Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/302

 kaleidescope of Roman uranianism is to be seen here. Catullus seems to have been a Dionysian-Uranian, as so many Latins always have been and are now—bisexual in their sensibilities. (An English example among poets is Byron, as we shall again see.) Catullus at first is met in his homosexual references as a coarse lampoonist; as in the famous scurrility directed toward two fellow-citizens who had been talking about his verses and his morals:

There are many such flights of the catullian blague; especially toward "passives", including Julius Cæsar and Mamurra, and in vulgar flouts at Mentula, Gretlius, G-allus, and others of the lewd "smart set" in Rome. But Catullus is plainly concerned in his private and pederastic personality, when attacking angrily sly Aurelius, who is trying to rob the poet the affections of a boy about town:

Catullus is not converted by Lesbia nor by any other mistress, from uranian boy-loves, no matter how femininity may have attracted his capricious heart. He addresses the beautiful lad Juventius, telling him that of his kisses he can never have enough (quite as he declared of the better-known osculations of Lesbia) and rhapsodizes over the boy's eyes as "sweeter than the golden honey of the bee"—those eyes which Catullus would fain "coyer with a thousand kisses." To this same boy, Juventius, are those lines that call him "the floweret of the youth" of all Rome. Catullus angrily and jealously sneers at Juventius on account of a flirtation with another lover, so poor that he has "neither a purse nor a valet." Bitterly too does