365
liest Augustan author that has come down to us.
There are indications that Roman elegy, like heroic verse, had two separate tendencies. There was the comparatively simple continuous treatment of the metre seen in Catullus and Virgil, who are content to follow the Greek rhythm, and there was the more rhetorical and pointed style first beginning to appear in Tibullus, carried a step further in Propertius, and culminating in the epigrammatic couplet of Ovid. This last is a peculiarly Latin development, unsuited to the Greek, and too elaborately artificial to be the vehicle for the highest poetry, but, when treated by one who is master of his method, admitting of a facility, fluency, and incomparable elegance, which perhaps no other rhythm combines in an equal degree. In almost all its features it may be illustrated by the heroic couplet of Pope. The elegiac line is in the strictest sense a pendant to the hexameter; only rarely does it introduce a new element of thought, and perhaps never a new commencement in narration. It is for the most part an iteration, variation, enlargement, condensation or antithesis of the idea embodied in its predecessor. In the most highly finished of Ovid's compositions this structure is carried to such a point that the syntax is rarely altogether continuous throughout the couplet; there is generally a break either natural or rhetorical at the conclusion of the hexameter or within the first few syllables of the pentameter. [1] The rhetorical as distinct from the natural period, which appears, though veiled with great skill, in the Virgilian hexameter, is in Ovid's verse made the key to the whole rhythmical structure, and by its restriction within the minimum space of two lines offers a tempting field to the various tricks of composition, the turn, the point, the climax, &c. in all of which Ovid, as the typical elegist, luxuriates, though he applies such elegant manipulation as rarely to over-stimulate and scarcely ever to offend the reader's attention
A History of Roman Literature, page 364
by Charles Thomas Cruttwell