Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/51

Rh expedition—to wit, the lines to his Cup-bearer, memorable as his sole express drinking-song (C. xxvii.), and the Mortgage (C. xxvi.); the one distinct in its rather youthful advocacy of neat potations—the other a possible reiteration of temporary impecuniosity, though, as has been said above, this theory must not be pressed too far. Anyhow, he was minded to join the proprætor Memmius's train, and swell as his poet for the nonce the "little Rome" which he gathered round him in the province. He may easily have been light of purse after so long a bondage to Lesbia; he may well have hoped to dissipate his chagrins by the variety of foreign travel: so to Bithynia went Catullus, with his friends, Helvius Cinna, Furius, and Aurelius, in the spring of 57 It has been told already how he despatched his parting words to Lesbia by the last-named pair. To Bithynia he sped; and his journey, sojourn, and return, supply a landmark, around which a tolerable amount of his extant poems may be clustered. It is not indeed directly that we discover what a failure it was in a commercial point of view. By putting two and two together, we collect that he spent a year in the proprætor's suite, and then visited, on the home route, Pontus, the Propontis, Thrace, Rhodes, the Cyclades, and the cities of Greece, arriving in due course, by way of the Adriatic, and by the canal which connected the Adige with the Mincio, at his own estate and villa of Sirmio. In one of his best-known and sweetest poems he commemorates the pinnace wherein he performed the voyage; and in another, as sweet, his feelings at reaching "home,