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'—
hedera iuvenalia vinctus
Tempora.
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—
Quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem.
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—
Namque tu solebas
Meas esse aliquid putare nugas, etc.—
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 lxviiib—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,—
Per consulatum perierat Vatinius,—
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,—
Malest Cornifici tuo Catullo,—
and—
Quid est Catulle? quid moraris emori?
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—
Veronae mater amata meae;
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—
Salve, o venusta Sirmio, atque ero gaude;
Gaudete vosque o vividae19 lacus undae—
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
Latina Siren
Qui solus legit ac facit poetas,—
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—
Sapphica puella
Musa doctior,—
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,—
Tempore quo primum vestis mihi tradita pura'st,
Iucundum cum aetas florida ver ageret,
Multa satis lusi: non est dea nescia nostri,
Quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem25.
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:—
Cui faveam potius? Caeli, tibi, nam tua nobis
Per facta exhibita'st unica amicitia,
Cum vesana meas torreret flamma medullas,
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,
Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo26.
The fact that this Clodia was the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher
is also indicated in the 79th poem of Catullus,
Lesbius est pulcher: quidni? quem Lesbia malit
Quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua.
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—
Ille mi par esse deo videtur;
and again,
Quo mea se molli candida diva pedem
Intulit,
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,
Lesbia mi praesente viro mala plurima dicit, etc.
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—
Sed furtiva dedit mira munuscula nocte,
Ipsius ex ipso dempta viri gremio31—
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—
Nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
Donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque—
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,—
Visam te incolumem audiamque Hiberum
Narrantem loca, facta, nationes—
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—
Quare, quod scribis Veronae turpe Catullo, etc.
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,—
Etsi me adsiduo confectum cura dolore
Sevocat a doctis, Ortale, virginibus, etc.
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,—
Non possum reticere deae qua me Allius in re, etc.—
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,—
Quae tamen etsi uno non est contenta Catullo
Rara verecundae furta feremus erae.
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—
O dulces comitum valete coetus.—
He was attracted to one of them, Helvius Cinna, by warm
admiration for his poetic accomplishment, as well as by
friendship37; and the time spent by them together was probably
lightened by the practice of their art, and the study of
the Alexandrine poets. Although the fame of Cinna did not
become so great as that of Catullus or Calvus, he seems
to have been regarded by the poets of that school in the light
of a master38; and it is probably owing to the example
of his Zmyrna, so highly lauded in the 95th poem of Catullus,
that Catullus composed his Epithalamium of Peleus and
Thetis, Calvus composed his Io, and Cornificius his Glaucus.
A still more remarkable poem of Catullus, the Attis, the
subject of which, so remote not only from Roman but even
Greek life, is identified with the Phrygian highlands and the
seats of the worship of Cybele, probably owes its inspiration as
well as its local colouring to the poet's sojourn in this district.
It is not unlikely that it was during the leisure of the time
spent in Bithynia that these poems were commenced, as
it was during his retirement to Verona after his brother's death
that his longer Elegiac poems were written. The mention of
the 'Catagraphi Thyni' in a later poem is suggestive of
the interest which he took in the novel aspects of Eastern
life opened up to him in the province. But it is in the
poems which are written in the year 56 b.c., that we chiefly
note the happy effect of the poet's absence from Rome, and of
his emancipation from his passion. Some of these poems,—more
especially xlvi, ci, xxxi, and iv,—are among the happiest
and purest products of his genius. They bring him before us
eagerly preparing to start on his journey 'among the famous
cities of Asia,'—making his pious pilgrimage to his brother's
tomb in the Troad,—greeting his beloved Sirmio and the
bright waters of the Lago di Garda on his first return home,
and recalling sometime later to his guests by the shores of the
lake the memories of the places visited, and of the gallant
bearing of his pinnace, 'through so many wild seas,' on
his homeward voyage. Some of the poems written from
Verona—those referring to his intrigue or perhaps his disappointment
with Aufilena, and the invitation to Caecilius
(xxxv), were probably composed about this time, before his
return to Rome. The 'Aufilena' poems belong certainly to a
time later than his passion for Lesbia; and during a still later
visit to Verona—probably that during which he met and
was reconciled to Julius Caesar—Catullus is found engaged in
love-affairs in which Mamurra was his rival. As the invitation
to Caecilius was written after the foundation of Como (b.c. 59),
it could not have been sent by Catullus during his earlier
sojourns at Verona: and 'the ideas' which he wished to
interchange with the poet who was then engaged in writing a
poem on Cybele—'Dindymi domina,'—to which Catullus
pointedly refers, may well have been those suggested by
his Eastern sojourn, and embodied in the Attis. But soon
afterwards we find him back in Rome, and the lively and most
natural comedy, dramatically put before us in x—
Varus me meus ad suos amores
Visum duxerat e foro otiosum—
bears the freshest impress of his recent Bithynian experiences.
Poems xxviii and xlviii, inspired by his hatred of Memmius
and his sympathy with the treatment, like to that which he had
himself experienced, which his friends Veranius and Fabullus
had met with at the hands of their chief Piso, probably belong
to a later time, after the return of Piso from his province in
55 b.c. Some critics have found the motive of the famous lines
addressed to Cicero—
Disertissime Romuli nepotum
Quot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli—
in the speech delivered in the early part of 56 b.c., in defence
of Caelius, of which, from the prominence given in it to the
vices of Clodia, Catullus must have heard soon after his
return to Rome. But the words of the poem hardly justify this
inference. Catullus was not interested in the vindication of
Caelius, who had proved false to him as a friend, and supplanted
him as a rival. And he was himself so perfect a
master of vituperation that he did not need to thank Cicero
for his having done that office for him in regard to Clodia.
Yet the reference to Cicero's eloquence, and to his supremacy
in the law courts—,
Tanto pessimus omnium poeta
Quanta tu optimus omnium patronus—
seems to point to some exercise of Cicero's special talent
as an advocate, for which Catullus was grateful. The great
orator and the great poet, who speaks so modestly of himself
in the contrast he draws between them, may have been brought
together in many ways. They had common friends and
acquaintances—Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Sestius, Licinius
Calvus, Memmius, etc.; and they heartily hated the
same persons, Clodia, Vatinius, Piso, and others. The intimate
associates of Catullus shared the political views and
sympathies which the orator had professed at least up to the
year 55 b.c. Cicero, too, was naturally attracted to young
men of promise and genius,—if they did not belong too
prominently to the 'grex Catilinae';—and, like Dr. Johnson in
his relations to Beauclerk and Boswell, he may have valued
their society more for their intellectual vivacity than their
moral virtues39.
The poems written in the last two years of the poet's life do
not indicate any emancipation from the coarser passions and
the fierce animosities of the period immediately preceding
the Bithynian journey. To this later time may be assigned
the famous lampoons on Julius Caesar and Mamurra, the poems
referring to some of his Veronese amours, those addressed
to Juventius, and the reckless, half-bantering, half-savage assaults
on 'Furius and Aurelius,' who were both the butts of his wit
and the sharers of his least reputable pleasures. They seem
to have been needy men, though of some social standing40,
probably of the class of 'Scurrae,' who preyed on his purse
and made loud professions of devotion to him, while they
abused his confidence and his character behind his back.
Some of the poems of his last years, however, are indicative
of a more genial frame of mind and of happier relations with
the world. It was at this time that he enjoyed the intimate
friendship of Licinius Calvus41, to whom he was united by
similarity of taste and of genius, as well as by sympathy in
their personal and political dislikes. Four poems—one certainly
among the very last written by Catullus—are inspired
by this friendship, and all clearly prove that at least this source
of happiness was unalloyed by any taint of bitterness. Two
other poems, the final repudiation of Lesbia, and the bright
picture of the loves of Acme and Septimius, which, by their
allusions to the invasion of Britain and to the excitement
preceding the Parthian expedition of Crassus and the Egyptian
expedition of Gabinius, show unmistakeably that they belong
to the last year of his life, afford conclusive evidence that
neither the exhausting passions, the rancorous feuds, nor the
deeper sorrows of his life had in any way impaired the vigour
of his imagination or his sense of beauty. Perhaps the latest
verses addressed by Catullus to any of his friends are those
lines of tender complaint to Cornificius, in which he begs
of him some little word of consolation—
Maestius lacrimis Simonideis.
The lines—
Malest, me hercule, et est laboriose,
Et magis magis in dies et horas—
might well have been drawn from him by the rapid advance of
his fatal illness, and the phrase 'lacrimis Simonideis' is suggestive
of the anticipation of death rather than of the misery of
unfortunate love42.
The length as well as the diction, rhythm, and structure
of the 64th poem—
Peliaco quondam prognatae, etc.—
shows that it was a work of much greater labour and thought
than any of those which sprang spontaneously out of the passion
or sentiment of the moment. Probably in the composition
of this, which he must have regarded as the most serious
and ambitious effort of his Muse, Catullus may have acted
on the principle which he commends so warmly in his lines
on the Zmyrna of Cinna—
Zmyrna mei Cinnae nonam post denique messem
Quam coepta'st nonamque edita post hiemem,—
and have kept it by him for years, elaborating the unfamiliar
poetic diction in which it is expressed, and enlarging its
original plan by the insertion of the long Ariadne episode.
It is the only poem of Catullus which produces the impression
of the slow and reflective processes of art as distinct from
the rapidly shaping power of immediate inspiration. From
this circumstance alone we should regard it as a work on which
his maturest faculty was employed. But it has been shown43
that throughout the poem, and more especially in the episode
of Ariadne, there are clear indications that Catullus had read
and imitated the poem of Lucretius, which appeared about
the end of 55 or the beginning of 54 b.c. We may therefore
conclude that in the year 54 b.c.—the last of his life—Catullus
was still engaged either in the original composition
of his longest poem, or in giving to it the finishing touches.
The concluding lines of the poem—
Sed postquam tellus scelere est imbuta nefando, etc.—
which are written in a more serious spirit, and with a graver
judgment on human life than anything else he has left, perhaps
indicate the path which his maturer genius might have struck
out for itself, if he had ever risen from the careless freedom of
early youth to the reflective habits and steady labour of riper
years.
But although longer life might have brought to Catullus
a still higher rank among the poets of the world, the chief
charm of the poems actually written by him arises from the
strength and depth of his personal feelings, and the force,
freshness, and grace with which he has expressed them.
Other Roman poets have produced works of more elaborate
composition, and have shown themselves greater interpreters
of Nature and of human life: none have expressed so directly
and truthfully the great elemental affections, or have uttered
with such vital sincerity the happiness or the pain of the
passing hour. He presents his own simple experience and
emotions, uncoloured by idealising fancy or reflexion, and
the world accepts this as among the truest of all records
of human feeling. The 'spirat adhuc amor' is especially
true of all the poems inspired by his love for Lesbia. It
is by the union of the utmost fire of passion with a heart
capable of the utmost constancy of feeling that he transcends
all other poets of love. We pass with him through every
stage of his passion, from the first rapture of admiration
and the first happiness of possession to the biting words or
scorn in which he announces to Lesbia his final renunciation
of her. We witness the whole 'pageant of his bleeding heart,'
from the fresh pain of the wound on first fully realising her
unworthiness, through the various stages of superficial reconcilement,—the
'amoris integratio' following on the 'amantium
irae44,'—on to the state of torture described by him in
the words 'Odi et amo45,' till at last he obtains his emancipation
by the growth of a savage rancour and loathing in
the place of the passionate love which had tried so long to
sustain itself 'like a wild flower at the edge of the meadow46.'
Among the many poems, written through nearly the whole
of his poetical career, and called forth by this, the most
vital experience of his life, those of most charm and power
are the two on the 'Sparrow of Lesbia' (ii and iii) written
in tones of playful tenderness, not without some touch of
the luxury of melancholy which accompanies and enhances
passion;—the two, v and vii,
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
and
Quaeris, quot mihi basiationes, etc.,—
written in the very height of his short-lived happiness, in
the wildest tumult and most reckless abandonment of passion,
when the immediate joy is felt as the only thing of any
moment in life; the 8th poem—
Miser, Catulle, desinas ineptire—
in which he recalls the bright days of the past—
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,—
and steels his heart against useless regret:—and another
poem written in a different metre, in the same mood, and
apparently after the wounds, which had been partially healed,
had broken out afresh,—
Si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas, etc.47;
in which he prays for a deliverance from his passion as from
a foul disease, or a kind of madness;—and lastly, the final
renunciation (xi),—
Furi et Aureli comites Catullo,—
in which scornful irony is combined with an imaginative
power and creative force of expression which he has only
equalled or surpassed in one or two other of his greatest
works,—such as the 'Attis' and the Epithalamium of Manlius.
Other tales of love told by poets have been more
beautiful in their course, or more pathetic in their issue;
none have been told with more truthful realism, or more
desperate intensity of feeling.
The fame of Catullus, as alone among ancient poets of
love rivalling the traditional glory of Sappho, does not rest
only on those poems which record the varying vicissitudes
of his own experience. His longer and more artistic poems
are all concerned with some phase of this passion, either in
its more beautiful and pathetic aspects, or in its perversion
and corruption. Thus he not only selects from Greek
legends the story of the desertion of Ariadne, of the brief
union of Protesilaus and Laodamia, of the glory and blessedness
of Peleus and Thetis, but he makes the tragic deed of
Attis, instigated by the fanatical hatred of love,—'Veneris
nimio odio,'—the subject of his art. Others of his poems are
inspired by sympathy with the happiness of his friends in the
enjoyment of their love, and with their sorrow when that love
is interrupted by death. The most charming of all his longer
poems is the Epithalamium which celebrates the union of
Manlius with his bride. No truer picture of the passionate
devotion of lovers has ever been painted than that presented
in the few playful and tender but burning lines of the 'Acme
and Septimius.' His own experience did not teach him the
lessons of cynicism. At the close as at the beginning of his
career, he finds in the union of passion with truth and
constancy the most real source of happiness. The elegiac
lines in which he comforts his friend Calvus for the loss of
Quintilia bear witness to the strength and delicacy of his
friendship, and, along with others of his poems, make us feel
that the life of pleasure in that age was not only brightened by
genius and culture, but also elevated by pure affection and
sympathy,—
Si quicquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulchris
Accidere a nostro Calve dolore potest,
Quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores
Atque olim missas flemus amicitias
Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est
Quintiliae, quantum gaudet amore tuo48.
The most attractive feature in the character of Catullus
is the warmth of his affection. No ancient poet has left so
pleasant a record of the genial intercourse of friends, or has
given such proof of his own dependence on human attachment
and of his readiness to meet all the claims which others have
on such attachment. In his gayest hours and his greatest
sorrow, amid his pleasures and his studies, he shows his
thoughtful consideration for others, his grateful recollection
of past kindness, and his own extreme need of sympathy.
Perhaps he expects too much from friendship, and, in addressing
his comrades, is too ready to assume that whatever
gives momentary pleasure or pain to 'their own Catullus' must
be of equal importance to them. No poet makes such use of
terms of endearment and affectionate diminutives in writing
both to and of his friends, and of himself in his relation to
them. But if he expected much from the sympathy of his associates,
he possessed in no ordinary measure the capacity of
feeling with and of heartily loving and admiring them. He
often expresses honest and delicate appreciation of the works,
or of the wit, taste, and genius of his friends. The dedication
of his volume to Cornelius Nepos, the lines addressed to Cicero,
the invitation to Caecilius—
Poetae tenero, meo sodali
Velim Caecilio papyre dicas,—
the poem in which he recalls to Licinius Calvus a day passed
together in witty talk and the interchange of verses over their
wine, the contrast which he draws between the doom of speedy
oblivion which he pronounces on the 'Annals of Volusius,' and
the immortality which he confidently anticipates for the 'Zmyrna'
of Cinna,—all show that, though fastidious in his judgments,
he was without a single touch of literary jealousy, and that he
felt a generous pride in the fame and accomplishments of men
of established reputation as well as of his own younger compeers.
Nor was his affection limited by literary sympathy. Of none
of his associates does he write more heartily than of Veranius
and Fabullus, young men, apparently enjoying their youth, and
trying to better their fortunes by serving on the staff of some
Praetor or Proconsul in his province. The language of
affection could not be uttered with more cordiality, simplicity,
and grace than in the poem of ten or eleven lines welcoming
Veranius on his return from Spain,—
Venistine domum ad tuos Penates
Fratresque unanimos anumque matrem?
Venisti. O mihi nuntii beati.
There is not a word in the poem wasted; not one that does
not come straight and strong from the heart. The 'Invitation
to Fabullus' is in a lighter strain, and is written with the
freedom and humour which he could use to add a charm to
his friendly intercourse49, and a sting to his less congenial
relations. Yet through the playful banter of this poem his
delicate and kindly nature betrays itself in the words 'venuste
noster,' and in those lines of true feeling,—
Sed contra accipies meros amores
Seu quid suavius elegantiusve.
His affection for both comes out incidentally in his remonstrance
with Marrucinus Asinius50 for having filched after
dinner, 'in ioco atque vino,' one of his napkins, which he
valued as memorials of the friends who had sent them to him,
and which he endows with some share of the love he felt for
them,—
Haec amem necessest
Ut Veraniolum meum et Fabullum.
The lampoons on Piso and his favourites, Porcius and
Socration, show that those who wronged his friends could
rouse in him as generous indignation as those who wronged
himself.
Other poems express the pain and disappointment of
a very sensitive nature, which expects more active and disinterested
sympathy from others than ordinary men care
either to give or to receive. Of this sort are his complaint
to Cornificius51,—
Malest, Cornifici, tuo Catullo—
and the affectionate reproach which he addresses to Alphenus
(xxx):—
Certe tute iubebas animam tradere, inique, me
Inducens in amorem, quasi tuta omnia mi forent.
Inde nunc retrahis te ac tua dicta omnia factaque
Ventos irrita ferre ac nebulas aerias sinis.
These, and other poems, show that Catullus was quick to
feel any coldness or neglect on the part of his friends, and
exceedingly dependent for his happiness on their sympathy.
But the tone of these poems is quite different from the
resentment which he feels and expresses against those from
whom he had experienced malice or treachery. It does
great injustice to his noblest qualities, to think of him as
one who wantonly attacked or lightly turned against his
friends. No instance of such levity of feeling can be adduced
from his writings. It has been conclusively shown52
that in the third line of the 95th poem there can be no
reference to Hortensius, who, under the name of Hortalus,
is addressed by Catullus in his 65th poem with courteous
consideration: and if 'Furius and Aurelius' are to be regarded,
on the strength of the opening lines of the 11th poem,
as having ever ranked among his devoted friends, then the
poem, instead of being a magnificent outburst of scornful
irony, becomes a mere specimen of bathos. Nothing, on the
other hand, can be more in keeping with the feeling of contemptuous
tolerance which Catullus expresses in his other
poems relating to them, than the pointed contrast between
their hollow professions of enthusiasm and the degrading office
which he assigns to them,—
Pauca nuntiate meae puellae
Non bona dicta.
Catullus could pass from friendship or love to a state of
permanent enmity and hatred, when he believed that those in
whom he had trusted had acted falsely and heartlessly towards
him: and then he did not spare them. But the duties of
loyal friendship and affection are to him a kind of religion.
Perfidy and falsehood are regarded by him not only as the
worst offences against honour in man, but as sins against the
Gods. He lays claim to a good conscience and to the
character of piety, on the ground that he had neither failed in
acts of kindness nor violated his word or his oath in any of his
human dealings:—
Si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas
Est homini, cum se cogitat esse pium,
Nec sanctam violasse fidem, nec foedere in ullo
Divum ad fallendos numine abusum homines, etc.53
That he possessed no ordinary share of 'piety,' in the
Roman sense of the word, appears from the poems which
express his grief for his brother's death. He died in the
Troad; and we have seen how, some years after the event,
Catullus turned aside from his pleasant voyage among the Isles
of Greece and coasts of Asia, to visit his tomb and to offer
upon it the customary funeral gifts. His words in reference to
this great sorrow, in all the poems in which he speaks of it, are
full of deep and simple human feeling. He does not venture
to comfort himself with the hope which he suggests to Calvus,
in the lines on the death of Quintilia, of a conscious existence
after death; but he resolves that his love shall still endure
even after the eternal separation from its object. Yet while
yielding to the first shock of this affliction, so as to become for
the time indifferent to the passion which had swayed his life,
and to the delight which he had taken in the works of ancient
poets and the exercise of his art, he does not allow himself to
forget what was due to living friends. It is characteristic of
his frank affectionate nature, that, while dead to his old
interests in life and literature, he finds his chief comfort in unburthening
his heart to his friends and in writing to them
words of delicate consideration. He cannot bear that, even in
a trifling matter, Hortalus should find him forgetful of a
promise: and he longs to lighten the sorrow of his friend
Manlius, who had written to him in some sudden affliction,—probably
the loss of the bride in whose honour Catullus had,
a short time previously, composed his great Nuptial Ode.
Though all other feelings were dead, and neither love could
distract nor poetry heal his grief, his heart was alive to the
memory of former kindness54, to the natural craving for sympathy,
and to the duty of thinking of others.
Another, and less admirable, side of the nature of Catullus
is reflected in his short satirical poems. These have nothing
in common with the ethical and reflective satire of Lucilius and
Horace: and although the objects of some of them are the
most prominent personages in the State, yet their motive
cannot, in any case, be called purely political. They are like
the lampoons of Archilochus and the early Greek Iambic
writers, purely personal in their object. They are either
the virulent expression of his antipathies, jealousies, and
rancours, or they are inspired by his lively sense of the
ridiculous and by his extreme fastidiousness of taste. The
most famous, most incisive, and least justifiable of these
lampoons are the attacks on Julius Caesar, especially that
contained in the 29th poem,—
Quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati,
Nisi impudicus et vorax et alco, etc.—
and in the less vigorous but much more offensive 57th poem.
Catullus in these poems expresses the animosity which the
'boni' generally entertained towards the chiefs of the popular
party: and his intimacy at this time with Calvus, who was
a member of the Senatorian party, and who lampooned Caesar
and Pompey in the same spirit, may have given some political
edge to his Satire. He was moved also by a feeling of disgust
towards the habits and manners of some of Caesar's instruments
and creatures,—such as Vatinius, Libo, Mamurra, etc.
But the chief motive both of the 29th and the 57th,—the two
poems which Suetonius regarded as attaching an 'everlasting
stigma' to the name of Caesar—is the jealousy of Mamurra,—the
object also of many separate satires,—who, through the
favour of the Proconsul and the fortune which he thereby
acquired, was a successful rival of Catullus in his provincial
love affairs. The indignation of Cicero was roused against the
riches of Mamurra on political grounds55: that of Catullus on
the ground that they gave their possessor an unfair advantage
in the race of pleasure:—
Et ille nunc superbus et superfluens
Perambulabit omnium cubilia, etc.
Suetonius tells the story, confirmed by the lines in a later poem
of Catullus—
Irascere iterum meis iambis
Inmerentibus, unice imperator,—
that Caesar, while staying at his father's house at Verona,
accepted the poet's apology for his libellous verses, and
admitted him the same day to his dinner-table. Had he
attached the meaning to the imputations contained in them,
which Suetonius did two hundred years afterwards, even his
magnanimous clemency could not well have tolerated them.
But, as Cicero tells us in his defence of Caelius, such charges
were in those days regarded as a mere 'façon de parler,' which
if made coarsely were regarded as 'rudeness' ('petulantia'), if
done wittily, as 'polite banter' ('urbanitas'). Caesar must
have looked upon the imputations of the 57th poem as a mere
angry ebullition of boyish petulance: and he showed the same
disregard for imputations made by Calvus, which, though
as unfounded, were not so absolutely incredible and unmeaning.
His clemency to Catullus met with a return similar
to that which it met with at a later time from other recipients
of his generosity. Catullus, though the 'truest friend,' was
certainly not the 'noblest foe.' The coarseness of his attack
may be partly palliated by the manners of the age: but the
spirit in which he returns to the attack in the 54th poem leaves
a more serious stain on his character. He was too completely
in the wrong to be able frankly to forgive Caesar for his
gracious and magnanimous treatment.
Many of his personal satires are directed against the
licentiousness of the men and women with whom he quarrelled.
Notwithstanding the evidence of his own frequent confessions,
he lays a claim to purity of life in the phrase, 'si vitam puriter
egi56,' and in his strange apology for the freedom of his verses,—
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est57.
He is absolutely unrestrained both in regard to the imputations
which he makes, and to the choice of the language in which he
conveys them; and in these imputations he spares neither rank
nor sex. It is one of the strangest paradoxes to find a poet
like Catullus, endowed with the purest sense of beauty, and
yet capable of turning all his vigorous force of expression to the
vilest uses. He is coarser in his language than any of the
older poets, and than any of those of the Augustan age. In
the time of the former the traditional severity of the old
Roman life,—'tetrica ac tristis disciplina Sabinorum,'—had
not altogether lost its influence. In the Augustan age, if
there was as much immorality as in the age preceding it, there
was more outward decorum. The licentiousness of that age
expresses itself in tones of refinement; it associates itself
with sentimentalism in literature; it was reduced to system
and carried out as the serious business of life. The coarseness
of Catullus is symptomatic rather of more recklessness than of
greater corruption in society. Impurity is less destructive to
human nature when it vents itself in bantering or virulent
abuse, than when it clings to the imagination, associates itself
with the sense of beauty, and expresses itself in the language of
passion. Though, in his nobler poetry, Catullus is ardent and
impassioned, he is much more free from this taint than Ovid or
Propertius. The errors of his life did not deaden his sensibility,
harden his heart, or corrupt his imagination. It is only
in his careless moods, when he looks on life in the spirit of a
humorist, or in moods of bitterness when his antipathies are
roused, or in fits of savage indignation against some violation
of natural feeling or some prosperous villainy, that he disregards
the restraints imposed by the better instincts of men on
the use of language.
Many of his Satires, however, are written in a more genial
vein, and are not much disfigured by coarseness or indelicacy
of expression. As he especially valued good taste and courtesy,
wit, and liveliness of mind in his associates, so he is intolerant
of all mean and sordid ways of living, of all stupidity,
affectation, and pedantry. The pieces in which these characteristics
are exposed are marked by keen observation, a lively
sense of absurdity, and sometimes by a boisterous spirit of fun.
They are expressed with vigour and directness; but they want
the subtle irony which pervades the Satires, Epistles, and Odes
of Horace. Among the best of his lighter satires is the poem
numbered xvii:—
O Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere magno,—
which has some touches of graceful poetry as well as of
humorous extravagance. It is directed against the dulness
and stolid indifference of one of his fellow-townsmen, who,
being married to a young and beautiful girl,—
Quoi cum sit viridissimo nupta flore puella
(Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
Asservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis),—
was utterly careless of her, and insensible to the perils to which
she was exposed. To rouse him from his sloth and stupor,
Catullus asks to have him thrown head over heels—
Munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus—
from a rickety old bridge into the deepest and dirtiest part of
the quagmire over which it was built. In another piece
Catullus laughs at the affectation of one of his rivals, Egnatius,—a
black-bearded fop from the Celtiberian wilds,—who had a
trick of perpetually smiling in order to show the whiteness of
his teeth;—a trick which did not desert him at a criminal trial,
during the most pathetic part of the speech for the defence, or
when he stood beside a weeping mother at the funeral pyre of
her only son. In another of his elegiac pieces he gives
expression to the relief felt on the departure for the East of a
bore who afflicted the ears of the polite world by a superfluous
use of his aspirates—
Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet
Dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias, etc.58
Just as the ears of men had recovered from this infliction—
Subito affertur nuntius horribilis,
Ionios fluctus, postquam illuc Arrius isset,
Iam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.
Like fastidious and irritable poets of other times (Horace,
Pope, Byron, etc.), Catullus waged internecine war against
pedants, literary pretenders, and poetasters. He remonstrates
in a vein of humorous exaggeration with his friend Licinius
Calvus, for palming off on him as a gift on the Saturnalia
(corresponding to our Christmas presents) a collection of the
works of these 'miscreants' ('impiorum'), originally sent to him
by some pedantic grammarian, in acknowledgment of his
services as an advocate—
Dii magni, horribilem ac sacrum libellum.
In the 36th poem he represents Lesbia as offering a holocaust
to Venus of the work of 'the worst of all poets,' 'The Annals
of Volusius,' in quittance of a vow on her reconcilement with
Catullus. In another (xxii), addressed to Varus, probably the
fastidious critic whom Horace quotes in the 'Ars Poetica59,' he
exposes the absurdity of one of their friends, who, though
in other respects a man of sense, wit, and agreeable manners,
entertained the delusion that he was a poet, and was never so
happy as when he had surrounded himself with the newest
and finest literary materials, and was plying his uncongenial
occupation. In another he records the nemesis, in the form of
a severe cough, which overtook him for allowing himself to be
seduced by the hopes of a good dinner to read (or perhaps
listen to the reading of) a speech of Cicero's friend and client
Sestius,—
Plenam veneni et pestilentiae.
About one half of the shorter poems, and more than half of
the epigrams, are to be classed among his personal lampoons
or light satiric pieces. Many of these show Catullus to us on
that side of his character, which it is least pleasant or profitable
to dwell on. He could not indeed write anything which did
not bear the stamp of the vital force and sincerity of his
nature: but even his vigour of expression does not compensate
for the survival in literature of the feelings and relations which
are most ignoble in actual life. Yet some of these satiric
pieces have an interest which amply justifies their preservation.
The greatest of all his lampoons, the 29th, has an historical as
well as a literary value. Tacitus, as well as Suetonius, refers to
it. It is not only a masterpiece of terse invective, but, like the
11th, it is a powerful specimen of imaginative irony. The momentous
events of a most momentous era—the Eastern conquests
of Pompey, the first Spanish campaign of Caesar, the subjugation
of Gaul, the invasion of Britain, the revolutionary measures
of 'father-in-law and son-in-law,'—are all made to look as
if they had had no other object or result than that of pampering
the appetites of a worthless favourite. Other lampoons,
such as those against Memmius and Piso, have also an historical
interest. They testify to the republican freedom of speech,
the open expression of which was soon to be silenced for ever.
They enable us to understand how strong a social and political
weapon the power of epigram was in ancient Rome,—a power
which continued to be exercised, though no longer with
republican freedom, under the Empire. The pen of the poet
was employed in the warfare of parties as fiercely as the tongue
of the orator; and although Catullus did not spare partisans of
the Senate, such as Memmius, yet all his associations and
tastes combined to turn his hostility chiefly against the popular
leaders and their tools. The more genial satiric pieces, again,
are chiefly interesting as throwing light on the social and
literary life of Rome and the provincial towns of Italy. They
give us an idea of the lighter talk, the criticism, and merriment
of the younger men in the world of letters and fashion during
the last age of the Republic. If they are not master-pieces of
humour, they are full of gaiety, animal spirits, shrewd observation,
and not very unkindly comment on men and manners.
Besides the poems which show Catullus in various relations
of love, affection, animosity, and humorous criticism, there are
still a few of the shorter pieces which have a personal interest.
He had the purest capacity of enjoying simple pleasures; and
some of his most delightful poems are vivid records of happy
experiences procured to him by this youthful freshness of
feeling. Three of these are especially beautiful,—the dedication
of his yacht to Castor and Pollux,—the lines written immediately
before quitting Bithynia,—
Iam ver egelidos refert tepores,—
and the famous lines on Sirmio. They all belong to the same
period of his life, and all show how happy and serene his spirit
became, when it was untroubled by the passions and rancours
of city life. The lines on his yacht—
Phaselus ille quem videtis, hospites,—
express with much vivacity the feelings of affectionate pride
which a strong and kindly nature lavishes not only on living
friends, but on inanimate objects, associated with the memory
of past happiness and adventure. His fancy endows it with
a kind of life from the earliest time when, under the form
of a clump of trees, it 'rustled its leaves' on Cytorus, till
it obtained its rest in a peaceful age on the fair waters of
Benacus. The 46th poem is inspired by the new sense of life
which comes to early youth with the first approach of spring,
and by the eager flutter of anticipation—
Iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari,
Iam laeti studio pedes vigescunt—
with which a cultivated mind forecasts the pleasure of travelling
among famous and beautiful scenes. But perhaps the most
perfect of his smaller pieces is that in which the love of home
and of Nature, the sense of rest and security after toil and
danger, the glee of a boy and the strong happiness of a man
unite to form the charm of the lines on Sirmio, of which it is as
impossible to analyse the secret as it is to reproduce in another
tongue the language in which it is expressed.
Catullus is one of the great poets of the world, not so much
through gifts of imagination—though with these he was well
endowed—as through his singleness of nature, his vivid
impressibility, and his keen perception. He received the gifts
of the passing hour so happily, that, to produce pure and
lasting poetry, it was enough for him to utter in natural words
something of the fulness of his heart. His interests, though
limited in range, were all genuine and human. His poems
inspired by personal feeling seem to come from him without
any effort. He says, on every occasion, exactly what he
wanted to say, in clear, forcible, direct language. There
are, indeed, even in his simplest poems, a few strokes of imaginative
expression, as, for instance,—
Aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
Furtivos hominum vident amores60,—
and this, written with the feeling and with the application which
Burns makes of the same image,—
Velut prati
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est61;—
and these two touches of tenderness and beauty, which appear
in a poem otherwise characterised by a tone of careless
drollery,—
Nec sapit pueri instar
Bimuli, tremula patris dormientis in ulna,—
and—
Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
Adservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis62.
But the great charm of the style in these shorter poems is its
simple directness, and its popular idiomatic ring. It largely
employs, especially in the poems which express his coarser
feelings, common, often archaic and provincial words, forms,
and idioms. There is nothing, apparently, studied about it, no
ornament or involution, no otiose epithets, no subtle allusiveness.
Yet in the poems expressive of his finer feelings it
shows the happiest selection, not only of the most appropriate,
but of the most exquisite words. To no style, in prose or
verse, in any language, could the words 'simplex munditiis' be
with more propriety applied. It has all the ease of refined and
vigorous conversation, combined with the grace of consummate
art. Though this perfection of expression could not have been
attained without study and labour, yet it bears no trace of
them.
In these smaller poems he shows himself as great a master
of metre as of language. The more sustained power which
he has over the flow of his verse, is best exemplified by
the skylark ring of his great Nuptial Ode, by the hurrying
agitation of the Attis, and the stately calm of the Peleus
and Thetis, giving place to a more impassioned movement
in the 'Ariadne' episode. But in his shorter poems, also,
he shows the true gift of the
ἀοιδός—the power of using
musical language as a symbol of the changing impulses of
feeling. Thus the delicate playfulness and tenderness of his
phalaecians,—the lingering long-drawn-out sweetness, and the
calm subdued sadness of the scazon, as exemplified in the
'Sirmio,' and the
Miser Catulle desinas ineptire,—
the 'bright speed' of the pure iambic, so happily answering
to the subject of the 'phaselus,' and its bold impetus as it
is employed in the attack on Julius Caesar—the irregular
but sonorous grandeur of his Sapphic63,—the majesty which in
the Hymn to Diana blends with the buoyant movement of
the glyconic,—all attest that the words and melody of the
poems were born together with the feeling and meaning
animating them. Although his elegiac poems are not written
with the smoothness and fluency which was attained by the
Augustan poets, yet those among them which record his graver
and sadder moods have a plaintive force and natural pathos,
which their roughness seems to enhance. If his epigrammatic
pieces, written in that metre, want the polish and point
to which his brilliant disciple attained under the Empire,
we may believe that Catullus experienced the difficulty which
Lucilius found, and which Horace at last successfully overcame,
of adapting a metre originally framed for the expression
of serious feeling to the commoner interests and experiences
of life.
The language of Catullus in these shorter poems is his own,
or, where not his own, is drawn from such wells of Latin
undefiled as Plautus and Terence. His metres are happy
applications of those invented or largely used by the earlier
lyric poets of Greece,—Sappho, Anacreon, Archilochus,—and
the later Phalaecus. For the form of some of his longer
poems he has taken, and not with the happiest result, the
Alexandrine poets for his models. But in these shorter
poems, so far as he has had any models, he has tried to
emulate the perfection attained in the older and purer era
of Greek inspiration. But it is not through imitation that he
has attained a perfection of form like to theirs. It is owing to
the singleness and strength of his feeling and impression,
that these poems are so exquisite in their unity and simplicity.
Catullus does not care to present the gem of his own thought
in an alien setting, as Horace, in his earlier Odes at least, has
often done. It is one of the surest notes of his lyrical genius
that, while more modest in his general self-estimate than any
of the great Roman poets, he trusts more implicitly than any of
them to his own judgment and inspiration to find the most
fitting and telling medium for the communication of his
thought. Thus he presents only what is essential, unencumbered
with any associations from older poetry. The form
is indeed so perfect that we scarcely think of it. We feel only
that nothing mars or interrupts the revelation of the poet's
heart and soul. We apprehend, as perhaps we never apprehended
before, some one single feeling of great potency and
great human influence in a poem of some ten or twenty lines,
every word of which adds something to the whole impression.
Thus for instance, in the poems—
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,—
Acmen Septimius suos amores,—
Verani, omnibus e meis amicis,—
Iam ver egelidos refert tepores,—
Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque,—
Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,—
we apprehend through a perfectly pure medium, and by a
single intuition, the highest pitch of the passionate love of
man and woman, the perfect beauty and joy of self-forgetful
friendship, the eager enthusiasm for travel and adventure, the
deep delight of returning to a beautiful and well-loved home,
the 'sorrow's crown of sorrows' in 'remembering happier things.'
We may see, too, in a totally different sphere of experience, how
Catullus instinctively seizes the moment of supreme intensity
of emotion, and utters what is vitally characteristic of it. He
is not, in any sense, one of the Anacreontic singers of the
pleasures of wine, of whom Horace is the typical example
in ancient times. Neither was he one, who, like Burns,
habitually forgot, in the excitement of good fellowship, the
perils of Bacchanalian merriment. Yet even the drinking
songs of the Scottish poet scarcely realise with more vivacity
the moment of mad elevation when a revel is at its height,
than Catullus has done in the song of seven short lines—
Minister vetuli puer Falerni
Inger mi calices amariores, etc.
The 'Hymn to Diana' occupies an intermediate place
between the poems founded on personal feelings and the
longer and more purely artistic pieces. Like the first it seems
unconsciously, or at least without leaving any trace of conscious
purpose, to have conformed to the conditions of the
purest art. It is, like them, a perfect whole, one of those,
to quote Mr. Munro, '"cunningest patterns" of excellence,
such as Latium never saw before or after, Alcaeus, Sappho,
and the rest then and only then having met their match64'. It
resembles some of the longer poems in being a creation of
sympathetic imagination, not an immediate expression of personal
feeling. It must have been written for some public
occasion; and the selection of Catullus to compose it would
imply that he was recognised as the greatest lyrical poet in
his lifetime, and that it was written after his reputation was
established. It is a poem not only of pure artistic excellence,
but of imaginative conception, like that exemplified in the
'Attis' and the 'Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis.' The
'Diana' of Catullus is not a vague abstraction or conventional
figure, as the Gods and Goddesses in the Odes of Horace
are apt to be. The mythology of Greece received a new
life from his imagination. In this poem he shows too, what
he hardly indicates elsewhere65, that he could identify himself
in sympathy with the national feeling and religion of Rome.
The Goddess addressed is a living Power, blending in her
countenance the human and picturesque aspects of the Greek
Artemis with the more spiritual and beneficent attributes
of the Roman Diana. Yet no confusion or incongruity arises
from the union into one concrete representation of these
originally diverse elements. She lives to the imagination
as a Power who, in the fresh morning of the world, had
roamed in freedom over the mountains, the woods, the
secret dells, and the river-banks of earth66,—and now from
a far away sphere watched over women in travail, increased
the store of the husbandman, and was the especial guardian
of the descendants of Romulus.
This poem affords a natural transition to the longer and
more purely artistic pieces in the centre of the volume. Yet
with some even of these a personal element is interfused.
The hymn in honour of the nuptials of Manlius, is, like
the short poem on the loves of Acme and Septimius, inspired
by the poet's sympathy with the happiness of a friend. The
68th poem attempts to weave into one texture his own love
of Lesbia, and the romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus.
But in general these poems bring before us a new side of
the art of Catullus. In one way indeed they add to our
knowledge of his personal tastes. The larger place given in
them to ornament and illustration lets us know what objects
in Nature afforded him most delight. His life was too full
of human interest to allow him to devote his art to the celebration
of Nature: yet he could not have been the poet he was
if he had not been susceptible to her influence. And this
susceptibility, indicated in occasional touches in the shorter
poems, finds greater scope in the poems of impersonal art
which still remain to be considered.
Among the more purely artistic pieces none is more beautiful
than the Nuptial Ode in celebration of the marriage of
his friend Manlius, a member of the great house of the Torquati,
and one of the most accomplished men of his time, with
Vinia Aurunculeia. In this poem Catullus pours forth the
fulness of his heart
'In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'
It is marked by the excellence of his shorter pieces and by
poetical beauty of another order. Resembling his shorter
poems in being called forth by an event within his own
experience, it breathes the same spirit of affection and of
sympathy with beauty and passion. It is written with the
same gaiety of heart, blending indeed with a graver sense
of happiness. The feeling of the hour does not merely
express itself in graceful language: it awakens the active
power of imagination, clothes itself in radiant imagery, and
rises into the completeness and sustained melody of the
highest lyrical art. The tone of the whole poem is one of
joy, changing from the rapture of expectation in the opening
lines to the more tranquil happiness of the close. The passion
is ardent, but, on the whole, free from grossness or effeminate
sentiment. Even where, in accordance with the Roman
marriage customs, he abandons himself for a few stanzas to the
spirit of raillery and banter—
Ne diu taceat procax
Fescennina locutio67—
he remembers the respect due to the innocence of the bride.
Thoughts of her are associated with the purest objects in
Nature,—with ivy clinging round a tree, or branches of
myrtle,—
Quos Hamadryades deae
Ludicrum sibi roscido
Nutriunt humore,—
or with a hyacinth growing in some rich man's garden. Like
the eager lover of beauty among our own poets, he sees in
other flowers—
Alba parthenice velut
Luteumve papaver—
the symbol of maidens—
'Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale.'
The grace of trees and the bloom of flowers were prized
by him among the fairest things in Nature. The charm in
woman which most moves his imagination is virgin innocence
unfolding into love, or passion ennobled by truth and constancy
of affection. So too, in the Epithalamium of Peleus
and Thetis, he compares Ariadne in her maidenhood to the
myrtle trees growing on the banks of Eurotas, and to the
bloom of vernal flowers:—
Quales Eurotae progignunt flumina myrtos
Aurave distinctos educit verna colores68.
In this Ode he expresses not merely, as in the Acme
and Septimius, his sympathy with the joy of the hour. He
recognises in marriage a greater good than in the love for
a mistress. He associates it with thoughts of the power and
security of the household, of the pure happiness of parental
love, of the continuance of a time-honoured name, and of the
birth of new defenders of the State.
The charm of the poem does not arise from its tone of
feeling and its clear ringing melody alone. The bright spirit
of the day awakens the inward eye which creates pictures
and images of beauty in harmony with itself. The poet
sees Hymenaeus coming from the distant rocks of Helicon,
robed in saffron, and wreathed with fragrant amaracus, in
radiant power and glory, chanting the song with his ringing
voice, beating the ground with his foot, shaking the pine-torch
in his hand. As the doors of the house are opened, and
the bride is expected by the singers outside, by one vivid
flash of imagination he reveals all their eager excitement—
Viden ut faces
Splendidas quatiunt comas?
The two pictures, further on in the poem, of a peaceful old
age prolonged to the utmost limit of human life—
Usque dum tremulum movens
Cana tempus anilitas
Omnia omnibus annuit,—
and of infancy, awakening into consciousness and affection,—
Torquatus volo parvulus
Matris e gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus,
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semihiante labello;
Sit suo similis patri
Manlio et facile insciis
Noscitetur ab omnibus,
Et pudicitiam suae
Matris indicet ore69;
are drawn with the truest and most delicate hand.
The whole conception and execution of this poem, as also
of the Attis and of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis,
leave no doubt that Catullus was richly endowed with the
vision and the faculty of genius, as well as with impassioned
feeling and the gift of musical expression.
The poem which immediately follows is also an Epithalamium,
intended to be sung by young men and maidens,
in alternate parts. It is written in hexameter verse, and
in rhythm, thought, and feeling resembles some of the
golden fragments from the Epithalamia of Sappho. The
whole poem sounds like a song in a rich idyll. Its charm
consists in its calm and mellow tone, in the dramatic truth
with which the feelings and thoughts natural to the young
men and maidens are alternately expressed, and especially
in the beauty of its two famous similes. In the first of
these a flower is again the symbol of the bloom and innocence
of maidenhood, growing up apart and safe from
all rude contact. The idea in the concluding lines of the
simile—
Idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui,
Nulli illum pueri, nullae optavere puellae,—
may probably have been suggested by a passage in Sappho,
of which these two lines remain,
οἵαν τὰν ὑάκινθον ἐν
ὤρεσι ποιμένες ἄνδρες
ποσσὶ καταστείβοισι,
χαμαὶ δέ τε πόρφυρον ἄνθος.
In the second simile, which is supposed to be spoken by
the young men, the vine growing upon a bare field, scarcely
rising above the ground, unheeded and untended, is compared
to the maid who
'Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness;'
while the same vine, when wedded to the elm, is regarded
as the symbol of the usefulness, dignity, and happiness which
await the bride.
The absence of all personal allusion in this poem, and
its resemblance in tone and rhythm to some fragments of
the Lesbian poetess, might suggest the idea that it was translated,
or at least imitated, from the Greek. But, on the other
hand, from its harmony with the kind of subject and imagery
in which Catullus most delights, and from the close observation
of Italian Nature, shown in such lines as this—
Iam iam contingit summum radice flagellum,—
it seems more probable that it was an adaptation of the
style of his great model to some occasion within his own
experience, than that it was a mere exercise in translation,
like his 'Coma Berenices.'
The 'Attis' is the most original of all his poems. As a work
of pure imagination, it is the most remarkable poetical creation
in the Latin language. In this poem Catullus throws himself,
with marvellous power, into a character and situation utterly
alien to common experience, and pours an intense flood of
human feeling and passion into a legend of strange Oriental
fanaticism. The effect of the piece is, in a great measure,
produced by the startling vividness of its language and imagery,
and by the impetuous rush of its metre. Though the poem
may have been partly founded on Greek materials, yet Catullus
has treated the subject in a thoroughly original manner. It is
difficult to believe that any translation could produce that
impression of genuine creative power, which is forced upon
every reader of the Attis. There is nothing at all like the
spirit of this poem in extant Greek literature. No other writer
has presented so life-like an image of the frantic exultation
and fierce self-sacrificing spirit of an inhuman fanaticism; and
of the horror and sense of desolation which the natural man,
more especially a Greek or Roman, would feel in the midst of
the wild and strange scenes described in the poem, when first
awaking to the consciousness of his voluntary bondage, and of
the forfeiture of his country and parents, and the free social
life of former days. A few touches in the poem—as, for
instance, the expressions, 'niveis manibus,' 'roseis labellis,' and
'Ego gymnasii fui flos,'—all introduced incidentally,—force
upon the mind the contrast between the tender youth and
beauty of Attis and the fierce power of the passion that
possesses him. The false excitement and noisy tumult of the
evening deepen the sense of the terrible reality and blank
despair of the morning.
The effect of the whole drama of human passion and agony
is intensified by the vividness of all its pictorial environment;—by
the vision of the wild surging seas, through which the
swift ship and its mad crew were borne, and of the gloom and
horror of the woods that hid the sounding rites of the goddess,
and the tall columns of her temple. With what a powerful and
rapid touch he paints the aspect of sky, earth, and sea in the
early morning—
Sed ubi oris aurei Sol radiantibus oculis
Lustravit aethera album, sola dura, mare ferum,
Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus.
Everything is seen in those sharply-defined forms, which
imprint themselves on the brain in moments of intense excitement
or agony.
These three poems are composed with the unity and simplicity
of the purest art. Like the shorter poems they have
taken shape under the influence of one powerful motive; and
the feeling with which they were conceived is sustained at its
height through the whole composition. It is more difficult to
find any single motive which combines into unity the original
nucleus of the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis with the
long episode of the desertion of Ariadne, which interrupts the
continuity of the 64th poem. The form of art to which it
belongs is the 'Epyllion' or heroic idyll, of which several
specimens are found among the poems of Theocritus. This
form was due to the invention of the Alexandrians; and
Catullus in the selection of his subject and in his manner
of treating it takes up the position of an imitator. But there is
no reason to suppose that he is reproducing, still less translating,
any particular work of these poets, or that his contemporaries—Cinna,
Calvus, and Cornificius,—merely reproduced
some Alexandrine original in their Zmyrna, Io, and Glaucus.
A comparison of the imagery of this poem with that of the
earlier Epithalamia, and a consideration of the passionate
beauty with which the subject of love and marriage is treated,
favour the conclusion that the style and substance of the poem
are the workmanship of Catullus. It may be doubted whether
any Alexandrine poet, except perhaps Apollonius, whom
Catullus in this poem70 often imitates, but does not translate,
had sufficient imagination to produce the original which
Catullus is supposed to have copied. But the plan of the
poem may have been suggested by some Alexandrine model.
The more complicated structure of the 68th poem is fashioned
after a particular style of Greek art: and on entering upon
a new and larger adventure, Catullus may have trusted to the
guidance of those whom he regarded as his masters. The
Alexandrians studied pictorial representation of outward scenes
and of passionate situations, and works of tapestry on which
such representations were wrought were common among their
'deliciae vitae71.' Thus, the mode in which the story of
Ariadne is told is one likely to have occurred to an Alexandrine
poet. It would be also in keeping with the over-subtlety of a
class of poets who owed more to learning than to inspiration, to
combine apparently incongruous parts into one whole by some
obscure link of connexion. Thus Catullus may have intended,
in imitation of Callimachus or some other Alexandrian, to
paint two pictures of the love of an immortal for a mortal,—the
love of Thetis for Peleus, and of Bacchus for Ariadne,—and to
heighten the effect of each by the contrast presented in the
pendent picture. The original good fortune and the unbroken
happiness of Peleus are more vividly realised by the contrast
presented to the imagination in the betrayal and passionate
agitation of Ariadne. The thought of the crowds of mortals
and immortals who come together to celebrate the marriage of
the Thessalian prince brings into greater relief the utter loneliness
of Ariadne, when first discovered by 'Bacchus and his
crew.' Or the original unifying motive of both pictures might
be sought in the concluding lines, written in a graver tone
than anything else in Catullus; and it might be supposed that
he intended by the two pictures of divine favour granted to
mortals (in one of which retribution is exacted for what he
regards as the greatest sin in actual life—a violation of good
faith) to enforce the lesson that it is owing to the sins of the
latter time that the Gods have withdrawn their gracious presence
from the earth. The thought contained in the lines
Sed postquam tellus scelerest imbuta nefando, etc.,
is pure and noble, and purely and nobly expressed. These
lines reveal a genuine and unexpected vein of reverence in the
nature of Catullus. The sins which he specifies as alienating
the Gods from men are those most rife in his own time, with
which he has dealt in a more realistic fashion in his satiric
epigrams. All this may, perhaps, be said. But on the other
hand, Catullus is the least didactic of poets. He is also the
least abstract and reflective. We cannot suppose (in the
case of such a writer) all the concrete passionate life of the
poem taking shape in his imagination in order to embody
any idea however noble. The idea was the afterthought, not
the creative germ. Nor can we think that the conception of
the whole poem existed in his mind before, or independently
of, the separate conception of its parts. He was attracted to
both subjects by the charm which the Greek mythology and
the bright spectacle of the heroic age had for his imagination,
by their harmony with the feelings and passions with
which he had most sympathy in real life, and by the scope
which they afforded to his peculiar power as a pictorial artist.
The device of the tapestry, by which the tale of Ariadne
is told, was especially favourable to the exercise of this gift.
He looked back upon an ideal vision of the golden morning
of the world, when men were so stately and noble, and women
so fair and true, that even the blessed Gods and Goddesses
deigned to visit them, and to unite with them in marriage. The
original motive of the two poems appears to be purely
imaginative. If there was any intention to give artificial unity
to the poem, by pointing the contrast between a love calm and
happy from the beginning, and one at first passionate and
afterwards betrayed, or between the holiness and nobleness of
an ideal past, and the sin and baseness of the actual present,
that intention was probably not present to the mind of
the poet when he first contemplated his subject, but came to
him in the course of its development.
It may be said, therefore, that if any principle of unity
is aimed at in the poem, it is one so artificial as rather
to detract from the artistic merit of the composition. There is
a similar want of unity in the 'Pastor Aristaeus' of Virgil,
which was also composed in the manner of the Alexandrine
Epyllion. The Alexandrians seem to have aimed rather at a
combination of diverse effects than at a composition 'simplex
et unum.' They cared much for the elaboration of details,
little for the consistency of the whole. And the same
tendency appears in their imitators. Neither can the poem be
called a successful specimen of narrative. There is scarcely
any story to tell in connexion with the marriage of Peleus.
It is a succession of pictures, not a tale of passion or adventure.
The romance of Theseus and Ariadne is told much less
distinctly and simply than the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
in Virgil. There is dramatic power in the soliloquy of Ariadne,
as in that of Attis, but the dramatic faculty in Catullus is
rather a phase of his special lyrical gift, which enables him to
identify himself with some single passionate situation, than the
power of giving life to various types of character. The
imaginative excellence of the poem is idyllic rather than epic
or dramatic. There is a wonderful harmony of tone in
his whole conception of the heroic age. He does not attempt
to reproduce the picturesque life represented by Homer, nor
the majestic passions imagined by the Attic tragedians, but he
has his own vision of the stately and beautiful figures belonging
to an ideal foretime,—
O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati
Heroes, saluete, deum genus.
There is a sense of the freshness and brightness of the
early morning in his conception of the time when the first ship,
manned by the flower of Greek warriors, 'broke the silence of
the seas'
(Illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten),
and when the Gods and Goddesses of Olympus, the mysterious
Powers over-ruling mortal destiny, and the other beings, half-human,
half-divine, whom Greek imagination so lavishly
created, appeared in their bodily presence to do honour to the
union of a mortal with an immortal. The poem abounds
in pictures, or suggestions of pictures, taken from the world of
divine and human life, and of outward Nature. Such are those
of the Nereids gazing on the Argo—
Emersere feri candenti e gurgite vultus
Aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes,—
of Ariadne watching with pale and anxious face the perilous
encounter of Theseus with the Minotaur—
Quam tum saepe magis fulgore expalluit auri,—
and again, looking on the distant fleet—
Saxea ut effigies bacchantis,—
of the advent of Bacchus—
Cum thiaso Satyrorum et Nysigenis Silenis,—
a passage which has inspired one of the masterpieces of
modern art,—of Prometheus—
Extenuata gerens veteris vestigia poenae—
of the aged Parcae—
infirmo quatientes corpora motu—
spinning the thread of human destiny, as with clear-ringing
voice they poured forth their truthful prophecy. So too
the eye of an artist is shown in the description of the scenes in
which the action takes place, and in the illustrative imagery
with which the subject is adorned,—as in the pictures from
mountain and sea scenery at lines 240 and 269; and in that
image of a waste expanse of sea called up in the lines—
Idomeneosne petam montes? a gurgite lato
Discernens ponti truculentum ubi dividit aequor?
A genuine love of Nature, which his more personal poems
only faintly suggest, appears in the lines describing the
gifts which Chiron brought with him from the plains and
vast mountain chains and river-banks of Thessaly—
Nam quoscumque ferunt campi, quos Thessala magnis
Montibus ora creat, quos propter fluminis undas
Aura parit flores tepidi fecunda Favoni,
Hos indistinctis plexos tulit ipse corollis,
Quo permulsa domus iucundo risit odore72;
and in the enumeration of the various trees which Peneus,
quitting Tempe,—
Tempe quae silvae cingunt super inpendentes,—
planted before the vestibule of the palace.
The diction and rhythm of the poem are characterised
by excellences of a quite different sort from those of his
other pieces. Both produce the impression of very careful
study and labour. In no previous work of Latin genius
was so much use made of an artificial poetical diction.
Though this diction has not the naïveté or charm of his
simpler pieces, yet it is very effective in its own way. It
reveals new and unsuspected wealth in the ore of the
Latin language. The old rhetorical artifices of alliteration,
assonance, etc. are used more sparingly than in Lucretius,
yet they do appear, as in the lines—
Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus,—
Aut tereti tenues tinnitus aere ciebant,—
Putridaque infirmis variabant pectora palmis.—etc., etc.
As in the Attis we find such word-formations as sonipedibus,
silvicultrix, nemorivagus, so in this poem we have
fluentisono,
raucisonos, clarisona, flexamino, etc. We recognise his
old partiality for diminutives, as in the
Frigidulos udo singultus ore cientem,
and
Languidulosque paret tecum coniungere somnos.
But there are many peculiarities of style which are scarcely,
if at all, observable in his other poems. New artifices, such as
those familiar to the Greek idyll, of the recurring chime of
the same or similar words, are frequent, as in the lines—
Vos ego saepe meo vos carmine compellabo;—
Cui Iupiter ipse
Ipse suos divom genitor concessit amores;—
Sicine me patriis avectam, perfide, ab oris,
Perfide, deserto liquisti in litore Theseu?
Sicine discedens neglecto numine divom;—
Nulla fugae ratio, nulla spes; omnia muta
Omnia sunt deserta, ostentant omnia mortem, etc.
The phrases are to a much greater extent cast in a Greek
mould73. The words follow one another in a less natural
order. Ornamental epithets, metaphorical phrases, and the
substitution of abstract for concrete words, occur much more
frequently. Latin poetry creates for itself an artificial diction
by assimilating, to a much greater extent than in any earlier
work of genius, the long-accumulated wealth of Greek poetry.
This was a gain to its resources, opening up and giving
expression to a new range of emotions, but a gain against
which must be set off a considerable loss of freshness and
naïveté.
The rhythm also is elaborately constructed after a Greek
model,—the model, not of Homer, but of the later poets
who wrote in his metre. It is much more carefully and
correctly finished than the rhythm of Lucretius. Each
separate line has a smoother cadence. The whole movement
is more regular, more calm, and more stately. But with
all the occasional roughness of Lucretius there is much more
life and force in his general movement. It is much more
capable of presenting a continuous thought or action to the
mind. The lines of Catullus seem intended to be dwelt
on separately, and each to bring out some point of detail.
There is generally a pause in the sense at the end of each
line, and thus the lines, when read continuously, produce
an impression of monotony74, which is increased by the frequent
use of spondaic lines. The uniformity of his pauses, and
the sameness of structure in a large number of his hexameters,
enable us to appreciate the great improvement in rhythmical
art which appeared some ten years later in the Bucolics
of Virgil. Yet if Catullus does not, in this his most elaborate
work, equal the natural force of language and rhythm displayed
in his simpler pieces, the poem, as a whole, has a
noble and stately movement, in unison with the noble and
stately pictures of an ideal fore-time which it brings before the
imagination.
The four longer elegiac pieces which follow add little to
our impression of the art of Catullus. In the 'Epistle to
Manlius'—perhaps owing to the trouble by which his mind
was darkened at the time of its composition—he does not
use the elegiac metre, as a vehicle of his personal feelings,
with much force or clearness. There is much more than
in his phalaecians and iambics the appearance of effort, and
there is much greater uncertainty as to his meaning. The
67th poem keeps alive with some vivacity a scandalous story
of his native province which might well have been allowed
to sink into oblivion. In the 'Coma Berenices,' and the
poem addressed to Allius, he again writes under the influence
of his Alexandrian masters. He seems to have regarded
the 'Carmina Battiadae' with the admiration which youthful
genius, not yet sure of its own powers, entertains for culture
and established reputation,—the kind of admiration which
led Burns to imagine that his own early inspiration might
be of less value to the world than 'Shenstone's art.' Like
Burns, too, Catullus is least happy when he gives up his
own language, which he wields easily and powerfully, and
the forms of art which came naturally to him, in deference
to the standard of poetic taste recognised in his day. His
selection of the 'Coma Berenices' as a task in translation,
illustrates the attraction which the union of beauty and passion
with truth and constancy of affection had for his imagination.
The poem to Allius is the most artificially constructed of
all his pieces. He endeavours to unite in it three distinct
threads of interest,—that of his passion for Lesbia, that of the
romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus, and that of his brother's
death in the Troad. Although this triple combination is
accomplished with much mechanical ingenuity75, yet the effect
of the poem as a whole is disappointing, and its motive,—gratitude
for a service which no honourable man, according
to our modern ideas of honour, would have rendered,—does
not make amends for the want of simplicity in its
structure. Yet as written in the heyday of his passion for
Lesbia, and largely inspired by that passion, it has, along
with an Alexandrian superfluity of ornament and illustration,
many beauties of expression and feeling. The passionate
devotion of Laodamia for Protesilaus is conceived with sympathetic
power,—
Quo tibi tum casu pulcherrima Laudamia,
Ereptum est vita dulcius atque anima
Coniugium76.
There is an exquisite picture of his own stolen meetings
with his 'candida diva'; and depth and sincerity of affection
are purely and simply expressed in the last two
lines—
Et longe ante omnes mihi quae me carior ipse'st,
Lux mea qua viva vivere dulce mihi'st.
In this poem too, although the application of the image is an
incongruous adaptation of an old Homeric simile, we meet
with a descriptive passage which, more perhaps than any
other in his poems, shows that Catullus was a true lover and
close observer of Nature,—
Qualis in aerii perlucens vertice montis
Rivos muscoso prosilit e lapide
Qui cum de prona praeceps est valle volutus
Per medium sensim transit iter populi,
Dulce viatori lasso in sudore levamen,
Cum gravis exustos aestus hiulcat agros77.
The perfection attained by Catullus in his best lyrical
poetry, and the power displayed in his longer pieces, are
so high and genuine that we are hardly surprised at the
enthusiasm of those who have ranked him, in respect both of
art and genius, foremost among Roman poets. If the
pure essence of poetry could be separated from the whole
spiritual and intellectual being of the poet, much might
be said in favour of that estimate. Others, who think that the
work accomplished by Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace is, both in
quantity and quality, of more lasting value to the world,
cannot forget that had they died at the same early age
as Catullus, their names would have been unknown, or perhaps
remembered as those of Cinna and Cornificius are now.
From the exquisite skill with which Catullus has treated light
and playful themes, he has been sometimes compared to
modern poets who have no other claim to recognition than a
similar facility. But if he is to be compared with any, it
is not with the minor poets, ancient or modern, but with the
greater, that he is to be ranked. The two eminent English
scholars who have made a special study of this poet, and have
done more than almost any others in recent times to elucidate
his meaning and gain for him his just recognition, look upon
him as the equal of Sappho and Alcaeus. Among modern
poets he has been compared to one, most unlike him in all the
outward conditions of his life, and in many of the conditions of
his art,—the poet Burns78. In general intellectual power, in the
breadth of his human sympathies, the modern poet is much
the greater. He is, in all ways, the larger man. But in some
endowments of heart and genius the ancient poet is far from
being the inferior. He was more fortunate in his nearness to
the greatest source of poetic culture, and in the use of a
medium of expression, not of a local and limited influence, but
one which brings him into immediate relation with educated
men of all ages and countries. But in the passionate ardour of
their temperament, and the robustness, too closely allied with
coarseness, of their fibre; in their susceptibility to beautiful
and tender emotions, and the mobility of nature with which
they yielded to impulses the most opposite to these; in their
large capacity of love and scorn, of pleasure and pain; in their
genuine sincerity and firm hold on real life; in the keenness of
their satire, and their shrewd observation of the world around
them;—in their simple and direct force of feeling and expression;
in the freshness of their love for the fairer objects in
Nature with which they were most familiar,—they have much
in common. The resemblance of the concluding lines of the
'Final renunciation of Lesbia' to the sentiment of the 'Daisy'
has been already noticed. The scornful advice, conveyed in
the words 'pete nobiles amicos,' finds many an echo in the
tones of the modern poet. The art of both is so inseparably
associated with their lives, that our admiration of it can
hardly help being enhanced or qualified by personal sympathy
with, or dislike of their characters. In the case of Catullus
it must be allowed that if a careless pursuit of pleasure, an
apparent absence of all high aims in life, the too frequent
indulgence in the coarsest language and the vilest imputations,
could alienate our affections from a great poet, his art would
be judged at a disadvantage. But his own frank revelations,
from which we learn his faults, must equally be taken as the
unintended evidence of his nobler and more generous nature.
If his passions led him too far astray, he himself, so far as now
appears, alone suffered from them. There is no trace in him
of the selfish calculation, or the baser falsehood, which renders
'the life of pleasure,' as led by many men, detestable. There
was in his case no 'hardening of all within' as its effect. The
small volume bequeathed by him to the world is in itself a
sufficient result of his few years. If he is in a great degree
unreflective, if he does not consciously realise what are the ends
of life, yet he does not look on life in a spirit of cynicism
or frivolity. Whatever vein of reflection appears in him is not
devoid of reverence and seriousness. His too frequent coarseness
is to be explained by the manners of his age and race;
and the imputations which he makes on his enemies were, in
all probability, never meant to be taken seriously. Although
unfortunate in his love, he has shown a capacity of ardent, self-forgetful,
and constant devotion, that deserved a better object.
He could care for another more than for his own life and
happiness. And he had, in a degree rarely equalled, a virtue
which devoted lovers often want, the truest, kindliest, most
considerate and appreciative affection for many friends. His
very dependence on their sympathy in all his joy and sorrow is
a claim on the sympathy of the world. If to love warmly,
constantly, and unselfishly be the best title to the love of
others, few poets, in any age or country, deserve a kindlier
place in the hearts of men than 'the young Catullus.'
Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus
Magno mittere passerem Maroni.
Donabo tibi passerem Catulli.
Ceu pulsae ventorum flamine nubes,
Aerium nivei montis liquere cacumen.
Qualis in aerii perlucens vertice montis
Rivos muscoso prosilit e lapide, etc.
At Volusi Annales Paduam morientur ad ipsam.
'Flos Veronensum ... iuvenum.'
Quod mihi fortuna casuque oppressus acerbo—
Pisonis comites, cohors inanis,
Porci et Socration, duae sinistrae
Pisones, etc.,
Satisne cum isto
Vappa frigoraque et famem tulistis?
Visam te incolumem audiamque Hiberum
Narrantem loca, facta, nationes,
Qui? non est homo bellus? inquies. Est.
Nunc te cognovi: quare etsi impensius uror,
Multo mi tamen es vilior et levior.
Qui potis est? inquis. Quia amantem iniuria talis
Cogit amare magis, set bene velle minus.
'Calvus, if those now silent in the tomb
Can feel the touch of pleasure in our tears
For those we loved, who perished in their bloom,
And the departed friends of former years:
Oh then, full surely thy Quintilia's woe,
For the untimely fate that bade ye part,
Will fade before the bliss she feels to know
How very dear she is unto thy heart.'—Martin.
Dii magni, salaputium disertum.
Neu me odisse putes hospitis officium.
Schmidt.
Quintilio si quid recitares, Corrige, sodes,
Hoc aiebat et hoc.
Litus ut longe resonante Eoa
Tunditur unda.
Quam mater prope Deliam
Deposivit olivam,
Montium domina ut fores
Silvarumque virentium
Saltuumque reconditorum
Amniumque sonantum.
'Soon my eyes shall see, mayhap,
Young Torquatus on the lap
Of his mother, as he stands
Stretching out his tiny hands,
And his little lips the while
Half open on his father's smile.
'And oh! may he in all be like
Manlius his sire, and strike
Strangers when the boy they meet
As his father's counterfeit,
And his face the index be
Of his mother's chastity.'—Martin.
Neque Alexandrina beluata conchyliata tapetia.
'Whate'er of loveliest decks the plain, whate'er
The giant mountains of Thessalia bear,
Whate'er beneath the west's warm breezes blow,
Where crystal streams by flowery margents flow,
These in festoons or coronals inwrought
Of undistinguishable blooms he brought,
Whose blending odours crept from room to room,
Till all the house was gladdened with perfume.'—Martin.
'As some clear stream, from mossy stone that leaps,
Far up among the hills, and, wimpling down
By wood and vale, its onward current keeps
To lonely hamlet and to stirring town,
Cheering the wayworn traveller as it flows
When all the fields with drought are parched and bare.'—Martin.
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The transliteration of Greek words is indicated, in the text, by a dashed line underneath the Greek word/s.
Scroll the mouse over the Greek word and the Latin text transliteration will appear:
Μέσος.
Sundry damaged or missing punctuation has been repaired.
The rest of the corrections are also indicated, in the text, by a dotted line underneath the correction.
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Page 28: 'Neibuhr' corrected to 'Niebuhr' (2nd entry)
"Niebuhr went so far as to assert that the Romans ..."
Page 53: Æneas and Aeneas both occurred on this page. Both spellings are correct, but as there is only the single instance of Æneas, with the æ ligature,
and around 30 instances of Aeneas, wihout the ligature, Æneas has been amended to Aeneas. The Æ/æ ligature has not otherwise been used in this book.
page 148: 'advorsam' is correct; alternative spelling for 'adversam'.
page 157: 'adoped' corrected to 'adopted'
"... into the forms which he adopted from Greece."
page 447: 'dulness' is correct; Oxford Dictionary gives it as an
alternative spelling.
page 468: 'Luaguidnlosque' corrrected to 'Languidulosque'
"Languidulosque paret tecum coniungere somnos."
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