⁴³   ii. 356.

⁴⁴   ii. 317.

⁴⁵   'Besides when mighty legions fill the plains with their rapid movement, raising the pageantry of warfare, the splendour rises up to heaven, and all the land around is bright with the glitter of brass, and beneath from the mighty host of men the sound of their tramp arises, and the mountains, struck by their shouting, re-echo their voices to the stars of heaven, and the horsemen hurry to and fro on either flank, and suddenly charge across the plains, shaking them with their impetuous onset.'—ii. 323-30.

⁴⁶   'And yet there is some place in the lofty mountains whence they appear to be all still, and to rest as a bright gleam upon the plains.'—ii. 331-32.

⁴⁷   'When, too, the utmost force of a violent gale is sweeping the admiral of some fleet over the seas, along with his mighty legions and elephants, does he not court the protection of the Gods with vows, and in his terror pray for a calm to the storm, and for favouring gales?'—v. 1226-30.

⁴⁸   'Moreover, the babe, like a sailor cast ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, speechless, in need of every aid to life, when first nature has cast him forth by great throes from his mother's womb; and he fills the air with his piteous wail, as befits one whose doom it is to pass through so much misery in life.'—v. 222-27.

⁴⁹   'And now, shaking his head, the aged peasant laments, with a sigh, that the toil of his hands has often come to naught; and, as he compares the present with the past time, he extols the fortune of his father, and harps on this theme, how the good old race, full of piety, bore the burden of their life very easily within narrow bounds, when the portion of land for each man was far less than now.'—ii. 1164-70.

⁵⁰   ii. 569-70.

CHAPTER XV.

Catullus.

Lucretius and Catullus were regarded by their contemporaries as the greatest poets of the last age of the Republic¹. They alone represent the poetry of that time to the modern world. Although born into the same social rank, and acted upon by the dissolving influences, the intellectual stimulus, and the political agitation of the same time, no poets could be named of a more distinct type of genius and character. The first has left behind him only the record of his impersonal contemplation. His life was passed more in communion with Nature than in contact with the world: his experiences of happiness or sorrow entered into his art solely as affording materials for his abstract thought. The second has stamped upon his pages the lasting impression of the deepest joy and pain of his life, as well as of the lightest cares and fancies that occupied the passing hour. Intensely social in his temper and tastes, he lived habitually the life of the great city and the provincial town, observing and sharing in all their pleasures, distractions, and animosities, and only escaping, from time to time, for a brief interval to his country houses on the Lago di Garda and in the neighbourhood of Tivoli. He seems to have had no other aim in life than that of passionately enjoying his youth in the pleasures of love, in friendly intercourse with men of his own rank and age, in the practice of his art, and the study of the older poets, by whom that art was nourished. All his poems, with the exception of three or four works of creative fancy and one or two translations, have for their subject some personal incident, feeling, or character. Nearly all have some immediate relation to himself, and give expression to his love or hatred, his admiration or scorn, his happiness or misery. There is nearly as little in them of reflexion on human life as of meditative communion with Nature; but, as individual men and women excited in him intense affection or passion, so certain beautiful places and beautiful objects in Nature charmed his fancy and sank into his heart. He shows himself, spiritually and intellectually, the child of his age in his ardent vitality, in the license of his life and satire, in the fierceness of his antipathies; and also in his eager reception of the spirit of Greek art, his delight in the poets of Greece and the tales of the Greek mythology, in his striving after form and grace in composition, and in the enthusiasm with which he anticipates the joy of travelling among 'the famous cities of Asia.' In all our thoughts of him he is present to our imagination as the 'young Catullus'—

More than any great ancient, and than any great modern poet, with the exception, perhaps, of Keats, he affords the measure of what youth can do, and what it fails to do, in poetry. Although the exact age at which he died is disputed, yet the evidence of his poems shows that he did not outlive the boyish heart. In character he was even younger than in actual age. Nearly all his work was done between the years 61 and 54 b.c.; and most of it, apparently, with little effort. Born with the keenest capacities of pleasure and of pain, he never learned to regulate them: nor were they, seemingly, united with such enduring vital power as to carry him past the perilous stage of his career, so as to enable him with maturer power and more concentrated industry to employ his genius and accomplishment on works of larger scope, more capable of withstanding the shocks and chances of time, than the small volume which, by a fortunate accident, has preserved the flower and bloom of his life, and the record of all the 'sweet and bitter' which he experienced at the hands of that Power—

The ultimate preservation of his poems depended on a single copy, which, after being lost to the world for four centuries, was re-discovered in Verona, the poet's birthplace, during the fourteenth century. As that copy was again lost, the text has to be determined from the conflicting testimony of later copies, only two of which are considered by the latest critics to be of independent value. There is thus much more uncertainty, and much greater latitude for conjecture, as to the actual words of Catullus, than in the case of almost any other Roman poet. As lines not found in this volume are attributed to him by ancient authors, and as he appears to allude to the composition of love poems in his first youth² which must have been written before the earliest of the Lesbia-poems, it may be inferred that we do not possess all that he wrote. It has been generally assumed that the dedicatory lines to Cornelius Nepos, with which the volume opens, were prefixed by the poet to the collected edition of his poems which we now possess; but Mr. Ellis, following Bruner, has shown that that poem may more probably have been prefixed to a smaller and earlier collection. The lines—

imply that earlier poems of Catullus were well known for some time before the writing of this dedication; and allusions in more than one of the poems³ prove that the poems of an earlier date must have been in circulation before those in which these allusions occur were written. In the time of Martial, a small volume, probably chiefly consisting of the Lesbia-poems, was known as the 'Passer Catulli⁴.' It may be inferred that, as he wrote his poems from his earliest youth till his death, he gave them to the world at various stages of his career. He may have combined in these libelli some of the elegiac epigrams with his iambics and phalaecians, just as Martial, who regarded him as his master, did afterwards. Even some of the longer poems, such as the Janua or the Epithalamia, may have formed part of these collections. The attention which he attracted from men eminent in social rank and literature,—such as Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Memmius, etc.,—shows that his genius was soon recognised: and his eager craving for sympathy and appreciation would naturally prompt him to bring his various writings immediately before the eyes of his contemporaries. It seems likely, therefore, that this final collection from several shorter collections already in circulation was made some time after the poet's death⁵; that some poems were omitted which were not thought worthy of preservation, and, possibly, that some may have then been added which had not previously been given to the world. It would be difficult to believe that poems expressive of the most passionate love and the bitterest scorn of the same person could have appeared for the first time in the same collection.

This collection consists of about 116 poems⁶, written in various metres, and varying in length from epigrams of only two lines to an 'epyllion' which extends to 408 lines. The poems numbered from i to lx, are short lyrical or satiric pieces, written in the phalaecian, glyconic, or iambic metres, and devoted almost entirely to subjects of personal interest. The middle of the volume is occupied by the longer poems—numbered lxi to lxviii^b—of a more purely artistic and mostly an impersonal character, written in the glyconic, galliambic, hexameter, and elegiac metres. The latter part of the volume is entirely occupied by epigrammatic or other short pieces in elegiac metre, varying in length from two to twenty-six lines. Many of the epigrams refer to the persons who are the subject of the short lyric and iambic pieces. There is no attempt to arrange the poems in anything like chronological order. Thus, among the first twelve poems, ii, iii, v, vii, ix, xii, are probably to be assigned to the years 61 and 60 b.c., while iv, x, xi, certainly belong to the last three years of the poet's life. It is difficult to imagine on what principle the juxtaposition of certain poems was determined. Probably, in some cases, it may have been on the mere mechanical one of filling up the pages symmetrically by poems of suitable length. Sometimes we find poems of the same character, or referring to the same person, grouped together, and yet varied by the insertion of one or two pieces related to the larger group by contrast rather than similarity of tone. Thus the passionate exaltation of the earlier Lesbia-poems is first relieved by a poem (iv) written in another metre, and appealing to a much calmer class of feelings, and next varied by one (vi) written in the same metre, and suggested by a friend's amour, which in its meanness and obscurity serves as a foil to the glory and brightness of the good fortune enjoyed by the poet. Yet this clue does not carry us far in determining the principle, if indeed there was any principle, on which either the short lyrical poems or

the elegiac epigrams were arranged. These various poems were written under the influence of every mood to which he was liable; and, like other passionate lyrical poets, he was susceptible of the most opposite moods. The most trivial incident might give rise to them equally with the greatest joy or the greatest sorrow of his life. As he felt a strong need to express, and had a happy facility in expressing his purest and brightest feelings, so he felt no shame in indulging, and knew no restraint in expressing, his coarsest propensities and bitterest resentments: and he evidently regarded his worst moods no less than his best as legitimate material for his art. Thus pieces more coarse than almost anything in literature are interspersed among others of the sunniest brightness and purity. The feelings with which we linger over the exquisite beauty of the 'Sirmio,' and are stirred by the noble inspiration of the 'Hymn to Diana,' receive a rude shock from the two intervening poems, characterised by a want of reticence and reserve not often paralleled in the literature or the speech of civilised nations. In a poet of modern times a similar collocation might be supposed indicative of a cynical bitterness of spirit—of a mind mocking its own purest impulses. But Catullus is too genuine and sincere a man, too natural in his enjoyments, and too healthy in all his moods, to be taken as an example of this distempered type of genius. It seems more likely, as is conjectured by recent commentators⁷, that the present collection was made (perhaps at Verona) in a comparatively late age, when the knowledge of the circumstances of Catullus and the intelligent appreciation of his poems was lost.

These poems, whether good or bad, serious or trivial, are all written with such transparent sincerity that they bring the poet before us almost as if he were our contemporary. They make him known to us in many different moods,—in joy and grief, in the ecstasy and the despair of love, in the frank outpouring of affection and the enjoyment of social intercourse, in the bitterness of his scorn and animosity, in the license of his coarser indulgences. They enable us to start with him on his travels; to enjoy with him the beauty of his home on the Italian lakes; to pass with him from the life of letters and idle pleasure and the brilliant intellectual society of Rome to the more homely but not more virtuous ways and the more commonplace people of his native province; to join with him in ridiculing some affectation of an acquaintance, or to feel the contagion of his admiration for genius or wit in man, grace in woman, or beauty in Nature. In the glimpses of him which we get in the familiar round of his daily life, we seem to catch the very turn of his conversation⁸, to hear his laugh at some absurd incident⁹, to see his face brighten as he welcomes a friend from a distant land¹⁰, to mark the quick ebullition of anger at some slight or rudeness¹¹, or to be witnesses of his passionate tears as something recalls to him the memory of his lost happiness, or makes him feel his present desolation¹². His impressible nature realises with extraordinary vividness of pleasure and pain experiences which by most people are scarcely noticed. To be rightly appreciated, his poems must be read with immediate reference to the circumstances and situations which gave rise to them. We must take them up with our feelings attuned to the mood in which they were written. Hence, before attempting to criticise them, we must try, by the help of internal and any available external evidence, to determine the successive stages of his personal and literary career, and so to get some idea of the social relations and the state of feeling of which they were the expression.

There is some uncertainty as to the exact date of his birth and death. The statement of Jerome is that he was born at Verona in the year 87 b.c., and that he died at Rome, at the age of thirty, in the year 57 b.c. But this last date is contradicted by allusions in the poems to events and circumstances, such as the expeditions of Caesar across the Rhine and into Britain, the second Consulship of Pompey, the preparations for the Eastern expedition of Crassus, which belong to a later date. The latest incident which Catullus mentions is the speech of his friend Calvus, delivered in August 54 b.c. against Vatinius¹³. A line in the poem, immediately preceding that containing the allusion to the speech of Calvus,—

was, till the appearance of Schwabe's 'Quaestiones Catullianae,' accepted as a proof that Catullus had actually witnessed the Consulship of Vatinius in 47 b.c. But it has been satisfactorily shown that that line refers to the boasts in which Vatinius used to indulge after the conference at Luca, or after his own election to the Praetorship, and not to their actual fulfilment at a later time. There is thus no evidence that Catullus survived the year 54 b.c.; and some expressions in some of his later poems, as, for instance,—

and—

are thought to indicate the anticipation of approaching death. But if 54 b.c. is to be accepted as the year of his death, one of Jerome's two other statements, viz. that he was born in the year 87 b.c. and that he died at the age of thirty, must be wrong. Most critics and commentators hold that the first date is right, and that the mistake lies in the words 'xxx. aetatis anno.' Mr. Munro, with more probability, believes the error to lie in the 87 b.c., and that Jerome, 'as so often happens with him, has blundered somewhat in transferring to his complicated era the Consulships by which Suetonius would have dated.' He argues further, that the phrase 'iuvenalia tempora,' in the passage quoted above from Ovid and written by him at the age of twenty-five, is more applicable to one who died at the age of thirty than of thirty-three. A further argument for believing that the 'xxx. aetatis anno' is right, and the date 87 b.c. consequently wrong, is that the age at which a person died was more easily ascertained than the date at which he was born, owing to the common practice of recording the former in sepulchral inscriptions. It is easy to see how a mistake might have occurred in substituting the first of the four successive Consulships of Cinna (87 b.c.) for the last in 84 b.c.; but it is not so obvious how the substitution of xxx. for xxxiii. could have taken place. The only ground for assuming that the date of 87 b.c. is more likely to be right, is that thereby the disparity of age between Catullus and his mistress Clodia, who must have been born in 95 or 94 b.c., is somewhat lessened. But when we remember that she was actually twelve years older than M. Caelius Rufus, who succeeded Catullus as her lover, and that Cicero in his defence of Caelius speaks of her as supporting from her own means the extravagance of her youthful ('adulescentis') lovers¹⁴, there is no more difficulty in supposing that she was ten than that she was seven years older than Catullus. Moreover, the brotherly friendship in which Catullus lived with Calvus, and his earlier intimate relations with Caelius and Gellius, who were all born in or about the year 82 b.c., seem to indicate that he was nearer to them in age than he would have been if born in 87 b.c. Between the age of twenty and thirty a difference of five years is not frequent among very intimate associates, who live together on a footing of perfect freedom. Again, the expression of the feelings both of love and friendship in the earlier poems of Catullus—written about the year 61 or 60 b.c.—seems more like that of a youth of twenty-three or four, than of twenty-six or seven, especially when we remember that, by his own confession, he had entered at a precociously early age on his career both of pleasure and of poetry. The date 84 b.c. accordingly seems to fit the recorded facts of his life and the peculiar character of his poetry better than that of 87 b.c.; and there seems to be more opening for a mistake in assigning the particular date of the poet's birth and death, than in recording the number of years which he lived¹⁵.

It seems, therefore, most probable that he was born in the year 84 b.c., and that he died at the age of thirty, either late in 54 b.c. or early in 53 b.c. The much less important, but still more disputed question as to his 'praenomen,' appears now to be conclusively settled, in accordance with the evidence of Jerome and Apuleius, in favour of Gaius, and against Quintus. In the large number of places in which he speaks of himself, he invariably calls himself 'Catullus'; and in the best MSS. his book is called 'Catulli Veronensis liber.' His Gentile name Valerius is confirmed by Suetonius in his life of Julius Caesar; and the evidence of inscriptions shows that that name was not uncommon in the district near Verona. How it happened that this Roman patrician name had spread into Cisalpine Gaul we do not know; but that the family of Catullus was one of high consideration in his native district, and maintained relations with the great families of Rome, is indicated by the intimate footing on which Julius Caesar lived with his father, and also by the fact that the poet was received as a friend into the best houses of Rome,—such as that of Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Metellus Celer,—shortly after his arrival there. It is quite possible that the last of these, who was Proconsul in Cisalpine Gaul in 62 b.c., and to whom Cicero writes when governor of that province, may have lived on the same footing as Julius Caesar did with Catullus' father at Verona, and that, in that way, Catullus obtained his first introduction to his wife Clodia, the Lesbia of the poems. Although some humorous complaints of money difficulties—the natural consequences of his fashionable pleasures—occur in his poems¹⁶, yet from the fact of his possessing, in his father's lifetime, a country house on lake Benacus and a farm on the borders of the Sabine and the Tiburtine territories, and of his having bought and manned a yacht in which he made the voyage from Bithynia to the mouth of the Po, it may be inferred that he belonged to a wealthy senatorian or equestrian family. One or two expressions, such as 'se atque suos omnes,' and again, 'te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua¹⁷,' seem to speak of a large connexion of kinsmen: but we only know of one other member of his own family, his brother, whose early death in the Troad is mentioned with very genuine feeling in several of his poems. The statement of Jerome that he was born at Verona is confirmed by Ovid and Martial, and by the poet himself. He speaks of the 'Transpadani' as his own people ('ut meos quoque attingam'); he addresses Brixia (the modern Brescia), as—

he speaks of one of his fellow-townsmen, as—

Besides spending his early youth there, we find him, on three different occasions, retiring thither from Rome, and making a considerable stay there; first, at the time of his brother's death, apparently at the very height of his liaison with Clodia; next, immediately after his return from Bithynia; and again in the winter of 55-54 b.c., when it is probable that his interview and reconciliation with Julius Caesar took place. We find him inviting his friend, the poet Caecilius, to come and visit him from the newly established colony of Como. He had his friends and confidants among the youth of Verona, and he records his intrigues both with the married women and courtesans of the place¹⁸. He took a lively interest in the humorous scandals of the Province, and he has made them the subjects of several of his poems,—e.g. xvii and lxvii. Although his life was too full of social excitement and human interests to make him dwell much on natural beauty, yet the pure feeling expressed in the Sirmio—

shows that he derived keen enjoyment from the familiar loveliness of that 'ocellus' of 'all isles and capes': and in the illustrative imagery of his more artistic poems we seem to find traces of the impression made unconsciously on his imagination by the mountain scenery of Northern Italy²⁰.

His native district afforded scope for the culture, which was the serious charm of his life, as well as for the pleasures which formed a large part of it. It was in the youth of Catullus that the power of Greek studies was first felt by the impressionable race, half-Italian, half-Celtic, of Cisalpine Gaul, which still remained outside of Italy, and is called by him 'Provincia.' Among the men of letters belonging to the last age of the Republic,—Cato, the grammarian and poet, the great teacher of the poets of the new generation²¹, described in lines quoted by Suetonius as

Cornelius Nepos, the friend who early recognised the genius of Catullus and to whom one of his 'libelli' was dedicated in the lines now prefixed to the collection,—Quintilius Varus, probably the Varus of poems x and xxii, and the friend whose death Horace laments in an Ode to Virgil, and whose candour as a critic he commends in the Ars Poetica,—Furius Bibaculus, Cornificius, and Caecilius, most of whom were among the intimate friends of Catullus, came from, or resided in, the North of Italy²². In the poem already mentioned he speaks of the mistress of Caecilius as being—

an indication that, not only in Rome but even in the northern province, the finest literary taste and culture was shared by women. Catullus shows in the earlier stage of his poetic career his familiarity both with the 'Muse of Sappho,' and with the more laboured art of Callimachus. His special literary butt, 'Volusius,' whose poems are ridiculed under the title of 'Annales Volusi,' was also his 'Conterraneus,' being a native of the ancient 'Padua,' a town at the mouth of the Po²³. The strength of the impulse first given to literary study in this age is marked also by the eminent names from the North of Italy, which belong to the next generation, those of Virgil, Cornelius Gallus, Aemilius Macer, Livy, etc. There is no proof that Catullus left his native district in order to complete his education, though it is not improbable that he may have done so and come under the instruction of the 'Latina Siren,' with whom he was later on terms of familiar intimacy (lvi); nor have we any sure sign of his presence at Rome before the year 61 b.c.²⁴ He tells us that he began his career both as an amatory poet and as a man of pleasure in his earliest youth,—

One or two of the poems which we still possess may have been written before Catullus settled in Rome, and before his genius was fully awakened by his passion for Lesbia: but the great majority belong to a later date; and if he did write many love poems before leaving Verona, 'in the pleasant spring-time of his life,' nearly all, if not all, of them were omitted from the final collection. Even the 'Aufilena poems,' which are based on an intrigue carried on at Verona, are shown, by the lines in c:—

to be subsequent to the liaison with Clodia. This last line can only refer to the one all-absorbing passion of the poet's life. His own relations to Aufilena, in whose affections he seems to have tried to supplant his friend Quintius, were subsequent to the composition of that poem. It is possible, as Westphal suggests, that the Veronese bride, 'viridissimo nupta flore puella' of the 17th poem, in whom Catullus evidently took a lively interest, may have been this Aufilena, at an earlier stage of her career.

The event which first revealed the full power of his genius, and which brought the greatest happiness and the greatest misery into his life, was his passion for 'Lesbia.' After the elaborate discussions of the question by Schwabe, Munro, Ellis and others, it can no longer be doubted that the lady addressed under that name was the notorious Clodia; the βοῶπις who appears so prominently in the second book of Cicero's Letters to Atticus, and the 'Medea Palatina' whose crimes, fascination, and profligacy stand out so distinctly in the defence of Caelius. We learn first from Ovid that 'Lesbia' was a feigned name; and the application of that name is easily intelligible from the admiration which Catullus felt, and which his mistress probably shared, for the 'Lesbian poetess,' whose passionate words he addressed to his mistress when he was first dazzled by her exceeding charm and beauty. Apuleius tells us further that the real name of 'Lesbia' was Clodia; and the truth of his statement is confirmed by his mention in the same place of other Roman ladies, who were celebrated by their poet-lovers,—Ticidas, Tibullus, and Propertius,—under disguised names. The statement made there that the real name of the Cynthia of Propertius was Hostia, is confirmed by the line in one of his elegies,

The fact that this Clodia was the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher is also indicated in the 79th poem of Catullus,

The play on the word pulcher might be illustrated by many parallel allusions in Cicero's Letters to Atticus. The gratitude expressed by Catullus to Allius²⁷, a man of rank and position, for having made arrangements to enable him to meet his mistress in secret, clearly shows that she could not have belonged to the class of libertinae, in whose case no such precautions could have been necessary: and the language of Catullus in the first period of his liaison—

and again,

is like the rapture of a lover acknowledging the gracious condescension of a superior, as well as the delight of passion returned. Of the two kinds of lovers, those who 'allow themselves to be loved' and are flattered by this tribute to their superiority, and those who are carried out of themselves by their idealising admiration of the object of their love, Catullus, in his earlier and happier time, unquestionably belonged to the latter. Such a feeling, on the part of a young provincial poet, although primarily inspired by charms of person and manner, would naturally be enhanced by the thought that the lady whom he loved belonged to one of the oldest and highest patrician houses, and was the wife of one of the greatest nobles of Rome, who was either actual Consul, or Consul designate, at the time when she first returned the poet's passion. The subsequent course of their liaison affords further corroboration of her identity with the famous Clodia. The rival against whom the poet's anger is most fierce and bitter, is addressed by him as Rufus²⁸,—the cognomen of M. Caelius, who became the lover of Clodia in the latter part of the year 59, and was defended by Cicero in a prosecution instigated by her in the early part of 56 b.c. The speech of Cicero amply confirms the charges of Catullus as to the multiplicity of her later lovers. As, therefore, there seems no reason to doubt, and the strongest reason to accept the statement of Apuleius that the real name of Lesbia was Clodia; as the Lesbia of Catullus was, like her, evidently a lady of rank and of great accomplishment²⁹; as there was no other Clodia of the family of Clodius Pulcher at Rome, except the wife of Metellus Celer, to whom the statements made in the poems of Catullus could apply; and as these statements closely agree with all that Cicero says of her,—there is no reasonable ground for doubting their identity. If it is urged, on the other side, that a lady of the rank and station of Clodia cannot have sunk so low, as some of the later poems of Catullus imply, it may be said that all that Catullus in his jealous wrath imputed to her need not have been true, and also that other Roman ladies of as high rank and position, both in the last age of the Republic and in the early Empire, did sink as low³⁰.

That the intrigue was carried on and had even reached its second stage—that of the 'amantium irae'—in the life-time of Metellus, appears from the 83rd poem,

Metellus was governor of the Province of Gallia Cisalpina in 62 b.c., and he must have returned to Rome early in 61 to stand for the Consulship. Catullus may have become known to Clodia in his absence, and the earliest poem addressed to her, the translation from Sappho, which is expressive of passionate and even distant admiration rather than of secure possession, may belong to the time of her husband's absence. But in the 68th poem, which recalls most vividly the early days of their love, when they met in secret at the house provided by Allius, the lines, in which the poet excuses her faithlessness to himself—

clearly imply that these meetings occurred after the return of Metellus to Rome. The earlier love poems to Lesbia—those on her pet sparrow, the 'Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,' and the 'Quaeris quot mihi basiationes,'—in all of which the feeling expressed is one at once of passionate admiration and of perfect security,—belong probably to the year 60, or to the latter part of the year 61 b.c. To this period may, in all probability, be assigned some of the poet's brightest and happiest efforts,—the Epithalamium in honour of the marriage of Manlius and Vinia Aurunculeia³², and the poems ix, xii, xiii, commemorative of his friendship with Veranius and Fabullus. The words in the last of these—

seem to admit of no other explanation than that they were written in the heyday of his passion. The lines in the poem, welcoming Veranius,—

seem to speak of some adventures encountered in Spain: and from the fact that three years later the two friends, who are always coupled together as inseparable by Catullus, went together on the staff of Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Caesar, to his Province of Macedonia, it seems a not unwarranted conjecture³³ that they were similarly engaged at this earlier time, and had gone to Spain in the train of Julius Caesar, and had returned with him to Rome in the middle of the year 60 b.c.³⁴ The twelfth poem, which is interesting as a testimony to the honour and good taste of Asinius Pollio, then a boy of sixteen, was written somewhat earlier, while Veranius and Fabullus were still in Spain.

The first hint of any rift in the loves of Catullus and Clodia is contained in the 68th poem, written in the form of a letter to Manlius³⁵—

Catullus had retired to Verona on hearing of the death of his brother, and he was for a time so overwhelmed with grief as to become indifferent both to poetry and love. He is as sincere and unreserved in the expression of his grief as of his former happiness, and as completely absorbed by it. He writes to Hortensius, enclosing, in fulfilment of an old promise, a translation of the 'Coma Berenices' of Callimachus, but at the same time expressing his loss of all interest in poetry owing to his recent affliction,—

In his letter to Manlius, in which he excuses himself on the same ground for not sending any poetry of his own, and for not complying with his request to send him some volumes of Greek poetry, on the ground that his collection of books was at Rome, he notices, with a feeling almost of hopeless indifference, a hint conveyed to him by Manlius, of his mistress' faithlessness³⁶. In the poem written somewhat later to Allius,—

in which his grief is still fresh but more subdued, and in which the full tide of his old passion, as well as his old delight in his art, returns to him, he speaks lightly of her occasional infidelities,—

If he can no longer be her only lover, he still hopes to be the most favoured. But he soon finds even this privilege denied to him. His love-poetry henceforth assumes a different sound. For a time, indeed, his reproaches are uttered in a tone of sadness not unmixed with tenderness. Afterwards, even though his passion from time to time revives with its old vehemence, and he again becomes the slave of Lesbia's caprice, his tone becomes angry, hard, and scornful. Finally, the evidence of her shameless life and innumerable infidelities with Caelius, Gellius, Egnatius, and 'three hundred others,' enables him utterly to renounce her. The earlier of the poems, both of anger and reconciliation, may probably have been written in the life-time of Metellus, i. e. in 60 or in the beginning of 59 b.c. But later in that year Metellus died, suspected of being poisoned by his wife, who, on the ground of that suspicion, was named by Caelius Rufus, after his passion had merged in a hatred equal to that of Catullus, by the terrible oxymoron of 'Clytemnestra quadrantaria.' Her widowhood gained for her absolute license in the indulgence of her propensities, and the first use she made of her liberty was to receive Caelius Rufus into her house on the Palatine. What her ultimate fate was we do not know, but the language of Cicero, Caelius, and Catullus show that she could inspire as deadly hatred as passionate admiration, and that the 'Juno-like' charm of her beauty, the grace and fascination of her presence, the intellectual accomplishment which made poets and orators for a time her slaves, did not save her from sinking into the lowest degradation.

The poems representing the second and third stage—that in which passion and scorn strive with one another—of the relations to 'Lesbia,' and containing the savage attacks on his rivals, belong to the years 59 and 58 b.c.: nor do there appear to be any other poems of importance referable to this latter date. One or two poems, in which his final renunciation is made with much scornful emphasis, belong to a later date after his return from Bithynia. He went there early in the year 57 b.c., on the staff of the Propraetor Memmius, and remained till the spring of the following year. The immediate motive for this step may have been his wish to escape from his fatal entanglement, but the chances of bettering his fortunes, the congenial society of his friend the poet Helvius Cinna and other members of the staff, and the attraction of visiting the famous seats of the old Greek civilization, were also powerful inducements to a man who combined a strong social and pleasure-loving nature with the enthusiasm of a poet and a scholar. His severance from his recent associations and from the animosities they engendered was favourable to his happiness and his poetry. He did not indeed improve his fortunes, owing, as he says, to the poverty of the province and the meanness of his chief. He detested Memmius, and has recorded his detestation in the hearty terms of abuse of which he was a master; and he expresses his joy in quitting, in the following spring, the dull monotony of the Phrygian plains and the hot climate of Nicaea. But he had great enjoyment in his association with his comrades on the Praetor's staff—