A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(The agnomen, NAUTA, found in some Codices and early editions, seems to have been derived from a corrupt reading of 2.24. 38.) The materials for a life of Propertius are meagre and unsatisfactory, consisting almost entirely of the inferences which may be drawn from hints scattered in his writings. We know neither the precise place nor date of his birth. He tells us that he was a native of Umbria, where it borders on Etruria, but nowhere mentions the exact spot. Conjecture has assigned it, among other towns, to Mevania, Ameria, Hispellum, and Asisium; of which one of the two last seems entitled to the preference. The date of his birth has been variously placed between the years of Rome 697 and 708 (B. C. 57 to 46). Lachmann, however, was the first who placed it so low as B. C. 48 or 47; and the latest date (B. C. 46) is that of Hertzberg, the recent German

editor. The latter's computation proceeds on very strained inferences, which we have not space to discuss; but it may possibly be sufficient to state that one of his results is to place the tenth elegy of the second book, in which Propertius talks about his extreme aetas (5.6) in B. C. 25, when, according to Hertzberg, he was one-and-twenty! For several reasons, too long to be here adduced, it might be shown that the year assigned by Mr. Clinton, namely, B. C. 51, is a much more probable one, and agrees better with the relative ages of Propertius and Ovid. We know that the latter was born in B. C. 43, so that he would have been eight years younger than Propertius : a difference which would entitle him to call Propertius his predecessor, whilst at the same time it would not prevent the two poets from being sodales (Ov. Tr. 4.10. 45).

Propertius was not descended from a family of any distinction (2.24. 37), nor can the inference that it was equestrian be sustained from the mention of the area bulla (4.1. 131), which was the common ornament of all children who were ingenui. (Cic. in Verr. 2.1, 58, with the note of Asconius ; Macrob. 1.6.) The paternal estate, however, seems to have been sufficiently ample (Nam tua versarent cum multi rura juvenci, 4.1. 129); but of this he was deprived by an agrarian division, probably that in B. C. 36, after the Sicilian war, and thus thrown into comparative poverty (in tenues cogeris ipse Lares, Ib. 128). At the time of this misfortune he had not yet assumed the toga virilis, and was therefore under sixteen years of age. He had already lost his father, who, it has been conjectured, was one of the victims sacrificed after the taking of Perusia; but this notion does not rest on any satisfactory grounds. The elegy on which it is founded (1.21) refers to a kinsman named Gallus. We have no account of Propertius's education; but from the elegy before quoted (4.1) it would seem that he was destined to be an advocate, but abandoned the profession for that of poetry. That he was carefully instructed appears from the learning displayed in his writings, and which was probably acquired altogether at Rome; the smallness of his means having prevented him from finishing his education at Athens, as was then commonly done by the wealthier Romans. At all events it is plain from the sixth elegy of the first book, written after his connection with Cynthia had begun, that he had not then visited Greece. In the twenty-first elegy of the third book he meditates a journey thither, probably at the time when he had quarrelled with his mistress; but whether he ever carried the design into execution we have no means of knowing.

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