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LIFE OF CATULLUS.

VALERIUS CATULLUS was a native of Verona or of some place in its immediate neighbourhood. It is doubtful whether his prænomen were Caius (Apuleius, Apolog. vol. ii. p. 12: Bipont. ed.) or Quintus (Pliny, H. N. xxxvii. 6). His father was a person of some distinction, since he was the friend and host of Cæsar the Dictator (Sueton. Jul. C. 73). The poet was born in B.C. 87, and died in, or shortly after, B.C. 47. He went at an early age to Rome, probably for the purpose of completing his education. He must have inherited a considerable property, since in addition to the paternal home on the beautiful promontory of Sirmio, on the shores of the lake Benacus (Lago di Garda), he had a country house at Tibur (Tivoli), a house or at least apartments at Rome, and was the owner of a yacht, in which he made a voyage from Pontus to Italy. (See Poemat. iv., xxxi., xxxv., xliv., lxviii.)

In the capital Catullus mingled with the gayest society, and as a natural consequence, became deeply involved in debts. To repair broken fortunes by plundering the provincials was then the usual resource of Roman prodigals; and, for this purpose, Catullus accompanied Caius Memmius, the friend of the contemporary poet Lucretius, to his prætorian province of Bithynia. Either Memmius suffered no one but himself to rob the Bithynians, or the province had been exhausted by previous exactions, and the poet returned to Rome "with a purse full of cobwebs" (x., xiii., xxviii., xlvii.), and exsecrating the rigour or the stinginess of his chief. His Bithynian expedition, indeed, afforded him an opportunity of visiting the most renowned cities of Greece and the Lesser Asia (xlvi.). During the voyage, a brother, whom Catullus speaks of in his poems with unaffected grief, is said to have died and to have been buried in the Troad. Still poor, and still attached to expensive

habits and company, Catullus survived his return to Italy a few years, dying, it is supposed, after he had completed his fortieth birthday (xxvi., xxxviii., lx.).

The lady whom Catullus celebrates in so many of his verses under the name of Lesbia, was, we are told by Apuleius (Apolog. vol. ii. p. 12: Bipont. ed.), a Clodia of the great Claudian house. But that she was, as has been assumed, the notorious sister of Clodius, the turbulent tribune, slain by Milo in B.C. 58, is improbable. The poet's compliment to Cicero, whom he styles "Optimus Patronus" (xlix.), would not have been palatable to a lady whom the orator had incensed by his fierce invectives and scurrilous jests (Cicero, Pro Cœlio, 8, 15, etc.). The associates of Catullus were such men as the younger Curio and M. Antonius; yet, there are many proofs that he was intimate with worthier persons, and indeed with some of the most eminent literary and political characters of the time, e.g. M. Cicero, and therefore perhaps with Atticus also, with Alphenus Varus, the advocate, with Licinius Calvus, a distinguished orator and poet, with Cinna, the author of the poem called 'Smyrna,' Cornelius Nepos the biographer, and others. The motives for his fierce lampoons against Cæsar are unknown, and his hostility is the more strange, since the elder Catullus was among the Dictator's intimate friends, and the Romans were apt to love and to hate according to the prejudices which they inherited. His rancour was indeed temporary, and in some poems (see xi. 10) Catullus seems inclined to treat with respect the great soldier and statesman of the age. Perhaps, as he included in his censure the Dictator's partisans, especially his master of the ordnance, L. Mamurra (xxix., lvii.), his feelings may have been as much political as personal. His attack on Cæsar, however, produced no unpleasant consequences either to the poet himself or his family. The ancients were, in our estimation, singularly callous to abuse in speech or writing. Cæsar was among the most placable of men, and after hearing the most stinging of Catullus's lampoons, he accepted an apology, and invited him on the same evening to supper (Sueton. Jul. C. 73; Cicero, Epist. ad Attic. xiii., 52).

Horace (Epist. i. 19, 23) claimed the honour of having been the first to naturalize among the Romans the lyrical metres of Greece. But he really deserves only the credit of increasing the number of those which the preceding generation of poets had adopted, and of imparting to them in their Latin dress greater precision and polish. The honour claimed by

the Augustan poet, more properly belongs to Catullus. In some respects also he, rather than Virgil, merits the praise of having refined and dignified the Roman hexameter, since his poem entitled 'The Marriage-Song of Peleus and Thetis' (lxiv.) is for vigour, majesty and sweetness nearly on a level with the smooth and stately measure of the Georgics and Æneid. Tibullus and Ovid both assign to Catullus the epithet of doctus, and its cause and propriety have given rise to much discussion among commentators. If it were bestowed upon him on account of his intimate acquaintance with Greek literature, doctus would be equally pertinent to Propertius, whose style was modelled on that of the Alexandrian versifiers, and who aspired to be the "Roman Callimachus.”

The extant works of Catullus consist in all of one hundred and sixteen pieces of various kinds, and with scarcely any arrangement of time or subject. A few of them are lyrical; one or two heroic; two or three elegiac and epistolary ; one a translation of a lost poem of Callimachus; and the residue belongs to that order of composition which the ancients termed Epigrams, i.e. brief sententious pieces, with or without a satirical point, often simply commemorative of an incident or a feeling. Of the 'Atys,' his master-work, we shall speak preliminary to the extract from it. It is probable that many of the poems of Catullus have been lost mere vers de société, such as he probably produced in considerable quantity, are seldom carefully preserved, or worth preserving, after the occasion which prompted them has passed away. We have not, for example, the Ithyphallica,' mentioned by Terentianus Maurus, nor the 'Philtra,' or verses on love-charms, alluded to by Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxviii. 2). On the other hand, certain pieces, like the 'Ciris' and the 'Pervigilium Veneris,' are erroneously ascribed to him.

The fame of Catullus flourished so long as Rome possessed a national literature, and his verses, particularly his hendecasyllables, were imitated by the Italian poets after the revival of classical learning. Though much indebted to the Greeks, he possessed a vital originality of his own, which redeems his verses from the defects of servile copies. Greek in their forms of thought, and often in the turn of their diction, they are truly Roman in spirit. In grace, melody, and tenderness, he stands unsurpassed among Latin poets. Yet he could not have written the Georgics or planned the Æneid: his power and beauty, his pathos and point, were suited only to short poems. Nie

buhr's opinion that Catullus was a gigantic and extraordinary genius, equal to the lyric poets of Greece previous to the age of Sophocles, is exaggerated (Lectures on Rom. Hist. ii. p. 153), and as wide of the truth as Quintilian's depreciation of him (Instit. Orat. x. 1, § 6). The Roman critic lived in an age too late to relish the simplicity of the republican era.

In the extracts which follow, I have endeavoured to select such passages from the poetry of Catullus as afford an insight into his tastes, pursuits, and habits of life, and I have pursued a similar plan with the selections from the verses of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. The student will probably take the more interest in the verses, if they help him in some measure to a knowledge of their authors. For the like reason I have prefixed to each collection of extracts a slight biographical sketch of the poet from whose writings they are taken.

The numerals in brackets, e.g. iv (xxxi), refer to the number of the poems in the complete editions of Catullus. The text of Doering has been generally followed, with occasional corrections by Orelli.

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