Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/19

Rh 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 d'esprit. 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