn from Apuleius was Plania, [14] and we gather from more than one notice in the poems that she was married [15] when Tibullus paid his addresses to her. If the form of these poems is borrowed from Alexandria, the gentle pathos and gushing feeling redeem them from all taint of artificiality. In no poet, not even in Burns, is simple, natural emotion more naturally expressed. If we cannot praise the character of the man, we must admire the graceful poet. Nothing can give a truer picture of affection than the following tender and exquisitely musical lines: "Non ego laudari curo: mea Delia, tecum Dummodo sim quaeso segnis inersque vocer. Te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora: Te teneam moriens deficiente manu." [16]