Lucretius and Catullus were regarded by their contemporaries as the
greatest poets of the last age of the Republic[547]. 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 reflection 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, the frank trusting simplicity, the ardent
feelings and passions, the careless unreflecting spirit of early youth.
In character he was even younger than in actual age. Nearly all his
work was done between the years 60 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 youth[548] 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 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 poems[549] prove that the poems of an earlier date must have
been in circulation before those in which these allusions occur were
written. It may be concluded 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. 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
was made either by the poet himself shortly before, or by some of his
many literary friends shortly after his death, from several shorter
collections already in circulation; that some poems were omitted which
were not thought worthy of preservation, and 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 poems[550], 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 three last
years of the poet's life. It is difficult to imagine on what principle
the juxtaposition of certain poems was determined. Perhaps, 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. The place occupied by
some poems in the series may be regarded rather as a confirmation of
Horace's dictum—
In longum tamen aevum
Manserunt hodieque manent vestigia ruris.
As Catullus had a larger share than any other Roman poet of the Italian
vigour and ardent sensuous temperament, so, too, the coarser fibre,
associated with that temperament, was especially conspicuous in him:
nor was this element in his nature much restrained by the urbanity and
culture on which he and his intimate associates prided themselves.
These poems, however, 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 conversation[551], to hear his laugh at some
absurd incident[552], to see his face brighten as he welcomes a friend
from a distant land[553], to mark the quick ebullition of anger at some
slight or rudeness[554], 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 desolation[555]. 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 Vatinius[556]. 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') lovers[557], 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 lived.
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 a branch of this patrician Roman house was settled in
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. Although some humorous
complaints of money difficulties—the natural consequences of his
fashionable pleasures—occur in his poems[558], 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, tua'[559] 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 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 place[560]. 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 relations
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 vividae
[561] 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 Italy[562].
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, Cornelius Nepos, Quintilius Varus,
Furius Bibaculus, Cornificius, and Caecilius, most of whom were among
the intimate friends of Catullus, came from, or resided in, the North
of Italy. 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, Tanusius Geminus, whose poems
are ridiculed under the title of 'Annales Volusi,' was also his
'Conterraneus.' 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 indication that
Catullus left his native district in order to complete his education,
nor have we any sure sign of his presence at Rome before the year 61
B.C.[563]. 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 amaritiem.
[564] The early poems there referred to probably gained him his first
reputation and attracted that notice of Cornelius Nepos, which is
gratefully acknowledged in the dedication,—
Quoi dono lepidum novum libellum.
One or two of those which we still possess—the 'Ianua,' for instance,
the 'O colonia quae cupis ponte ludere magno,' possibly also the
'Vesper adest: invenes consurgite'—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 to be subsequent
to the liaison with Clodia by the lines in c.—
Cui faveam potius? Caeli, tibi, nam tua nobis
Per facta exhibitas't unica amicitia,
Cum vesana meas torreret flamma medullas.
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 not unlikely, 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
made both the supreme happiness and supreme misery of 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 avo.
[565] The fact that this Clodia was the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher is also
indicated, and her supposed relations to her brother are hinted at 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 Allius[566], 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 Rufus,[567]—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 accomplishment[568]; 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 low[569].
That the intrigue was carried on and had even reached its second
stage—that of the 'amantium irae'—in the lifetime 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 gremio
[570]—
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 Aurunculeia,[571] 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—
show 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 inseparables 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 conjecture[572] 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. 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 Manlius—
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' faithlessness.[573] 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 lifetime 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 friendship[574]; 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
master[575]; 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, and Calvus composed his Io.
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. 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, 'tot per impotentia freta,' 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 written 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—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 piece of 'genre-painting' contained 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
Quanto 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 of the
orator. 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 virtues.
The poems written in the two last 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 standing[576], 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 Calvus[577], 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, 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 exquisite 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
love[578]. Yet, if we are to regard Catullus as himself responsible for
the final arrangement of his poems, and if we suppose that there was
any principle in their arrangement, the position of the poem between
those two utterly incongruous in tone, 'Salax taberna,' and 'Egnatius
quod candidos habet dentes,'—both directed against his rivals in the
last stage of his liaison with Lesbia,—leaves some doubt as to
whether the poem may not belong to the period of his fatal passion.
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—
Zymrna 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
shown[579] 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 of 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
irae[580],'—on to the state of torture described by him in the words
'Odi et amo[581],' 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 meadow[582].' 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.;
[583] 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 unselfish 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 tuo.
[584] 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 intercourse[585], 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 Asinius[586] 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 Cornificius[587],—
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 shown[588] 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 or
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.
[589] 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
kindness[590], 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 aleo, 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 grounds: 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 egi[591],' and in his strange apology for
the freedom of his verses,—
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est.
[592] 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 humourist, 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 humourous
extravagance. It is directed against the dullness 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 ricketty 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.
[593] 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,
addressed to Varus, probably the fastidious critic whom Horace quotes
in the 'Ars Poetica[594],' 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, 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, spontaneous language. There are, indeed, even in
his simplest poems, a few strokes of imaginative expression, as, for
instance,—
Aut quam sidera multa, cum facet nox,
Furtivos hominum vident amores,
[595]—
and this, written with the feeling and with the application which Burns
makes of the same image,—
Velut prati
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
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 uvis.
[597] But the great charm of the style in these shorter poems is its
simple directness, and its popular idiomatic ring. There is nothing,
apparently, studied about it, no ornament or involution, no otiose
epithets, no subtle allusiveness. Yet 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 ἄοιδος—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 Sapphic[598],—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 more prosaic 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 match'[599]. 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 elsewhere[600], 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 earth[601],—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—
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 colores.
[603] 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
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 idyl. 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
ποίμενες
ἄνδρες
πόσσι
καταστείβοισι,
χάμαι 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 idyl, 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
poem[605] 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 vitae[606].' 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 veleris 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 odore
[607];
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, &c. 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 idyl, 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 mould[608].
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 monotony[609], 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 ingenuity[610], 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
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 two last lines—
Et longe ante omnes mihi quae me carior ipso'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 agros.
[612] 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 Burns[613]. 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.'
