SOURCE: An introduction to Tibullus: A Commentary, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973, pp. 3-13.

In the following essay, Putnam provides an overview of Tibullus, considering his life and his poems' subjects, order, style, and meter.

Documentation for the life of Albius Tibullus is meager.¹ If we may trust Ovid's list of elegists—Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and himself—as chronological, then Tibullus' birthdate would logically rest somewhere between 60 and 55 B.C.² An epigram, attached to the manuscripts and ascribed to Domitius Marsus, points to contemporary death dates for Vergil and Tibullus. This would place his demise not long after September, 19 B.C.³ The vita, a brief "life" also in the manuscript tradition, itself probably a much later abridgment of the Suetonian "life," appeals to the epigram as evidence for an early death. Postulating date of birth around 55 B.C., we would conjecture for Tibullus a life span of some...