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The Poetry of 
 Catullus 
 
 BY 
 
 D. A. SLATER, M.A., 
 
 Professor of Latin in the University College^ Cardiff. 
 
 A Lecture delivered to the 
 
 Manchester Branch of the Classical Association 
 
 on February 2nd, 191 2. 
 
 MANCHESTER 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1912 
 
 Price Sixpence net. 
 

 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Menrg W. Sage 
 
 1891 
 
 A-s'ii.'ils isjub.. 
 
The Poetry of 
 Catullus 
 
 BY 
 
 D. A. SLATER, M.A., 
 
 Professor of Latin in the University College, Cardiff. 
 
 A Lecture delivered to the 
 
 Manchester Branch of the Classical Association 
 
 on February 2nd, 191 2. 
 
 MANCHESTER 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1912 
 
 Price Sixpence net. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026499719 
 
Zhc poetry of Catullus 
 
Sherratt & Hughes 
 Publishers to the University of Manchester 
 Manchester : 34 Cross Street 
 I^ondon : 33 Soho Square, W. 
 
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 New York : 443-449 Fourth Avenue 
 
The Poetry of 
 Catullus 
 
 BY 
 
 D. A. SLATER, M.A., 
 
 Professor of Latin in the University College, Cardiff. 
 
 A Lecture delivered to the 
 
 Manchester Branch of the Classical Association 
 
 on February 2nd, 191 2. 
 
 MANCHESTER 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1912 
 
 E.V. 
 

The Poetry of Catullus. 
 
 Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, — 
 
 As you go into the Bodleian at Oxford, you will see 
 on the Librarian's right hand a glass-covered case, and in 
 it, among other relics, a brine-stained book and an old- 
 fashioned repeater. Read the labels and you learn 
 that you are looking at the watch and the Sophocles that 
 were found on Shelley when his body was cast up by the 
 sea near Via Reggio that July morning in 1829. The 
 thoughts and associations which these objects, like the 
 white marble statue of the poet in that corner of 
 University Quadrangle, conjure up amid their present 
 austere surroundings are as incongruous and refreshing in 
 their way as the light of poetry amid the prose of life. 
 Oxford is not prodigal of such tributes, and, as you pass 
 into Duke Humphrey's Library, you wonder, it may be, 
 whether, in thus cherishing at her heart the memory of 
 Shelley the poet after she had cast out Shelley the atheist, 
 she is thinking of what was, or of what might have been; 
 of what the man did or of what it might have been 
 granted him to do but for the sudden squall that swept 
 him away. " It was all over," writes Trelawny, " within 
 twenty minutes." 
 
 Dreamers will say it speaks well for the world that she 
 has the generosity when a man dies young to judge 
 him by what he might have done, not by what he did. 
 If there has been a glint of gold in the promise of his 
 youth, she sets him, as Shelley himself set Keats, among 
 ''the inheritors of unfulfilled renown," and does more 
 honour, it may. be, to his memory than to the memory of 
 those " who have lived out all the length of all their days," 
 
many of them without fulfilling in their prime the promise 
 of their youth. This, I take it, is the true meaning of the 
 old Greek proverb :■ — 
 
 bv ol Oeol 4>tXovcriv uTroOvyrKei veo'S. 
 
 H 
 The favourites of the gods are released from life before 
 
 they have had time to outstay their youth. The tribute to 
 
 those who died young is tribute to the youth which they 
 
 never lived to lose — ^in part, no doubt, objective, but in part 
 
 also subjective, and prompted by the thought expressed in 
 
 that line of Thackeray : " Oh, the brave days, wheia we 
 
 were twenty-one J" 
 
 Youth's a stuff that will not last, and to embody in 
 
 poetry or in prose the charm and the fulness of youth, the 
 
 poet, or prose-poet, must himself be young. It is only here 
 
 and there a Colonel Newcome in fiction Or a George 
 
 Meredith in life who can keep his hold an " Youth in age.'' 
 
 You remember the lines with that title which appeared in 
 
 Meredith's last volume, written in his eightieth year: — 
 
 " Once I was part of the music I heard 
 
 On the boughs — or sweet between earth and sky. 
 For joy of the beating of wings on high 
 My heart shot into the breast of the bird. 
 
 " I hear it now and I see it fly. 
 
 And a hfe in wrinkles again is stirred, 
 My heart shoots into the breast of the bird, 
 As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh." 
 
 The best of lyric poetry has been the work of youth; 
 the work of Sappho, Catullus and Shelley, who died, all 
 three, it is said, before they were thirty, but yet not before 
 they had left written for all time their record of the 
 thoughts, and the aspirations, the joys and the sorrows of 
 youth — ^youth too, itself and love incarnate — "the glory 
 and the freshness of a dream." 
 
Of these three Catullus, the^Heiije (as he has been 
 called) of Roman Literature, was born, not inappro- 
 priately, at Verona, the City of Juliet and Romeo, 
 probably in the year 84 B.C. In a way the date has its 
 importance, for the period was one of comparative calm. 
 Great movements were developing and great ideas were in 
 the air. But the storm of civil war in which the Republic 
 vvent down, leaving the poets of the Augustan age to drift 
 under the patronage and into the service of the court, had 
 yet to break. Catullus was a child of three when " the 
 mulberry-faced dictator," Sulla, was in power, and he died 
 soon after Caesar had for the first time invaded Britain 
 and five years before he crossed the Rubicon. In a word 
 Catullus lived free and wrote free. That is half his 
 charm. 
 
 His father was a man of means and a friend of 
 Caesar. Catullus himself cannot have been poor, for, in 
 spite of some playful complaints of straitened circum- 
 stcinces — a mortgaged villa and a purse full of cobwebs — 
 we yet gather that he had a yacht of his own and two 
 country houses, one on the Gaida Lake at Sirmio and the 
 other at Tibur, the Brighton of Italy. 
 
 Of his boyhood and youth very little is known. The 
 poems — and biography other than the poems we have 
 practically none — contain a confession that, like Swin- 
 burne, he wrote verses at sixteen. "When first the garb 
 of manhood was given me, when my primrose youth was 
 in its pleasant spring, I played enough at rhyming"— 
 Multa satis lusi.* But, like Swinburne again, at sixteen, 
 or later, he too " had a bonfire." For these trifles, as he 
 calls them, seem never to have been published. And 
 plainly there was study — study in manner and in matter, 
 as well as in metre; the poems that remain prove that 
 But he does not, like Horace, take us into his confidence 
 * Lxviii. 15 seq. 
 
8 
 
 and tell the story of his training. At the age of twenty- 
 two or twenty-three he migrated to Rome, and at Rome, 
 except for occasional visits to the country and some travel 
 abroad, he seems to have spent the last eight years of his 
 life. It is strange that whereas, according to Horace, the 
 race of poets " love the country and avoid the town," to 
 Catullus life in the country was anathema. " Idem 
 infacetost infacetior rure" he says of a poetaster, "the 
 fellow is as dull as the hedges and ditches of the 
 country." But then Catullus was in many ways a 
 paradox. Nor does the paradox become any the less 
 startling when we remember what Sir Archibald Geikie 
 pointed out in the masterly address which he delivered 
 to the Classical Association at Liverpool as its President 
 last year — that no Roman writer had a keener eye than 
 Catullus for all the manifold beauty of nature or a finer 
 power of expressing what he saw. And yet his poetry is 
 the voice less of nature than of life. Now, poets may 
 learn many lessons in the country. They may find 
 " sermons in stones, books in the running brooks." But 
 to know their fellow-men they must live among them. 
 Even Wordsworth might have been more human and not 
 a whit less Wordsworthian — for he would have lost none 
 of his " healing power '' — ^had he mixed a little more with 
 the world of men. " There is a sort of knowledge," says 
 the author of Tom Jones, "which it is beyond the 
 power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had by 
 conversation. So necessary is this to the understanding 
 the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of 
 them than those learned pedants whose lives have been 
 entirely consumed . . . among books; for, however 
 exquisitely human nature may have been described by 
 writers, the true, practical system can be learnt only in the 
 world." 
 
 If Catullus was to acquire this knowledge there was no 
 
better place in which to seek it than the capital, where he 
 settled (in the year after Cicero's consulship), while 
 Catiline was selling his life dear in the uplands of 
 Etruria. 
 
 One needs to be young to realise the zest and the 
 excitement with which he must have entered into the 
 new life. Through Caesar, his father's friend, he 
 could get to know everybody in Rome worth 
 knowing, both men of action and men of letters, such as 
 Qa.lvus the Sheridan and Cinna the Lyly of Rome. 
 Young, reckless, headstrong, he plunged eagerly into all 
 the gaieties of the capital, " the delightful life of youth, 
 with full cups and empty purses." JSphemian' he must 
 have been : there are the poems to tell ; but in the midst of 
 all attractions and distractions he was reading with the 
 appetite of a Macaulay. To his contemporaries he is above 
 all else Doctus Catullus — Catullus the scholar. The one 
 thing lacking soon followed. If a life without a love- 
 story is indeed only half a life, a vie manquee, the pnet of 
 love must ,have learnt ia -rapture ^ndsuffpring whalJie is 
 afterwards . to - describe., in ,.soilg. It is impossible to 
 separate his life from his poetry. And it is for his lyrics 
 of life and of love that Catullus is remembered. Lesbia 
 was the inspiration of them all; Lesbia dictavit, docte 
 Catulle, tibi. 
 
 The tale is a sad one. It was the old story of Troilus 
 and Cressida; romance darkening into tragedy; the 
 ra,ptu,res of anticipation and -possession., dying out into 
 mistrust, jealousy, despair. It seems strange that we 
 sKould owe some of the finest poetry in the world to a 
 sister of the notorious Clodius ; less strange, perhaps, that 
 a story of which she was the heroine should end 
 unhappily. All the chief characters in the episode are 
 known to history. Caelius, who played Diomed lo 
 
10 
 
 Lesbia's Cressid, was undoubtedly the Caelius whom 
 Cicero defehded in the speech Pro Caelio. Ovid, in 
 the Triiiia, assumes everybody to know that the name 
 Lesbia was an alias, and Apuleiu^ states as a fact that 
 " Lesbia " was Clodia. 
 
 Art has preserved no likeness of Catullus. Nor need 
 we stop to paint an imaginary portrait of Lesbia. That 
 portrait may probably be found, sketched by contrasts, in 
 the forty-third poem; a Juno, a Clytemnestra, so Cicero 
 and Caelius call her; a tall, imperious, brilliant patrician 
 with the fine hands and blazing eyes that the age thought 
 beautiful. But no one is really concerned to know what- 
 like were Petrarch's "Laura" or the "dark lady" of Shake- 
 speare's sonnets. It is said to have been at Cicero's house 
 that the two first met : and it may have been by Cicero's 
 hand that Catullus sent to Clodia the fifty-first poem in 
 the collection, the raptures of which I venture to illustrate 
 from a rendering which a young student* once made for 
 me: — 
 
 God, or more than God he seemeth. 
 In whose eyes thy bright glance beameth. 
 In whose ears thy laughter trilleth. 
 Sitting near to thee; 
 
 * Mr. J. C. Rollo, of Glasgow University, in 1503. I have 
 printed the rendering in the text because I know no other that 
 represents as happily the bounding, boyish spontaneity of the 
 Latin; but the reader will thank me, I venture to think, for 
 adding a statelier version from a greater hand, which is too 
 little known : — 
 
 Him rival to the gods I place. 
 
 Him loftier yet, if loftier be, 
 Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face, 
 
 Who listens and who looks on thee ; 
 
II 
 
 For that smile my senses stealeth, 
 And the look that thee revealeth, 
 Every word uprising killeth ! 
 Lesbia, love but me ! 
 
 Through my veins the hot blood boundeth, 
 Fails my voice — strange murmuring soundeth — 
 All the vi^orld such darkness fiUeth, 
 Nought mine eyes can see. 
 
 The poem is fragmentary. The original Greek ode, of 
 which it is an adaptation, was addressed to a Lesbian girl. 
 Catullus designed it to be a veiled declaration of his love. 
 If his Lesbia cared, she would understand ; if not — it was 
 " only a translation." Incidentally the poem gave birth 
 to the title Lesbia. 
 
 Into the details of this " soul's tragedy " — or ""history of 
 a heart," as Tyrrell calls it — this is not the time to enter. 
 In the briefest but clearest outline it can be read by all in 
 the sixty-eighth poem, an elegiac chapter of autobio- 
 graphy, and in the lyric sequence of Lesbia poems (there 
 are barely twenty altogether), which carries the action 
 forward, step by step, through homage and rapture to 
 
 Thee smiling soft. Yet this delight 
 
 Doth all my sense consign to death; 
 For when thou dawnest on my sight, 
 
 Ah wretched ! flits my labouring breath. 
 
 My tongue is palsied. Subtly hid 
 
 Fire creeps me through from limb to limb : 
 
 My loud ears tingle all unbid : 
 Twin clouds of night mine eyes bedim. 
 
 This was published by Mr. Gladstone in a volume which he and 
 the then Lord Lyttelton dedicated " ex communi voto in 
 memoriam duplicum nuptiarum." Quaritch (1863). 
 
12 
 
 doubt and repulsion, on to the sombre close, the final 
 farewell in the poem numbered eighth, in which the self- 
 restraint is almost as remarkable as the intensity of the 
 work. The agony to which Lesbia's inconstancy con- 
 demned him is summed up in two lines in the most famous 
 of his epigrams, the Odi et amo, in which the old love and 
 the new hate are struggling for the mastery : — 
 
 Can Love breed hate, Hate love ? Ah, who shall say ? 
 And yet I feel it . . . and have torment aye. 
 
 The chronology of the Lesbia poems is quite uncertain. 
 At most the attachment can hardly have extended over 
 more than four years. It may have been much shorter. 
 The problem is full of difficulties. In one view the poet 
 died broken-hearted when, close upon the loss of Lesbia, 
 followed the death of his favourite brother. Yet external 
 and internal evidence alike tend to prove that he weiit 
 abroad in 57 with an appointment in the Roman Civil 
 Service on the staff of a provincial governor in Asia, to 
 forget his troubles. And it seems to have been after his 
 return that some of the sprightliest and gayest of the 
 occasional poems were written. The Lines to his Yacht 
 and the Visit with Varus do not read like the work of a 
 broken-hearted man. Nor does a broken heart usually 
 suffer its possessor to collect his own works and dedicate 
 them — as Catullus did — in buoyant verses to a friend. 
 The inference is that the detachment for which he prayed 
 in the Farewell'vfzs achieved, before, — with the last of his 
 lyrics, the " Malest, Corniiici, tuo Catullo" a poem which 
 reads like the cry of a tired child, — ^he died in 54, leaving 
 his last curse to Caesar's satellite Vatinius, who was 
 already boasting about the consulship which he was to 
 hold some seven years later. 
 
 Such is the outline of a brief and restless career, in which 
 the one great passion looms large.. It would be easy to 
 
# 
 
 13 
 
 dilate upon the friendships and the feuds, the wit and the 
 revels, about which still clings the very " atmosphere and 
 breath " of the writer, his zest for life and his passion for 
 travel. The campaigns of Caesar in Gaul and the wan- 
 derings of Veranius and Fabullus in Spain fill him too 
 with the " go- fever " for which his quicksilver temperament 
 has prepared us. It breathes in his constant use of the 
 word vagus (a wanderer), and when his own turn comes 
 his companions must, he tells them, " take wings and fly '' 
 with him. The eagerness with which he anticipates the 
 journey through the great cities of the East is more 
 striking than the contentedly happy note of his best- 
 known poem, his " Home, Sweet Home," when his yacht has 
 sailed back (with the master on board) to his beloved 
 lake-land Sirmio. Thither many a pilgrim has come since 
 to roam over the peninsula of Catullus. Tennyson's life' 
 tells us how he spent a long summer's day on the 
 olive-silvery shore making his " Frater ave atque vale," 
 and how he dwelt on the memory later at his own home- 
 coming and re-read the poems to enjoy the magic of their 
 metre and " the perfection of the art." He came there, after 
 long wandering, to the cenotaph of Catullus as Catullus 
 had conie to the grave of his brother. And it is as 
 " brother "t that he greets the Roman. Only to Virgil 
 and Catullus among Latin poets has Tennyson left the 
 tribute of a song: — 
 
 Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row ! 
 So they row'd, and there we landed — " venusta Sirmio !" 
 There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer 
 glow, 
 
 * Popular Edition, Macmillan & Co., iSgg, page 624 seq. 
 t So Swinburne in the poem beginning " Catulle frater ut 
 velim comes tibi." 
 
14 
 
 There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers 
 
 grow. 
 Came that " Ave atqu& Yale "of the Poet's hopeless woe, 
 Tendetest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago, 
 " Fratet Ave atque Vale" — as we wandered to and fro 
 Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below 
 Sweet Catullus' all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio ! 
 
 One of the first things that strikes us in approaching 
 Catullus is the cold indifference or cQntejnpt with which he 
 seems to be regarded by all but the poets of the ancient 
 world. It is an old grievance against Quintilian that, in 
 his survey of Roman literature, when awarding the palm 
 for lyric poetry to Horace, he bestows but a bare men- 
 tion — and that not an honourable mention — upon Catullus. 
 Horace himself condemned a contemporary because he 
 could recite nothing but Calvus and Catullus, and he 
 claimed, apparently unchallenged, the distinction of 
 having himself introduced into Latium the lyrics of 
 Greece. 
 
 History, too, refers only to the Csesar epigrams, the 
 " carmina referta contumeliis Cessans" which are certainly 
 one of the least presentable, even though they may be one 
 of the most powerful portions of the poet's work. Ovid 
 and Martial make some amends. But compared with the 
 tribute of a Tennyson or a Landor,* even their eulogies 
 " are as water unto wine." We hear of a conspiracy of 
 silence hatched by the Augustan age against writers of 
 the Republic. But the real clue to this indifference is, no 
 doubt, simpler — ^perhaps less surprising. To the everyday 
 world of business and action Catullus did not matter. 
 If the man in the street knew him by name at all it was 
 
 * C.f. Lord Houghton's words in his Essay on Landor (Ward's 
 English Poets, voL iv., p. 466) : " Catullus, his lifelong model of 
 the perfection of literary grace." 
 
15 
 
 only as the autlior of an attack that failed : the writer of 
 a handful of political verse, the bitter protest of a dying 
 Republicanism against the advent of an inevitable and 
 salutary Monarchy. For the rest, he was a child who 
 never grew up. Professor Mackail, in one of those 
 flashes of insight with which he " lightens upon 
 the subject " of Latin Literature, compares him to 
 an extraordinarily gifted child; and for a child, 
 however giftedi_ there- . waa ..very Jittle room __ in 
 serious,^ utilitarian,, grown-up Rome. The attitude is 
 natural. Nor is it confined to ancient times. In one of 
 the finest scenes of Lorna Doone, the scene in which old 
 Sir Ensor, after he has tried by fair means and foul to 
 prevent the marriage of Lorna to Jan Ridd, knowing as 
 he does the truth about her birth and her position, and 
 realising that in the great world " people don't do such 
 things " — old Sir Ensor is represented by Blackmore as 
 relenting on his death-bed, and relenting with the half- 
 cynical, half-envious comment, " Boy and girl, be boy 
 and girl, until you have grandchildren." Catullus never 
 lived to have grandchildren. But he kept his freshness 
 and his boyhood to the last. And it was as a child, a 
 marvellous child, that the average Roman left him 
 severely alone, to be recognised in modern times as " the 
 one Roman poet whom no boy," and it might surely be 
 - added no reader, " has ever failed to appreciate." 
 
 In most writers there are two distinct elements—one 
 ephemeral and transient, engendered by the fashion of 
 the moment or the hour; the other essential and perma- 
 nent, the expression of the writer's innermost self, wrung 
 from him by necessity — "he can no other." In Catullus 
 the line of cleavage is well marked. When he came to 
 Rome in 62, it is reasonable to suppose that he found the 
 younger generation in full revolt against the old school 
 of national poetry and all agog with the fresh fashion of 
 
10 
 
 Alexandrianism. A new world had swum into their ken. 
 Tfnd they were busy excerpting, translating, imitating 
 these modern Greeks, with their microscopic analysis of 
 the feelings, their tedious elaboration of the unessential, 
 their artistic embroidery and their inartistic senti- 
 mentality. It was not for him to set at defiance the 
 opinion of the literary world. He swam with the stream, 
 and the translations and imitations of Callimachus sur- 
 jrive to attest his homage and his success. As literary 
 exercises these verses are all very well. So are the back 
 numbers of a Fashion journal — in their own place and for 
 their proper purpose. But if they were lost, the world 
 would regard the loss with equanimity. On one of these 
 essays, the Peleus and Thetis, very different judgments 
 have been passed. Some rank it with the poet's best work. 
 Among its eulogists is Sir Theodore Martin, the translator 
 of Catullus. " From first to last it maintains," he says, 
 " a high level of imaginative power. The opening picture 
 of the Nereids" (or Mermaidens) "peering up in wonder 
 at the adventurous Argonauts, who were the first to break 
 the solitude of their ocean haunts, takes us at once into 
 the clearest and brightest region of poetical romance, and 
 there the poet keeps us to the close, passing before us 
 picture after picture wrought with a master's hand, and 
 swaying us at his will upon the waves of passion or of 
 pathos." The poem has certainly the simplicity and the 
 'charm of a true fairy-tale : the beauty of the parts makes 
 generous atonement for the inequality of the whole. And, 
 as usual with Catullus' best work, the inspiration is drawn 
 direct from life. It is the reality of Lesbia's unfaith that 
 is told under a thin disguise as the legend of false 
 Theseus ; and if ever a lament was written from the heart, 
 it is the lament of Ariadne. Nor can lovers of poetry 
 afford to forget the influence which the poem exercised on 
 Virgil. Here was sown at least some of the seed, which 
 
17 
 
 was afterwards to bear first blade and then harvest in the 
 Fourth Eclogue and the Fourth ^neid. Or, to vary the 
 metaphor, we may say that the Ariadne of Catullus is the 
 vivid sketch, which in Virgil's hands became the finished 
 picture. Dido. And in each case the later poet indicates 
 his debt to the earlier by a literary echo. Music employs a 
 somewhat similar effect when, for instance, in. the opera of 
 Fra Diavolo, the approach of the master spirit is heralded 
 on the scene by a certain stave of arresting melody. 
 Similarly in modern poetry the author of the Shrof shire 
 Lad echoes a phrase from Tain Lin or a couplet from 
 Willies Lady when he wishes to claim kinship with the 
 old English Ballad. So Virgil, by adapting in his 
 Messianic Eclogue the refrain from the Song of the Fates 
 and by borrowing a line from the Ariadne at the crisis of 
 Dido's passion,* acknowledges, with the skill and the- 
 generosity of a master, his debt to the bard whom the 
 unwritten law of the Augustan age did not permit him to 
 mention by name. 
 
 The Lock of Berenice's Hair, on the other hand, may be ' 
 said to be merely grotesque and only interesting as an 
 experiment in mock-heroics, which may have supplied 
 Statius with a hint for his exaggerative descriptions of 
 Domitian and Mr. Pope with the idea of his Rape of the 
 Lock. This and a few more such pieces may, after all, 
 be regarded as mere studies, dictated by fashion and 
 preserved by friendship. Nor do I hold a brief for the 
 epigrams. An article was recently published in the 
 Spectator with the suggestive title, " Insult as a Fine Art." 
 That is an art in which the Ancients, excel led. But much 
 as we may regret that the epigrams were ever written, or 
 that, having been written, they should have survived to 
 
 * Compare Catullus, Ixiv. 327, with Virgil, E. iv. 46-47; and 
 Catullus, Ixiv. 141, with Virgil, AeheicL iv. 316. 
 
i8 
 
 this day, it must never be forgotten that their scurrihty 
 was a convention and that they were no more meant to be 
 taken literally than is the fiery language of a modern 
 navvy. Pruned of these excrescences the "Liber Catutti" 
 a volume of Ii6 poems,* would be shorter than the 
 Slirof shire Lad, a work with which it has more than a 
 little in common, but, short as it would be, it would also 
 be immortal. The residue is pure gold. 
 
 With an unerring insight and an unrivalled directness, 
 the true Catullus can paint a word-picture as few other 
 poets can. Whether it is the babe in his mother's 
 arms — the Madonna and child of the mediaeval painters^— 
 or the grandam in the chimney-corner; or the flower in a 
 garden-close; or the wind that comes up out of the sea at 
 dawn; or the stream of people passing to and fro in the 
 streets of Rome — such a crowd as we see daily if we 
 travel by train pouring into or out of a twentieth-century 
 railway station : — 
 
 hii qui in flatea modo hue modo illuc 
 In re fraetereunt sua occufati 
 
 — whatever the scene, the poet has still his eye fixed on the 
 object. Aspects of nature or aspects of life, all with a 
 few strokes of the pen, are conjured into an imperishable 
 reality. It is the triumph of art, because it is the triumph 
 of truth. 
 
 It would be hazardous for a modern to try to gauge 
 the exact effect of an ancient poem on an ancient reader, 
 especially when contemporary criticism is silent. Else we 
 might be tempted to assert with confidence that the famous 
 translation by Wm. Cory, in lonica, modelled as it is on a 
 
 * In this one respect Catullus was Alexandrian to the core. 
 He accepted whole-heartedly the Alexandrian maxim, jueya 
 fitliXtov fxiya kokov. 
 
ig 
 
 Greek original and cast in language of absolute sim- 
 plicity, must convey to us very much the same impression 
 that an elegy of Catullus conveyed to a Roman: — 
 
 They told me, Heracleitus, 
 
 They told me you were dead : 
 They brought me bitter news to hear 
 
 And bitter tears to shed. 
 
 I wept, as I remembered. 
 
 How often you and I 
 Had tired the sun with talking 
 
 And sent him down the sky. 
 
 And now that thou art lying, 
 
 My dear old Carian guest, 
 A handful of grey ashes 
 
 Long, long ago at rest. 
 
 Still are thy pleasant voices, 
 
 Thy nightingales, awake. 
 For Death — He taketh all away 
 
 But them He cannot take. 
 
 That poem has just the tones of directness, simplicity 
 and unreserve that characterise Catullus in his poems of 
 tears, of laughter and of love. 
 
 The chief interest must centre about the intenser 
 lyrics and elegies. The poet's moods change like the 
 moods of a child. But throughout his temper never knows 
 a medium. It is always an agony or an ecstasy or a 
 rapture. Let me illustrate this point by one poem on each 
 theme. Take first a love-poem, which Professor 
 Phillimore has translated : — 
 
20 
 
 Dear love, if it were mine 
 
 To kiss for evermore 
 
 With kisses million-fold 
 Those honeyed lips of thine, 
 I should not have my fill; 
 
 Although the harvest store 
 
 Of kisses were untold 
 As the dry cornstalks — still 
 I should not have my fill. 
 
 And then the laughter and the mirth. Now it is 
 the impish merriment of a Puck, with his "Lord, what 
 fools these mortals be!" — O saeclum insifiens et 
 infacetum! — girding at the folly of the world. Some 
 rival of Lesbia is gibbeted with scorn : — 
 
 And can the Town call you a belle. 
 And say that you're a Lesbia ? — Well ! 
 The poor Town's wits have fled pell-mell ! 
 
 Now it is the Homeric laughter of the lines on Calvus, 
 who, though a giant in eloquence, was a dwarf in stature. 
 The rendering is Sir Theodore Martin's : — 
 
 When in that wondrous speech of his 
 
 My Calvus had denounced 
 Vatinius and his infamies 
 
 Most mercilessly trounced — 
 A voice the buzz of plaudits clove, 
 
 My sides I nearly split 
 With laughter, as it cried, " By Jove ! 
 
 An eloquent — ^tom-tit!" 
 
 But the love and the laughter die away. It is the heart- 
 ache that inspired what are, after all, his most haunting 
 poems. From the first, in the dirge on Lesbia's love-bird 
 there is a suggestion that Catullus — " Catullus, whose dead 
 
21 
 
 songster never dies" — was a man of quicker sensibilities 
 than his fellows, and the lines to Calvus on the death of 
 his young bride, Quintilia, bear out the estimate. But 
 after the two great sorrows of his life, the loss of Lesbia 
 and the death of his brother, he wrote what are certainly 
 three of the saddest laments in all literature. They 
 represent the waning, I will not say the passing, of his 
 youth. Perhaps it is well that he did not survive so cruel 
 a disillusionment long. The eighth poem, with its 
 pitiful refrain: — 
 
 " Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past." 
 The fifty-first, a sort of fugue on the theme which the 
 Odi et amo supplied, a death struggle between love and 
 reason, in which only by taking hatred for his bosom 
 friend can the poor passion-ridden lover, " too unhappy to 
 be kind," win back for himself, some hold upon life : — 
 
 . . . No more for answering love I sue. 
 No more that her untruth be true : 
 Purge but my heart, my strength renew. 
 And doom me not my faith to rue. 
 
 Upon these it is almost too painful to dwell. Macaulay's 
 comment is well known : " One thing Catullus has. I do 
 not know whether it belongs to him or to myself, but there 
 are chords of my mind which he touches as no one else 
 does." And he adds that three o€ the poems affect him 
 more than he can explain. They always move him to" 
 tears. 
 
 But in these two poems there is an alloy of hate. In 
 the lament on his brother's death, written seemingly by 
 the graveside in the Troad, which he had travelled far to 
 visit, we have a purer and a more chastened sorrow. It 
 may be possible, with the help of a refrain, though there 
 is no refrain in the Latin, to suggest something of the 
 
22 
 
 sustained sadness of the original and the terrible sense of 
 desolation it conveys : — 
 
 Brother of mine, o'er land and sea 
 At last, at last I have won to thee, 
 To lay my head on thy grave and weep 
 The blinding tears for thy .tearless sleep. 
 Brother of mine. 
 
 Brother of mine, oh unheeding dust, 
 That the &re has seared and the urn has crushed, 
 " Listen," I cry with a fruitless faith 
 As I lean my lips to the ear. of death, 
 "Brother of mine!" 
 
 Brother of mine, who art gone from me. 
 Was Life so blind to the worth of thee ? 
 I come, as our fathers bade us come. 
 With a last sad gift to thy lonely tomb. 
 Brother of mine. 
 
 Brother of mine, to the end of time 
 Thy death shall live in my tear-stained rhyme. 
 Comrade of old, be my comrade still. 
 Hail yet again, and again farewell. 
 Brother of mine. 
 
 It might be thought to argue a morbid taste if one should 
 dwell longer upon this side of Catullus. . And yet it is in 
 the poems of sorrow that we seem to have his deepest ^nd 
 most earnest thought. They are a marvel of self- 
 revelation. Nor is this only a revelation of self. For, 
 like Death in Sir Walter Raleigh's famous Epilogue, 
 Catullus, "the human," holds up a glass before the eyes 
 of us all in which we may see our own humanity — and we 
 acknowledge it. And the note is quite distinct from 
 every other note but Virgil's in Latin Poetry. If 
 
23 
 
 it admits analysis at all, it is the tingling 
 protest of full-blooded life against a seemingly inscrut- 
 able and unjust decree. It is the child's or the pagan's 
 attitude of rebellion against inevitable law; the blank 
 despair of the soul, without faith in immortality, which 
 has dreamed of life that it is very good and awakes to 
 realise that it is also very short. 
 
 It is fortunate for us that in life, as in literature, such 
 agony is shortlived. And that, unless the sufferer dies of 
 his wounds, after the horror of the revelation, comes the 
 cold serenity of middle-age ; that the lover with his woeful 
 ballad quits the stage, and to him succeeds the matter-of- 
 fact man, who has shed his enthusiasms and parted with 
 his ambitions, and who is either, as George Meredith says 
 of Horace, "turning to fat in the sun," hugging a little 
 hoard of comfortable maxims, which tell him that content 
 lies here or lies there, and learning the hard and imprac- 
 ticable lesson to love nothing, hate nothing, value nothing, 
 except, it may be, the even-balanced mind, with its" perfect 
 philosophic tolerance" and garish. devotion to the pleasure 
 of the moment, "the little crow and croon" of Omar- 
 Fitzgerald: — 
 
 Ah fill the Cup : what boots it to repeat 
 How time is slipping underneath our Feet ? 
 Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday, 
 Why fret about them if To-day be sweet ! 
 
 Or else, like the hero of Rugby Cha-pel, he becomes a slave 
 to the idea of duty, pressing on with a more virile motive 
 "to a clear-purposed goal," with the same indifference 
 to all else and with the conscious strenuousness with which 
 Milton invests the hero of Paradise Lost: — 
 The unconquerable will 
 And courage never to submit or yield 
 And what else is not to be overcome. 
 
24 
 
 In either case, be he Epicurean or Stoic, the man has lost 
 the light of his youth, the spirit of Catullus. The vision 
 and the agony return no more. 
 
 It is to the sheaf of " unassailable " lyrics that 
 Catullus owes his immortality. But he is as remarkable, 
 in a way, for his lighter verse, short pieces, every one of 
 them. There is, if we may so say, a kind of " other- 
 dayishness " about the occasional poems. Slight incidents 
 and passing episodes, described in language which in point 
 of diction differs hardly, if at all, from the prose of every 
 day, take under his hand as vivid a reality as if they had 
 occurred this week in England, not " nineteen-hundred 
 years ago " in Rome. Translations can only suggest this ; 
 but two may perhaps be cited — an acknowledgmentto the 
 great orator Cicero and an invitation to a frivolous friend; 
 for the former I am indebted to an old student,* for the 
 latter to an anonymous writer in the Press : — i 
 
 O Marcus, Master of the Roman Bar, 
 Prince of all Counsels that have been, that are. 
 And shrewdest of all Counsels yet to be 
 To guide or gull us, — 
 
 His thanks the worst of poets offers thee : 
 Thee, of all advocates the very first. 
 He of all poets quite the very^ worst — 
 Your friend — Catullus ! 
 
 If you're in luck's way, by and by 
 We'll feast, old crony, you and I 
 Right royally ; but don't omit 
 Rare and refreshing stores of wit 
 And wine — in short of everything: — 
 We'll feast like lords if these you'll bring; 
 
 * The Rev. Cyril Martindale. 
 
25 
 
 For cobwebs fill my money-coffer 
 And I have nothing else to offer 
 But mere affection. ... As I live 
 There's just one dainty left to give — 
 A scent, distilled by Love and Venus 
 For Lesbia, whidh we'll share between us. 
 So fragrant 'tis, you'll cry, I know : 
 " Gods, make me nose from top to toe." 
 
 The figures, too, are as true to life in the gay as in the 
 serious poems : Egnatius with the recurring smile, the 
 prototype of the man with the teeth in Dickens ; Sulla, the 
 litterateur, how he would have vexed the soul of Dr. 
 Johnson ! (the type is perennial) ; the man who would not 
 rest till his friends had read and criticised his work; 
 Pollio, the shameless cleptomaniac ; and Arrius, the Roman 
 cockney. These portraits form a gallery in which one 
 would gladly linger. But let me conclude with a poem of 
 a different stamp, the Hymn to Diana, written for boys 
 and girls to sing at a public festival. I give it as rendered 
 by Professor Jebb. " There are few more entirely success- 
 ful pieces of translation," says the Professor of Poetry at 
 Oxford in his recent Essays of Poets and Poetry, " than 
 Sir Richard Jebb's poetic rendering of Catullus's lovely 
 little lyric." The poem illustrates the detachment and the 
 purity that are one side of this chameleon Catullus. 
 
 Diana guardeth our estate. 
 Girls and boys immaculate; 
 Boys and maidens pure of stain. 
 Be Diana our refrain. 
 
 O Latonia, pledge of love 
 Glorious to most glorious Jove, 
 Near the Delian olive-tree 
 Latona gave thy life to thee,- 
 
26 
 
 That thou should'st be for ever queen 
 Of mountains and of forests green; 
 Of every deep glen's mystery; 
 Of all streams and their melody. 
 
 Women in travail ask their peace 
 From thee, our Lady of Release : 
 Thou art the watcher of the ways : 
 Thou art the Moon with borrowed rays : 
 
 And, as thy full or waning tide 
 Marks how the monthly seasons glide. 
 Thou, Goddess, sendest wealth of store 
 To bless the farmer's thrifty floor. 
 
 Whatever name delights thine ear. 
 By that name be thou hallowed here ; 
 And, as of old, be good to us. 
 The lineage of Romulus. 
 
 There is a steady glow of tranquil beauty about this 
 poem, which is worlds away from the volcanic fire and 
 fury of the epigrams. The contrast is so marked that as 
 we turn from the one to the other we find ourselves asking 
 whether they can both be the work of the same man, 
 unless, indeed, we accept the Diana and the Sirmio as 
 fruits of study — an acquired calm, and say that the " fever 
 and the pain" were in the blood — an inheritance and a 
 birthright. For, indeed, no student of Catullus can live 
 long among Celts without feeling irresistibly drawn to an 
 old theory recently revived by a great authority on Celtic 
 literature, Dr. Kuno Meyer;* the theory, I mean, that 
 Catullus was a Celt or that at least he had Celtic blood in 
 
 * In a University Lecture given at Oxford last autumn. In 
 what follows I am indebted to Dr. Meyer for the benefit of some 
 brief remarks which he sent me privately on the subject. 
 
27 
 
 his veins. The native Latin took from time to time fresh 
 hxies in a Greek school, a Spanish school, an African 
 school of Roman literature, in all of which a racial pattern 
 is clearly discernible upon the groundwork of the mother 
 tongue. Even from different parts of Italy itself came 
 writers with a local temperament so strongly marked that 
 it is unhesitatingly declared to have been chatacteristic of 
 their native district. Thus the arrogance of Naevius is 
 ascribed to his Campanian stock and the melancholy of 
 Propertius to his Umbrian descent. Now there is no 
 external evidence in the case of Catullus. But we all 
 know the Celtic temperament. It is the Irish plays of 
 Mr. Synge; it is Ulster Hall; it is Committee Room 
 Fifteen; it is the dreamy mysticism of the Highlander; 
 it is the haunting pathos of those wonderful dirges which 
 make up the most distinctive element in Welsh music. It 
 is subject to many moods — a close sympathy with nature 
 and a keen relish for life. It is compact of gall and 
 honey, of fire and gloom. It is that strange medley of 
 stormy optimism and brooding melancholy that we must 
 often have marvelled to see mixed and commingled in 
 some Celt of our acquaintance. In a word, it is the 
 temperament of Catullus. Arid when we find that the 
 poet had a Celtic name of which the modern Cadwall or 
 Cadell is said to be the lineal descendant;* that he came 
 from a district peopled almost from time immemorial with 
 Celtic settlers, full of Celtic traditions and Celtic associa- 
 tions ; and when Professor Meyer assures us that " for all 
 the un-Roman featiues in his work parallels may be cited 
 in plenty from Irish and Welsh poetry," we shall be 
 strangely sceptical if we do not admit that here is perhaps 
 the clue to the paradox of Catullus, the eager, wayward, 
 
 * For this, derivation I have to thank my friend Mr. T. H. 
 Thomas, of Cardiff. 
 
28 
 
 passionate child, at whose touch the cold Latin took on the 
 warm humanity and poignant pathos which meet us again 
 and again in that other quasi-Celt, the Master, Virgil,* and 
 which -through some mysterious medium of racial sym- 
 pathy never fail to awaken a responsive echo of vivid 
 affection in Celtic students to-day.t 
 
 Here, then, is one clue. But a greater marvel remains. 
 For, given the Celtic temperament and the bitter-sweet 
 experience, who shall say how it was all to be embodied 
 in language? That is the triumph which Art achieves 
 although it is denied to Science. A famous teacher of 
 Science, at the close of a long life devoted to experi- 
 mental research, declared his work to be, after all, a 
 failure, because on his laboratory tables he had never been 
 able to create life. And yet that is just the miracle which 
 Catullus performed and which the true poet must always 
 perform. Unless the characters " breathe and move and 
 have their being " in his song, the work does not count. 
 
 Two streams of life, with ebb and flow. 
 Throughout the world forever go, 
 Two currents that set steadily 
 From century to century. 
 But one runs in the veins of man 
 And has done since the race began ; 
 The other floods the unchanging page 
 With changing hues from age to age. 
 The men that were, the men that are. 
 Look ever to the self-same star, 
 
 * C.f- (e.g.) Sellar's Virgil, p. 104. 
 
 + This theory might help to solve the enigma of the Attis. 
 Traditions which assigned an Oriental origin to the Celts may 
 have interested Catullus in Eastern legends, just as in modern 
 times they drew. Mangan to handle Oriental themes. See Lionel 
 Johnson in the Treasury of Irish Poetry, edited by Stopf ord A. 
 Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (Smith, Elder & Co.), p. 245. 
 
29 
 
 And Nature on her living loom 
 Weaves still the pattern of our doom, 
 Impulse and effort, love and strife. 
 The travail and the joy of life. 
 The hope, the fear, the rage, the lust, 
 That will not mingle with the dust, 
 But still incarnate, vocal still. 
 Their destiny and ours fulfil. 
 Pent in our narrow room we see 
 The passion and the pageantry. 
 And each in his own soul still hives 
 The mystery of other lives. 
 And claims for kin the nobler soul. 
 Who ran the race and reached the goal. 
 Or struck the blow and won renown. 
 That to all time go?s ringing down. 
 
 Aye, still those gallant spirits ride 
 Triumphant on the racing tide. 
 And still upon the wind is borne 
 The challenge of that elfin horn. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen, — It has been a very great privilege 
 to stand here this evening and put in a plea for the study 
 of Latin poetry. Little that I have said can claim to be 
 considered new. But no appreciation, however imperfect, 
 of a writer like Catullus can wholly fail to show at how 
 many points ancient literature touches modern life. The 
 late Professor Freeman was never tired of insisting on the 
 unity of History. We are apt to forget that there is also 
 a unity of Literature. Human life has grown more com- 
 plex; human nature has changed but little. The Roman 
 boy was father of the English man. And in the Classics 
 (the Greek and Latin Classics) we have not only the great 
 
30 
 
 original of almost all modern literature : we have also a 
 vivid picture of a simpler, a more virile, perhaps also a 
 more earnest, life than the life of to-day. The great aim 
 and object of our Association is, I take it,, to see that 
 study of the language and study of the life shall hence- 
 forth go hand-in-hand ; that it shall be a study not of dry 
 bones but of living men, men in whose simplicity and 
 earnestness and patriotism we may even chance to find a 
 priceless antidote to the spirit of an age, which tends to 
 fix its gaze upon itself and whieJi often seems to be in 
 danger of making material comfort and material prosperity 
 the one and only standard of human achievement. 
 
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 A STUDY OF THE 
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 BY 
 
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