SOURCE: "Pastoral Elements in Latin Elegy" in The Origins of Latin Love-Elegy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938, pp. 76-84.

In the following excerpt, Day examines the pastoral elements in Tibullus's elegies and the influence of other poets on their composition.

In an earlier chapter it was noticed that in the elegies of Philetas there appears to have been a marked bucolic element, so far as can be judged from the few surviving fragments, and that the first book of the Leontium of Hermesianax was probably concerned with the tragic loves of shepherds. So that the Latin elegists, whatever they may have owed to their Greek predecessors, were at least justified by tradition in introducing pastoral themes into elegy.

But it is hardly necessary to go back to Greek elegy to explain the appearance of pastoral strains in Propertius and Tibullus. The fountain of Propertius' inspiration rises in the cave where...