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THE greatest lyric poet of the Ciceronian period is Gaius Valerius Catullus. The exact dates of his birth and death are uncertain. According to Jerome he was born in 87 B. C., and died in 57 B. C., at the age of thirty years. But in one poem33 he refers to Pompey’s second consulship (55 B. C.), and in two others34 he mentions Cæsar’s expedition to Britain (55 B. C.). It is therefore evident that his death can not have taken place in 57 B. C. But as his poems contain no references to any event later than 55 or 54 B. C., it is reasonably certain that he died not much after the latter date. As he is known to have died young, his birth may be assigned to about 85 B. C., or perhaps a year or two later. His birthplace was Verona, and his family was wealthy and of good position. He went to Rome while still hardly more than a boy, and began to write love poems soon after taking the toga virilis, that is to say, at the age of seventeen. Rome was then a brilliant capital, in which Greek culture, with all its intellectual vivacity and all its vices, had taken firm root. The family connections of the young Catullus, whose father was a friend of Julius Cæsar, introduced him to the aristocratic society of the capital, and his personal qualities doubtless contributed to make him a prominent figure among the gay youth of the city.

About 61 B. C. began his passionate love for the brilliant but dissolute woman whom he has immortalized in his poems under the name of Lesbia. Her real name was Clodia, and when he met her she was the wife of Quintus Cæcilius Metellus Celer. For a time she seemed at least to return the love of her young adorer, but almost immediately after her husband’s death, which took place in 59 B. C., she is reproached by Catullus for faithlessness. In the spring of 57 B. C., Catullus went to Bithynia as a member of the staff of the proprætor C. Memmius, and by this time his connection with Clodia seems to have been at an end. In the spring of 56 B. C., Catullus returned to Rome, after visiting the tomb of his brother, who had died in the Troad. From this time on his poems are still in part poems of love, but they lack the passionate fire of the lines addressed to Lesbia. Most of the poems belonging to the last years of his life, when they contain personal allusions, are inspired rather by the political events of the time than by love.

The poems of Catullus, as they have been handed down to us, form a small book of 2,280 lines. They are not arranged chronologically, but rather according to contents and style. The first sixty are short poems in various lyric metres, and have to do with the poet’s love, with his friends and enemies, and with the experiences of his life. These are followed by seven longer poems in imitation of Alexandrian originals, and the rest of the collection consists of short pieces, all in elegiac verse. This arrangement is doubtless due to some editor, not to Catullus himself, but gives the book a certain artistic unity which would be lacking if the poems were arranged in chronological order. A few quotations from Catullus which can not be identified with passages in the extant poems are found in the works of other writers, but they are so few as to indicate that nearly all he ever wrote is contained in the existing book.

In the longer poems Catullus shows himself a consummate master of language and versification and a skillful imitator of the Alexandrian poetry most popular among the younger literary men of his time. The first epithalamium, or wedding song, composed for the marriage of Manlius Torquatus and Vinia Arunculeia, is written in lyric metre of short lines. It is supposed to be sung as the bride is escorted to her new home, the first part by a chorus of maidens, the second by youths. Such songs were traditional among the Greeks as well as among the Romans, and there is little originality in the subject or its general treatment, but the brilliant versification and the charming tender passages it contains make this the most attractive of all the longer poems of Catullus. The second epithalamium, in hexameter verse, was apparently composed for no special occasion. A chorus of youths and a chorus of maidens sing responses, calling upon Hymenæus, the god of marriage, and describing by allusion the passage of the bride from maidenhood to wifehood. So the maidens compare her to a flower that has grown in a secluded garden, and the youths compare her to a vine that twines about an elm.

The third of the longer poems, the sixty-third of the whole collection, is the only existing Latin poem in the difficult and complicated galliambic metre. It describes the madness of the youth Attis, who mutilates himself and gives himself up to the service of the goddess Cybele. The despair of Attis when he recovers from his madness and yearns for his country, his friends, and his past happiness, is depicted with admirable power, and the ecstatic worship of Cybele is most vividly portrayed. The longest poem of all describes in hexameter verse the marriage of Peleus with the sea-goddess Thetis. This is not in any sense a lyric poem, but an epyllion, or little epic. It contains passages of great beauty, but offers little opportunity for the display of the peculiarly lyric genius of Catullus, and is, on the whole, the least successful of his poems. This is followed by The Lock of Berenice, a translation of a poem of the same name by the Alexandrian Callimachus. Queen Berenice had cut off a lock of her hair in accordance with a vow when her husband returned safe from war. The lock disappeared from the temple in which it had been offered, and the astronomer Conon discovered it as a new constellation in the heavens. The lock of hair is supposed to speak and to yearn for its former place upon the forehead of the queen. In the preface to this poem, which is addressed to the orator Hortensius Hortalus, Catullus speaks in beautiful lines of the death of his brother:

Oh, is thy voice forever hushed and still?

Oh, brother, dearer far than life, shall I

Behold thee never? But in sooth I will

Forever love thee, as in days gone by:

And ever through my songs shall ring a cry

Sad with thy death, sad as in thickest shade

Of intertangled boughs the melody,

Which by the woful Daulian bird is made,

Sobbing for Itys dead her wail through all the glade.35

The Lock of Berenice is followed by a conversation with a door, which hints at several immoral stories. The last of the longer poems is an elegy on the death of the poet’s brother, joined with the praises of his friend M’. Allius and of his beloved. This poem is remarkable for the number of digressions it contains, and in this, as in its general tone, it is an imitation of the Alexandrian style.

The seven poems just described contain many beautiful passages, but they show us Catullus chiefly as the learned, skillful, and successful imitator of Alexandrian Greek models. His real genius appears in the shorter poems, which deal with the feelings of his own heart. In these also he is an imitator, so far as his metres are concerned, but the feelings are his own, and he expresses them in words that burn. No translation can do justice to the sharp, quick strokes of his invectives or to the passionate outpourings of his love. One of his favorite metres is the “hendecasyllable” or eleven syllable verse, which, by its quick movement, helps to create an impression of great swiftness of thought and flashing outbursts of emotion. At the same time, the numerous diminutive suffixes employed give a light and graceful, almost playful, tone to the verse. Some of the lines directed against those whom Catullus hated or despised, are scurrilous and indecent; but that is the fault of the age rather than of the poet himself. In general the thoughts and emotions expressed range from passionate love to violent invective, while through many of the poems there runs a vein of half satirical playfulness. Some of the qualities of Catullus’ poetry may be made clear by translations of a few of the short poems. The first shows at once his passionate love for Lesbia, and something of his half-satirical humor:

My Lesbia, let us live and love,

Nor let us count it worth above

A single farthing if the old

And carping greybeards choose to scold.

The suns that set and fade away

May rise again another day.

When once has set our little light

We needs must sleep one endless night.

A thousand kisses give me, then

A hundred, then a thousand, when

I bid you give a hundred more;

When many thousands o’er and o’er

We’ve kissed, we’ll mix them, so that we

Shall lose the count, and none shall be

Aroused to evil envious hate

Through knowing that the sum’s so great.36

A well-known and especially attractive poem is the playful lament for the sparrow:

Let mourning fill the realms of Love;

Wail, men below and Powers above!

The joy of my beloved has fled,

The Sparrow of her heart is dead—

The Sparrow that she used to prize

As dearly as her own bright eyes.

As knows a girl her mother well,

So knew the pretty bird my belle,

And ever hopping, chirping round,

Far from her lap was never found.

Now wings it to that gloomy bourne

From which no travellers return.

Accurs’d be thou, infernal lair!

Devourer dark of all things fair,

The rarest bird to thee is gone;

Take thou once more my malison.

How swollen and red with weeping, see,

My fair one’s eyes, and all through thee.37

Like most educated Romans, Catullus had a great love for the country. His joy in returning to his country seat on the peninsula of Sirmio forms the subject of a charming little poem:

Gem of all isthmuses and isles that lie,

Fresh or salt water’s children, in clear lake

Or ampler ocean; with what joy do I

Approach thee, Sirmio! Oh! am I awake,

Or dream that once again mine eye beholds

Thee, and has looked its last on Thracian wolds?

Sweetest of sweets to me that pastime seems,

When the mind drops her burden, when—the pain

Of travel past—our own cot we regain,

And nestle on the pillow of our dreams!

’Tis this one thought that cheers us as we roam.

Hail, O fair Sirmio! Joy, thy lord is here!

Joy too, ye waters of the Golden Mere!

And ring out, all ye laughter-peals of home!38

33 c. cxiii, l. 2.

34 cc. xi and xxix.

35 Translated by Theodore Martin.

36 c. v.

37 c. iii. Translated by Goldwin Smith in Bay-Leaves.

38 c. xxxi, Translated by C. S. Calverley.