few, and that they are repeated in every generation. But perhaps the essential verity of the poet's story is best shown by the fact that the psychology of it is at once too consistent in itself and too much at variance with literary conventionalities to be the invention of any poet in the Augustan Age. In fact, I doubt whether it could be accounted for by literary motives alone in any age.

Thanks to her own dominant personality and the skill of the artist by whom she is painted, Cynthia is the most real and the most interesting of the elegiac heroines. She is an individual, and there is no one like her in antique poetry.

Her social position, or better, perhaps, her position before the law, cannot be determined with certainty. As a rule the heroine of the Elegy is a hetaira, and in Rome this class was largely represented by the libertina, or freedwomen. We learn, however, from Propertius that Cynthia was the granddaughter of a famous poet, and from Apuleius 150 years afterwards that her real name was Hostia. Her grandfather, then, must have been that Hostius near the beginning of the first century B.C. who wrote a poem on the Istrian War. If so, she was hardly a freedwoman, but rather a declassée, a type only too common in the brilliant but lax society of the Augustan period.

The minuteness with which Propertius describes her perfections is as modern as it is unclassical. In this respect the lover of Cynthia is a striking contrast to the lover of Lesbia. Both men are sensitive, sensuous, luxurious. Both men reacted keenly and instantly to the beautiful. But Propertius was analytical and reflective. He could not attain the joyous wisdom of Catullus's immortal youth. Propertius never could have destroyed the tally of his raptures-"Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus," as Catullus said of his Lesbia's kisses. On the contrary, he must needs count, weigh, and appraise them one by one. Her eyes were large, dark and brilliantly expressive:

"Twin torches they to set my heart on fire,

Twin stars to guide me through life's trackless sea."

Her hair was fulvus, presumably the tawny red of Titian. At all events, her complexion is 'white lilies,' 'the first flush of Dawn,' 'rose-leaves floating in milk'; apparently what he means is

the delicate skin, the delicate pink and white suggestive of sweetpeas, which not infrequently goes with such hair. Once, to be sure, he does accuse her of paint-this in connection with the importation of a yellow wig from Britain-but only to bring home the fact that she is ravishingly beautiful as she is. Her hands were slim and delicate, her fingers long and shapely. she is trying to scratch out his eyes, he thinks of her nails as formosa. Doubtless he would have said as did the lover in the old play :

"Her lips made swearings sound of piety,

So sweet and prettily they came from her."

Even when

She walks like the goddesses. Once, indeed, he insists that she is more beautiful than Venus and several other Olympian ladies of quality whom he enumerates in the succeeding lines. She was maxima toto corpore, he says. Maxima is not big and bony, and not ample, spatiosa, as Ovid says expressively of Andromache-Cynthia was too sensitive and high-strung for that but rather stately and impressive. Tall she may have been, but I suspect she seemed taller to him than she really was-partly because of her carriage, partly because of her dominant will. To the last he stood a little in awe of her.

It is possible that what we have here was something very like the Italian type immortalized by Titian. If so, it was probably modified by more intellect and perhaps by more irregularity of feature than is usual in Titian's women. Cynthia was not alone beautiful: she was fascinating, witty, a fine conversationalist, an accomplished musician, an adept in the mysteries of the loom, a first-class literary critic. Nay she was a poetess—a poetess, too, whose verses, says Propertius, are quite the equal of Corinna's.

Sometimes, indeed, he confides to us that he cares less for her beauty than for these other attractions. In the light of his cool and analytical, yet aspiring and idealizing, mind, he is telling the truth. But alas for his weak and passionate heart! It was her beauty, not her accomplishments, that dragged him back to her again and again, even in his own despite.

"Quamvis dura, tamen rara puella fuit,"

is his own reluctant admission, even while nursing his wrongs after a mortal quarrel.

Such, if we make due allowance for the enthusiasm of a lover, was the woman whom Propertius met at the turning-point of his He could not have been much over eighteen: precocious and erratically brilliant, filled with his book-learning, fired with his Alexandrian poets; but scarcely more than the child he had just ceased to be.

Cynthia, on the contrary, as we might guess, was several years older-probably not less than twenty-four or twenty-five—and well-versed in the art of subjugation. Not, however, that such a women needed any special training to subjugate this innocent and ardent, shy and passionate boy. The difficulty would be to get such a boy to declare his love. The stormy and impetuous Cynthia, however, realizing that she was dealing not with a theory but with a condition, took the matter into her own hands and made the declaration herself. Of course, he was swept off his feet.

It is easy to see why he loved Cynthia. He himself gives us a number of excellent reasons. But why did Cynthia love him? Propertius gives us two reasons-his verse and his fidelity. No doubt he had her own word for it, and he seems really to have believed it. But these were not her reasons; otherwise she would not have given them. Moreover, in affairs of the heart poetry is of no demonstrable value. His friend Ovid could have told him that. And even fidelity, though infinitely superior to the brand supplied by Propertius, is not always as important as it ought to be. I am inevitably reminded of the old man who while riding home from his wife's funeral remarked to a friend: "Well, she was a good wife; the meals were always on time, the stockings were always darned, and everything was all right: I lived with her for forty years-and I never did like her!" The words are such a revelation of our poor human nature that one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry.

We might imagine the novelty of reversed conditions, the attraction of youth and inexperience, etc.; in short, the usual stock in trade of the modern psychological novelist. But these are passing. We must look deeper to explain a feeling which,

whatever its original basis was, lasted through everything and until her dying day. Perhaps she herself never paused to inquire. Cynthia, however, after every possible deduction, was not an ordinary woman. She had a strong mind; her character, though passionate and ill-regulated, was generous, and above all, she could idealize. Her lover was young and inexperienced, but he was a poet and an idealist. In spite of her previous experience-nay, for that very reason-the first love of this homebred boy must have been a revelation to her. He was not the type she had met, and, alas, was still to meet. May we not assume that in those days she was often touched to the quick by a delicacy and consideration to which she was not accustomed, aroused by traits and opinions new in her experience, pleased and inspired by the unquestioning attribution to herself of virtues and ideals which other men had never discovered?

Of these first hours of unclouded happiness we have no record except that the lovers met out of doors and at night. On those occasions, when they pledged eternal fidelity under the stars, when she was carried away not only by their mutual passion, but by his infectious idealism, when she sat by his side and gazed upon the bright vision of their future called up by his wonderful imagination, who knows how often even she may have dreamed of the impossible? Not until the last do we hear of those happy hours, and, what is significant of the essential truth of our deduction, it is Cynthia, not Propertius, who speaks of them.

Of course, they were both very human, and, as usual, the fact was emphasized in their later companionship. The artistic temperament is full of moods and fancies. And they both had it. Propertius was a born self-tormentor, and not an easy man to live with under any circumstances. And Cynthia herself was anything but an equable person. The barometer of her moods never stood at 'set fair.' She was undisciplined, full of extremes, a woman of fire and ice, proud, imperious, sensitive, quick to resent and slow to forgive. There were halcyon hours of capricious fondness, when he felt himself all but translated; there were whirlwinds of tempestuous rage, when he was all but in danger of his life; there were dead calms of glacial indifference, when all he could do was to shiver and wait. Between her

cruelty and her kindness, her furious abuse and her furious tenderness, he scarcely knew whether he was most happy in his misery or most miserable in his happiness.

After all, however, these variations were nothing very serious. The lovers were still extremely happy in their own stormy fashion. Propertius was urged by his friend Tullus to accompany him on an extended tour in the East. The offer was tempting, but was finally declined. Cynthia, too, was hotly pursued by a certain rich suitor to accompany him to Illyria, but she finally refused. The decision says much for the real depth of her affection, for when we consider the uncertainty of her position, as well as of her income, she sacrificed far more than did Propertius. It was one of the happiest hours of the poet's life. "I walk among the highest stars," he cries, "for Cynthia, the peerless Cynthia, is always mine!"

Perhaps the most refreshing, and certainly the most unusual, aspect of this affair is the almost complete absence of those complaints of greed and extravagance which recur with such wearisome regularity in the amatory literature of antiquity. Cynthia was not mercenary. Her lover affirms it more than once, and in so many words. She did love finery-as any woman should, and generally does. And finery is expensive. But he never criticizes her love of finery on the score of expense, much less on the score of expense to him. Adverse criticism of her attire is always for some other reason, and what is especially characteristic of Propertius, the reason put in the foreground is never the real reason.

"Why, dear heart," he ventures to expostulate in the famous elegy devoted to this theme, "do you care to go out and join the parade, your hair adorned with jewels, and to sway within the transparent folds of Coan vestments? Why to drench your locks with myrrh of the Orontes, and to put yourself on the market with endowments not your own? Why will you mar the beauty of nature with embellishments bought with a price, instead of allowing your real self to shine resplendent in its own advantages? Believe me, not anything you take for that fair form can make it more fair. Cupid himself is naked; he is no lover of the artifices of beauty. See what colors the beautiful