Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius

Front matter

Ancient Classics for English Readers

EDITED BY THE

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS.

Valerius Catullus—about whose prænomen there is no evidence to show whether it was Caius or Quintus, and need be still less concern, as wherever the poet speaks of himself in his poems it is by his surname Catullus—was born at Verona B.C. 87, and died, it is probable, in B.C. 54 or 53. Like the two somewhat later elegiac poets usually associated with him, his life and flower were brief; but there is internal evidence to prove that he was alive after B.C. 57, his death-date in the Eusebian Chronicle; and the silence of his muse as to public events immediately subsequent to 54 B.C., the death of Clodius in 52, and the civil wars in 49-47 amongst the number, forbids the probability that he attained a longer span than some thirty-four years. A colour has been sought to be given to a later date from the supposed mention in Poem lii. of the actual consulship of Vatinius in B.C. 47; but it is clear from Cicero that that worthy whilst ascending the ladder of office had a habit of enforcing his affirmations by the oath, "as sure as I shall be consul," and so that the poet ridiculed a mere prospect, and not an accomplished fact—

Vatinius—what that caitiff dares!— By when he shall be consul swears!"

Similarly, the argument for a much later date than 57 B.C. for Catullus's lampoons on Cæsar and Mamurra may as well be used on the other side, as it is obvious that such attacks would be on all accounts subdued after the Dictatorship was established, though policy and statesmanship doubtless counsel ignorance or oversight of such petty and ephemeral warfare. On the whole, it should seem that there are allusions in the poems of Catullus which must have been written in B.C. 54 and in 53, but scarcely a shadow of any grounds for believing him to have survived the later of these dates.

Beyond the birth-date, we have literally no souvenirs of the childhood or early youth of Catullus, for he has recorded scarcely any admonitus locorum, like Horace, and does not deal in playfully-described miracles to herald the advent of a "divine poet." Born at Verona, an important town of Transpadane Gaul on the river Athesis, which became a Latin colony in 89 B.C., and one of the finest cities in that part of Italy, he was by family and antecedents essentially Roman, and in education and tastes must be regarded as emphatically a town-bird. There is nothing to lead to the impression that he had the keen eye of Virgil for the natural and sylvan beaties of his birthplace and its environs, no special mention of its wine, apples, or spelt. He does not indeed utterly ignore the locality, for one of his most graceful pieces is a rapture about Sirmio (C. xxxi.), where he possessed a villa, no great distance from Verona, on the shores of the Lago di Garda. Hither in his manhood he returned for solace after trouble and disappointment; but it was probably rather with a craving for rest than from the love of nature, which is not a key-note of his life or poetry. His removal to Rome at an early age for his education must have begun the weaning process; and though Verona had its "capital in little," its importance, still witnessed by the remains of an amphitheatre more perfect though smaller than the Colosseum, its medley of inhabitants from the east and west, with a fair share of culture and urbanity, in spite of the infusion of barbarism which Cicero complained had reached even Rome with the "breeks" of the peoples from beyond the Alps, it is easy to conceive that Catullus soon contracted a preference for the capital, and was fain to quiz the provincials of his original home, though he seems to have retained not a few acquaintances and family ties amongst them. Such ties, as is seen in the cases of Catullus and Horace, were stronger in the provinces than in Rome; and we shall see anon that the former was influenced by the tenderest and most touching fraternal affection; but the charms of a residence at Rome, from the school-boy period up to his brief life's end, asserted a power which was rarely interrupted by rustication or foreign travel; and he cannot herein be accused of the volatility or changeableness which characterised others of his craft and country. This would be a power certain to grow with years, and the more so as books, society, culture, were accumulated in the capital. "At Rome," wrote the poet to Manlius—

Alone I live, alone my studies ply, And there my treasures are, my haunts, my home."

It is little more than guess-work to speculate on the rank and calling of Catullus's father. From the life of Julius Cæsar by Suetonius we gather that he was on terms of intimacy with, and a frequent host of, that great man; and it is not improbable that he and the son who died in Asia Minor may have been merchants, though the death in question would consist as well with the surmise that Catullus's brother was on some prætor's staff. Attempts have been made to establish against the poet himself a charge of impecuniousness and wastefulness; but "the cobwebs in his purse" in the invitation to Fabullus (C. xiii.) are a figure of speech which need not be literally interpreted; his allusions in C. xi., "Concerning Varus's Mistress," to a scanty exchequer and shabby equipment whilst in the suite of Memmius in Bithynia, cut rather at that ill-conditioned and illiberal prætor than himself; and as to the jeu desprit about the "Mortgage," it makes all the difference of meum and tuum whether we read of "your" or "my" country-seat as the snug tenement, as to which the poet tells Furius-

That there's a mortgage, I've been told, About it wound so neatly, That, ere this new moon shall be old, 'Twill sweep it off completely."—(C. xxvi.)

Some possible colour for the suspicion is indeed found in the fact that on occasion—like other young men about town—Catullus sought to improve his finances, and so—like other young men—joined the suite of the prætor, Caius Memmius, in Bithynia, attracted by the literary prestige of that governor, who was the friend and patron of Lucretius. From him, however, he derived nothing but disappointment. Memmius did not enrich his own coffers: his suite, if we may judge by Catullus, did not recoup their outfit; but, on the contrary, might have stood as a warning to other would-be fortune-menders for the nonce, as the poet points the simile—

Like me, who following about My prætor—was—in fact, cleaned out."—(C. xxviii.)

But with regard to the poet's general finances we have certainly no reason, from his remains, to suppose that he was habitually out at elbows. On the contrary, we know that he had two country-houses,—one at the Lago di Garda (which some have thought is still represented by the ruins of a considerable edifice at the extremity of the promontory on its southern shore, though later discoveries show that these are remains of baths of the date of Constantine, to say nothing of their extent being out of keeping with a poet's villa); and the other in the suburb of Tibur, where was his Tiburtine, or, as his ill-wishers called it, to tease him, his Sabine Farm (C. xliv.) Add to these a house and library at Rome, of which he wrote, as we have seen above, to Manlius, and an estate which he owed to the bounty of a friend, and of which little more is known than that it included amongst other goods and chattels a housekeeper; and we shall determine that Catullus was probably in nowise amenable to the charge of being a spendthrift or "distrest poet," but rather a man of good average means, in fair circumstances and good society. For the latter it is plain that his education would have fitted him. Though he had not, like Horace, the advantage of a Greek sojourn to give it finish and polish, he had enjoyed what was then at a premium in Latin towns even more than at Rome, a thorough introduction to Greek literature. Herein he laid the foundations of that deep familiarity with the Alexandrian poets, which, in common with his brother elegiast, Propertius, but perhaps with special manipulation all his own, characterises his other than erotic poetry. It is possible that the imitations of Alexan- drine poetry may have been his earliest poetic efforts, but the more natural supposition is that his earliest verses are inspired rather by the taverns and lounges of Roman or Veronese resort than by the schools; and if so, an early date would be assigned to "Colonia, its Old Bridge, and the Stupid Husband" (C. xvii.), the poem about a "Babbling Door," the "Mortgage," and other like squibs and jeux desprit. The lack of what, to the accomplished Roman of the highest rank, was tantamount to a college education at Athens, Catullus made up later on by what is also a modern equivalent—foreign travel. After his bootless winter in Bithynia, he chartered a yacht and started on a tour amidst the isles of the Archipelago, after having first done the cities of Asia. And so up the Ionian and Adriatic he sailed home to the Lago di Garda and Sirmio, furnished, doubtless, with poetic material and fancy suggested by his voyage, and fitted more than ever for the intercourse of those literary men at Rome whose friendship he enjoyed in his mature life,—if we may use such an expression of one who died at thirty-four. Among these were Pollio, Calvus, Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, with whom to have been on terms of intimacy is a distinct set-off against an acquaintance with some scores of lighter and looser associates. It is only imperfect acquaintance with the poems of Catullus that sets up his image as that of a mere Anacreontic poet, a light jester and voluptuary, who could not be earnest but when his jealousy was roused by his beauteous bane—his Lesbia. The finished grace of his poetic compliments to such historic Romans as those we have just named may be set beside the touching and pathetic poem to his brother as proofs of his exquisite command of very different veins, although in his hours of youthful gaiety he could throw off light lays on passing tittle-tattle, or chronicle adventures more or less scandalous and licentious. His claim to permanent honour as a poet rests upon the depths of intense feeling which, whether in light love (if his love for Lesbia can ever be so called) or in brotherly affection, as shown in his lament for his brother's death in the Troad, well up to the sound of the plaintive lyre. It is pretty fully settled that this brother's death did not synchronise with the poet's voyage to Bithynia. Had it been so, would he not surely, as Mr Theodore Martin has observed, have linked a fond memory of their joint boyhood with his ode on return to Sirmio? The times and seasons were distinct, but Catullus made a set pilgrimage to his brother's grave on the Rhætean headland; and to this landmark, as it were, of his life, this heartbreaking journey, and the desolation of the home to which he returned, must be referred his sad lines to Hortalus, Manlius, and Cornificius. If to this we add the late realisation of Lesbia's utter wantonry (a chapter in the poet's history which, as influencing it beyond all others, deserves to be treated separately and at length), it is made clear that his youthful spirits may by this time have been deserting the sensitive and saddened Catullus; and though there is no distinct record of his death, the inference is justifiable that accumulated bereavements and the rupture of tenderest ties, rather than the effects of habitual profligacy, brought to a premature death the richly-gifted and learned Veronese songster, whom Ovid in his "Amores" bids meet another early-taken bard—Tibullus—his youthful temples ivy-crowned, in the Elysian valley. It is surely with his riper years (perhaps about 61 or 60 B.C.), and not with those when he was more fickle and in the heyday of young blood, that we should connect his passion for Lesbia. Tired, perhaps, of light loves, which left only their bitterness behind, he had dreamed—though it was an empty and ill-founded dream—of a more enduring connection with this most beautiful and graceless of Roman matrons. This idol shattered, its worshipper undeceived, and the brother whom he loved with a pure affection torn from him by an untimely death, Catullus has little more in the way of a landmark for the biographer. Between these events and his death-date, whether we take that as 57 or 54 B.C., there was time for tender regrets, occasional alternations between palinodes and professions of forgiveness, presentiments of coming fate, and more direct facing of premature death. Time also, as to our good fortune he discovered, for collecting the volume of his poems, which he fitly dedicated to Cornelius Nepos, and forwarded to him in a highly-finished dainty copy, "purfled," as one translator expresses it, "glossily, fresh with ashy pumice." It is a happy sample of his ideal of poetic compliment, and apologetically excuses the boldness of offering so slender an equivalent for the historian's three volumes (which have not survived) of Italian history. The first verse illustrates the binding and preparing of a Roman presentation copy. The last points the contrast of a sort of Diomede and Glaucus exchange with a lurking esteem for his own professedly inadequate gift:—

Great Jove, what lore, what labour there! Then take this little book, whate'er Of good or bad it store; And grant, oh guardian Muse, that it May keep the flavour of its wit A century or more!"—M.

Before proceeding to examine the extant poetry of Catullus upon the principle of division into groups, it is fair to him to say a few words in deprecation of the character for licentiousness of life and poetry under which it has been his misfortune to suffer amongst moderns. It ought to be taken into account that the standard of morals in his day was extremely low; vice and profligacy walking abroad barefaced, and some fresh scandal in high places—amidst the consul's suite and the victorious general's retinue—being bruited abroad as day succeeded day. A poet who moved in the world and had gained the repute of a smart hitter at the foibles and escapades of his neighbours, whilst himself hot-blooded, impetuous, fearless, and impatient of the restraints of society, was not unlikely to become the object of some such general charges as we find from C. xvi., that Aurelius and Furius circulated against Catullus. And to our apprehension the defence of the poet—

True poets should be chaste, I know, But wherefore should their lines be so?"—

seems like begging the question, and scarcely a high tone of self-justification. Indeed, his retort is not simply turning the tables, as he might have done, on his maligners, but somewhat unnecessarily defending his life at the expense of his writings. This, it is probable, has acted in his disfavour. Excepting a few extremely personal and scurrilous epigrams and skits, it is not easy to pick out in the poetry of Catullus a greater looseness of language than in that of his Augustan successors; whilst as compared with his contemporaries in high places and public life, his moral conduct might have passed for fairly decent. What most concerns the modern reader is that after abatements and omissions of what is more or less unpresentable, there remains so much of a more refined standard of poetry and manners, so much tenderness in pure affection and friendship, so much, we might almost say, chivalry and forgivingness in the treatment of more questionable objects of his passion, that we are won to condonation of the evil which is that of the time and society for the charm and ideal refinement of the genius which is specially his own. The standard of purity and morals has, we know, risen and fallen in modern times and nations; and a severe "index expurgatorius" should ban our Herricks, Moores, and Byrons—nay, even Burns; but unless a sponge is to wipe out for the sake of a few blots a body of true poetry, rare in form and singularly rich in talent and grace, and a hard and fast rule is to condemn bitter and sweet alike, it is to be hoped that a fairer insight into the poetry of Catullus, attainable through the blameless medium of at least one excellent translation, will enable English readers to judge how much of the prejudice attaching to the name of Catullus is without foundation, and how rich and original is the freshness and vivacity of his muse. It is no little gain to feel that in this genius we have "not only one of the very few writers who on one or two occasions speaks directly from the heart," but one entitled to the much more comprehensive praise, as has been shown by Professor Sellar, of "a wonderful sincerity in all the poems, by means of which the whole nature of the poet, in its better and worse features, is revealed to us as if he were our contemporary."

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

CATULLUS AND LESBIA.

Although chronology would plead for the postponement till much later of the record of Catullus's love-fever, and it might seem more in order to set first the floating epigrams and occasional pieces which treat of town or country jokes, witticisms, petits soupers, and the like, and to make the reader acquainted with the everyday life of the poet at home or abroad; yet the passion for Lesbia was so absorbing when it was lighted, and possessed its victim so thoroughly, that we must needs treat it first in our sketch of his writings. A poet's love has mostly been inseparable from his after-fame; and in a higher degree than the Cynthia of Propertius, the Corinna of Ovid, or the Delia, probably, of Tibullus, does the Lesbia of Catullus fasten her spell around him, to the exclusion of other and fresh loves, of which he was apparently cautious and forbearing both before and after the crisis of his master-passion. His erotic verses, save those to Lesbia, are but few. Ipsithilla, Aufilena, and Ametina are mere passing and casual amours, soon forgotten; he is oftener found supping with a friend and his chère amie than flirting on his own account; and there is nothing in Catullus that betrays the almost certainty that his mistress has justification in his infidelity for any number of her own lâches and transgressions, such as is always peeping out in the elegies of Propertius. On the contrary, it is fair to believe that in his case "the heart that once truly loved ne'er could forget," however unfortunate and direful its choice and the issue of it. He was true to the ideal and stanch to the championship of Lesbia's resplendent beauty, long after he had proved that it was not for him; and however disastrous to his peace of mind, health, and even life, the results of her coldness and fickleness, the spell clung to his heart, even after his mind was cured; and so Lesbia asserts foremost mention when we call up the surroundings of Catullus.

Who, then, was this potent enchantress? The elder sister, it is pretty well agreed, of that notorious P. Clodius who was slain by Milo, and a member of the great Claudian house at Rome. Like brother, like sister! The former had added a grave sacrilege to unheard-of profligacy, and outraged even the lax standard of Roman society in his day by the versatility of his shamelessness. To the character of an unbridled libertine he added that of an unscrupulous political incendiary, with whom poison and assassination were wonted modes of removing a rival from his path. The Clodia whom we identify by almost common consent with the Lesbia of Catullus was the second of his three sisters, and unequally yoked with Metellus Celer, who was consul in 60 B.C., and on frequent occa- sions a correspondent of Cicero. But, like her sisters, she was notorious for her infidelities; and, like her brother, was not nice as to methods of getting rid of such as slighted her advances or tired of her fickleness. Even Cicero was credited with having stirred her passion unwittingly. A gay friend of Catullus, Cælius Rufus, had incurred her persecutions and false accusations of an attempt to poison her, by freeing himself from his liaison with her; and Cicero had defended him in a speech which furnishes the details of her abandoned life of intrigue and profligacy. With her husband she was at constant war; and his death by poison in 59 B.C. was freely laid at his wife's door. So, at least, we gather from Cicero's defence of Cælius, delivered in the following year, which saddles her with epithets betokening the depths to which she had descended in her career of vice and licence. After her husband's death, and her release from a yoke which she had never seriously respected, she appears to have given herself over to the licentious pleasures of Baiæ, kept open house with the young roués of the capital at her mansion on the Palatine, and consorted with them without shame or delicacy by the Tiber's bank, or on the Appian Road. In such company Catullus, as an intimate of Cælius, Gellius, and others whose names were at one time or another in her visitors' book, most probably first met her; and the woman had precisely the fascinations to entangle one so full of the tender and voluptuous, and withal so cultivated and accomplished as Catullus must have been. It has been epi- grammatically said of the women of that epoch at Rome that "the harp and books of Simonides and Anacreon had replaced the spindle and distaff; and that with a dearth of Lucretias," or chaste matrons, "there was no lack, unfortunately, of Sempronias"—i.e., unchaste blue-stockings. But had Clodia's or Lesbia's culture and cleverness been the head and front of her offending, the poet might less have rued his introduction to a sorceress who, "insatiable of love, and almost incapable of loving," had ambition, vanity, and woman's pride sufficient to covet a name in connection with the foremost lyric poet of the day. On his part there seems to have been no resistance to the toils; and no wonder if, with the ends of her vanity to achieve, she bent her literary talents, as well as her coquetry and natural graces of mien and person, to his captivation. Cicero has recorded that she was talked of, like Juno, as βοῶπις, in compliment to her grand and flashing eyes; and there is no lack of evidence that her beauty, grace, figure, and wit were rare. It might be asked on what certitude this description of Clodia is transferred so confidently to Lesbia. In the first place, let it be admitted that, after the fashion of the Alexandrian poets, the custom prevailed with such Roman writers as Varro, Atacinus, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, to celebrate their mistresses under the feigned names of Leucadia, Lycoris, Delia, Cynthia, Corinna; and it will not seem unlikely that Catullus should choose for the nom de plume of his enslaver a name recalling Sappho the Lesbian, especially as it was probably by a sympathetic translation into Latin sapphics of her famous ode to Phaon that he first announced his suit and evinced his passion. After this is granted, it will remain to decide from internal evidence whether there are grounds of identification between the Lesbia of Catullus's poetry and the famous or infamous sister of Publius Clodius. They need only be summarised to establish a verdict in the affirmative, and confirm the statement of Apuleius that she whom Ovid tells us Catullus loved under the feigned name of Lesbia, was the Clodia whose character Cicero painted in such undisguised force of colours. First, both lay under the stigma of guilty relations with a brother. Secondly, both appear to have at one time indulged an amour with Cælius Rufus, and both were unmistakably married women. Thirdly, the characters of both coincide in point of wit, learning, and cultivation, their persons in exceptional beauty, and their tempers in caprice and occasional violence. Fourthly, the rank of Clodia was distinctly high and patrician; and though an evil name attached to her on Cicero's showing, there is no reason to suppose that she utterly disregarded appearances. Lesbia's rank, indeed, is not indicated in plain terms by her poet, but it comes out in a probable interpretation of some expressions in an elegiac poem to Allius, that she was certainly no vulgar intriguante, but met her lover at the house of that noble, and so far paid the outward respect to decency, which is wont to be retained later than most other characteristics by the well-born.

The remains of Catullus would be deprived of three parts of their interest, had the Lesbian odes and ditties been unfortunately lost. Not only, however, is this not the case, inasmuch as, of many extant, she is the distinct burden: but many poems, not professedly addressed to her, are really referable to her inspiration. Accordingly, it is a part of the rôle of every critic of Catullus to arrange, according to his skill in divination or conjecture, the sequence of the poems of the Lesbian series; and that which it has been thought most convenient to follow in these pages is the plausible and clear arrangement of Theodore Martin, the most congenial and appreciative of the poet's English translators. It is a happy and shrewd instinct which places first in the series that model translation from Sappho's Greek fragment, which seems at once a naming-day ode and a declaration of passion, fenced and shielded under the guise of being an imitative song. The poet, in the fervour of his new-kindled devotion, in the flutter of hope and yearning, and not yet in the happiness of even short-lived assurance, pours forth a wonderful representation of one of the most passionate of Greek love-songs; and therein (if we strike out an alien stanza, which reads quite out of place, and must have been inserted, in dark days, by some blundering botcher or wrong-headed moralist) transfers from the isles of Greece burning words which have suffered nothing in the process, and which perhaps served the poet for a confession of his flame:—

Peer for the gods he seems to me, And mightier far, if that may be, Who, sitting face to face with thee, Can there serenely gaze; Can hear thee sweetly speak the while, Can see thee, Lesbia, sweetly smile; Joys that from me my senses wile And leave me in a maze.

For ever, when thy face I view, My voice is to its task untrue. My tongue is paralysed, and through Each limb a subtle flame Runs swiftly; murmurs dim arise Within my ears, across my eyes A sudden darkness spreads, and sighs And tremors shake my frame."

Nothing that we could add by way of comment could enhance the truth to nature of the sensations, which the poet renders more vivid as he endorses them, and which Tennyson and Shelley have, consciously or unconsciously, enumerated in kindred sequence in "Eleonore" and the "Lines to Constantia singing." There is something in their reality and earnest truth from the heart, for which we look in vain for imitation in the Elizabethan lyrists. Probably to the same season of hope and wooing must be referred the two pretty ditties on Lesbia's sparrow, in life and in death, which the most casual of readers connects with Catullus, and which have given the key-note to any number of imitations, parodies, and kindred conceits, though, it may be confidently averred, at a marked abatement of ease and grace. In the first, he pictures with vivid touches the coy and witching charmer, inflaming her jealous and impatient lover, and haply disguising her own passion, by playful toying with her pet birdie, to which she surrenders her finger-tip in mock provocation. He has plainly no sympathy with misplaced favours, as he regards the privileges vouchsafed the favourite, whilst he hungers in the very reach of enjoyment. And his moral from what he witnesses is the simple suggestion of a less trifling and more worthy object—himself—though there is a little obscurity in the connection with Atalanta and the apples. We give it, in this instance, from a stray version by the author of 'Lorna Doone'—

Oh that I could play with thee Like herself, and we could find For sad harassings of mind Something gay to set them free!

This would charm me, as they tell That the nimble demoiselle, Charmed by golden fruit, betrayed All her vows to die a maid."—R. D. B.

Perchance the poet did not take into account that the fruit, once grasped, was scarce worth the effort to secure it; that all was not gold that glittered; that Lesbia was incapable of deeper feeling than wantoning with a bird-pet. But the birdie's elegy is a yet more memorable poem,—one, too, that elicits the poet's element of pathos. Written to ingratiate himself with Lesbia, its burden is a loyal commemoration of his quondam rival; but a line or two, even if suggested by an Alexandrian idyllist, on the greed of Orcus and the brief life of all that is lovely and lovable, touch a chord which was never far from the vein of Catullus, though he is soon recalled to the sensible detriment which his lady's eyes are likely to suffer from her tears:—