SOURCE: An introduction to Tibullus: Elegies, third edition, translated by Guy Lee, revised in collaboration with Robert Maltby, Leeds: Francis Cairns (Publications) Ltd, 1990, pp. ix-xxii.

In the following essay, Lee describes some of the chief merits of Tibullus's poems.

The reader who comes to Tibullus from the love poetry of Ovid will be surprised to discover in parts of his work a distinctly Ovidian tone. The Consultation with Priapus (1.4) in which the grotesque fertility god treats the poet to a brief lecture on the art of pederasty in elegantly balanced couplets is evidently intended to shock and to amuse and its unexpected conclusion to raise a laugh or at any rate a smile. On the formal side also the fact that no fewer than forty of the poem's forty-two pentameters end in a word of two syllables, a proportion unparalleled in the first book of Propertius, the immediate...