Biography Essay

Little is known about the life of Sextus Propertius except what may be gleaned from his four books of elegies published at intervals, probably between 30 and 13 B.C. There, he calls himself only Propertius. Donatus's Life of Virgil adds the praenomen Sextus (section 30). Propertius's date of birth, though disputed, is often set about 50 B.C., on the assumption that he published his first book of elegies around the age of twenty. The second book, describing the dedication of the Temple of the Palatine Apollo in 28 B.C., hailing Octavian as Augustus (a title adopted in 27 B.C.), and referring to the death of Gallus (ca. 26 B.C.), perhaps followed in 26 or 25 B.C.; and the third book, adapting programmatic themes from Horace's Odes I-III, and seemingly commemorating in poem 18 the death of Marcellus (late in 23 B.C.), was published after 23 B.C. Since Propertius's final book...