Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/262

Rh 250 CATULLUS pinus &quot;) which deals with the main subject of the poem. But the criticism of Mr Munro in his edition of Lucretius, which shows similarities of expression, which cannot be mere casual coincidences, between the Ariadne-episode in the Epithalamium of Catullus (from line 52 to 266) and the poem of Lucretius, leaves little doubt that that portion at least of the poem was written after the publication of the De rerum natura, in the winter of 55-54 B.C. There is no reason for supposing that Catullus could have had any access to that poem in the lifetime of Lucretius, and even if he were personally known to him and had been acquainted with his poem 15efore its publication, the liberty which ancient poets assumed of using the thoughts and language of previous or contemporary writers could not have included the right of appropriating them before they saw the light. No ancient author has left a more vivid impression of himself on his writings than Catullus. Neither the Letters to Atticus of Cicero nor the Satires and Epistles of Horace afford more trustworthy indications of feeling and character. The interests which occupied his life and inspired his poetry were limited to the passions and the purer pleasures of youth, such as friendly intercourse with men of con genial and cultivated tastes, the enjoyment of outward nature and foreign travel, the cultivation of his art, and the study of the early Greek lyric and the later Alexandrine poets. Coming to Rome in early youth from a distant province, not wt that time included within the limits of Italy, he lived as an equal with the men of his time of most intellectual activity and refinement, as well as of highest social and political eminence. Among those to whom his poems are addressed we find the names of Hortensius, Cicero, and Cornelius Nepos, attesting the fact that his society was valued by older men of established reputation and graver pursuits. With Memmius he was at least on sufficiently intimate relations to form one of the members of his staff during the time of his provincial government. He lived on terms of affectionate friendship with Licinius Calvus, with Helvius Cinna, whose distinc tion (whatever his real merits as a poet may have been) is attested in Virgil s line &quot;Nam neque aclinic Vario videor, nee dicere Cinna Digna,&quot; with Varus, in all probability the Quintilius Varus whose death Horace laments to Virgil in the 24th ode of the first book, and other poets and men of letters contemporary with him. It is interesting to notice among those men tioned as belonging to the circle of his younger friends, one who lived to become one of the most eminent men as statesman, orator, and man of letters in the following generation, Asinius Pollio, characterized by Catullus as leporum &quot; Disertus puer et facetiarum.&quot; xii. 8. Catullus brought into this circle the genius of a great poet, the social vivacity of a vigorous nature, the simplicity and sincerity of an unambitious, and the warmth of an affec tionate disposition. He betrays all the sensitiveness of the poetic temperament, but it is never the sensitiveness of vanity, for he is characterized by the modesty rather than the self-confidence which accompanies genius, but the sensitiveness of a heart which gives and expects more sympathy and loyalty in friendship than the world either wants or cares to give in return. He shows also in some of his lighter pieces the fastidiousness of a refined taste, intolerant of all boorishness, pedantry, affectation, and sordid ways of life. The passionate intensity of his temperament displays itself with similar strength in the outpourings of his animosity as of his love and affection. It was, unfortunately, the fashion of the time to employ in the expression of these animosities a licence of speech and of imputation which it is difficult for men living under different social conditions to understand, still more difficult to tolerate. Cicero, in reference to such imputations says, in his defence of Cselius (ch. iii.) &quot; Sunt ista maledicta pervulgata in omnes, quorum in adolescentia forma et species fuit liberalis ; &quot; and a few sentences later he says of this kind of maledictio, &quot; si petulantius iactatur, convicium ; si facetius, urbanitas nominatur.&quot; It is not easy to realize what the style of those scurrilities must have been, which were &quot; more petulant &quot; and &quot; less urbane &quot; than those of Catullus. But the language of Cicero implies that they were taken, and meant to be taken, merely as a fa^on de parler, and would not be regarded either by the objects of them or by those who read them as conveying the serious belief of the writer. Mr Munro (Journal of Philology, iii.) has examined the 29th poem &quot; Quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati,&quot; the longest and most important of the lampoons on Ctesar and Mamurra, and has shown with much learning and acuteness the motives and intention of Catullus in writing them. Had Julius Caesar really believed, as Suetonius writing two hundred years afterwards says he did, that &quot; an eternal stigma had been cast upon him by the verses concerning Mamurra,&quot; we should scarcely apply the word magnanimity to his condonation of the offence. But these verses survive as a memorial not of any scandal affecting Julius Ctesar which could possibly have been believed by his contemporaries, but of the licence of speech which was one of the symptoms of the social and political disorganiza tion of the age, of the jealousy with which the younger members of the Roman aristocracy, who a little later fought on the side of Pompcy, at that time regarded the ascendency both of the &quot; father-in-law and the son-in-law,&quot; and the social elevation of some of their instruments, and also, to a certain extent, of the deterioration which the frank and generous nature of Catullus underwent from the passions which wasted and the faithlessness which marred his life. The great age of Latin poetry extends from about the year 60 B.C. till the death of Ovid in 17 A.D. There are three marked divisions in this period, each wdth a distinct character of its own : the first represented by Lucretius and Catullus, the second by Virgil and Horace, the last by Ovid. Force and sincerity are the great characteristics of the first period, maturity of art of the second, facility of the last. The educating influence of Greek art on the Roman mind was first fully experienced in the Ciceronian age, and none of his contemporaries was so susceptible of that influence as Catullus. With the susceptibility to art he combined a large share of the vigorous and genial qualities of the Italian race. Like most of his younger contemporaries, the vewrepot of whom Cicero speaks (Epist. ad Atticum, vii. 2), he studied in the school of the Alexandrine poets, with whom the favourite subjects of art were the passion of love, and stories from the Greek mythology, which admitted of being treated in a spirit similar to that in which they celebrated their own experi ences. It was under this influence, that Catullus wrote the Coma Berenices, the 68th poem, which, after the manner of the Alexandrines, interweaves the old tale of Protesilaus and Laodamia with the personal experiences of the poet himself, and the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, which combines two pictures from the Greek mythology, one of the secure happiness of marriage, the other of the passionate despair of love betrayed. In this last poem Catullus exercises a power of creative pictorial imagination far transcending that displayed in any of the extant poetry of Alexandria. We have no means of deter mining what suggested the subject of the Attis to Catullus,