ABSTRACT
Propertius was probably a slightly younger contemporary of Tibullus. He was born between 54 and 47 B .C.E., the son of local aristocracy at the town of Assisi in Umbria. His father died around 41-40 B.C.E., just after the Perusine War and at the time when Propertius's family suffered from land confiscations at the hands of Octavian. We do not know exactly when Propertius came to Rome. After the publication of his first book of poetry, called the Monobiblos (29-28 B.C. E.), when he was in his early twenties, he came to the attention of Maecenas and eventually joined Horace and Vergil as members of Maecenas's literary circle. He published four books of elegies (or perhaps five, if our Book II is, as s~me believe, really two books) whose dates are open to some dispute. Since a friend of Pliny, a writer of the first century C. E., is recorded as claiming descent from Propertius, we infer that he was married. We do not know when he died, but a reference to him by Ovid suggests that he was certainly dead by 2 B .C.E.
