Propertius

Sextus Propertius was a Latin poet of the Augustan age who wrote love elegies in the elegiac couplet. He was born around 50 to 45 BC in or near Assisium, the modern Assisi in Umbria, and died shortly after 15 BC. Almost nothing is known of his life beyond what his own poems suggest: his father died while he was a child, the family lost land in a confiscation, and he nonetheless received a good education and lived on the Esquiline Hill in Rome among well-connected friends. He joined the circle of the patron Maecenas, which also included the poets Gallus and Virgil. His surviving work is four books of Elegies. The first, the Monobiblos, appeared around 30 BC and centres on a woman called Cynthia, whom modern scholars read as a literary construction in the tradition of the fictionalised beloved. Later books widen to address Maecenas and Augustus and, in Book IV, to explain the origins of Roman rites and landmarks. He was less celebrated in his own time than some other Latin elegists, but scholars now treat him as a major poet.