Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/40

28 her part, appears to have faintly opposed by offhand professions and general assurances, which Catullus, for the matter of that, was quite sharp enough to see through. "My mistress," he writes in C. lxx.—

The last line of the first stanza is a commonplace for a Roman fair one's assurance of stanchness which, if analysed, will prove to be a very safe averment. Jove the resistless was never likely to put her constancy to the test, though Ovid and his brother poets fabled otherwise. In their view, as Theodore Martin remarks, "the purity was too sublime for belief which could withstand the advances of the sire of gods and men." It is something, then, to find our lovelorn poet retaining enough strength of mind to meet the lady's oath by a counter-commonplace; though it must be owned that his good resolutions and steeled heart do not count for much, when the next poem in Martin's arrangement exhibits him not only declining, as generosity might prompt him, to abuse the frail one himself, but also disposed to turn a sceptical ear to certain scandals which had been brought to his notice:—