The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 47

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

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

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

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

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

1164-70.]

[Footnote 50: ii. 569-70.]

CHAPTER XV.

CATULLUS.

Lucretius and Catullus were regarded by their contemporaries as the greatest poets of the last age of the Republic[1]. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sionately enjoying his youth in the pleasures of love, in friendly intercourse with men of his own rank and age, in the practice of his art, and the study of the older poets, by whom that art was nourished. All his poems, with the exception of three or four works of creative fancy and one or two translations, have for their subject some personal incident, feeling, or character. Nearly all have some immediate relation to himself, and give expression to his love or hatred, his admiration or scorn, his happiness or misery. There is nearly as little in them of reflexion on human life as of meditative communion with Nature; but, as individual men and women excited in him intense affection or pa.s.sion, 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 antic.i.p.ates the joy of travelling among 'the famous cities of Asia.' In all our thoughts of him he is present to our imagination as the 'young Catullus'--

hedera iuvenalia vinctus Tempora.

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

Quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem.

The ultimate preservation of his poems depended on a single copy, which, after being lost to the world for four centuries, was re-discovered in Verona, the poet's birthplace, during the fourteenth century. As that copy was again lost, the text has to be determined from the conflicting testimony of later copies, only two of which are considered by the latest critics to be of independent value. There is thus much more uncertainty, and much greater lat.i.tude 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[2] 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 a.s.sumed that the dedicatory lines to Cornelius Nepos, with which the volume opens, were prefixed by the poet to the collected edition of his poems which we now possess; but Mr. Ellis, following Bruner, has shown that that poem may more probably have been prefixed to a smaller and earlier collection. The lines--

Namque tu solebas Meas esse aliquid putare nugas, etc.--

imply that earlier poems of Catullus were well known for some time before the writing of this dedication; and allusions in more than one of the poems[3] prove that the poems of an earlier date must have been in circulation before those in which these allusions occur were written. In the time of Martial, a small volume, probably chiefly consisting of the Lesbia-poems, was known as the 'Pa.s.ser Catulli[4].'

It may be inferred that, as he wrote his poems from his earliest youth till his death, he gave them to the world at various stages of his career. He may have combined in these libelli some of the elegiac epigrams with his iambics and phalaecians, just as Martial, who regarded him as his master, did afterwards. Even some of the longer poems, such as the Janua or the Epithalamia, may have formed part of these collections. The attention which he attracted from men eminent in social rank and literature,--such as Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Memmius, etc.,--shows that his genius was soon recognised: and his eager craving for sympathy and appreciation would naturally prompt him to bring his various writings immediately before the eyes of his contemporaries. It seems likely, therefore, that this final collection from several shorter collections already in circulation was made some time after the poet's death[5]; that some poems were omitted which were not thought worthy of preservation, and, possibly, that some may have then been added which had not previously been given to the world.

It would be difficult to believe that poems expressive of the most pa.s.sionate 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[6], written in various metres, and varying in length from epigrams of only two lines to an 'epyllion' which extends to 408 lines. The poems numbered from i to lx, are short lyrical or satiric pieces, written in the phalaecian, glyconic, or iambic metres, and devoted almost entirely to subjects of personal interest. The middle of the volume is occupied by the longer poems--numbered lxi to lxviii^b--of a more purely artistic and mostly an impersonal character, written in the glyconic, galliambic, hexameter, and elegiac metres. The latter part of the volume is entirely occupied by epigrammatic or other short pieces in elegiac metre, varying in length from two to twenty-six lines. Many of the epigrams refer to the persons who are the subject of the short lyric and iambic pieces. There is no attempt to arrange the poems in anything like chronological order. Thus, among the first twelve poems, ii, iii, v, vii, ix, xii, are probably to be a.s.signed to the years 61 and 60 B.C., while iv, x, xi, certainly belong to the last three years of the poet's life. It is difficult to imagine on what principle the juxtaposition of certain poems was determined. Probably, in some cases, it may have been on the mere mechanical one of filling up the pages symmetrically by poems of suitable length. Sometimes we find poems of the same character, or referring to the same person, grouped together, and yet varied by the insertion of one or two pieces related to the larger group by contrast rather than similarity of tone.

Thus the pa.s.sionate exaltation of the earlier Lesbia-poems is first relieved by a poem (iv) written in another metre, and appealing to a much calmer cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate 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 coa.r.s.est 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 coa.r.s.e 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 n.o.ble inspiration of the 'Hymn to Diana,' receive a rude shock from the two intervening poems, characterised by a want of reticence and reserve not often paralleled in the literature or the speech of civilised nations. In a poet of modern times a similar collocation might be supposed indicative of a cynical bitterness of spirit--of a mind mocking its own purest impulses. But Catullus is too genuine and sincere a man, too natural in his enjoyments, and too healthy in all his moods, to be taken as an example of this distempered type of genius. It seems more likely, as is conjectured by recent commentators[7], that the present collection was made (perhaps at Verona) in a comparatively late age, when the knowledge of the circ.u.mstances of Catullus and the intelligent appreciation of his poems was lost.

These poems, whether good or bad, serious or trivial, are all written with such transparent sincerity that they bring the poet before us almost as if he were our contemporary. They make him known to us in many different moods,--in joy and grief, in the ecstasy and the despair of love, in the frank outpouring of affection and the enjoyment of social intercourse, in the bitterness of his scorn and animosity, in the license of his coa.r.s.er 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 pa.s.s 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[8], to hear his laugh at some absurd incident[9], to see his face brighten as he welcomes a friend from a distant land[10], to mark the quick ebullition of anger at some slight or rudeness[11], or to be witnesses of his pa.s.sionate tears as something recalls to him the memory of his lost happiness, or makes him feel his present desolation[12]. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, such as the expeditions of Caesar across the Rhine and into Britain, the second Consulship of Pompey, the preparations for the Eastern expedition of Cra.s.sus, 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[13]. 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 'x.x.x. 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 pa.s.sage 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 'x.x.x. 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 subst.i.tuting 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 subst.i.tution of x.x.x.

for x.x.xiii. could have taken place. The only ground for a.s.suming 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[14], 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 a.s.sociates, 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 a.s.signing the particular date of the poet's birth and death, than in recording the number of years which he lived[15].

It seems, therefore, most probable that he was born in the year 84 B.C., and that he died at the age of thirty, either late in 54 B.C.

or early in 53 B.C. The much less important, but still more disputed question as to his 'praenomen,' appears now to be conclusively settled, in accordance with the evidence of Jerome and Apuleius, in favour of Gaius, and against Quintus. In the large number of places in which he speaks of himself, he invariably calls himself 'Catullus'; and in the best MSS. his book is called 'Catulli Veronensis liber.'

His Gentile name Valerius is confirmed by Suetonius in his life of Julius Caesar; and the evidence of inscriptions shows that that name was not uncommon in the district near Verona. How it happened that this Roman patrician name had spread into Cisalpine Gaul we do not know; but that the family of Catullus was one of high consideration in his native district, and maintained relations with the great families of Rome, is indicated by the intimate footing on which Julius Caesar lived with his father, and also by the fact that the poet was received as a friend into the best houses of Rome,--such as that of Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Metellus Celer,--shortly after his arrival there.

It is quite possible that the last of these, who was Proconsul in Cisalpine Gaul in 62 B.C., and to whom Cicero writes when governor of that province, may have lived on the same footing as Julius Caesar did with Catullus' father at Verona, and that, in that way, Catullus obtained his first introduction to his wife Clodia, the Lesbia of the poems. Although some humorous complaints of money difficulties--the natural consequences of his fashionable pleasures--occur in his poems[16], 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 c.u.m tota gente, Catulle, tua[17],' 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--

Quendam municipem meum.

Besides spending his early youth there, we find him, on three different occasions, retiring thither from Rome, and making a considerable stay there; first, at the time of his brother's death, apparently at the very height of his _liaison_ with Clodia; next, immediately after his return from Bithynia; and again in the winter of 55-54 B.C., when it is probable that his interview and reconciliation with Julius Caesar took place. We find him inviting his friend, the poet Caecilius, to come and visit him from the newly established colony of Como. He had his friends and confidants among the youth of Verona, and he records his intrigues both with the married women and courtesans of the place[18]. He took a lively interest in the humorous scandals of the Province, and he has made them the subjects of several of his poems,--e.g. xvii and lxvii. Although his life was too full of social excitement and human interests to make him dwell much on natural beauty, yet the pure feeling expressed in the Sirmio--

Salve, o venusta Sirmio, atque ero gaude; Gaudete vosque o vividae[19] lacus undae--

shows that he derived keen enjoyment from the familiar loveliness of that 'ocellus' of 'all isles and capes': and in the ill.u.s.trative 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[20].

His native district afforded scope for the culture, which was the serious charm of his life, as well as for the pleasures which formed a large part of it. It was in the youth of Catullus that the power of Greek studies was first felt by the impressionable race, half-Italian, half-Celtic, of Cisalpine Gaul, which still remained outside of Italy, and is called by him 'Provincia.' Among the men of letters belonging to the last age of the Republic,--Cato, the grammarian and poet, the great teacher of the poets of the new generation[21], described in lines quoted by Suetonius as

Latina Siren Qui solus legit ac facit poetas,--

Cornelius Nepos, the friend who early recognised the genius of Catullus and to whom one of his 'libelli' was dedicated in the lines now prefixed to the collection,--Quintilius Varus, probably the Varus of poems x and xxii, and the friend whose death Horace laments in an Ode to Virgil, and whose candour as a critic he commends in the Ars Poetica,--Furius Bibaculus, Cornificius, and Caecilius, most of whom were among the intimate friends of Catullus, came from, or resided in, the North of Italy[22]. 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 b.u.t.t, 'Volusius,' whose poems are ridiculed under the t.i.tle of 'Annales Volusi,' was also his 'Conterraneus,' being a native of the ancient 'Padua,' a town at the mouth of the Po[23]. The strength of the impulse first given to literary study in this age is marked also by the eminent names from the North of Italy, which belong to the next generation, those of Virgil, Cornelius Gallus, Aemilius Macer, Livy, etc. There is no proof that Catullus left his native district in order to complete his education, though it is not improbable that he may have done so and come under the instruction of the 'Latina Siren,' with whom he was later on terms of familiar intimacy (lvi); nor have we any sure sign of his presence at Rome before the year 61 B.C.[24] He tells us that he began his career both as an amatory poet and as a man of pleasure in his earliest youth,--

Tempore quo primum vestis mihi tradita pura'st, Iucundum c.u.m aetas florida ver ageret, Multa satis lusi: non est dea nescia nostri, Quae dulcem curis miscet amaritiem[25].

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

Cui faveam potius? Caeli, tibi, nam tua n.o.bis Per facta exhibita'st unica amicitia, c.u.m vesana meas torreret flamma medullas,

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

The event which first revealed the full power of his genius, and which brought the greatest happiness and the greatest misery into his life, was his pa.s.sion 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 [Greek: boopis] 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 pa.s.sionate 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[26].