So many centuries and so many revolutions stand between us and the ancient world that in the present age we are apt to cast about restlessly for any spirit of those earlier days who might conveniently be hauled back, like Alcestis or Proserpine, into the light of the living. There are, of course, the perennial classics, the Virgils and the Homers of that time, to be cherished as eternal beacons who have said what will always need to be said. With such as these we may sympathize, but we cannot identify; for there is something about them which, in transcending everything, transcends us as well. Conversely, there are the many lesser poets of that time, like Triphiodorus and Silius Italicus, who, by so thoroughly summing up the fashions and the vanities of their eras, remind us rather unflatteringly of our own, and these we are only too happy to send back into their accustomed oblivion. But there are certain poets who manage to capture something very specific in their age that chimes with something very specific in our own, and this causes us to linger about them rather longer than we do about their contemporaries. Sextus Propertius is one of these poets. For if it was Ovid who found sympathetic readers in the generation of Spencer and Tasso, and the mild Tibullus who struck his Victorian readers as a kind of Keats avant la lettre, today it is triumphantly Propertius—together with his near contemporary, Catullus—in whom we find