Tibullus (Albius Tibullus)

Albius Tibullus (c. 55–c. 19 BC) was a Roman poet of the Augustan age, a member of the circle of the patron and general Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. He is remembered for two books of love elegies addressed to a woman he calls Delia, to a second mistress, Nemesis, and to a boy, Marathus, in which the pleasures of country life and peace are set against the greed and violence of war and wealth.

Ovid mourned his early death in a famous elegy. Tibullus's own work fills Books I and II of the Corpus Tibullianum; the later books are by other hands. This archive offers the English verse translation of Theodore C. Williams (1908), which includes the third book, ascribed to Lygdamus, and one poem from the fourth book.