Among the small but remarkable company of Roman elegiac poets of the first century B.C.--including Catullus, Gallus, Propertius, and Ovid--Albius Tibullus is often underestimated. He is treated as the least distinctive personality, writing the least dramatically confessional poetry in a genre that relies on the illusion of personal confession. His two books of poems also constitute the shortest body of work of the three elegists whose work has survived in extenso. But it was precisely his controlled, "bas-relief " style that won him Quintilian's approval as tersus atque elegans maxime (especially polished and discriminating). Quintilian was not alone in assessing Tibullus so highly.

Tibullus's work is characterized by purism in language and meter, a varied repertory of erotic and nonerotic themes presented as personal experience, a view of national events through the lens of personal friendship rather than public patriotism, and spare use of mythological topoi in...