UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES
Ancient Classics for English Readers
EDITED BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
{SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES.)
CATULLUS, TIBULLUS,
AND
PKOPEKTIUS
6438 4
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES.
HOMER : THE ILIAD BY THE EDITOR.
HOMER : THE ODYSSEY, ... BY THE SAME.
HERODOTUS, ... BY GEORGE C. SWAYNE, M.A.
C<ESAR, ...... BY ANTHONY TROLLOPE.
VIRGIL, BY THE EDITOR.
HORACE, BY THEODORE MARTIN.
AESCHYLUS, BY THE RIGHT REV. THE BISHOP OF COLOMBO.
XENOPHON, . . BY SIR ALEX. GRANT, BART., LL.D.
CICERO, BY THE EDITOR.
SOPHOCLES, ... BY CLIFTON W. COLLINS, M.A.
PLINY, BY A. CHURCH, M.A., AND W. J. BRODRIBB, M.A.
EURIPIDES, ... BY WILLIAM BODHAM DONNE.
JUVENAL, .... BY EDWARD WALFORD, M.A.
ARISTOPHANES BY THE EDITOR.
HESIOD AND THEOGNIS, BY THE REV. JAMES DAVIES, M.A.
PLAUTUS AND TERENCE, ... BY THE EDITOR.
TACITUS, .... BY WILLIAM BODHAM DONNE.
LUCIAN BY THE EDITOR.
PLATO .BY CLIFTON W. COLLINS.
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY, ... BY LORD NEAVES.
LIVY BY THE EDITOR.
OVID, BY THE REV. A. CHURCH, M.A.
CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, & PROPERTIUS, BvJ. DAVIES, M.A.
DEMOSTHENES, . . BY THE REV. W. J. BRODRIBB, M.A.
ARISTOTLE, ... BY SIR ALEX. GRANT, BART., LL.D.
THUCYDIDES, BY THE EDITOR.
LUCRETIUS, . . . . BY W. H. MALLOCK, M.A.
PINDAR, ... BY THE REV. F. D. MORICE, M.A,
STATE NORMAL SCHfflt,
s, CaJ.
CATULLUS, TIBULLUS,
PBOPEBTIUS
BY THE
REV. JAMES DAVIES, M.A.
PREBENDARY OF HEREFORD CATHEDRAL!
. VOKMURLY SCHOLAR OP LINCOLN
COLLEGE, OXFORD
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
188 I .
PREFACE.
IN the following chapters special acknowledgment is
due to Mr Theodore Martin for numberless extracts
from his admirable and now perfected version of
Catullus ; and an almost equal debt has been in-
curred to Dr James Cranstoun by loans on his Tibul-
lus and Propertius, both of them scholarly perform-
ances, and at present the most adequate English
versions of those poets in a complete form. Through
the kindness of friends, and the publicity of reviews,
some variety has been imparted to the translations
e.g., in poems of Catullus rendered by Mr R. Dodd-
ridge Blackmore, the author of ' Lorna Doono ; ' in
the "Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis," a portion of
which has been given in a free translation by the
Rev. A. C. Auchmuty ; and in pieces of Catullus and
Propertius, borrowed from Hummel and Brodribb'a
' Lays from Latin Lyres ' (1876 : Longmans) ; and
from the late Sir Edmund Head's 'Ballads and
VI PREFACE.
Poems' (Smith & Elder: 1868), in which the trans-
lations of Propertius are sadly too few. In the
course of the work the writer has found that it
is perfectly vain to expect the reader to take
kindly to the versions of Professor Eobinson Ellis;
but he may tolerate the few that are given for
their exact literality and evident scholarship. Mr
Paley's versions, where they have been used, will be
found to combine poetic feeling with these merits.
It has seemed well to designate all the versions of the
three poets for which the author of the volume is him-
self responsible with the letter " D. ; " and he desires
to plead for these not so much a claim of superiority
to other versions, as a scruple to avail himself of the
honey of other bees, without samples and contribu-
tions from his own hive. There is room for even
more workers in this special field of translation ; and
the volume will have done good if it inspires a
friendly rivalry in rendering three specially delightful
poets into congenial English.
J. D.
MOOB COUET, September 1, 1876.
CONTENTS.
CATULLUS.
IPAOB
CHAP. I. THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS, . . 1
it II. CATULLUS AND LESBIA, .... 13
it III. CATULLUS BEFORE AND AFTER THE MISSION
TO BITHYNIA 33
ii IV. CATULLUS AMONG MEN OF LITERATURE, . 49
n T. HYMEN, O II YM r.N.KK ! .... 62
n TI. THE ROMAN - ALEXANDKINE AND LONGER
FOEMS OF CATULLUS, .... 76
TIBULLUS.
M I. THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS, ... 93
n II. TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES, . 104
it III. TIBULLUS IN HIS CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS
CAPACITY, 121
PEOPERTIUS.
n I. LIFE OF SEXTUS PROPERTIUS, . . .131
n ii. CYNTHIA'S POET, . ... . . 147
N III. I'ROPEKTIUS AS A SINGER OF NATIONAL
ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY, . . . .168
CATULLUS.
CHAPTER I.
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS.
VALERIUS CATULLUS about whose praenomen there is
no evidence to show whether it was Caius or Quintus,
and need be still less concern, as wherever the poet
speaks of himself in his poems it is by his surname
Catullus was born at Verona B.C. 87, and died, it is
probable, in B.C. 54 or 53. Like the two somewhat
later elegiac poets usually associated with him, his
life and flower were brief ; but there is internal evi-
dence to prove that he was alive after B.C. 57, his
death-date in the Eusebian Chronicle ; and the silence
of his muse as to public events immediately subsequent
to 54 B.O., the death of Clodius in 52, and the civil
wars in 49-47 amongst the number, forbids the pro-
bability that he attained a longer span than some
thirty-four years. A colour has been sought to be
given to a later date from the supposed mention in
A. o.s. s., voL iiL A
2 CATULLUS.
Poem Hi. of the actual consulship of Vatinius in B.C.
47; but it is clear from Cicero that that worthy whilst
ascending the ladder of office had a habit of enforcing
his affirmations by the oath, " as sure as I shall be
consul," * and so that the poet ridiculed a mere pros-
pect, and not an accomplished fact
" Vatinius what that caitiff dares !
By when he shall be consul swears ! n
Similarly, the argument for a much later date than
67 B.C. for Catullus's lampoons on Caesar and Mamurra
may as well be used on the other side, as it is obvious
that such attacks would be on all accounts subdued
after the Dictatorship was established, though policy
and statesmanship doubtless counsel ignorance or over-
sight of such petty and ephemeral warfare. On the
whole, it should seem that there are allusions in the
poems of Catullus which must have been written in
B.O. 54 and in 53,t but scarcely a shadow of any
grounds for believing him to have survived the later
of these dates.
Beyond the birth-date, we have literally no souvenirs
of the childhood or early youth of Catullus, for he has
recorded scarcely any admonitm locorum, like Horace,
and does not deal in playfully-described miracles to
* Cic. in Vatin. Interrog., 2. 6. 5. 11.
+ Some allusions in C. xii. to Furius and Aurelins, and in C.
xxix., are later than Caesar's invasion of Britain in B.C. 55 ;
and C. liii. is an epigram based on a speech of Licinius Calvus
against Vatinius, whom Cicero at Caesar's instance defended in
.c. 54.
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS. 3
herald the advent of a "divine poet." Born at
Verona, an important town of Transpadane Gaul
on the river Athesis, which became a Latin colony
in 89 B.C., and one of the finest cities in that part of
Italy, he was by family and antecedents essentially
Roman, and in education and tastes must be regarded
as emphatically a town-bird. There is nothing to lead
to the impression that he had the keen eye of Virgil
for the natural and sylvan beaties of his birthplace
and its environs,, no special mention of its wine,
apples, or spelt. lie does not indeed utterly ignore
the locality, for one of his most graceful pieces is a
rapture about Sirmio (C. xxxL), where he possessed
a villa, no great distance from Verona, on the shores
of the Lago di Garda. Hither in his manhood he
returned for solace after trouble and disappointment ;
but it was probably rather with a craving for rest than
from the love of nature, which is not a key-note of his
life or poetry. His removal to Rome at an early ago
for his education must have begun the weaning pro-
cess ; and though Verona had its " capital in little,"
its importance, still witnessed by the remains of an
amphitheatre more perfect though smaller than the
Colosseum, its medley of inhabitants from the east
and west, with a fair share of culture and urbanity,
in spite of the infusion of barbarism which Cicero
complained had reached even Rome with the " breeks "
of the peoples from beyond the Alps, it is easy to
conceive that Catullus soon contracted a preference
for the capital, and was fain to quiz the provincials
of his original home, though he seeuis to have retained
4 CATULLUS.
not a few acquaintances and family ties amongst them.
Such ties, as is seen in the cases of Catullus and
Horace, were stronger in the provinces than in Eome ;
and we shall see anon that the former was influenced
"by the tenderest and most touching fraternal affection ;
but the charms of a residence at Eome, from the school-
boy period up to his brief life's end, asserted a power
which was rarely interrupted by rustication or foreign
travel ; and he cannot herein be accused of the vola-
tility or changeableness which characterised others of
his craft and country. This would be a power certain
to grow with years, and the more so as books, society,
culture, were accumulated in the capital " At Eome,"
wrote the poet to Manlius
" Alone I live, alone my studies ply,
And there my treasures are, my haunts, my home."
It is little more than guess-work to speculate on the
rank and calling of Catullus's father. From the life
of Julius Caesar by Suetonius we gather that he was
on terms of intimacy with, and a frequent host of, that
great man ; and it is not improbable that he and the
son who died in Asia Minor may have been merchants,
though the death in question would consist as well
with the surmise that Catullus's brother was on some
praetor's staff. Attempts have been made to establish
against the poet himself a charge of impecuniousness
and wastefulness ; but " the cobwebs in his purse " in
the invitation to Fabullus (C. xiii.) are a figure of
speech which need not be literally interpreted ; his
allusions in C. xi., " Concerning Varus's Mistress," to a
TUE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS. 5
scanty exchequer and shabby equipment whilst in the
suite of Memmius in Bithynia, cut rather at that ill-
conditioned and illiberal praetor than himself; and as
to the jeu d? esprit about the " Mortgage," it makes all
the difference of meum and tuum whether we read of
"your" or "my" country-seat as the snug tenement,
as to which the poet tells Furius
" That there's a mortgage, I've been told,
About it wound so neatly,
That, ere this new moon shall be old,
'Twill sweep it off completely." (C. xxvi.)
Some possible colour for the suspicion is indeed found
in the fact that on occasion like other young men
about town Catullus sought to improve his finances,
and so like other young men joined the suite of the
praetor, Caius Memmius, in Bithynia, attracted by the
literary prestige of that governor, who was the friend
and patron of Lucretius. From him, however, he de-
rived nothing but disappointment. Memmius did not
enrich his own coffers : his suite, if we may judge by
Catullus, did not recoup their outfit; but, on the
contrary, might have stood as a warning to other
would-be fortune-menders for the nonce, as the poet
points the simile
" Like me, who following about
My prastor was in fact, cleaned out" (C. xxviii.)
But with regard to the poet's general finances we
have certainly no reason, from his remains, to suppose
that he was habitually out at elbows. On the contrary,
6 CATULLUS.
we know that he had two country-houses, one at the
Lago di Garda (which some have thought is still repre-
sented by the ruins of a considerable edifice at the ex-
tremity of the promontory on its southern shore, though
later discoveries show that these are remains of baths
of the date of Constantine, to say nothing of their ex-
tent being out of keeping with a poet's villa) ; and the
other in the suburb of Tibur, where was his Tiburtine,
or, as his ill-wishers called it, to tease him, his Sabine
Farm (C. xliv.) Add to these a house and library at
Rome, of which he wrote, as we have seen above, to
Manlius, and an estate which he owed to the bounty
of a friend, and of which little more is known than
that it included amongst other goods and chattels u
housekeeper ; * and we shall determine that Catullus
was probably in nowise amenable to the charge of
being a spendthrift or " distrest poet," but rather a man
of good average means, in fair circumstances and good
society. For the latter it is plain that his education
would have fitted him. Though he had not, like
Horace, the advantage of a Greek sojourn to give it
finish and polish, he had enjoyed what was then at a
premium in Latin towns even more than at Rome, a
thorough introduction to Greek literature. Herein he
laid the foundations of that deep familiarity with the
Alexandrian poets, which, in common with his brother
elegiast, Propertius, but perhaps with special manipu-
lation all his own, characterises his other than erotic
poetry. It is possible that the imitations of Alexan-
* " To my domains he set an ampler bound,
And unto me a home and mistress gave."
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS. 7
drine poetry may have been his earliest poetic efforts,
but the more natural supposition is that his earliest
verses are inspired rather by the taverns and lounges of
Roman or Veronese resort than by the schools; and if
so, an early date would be assigned to " Colonia, its
Old Bridge, and the Stupid Husband" (C. xvii.), the
poem about a "Babbling Door," the "Mortgage," and
other like squibs and jeux d 'esprit. The lack of what,
to the accomplished Roman of the highest rank, was
tantamount to a college education at Athens, Catullus
made.up later on by what is also a modern equivalent
foreign travel. After his bootless winter in Bithynia,
he chartered a yacht and started on a tour amidst the
isles of the Archipelago, after having first done the
cities of Asia. And so up the Ionian and Adriatic
he sailed home to the Lago di Garda and Sirmio,
furnished, doubtless, with poetic material and fancy
suggested by his voyage, and fitted more than ever for
the intercourse of those literary men at Rome whoso
friendship he enjoyed in his mature life, if we may
use such an expression of one who died at thirty-four.
Among these were Pollio, Calvus, Cicero, Cornelius
Nepos, with whom to have been on terms of intimacy
is a distinct set-off against an acquaintance with some
scores of lighter and looser associates. It is only im-
perfect acquaintance with the poems of Catullus that
sets up his image as that of a mere Anacreontic poet,
a light jester and voluptuary, who could not be earnest
but when his jealousy was roused by his beauteous
bane his Lesbia. The finished grace of his poetic
compliments to such historic Romans as those we havo
8 CATULLUS.
just named may be set beside the touching and pathetic
poem to his brother as proofs of his exquisite com-
mand of very different veins, although in his hours of
youthful gaiety he could throw off light lays on pass-
ing tittle-tattle, or chronicle adventures more or less
scandalous and licentious. His claim to permanent
honour as a poet rests upon the depths of intense
feeling which, whether in light love (if his love for
Lesbia can ever be so called) or in brotherly affection,
as shown in his lament for his brother's death in the
Troad, well up to the sound of the plaintive lyre. It
is pretty fully settled that this brother's death did not
synchronise with the poet's voyage to Bithynia. Had
it been so, would he not surely, as Mr Theodore
Martin has observed, have linked a fond memory of
their joint boyhood with his ode on return to Sirmio ?
The times and seasons were distinct, but Catullus
made a set pilgrimage to his brother's grave on the
Ehaetean headland ; and to this landmark, as it were,
of his life, this heartbreaking journey, and the deso-
lation of the home to which he returned, must be
referred his sad lines to Hortalus, Manlius, and Cor-
nificius. If to this we add the late realisation of
Lesbia's utter wantonry (a chapter in the poet's his-
tory which, as influencing it beyond all others, deserves
to be treated separately and at length), it is made clear
that his youthful spirits may by this time have been
deserting the sensitive and saddened Catullus; and
though there is no distinct record of his death, the
inference is justifiable that accumulated bereavements
and the rupture of tenderest ties, rather than the
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS. 9
effects of habitual profligacy, brought to a premature
death the richly-gifted and learned Veronese songster,
whom Ovid in his " Amores " bids meet another early-
taken bard Tibullus his youthful temples ivy-
crowned, in the Elysian valley. It is surely with his
riper years (perhaps about 61 or 60 B.C.), and not with
those when he was more fickle and in the heyday of
young blood, that we should connect his passion for
Lesbia. Tired, perhaps, of light loves, which left only
their bitterness behind, he had dreamed though it was
an empty and ill-founded dream of a more enduring
connection with this most beautiful and graceless of
Eoman matrons. This idol shattered, its worshipper
undeceived, and the brother whom he loved with a
pure affection toni from him by an untimely death,
Catullus has little more in the way of a landmark for
the biographer. Between these events and his death-
date, whether we take that as 57 or 54 B.C., there was
time for tender regrets, occasional alternations between
palinodes and professions of forgiveness, presentiments
of coming fate, and more direct facing of premature
death. Time also, as to our good fortune he discov-
ered, for collecting the volume of his poems, which ho
fitly dedicated to Cornelius Nepos, and forwarded to
him in a highly-finished dainty copy, "purfled," as
one translator expresses it, " glossily, fresh with ashy
pumice." It is a happy sample of his ideal of poetic
compliment, and apologetically excuses the boldness
of offering so slender an equivalent for the historian's
three volumes (which have not survived) of Italian
history. The first verso illustrates the binding and
10 CATULLUS.
preparing of a Eoman presentation copy. The last
points the contrast of a sort of Diomede and Glaucus
exchange with a lurking esteem for his own professedly
inadequate gift :
" Great Jove, what lore, what labour there !
Then take this little hook, whate'er
Of good or bad it store ;
And grant, oh guardian Muse, that it
May keep the flavour of its wit
A century or more !" M.
Before proceeding to examine the extant poetry of
Catullus upon the principle of division into groups,
it is fair to him to say a few words in deprecation
of the character for licentiousness of life and poetry
under which it has been his misfortune to suffer
amongst moderns. It ought to "be taken into account
that the standard of morals in his day was extremely
low; vice and profligacy walking abroad barefaced, and
some fresh scandal in high places amidst the con-
sul's suite and the victorious general's retinue being
bruited abroad as day succeeded day. A poet who moved
in the world and had gained the repute of a smart
hitter at the foibles and escapades of his neighbours,
whilst himself hot-blooded, impetuous, fearless, and
impatient of the restraints of society, was not unlikely
to become the object of some such general charges as
we find from C. xvi., that Aurelius and Furius circu-
lated against Catullus. And to our apprehension the
defence of the poet
" True poets should be chaste, I know,
, But wherefore should their lines be so ?"
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CA'iULLUS. 11
seems like begging the question, and scarcely a high
tone of self-justification. Indeed, his retort is not
simply turning the tables, as he might have done, on
his maligners, but somewhat unnecessarily defending
his life at the expense of his writings. This, it is
probable, has acted in his disfavour. Excepting a few
extremely personal and scurrilous epigrams and skits,
it is not easy to pick out in the poetry of Catullus
a greater looseness of language than in that of his
Augustan successors ; whilst as compared with his
contemporaries in high places and public life, his
moral conduct might have passed for fairly decent.
What most concerns the modern reader is that after
abatements and omissions of what is more or less
unpresentable, there remains so much of a more re-
fined standard of poetry and manners, so much ten-
derness in pure affection and friendship, so much, we
might almost say, chivalry and forgivingness in the
treatment of more questionable objects of his passion,
that we are won to condonation of the evil which is
that of the time and society for the charm and ideal
refinement of the genius which is specially his own.
The standard of purity and morals has, we know,
risen and fallen in modern times and nations ; and a
severe " index expurgatorius " should ban our Herricks,
Moores, and Byrons nay, even Burns ; but unless a
sponge is to wipe out for the sake of a few blots a
body of true poetry, rare in form and singularly rich
in talent and grace, and a hard and fast rule is to
condemn bitter and sweet alike, it is to be hoped that
a fairer insight into the poetry of Catullus, attainable
12 CATULLUS.
through the blameless medium of at least one excel-
lent translation, will enable English readers to judge
how much of the prejudice attaching to the name of
Catullus is without foundation, and how rich and
original is the freshness and vivacity of his muse.
It is no little gain to feel that in this genius we have
" not only one of the very few writers who on one or
two occasions speaks directly from the heart," but
one entitled to the much more comprehensive praise,
as has been shown by Professor Sellar, of " a wonder-
ful sincerity in all the poems, by means of which the
whole nature of the poet, in its better and worse
features, is revealed to us as if he were our contem-
porary." *
* Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 342.
CHAPTER IL
CATULLUS AND LESBIA.
ALTHOUGH chronology would plead for the postpone-
ment till much later of the record of Catullus's love-
fever, and it might seem more in order to set first the
floating epigrams and occasional pieces which treat of
town or country jokes, witticisms, petits saupers, and
the like, and to make the reader acquainted with
the everyday life of the poet at home or abroad;
yet the passion for Lesbia was so absorbing when it
was lighted, and possessed its victim so thoroughly,
that we must needs treat it first in our sketch of
his writings. A poet's love has mostly been insepar-
able from his after-fame ; and in a higher degree than
the Cynthia of Propertius, the Corinna of Ovid, or
the Delia, probably, of Tibullus, does the Lesbia of
Catullus fasten her spell around him, to the exclusion
of other and fresh loves, of which he was apparently
cautious and forbearing both before and after the
crisis of his master-passion. His erotic verses, save
those to Lesbia, are but few. Ipsithilla, Aufilena,
and Ametina are mere passing and casual amours,
soon forgotten; he is oftener found supping with a
14 CATULLUS.
friend and his cJiere amie than flirting on his own
account ; and there is nothing in Catullus that betrays
the almost certainty that his mistress has justification
in his infidelity for any number of her own laches and
transgressions, such as is always peeping out in the
elegies of Propertius. On the contrary, it is fair to be-
lieve that in his case " the heart that once truly loved
ne'er could forget," however unfortunate and direful its
choice and the issue of it. He was true to the ideal
and stanch to the championship of Lesbia's resplendent
beauty, long after he had proved that it was not for
him; and however disastrous to his peace of mind,
health, and even life, the results of her coldness and
fickleness, the spell clung to his heart, even after his
mind was cured ; and so Lesbia asserts foremost men-
tion when we call up the surroundings of Catullus.
Who, then, was this potent enchantress ? The elder
sister, it is pretty well agreed, of that notorious P.
Clodius who was slain by Milo, and a member of the
great Claudian house at Eome. Like brother, like
sister ! The former had added a grave sacrilege to
unheard-of profligacy, and outraged even the lax
standard of Eoman society in his day by the versa-
tility of his shamelessness. To the character of an
unbridled libertine he added that of an unscrupulous
political incendiary, with whom poison and assassina-
tion were wonted modes of removing a rival from his
path. The Clodia whom we identify by almost common
consent with the Lesbia of Catullus was the second of
his three sisters, and unequally yoked witli Metellus
Celer, who was consul in 60 B.C., and on frequent occa-
CATULLUS AND LESLIA. 15
sions a correspondent of Cicero. But, like her sisters,
she was notorious for her infidelities ; and, like her
brother, was not nice as to methods of getting rid of
such as slighted her advances or tired of her fickle-
ness. Even Cicero was credited with having stirred
her passion unwittingly. A gay friend of Catullus,
Caelius Rufus, had incurred her persecutions and
false accusations of an attempt to poison her, by
freeing himself from his liaison with her ; and Cicero
had defended him in a speech which furnishes ihe
details of her abandoned life of intrigue and profli-
gacy. With her husband she was at constant war ;
and his death by poison in 59 B.C. was freely laid
at his wife's door. So, at least, we gather from
Cicero's defence of Cselius, delivered in the follow-
ing year, which saddles her with epithets betoken-
ing the depths to which she had descended in her
career of vice and licence. After her husband's death,
and her release from a yoke which she had never
seriously respected, she appears to have given herself
over to the licentious pleasures of Baiae, kept open
house with the young roues of the capital at her
mansion on the Palatine, and consorted with them
without shame or delicacy by the Tiber's bank, or on
the Appian Road. In such company Catullus, as an
intimate of Caelius, Gellius, and others whose names
were at one time or another in her visitors' book, most
probably first met her ; and the woman had precisely
the fascinations to entangle one so full of the tender
and voluptuous, and withal so cultivated and accom-
plished as Catullus must have been. It has been epi-
16 CATULLUS.
grammatically said of the women of that epoch at
Rome that " the harp and books of Simonides and
Anacreon had replaced the spindle and distaff; and
that with a dearth of Lucretias," or chaste matrons,
" there was no lack, unfortunately, of Sempronias " *
i.e., unchaste blue-stockings. But had Clodia's or
Lesbia's culture and cleverness been the head and
front of her offending, the poet might less have rued
his introduction to a sorceress who, "insatiable of
love, and almost incapable of loving," had ambition,
vanity, and woman's pride sufficient to covet a name
in connection with the foremost lyric poet of the day.
On his part there seems to have been no resistance to
the toils; and no wonder if, with the ends of her
vanity to achieve, she bent her literary talents, as
well as her coquetry and natural graces of mien and
person, to his captivation. Cicero has recorded that
she was talked of, like Juno, as /Joum-is, in compli-
ment to her grand and flashing eyes ; and there is no
lack of evidence that her beauty, grace, figure, and
wit were rare. It might be asked on what certitude
this description of Clodia is transferred so confidently
to Lesbia. In the first place, let it be admitted
that, after the fashion of the Alexandrian poets, the
custom prevailed with such Eoman writers as Varro,
Atacinus, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, to cel-
ebrate their mistresses under the feigned names of
Leucadia, Lycoris, Delia, Cynthia, Corinna ; and it,
* Sempronia, wife of D. Junius Brutus, was a woman of
personal attractions and li terary acquirements, but of profligate
character.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 17
will not seem unlikely that Catullus should choose for
the nom de plume of his enslaver a name recalling
Sappho the Lesbian, especially as it was probably
by a sympathetic translation into Latin sapphics of
her famous ode to Phaon that he first announced
his suit and evinced his passion. After this is grant-
ed, it will remain to decide from internal evidence
whether there are grounds of identification between
the Lesbia of Catullus's poetry and the famous or
infamous sister of Publius Clodius. They need only
be summarised to establish a verdict in the affirma-
tive, and confirm the statement of Apuleius that
she whom Ovid tells us Catullus loved under the
feigned name of Lesbia, was the Clodia whose character
Cicero painted in such undisguised force of colours.
First, both lay under the stigma of guilty relations with
a brother. Secondly, both appear to have at one time
indulged an amour with Czelius Kufus, and both were
unmistakably married women. Thirdly, the characters
of both coincide in point of wit, learning, and culti-
vation, their persons in exceptional beauty, and their
tempers in caprice and occasional violence. Fourthly,
the rank of Clodia was distinctly high and patrician ;
and though an evil name attached to her on Cicero's
showing, there is no reason to suppose that she utterly
disregarded appearances. Lesbia's rank, indeed, is
not indicated in plain terms by her poet, but it comes
out in a probable interpretation of some expressions
in an elegiac poem to Allius, that she was certainly
no vulgar intriguante, but met her lover at the house
of that noble, and so far paid the outward respect to
A.C.S.S., vol. iii. B
18 CATULLUS.
decency, which is wont to be retained later than most
other characteristics by the well-born.
The remains of Catullus would be deprived of three
parts of their interest, had the Lesbian odes and
ditties been unfortunately lost. Not only, however,
is this not the case, inasmuch as, of many extant, she
is the distinct burden : but many poems, not pro-
fessedly addressed to her, are really referable to her
inspiration. Accordingly, it is a part of the role of
every critic of Catullus to arrange, according to hia
skill in divination or conjecture, the sequence of the
poems of the Lesbian series ; and that which it has
been thought most convenient to follow in these pages
is the plausible and clear arrangement of Theodore
Martin, the most congenial and appreciative of
the poet's English translators. It is a happy and
shrewd instinct which places first in the series
that model translation from Sappho's Greek frag-
ment, which seems at once a naming-day ode and
a declaration of passion, fenced and shielded under the
guise of being an imitative song. The poet, in the
fervour of his new-kindled devotion, in the flutter of
hope and yearning, and not yet in the happiness of even
short-lived assurance, pours forth a wonderful repre-
sentation of one of the most passionate of Greek love-
songs ; and therein (if we strike out an alien stanza,
which reads quite out of place, and must have been
inserted, in dark days, by some blundering botcher or
wrong-headed moralist) transfers from the isles of
Gre3ce burning words which have suffered nothing in
, CaL
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 19
the process, and which perhaps served the poet for a
confession of his flame :
' Peer for the gods he seems to me,
And mightier far, if that may be,
Who, sitting face to face with thee,
Can there serenely gaze ;
Can hear thee sweetly speak the while,
Can see thee, Lesbia, sweetly smile ;
Joys that from me my senses wile
And leave me in a maze.
For ever, when thy face I view,
My voice is to its task untrue,
My tongue is paralysed, and through
Each limb a subtle flame
Runs swiftly ; murmurs dim arise
Within my ears, across my eyes
A sudden darkness spreads, and sighs
And tremors shake my frame." *
Nothing that we could add by way of comment could
enhance the truth to nature of the sensations, which
the poet renders more vivid as he endorses them, and
which Tennyson and Shelley have, consciously or
unconsciously, enumerated in kindred sequence in
" Eleonore " and the " Lines to Const ant ia singing."
There is something in their reality and earnest truth
from the heart, for which we look in vain for imitation
in the Elizabethan lyrists. Probably to the same
season of hope and wooing must be referred the two
C. li., Rossbach and Laehmann ; Th. Martin, p. 3.
20 CATULLUS.
pretty ditties on Lesbia's sparrow, in life and in death,
which the most casual of readers connects with Cat-
ullus, and which have given the key-note to any num-
ber of imitations, parodies, and kindred conceits,
though, it may be confidently averred, at a marked
abatement of ease and grace. In the first, he pictures
with vivid touches the coy and witching charmer,
inflaming her jealous and impatient lover, and haply
disguising her own passion, by playful toying with her
pet birdie, to which she surrenders her finger-tip in
mock provocation. He has plainly no sympathy with
misplaced favours, as he regards the privileges vouch-
safed the favourite, whilst he hungers in the very
reach of enjoyment. And his moral from what he
witnesses is the simple suggestion of a less trifling and
more worthy object himself though there is a little
obscurity in the connection with Atalanta and the
apples. We give it, in this instance, from a stray
version by the author of ' Lorna Doone '
" Oh that I could play with thee
Like herself, and we could find
For sad harassings of mind
Something gay to set them free !
This would charm me, as'they tell
That the nimble demoiselle,
Charmed by golden fruit, betrayed
All her vows to die a maid." R. D. B.
I^rchance the poet did not take into account that the
fruit, once grasped, was scarce worth the effort to
secure it; that all was not gold that glittered; that
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 21
Lesbia was incapable of deeper feeling than wantoning
with a bird-pet. But the birdie's elegy is a yet more
memorable poem, one, too, that elicits the poet's
element of pathos. Written to ingratiate himself with
Lesbia, its burden is a loyal commemoration of his
quondam rival ; but a line or two, even if suggested
by an Alexandrian idyllist, on the greed of Orcus
and the brief life of all that is lovely and lovable,
touch a chord which was never far from the vein of
Catullus, though he is soon recalled to the sensible
detriment which his lady's eyes are likely to suffer
from her tears :
" Loves and Graces mourn with me
Mourn, fair youths, where'er ye be !
Dead my Le.sbia's sparrow is
Sparrow that was all her bliss ;
Than her very eyes more dear ;
For he made her dainty cheer,
Knew her well, as any maid
Knows her mother ; never strayed
From her bosom, but would go
Hopping round her, to and fro ;
And to her, and her alone,
Chirruped with such pretty tone.
Now he treads that gloomy track
Whence none ever may come back.
Out upon you, and your power,
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus' gloomy shades, that e'er
Ye took my bird that was so fair !
Ah, the pity of it ! Thou
Poor bird, thy doing 'tis, that now
My loved one's eyes are swollen and red
With weeping for her darling dead."
22 CATULLUS.
It only needs to compare this delicate and musical
piece, and the subtle infusion of its (in the original)
tender diminutives, with Ovid's " On the Death of a
Parrot," in which the parrot is very secondary to its
mistress, and we shall discern the elements of popu-
larity which made it a household word up to the time
of Juvenal, and still preserve it as a trial-ground for
neatness and finish in translators.
But soon we find a song that gives a note of pro-
gress in Lesbia's good graces. A sense of enjoyment
and abandon animates the strain in which Catullus
pleads for licence to love his fill, on the ground that
to-morrow death may terminate the brief reign of
fruition. In sharp contrast with the heyday of
present joy he sets the drear prospect which had
made itself felt in the poem last quoted ; but now it
is as an incentive to " living while we may : "
" Suns go down, but 'tis to rise
Brighter in the morning skies ;
But when sets our little light,
We must sleep in endless night."
The moral, or conclusion, is not that which commends
itself to faith or hope; but the pagan mind of the
erotic poets delighted, as we may see in Ovid, Tibul-
lus, and Propertius, also in the contrast of now and
then the gay brightness of the passing hour with the
dark shadow looming in the background and drew
from it no profounder suggestion than love and
kisses ! In the rationale or arithmetic of these, Catul-
lus shows himself an adept. In the piece just quoted
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 23
he piles up an addition sum that takes away the
breath, and eventually gives a reason for
" Kiss after kiss without cessation,
Until we lose all calculation ;
So envy sJiall not mar our blisses
By numbering up our tale of kisses"
The ancients had a motive for letting their kisses pass
counting, which does not appear in the love-ditties of
our Herricks and Drummonds, though both betray
the influence of Catullus the deprecation, to wit, of
magic, mischance, ill-luck, or an evil-eye, which their
superstition considered unascertained numbers to se-
cure. Exemption from such, then, was a stimulus to the
lover's appetite for kisses, as is pleaded again by the
poet "To Lesbia Kind" in C. vii., where he exhausts
the round of similes for numbers numberless the sea-
sands, the stars of night, and so forth and doubts
whether the very largest definite number
" Which a curious fool might count,
Or with tongue malignant blast,"
could satisfy his thirst and fever. One could wish
that to the Lesbian series might be linked a short
poem in kindred vein (C. xlviii.) which may well sut
up the poet's dicta upon the subject, inscribed " To a
Beauty "
u Oh, if I thine eyes might kiss,
And my kisses were not crimes,
I would snatch that honeyed bliss
Full three hundred thousand times !
2-i CATULLUS.
Nor should these a surfeit bring,
Not though that sweet crop should yield
Kisses far outnumbering
Corn-ears in the harvest-field."
But whilst as yet Catullus enjoys a dream of success-
ful love, and the fancied happiness of possession, with
no misgivings arising from awakened jealousy or fears
of fickleness, has he left any hint whereby we may
reach the secret of Lesbia's witchery ? There is one
which does pre-eminently supply tnis his comparison
of her with a contemporary beauty generally admired,
by name Quinctia. The latter, he admits, has several
feminine charms ; but Lesbia's attraction is the con-
centration in herself of all the perfections of the most
peerless women. Hers is a gathering of "every
creature's best" into one ineffable grace, "so perfect
and so peerless " is she ! * But let Catullus speak
through his eloquent interpreter :
" Most beautiful in many eyes
Is Quinctia, and in mine
Her shape is tall, and straight withal,
And her complexion fine.
These single charms of form and face
I grant that she can show ;
But all the concentrated grace
Of ' beautiful,' oh no !
For nowhere in her can you find
That subtle voiceless art
* Ferdinand to Miranda " The Tempest," act iii. sc. 1.
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 25
That something which delights the mind,
And satisfies the heart.
But Lesbia's beautiful, I swear ;
And for herself she stole
The charms most rare of every fair,
To frame a perfect whole."
But anon comes a change over the poet's complacent
satisfaction. This perfect creature is only outwardly
and bodily perfect; or, if her mental endowments
enhance the attractions of her form and beauty, ho
soon finds that the heart is wanting. It was her
pride in the homage of a brilliant and popular poet
that had bidden her win him to her feet : the effort
to retain him there was too great for her fickle tem-
perament, if indeed she did not trust her fascinations
to keep him attached to her train at fast or loose, as
it suited her purpose. It would hardly seem that ho
could have counted upon much more, if we are to
connect with Lesbia, as there is every reason to do,
the poem to Manius Acilius Glabrio, in which he pro-
fesses toleration of rivals, and goes so far as to say
that
" Therefore so that I, and I alone,
Possess her on the days she culls for me,
And signalises with a whiter stone,
I care not how inconstant she may be."
(C. Ixviii. ad Jin.)
Perhaps for a while it sufficed him to act as his own
detective, and warn off such fops as Gellius, AltVnu-,
26 CATULLUS
Egnatius, and Eavidus with sarcasms, innuendos, and
threats of biting iambics, if they forestalled his privi-
leged visits. He may have trusted also somewhat to
the gratitude he might quicken in Lesbia's bosom by
such compliments by contrast as the skit he wrote
on the mistress of Mamurra of Formiae, a creature of
Julius Caesar, who had raised him in Gaul from a low
station, and put him in the way of acquiring wealth
for the simple purpose of squandering it. Its tenor is
a mock compliment to a provincial belle of features
nowise so perfect and well matched as they might be.
And the suggestion that this is she about whom the
province raves, leads up to what Catullus deems the
ne plus ultra of absurdity :
" But then they say your shape, your grace,
My Lesbia's, mine, surpasses !
Oh woe, to live with such a race
Of buzzards, owls, and asses ! " (C. xliii.)
Lesbia, however, most probably felt her hold on her
poet to be sufficiently tenable for her taste or purpose,
and, wanton-like, shrank not from trespassing on a
love which, however sensual, might have been counted
as stanch for the period. And so she doubtless
trespassed upon it, and outraged him by some more
than common heartlessness ; for such must have been
the provocation for his touching verses to "Lesbia
False," which open a new phase in the history of this
attachment, and discover a depth of pathos and ten-
derness in the contemplation of eternal separation,
which in the brief sunshine of her favour he had had
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 27
no scope for developing. The feeling which is aroused is
not one of pique or retaliation, or any like selfish resort
of vengeance : he steels himself, theoretically, against
the weakness of further dalliance with one so faith-
less ; but his concern is for the most part about her
fall from a pedestal whereon his love had set her :
" A woman loved, as loved shall be
No woman e'er by thee again ! "
Some lingering glances are indeed thrown in the
direction of past delights, and of " love for love ; "
but the burden of his song is the change it will be to
her when she realises that
" Her love for every one
Has made her to be loved by none."
There is no consolation to be drawn from a bitter smile
at this. Catullus sees the course which self-respect
dictates to him, but cannot keep from the thought as
to Lesbia
" How drear thy life will be !
Who'll woo thee now ? who praise thy charms ?
Who now be all in all to thee,
And live but in thy loving arms ?
Ay, who will give thee kiss for kiss ?
Whose lip wilt thou in rapture bite f
But thou, Catullus, think of this,
And spurn her in thine own despite." (C. via.)
Fine resolves " to let the wanton go," which she, on
28 CATULLUS.
her part, appears to have faintly opppsed 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. Ixx.
u My mistress says, there s not a man
Of all the many that she knows,
She'd rather wed than me, not one,
Though Jove himself were to propoae.
She says so ; but what woman says
To him who fancies he has caught her,
'Tis only fit it should be writ
In air or in the running water."
The last line of the first stanza is a commonplace foi
a Roman fair one's assurance of stanchness which, il
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 retain-
ing 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 gener-
osity might prompt him, to abuse the frail one him-
self, but also disposed to turn a sceptical ear to certain
scandals which had been brought to his notice :
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. 29
u Could I so madly love, and yet
Profane her name I hold so dear 1
Pshaw ! you with any libels let
Your pot-house gossips cram your ear ! "
Perhaps to this state of suspense and partial estrange-
ment may be referable the verses about Lesbia's vow
to bum the ' Annals ' of Yolusius, a Avretched poet
whom she had professed to favour, if Catullus would
only return to her arms, and cease brandishing his
iambic thunderbolts. The crisis at last has come
when the idol has been shattered ; but the votary
cannot yet shake off the blind servitude which his
better judgment repudiates. As yet he can comfort
himself with those fallacious tokens of mutual love
which appear in his ninety-second piece, and which
may be given, for a change, from Swift's transla-
tion :
" Lesbia for ever on me rails ;
To talk of me she never fails.
Now, hang me, but for all her art
I find that I have gained her heart.
My proof is this, I plainly see
The case is just the same with me ;
I curse her every hour sincerely,
Yet hang me but I love her dearly ! "
Unfortunately, the lovo has vitality and elements of
steadfastness only on the one side. Repeated sins
against it open wide the eyes of Catullus, till he is
forced to own to himself that the sole link that is left
between them is rather a passion of wild desire than
the purer and tenderer flame, which burned for hor
30 CATULLUS.
whilst he believed her true. Here is his confession of
the new phase of his love, the love that's merely a
madness :
u So loved has woman never been
As thou hast been by me,
Nor lover yet was ever seen
So true as I to thee.
But cruel, cruel Lesbia, thou /
Hast by thy falsehood wrought .
Such havoc in my soul, and now
So madly 'tis distraught,
'Twould prize thee not, though thou shouldst grow
All pure and chaste as ice ;
Nor could it cease to love thee, though
Besmirched with every vice." (C. Ixxv.)
He can now condone the past for the mere bribe of a
passing favour. He is one moment lifted to ecstasies
by the "agreeable surprise" of Lesbia's unexpected
kindness, and pours out his soul in transports breath-
ing passionate prayers for a reunion which his secret
heart seems to whisper has no elements of continuance.
When he sings in C. cix.
" So may each year that hurries o'er us find,
While others change with life's still changing hue
The ties that bind us now more firmly twined,
Our hearts as fond, our love as warm and true "-
the petition is rendered of none effect by the misgiving
implied in his fond hope that Lesbia's professions
may be sincere. Full soon must the truth have un-
CATULLUS AND LESBIA. , 31
deceived him, for it must have been after, but not
long after, this revival of his transient bliss, that, on
the eve of foreign travel with a view to placing the sea
between himself and his fickle mistress, he commis-
sioned Furius and Aurelius, friends and comrades for
whom he elsewhere shows his regard, to carry her a
message of plaintive adieu, which reads like a threnody
of buried love :
" Enjoy thy paramours, false girl !
Sweep gaily on in passion's whirl !
By scores caressed, but loving none
Of all the fools by thee undone ;
Nor give that love a thought, which I
So nursed for thee in days gone by,
Now by thy guile slain in an hour,
Even as some little wilding flower,
Tliat on the meadou^s border blushed,
Is by the passing ploughshare crushed." (C. xii.)
The crushed hope, which is likened to the frail flower
on the meadow's edge next the furrow (or, as we call
it, the " adland "), is one of the most graceful images
in the whole of Catullus, and speaks volumes for his
freshness of fancy, whilst asserting the depth of his
passion. After this, there seems to have remained for
the poet little save pathetic retrospects, which he can
scarce have hoped would wake remorse. Perhaps it
was not the way to quicken this, to plead in formd
pauperis his own deserts and good deeds of happier
days, nor yet the fell disease which is wasting him
away, in the form of a broken heart. In the 7Gth
poem, such, however, was one of his last references to
32 CATULLUS.
the subject, a burden of passionate regrets, which are
mingled with distinct admissions that he knows Les-
bia to be wholly past reclaiming. The whole tone of
it bespeaks emancipation and return to a free mind,
purchased, however, at the cost of an abiding heartache.
But was it not time ? Would the poet have deserved
a niche in the temple of fame, could he have still
dallied with one of whom he could write to Cselius
Eufus, an old admirer, who had found her out much
earlier, in terms we can only approach by free trans-
lation, as follows ?
" Our Lesbia, Ca?lius Lesbia once so bright
Lesbia I loved past self, and home, and light,
And all my friends, has sunk i' th' mire so low
That in its lanes and alleys Rome doth know
No name so cheap, no fame so held at naught
By coarse-grained striplings of the basest sort."
(C. Iviii.) D.
CHAPTER III
CATULLUS BEFORE AND AFTER THE MISSION TO BITHYNIA.
THE fever of Catullus for Lesbia asserts for itself a
tirst place in the biography of Catullus ; but the most
distinct chronological landmark is his mission in the
suite of Memmius to Bithynia. Yet, before the date
of that expedition, and at a very early point of his
career, the period of which, in C. Ixviii. 15-19, he
says, according to Mr Ellis's " Longs and Shorts "
" Once, what time white robes of manhood first did array
me,
Whiles in jollity life sported a spring holiday,
Youth ran riot enow ; right well she knows me, the God-
dess
She, whose honey delights blend with a bitter annoy,"
he probably wrote those poems of a more or less scur-
rilous and unproduciblo character which betray some
sort of connection with his earlier and more ephemeral
loves. Of these, it would seem as if some were written
at Verona and in his native district, as they lack, morn
than other poems distinctly later in date, the urbanity
which Catullus could assume upon occasion. Somn
of them are simply reproductions of local gossip and
A.C.8.S., vol. iii.
34 VATULLUS.
scandal, the piquancy of which belonged to the hour.
One (C. Ixxxii.) is a poetic appeal to a friend, if he
values his friendship, to abstain from rivalling him
in his love a style of appeal to which the poet has
recourse again and again at an after-date; and the two
most considerable are a dialogue between Catullus and
a door, which has no good to tell of its mistress ; and
a more presentable though still ambiguous skit on a
stupid husband, who was clearly a fellow-townsman of
the poet's, and had made himself a butt by wedding a
young wife. The point of this poem consists in the
colony addressed (which we take to be Verona) having
had a rickety old bridge, of which the citizens were
ashamed. The poet takes occasion to make poetical
capital at the same time out of the popular longing
for a better structure, and the ridicule attaching to
an ill-assorted union. He bargains for a new bridge
being inaugurated, by the precipitation of the "old
log" from the creaky arches of a structure like him-
self. It appears that this bridge had been the scene
of all the country town's fetes and galas ; and its in-
adequacy for such work is amusingly compared with
the ill-matching of December and May, which is illus-
trated hard by it. A stave of the version by Pro-
fessor Badham of Sydney will furnish so much of a
taste of this poem as the reader will care to read :
" I should like from your bridge just to cant off the log,
For the chance that his rapid descent to the bog
Might his lethargy jog ;
And the sloth of his mind,
Being left there behind,
THE MISSION TO BITUYNIA. 35
In the quagmire should stay,
As the mule leaves his shoe in the glutinous clay."
(C. xvii.)
But it is to a period between this and the journey to
Bithynia that we refer at least some of his livelier
trifles, written to friends, or against foes and rivals ;
such as the banter of Flavius, whose bachelor lodgings
he suspects could tell a tale to explain the rich-dis-
tilled perfumes tilling the room ; the invitation to
Tibullus to come and dine, and bring with him not
only his chere amie, but also the dinner and wine
in fact, all but the unguents. The excuse for this
quaint mode of entertaining is one which gives what
colour there is to the theory that the poet's tour
abroad was to recruit his fortune. He writes
" But bring all these you must, I vow,
If you're to find yourself in clover,
For your Catullus' purse just now
With spiders' webs is running over.**
This apportionment of a picnic entertainment was
just the reverse, it seems, of one to which Horace
(Odes, B. iv. 12) invited a certain Virgil, who was to
bring the unguent, whilst his host found the wine ;
but Catullus tells us in this case it was such super-
lative unguent
" Unguent, that the Queen
Of beauty gave my lady-love, I ween ;
So, when in its sweet perfume you repose,
You'll wish that your whole body were a nose."
(C. xiii.)
36 CATULLUS.
To realise this, we should bear in mind the ancient
esteem for chaplets, rose-leaves, and perfumes of all
kinds at the banquet, and the expense to which Roman
hosts would go to gratify this taste. To judge by
Martial (whom Theodore Martin quotes on this pas-
sage), it sometimes went to the length of the banquet
striking the guests as much more a concern of the
nose than of the mouth or palate. Perhaps it is no
bad thing that we have gone back to a more natural
arrangement. Another glimpse at a dinner or supper
at which the poet assisted may have belonged to this
period, and at any rate is amusing and characteristic. It
is in a squib upon one Marrucinus Asinius, apparently
a brother of Horace's and Virgil's friend, the poet-
statesman Asinius Pollio, imputing to him a petty
larceny of which we have heard in modern boarding-
houses, and which many know, to their sorrow, is at
least matched by the modern disregard of meum and
tuum in the matter of umbrellas and wraps. It was
in jest, of course but sorry, ill-understood jest, ac-
cording to Catullus that this worthy had a knack of
purloining his brother guests' napkins whilst at meat ;
and what made matters worse was, that the convives
of old brought these napkins with them, and if they
missed them during the meal, were reduced to an in-
convenience which we who don't eat with our fingers
cannot realise. Catullus begins by telling this low
joker that his fun is not such as gentlemen under-
stand fun which he is sure his refined and witty
brother, Pollio, would pay a talent rather than have
tacked to the name of any of his kin. But ho adds
THE MISSION TO BITHYNIA. 37
that the reason why he insists on the napkin's restitu-
tion, on pain of a thorough lampooning, is this :
" 'Tis not for its value I prize it don't sneer !
But as a memento of friends who are dear.
'Tis one of a set that Fabullus from Spain
And Verannius sent me, a gift from the twain ;
So the napkins, of course, are as dear to Catullus
As the givers, Verannius himself and Fahullus."
<C. xii.)
The names of these two boon companions of our poet,
"by the way, are a slight support to the theory of
" cobwebs in the pocket or purse " before alluded to.
Their easy lives and pleasant manners and dinners-out
at Rome had no doubt rendered it a necessity on their
parts to get upon Rome praetor's staff; and so they
had been to Spain with Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a com-
missariat officer with praetorian powers, whom collateral
evidence shows to have been a selfish and needy volup-
tuary, whose menage was mean and shabby, and who
fleeced his suite as well as his province. It is to the
first of this pair that Catullus addresses a poem, which
represents him favourably in the r&le of friend, and
from which one gathers an idea of a literary lounger'*
interest in travellers' tales (C. ix.)
" Dearest of all, Veranniua ! O my friend !
Hast thou come back from thy long pilgrimage,
With brothers twain in soul thy days to spend,
And by thy hearth-fire cheer thy mother's age ?
And art thou truly come ? Oh, welcome news !
And I shall see thee safe, and hear once more
Thy tales of Spain, its tribes, its feats, its views,
Flow as of old from thy exhaustless store.
38 CATULLUS.
And I shall gaze into thine eyes again !
And I again shall fold thee to my breast !
Oh, you who deem yourselves most blest of men,
Which of you all like unto me is blest ? "
It is hard to conceive a truer or heartier welcome
home ; but, as a sample of our poet's lighter and
more satiric vein, should be read alongside of it his
lines to the two adventurers on their joint return,
replete with kind inquiries for their pocket-linings.
Catullus has a suspicion how things have gone :
" Your looks are lean, your luggage light !
What cheer ? what cheer i Has all gone right ? "
He goes on to surmise that they have disbursed con-
siderably more than they netted; and branches off
into some not unnatural radicalism about the folly of
" courting noble friends," and the desirability of put-
ting no trust in patrons. By this time, he had him-
self made trial of Memmius for he does not scruple to
classify that self-seeking prsetor with the broken reed
on whom his friends had depended ; and, in the close
of the poem we quote, he speaks plainly :
" Memmius, by your scurvy spite,
You placed me in an evil plight !
And you, my friends, for aught I see,
Have suffered very much like me ;
For knave as Memmius was, I fear
That he in Piso had his peer." (C. xxviii.)
There are several unattached pieces of Catullus,
which we might assign to a date prior to his Bithynian
THE MISSION TO BITHYNIA. 39
expedition to wit, the lines to his Cup-bearer, memor-
able 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 pos-
sible 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 propraetor
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 oi'
foreign travel : so to Bithynia went Catullus, with his
friends, Helvius China, Furius, and Aurelius, in the
spring of 57 B.C. 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 clus-
tered. It is not indeed directly that we discover what
a N failure it was in a commercial point of view. By
putting two and two together, we collect that he spent
a year in the propraetor's suite, and then visited, on
the home route, Pontus, the Propontis, Thrace,
Rhodes, the Cyclades, and the cities of Greece, arriv-
ing in due course, by way of the Adriatic, and by the
canal which connected the Adigo with the Mincio, at
his own estate and villa of Sirmio. In cne 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 " homo,
40 CATULLUS.
s^weet home," rendered dearer by so many months of
absence. The piece which lets us into the history of
the stay-abroad is a lively picture of Roman gay life,
and of a matter-of-fact gay lady, the chkre amie of
the poet's friend Varus, in whose company Catullus
found it difficult to maintain a wise reserve as to
the extent of his shifts and ill-luck in the Bithynian
venture. She, like every one else, was agog to know
how it had succeeded :
" Is gold so rife there as they say ;
And how much did you pocket, eh ?"
The poet at first was pretty explicit :
" Neither I,
Nor yet the praetor, nor his suite,
Had in that province luck to meet
With anything that, do our best,
Could add one feather to our nest.
Our chances, too, were much decreased,
The praetor being such a beast,
And caring not one doit, not he,
For any of his company."
Thinking this admission enough, Catullus would fain
have turned the subject before the lady discovered the
utter barrenness of his return. But this was not her
idea. Had he not brought home " a litter and bearers " ]
Every one knew they grew in Bithynia. The poor
poet tried to make believe that he had ; and her next
move was to ask the loan of them to go to the shrine
of Serapis. "What was he to do, when he had not the
ghost of even one brawny knave to carry his truckle-
THE MISSION TO EITHYN1A. ' 41
Led ? He backs out of it with the lame excuse that
the bearers are scarcely his to lend, being Caius Cinna's
purchase, though what was Cinna's was his friend's
also ; but, ends the poet, driven into a corner
" But, madam, suffer me to state,
You're plaguily importunate,
To press one so extremely hard,
He cannot speak but by the card." (C. xi.)
Not much evidence, it may be said, of the fruits, or want
of fruit, of a year in the provinces. At any rate, there .
is proof that a second spring found the poet on the
wing, rejoicing to be homeward bound. He is going
to see all he can of famous cities by the way ; and it
does not seem as if he had persuaded any of his com-
rades to bear him company, though it has been sur-
mised without much proof that his brother was of the
number. Perhaps they had fared even worse, and
could ill afford to pay their share of the expenses of
the home route. The "Farewell toBithynia " is so fresh
and tender, and its last lines breathe a misgiving so
soon to be realised, if the theory to which we alluded
about his brother be true, that they deserve quota-
tion :
" A balmy warmth comes wafted o'er the seas ;
The savage howl of wintry tempests drear
In the sweet whispers of the western breeze
Has died away ; the spring, the spring is here !
Now quit, Catullus, quit the Phrygian plain,
Where days of sweltering sunshine soon shall crown
Nicaea's fields with wealth of golden grain,
And fly to Asia's cities of renown.
42 CATULLUS.
Already through each nerve a flutter runs
Of eager hope, that longs to be away ;
Already, 'neath the light of other suns,
My feet, new-winged for travel, yearn to stray.
And you, ye band of comrades tried and true,
Who side by side went forth from home, farewell !
How far apart the paths shall carry you
Back to your native shore ah, who can tell ? "
(C. xlvi.)
"What a suggestive thought for the breaking-up of a
year's daily familiar intercourse, with the jests, con-
fabulations, lounges, tiffs, confidences, to which it has
given rise ! Once interrupted, will this conclave ever
reassemble in its integrity ? Of those that meet, how
many will retain their like-minded ness 1 how few will
not have " suffered a sea change " that has made them
other than they were in heart, tone, and affections ? To
two, we know, of this company, Furius and Aurelius,
our poet wrote a rather savage retort in later years for
a strong expression upon the freedom and licence
of his life and verses ; and whilst he attempted the
lame defence of an unchaste Muse on the score of
a decent life (as to which he had much better, we
suspect, have said little or nothing), indignantly
objected to the criticism of his moral character by a
couple of roues sunk as low in profligate living as he
hints they are. To tell the truth, the poet's mode of
life at all times must have been such as to render it
the only feasible course for him to fall back upon a
lame and impotent tu quoque. But he may have been
in no mood for their old jokes and inntiendos, however
THE MISSION TO BITHYNIA. 43
familiar as edge-tools to his earlier nature, when this
same change of scene had brought him face to face
with personal ill-health and with a beloved brother's
death. We cannot exactly time this last event, which
took place in the Troad ; or it might seem as though,
in the last passage quoted, our poet had been endowed
with a spirit of prophecy. Certain it is that the
premature loss of him ^
" Whom now, far, far away, not laid to rest
Amid familiar tombs with kindred dust,
Fell Troy detains, Troy impious and unblest,
'Neath its unhallowed plain ignobly thrust "
(C. Ixviii. 97-100)
wrought a distinct change of tone in the effusions of
Catullus, thenceforth more directed towards the at-
traction of friendly sympathy than the youthful and
hot-headed concoction of scurrilous and offensive lam-
poons. With a vaguely-ascertained chronology, it is
not easy to prove this by examples ; but it is con-
sistent with a tender and affectionate nature that such
a change should have supervened, though it cannot
be maintained that there were no recurrences to the
earlier and more pungent vein. One or two glimpses
of Catullus as a master, and in his simpler and more
domestic relations, will fitly end the present chapter,
and give a meet conclusion to the Bithynian voyage.
What pleasanter pride of ownership ever found its
vent in song than our poet's dedication of his pinnace
after it had done its work, and conveyed him home
into the Lago di Garda?
U CATULLUS.
" Yon pinnace, friends, now hauled ashore,
Boasts that for speed none ever more
Excelled, or 'gainst her could avail
In race of oars, or eke with sail.
This, she avers, nor Adria's bay
Nor Cyclad isles will dare gainsay
Fierce Thrace, or Rhodes of ample fame,
Or Pontus with ill-omened name ;
Where whilom it, a pinnace now,
Was a maned tree on mountain-brow :
Yea, from its mane on tall Cytorus
Soft music sighed in breeze sonorous.
Whose box-clad heights, Amastris too,
Avouch this origin as true ;
And witness what my pinnace vows,
It first saw light on yonder brows
First dipt its oars in neighbouring sea,
And then through wild waves carried me,
Its master, in its stanch, smart craft,
Breeze foul or fair, or wind right aft.
No calls to gods of sea or shore
She lifted ; and, the voyage o'er,
From farthest tracts of brine, to rest,
Came to our smooth lake's placid breast.
'Tis over now. Her mission done,
Here she enjoys a rest well won,
And dedicates her timbers here
To Castor and to Castor's peer." (D.)
The fascination of the piece, of which this is a tran-
script, has been so widely felt, that it has yielded
itself to dozens of clever and graceful parodies and
imitations at various times. One of the most recent
is in a little volume of 'Lays from Latin Lyres,'
recently published at Oxford, where the pinnace re-
THE MISSION TO LITHYSIA. 45
appears as an Oxford racing-boat, dear to its own
college for victories innumerable over such rivals as
" Brasenose of boating fame,
Or Exeter with crimson oar,
Or Balliol men from Scotia's shore."
But the intrinsic charm of the original consists in the
fond ownership which breathes in it ; and the same is
the case with the poet's address to Sirmio, his marine
estate, on his return from his voyage in it, which we
give in the version of Professor Eobinson Ellis :
" thou of islands jewel, and of half-islands,
Fair Sirmio, whatever o'er the lake's clear rim
Or waste of ocean Neptune holds, a twofold power :
What joy have I to see thee ! and to gaze, what glee !
Scarce yet believing Thynia past, the fair champaign
Bithynian, yet in safety thee to greet once more.
From cares no more to part us where is any joy like
this?
When drops the soul her fardel, as the travel-tired,
World - weary wand'rer touches home, returns, sinks
down
In joy to slumber on the bed desired so long
This meed, this only, counts for e'en an age of toil.
O take a welcome, lovely Sirmio, thy lord's,
And greet him happy; greet him all the Lydian
lake:
Laugh out whatever laughter at the hearth rings
clear."
Mi Ellis's expression for the last line of the Latin sets
46 CATULLUS.
at rest a claim of various competitors, and realises the
gist of the verse, though the metre is very hard to ac-
custom one's self to. Without adopting Landor's emen-
dations, we may quote his illustration of the concluding
verses of this piece : "Catullus here calls on Sirmio to
rejoice in liis return, and invites the waves of the lake
to laugh. "Whoever has seen this beautiful expanse of
water, under its bright sun and gentle breezes, will
understand the poet's expression he will have seen
the winds dance and laugh." The critic, however,
based an emendation of " Ludise " for " Lydiae," " dan-
cing " for " Lydian," on his bit of criticism. In another
poem (C. xliv.) of a humorous character, we see the
same kindlier side of the poet's nature, in his affection
for his Sabine and Tiburtine farm. The lucale of
this was one appreciated by Horace, and a retreat
which Catullus must have thought himself lucky in
having at command. He playfully hints that his
friends will best please him if they dub it Tiburtine,
though there was no doubt that its precise site, the
banks of the Anio, made it an open question to which
district it should be tacked ; and he pays it a tribute
of gratitude for enabling him to shake off a pestilential
catarrh, which appears to have had its beginning in
that seat of all evils, the stomach. A desire of epicu-
rean experiences and of a dinner with a certain Sestius,
who united the reputation of a brilliant host with that
of a dull orator, had led the evil genius of Catullus to
a banquet, where he was bored to death by the recital
of his entertainer's oration against one Caius Antius ;
and this proved a penance so grievous that the poet
THE MISSIOS TO BITHYNIA. 47
humorously declares it gave him an ague. He fell
a-coughing incontinently, and there was nothing for
it, he adds
"Until I fled,
And cured within thy easy breast
Myself with nettle-juice and rest."
In the same playful vein, Catullus records his thanks
to the nurse who has brought him round again his
farm pel-sonified for letting him off so lightly for a
temporary fickleness ; and makes a facetious promise
that if ever again he lets the love of good living entice
him into such a purgatory, he'll invoke these shivers
and this hacking cough not on himself, oh dear no !
but on the ill-advised host who only invites his friends
when he wants to air his lungs and speeches.
Here, it will be said, crops out, amidst strong home
instincts, the old and strong leaven of satire and lam-
pooning. But if we turn to the crowning grief of the
life of Catullus, it will be seen how severe and absorb-
ing is his tender grief. Here is the outpouring of his
heart at the grave in the Troad :
" In pious duty, over lands and seas,
Come I, deaf brother, to thine exsequies ;
Bent on such gifts as love in death doth pay,
Fraught with last words to cheer thee on thy way ;
In vain. For fate hath torn thee from my side,
Brother, unmeet so early to have died.
Yet, oh ! such offerings as ancestral use
Assigns the tomb, may haply find excuse :
Yea, take these gifts fraternal tears bedew,
And take, oh take, my loving, last adieu ! "
(C. ci.) D.
48 CATULLUS.
I3ut with affectionate natures like that of Catullus, the
memory is not silenced by the barrier which divides
the yearning spirit from its kind. The last adieu is a
figure of speech which a thousand reminiscences falsify.
The forlorn brother tries to solace himself with tender
allusions to his bereavement whenever he is sending a
missive to some congenial spirit, or inditing epistles
of sympathy to a patron in kindred sorrow. What
can be sweeter than his lines to Hortalus which
accompanied the translation of his Alexandrian model,
Calliniachus's poem on " Berenice's Hair," to which we
shall have to refer again ; or his allusion to the same
loss in the elegiacs to Manlius, when he undertook the
difficult task of consoling with an elegy one whom he
gifted erewhile with the most glowing of epithalamia ?
There is one allusion also to the same topic in the
verses to M. Acilius Glabrio, breathing the same acute
sense of desolation, and deploring the destiny that
ordains their ashes to lie beneath the soils of different
continents. It may suffice to cite Theodore Martin's
version of the allusion, in the lines to Hortalus, to
the brother so soundly sleeping by the Ehsetean shore
in Trojan earth :
" Oh ! is thy voice for ever hushed and still ?
O brother, dearer far than life, shall I
Uehold thee never ? But in sooth I will
For ever love thee, as in clays gone by ;
And ever through my songs shall ring a cry
Sad with thy death sad as in thickest shade
Of intertariglccl boughs the melody,
Which by the woful Daulian bird is made,
Sobbing for Itvs dead her wail through all the glade."
(C. Ixv.)
THE MISSION TO B1THYNIA. 49
In the like allusion of the poem to Manlius we are
told further that the brother's death has had the effect
of turning mirth to gloom, taking light and sun from
the dwelling, and robbing home of the charm of mu-
tual studies and fraternal unity. Even in modern
times, a recent poet of the second rank is perhaps best
remembered by his touching lyrics on " My Brother's
Grave," and may have got the first breath of inspira-
tion from the Roman poet, who, as he tells us in the
67th poem, retired for self-converse and the society of
his despair to the rural retreats of Verona. Perhaps
in such isolation it is well to be broken in upon ;
perhaps it is the sense that comes upon one, after a
course of enforced loneliness, that one's books, treasures,
haunts (as with Catullus) are in town, that makes the
mourner see the folly of unavailing sorrow, and strive
to shake it off, though, in his case, with too little
health for achieving his task successfully.
A.C.S.S., vol. iii.
CHAPTER IV.
CATULLUS AMONG MEN OF LITERATURE.
THOUGH we have just seen Catullus bidding fair to
sink into despondency, there is no reason to suppose
that this state of spirits at once, or ever entirely, shut
out gayer moods upon occasion, much less that it put
an end to social intercourse with those literary com-
peers of whom in his brief life the poet had no lack.
When at Rome he contrived to amuse himself by no
means tristely, if we may accept the witness of one or
two lively pieces that seem to belong to the period
after the Bithynian campaign, and to the closing years
of his career. One stray piece "To Camerius" (C. liv.)
gives a little hint of the company he kept, and the
manner in which his days were frittered away, even
when a cloud had overshadowed his life. It is a *
playful rallying of an associate of lighter vein upon
the nature of his engagements and rendezvous, and
affords a glimpse of Roman topography not so
common in Catullus as could have been wished.
Wishing to "track his friend to his haunts, the poet
says he sought him in the Campus Minor, which
would seem to have been a distinct division of the
CATULLUS AMONG MEN OF LITERATURE. 51
Campus Martins, in the bend of the Tiber to the
north of the Circus Flamiuius, and to have repre-
sented a familiar portion of the great Eoman park
and race -course. In the Circus, also, and in the
book-shops, in the hallowed Temple of Capitoline
Jupiter at no great distance from the same public
resort, as well as in the Promenade and Portico of
Pompey the Great, lying to the south of the Campus
Martius, and attached to the Theatre of Pompey built
by him in his second consulship B.C. 55 (and so now
in the height of fashion and novelty), Catullus has
sought his friend, but can nowhere get an inkling of
him. But for the mention of the book-stalls, we might
have passed by the whereabouts of Camerius, as the
nature of the poet's inquiries implies that the truant
was pleasantly engaged in a congenial flirtation, which
he had the good sense to keep to himself. The sequel,
however, of the verses of Catullus goes to prove that
he was himself alive to the same amusements as his
friend, and would have been well pleased to have been
of his company. The grievance was that the search
proved fruitless. His Alexandrian myth -lore fur-
nishes him half-a-dozen standards of fleetness to
which he professes to have attained Talus, Ladas,
Perseus, Pegasus, and the steeds of Rhesus and yet
he has not overtaken Camerius, but had to chew the
cud of his disappointment, besides being tired and
footsore.
But it would be a mistake to argue systematic
frivolity from casual glimpses of days wasted, upon a
lively poet's own showing. On the other side of tho
52 CATULLUS.
scale may be counted the names of learned and witty
contemporaries known like himself to fame with
whom Catullus was in familiar intercourse. Fore-
most perhaps we should' set Cornelius Nepos and
Cicero : the former, because to him Catullus dedicates
his collected volume ; the latter, for the very compli-
mentary terms in which he rates the chief of orators,
albeit the sorriest of poets. Lest there should be any
doubt in the face of internal evidence as to the iden-
tity of Cornelius with him of the surname familiar to
schoolboys, it may be noted that this is set at rest by
a later poet, Ausonius ; but the verses of dedication
evince a lively interest in the historian -and biographer,
whose ' Epitome of Universal History ' has not sur-
vived the wreck of ages, whilst the lives which we
read, with the exception of that of Atticus, are simply
an epitome of the work of KVpos. The gracefully-
turned compliment of the poet, however, will show
the store he sets by his friend's literary labours and
erudition and it is best represented by Theodore
Martin :
" My little volume is complete,
Fresh pumice-polislied, and as neat
As book need wish to be ;
And now, what patron shall I choose
For these gay sallies of my Muse ?
Cornelius, whom but thee ?
For though they are but trifles, thou
Some value didst to them allow,
And that from thee is fame,
CATULLUS AMONG MEN OF LITERATURE. 53
Who daredst in thy three volumes' space,
Alone of all Italians, trace
Our history and name.
Great Jove ! what lore, what labour there !
Then take this little book, whate'er
Of good or bad it store ;
And grant, oh guardian Muse, that it
May keep the flavour of its wit
A century or more ! "
The reference to the polish of the pumice-stone in
the first verse may lie simply metaphorical, and de-
signed to express the general neatness of the work as
poetry; but this sense must not be pressed too far,
when we remember the enhancement of an author's
affection for his own productions, which consists in
their neat turning out and getting up. The ancient
parchments underwent no small amount of pumice-
polishing on the inside for the purpose of taking the
ink, and on the outside, with the addition of colour,
for a finish. Our poet might indulge in a reasonable
complacency when he sent a presentation copy to Cor-
nelius Nepos, which externally and internally laid
equal claim to neatness. It was not so always, as wo
find him telling his friend Varus, in reference to the
poetaster Suffenus, who had a knack of rattling off
any number of verses, and then, without laying them
by for correction and revision, launching them upon
the public in the smartest and gayest of covers. Of
this scribbler's mania he writes
" Ten thousand lines and more, I wot,
He keeps fair-copied scribbled not
54 CATULLUS.
On palimpsest but ripe for view ;
Red strings, spruce covers, paper new
And superfine, with parchment lined,
And by the pumice-stone refined."
(C. xxii.) D.
"Whatever may have been Catullus's weakness, he at
least would have turned out verses that did not de-
pend for acceptance on their cover. To his intimacy
with Marcus Tullius Cicero, despite the hindrances
which it might have been supposed to risk on the
supposition that Lesbia was Clodia, Catullus has left
distinct witness in the brief but pointed epigram :
" Most eloquent of all the Roman race
That is, hath been, or shall be afterward,
To thee Catullus tenders highest grace,
Sorriest of poets in his own regard ;
Yea, sorriest of poets, aye, and worst,
As Tully is of all our pleaders first."
<C. xlix.) D.
But among the intimates of our poet was another
pleader, who, if second to Cicero in the forum, was
more than his match in the field which Catullus
adorned Licinius Calvus Macer. That he held high
rank as an orator is beyond a doubt : he has some
claims to be the annalist of that name much quoted
and referred to by Livy: he has the credit with Ovid
and contemporary poets of a neck-and-neck place in
poetry with Catullus, though nothing remains to test
the soundness of the critical comparison. Both wrote
epigrams ; of both Ovid sings in his dirge over Tibul-
lus that if there is any after-world, learned Catullus,
CATULLUS AMOSG MEN OF LITERATURE. 55
with his youthful temples wreathed in ivy, will meet
him there, in the company of Calvus. All that we
read of the latter is in his favour, with the exception,
perhaps, of the scurrilous lampoons on Caesar and his
satellites, in which, as elsewhere, he emulated his
brother poet. Like him, his career was brief, for he
died of over-training and discipline in his thirty-fifth
year, his famous speech against Vatinius having been
delivered in his twenty-seventh, and having been his
first forensic effort. It was apropos of that speech
that Catullus made the following jeu d' esprit, with an
allusion to his friend's union of vehement action with
a person and stature small almost to dwarfishness :
" 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 I
An eloquent torn-tit ! ' " (C. liii.)
As is not uncommon with men of like stature, vehe-
mence of gesticulation made up for insignificance of
height and physique; and that Vatinius had reason to
feel this, is gleaned from Seneca's tradition, that when
he found how telling was its impression on his tribunal,
he exclaimed, "Am I, then, judges, to be condemned
simply because yon pleader is eloquent?" We have,
however, more concern with him as a poet The first
piece of Catullus in which we are introduced to him
56 CATULLUS.
might meetly be headed " Eetaliation ; " for in it our
poet bitterly upbraids Calvus for inflicting upon him
a morning's work that, but for their ancient love,
might provoke more lasting hatred than his speech
drew from Vatinius. He had sent him, it seems, a
"horrible and deadly volume" of sorry poetry, a
" rascally rabble of malignants " the latest novelty
from the school of Sulla the grammarian ; for no other
object than to kill him at the convenient season of
the Saturnalia with a grim playfulness, which the poet
vows shall not go unrequited :
" Come but to-morrow's dawn, I'll surely hie
To stall and book-shop, and the trash I buy,
With sums on Caesius and Suffenus spent,
Mischievous wag, shall work thy punishment."
D.
At other times the intercourse between the friends was
not so disappointing. Seemingly at Calvus's house
the two friends met one evening to enjoy the feast of
reason and the flow of soul, and the effects of such
unmixt enjoyment overset the poet's fine-wrought
brain-tissues :
" How pleasantly, Licinius, went
The hours which yesterday we spent,
Engaged as men like us befits
In keen encounter of our wits !
My tablets still the records bear
Of all the good things jotted there:
The wit, the repartee that flew
From you to me, from me to you :
The gay bright verse that seemed to shine
More sparkling than the sparkling wine."
CATULLUS AMONG MEN Of LITERATURE. 57
The end of it was, however, that Catullus could not
" sleep for thinking on't " Avhen he reached home, and
was all agog to be up at dawn, and to challenge a re-
newal of the pleasant word-fence ; but misused nature
resented the liberties our poet thought to take with it.
His limbs were so tired with a sleepless night, that he
was fain, at dawn of day, to stick to his couch ; and
from thence to fire off a lively poem of remembrance
to his comrade of the night before, the burden of
which is to warn him against offering any impediment
to a speedy and equally pleasant reunion, lest haply
Nemesis should exact the like penalties from him who
has hitherto come off scot-free. One other notice of
Calvus is demanded by a sense of our poet's higher
and tenderer vein of poesy. It seems that at the
age of twenty-eight Calvus lost his beloved mistress
Quinctilia a theme for tearful elegies, of the beauty
of which neither Propertius nor Ovid were insensible,
whilst it secured a tender echo in Catullus, whoso
heart was prepared for reciprocity by a community
of suffering:
" If, Calvus, feeling lingers in the tomb,
And shades are touched by sense of mortal tears,
Mourning in fresh regrets love's vanished bloom,
Weeping the dear delights of vanished years
Then might her early fate witli lighter grief
Thy lost Quinctilia's gentle spirit fill,
To cherish, where she bides, the assured belief
That she is nearest, dearest to thee still."
(C. xcvi.) D.
58 CATULLUS.
Besides these distinguished names, others almost as
well known might he enumerated among the more
worthy associates of Catullus ; for instance, Asinius
Pollio, the friend of Virgil and Horace, the scholar,
poet, and public man, to whose refinement and taste
he testifies in Poem xii. (" To Marrucinus Asinius ") ;
Varus, whose other name was more probably Quin-
tilius than Alphenus, and who will then be the ac-
complished scholar and soldier from Catullus's own
neighbourhood, Cremona, to whose memory Horace
pays such a touching tribute ;* and Helvidius Cinna,
the poet who at Csesar's funeral was killed by the
rabble in mistake for his namesake Cornelius Cinna,
and of whom we get a notice in Shakespeare's
" Julius Ciesar," and in Plutarch. His famous
work was a probably epic poem named "Smyrna,"
of which only a couple of verses are extant ; but
if we may accept Catullus's friendly judgment, the
example of Cinna in taking nine years to elaborate
his epic, was one that other poets might with advan-
tage follow ; and a favourable tradition of him has
clung to the grammarian. He is mentioned above
in the poem about a visit to Varus's mistress, apropos
of the sedan from Bithynia ; and in- Poem xcv. there
is some light afforded to the elaborate character
of his great work. It is given in Mr Robinson
Ellis's elegiacs, more for their exactness than their
elegance :
* Ode I. xxiv., Ad Virgilium.
CATULLUS AMONG MEN OF LITERATURE. 59
" Nine times winter had end, nine times flushed summer
in harvest,
Ere to the world gave forth Cinna the labour of years
' Smyrna ; ' but in one month Hortensius hundred on
hundred
Verses, an unripe birth feeble, of hurry begot."
Our poet goes on, in verses somewhat defective and
corrupt, to say that Cinna's masterpiece will be
studied by ages yet unborn, whereas the annals of
Volusius the scribbler of whom the 36th poem
written for Lesbia records Catullus's opinion may
expect one inevitable destiny to be used as wrappers
for mackerel and other cheap fish. It is but fair to
add that Virgil passingly alludes to the poetry of
Cinna as meritorious.*
There remain one or two other contemporaries of
kindred vein of whom we know only the names, and
what Catullus has written on them. Such are Caecilius
and Cornificius, to whom are addressed his 35th and
38th poems. The former, as is gathered from the
first of these, dwelt, or had a villa, near the town and
lake of Como
" Whose fair pellucid waters break
In many a dimpling smile *
and this Catullus exhorted him to quit upon a visit
to himself at Verona, not, however, without shrewd
misgivings that there was a charming cause for his
* Virgil, Eel. ix. 85.
60 CATULLUS.
rustication and retirement. Csecilius is engaged on
a poem " To the Mighty Mother, Cybele," and has
excited his mistress's curiosity and interest by re-
cital of the completed half of it. She will not let
him go till she has heard the rest. Catullus's
opinion of her good taste is expressed in the conclud-
ing stanza :
" Thy passion I can well excuse,
Fair maid, in whom the Sapphic Muse
Speaks with a richer tongue ;
For no unworthy strains are his,
And nobly by Csecilius is
The Mighty Mother sung."
Of Cornificius as little is known as of Csecilius. He
would seem to have been one of the fair-weather
friends who hang aloof when sickness and failing
health yearn for the kindly attention and affectionate
souvenir. The little poem addressed to him bears
evidence of the poet's decline. He is succumbing to
the loss of his brother supervening on the laceration
of his heart by the unfeeling Lesbia, This may well
have been the last of his many strains certainly one
of the most touching and plaintive ; and of the trans-
lations, we know none that does it justice but Theo-
dore Martin's :
' Ah, Cornificius ! ill at ease
Is thy Catullus' breast ;
Each day, each hour that passes, sees
Him more and more depressed.
CATULLUS AMONG MEX OF LITERATURE. 61
And yet no word of comfort, no
Kind thought, however slight,
Comes from thy hand. Ah ! is it so
That you my love requite ?
One little lay to lull my fears,
To give my spirit ease
Ay, though 'twere sadder than the tears
Of sad Simonides."
CHAPTER V.
HYMEN, o HYMEN.EE!
CATULLUS has been presented up to this point rather
as the writer of passionate love-verses to Lesbia, or
vers de societe to his friends, literary or light, as the
case might be. There are yet two other and distinct
aspects of his Muse. That which he borrowed from
the Alexandrian school of poetry will demand the
full consideration of another chapter; but in the
present it will suffice to give some account of his
famous epithalamia, the models of like composition
for all time, and the loci classici of the ceremonial of
Roman marriages, as well as exquisite pictures of the
realisation of mutual affection. It has been seen how
fully, notwithstanding his own blighted hopes, Catul-
lus was able to conceive the life-bond between his
friend Calvus and his helpmeet Quinctilia. A longer
and more lively picture presents the ecstasy of Acme
and Septimius in lines and words that seem to burn.
The two doting lovers plight vows, and compare
omens, and interchange embraces and kisses that in-
spire with passion the poet's hendecasyllables. The
conclusion of the piece is all we can quote, and is
HYMEN, RYMENJEEI . 63
given from a translation by the author of 'Lorna
Doone,' but it may serve to show that Catullus was
capable of picturing and conceiving the amount of
devotion which his nuptial songs connect with happy
and like-minded unions :
Starting from such omen's cheer,
Hand in hand on love's career,
Heart to heart is true and dear.
Dotingly Septimius fond
Prizes Acme far beyond
All the realms of east and west
Acme to Septimius true,
Keeps for him his only due,
Pet delights and loving jest.
Who hath known a happier pair,
Or a honeymoon so fair ? "
One image from the rest of the poem cannot pass un-
noticed that of Acme bending back her head in
Septimius's embrace, to kiss with rosy mouth what
Mr lilackmore translates "eyes with passion's wine
opprest ; " but the whole piece deserves to the full
the unstinted praise it has met with from critics and
copyists.
The Epithalamium of Julia and Manlius, however,
is a poem of more considerable proportions ; and at
the same time that it teems with poetic beauties,
handles its subject with such skill and ritual know-
ledge as to supply a correct programme of the marriage
ceremonial among the Romans. Strictly speaking, it
is not so much a nuptial ode or hymn in the sense
in which the playmates of Helen serenade her in
64 CATULLUS.
Theocritus, as a series of pictures of the bridal pro-
cession and rites, from end to end. The subjects of
this poem were a scion of the ancient patrician house
of the Torquati, Lucius Manlius Torquatus, a great
friend and patron of our poet, and Yinia, or Julia
Aurunculeia, one of whose two names seems to have
been adoptive, and as to whom the poet's silence seems
to imply that her bridegroom's rank was enough to
dignify both. It was not so long afterwards that
Manlius sought our poet's assistance or solace in the
shape of an elegy (see Poem Ixviii.) on her untimely
death; but in the present instance his services are taxed
to do honour to her wedding : and it may be interesting
to accompany him through the dioramic description
which his stanzas illustrate. The poem opens with an
invocation to Hymen, child of Urania, dwelling in his
mother's Helicon, bidding him wreathe his brows with
sweet marjoram or amaracus, fling round him a flame-
coloured scarf, and bind saffron sandals to his feet, in
token of going forth upon his proper function and
errand. Other accompaniments of his progress are
to be song, and dance, and pine-torch, each of them
appropriate in the evening fetching-home of the bride
from her father's house ; and his interest is bespoken
in one who is fair, favoured, and fascinating as Ida's
queen, when she condescended to the judgment of
Paris :
" As the fragrant myrtle, found
Flourishing on Asian ground,
Thick with blossoms overspread,
By the Hamadryads fed,
HYMEN, HYMEX^EEI 65
For their sport, with honey-dew
All so sweet is she to view."
It is this paragon, proceeds the ode, for whose sweet
sake the god is besought to leave awhile his native
grottos and pools, and lend his aid in binding soul
to soul to her husband yea, closer than clasping ivy
twines meshy tendrils round its naked elm. To wel-
come her too, as well as to invite Hymenseus to his
wonted office with the readier alacrity, are bidden the
blameless maidens of the bride's train, with a series of
inducements adapted to bespeak their sympathy his
interest in happy nuptials, his blessing so essential to
the transfer of the maiden from one home and name
to another, his influence on the prospects of an
honoured progeny ; and strong language is used, in vv.
71-75, of such nations as ignore the rites and ordinances
of marriage.
And now the bride is bidden to come forth. The
day is waning ; the torch-flakes flicker bright in the
gloaming; there is no time for tears of maidenly
reluctance j the hour is at hand :
" Dry up thy tears ! For well I trow,
No woman lovelier than thou,
Aurunculeia, shall behold
The day all panoplied in gold,
And rosy light uplift his head
Above the shimmering ocean's bed I
As in some rich man's garden-plot,
With flowers of every hue inwrought,
Stands peerless forth, with drooping brow,
The hyacinth, so standest thou !
A.C.S.S., vol. iii. K
66 CATULLUS.
Come, bride, come forth ! No more delay !
The day is hurrying fast away ! "
Then follow encouragements to the bride to taice
the decisive step over the threshold, in the shape
of substantial guarantees of her bridegroom's loyalty;
and of course the elm and the ivy are pressed, for
not the first time, into such service. More novel,
save that the text of Catullus is here so corrupt
that commentators have been left to patch it as they
best may for coherence, is the stanza to the bridal
couch. All that Catullus has been allowed by the
manuscripts to tell us is that its feet were of ivory,
' Avhich is very appropriate ; but if the reader's mind
is enlisted in the question of upholstery, it may be
interested to know that collateral information enables
one critic to surmise that the hangings were of sil-
ver-purple, and the timbers of the bedstead from
Indian forests. But anon come the boys with the
torches. Here is the veil or scarf of flame-colour,
or deop brilliant yellow, capacious enough, as we
learn, to shroud the bride from head to foot, worn
over the head during the ceremony, and retained so
till she was unveiled by her husband. Coincidently
the link-bearers are chanting the hymenaeal song, and
at intervals, especially near the bridegroom's door, the
rude Fescennine banter is repeated ; whilst the bride-
groom, according to custom, flings nuts to the lads in
attendance, much as at a Greek marriage it was custo-
mary to fling showers of sweetmeats. The so-called
Fescennine jests were doubtless as broad as the occa-
sion would suggest to a lively and joke-loving nation - }
HYMEN, HYMEN^EE! 67
and another part of the ceremonial at this point, as it
would seem from Catullus, though some have argued
that it belonged rather to the marriage-feast, was the
popular song " Talassius " or " Talassio," said to have
had its origin in an incident of the " Rape of the
Sahine Women." Catullus represents the choruses at
this point as instilling into the bride by the way all
manner of good advice as to wifely duty and obedience,
and auguring for her, if she takes their advice, a sure
rile in the home which she goes to share. If she has
t ict, it will own her sway
u Till hoary age shall steal on thee,
With loitering step and trembling knee,
And palsied head, that, ever bent,
To all, in all things, nods assent."
In other words, a hint is given her that, though the
bridegroom be the head of the house, she will be her-
self to blame if she be not the neck.
As the poem proceeds, another interesting cere-
monial, which is attested by collateral information, is
set graphically before the reader. Traditionally con-
nected with the same legend of the carrying off of
the Sabine women, but most probably arising out of
a cautious avoidance of evil omens through a chance
stumble on the threshold, was a custom that on reach-
ing the bridegroom's door, the posts of which were
wreathed in flowers and anointed with oil for her
reception, the bride should be carried over the step by
the pronubi attendants or friends of the groom, who
must be " husbands of one wife." This is expressed as
68 CATULLUS.
follows in Theodore Martin's happy transcript of the
passage of Catullus:
" Thy golden-sandalled feet do thou
Lift lightly o'er the threshold now !
Fair omen this ! And pass between
The lintel-post of polished sheen !
Hail, Hymen ! Hymenseus, hail !
Hail, Hymen, Hymenseus !
See where, within, thy lord is set
On Tyrian-tinctured coverlet
His eyes upon the threshold bent,
And all his soul on thee intent !
Hail, Hymen ! Hymenaeus, hail !
Hail, Hymen, Hymenseus ! "
By-and-by, one of the three prsetexta-clad boys,
who had escorted the bride from her father's home to
her husband's, is bidden to let go the round arm he
has been supporting ; the blameless matrons (pro-
nubce), of like qualification as their male counterparts,
conduct the bride to the nuptial-couch in the atrium,
and now there is no let or hindrance to the bride-
groom's coming. Catullus has so wrought his bridal
ode, that it culminates in stanzas of singular beauty
and spirit. The bride, in her nuptial-chamber, is re-
presented, with a countenance like white parthenice
(which one critic * suggests may be the camomile
blossom) or yellow poppy for beauty. And the bride-
groom, of course, is worthy of her ; and both worthy
* It may interest some to know that this was an MS. sug-
gestion of poor Mortimer Collins, a dear lover of Catullus.
HYMEN, HYMENJBE! 69
of his noble race, as well as meet to hand it on. The
natural wishes follow :
" "Tis not meet so old a stem
Should be left ungraced by them,
To transmit its fame unshorn
Down through ages yet unborn.""
The next lines of the original are so prettily turned
by Mr Cranstoun, that we forbear for the nonce to tax
the charming version of Martin :
u May a young Torquatus soon
From his mother's bosom slip
Forth his tender hands, and smile
Sweetly on his sire the while
With tiny half-oped lip.
May each one a Manlius
In his infant features see,
And may every stranger trace,
Clearly graven on his face,
His mother's chastity."
Of parallels and imitations of this happy thought
and aspiration, there is abundant choice. Theodore
Martin's taste selects a graceful and expanded fancy of
Herrick from his " Hesperides j" while Dunlop, in his
' History of Koman Literature,' quotes the following
almost literal reproduction out of an epithalamium on
the marriage of Lord Spencer by Sir William Jones,
who pronounced Catullus's picture worthy the pencil
of Domenichino :
" And soon to be completely blest,
Soon may a young Torquatus rise,
70 CATULLUS.
Who, hanging on his mother's breast,
To his known sire shall turn his eyes,
Outstretch his infant arms awhile,
Half-ope his little lips and smile." *
The poem concludes with a prayer that mother and
child may realise the fame and virtues of Penelope
and Telemachus, and well deserves the credit it has
ever enjoyed as a model in its kind.
Of the second of Catullus's Nuptial Songs an
hexameter poem in amoabsean or responsive strophes
and antistrophes, supposed to be sung by the choirs
of youths and maidens who attended the nuptials,
and whom, in the former hymn, the poet had been ex-
horting to their duties, whereas here they come in turn
to their proper function no really trustworthy his-
tory is to be given, though one or two commentators
propound that it was a sort of brief for the choruses,
written to order on the same occasion for which the
poet had written, on his own account, the former nup-
tial hymn. But the totally different style and struc-
ture forbid the probability of this, although both are
remarkable poems of their kind. This one, certainly,
has a ringing freshness about it, and seems to cleave
the shades of nightfall with a reveille singularly re-
memberable. The youths of the bridegroom's company
have left him at the rise of the evening star, and gone
forth for the hymenaeal chant from the tables at
which they have been feasting. They recognise the
bride's approach as a signal to strike up the hymen-
seal. Hereupon the maidens who have accompanied
* Dimlop's Roman Literature, i. 497.
HYMEN, HYMEN ME I 71
the bride, espying the male chorus, enter on a rivalry
in argument and song as to the merits of Hesperus,
whom they note as he shows his evening fires over
(Eta a sight which seems to have a connection with
some myth as to the love of Hesper for a youth
named Hymenseus localised at (Eta, as the story of
Diana and Endymion was at Latmos, to which Virgil
alludes in his eighth eclogue. Both bevies gird them-
selves for a lively encounter of words, from their
diverse points of view. First sing the virgins :
" Hesper, hath heaven more ruthless star than thine,
That canst from mother's arms her child untwine ?
From mother's arms a clinging daughter part,
To dower a headstrong bridegroom's eager heart ?
Wrong like to this do captured cities know ?
Ho ! Hymen, Hymen ! Hymenaeus, ho ! " D.
The band of youths reply in an antistrophe which
negatives the averment of the maidens :
" Hesper, hath heaven more jocund star than thee,
Whose flame still crowns true lovers' unity ;
The troth that parents first, then lovers plight,
Nor deem complete till thou illum'st the night ?
What hour more blissful do the gods bestow ?
Hail ! Hymen, Hymen ! Hymenoeus, ho ! " D.
To judge of the next plea of the chorus of maidens by
the fragmentary lines which remain of the original, it
took the grave form of a charge of abduction against
the incriminated evening star. If he were not a prin-
cipal in the felonious act, at least he winked at it,
when it was the express vocation of his rising to pre-
72 CATULLUS.
vent, by publicity, all such irregular proceedings.
But now the youths wax bold in their retort, and
wickedly insinuate that the fair combatants are not
really so very wroth with Hesper for his slackness.
After a couplet which seems to imply, though its
sense is obscure and ambiguous, that the sort of
thieves whom these maidens revile, and whose ill
name is not confined to Roman literature (for in the
Eussian songs, as we learn from Mr Ealston's enter-
taining volumes, the bridegroom is familiarly regarded
as the "enemy," "that evil-thief," and "the Tartar"),
speedily find their offences condoned, and are received
into favour, they add a pretty plain charge against
the complainants that
" Chide as they list in song's pretended ire,
Yet what they chide they in their souls desire."
This is such a home-thrust _that the virgins change
their tactics, and adduce an argument ad miseri-
cordiam, which is one of the most admired passages
of Catullus, on the score of a simile often imitated
from it. The following version will be found tolei
ably literal :
" As grows hid floweret in some garden closed,
Crushed by no ploughshare, to no beast exposed,
By zephyrs fondled, nursed up by the rain,
With kindly sun to strengthen and sustain :
To win its sweetness lads and lasses vie :
But let that floweret wither by-and-by,
Nipped by too light a hand, it dies alone
Its lover lads and lasses all are flown !
BYJUEH, HYMENS El 73
E'en as that flower is lovely maiden's pride,
In her pure virgin home content to bide ;
A husband wins her, and her bloom is sere,
No more to lads a charm, or lasses dear ! " D.
The last line is undoubtedly borrowed from a frag-
ment of the Greek erotic poet, Mimmermus ; and the
whole passage, as Theodore Martin shows, has had its
influence upon an admired canto of Spenser's ' Faery
Queen' (B. ii. c. xii.)
Will the boys melt and give in, or will they show
cause why they should not accept this sad showing of
the mischief, for which Hymen and Hcsper have the
credit f Let us hear their antistrophe :
" As a lone vine on barren, naked field
"Lifts ne'er a shoot, nor mellow grape can yield,
But bends top-heavy with its slender frame, '
Till root and branch in level are the same :
Such vine, such field, in their forlorn estate
No peasants till, nor oxen cultivate.
Yet if the same vine with tall elm-tree wed,
Peasants will tend, and oxen till its bed.
So with the maid no lovers' arts engage,
She sinks unprized, unnoticed, into age ;
But once let hour and man be duly found,
Her father's pride, her husband's love redound." *
D.
* Compare tho sentiment of Waller's "Go, Lovely Row,"
particularly in the third stanza :
" Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired ;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
Aud not blush so to be admired."
74 CATULLUS.
The epithalamium ends with an arithmetical calcula-
tion of the same special pleaders, which the maidens
apparently find unanswerable, and whith is of this
nature namely, that they are not their own property,
except as regards a third share. As the other two shares
belong to their parents respectively, and these have
coalesced in transferring their votes to a son-in-law, it
is obviously as futile as it is unmannerly to demur to
the nuptial rites. And so the poem ends with the
refrain of " Hymen, Hymenaee ! " It has with
much plausibility been conjectured by Professor Sellar
to be an adaptation of Sappho or some other Greek
poet to an occasion within Catullus's own experience.
Certainly it does not exhibit like originality with the
poem preceding it. It might be satisfactory, were it
possible, to give, by way of sequel to the epithalamium
of Julia and Manlius, trustwoithy data of the young
wife's speedy removal ; but this is based upon sheer
conjecture, and so much as we know has been already
stated. If we might transfer to the elegiacs addressed
to Manlius before noticed a portion of the story of
Laodamia, which has sometimes been printed with
them, but is now arranged with the verses to Manius
Acilius Glabrio, we should be glad to conceive of
Julia's wedded life as matching that of Laodamia, and
offering a model for its portrayal.
" Nor e'er was dove more loyal to her mate
That bird which, more than all, with clinging beak,
Kiss after kiss will pluck insatiate
Though prone thy sex its joys in change to seek,
HYMEN, HYMEN ME I 75
Than thou, Laodamia ! Tame and cold
Was all their passion, all their love to thine :
When thou to thy enamoured breast didst fold
Thy blooming lord in ecstasy divine.
As fond, as fair, as thou, so came the maid,
Who is my life, and to my bosom clung ;
While Cupid ivmndher fluttering, arrayed
In saffron vest, a radiance o'er her flung."
(C. Ixviii.) M.
CHAPTER VL
THE ROMAN-ALEXANDRINE AND LONGER POEMS
OF CATULLUS.
THAT portion of the poetry of Catullus which has been
considered hitherto is doubtless the most genuine and
original ; but, with the exception of the two epitba-
lamia, the poems now to be examined, as moulded on
the Alexandrine form and subjects, are perhaps the
more curious in a literary point of view. Contrasting
with the rest of his poetry in their lack of " naturalism
essentially Eoman and republican," they savour undis-
guisedly of that Roman - Alexandrinism in poetry
which first sprang up in earnest among the contem-
poraries of Cicero and Caesar, and grew with all the
more rapidity owing to the frequent visits of the
Romans to the Greek provinces, and the increasing
influx of the Greek literati into Rome. Of the Alex-
andrine literature at its fountain-head it must be remem-
bered that it was the substitute and successor on the
ruin of the Hellenic nation, and the decline of its
nationality, language, literature, and art of the for-
mer national and popular literature of Greece. But it
was confined to a limited range. " It was," says Pro-
TUB LONGER POEMS. 77
fessor Mommsen, "only in a comparatively narrow
circle, not of men of culture for such, strictly speak-
ing, did not exist but of men of erudition, that the
Greek literature was cherished even when dead ; that
the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of re-
search ; and that the living sense of sympathy or the
dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of pro-
ductiveness. This posthumous productiveness consti-
tutes the so-called Alexandrinism." Originality found
a substitute in learned research. Multifarious learning,
the result of deep draughts at the wells of criticism,
grammar, mythology, and antiquit : es, gave an often
cumbrous and pedantic character to laboured and vol-
uminous epics, elegies, and hymnology (a point and
smartness in epigram being the one exception in favour
of this school), whilst the full genial spirit of Greek
thought, coeval with Greek freedom, was exchanged for
courtly compliment, more consistent with elaboration
than freshness. Among the best of the Alexandrian
poets proper indeed, the best of all, if we except the
original and genial Idyllist, Theocritus was the learned
Callimachus; and it is upon Callimachus especially
that Catullus has drawn for his Roman-Alexanfirine
poems, one of them being in fact a translation of that
poet's elegy " On the Hair of Queen Berenice;" whilst
another, his " Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis," has been
supposed by more than one critic to be a translation
of Callimachus also. This is, indeed, problematical ;
but there is no doubt that for his mythologic details,
scholarship, and other features savouring of ultra erudi-
78 CATULLUS.
tion, he owes to Callimachus characteristics which his
intrinsic poetic gifts enabled him to dress out accept-
ably for the critics of his day. The singular and
powerful poem of " Atys " belongs to the same class,
by reason of its mythological subject. A recent
.French critic of Catullus, in a learned chapter on
Alexandrinism, defines it as the absence of sincerity
in poetry, and the exclusive preoccupation of form.
" He," writes M. Couat, " who, instead of looking
around him, or, better, within himself, parades over
all countries and languages his adventurous curiosity,
and prefers I'esprit to Tame the new, the pretty, the
fine, to the natural and simple such an one, to
whatever literature he belongs, is an Alexandrinist
Alexandrinism in excess is what in this writer's view
is objectionable ; and whilst we are disposed to think
that few will demur to this moderate dogma, it is
equally certain that none of the Eoman cultivators of
the Alexandrine school have handled it with more
taste and less detriment to their natural gifts than
Catullus. "With him the elaborateness which, in
its home, Alexandrinism exhibits as to metre and
prosody, is exchanged for a natural and unforced
power, quite consistent with simplicity. As is
well observed by Professor Sellar, "His adaptation
of the music of language to embody the feeling or
passion by which he is possessed, is most vividly felt in
the skylark ring of his great nuptial ode, in the wild
hurrying agitation of the Atys, in the stately calm of
the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis." Herein, as
indeed in the tact and art evinced generally in these
THE LONGER POEMS. 79
larger poems, we seem to find ground for dissent from
the opinion of several otherwise weighty critics of
Catullus, that they were the earlier exercises of his
poetic career a subject upon which, as there is the
scantiest inkling in either direction, it is admissible to
take the negative view. As a work of art, no doubt
the " Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis " are damaged by
the introduction of the episode of Ariadne's desertion
within the main poem an offence obviously against
strict epic unity. But it is not by any means sure
that this is so much a sign of youthful work as of an
independence consistent with poetic fancy, and cer-
tainly not amenable to the stigma of Alexandrinism,
which must be en regie, if anything. It is with this
largest, and in many respects finest, sample of Catullus's
epic capacity, that we propose to deal at greatest length,
reserving space for a glance or two at the " Atys " and
the " Hair of Berenice." " The whole poem " (Peleus
anil Thetis), to quote Mr Sellar once more, " is per-
vaded with that calm light of strange loveliness which
spreads over the unawakened world in the early sunrise
of a summer day." If here and there a suspicion of
over -wrought imagery and description carries back
the mind to a remembrance of the poet's model, it
must be allowed that, for the most part, this poem
excels in variety, in pictorial effects, in force of fancy,
and clever sustentation of the interest. It begins
with the day on which, in the hoar distance of mythic
ages, the Pelion-born Argo was first launched and
manned, and the first sailor of all ever burst on the
realm of Amphitritc a statement which we must not
80 CATULLUS.
criticise too closely, as the poet elsewhere in the poem
tells of a fleet of Theseus prior to the Argonautic
expedition :
" Soon as its prow the wind-vexed surface clave, ^
Soon as to oarsmen's harrow frothed the wave,
Forth from the eddying whiteness Nereids shone,
With faces set strange sight to look upon.
Then, only then, might mortal vision rest
On naked sea-nymph, lifting rosy hreast
High o'er the billows' foam. 'Twas then the flame
Of love for Thetis Peleus first o'ercame :
Then Thetis deigned a mortal spouse to wed !
Then Jove approved, and their high union sped."
D.
The poet having thus introduced the betrothal, aa
it were, of the goddess and the hero, pauses, ere he
plunges into his subject, to apostrophise heroes and
heroines in general, and more especially the twain
immediately concerned : Peleus, for whom the very
susceptible father of the gods had waived his own
penchant for Thetis ; Peleus, the stay and champion
of Thessaly ; and Thetis, most beautiful of ocean's
daughters, and grandchild of earth-girding Tethys and
her lord Oceanus a fitting proem to the action of
the poem, which commences with no further delay.
"VVe see all Thessaly come forth to do honour and
guest-service to the nuptials, gifts in their hands, and
joy and gladness in their countenances. Scyros and
Phthia's Tempe, Cranon, and Larissa's towers are all
deserted on that day, for the Pharsalian home where
high festival and a goodly solemnity is kept. A lively
TIIE LONGER POEMS. 81
description follows of the country and its occupations
given over to complete rest and keeping holiday ; and
this is seemingly introduced by way of contrast to the
stir and splendour and gorgeous preparations within
the halls of Peleus. But the poet without delay
presses on to one of his grand effects of description
the rich bridal couch, with frame of ivory and cover-
let of sea- purples, on which was wrought the tale of
Ariadne's desertion by Theseus. She has just awak-
ened to her loss, and the picture is one of passionate
fancy and force. To give a transcript of this is
impossible ; and though Mr Martin's handling of the
whole passage is admirably finished, yet where the
best comes far short of the original, it seems justifi-
able to introduce a distillation of its spirit, without
attempting metrical likeness. The following version
is by the Rev. A. C. Auchmuty* (see Catull. Ixiv.
w. 52-75) :
" There, upon Dia's ever-echoing shore,
Sweet Ariadne stood, in fond dismay,
With wild eyes watching the swift fleet, that bore
Her loved one far away.
And still she gazed incredulous ; and still,
Like one awaking from beguiling sleep,
Found herself standing on the bea'chy hill,
Left there alone to weep.
But the quick oars upon the waters flashed,
And Theseus fled, and not a thought behind
* Verses, Original and Translated, by A. C. Auchmuty.
Exeter, 1869.
A.C.8.8., vol. iiL *
82 CATULLUS.
He left ; but all his promises were dashed
Into the wandering wind.
Far off she strains her melancholy eyes ;
And like a Mwnad sculptured there in stone
Stands as in act to shout, for she espies
Him she once called her ow
Dark waves of care swayed o'er her tender soul ;
The fine-wove turban from her golden hair
Had fallen ; the light robe no longer stole
Over her bosom bare.
Loose dropped the well-wrought girdle from her breast,
That wildly struggled to be free : they lay
About her feet, and many a briny crest
Kissed them in careless play.
But nought she recked of turban then, and nought
Of silken garments flowing gracefully.
O Theseus ! far away in heart and thought
And soul, she hung on thee !
Ay me ! that hour did cruel love prepare
A never-ending thread of wildering woe ;
And twining round that heart rude briars of care,
Bade them take root and grow ;
What time, from old Piraeus' curved strand
A ship put forth towards the south, to bring
Chivalrous-hearted Theseus to the land
Of the unrighteous king."
A comparison of the above with the Latin text will
show that, as in the italicised passages, the translator
has been careful to preserve, as much as might be, the
expressions, metaphors, and similes of the author.
That author proceeds from this point to explain the
causes of Theseus's visit to the home of Minos, and to
unfold the legend of the monster, the labyrinth, the
clue to it supplied by Ariadne, and the treachery of
THE LONGER POEMS. 83
Theseus, who, when he had vanquished the monster,
and led the princess to give up all for him, forsook
her as she lay asleep in Dia's sea-girt isle. The lament
of Ariadne on discovering her desolation is a triumph
of true poetic art in its accommodation of the measure
to the matter in hand ; the change from calm descrip-
tion to rapid movement and utterance, as, climbing
mountain-top, or rushing forth to face the surges up-
plashing over the beach to meet her, she utters out-
bursts of agony and passion intended to form a con-
summate contrast to the ideal happiness of them on
whose coverlet this pathetic story was broidered. Two
stanzas from Martin's beautiful and ballad-like version
must represent the touching character of this lament,
in which, by the way, are several turns of thought
and expression which Virgil seems to have had in
mind for the 4th Book of the ' ./Eneis : '
"Lost, lost ! where shall I turn me ? Oh, ye pleasant hills
of home,
How shall I fly to thee across this gulf of angry foam ?
How meet my father's gaze, a thing so doubly steeped in
guilt,
The leman of a lover, who a brother's blood had spilt ?
A lover ! gods ! a lover ! And alone lie cleaves the deep,
And leaves me here to perish on this savage ocean steep.
No hope, no succour, no escape ! None, none to hear my
prayer !
All dark, and drear, and desolate ; and death, death every-
where !" <C. Ixiv. vv. 177-187.)
The lines in which she declares that, had ^Egrua ob-
jected to her for a daughter-in-law, she would havo
84 CATULLUS.
been his handmaid, to spread his couch and lave his
feet, have more than one echo in English poetry ; and
the climax of the lament, in a deep and sweeping
curse on her betrayer, is a passage of terribly realistic
earnestness :
"Yet ere these sad and streaming eyes on earth have
looked their last,
Or ere this heart has ceased to beat, I to the gods will cast
One burning prayer for vengeance on the man who foully
broke
The vows which, pledged in their dread names, in my fond
ear he spoke.
Come, ye that wreak on man his guilt with retribution dire,
Ye maids,* whose snake - wreathed brows bespeak your
bosom's vengeful ire !
Come ye, and hearken to the curse which I, of sense forlorn,
Hurl from the ruins of a heart with mighty anguish torn !
Though there be fury in my words, and madness in my
brain,
Let not my cry of woe and wrong assail your ears in vain !
Urge the false heart that left me here still on with head-
long chase,
From ill to worse, till Theseus curse himself and all his
race ! " M.
It is not to be denied that it would have been
more artistic had the poet here dismissed the legend
of Theseus and his misdemeanours, or, if not this,
had he at least omitted the lesson of divine retribution
conveyed in his sire's death as he crossed tbe home-
threshold, and contented himself with the spirited pre-
sentment of Bacchus and his attendant Satyrs and
THE LONGER POEMS. 85
Sileni in quest of Ariadne, on another compartment
of the coverlet. So far, the reader of the poem has
represented one of the crowd gazing at the triumphs
of needlework and tapestry in the bridal chambers.
Now, place must be made for the divine and heroic
guests, and their wedding-presents : Chiron, with the
choicest meadow, alpine, and aquatic flowers of his land
of meadows, rocks, and rivers ; Peneius, with beech,
bay, plane, and cypress to plant for shade and verdure
in front of the palace ; Prometheus, still scarred with
the jutting crags of his rocky prison; and all the gods
and goddesses, save only Phoebus and his twin-sister,
absent from some cause of grudge which we know not,
but which the researches of Alexandrine mythologists
no doubt supplied to the poet. Anon, when the
divine guests are seated at the groaning tables, the
weird and age-withered Parcse, as they spin the threads
of destiny, in shrill strong voices pour forth an alter-
nating song with apt and mystic refrain, prophetic of
the bliss that shall follow this union, and the glory
to be achieved in its offspring. Here are two quatrains
for a sample, relating to Achilles the offspring of the
union :
u His peerless valour and his glorious deeds
Shall mothers o'er their stricken sons confess,
As smit with feeble hand each bosom Meeds,
And dust distains each grey dishevelled tress.
Run, spindles, run, and trail the fateful threads.
For as the reaper mows the thickset ears,
In golden corn-lands 'neath a burning sun,
86 CATULLUS.
E'en so, behold, Pelides' falchion shears
The life of Troy, and swift its course is run.
Kun, spindles, run, and trail the fateful threads."
D.
At the close of this chant of the fatal sisters, Catullus
draws a happy picture, such as Hesiod had drawn
before him, of the blissful and innocent age when the
gods walked on earth, and mixed with men as friend
with friend, before the advent of the iron age, when
sin and death broke up family ties, and so disgusted
the minds of the just Immortals that thenceforth there
was no longer any " open vision "
" Hence from earth's daylight gods their forms refrain,
Nor longer men's abodes to visit deign."
It is by no means so easy to give any adequate idea of
the " Atys," which is incomparably the most remark-
able poem of Catullus in point of metrical effects, of
flow and ebb of passion, and of intensely real and
heart-studied pathos. The subject, however, is one
which, despite the praises Gibbon and others have
bestowed on Catullus's handling of it, is unmeet for
presentment in extenso before English readers. The
sensible and correctly -judging Dunlop did not err in
his remark that a fable, unexampled except in the
various poems on the fate of Abelard, was somewhat
unpromising and peculiar as a subject for poetry. In
a metre named, from the priests of Cybele, Galliam-
bic, Catullus represents it may be from his experi-
ence and research in Asia Minor the contrasts of
enthusiasm and repentant dejection of one who, for
THE LONGER POEMS. 87
the great goddess's sake, has become a victim of his
own frenzy. A Greek youth, leaving home and
parents for Phrygia, vows himself to the service and
grove of Cybele, and, after terrible initiation, snatches
up the musical instruments of the guild, and incites
his fellow-votaries to the fanatical orgies. Wildly
traversing woodlands and mountains, he falls asleep
with exhaustion at the temple of his mistress, and
awakes, after a night's repose, to a sense of his rash
deed and marred life. The complaint which ensues
is unique in originality and pathos. "No other
writer" thus remarks Professor Sellar "has pre-
sented so real an image of the frantic exultation and
fierce self-sacrificing spirit of an inhuman fanaticism ;
and again, of the horror and sense of desolation which
a natural man, and more especially a Greek or Roman,
would feel in the midst of the wild and strange scenes
described in the poem, and when restored to the con-
sciousness of his .voluntary bondage, and of the for-
feiture of his country and parents and the free social
life of former days." The same writer acutely notes
the contrast betwixt " the false excitement and noisy
tumult of the evening and the terrible reality and
blank despair of the morning," which, with " the pic-
torial environments," are the characteristic effects of
this poem. In the original, no doubt these effects are
enhanced by the singular impetuosity of the metre,
which, it is well known, Mr Tennyson, amongst others,
has attempted to reproduce in his experiments upon
classical metres. Such attempts can achieve only a
fitful and limited success. English Galliambics can
88 CATULLUS.
never, in the nature of things or measures, be popular.
And even supposing the metre were more promising,
it is undeniably against the dictates of good taste to
make the revolting legend of Atys a familiar story to
English readers of the ancient classics.
Curiosity, however, would dictate more acquaint-
ance with " Berenice's Lock of Hair," a poem sent, as
has been already stated, by Catullus to Hortalus, and
purporting to be the poet's translation of a court poem
of his favourite model, the Alexandrian poet Calli-
machus. The metre of both is elegiac; but of the
original only two brief fragments remain so brief,
indeed, that they fail to test the faithfulness of the
translator. The subject, it should seem, was the fate
of a tress which Berenice, according to Egyptian tables
of affinity the lawful wife and queen of Ptolemy Euer-
getes, king of Egypt, although she was his sister,
dedicated to Venus Zephyritis as an offering for the
safety of her liege lord upon an expedition to which
he was summoned against the Assyrians, and which
sadly interfered with his honeymoon. On his return
the vow was paid in due course : the lock, however,
shortly disappeared from the temple : and thereupon
Conon, the court astronomer (of whom Virgil speaks
in his third eclogue as one of the two most famous
mathematicians of his time), invented the flattering
account that it had been changed into a constellation.
So extravagant a compliment would naturally kindle
the rivalry of the courtly $nd erudite Alexandrian
poet; and the result was soon forthcoming in an
elegiac poem, supposed to be addressed to her mis-
THE LOGGER POEMS. 89
cress by the new constellation itself, in explanation of
ner abduction. To judge by the fragments which are
extant, Catullus appears to have paraphrased rather
than closely translated the original of Callimachus,
though how far he has improved upon or embellished
his model it is of course impossible to say. In some
degree this detracts from the interest of the poem at
any rate, when viewed in connection with the genius
of Catullus. Still, it deserves a passing notice for its
art and ingenuity, as employed after Catullus's man-
ner, in blending beauty and passion with truth and
constancy. It is curious, too, for its suggestive hints
for Pope's " liape of the Lock." The strain of compli-
ment is obviously more Alexandrian than Eoman;
and readers of Theocritus will be prepared for a good
deal in the shape of excessive compliment to the
Ptolemys. But even in the compliment and its ex-
travagance there is a considerable charm ; and it is
by no means uninteresting to possess, through the
medium of an accomplished Latin poet, our only
traces of a court poem much admired in its day. If,
after all, the reception of Berenice's ha'ir among the
constellations forming the group of seven stars in
Leo's tail, by the Alexandrian astronomers, is a
matter of some doubt, it is at least clear that Calli-
machus did his best to back up Conon's averment of
it, and that it suited Catullus to second his assertion
so effectually, that it has befallen his muse to trans-
mit the poetic tradition. The argument of the poem
may bo summarised. The Lock tells how, after its
dedication by Berenice, if she received her lord from
90 CATULLUS.
the wars safe and sound, Conon discovered it a con-
stellation in the firmament. He had returned vic-
torious ; the lock had been reft from its mistress's
head with that resistless steel to which ere then far
sturdier powers had succumbed
" But what can stand against the might of steel?
'Twas that which made the proudest mountain reel,
Of all by Thia's radiant son surveyed,
What time the Mede a new ^Egean made,
And hosts barbaric steered their galleys tall
Through rifted Athos' adamantine wall.
When things like these the power of steel confess,
What help or refuge for a woman's tress?" (42-47.) M;
Need we suggest the parallel from Pope 1
" What tune could spare from steel receives its date,
And monuments, like men, submit to fate.
Steel could the labours of the gods destroy,
And strike to dust the imperial towers of Troy ;
Steel could the works of mortal pride confound,
And hew triumphal arches to the ground.
What wonder then, fair nymph, thine hairs should feel
The conquering force of unresisted steel?"
The tress proceeds to describe her passage through
the air, and her eventual accession to the breast of
Venus, thence to be transferred to an assigned posi-
tion among the stars. A high destination, as the
poem makes Berenice's hair admit, yet one (and here
adulation takes its finest flight) which it would cheer-
fully forego to be once more lying on its mistress's
head :
THE LONGER POEMS. 91
" My state so glads me not, but I deplore
I ne'er may grace my mistress' forehead more,
With whom consorting in her virgin bloom,
I bathed in sweets, and quaffed the rich perfume."
In conclusion, the personified and constellated lock,
with a happy thought, claims a toll on all maids and
matrons happy in their love and nuptials, of an onyx
box of perfume on the attainment of each heart's de-
sire ; and this claim it extends, foremost and first, to
its mistress. Yet even this is a poor compensation
for the loss of its once far prouder position, to recover
which, and play again on Berenice's queenly brow, it
would be well content if all the stars in the firmament
should clash in a blind and chaotic collision :
" Grant this, and then Aquarius may
Next to Orion blaze, and all the world
Of starry orbs be into chaos whirled." M.
After a survey of the larger poems in the foregoing
chapter, and that next before it, it would be especially
out of place to attempt the barest notice of all that
remains a few very scurrilous and indelicate epi-
grams, having for their object the violent attacking of
Caesar, Mamurra, Gellius, and other less notable names
obnoxious to our poet. By far the most part of these
are so coarse, that, from their very nature, they are best
left in their native language ; and in this opinion we
suspect we are supported by the best translators of
Catullus, who deal with them sparingly and gingerly.
Here and there, as in Epigram or Poem 84, Catullus
92 CATULLUS.
quits this uninviting vein for one of purer satire in
every sense, the sting of it being of philological in-
terest. Arrius, its subject, like some of our own
countrymen, seems to have sought to atone for clip-
ping his h's by an equally ill-judged principle of com-
pensation. He used the aspirate where it was wrong
as well as where it was right. The authors of a recent
volume already alluded to ' Lays from Latin Lyres'
have so expressed the spirit and flavour of Catul-
lus's six couplets on this Arrius, that their version
may well stand for a sample of one of the most amus-
ing and least offensive of his skits of this nature. It
is, of course, something in the nature of a parody :
" Whenever 'Arry tried to sound
An H, his care was unavailing ;
He always spoke of 'orse and 'ound,
And all his kinsfolk had that failing.
Peace to our ears. He went from home ;
But tidings came that grieved us bitterly
That 'Arry, while he stayed at Home,
Enjoyed his 'oliday in Hitaly."
And so we bid adieu to a poet who, with all his faults,
has the highest claims upon us as a bard of nature
and passion, and who was beyond question, the first
and greatest lyric poet of Italy.
TIBULLUS.
CHAPTER L
THE LIFE OF ALBIU8 TIBULLUS.
ALTHOUGH Catullus, as we have seen, lays some claim
to the credit of acclimatising the elegy as well as other
Greek types of poetry at Rome, the neatness and finish
of that form of verse may be attributed to Albius
Tibullus, a Roman of equestrian family, whose birth-
place was Pedum, perhaps the modern village of Gal-
licano, and in his day so ruined and insignificant that
it survived rather as the name of a district than as an
ancient and once famous Latin city. Tradition has
not preserved the poet's prajnomen; but his birth-
date was probably B.O. 54 : and, like the two other
tuneful brethren with whom we associate him, his life
and career were brief. He is supposed to have died
B.C. 18, according to an epigram of Pomitius Mai-sus
only a few months later than Virgil. As is the case
with Catullus and Propertius, the data for a life of
94: TIBULLUS. . . ___
Tibullus are scant and shadowy, and consist chiefly
of an elegy of Ovid, an epistle of Horace, and a less
authoritative life by an old grammarian, with the
internal evidence to be extracted from the poet's ac-
knowledged remains. As he nowhere names his sire,
it is inferred that he died whilst he was yet a youth ;
but there are frequent and loving notices of his mother
and sister. Apparently his family estates had been
confiscated at the time of Ctesar's death, and his for-
tunes had undergone the same partial collapse which
befell his poetic contemporaries, Horace and Virgil;
but, like them, he clearly succeeded in recovering at
least a portion of his patrimony, and this apparently
by the good offices of his great patron, M. Valerius
Messala, a chief of the ancient aristocracy, who, after
the fashion of Maacenas and Agrippa, kept up a
retinue and mimic court of versifiers, and, it must be
allowed, exacted no more of them than was his honest
due. It was at Pedum, on his patrimonial estate
between Tibur and -Prameste, some nineteen miles
from Rome, that he passed the best portion of his
brief but mainly placid life, amidst such scenes and
employments as best fitted his rural tastes, indif-
ferent health, and simple, contemplative, affectionate
nature. In his very first elegy, he describes himself
in strict keeping with his eminently religious spirit
which, it has been well remarked, bade him fold his
hands in resignation rather than open them in hope
wreathing the god Terminus at the cross-roads, paying
first-fruits to Ceres, setting up a Priapus to scare bird-
Dirates from his orchards, and honouring the Lares
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS. 95
with the offering of a lambkin, the substitution of
which for the fatted calf of earlier days betrays the
diminution of his fortunes. As Mr Cranstoun tran-
slates, the poet's admission runs thus :
" Guards of a wealthy once, now poor, domain
Ye Lares ! still my gift your wardship cheers :
A fatted calf did then your altars stain,
To purify innumerable steers.
A lambkin now a meagre offering
From the few fields that still I reckon mine,
Shall fall for you while rustic voices sing :
' Oh grant the harvests, grant the generous wine ! ' "
(C. i. 1. 45, &c.)
The probable dates of his allusions to changed for-
tunes, in the first book of elegies, forbid the conjecture
of some of his biographers that these arose from his
lavish expenditure on his mistresses ; and it is cer-
tainly not so much of a dilapidated roue as of one who
lived simply and within his income and means, that
the shrewd-judging Horace wrote in Epistle iv. (Book
I-)-
" No brainless trunk is yours : a form to please,
Wealth, wit to use it, Heaven vouchsafes you these.
What could fond nurse wish more for her sweet pet,
Than friends, good looks, and health without a let,
A shrewd clear head, a tongue to speak his mind,
A seemly household, and a purse well lined ? "
Conington.
Judging of him by his writings, and those of hia
friends, Tibullus, then, would strike us as a genial,
96 TIBULLUS.
cheery, refined, but not foppish Roman knight ; not
overbearing, from having been very early his own
master, but, for a Roman in his condition, of a singu-
larly domestic character. It is clear that the court
and livery of Augustus had no charms for him in com-
parison with the independence of his Pedan country-
life, although an introduction to the former might
have been had for the asking. His tone is that of
an old-fashioned Conservative, disinclined to violent
changes, holding the persuasion that "the old is
better," and prepared to do battle for the good Satur-
nian times, before there were roads or ships, imple-
ments of husbandry or weapons of war. Nothing
in his poems justifies the impression that his own
meddling in politics had to do with whatever amount
of confiscation befell him : indeed it may reasonably
be assumed that, in pleading for restitution or com-
pensation, his patron may have found his manifest
aversion to politics as well as war very much in his
favour. With Messala, who had fought against the
Triumvirs tinder Cassius at Philippi, but had dis-
tinguished himself eminently at Actium on the side
of Augustus, Tibullus had been early intimate, though
he declined to accompany him to this decisive war in
B.C. 31. Less than a year later, however, he did
accompany him as aide-de-camp, or perhaps more
probably as the bard of his prospective exploits, on
a campaign to Aquitania, and was present at the
battle of Atax (Ande in Languedoc), in which the
rebel tribes were effectually quelled. In the seventh
elegy of his first book, on the subject of Messala's
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUb. 97
birthday, the poet gives, partly from eyewitness and
partly from report (for he did not get further than
Corcyra in B.C. 30, on his voyage with his patron on
his Asiatic expedition), a sketch of the localities of
Messala's victories, which may thus be represented in
English :
" Share in thy fame I boast ; be witness ye,
Pyrene's heights, and shore of Santon sea :
Arar, swift Rhone, Garumna's mighty stream,
Yellow Camutes, and Loire of azure gleam :
Or shall calm Cydnus rather claim my song,
Transparent shallows smoothly borne along 1
How peaks of Taurus into cloiidland peer,
Nor yet its snow the rough Cilicians fear ?
Why need I tell how scatheless through the sky
O'er Syrian towns the sacred white doves fly ?
How Tyre, with barks the first to trust the breeze,
Keeps from her towers an outlook o'er the seas ?
Or in what sort, when Sirius cracks the fields,
The plenteous Nile its summer moisture yields."
(Book I. C. vii'. 9-22.) D.
It was ill-health of a serious kind, if we may judge
from his misgivings in the opening of the third elegy
of the first book, which cut short his second campaign
at Corcyra; and there may probably have been as
much justification for his step in a natural delicacy of
constitution, as predisposition to it in his singularly
unwarlike tendencies. At any rate, when he turned
his back upon Corcyra, it was to say adieu for ever to
the profession of arms ; and thenceforth, though men-
tally following his patron's fortunes with affectionate
interest, which often finds vent in song, he seems to have
A.C.S.S., vol. iii. o
98 TIB ULL US.
given up all campaigns, except in the congenial fields
of love and literature. No doubt, he had no objection
on occasion to fight his few battles over again ; and, as
the broken soldier in Goldsmith's ' Deserted Village,'
" Shouldered his crutch and showed how fields were
won,"
so our poet was quite at home in telling as well as hear-
ing the soldier's tale, with the aid of the wine-flask to
map out the battle-fields with miost finger on the
table. But Peace approved herself so much more to
his mind that we find him constantly attributing to it
the whole cycle of blessings ; amongst others
" Peace nursed the vine, and housed the juice in store,
That the sire's jar his offspring's soul should cheer ; "
and it is with perhaps more heartfelt enthusiasm than
that which he bestowed on the Gallic or Asiatic cam-
paigns that he commemorates on Messala's birthday,
already referred to, the peaceful services of that general
to his country in reconstructing a portion of the Fla-
minian way out of the spoils Avhich he had captured
from the enemy. The lines in the original indicate
that this great work was in course of construction
when the seventh elegy was written ; and it is not an
uninteresting note that, as in our day, so of old, the
road-maker was esteemed a public benefactor and the
pioneer of civilisation. " Be thine," ends the poet
" Be thine a race to crown each honoured deed,
And, gathering round thine age, swell honour's meed.
Frascati's youth and glistening Alba's son
Tell out the civil work thine hand hath done.
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS. 99
Thy wealth it is the gritty rock conveys,
The gravel strews, the jointed stones o'erlays :
Hence, since no more he stumbles home from town,
Hence, of thy road oft brags belated clown.
Come then for many a year, blest birthday, come,
And brighten each year more Messala's home !" D.
In truth, the lot of Tibullus was fitter to be cast in
such peaceful surroundings than in the wars and battle-
lields of Eome, for empire far renowned. And there-
lore, with the exception of the sole warlike episode we
have noticed, his subjects are mostly peaceful, and
the poems, which are the chronicle of his life, pretty
equally divided between praise of the country and
commemoration of rustic festivals and holidays, and
the praises or reproaches which he . pours forth to
his mistresses ; for it does not seem that he exactly
parallels his co-mates Catullus and Propertius in ex-
alting his Delia to the same unapproached throne
as Lesbia or Cynthia. Still the history of his loves
demands quite as distinct a commemoration and illus-
tration as that of those of his fellows; and it will there-
fore be convenient to reserve it to another chapter,
gathering up into this present sketch what little
remains to tell of the poet's biography distinct from
these. If we may take Ovid's contributions to the
record, it will be found in his "Tristia" that the fates
allowed them no time for intimacy, but that Tibullus
was read and known and popular in the reign of
Augustus, not, however, through any special culti-
vation of an imperial patron, whom ho invariably
ignores, though not because ho had had no overtures
ICO TIBULLUS.
to become a bard of the empire. Enough for him to
be stanch to an independent Eoman noble, the most
virtuous of his class, and to watch his opportunities of
a well-timed poetical compliment to him or his. Thus
when a rural feast is kept, and all are drinking healths
and making merry, the health of the absent hero, Mes
sala, is the toast he passes as an excuse for the glass
(El. lib. ii. 1). Another special and appropriate poem
(ii. 5) is written in honour of the eldest son of Mes-
sala, Marcus Valerius Messalinus, and of bis election
into the College of Fifteen to guard and inspect
the Sibylline books in the Capitol, of which books
he maintains the credit by pointing to the predicted
eruption of Mount ^Etna and eclipse of the sun in the
fated year of J.ulius Caesar's assassination. We hear
very little indeed of our poet from his contemporaries,
and next to nothing from him of them, out of the
range of the Messaline family, a proof of that addic-
tion to rural pursuits and privacy, which, along with
his loves, formed the staple of his muse. Even his
death, as pictured by Ovid, looks exceedingly like a
cento made up out of his own elegies ; for that poet
(Amor., iii. 9) makes his mother close his eyes, his
sister hang over his couch and watch his pyre with
dishevelled hair, and his mistresses lay claim to his
preference at that sad last ceremony, in language that
may well have been framed upon a study of the lan-
guage of Tibullus, when, in El. i. Ill, he anticipates
death afar from these last tributes at Corcyra. In
the absence of testimony we may infer that he died
peacefully at home peacefully, though somewhat
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS. 101
immaturely. Domitius Marsus reappears in Mr Crans-
toun's quatrain
" Thee, young Tibullua, Death too early sent
To roam with Virgil o'er Elysium's plains,
That none might longer breathe soft love's lament,
Or sing of royal wars in martial strains ; "
and it is but fair to add, from Professor Nichol's ad-
mirable version of the " Mors Tibulli," Ovid's graceful
asseveration that " Albius is not dead ; " but that, if
aught remains beyond the Stygian flood
" Kenned Tibullus ! thou art joined to those
Living in calm communion with the blest ;
In peaceful urn thy quiet bones repose :
May earth lie lightly where thine ashes rest ! "
(Am. iii. 9.)
The present may be a convenient place for stating
briefly that that portion of the Elegies attributed to
Tibullus which is unquestionably authentic is limited
to the first and second books; and that the first alone,
in all probability, had the advantage of his own revi-
sion and preparation for the press. Amongst the argu-
ments against the authenticity of the third and fourth
books, there are some which can hardly bo met by
the cleverest special pleading, though wo confess that
Mr Cranstoun has shown considerable ingenuity in
his conservative view of the question. It is, however,
more probable that the elegies of the third book,
which treat of the loves of Lygdamus and Nesera for
the most part, and which perceptibly lack the spirit
of Tibullus, whilst they evince quite a different talent,
102 TIBULLUS.
where they exhibit any, were the work of some other
poet in Messala's circle, whose name, or else nom de
2)lume, may have been Lygdamus. As to the elegies
of the fourth book (apart from the first poem, which is
epic or heroic, and is panegyrical of Messala, though,
for the most part, a raw and juvenile production, not
worthy of Tibullus's genius), the general view is that
they are worthier of Tibullus than the third book, but
more probably the work of a female hand ; and with
one or two exceptions, that of the Sulpicia, a woman
of noble birth, and of Messala's circle, whose love for
Cerinthus or Cornutus is their chief feature. One
thing is certain, that the range of the two earlier
books will furnish abundant samples of each charac-
teristic vein of the genuine Tibullus, who, though Dr
Arnold coupled him as a bad poet with Propertius,
and Niebuhr charged him with sentimentality, is
nevertheless a poet of singular sweetness of versifica-
tion, though unequal to his later elegiac brother in
force and strength. Perhaps the adverse criticisms
made upon him are due to the narrow range of his
themes ; but he is worth a study, no less for the in-
dependence of his mind and muse, than for the almost
utter absence of any Alexandrine influence on his
style, syntax, and language. Of pure taste and great
finish, his genius is Italian to the core ; and whilst he
may lack the various graces of other poets of the em-
pire before and after him, he is second to none in a
tender simplicity and a transparent terseness, which are
peculiarly his own. It may not be amiss to close this
chapter with the just eulogium of this poet by Mr Grans-
THE LIFE OF ALBIUS TIBULLUS. 103
toun, the most appreciative, and, on the whole, the
most successful of Tibullus's translators. " His love
of home and friends, his enjoyment of the country, of
hills and dales, of shepherds and sheepfolds, of smil-
ing meadows and murmuring rivulets, of purple vine-
yards and yellow corn-fields, and of the innocence and
simplicity of earlier days, comoineu with that tender
melancholy which ever, cloud-like, threw a shadow
o'er his brow, gives him an almost romantic interest
in the eyes of modern readers ; and will always secure
for him, with lovers of rural scenes, one of the most
enviable positions among the sons of ancient song."
CHAPTEE H.
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES.
WITH his domestic qualities, his plaintive tone, and
predisposition to contented enjoyment of rural happi-
ness, Tibullus, under other conditions and another
creed, might have found the ideal which he sought; hut
subjected to the caprices and inconstancy of one mis-
tress after another, his life was alloyed by a series of
unprosperous loves. If the third hook, as has been
stated, is in all probability the work of another hand,
the sole attachment that promised a consummation
in marriage, that with the compatible but uncertain
Nesera, did not come upon the list of his loves. It
was Delia, or, as her true name appears to have been,
Plania (which the poet altered to affect the Greek),
who first seriously engaged Tibullus's affections, and
secured the tribute of his most perfect elegies. In
condition, she appears to have been, like the Cynthia
of Propertius, a hetaera, but of respectable parentage ;
and in some passages she is spoken of as if a married
woman. The poet, at any rate, found a bar to mar-
riage with her of some kind ; and probably the in-
ducement of a richer as well as a more permanent
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 105
connection, induced her to transfer herself to the
wealthy spouse whom Tibullus pictures in his sixth
elegy (Book i.) as deceived and outraged by her infidel-
ities. But we ought to take Delia's self as painted in
our poet's first and happiest colours. The first six
elegies of the first book (with the exception of the
fourth) tell 'more or less of his love for her, and are
amongst the highest developments of his poetic power.
His allusion in the fifth elegy to the beginning of her
influence affords, at the same time, some clue to her
personal charms. In declaring that her spell is so
potent that, though they have quarrelled, he cannot
forget Delia amidst other charmers, he analyses the
nature of her ascendancy. Was it
" By spells ? No, by fair shoulders, queenly charms,
And golden locks, she lit this witching flame ;
Lovely as to Haemonian Peleus' arms,
On bridled fish the Nereid Thetis came."
There are indications, too, that she could be kindly
and affectionate, and possessed such influence over him
through her tenderness, albeit short-lived and incon-
stant, as to make him sit light on hopes of advancement
from a patron, and rather disposed to spend his days
with her in silken dalliance and in rural quietude.
Ecce sifjnum :
" How sweet to lie and hear the wild winds roar,
While to our breast the one beloved we strain ;
Or, when the cold South's sleety torrent* pour,
To sleep secure, lulled by the plashing rain !
106 TIBULLUS.
This lot be mine : let him be rich, 'tis fair,
Who braves the wrathful sea and tempests drear ;
Oh, rather perish gold and gems, than e'er
One fair one for my absence shed a tear !
Dauntless, Messala, scour the earth and main
To deck thy home with warfare's spoils 'tis well ;
Me here a lovely maiden's charms enchain,
At her hard door a sleepless sentinel.
Delia, I court not praise, if mine thoti be ;
Let men cry lout and clown I'll bear the brand :
In my last moments let me gaze on thee,
And dying, clasp thee with my faltering hand."
(i. 45-60.) C.
It is a characteristic of Tibullus, beyond almost any
other of his elegiac brotherhood, that a tender melan-
choly breathes constantly through his poetry, and that
the most pleasing pictures of serene content are anon
overclouded by a tinge of sad forecast. Indeed, he
makes the uncertain but lowering future an argument
for using the present opportunities of enjoyment.
Thus, in the close of the elegy from which we have
just quoted, he mingles gay and grave :
" Join we our loves while yet the fates allow :
Gloom-shrouded Death will soon draw nigh our door.
Dull age creeps on. 'Love's honeyed flatteries grow
Out of all season, where the locks are hoar " D.
but seemingly in the end allows the gay spirit to
predominate. Next apparently in order to the above
elegy comes one composed by Tibullus on his sickbed
in Corcyra (El. iii., bk. 1), and nominally addressed
to Messala, though the burden of it first and last is
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 107
Delia, and Delia only. Out of it we glm not a few-
notices of Roman customs e.g., the resort of Delia to
the luck of the dice-box to ascertain, before he started,
the prospects her lover had of safe return, in spite of
the favourable nature of which she had wept oft and
ominously ; the misgivings of the poet himself, based
on ill omens; and the procrastination of his voyage, of
which he laid the fault on the Jew's Sabbath being
ill-starred for beginning a journey. Delia too con-
sulted, we find, the fashionable goddess of Roman
ladies of her period, Egyptian Isis, and clanged the
brazen istra, wherewith she was worshipped, with as
much devout enthusiasm as the best of them. The
poet assures himself that if her vows are heard, and
the goddess answers her prayers, homage, and offer-
ings, he shall rise from this bed of sickness, and,
better than all, eschew war and its fatigues and alarms
for the rest of his life-span. These, he suggests, are
the indirect cause of his present serious illness ; and
some fine couplets contrast, in Tibullus's own view,
the reigns of peaceful Saturn and his war-and-death-
loving son. In a strain of mild depression he goes on
to write his own epitaph as prefatory to an unfavour-
able termination to his malady ; but it is amusing to
note that he counts upon Elysium in the after-world
on the score of his true love and stanchuess in the
present life :
" But me, the facile child of tender Love,
Will Venus waft to blest Elysium's plains,
Where dance and song resound, and every grove
Rings with clear-throated warblers' dulcet strains.
108 TIBULLUS.
Here lands untilled their richest treasures yield
Here sweetest cassia all untended grows
With lavish lap the earth, in every field,
Outpours the blossom of the fragrant rose.
Here bands of youths and tender maidens chime
In love's sweet lures, and pay the untiring vow ;
Here reigns the lover, slain in youthhood's prime,
With myrtle garland round his honoured brow."
(El. iii.) C.
It does not become directly obvious why after this
happy prospect the poet goes off at a tangent to an-
other and less inviting portion of the after- world, the
abode of the guilty in Tartarus, where Tisiphone
shakes her snaky tresses, and Ixion, Tityos, Tantalus,
and the daughters of Danaus atone their treasons
against Juno, Jove, and Venus. But the clue to the
riddle is a little jealousy on the poet's part. He un-
disguisedly suggests that with these " convicts under-
going sentence " is the best place for a certain lover
of Delia's, who took an undue interest in Tibullus's
foreign service, and wished in his heart that it might
be of long duration (iii. 21, .22). Too polite and too
affectionate to hint that such ought to be her desti-
nation also, if untrue to her vows to himself, the poet
adroitly bids her fence about her chastity with the
company of her trusty duenna or nurse, to tell her
stories, and beguile the hours of lamplight with the
distaff and the thread. Taking heart from this pretty
picture, which his fancy has wrought upon a pattern
of Lucretian precedent, not out of date it would seem
in good Roman houses, though it might be ima,';ina-
Tl BULL US AND HIS LOVES. 109
tive to connect it with Delia's, Tibullus seems to change
his mind about leaving his bones in Corcyra, or wing-
ing his spirit's flight to Elysium, and to prepare his
mistress for his unexpected return :
" So may I, when thy maids, with working spent,
And prone to sleep, their task by turns remit,
Upon thee, as by Heaven's commission sent,
Come suddenly, with none to herald it.
And thou, in dishabille, thy locks astray,
Barefoot to meet thy lover, Delia, run !
Goddess of morn, with rosy steeds, I pray,
Bring on betimes that all-aiispicious sun." D.
Whether thus unheralded or not, Tibullus certainly
realised his desire of a safe return to home and Delia.
The second elegy in the printed order appears to suit
the date of the year after this return B.C. 29, and
discovers our poet in anything but the happiest rela-
tions with his mistress. Shut out, as was too often
the lover's portion in the experience of the writers of
Latin elegy, from his mistress's doors, and forestalled,
it should seem, by a lover more favoured for the
moment, he describes himself as solacing his chagrin
in cups, and in prayers to Delia to have recourse to
Venus for coxirage to elude her keepers. The goddess
of good fortune is Venus, and "Venus helps the brave."
Under her auspices, and in her service, the poet makes
light of his dangerous and unseasonable vigils :
" A fig for troubles ; so my Delia's door
Ope, and her fingers snapt my entrance bid.
Twere well, though, that each sex to pry forbore;
For Venus wills her laches to be hid." D.
110 TILULLUS.
But lest such encouragements should not suffice to
influence his coy inamorata, or her fears of offending
the so-called " husband," who withholds her from him,
should become confirmed, Tibullus adduces the assur-
ances of a witch whom he has lately consulted to show
that a way may be smoothed for their interviews as
heretofore. Of this witch Tibullus gives a highly
poetic description :
" Her have I known the stars of heaven to charm,
The rapid river's course by spells to turn,
Cleave graves, bid bones descend from pyres still warm,
Or coax the Manes forth from silent urn.
Hell's rabble now she calls with magic scream,
Now bids them milk-sprent to their homes below :
At will lights cloudy skies with sunshine's gleam,
At will 'neath summer orbs collects the snow.
Alone she holds Medea's magic lore :
None else, 'tis said, hath power Hell's dogs to tame :
She taught me chaunts, that wondrous glamour pour,
If, spitting thrice, we thrice rehearse the same."
(El. ii. 43-55) D.
The services of this functionary Tibullus professes
to have secured to throw dust in his rival's eyes,
though for the matter of that he lets fall a hint that,
had he preferred it, she could have given him a spell
that would enable him to forget her. But that was
not his wish, the earnest desire rather of a lasting and
mutual love. It would seem to be with a covert
reference to his rival, a soldier probably, enriched with
spoils and loot, and divided as occasion suited betwixt
the fields of Venus and of Mars, that Tibullus drew
the counterpart pictures of peace and war that follow,
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES. Ill
and wondered why, as his desires were so simple,
some adverse god denied him their fruition. He can-
not tax his memory with sacrilege or slight to Venus,
and protests that if he can have done any wrong
unwittingly, he is ready to make full atonement.
Possessed, however, of a conviction at whose door
the estrangement of Delia is to be laid, he ends his
elegy with a warning to the successful lover that his
turn is to follow. This warning illustrates the fate
of the trifler with affection and mocker of love, who
in his old age succumbs to its chains himself, and
whom his neighbours see
" With quivering voice his tender flatteries frame,
And trim with trembling hands his hoary hair ;
Lounge at the dear one's threshold, blind to shame,
And stop her handmaids in the thoroughfare.
While boys and youths thronged round with faces grave,
Each spitting on his own soft breast in turn
But spare me, Venus, spare thy bounden slave !
Why dost thou ruthlessly thy harvests burn ? "
This spitfing into the bosom, a coarse and superstitious
deprecation of evil or distasteful objects and conse-
quences, common to the ancients, and still common
among the Greeks, means in this case contempt for
the old lover caught in his own toils, and may pos-
sibly be meant to convey a sly hint to Delia that
" Perchance her love to every one
May make her to be loved by none."
By the next year apparently, the date of the fifth
elegy, matters are worse between Tibullus and Delia ;
112 TIBULLUS.
but the poet has abandoned his professed unconcern,
and, in his distraction at lengthened separation, de-
scribes himself in a bad way :
" Driven like a top which boys, with ready art,
Keep spinning round upon a level floor."
(El. v. A 3, 4.)
He descends from his vantage-ground of complaint
and makes a plenary recantation, enumerating at the
same time arguments of services rendered, such as
nursing her through a long and serious illness, and
consulting enchantresses and approaching altars with
a view to her recovery. Fondly, he adds, he had
dreamed that the first-fruits of this would be the
return of her attachment, a reconciliation which would
enable him to carry out a scheme of rural happiness
for the rest of their lives on his estate at Pedum, in
which each should perform their appropriate household
duties, and Delia's province should be undisputed rule
over all the slaves born in the house, himself included
as the merest cipher. She was to discharge votive
offerings to the rural god, to pay tithe and first-fruit
for the folds and crops, and, when the conquering
hero Messala deigned to visit their retreat, to pluck
him the sweetest apples from the choicest trees, and
herself to wait upon him with a befitting banquet.
The pretty domestic picture includes a vision of teem-
ing baskets of grapes, and the same vats of pressed
must which we read of in the ballad of Horatius as
foaming " round the white feet of laughing girls."
But, sighs Tibullus, this fancv sketch has come to
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 113
nought. East and south winds even now are bearing
the fond dream away. Another is blest, and reaps the
fruit of his own vows and solicitude. In a companion
elegy, which recent editors have seen fit to distinguish
from that on which we have just touched, the failure
of his endeavours to console himself with some other
fair one, or drown care in the wine-cup, is vividly de-
scribed ; and Delia's infatuation with her wealthier
admirer attributed to the hired services of a witch,
against whom Tibullus pours out a highly poetical
volley of imprecations. Such a character, described
as heralded by the screech-owl's hoot, and hungrily
gnawing the bones which the wolves have discarded
in the cemeteries, reminds one of the ' Pharmaceutria '
in the Idylls of Theocritus, and Eclogues of Virgil,
or, more familiarly, of the Ghoules in the Arabian
Nights. Still, however, there are harder words for all
others than Delia, whose accessibility to the " golden
key " is lightly noticed, while upon the successful
rival is lavished a highly-drawn picture of the pros-
pect awaiting him in the wheel of chance :
" E'en now before her threshold not in vain
An anxious lover stops and prowls ; nay, more,
Looks round, pretends to pass, returns again,
And stands and coughs before her very door.
I cannot tell what Love may have in store
He works by stealth : but now enjoy thy dream,
While Fate permits to worship and adore ;
Thy boat is gliding on a glassy stream."
<V. 71-76.) C.
Still less satisfactory are the relations of Delia and
A.C.S.S., vol. iii. H
114 TIBULLUS.
Tibullus when next we meet them in the sixth elegy;
for now a year more has flown, and the poet is chang-
ing his tactics, and twitting the present possessor of
Delia's affections with her inconsistency, of which no
one has had more experience. She is now apparently
married to her rich admirer ; but Tibullus has no idea
of letting him have an easy pillow if, indeed, the elegy
is meant for his perusal, and not rather as banter for the
fickle mistress who has given the poet up. The tone,
in either case, is not such as to present the poet in a
pleasant or natural light, when he mockingly, and in a
style reminding us of Ovid in his ' Art of Love,' enu-
merates his own past devices to gain access to Delia,
and to foil her guards and duennas, and quotes his
experience as worth buying, on the principle of setting
a thief to catch a thief. As, however, in such loves,
it would be quite out of course to know one's own
mind, it is not a surprise to find the poet, in another
poem of the same year, evidently clinging to. the hope
of a reconciliation, even after what should have seemed
an unpardonable affront and insult ; and striving to
ingratiate himself with Delia by favourable mention
of her mother "a golden old woman," because she
has always looked kindly on his addresses who, he
hopes, may live many years, and with whom he would
be quite content to go halves in the residue of years
yet in store for him though not, we conclude, in the
sense of spending them with her. At any rate, he
goes the length of saying that he shall always love her,
and her daughter for her sake, though he would be
glad if she could teach that daughter to behave herself.
T1BULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 115
The mention of the ribbon (vitta), which confined the
hair of freeborn ladies before and after marriage to
distinguish them from frailer sisters, and of the stole,
which was a distinctive part of the Eoman matron'n
dress, as forming no part of Delia's attire, seems to
cast a doubt upon her having even up to this time
formed any legal or permanent connection ; and though
lie hopes the contrary, it is plain that Tibullus fore-
casts for his Delia the fate of a fickle flirt, whose latter
end is sketched at the close of the sixth elegy :
" For the false girl, in want when youth has fled,
Draws out with trembling hand the twisted thread,
And forms of warp and woof her weary piece,
Biting the tufts from off the snowy fleece,
While bands of youth behold her, overjoyed,
And swear she's marvellously well employed ;
Venus on high disdains er every tear,
And warns the faithless she can be severe." C.
So far as Tibullus was concerned, it would seem that
his patience finally failed not very long after this was
written, and biographers fill Delia's place, after the last
rupture, with one who is unnamed in his poetry, and
unnoticed by Ovid in his references to Tibullus's loves.
The heartless Glycera's connection with him rests, in
fact, on a well-known ode of Horace; nor does the
allusion to her in it (Ode i. 33) amount to much more
than a philosophic counsel not to take on so, because
tha perjured fair one has made a younger choice. Our
poet seems to have met with his usual luck, perhaps
because too sentimental and in earnest for the merce-
nary charmers with whom he came in contact It has
116 T1BULLUS.
been supposed that the thirteenth elegy of the fourth
book may be a sample of the " miserable or dolorous
elegies " which he wrote to her, and to Avhich Horace
alludes ; but if so, it " protests too much," exhibits
too little independence, and rests too seriously upon
Glycera for his happiness, to be likely to hold her
affections. Women of her class are not really of one
mind with the love-sick wooer who wishes " the desert
were his dwelling-place, with one sweet spirit for his
minister ; " or, as Tibullus's mode of expressing the
same sentiment is Englished
" Then the untrodden way were life's delight
Life's loved asylum the sequestered wood :
Thou art the rest of cares : in murky night
A radiant star, a crowd in solitude" C.
Glycera must have preferred a crowd of a more normal
character, for ere long (it would seem within four or
five years after the rupture with Delia) he is found
in the toils of the mercenary and avaricious Nemesis,
to whom he addressed the love elegies of the second
book. If his amour with Glycera may be dated B.C.
24 or 23, the connection with Nemesis, who saw the
last of him, began about the year B.C. 21. It does
not seem to have had the excuse of such attractions
as were possessed by Delia, for the poet is silent as to
her personal beauty, although she exercised that in-
fluence over him, and made those exacting demands
on his finances, which bespeak a fascination quite as
overmastering. When we first hear of her, she has
left him for the country (El. iii. bk. 2), and as he
puts in the most exquisite of vignettes
TIBULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 117
" Lo ! Venus' self has sought the happy plains,
And Love is taking lessons at the plough " C.
of course he needs must follow her, content to perform
the most menial of peasant's duties, if only he may
bask in her sunshine. A precedent for such a course
is adduced in the mythic servitude of Apollo in the
halls of Admetus
" The fair Apollo fed Admetus' steers,
Nor aught availed his lyre and locks unshorn ;
No herbs could soothe his soul or dry his tears,
The powers of medicine were all outworn.
He drove the cattle forth at morn and eve,
Curdled the milk, and when his task was done,
Of pliant osiers wove the wicker sieve,
Leaving chance holes through which the whey
mi:/ht run.
How oft pale Dian blushed, and felt a pang,
To see him bear a calf across the plain !
And oft as in the deepening dell he sang,
The lowing oxen broke the hallowed strain." C.
" Happy days of old," sighs the poet, " when the gods
were not ashamed of undisguised bondage to Love ; "
though, as he adds
u Love's now a jest ; yet I, who bow to love,
Would rather be a jest than loveless god."
A tirade which follows in this poem against war and
lust of gain leads to the suspicion that now, as probably
with Delia, some richer mercantile or military rival is
in the poet's thoughts. The picture drawn of the spoils
of land and sea, the foreign stone imported to Italy and
118 . TIBULLUS.
dragged along Eoman thoroughfares, and the moles,
which stem hitherto resistless seas, and protect the
fish against the sway of winter, is set over against the
simplicity of Tibullus's menage and primitive establish-
ment ; but, as if he knew beforehand that her taste
would repudiate such simplicity, he affirms that if
luxury and expense be the penchant of Nemesis, he
will turn his thoughts to pillage and rapine, to procure
her the means of it. His own tastes recoil from fashion
and finery, and go back to the pastoral way of their
ancestors, but he is prepared to sink his tastes
" That through the town his Nemesis may sail,
Eyed of all eyes, for those rich gifts of mine
The Coan maidens' gauze-spun robes and veil,
Inwrought and streaked with many a golden line."
D.
Such promises and professions were no doubt the con-
dition of his retaining even a share in her favour, but
a misgiving arises that he competes at unequal odds
with a richer upstart, of whom he bitterly hints
" The truth be told, he's now her bosom's lord,
Whom oft of old the slave-mart's rule compelled
To lift to view, imported from abroad,
The foot-soles which a tell-tale chalk-mark held."
D.
Professions, however, in Nemesis's school, are nothing
without practice. The more she exacts, the faster
becomes his bondage ; and he is not long in finding
that it was a delusion to dream that songs and love-
ditties would countervail more substantial presents
" With hollowed palm she ever craves for gold."
TILULLUS AND HIS LOVES. 119
It is of no use for poets to rail against luxury and the
fashionable temptations to female extravagance in
Coan robes and Eed Sea pearls ; no use to set "the
girl who gives to song what gold could never buy " over
against her whose principle is to sell herself to the
highest bidder. Nemesis is not the sort of mistress to
be wrought upon by the " less or more " of posthumous
regrets, and so Tibullus resigns himself to sacrifices
which his instinct tells him she will appreciate. If
her cry of " Give, give " demands it, he protests
" My dear ancestral home I'll set to sale
My household gods, my all for her resign."
After this protestation, addressed to such as Nemesis,
it was simply a poetical surplusage to profess to be
ready to drink any number of love-potions ; and it is
satisfactory to be able to think that even the sacrifice
of his patrimony came to no more than the figure of
speech that it was. Nemesis is incidentally mentioned
in the complimentary " Elegy to M. Valerius Messali-
nus," of which mention has been made already, and
of which the date was about B.C. 20, in terms that be-
speak her influence over the poet's mind and muse,
and imply that if he is to live to celebrate in verse the
family of Messala, it will be through happy relations
with her, his latest love. A year after the year
before that of his death another elegy (vi. B. ii.) re-
presents him bent on following his friend and brother
poet, Macer, to the wars, by way of escaping Nemesis's
caprices. Till now he has allowed hope of better
treatment to sustain him, and even now he lays the
120 , TIBULLUS.
blame on a false and odious go-between, who pleads
her mistress's illness or absence from home, when her
voice gives the lie to the excuse. It is characteristic
of Tibullus that he finds it almost impossible to think
any evil of his unscrupulous enslavers, and always
creates a deputy, in the person of whom they receive
his reproaches and curses. In the year B.C. 18, it
would appear, Tibullus succumbed to repeated in-
roads on a health always delicate, and died, as we
learn from Ovid, with his hand clasped in that of
Nemesis. The picture of his obsequies drawn by the
author of the ' Amores ' may be in part a fancy
sketch, where, for example, it represents Delia and
Nemesis embracing at the funeral pyre, and the newer
love waving the earlier off with assurances that
" Dying, he clasped his failing hand in mine ; "
whilst Delia faltered out that, in her reign, death and
failing health were not so much as thought of; but it
is consistent enough that the avaricious Nemesis may
have closed his eyes, and taken the slight needful
pains to keep her ascendancy to the end. Whilst the
chapter of Tibullus's " generally unprosperous loves "
cannot be regarded as in all respects edifying, it is
essentially part and parcel of his life and poetry, and,
all things considered, redounds far more in what has
been seen to his credit and goodness of heart than to
that of his successive paramours.
CHAPTER HI.
T1BULLUS IN HIS CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY.
THOUGH on a cursory glance it might appear that
Tibullus was wholly absorbed in his loves, and when
suffering depression through their ill success took a
gloomy view of the world's moral government, no
careful student of his poetry can fail to notice how
stanch an observer he was of the old rites and customs
of his fathers, and how much the punctual fulfilment
of the ancient ritual of his country's religion, to say
nothing of its later and foreign accretions, was a law
to him. In keeping with this characteristic religious-
ness, he duly reverenced with offerings of first-fruits
the lone stump or old garland-wreathed stone which
represented the god of the country in the fields or
crossways, he duly kept the holidays of the Roman
Calendar, lie offered to the Genius customary and
propitiatory sacrifices on his own or his patrons' birth-
days. Hence, as well as for the collateral lore which
pious performance of such ceremonies would accumu-
late, one special phase of interest in his poetry is, so
to speak, antiquarian ; and modern readers may look
to him not in vain for light upon at least the rustic
122 TI BULL US.
festivals of Italy, some of which, find a curious parallel
in old English customs growing daily more nearly obso-
lete. One very remarkable example is the Festival of
the Ambarvalia, to which Tibullus devotes the first elegy
of his second book, in a description which is, along
with a well-known passage of the First Georgic of Vir-
gil, a chief locus classicus touching this rural celebra-
tion. That which the poet describes must be regarded
as the private festival held towards the end of April
by the head of every family, and not the public and
national feast performed by the Fratres Arvales in
May. This festival, held in honour not of Ceres only,
. as it might seem from Virgil, but of Mars also, as we
gather from Gate's treatise on Rustic matters, and, as we
learn from Catullus, of Bacchus and the gods of the
family, and even Cupid, took its name from the chief
feature of the victim offered on the occasion being
thrice solemnly led round the fields before the first
sheaf of corn was reaped, or the first bunch of grapes
cut. In its train followed the reapers, vine-pruners,
farm-servants, dancing and singing praise to Ceres or
Bacchus, and making libations of honey, wine, and
milk. The object was the purification and hallowing
of themselves, their herds, their fields and fruits, by
the rural population of Latiuni ; and it was supposed
to keep plague and pestilence from the border which
the procession perambulated. As to the victim, an
earlier admission of Tibullus in the course of his
poems lets us into the fact that with him, owing to
his circumstances, it was only a lamb, whereas richer
worshippers offered either a calf or sometimes a lamb,
SIS CIVIL AXD RELIGIOUS CAPACITY. 123
calf, and sow (suovetaurilia) together ; but in all cases
the festival wound up with a carousal and jollification
for all concerned, and furnished to the rural popula-
tion a picturesque and looked-for anniversary. Those
who are curious in finding parallels and origins for
their own country's old customs will trace to the
Ambarvalia the "Gang-days" or walkings of the
parish bounds in religious procession, which still
linger in old English parishes and boroughs, and
which at the Reformation were substituted for a
festival celebrated in the Latin Church during three
days at Whitsuntide. In this, one main object seems
to have been to solicit God's blessing on the land and
its crops ; and intimately connected with the cere-
monial which led to Rogation Days being called
Gang-days, was a customary procession. Feasting,
also, and revelry, were not forgotten ; though in the
present day the sole surviving feature is, here and
there, perambulation of the boundaries a relic, doubt-
less, of the very lustration of which Tibullus gives
the prettiest picture extant. According to him, the
whole face of nature was to keep holiday, whether
animate or inanimate, in honour of Bacchus, Ceres,
and their associate deities. Even women were to lay
by their spindles, and with ablutions, purifications, and
R'hite raiment, place themselves in accord with so pure
a festival :
" This festal day let soil and tiller rest !
Hang up the share, and give all ploughing o'er ;
Unstrap the yokes. Each ox, with chapluts drest,
Should feed at large a well-filled stall before.
124 TIBULLUS.
See the doomed lamb to blazing altars led,
White crowds behind with olive fillets bound ;
That evil from our borders may be sped,
Thus, gods of home, we lustrate hind and ground.
That ye may fend from all mischancs the swain,
And from our acres banish blight and bale,
Lest hollow ears should mock our hope of grain,
Or 'gainst weak lambs the fleeter wolf prevail.
Bold in his thriving tilth the farmer then
Logs on a blazing hearth shall cheerly pile ;
And slaves, by whom their master's ease we ken,
Frolic, and wattle bowers of twigs the while."
(C. ii. 1. 5-24.) D.
From the immediate context we gather that, if the
auspices were favourable on the showing of this rural
sacrifice, it was a signal for general relaxation and
merry-making. Tibullus would call for Falernian of
a prime old brand, and broach a cask of Chian to
boot. The revelry which in his view of things would
appropriately follow, reminds one of the orgies in
which, according to the song, " no man rose to go till
he was sure he could not stand." Constant toasting
of absent friends and patrons induced a moistness and
a reeling gait, which on this occasion was not a re-
proach or shame, but quite the contrary. It was, says
Tibullus, a usage of primeval precedent in the golden
age of man's innocency, when first the rural gods bore
a hand in instructing him to harvest his fruits, and
Uucchus assisted in organising the choral song and
dance which celebrated such harvests. Even Cupid,
who was country-born and country-bred, should bo
HIS CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY. 125
bidden, he adds, to this rural ceremonial, for it makes
all the difference whether the flock and its master
experience the smile or frown of the much - praised
god:
" Great Cupid, too, 'tis said, was born and nurst
'Mongst sheep and cattle and unbroken mares ;
fhere with unskilful bow he practised first,
Now what a skilful hand the weapon bears.
Not cattle now, as heretofore, his prey,
But blooming maids and men of stalwart frame ;
He robs the youth and makes the greybeard say,
At scornful maiden's threshold, words of shame."
But, if he comes, he is to leave aside his bow, and
hide his torches. The date of this elegy is probably
the year B.C. 23.
In the fifth elegy of the second book, to which
allusion has been already made as that in which
Messala's eldest son, Messalinus, is complimented on
his election into the College of Fifteen, one pic-
ture or episode of rural life describes the festival
of the Palilia. This was a very ancient Italian holi-
day, partaking even more than the Ambarvalia of the
character of a lustration, inasmuch as in it firo and
water were used to purify shepherds and sheep, hinds,
herds, and farm-buildings. This festival fell on the
traditionary birthday of the city of Roi >e, and was
kept in honour of Pales, the tutelary goddess of
shepherds, such as were Rome's founders. To her
were offered prayers, and sacrifices of cakes, millet,
milk, and various eatables, one solemn preliminary,
according to Ovid, being the composition of the smoke
126 TIBULLUS.
with Avhich stalls, sheep, and shepherds were purified
In the evening, after the lustration, bonfires wer<.
lighted, through the smoke of which the flocks were
driven with their shepherds thrice ; a second purifica-
tion, to which succeeded an open-air feasting on turf
benches. To this festival, which is fully described by
Ovid in his ' Fasti ' (iv. 731, &c.), allusion is made also
in the Elegies of Propertius (v. iv. 75. Paley). The
picture as given by Tibullus may be here represented,
with a note or two, from the version of Mr Cran-
stoun :
" On Pales' festival, the shepherd, gay
With wine, shall sing : then wolves be far away.
Wine-maddened, he will fire the stubble-heap,
And through the sacred flames with ardour leap.
His wife will bring her boy his heart to cheer,
To snatch a kiss, and pull his father's ear.
Nor will the grandsire grudge to tend the boy,
But prattle with the child in doting joy.
The worship o'er, the youths upon the glade
Will lie beneath some old tree's glancing shade ;
Or with their garments screen their rustic bowers,
Fill full the bowl, and crown the wine with flowers ;
Each bring his feast, and pile green turf on high,
Turf that shall festive board and couch supply.
Where drunk, the youth his sweetheart will upbraid,
And shortly after wish his words unsaid.
Though bearish now, he'll sober down to-morrow,
Swear he was mad, and shed the tear of sorrow."
(C., p. 62, 63.)
The italicised epithets have been inserted as more
literal, and the italicised lines as needing illustration.
CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY. 127
The custom of leaping through the fire, under the
notion of being purified by the smoke, is alluded to
by Propertius likewise ; and is said by Mr Keightley
to be still kept up in parts of Ireland and Scotland.
The seemingly disrespectful liberty taken by the child
with his father's cars, is explained by the peculiar
and playful kiss, given by a person to another whose
ears he held by way of handles, which Greeks and
Romans occasionally practised, and which was called
by the latter chutra. As to the old tree at the
village centre, the cross-roads, or district boundary, it
belongs to all time, and was the natural trysting-place
for the festival of Pales, as many an ancient oak or
elm discharges a like office, or designates a like tryst,
in our English counties.
The scrupulousness with -which Tibullus kept these
rural festivals, observed his dues to Ceres, Silvanus,
and the Lares, and set up a Priapus in his orchard,
accommodated against stress of weather by a shady
grot, might 05 might not be taken as an argument that
two elegies in the third and fourth books, alluding to
the Matronalia, were from his muse, and not another's.
One so wrapt up in the country may have done all,
when he had discharged his duties to the deities pre-
siding over it j or, on the other hand, one who made
so much of birthdays and anniversaries, might have
made a point of including among his special feasts the
first day of the first month (March) of the sacerdotal
year, the festival Matronalia in honour of Juno, the
goddess of married women, a season when not only
husbands but lovers were wont to present their loves
128 Tl BULL US.
with gifts, designated strence, the etrennes of New
Year's Day in Paris. The first elegy of the third hook
draws a lively picture of the stir and hustle of a day
not unlike St Valentine's morning in its latest develop-
ment ; and the second in the fourth hook, an elegant
and erotic performance, commends Sulpicia's heauty
as she appears dressed for this festival. Neither,
however, has the detail and the descriptiveness of
Tibullus's pictures of the rural feasts. Both may well
have emanated from one of Messala's set of proteges;
but any one imbued with the tone and spirit of his
genuine elegies will hesitate to admit these into that
category. But this same scrupulousness and exact-
ness to which we have referred, besides attesting the
religious spirit, according to the light that was in him,
of Albius Tibullus, extended itself to his civil status
and conduct, in relation to the powers that then were.
Not improbably he was at heart an old-fashioned
waif and stray of the republic, for whom it was
enough to be admitted to the literary Circle of that
virtuous representative of the old Roman nobles, Mes-
sala ; and who, while acquiescing in the imperial rule
from inability, and probably disinclination, to take a
prominent or active part in politics or social matters,
made a point of maintaining his independence, by
keeping aloof from the cohort of the bards of the
empire. Though Ovid can elegise his tuneful pre-
decessor in strains which were no more than justly
due to one to whom his own poetry owed not a
little, and imagine him in death associated with
Catullus, Calvus, Gallus, and other poets, we do
II IS CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITY. 129
not find Tibullus cultivating or even naming Au-
gustus or his ministers, or the members of his literary
coteries. How much or littje Horace knew of him
depends upon the genial Venusian's evidence in a
single ode and a single epistle ; and that evidence does
not go for much. There is nothing to prove that
his goodwill was warmly reciprocated ; whilst Ovid,
who was much junior to Tibullus, did not enjoy his
personal friendship. There is, at all events, consider-
able negative evidence that our poet valued and cher-
ished his independence ; and good ground for believ-
ing that he maintained it. Whether there is enough
to justify Dean Merivale's theory, " That he pined
away in unavailing despondency in beholding the sub-
jugation of his country," it would be hard to pro-
nounce, in the face of his slightly unpatriotic and
un-Roman deprecation of military service, his fondness
for ease and rustication, and his undeniable life of some-
what Anacreontic self - pleasing ; but on the other
hand, there is ample ground for the idea, broached
and shadowed forth by the same eminent historian,
that Tibullus " alone of the great poets of his day
remained undazzled by the glitter of the Caesarian
usurpation." * Akin to this independence of principle
is Tibullus's exceptional independence in literary
style : whilst all his contemporaries were addicting
themselves to Greek mythology and Alexandrine'
models, he stood alone in choice of themes and scenes
best suited to his purely Italian genius. His terse,
* History of Rome under tho Empire, iv. 602.
A.C.8.S., vol. iii. I
130 T1BULLUS.
clear, simple language, as well as thought, distinguish
him. equally from the learning and imagination of
Catullus, and the artificial phraseology and constantly-
involved constructions of Propertius. He deserves the
meed of natural grace and unrestrained simplicity, and
ranks amongst his elegiac contemporaries as par excel-
lence the poet of nature. In some respects his genius
might compare with that of Burns, though in others
the likeness fails; and perhaps it is owing to his
limited range of subjects that he has not been more
translated into English. Dart's translation, as well
as that of Grainger, is almost forgotten ; the partial
translations of Major Packe and Mr Hopkins quite so.
A few neat versions of Tibullus which occur in ' Speci-
mens of the Classic Poets,' are due to Charles Abraham
Elton, the scholarly translator of Hesiod ; but it is
to Mr James Cranstoun that the English reader who
wishes to know more of this poet than can be learned
in a comparatively brief memoir and estimate, must
incur a debt such as we have incurred in the fore-
going pages.
PROPERTIUS.
CHAPTER L
LIFE OP PROPERTIUS.
OP the youngest member of the elegiac trio it is not
hard to approximate the birth-date and establish the
birthplace. With reference to his full designation it
will suffice to say that the name of Sextus rests on
fair authority, whilst there is nothing but a copyist's
blunder and confusion of our poet with Prudentius
to account for the second name of " Aurelius " some-
times erroneously given to him. As to the date of
our poet's birth, Ovid tells us in his "Tristia"*
that he was younger than Tibullus, but older than
himself, so that whereas with Tibullus he had little
time for intimacy, with Propertius he enjoyed a tol-
erably close' literary acquaintance. This would ena-
ble us to place his birth somewhere betwixt n.c. 54
and 44, and there is a probability that it was about
* IV. x. 51-64.
132 PROPERTIUS.
B.C. 49. Like his predecessors in Koman elegy, he
was country born and bred : nursed in the TJmbriau
town of Asisium in Upper Italy, amidst the pastures
of Mevania, near the source of the Clitumnus, unless
in preference to his own evidence we choose to credit
the comparatively modern story which connects the
poet and his villa with " Spello," the modern repre-
sentative of the ancient town of Hispellum in the
same neighbourhood. Propertius, indeed, is tolerably
circumstantial on the subject where in his fifth book *
he makes the old Babylonish seer, who dissuades him
from attempting archaeological poems about "early
Rome " and the like, evince a knowledge of his ante-
cedents by telling him
" Old Umbria gave thee birth a spot renowned
Say, am I right? is that thy native ground ?
Where, dewy-moist, lie low Mevania's plains,
Where steams the Umbrian lake with summer rains,
Where towers the wall o'er steep Asisium's hill,
A wall thy genius shall make nobler still."
This account, it should be observed, is consistent with
the poet's direct answer to the queries of his friend
Tullus concerning his native place at the end of the
first book, that
"Umbria, whose hill-border crowns
The adjacent underlying downs,
Gave birth to me a land renowned
For rich and finely-watered ground."
The steaming waters, which are called the Umbrian
* EL i. ad fin.
LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. 133
lake in the first passage, are doubtless the same which
are credited with fertilising power in the second :
the same sloping river (as the derivation imports) of
Clitumnus, which a scholiast upon the word in the
second book of Virgil's 'Georgics' declares to have
been a lake as well as a river. The locale is of some
importance, seeing that it enhances our interest if
we can trace the lifelike scenes of Propertius's more
natural muse to his recollections of the Umbrian
home, from which he had watched the white herds
of Clitumnus wind slowly stall-ward at eve, had heard
the murmurs of the Apennine forests, and gazed with
delight on the shining streams and pastures of moist
Mevania. Scarcely less so, if we can account for the
exceptionally rugged earnestness of his muse by the
reference to his Umbrian blood, and the grave and
masculine temperament peculiar to the old Italian
races. In parentage, Propertius was of the middle
class, the son of a knight or esquire who had joined
the party of Lucius Antonius, and to a greater or less
extent shared the fate of the garrison of Perusium,
when captured by Octavius. A credible historian
limits the massacre there to senators of the town and
special enemies ; but the elder Propertius, if he came
off with his life, was certainly mulcted in his property ;
for whilst there are some expressions of the poet to
show that his sire's death was peaceful, though prem-
ature, it is certain that a largo slice of his patrimony
had to go as a sop and propitiation to the veterans of
Augustus. The poet's reminiscences of his early homo
must like those of Tibullus, have been associated
134 PROPERTIUS.
with the hardships of proscription and confiscation ;
with early orphanage and forfeited lands ; with such
shrunken rents and decimated acreage, as made a
young man all the keener to bring his wits into the
market, and perchance to develop talents which would
have " died uncommended," had the stimulus of stern
necessity not existed. In the same elegy * already
alluded to, allusion is made to the sweeping en-
croachments of the ruthless " government measuring-
rod," which made him fain, when he assumed the
manly toga, and laid aside the golden amulet worn by
the children of the freeborn or " ingenui," to relieve
his widowed mother of the burden which his father's
premature death had devolved on her, and to repair
to Eome with a view to completing his training for
the bar. That he was obliged to content himself with
an ordinary preparation, and to forego the higher
Attic polish, is clear from an admission to his friend
Tullust that he has yet at a much later period to
see Athens ; but further, we may guess that his
keeping terms at the bar soon became only his osten-
sible occupation in life, and that like young Horace
the treasury clerk, and Virgil the suitor, and Tibullus
the claimant, the channel which led to real fame and
competence was poetry.
" Then Phoebus charmed thy poet-soul afar
From the fierce thunderings of the noisy bar."
Of how many modern divines, and essayists, and lit-
* V. i. 129-134. f I. vi. 13.
LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. 135
terateurs has not the original destination been similar,
and similarly diverted ! It was essential, doubtless, to
Propertius's success in this divergent occupation and
livelihood that he should find a patron, to become to him
what Maecenas was to Horace, and Messala to Tibullus.
Later on, he got introduced to the great commoner,
prime minister, and patron, whose inner circle on the
Esquiline assured distinction in letters to all its mem-
bers : but his first patron was Volcatius Tullus, the
nephew of L. Volcatius Tullus, consul in RC. 33 and
proconsul in Asia, who was of the poet's own age, and
probably his uncle's lieutenant. To this Tullus are
addressed several of the elegies of the first book, and
it is reasonable to think that the link between patron
and client was one of equal friendship. A little of
the proper pride of the Umbrian rhymer comes out in
what he writes to Maecenas, at a subsequent period,
deprecating public station and prominence, and deli-
cately suggesting that in eschewing these and loftier
themes he does but imitate the retiring modesty of
his patron.
Before, however, we discuss his relations with patrons
and contemporary poets, it were well to glance at the
sources and subjects of his trained and erudite muse.
If ever epithet was fitted to a proper name, it is the
epithet of " doctus " or " learned " in connection with
that of Propertius. More than Catullus, infinitely more
than Tibullus, Propertius was imbued with and bathed
in the Alexandrian pcetry and poets. Again and again
he calls himself the disciple of the Coan Philetas,
and his ambition was to be, what Ovid designates
136 . PROPERTIUS.
him, the " Eoman Callimachus." That this ambition
was detrimental at times to his originality and true
genius, there is abundant proof in the perusal of his
elegies. His too much learning, his stores of Alex-
andrian archaeology, overflow upon his love-elegies in
such wise as to impress the reader with the unreality
of the erudite wooer's compliments, and to make him
cease to wonder that Cynthia jilted him for a vulgar
and loutish praetor. And this was not confined to his
love-poems. Where he deals with Eoman and Italian
legends, he is apt to overcumber them with parallels
from foreign mythland : and it may be said without
controversy that where he fails in perspicuity, and
induces the most irrepressible tedium, is in his un-
measured doses of Greek mythology.
It is the general opinion of scholars that the essen-
tially Eoman poems of Propertius were his first at-
tempts in poetry, and that he took the lost "Dreams,"
as he styles that poet's epic, of Callimachus for his
model of their style. If so, it is no less probable that
the self -same themes occupied his latest muse, the
mean space being given up to his erotic, and, par ex-
cellence, his Cynthian elegies. From his own showing,
the brilliant and fascinating mistress who bewitched
him, as Lesbia and Delia (we call all three by their
poets' noms de plume) had bewitched Catullus and
Tibullus, was the fount and source, the be-all and
end-all, of his poetic dreams and aspirations. Never-
theless, it may be doubted whether Propertius did
not give, in some of his poems on early Eome,
earnests of a more erudite^'if a less attractive, bal-
LIFE OF PROPERT1US. 137
ladic gift, than the more facile Ovid, whose ' Fasti '
have cast into shade his predecessor's experiments in
turning the Roman Calendar into poetry. Reserving
the story of his loves for another chapter, it will bo
advisable that in the present we should confine our-
selves to the record of his life and career, indepen-
dently of that absorbing influence. It was no doubt
a turning-point for him, when Propertius gained in-
troduction and acceptance into the literary coterie of
Maecenas. Although his difference in age, and his
probably less courtly manners and temper, interfered
with his admission to the same close intimacy as tho
lively Venusian in the minister's villa and gardens
on the Esquiline, there is abundant internal evidence
that he was welcomed there not only for his merit as
a poet, but also for the special purpose of all tho in-
troductions to that brilliant circle namely, to nurse
and raise up a meet band of celebrants of the vic-
tories and successes of Augustus. In an elegy * which
evinces the depth and breadth of his archaeological and
mythologic lore, the poet is found excusing his in-
ability to write epics or heroics, though he adds that,
could he essay such themes, it should be to commem-
orate the deeds of the victor at Actium, the triumphs
in which golden -fettered kings were led along the
Via Sacra, and the praise of his stanch friend and
servant
"In tune of peace, in time of war, a faithful subject
aye."
* II. i.
138 PROPERTIUS.
In the same spirit is breathed the address to the same
patron in the ninth elegy of the fourth book, where,
deprecating heroic poetry, Propertius gracefully pro-
fesses his readiness to rise to the height of that high
argument, if Maecenas will set him an example of
conquering his own innate dislike to prominence, and
assume his proper rank and position. If it is true of
the patron that
" Though Caesar ever gives the ready aid,
And wealth profusely proffered never fails
Thou shrink'st, and humbly seek'st the gentle shade,
And with thine own hand reef st thy bellying sails"
the poet-client insinuates that it ought to be -enough
for himself
" Enough, with sweet Callimachus to please,
And lays like thine, O Coan poet, weave :
To thrill the youth and fire the fair with these,
Be hailed divine, and homage meet receive."
Indeed, if ever his instinctive conviction of his proper
metier is shaken by the importunities of those who
would have won him over to the laureateship of the
imperial eagles, he speedily and wisely recurs to his
first and better judgment. It may be he had discovered
that to cope with such a task he needed greater plasti-
city of character than accorded with his Umbrian- origin
that he would have to smooth over defects, and, mag-
nify partial successes. Even where in the first elegy
of the third book he seems to be qualifying for the
office, and preluding his task by graceful compliments
to'jAugustus, not only do the spectres of the slaughtered
LIFE OF PROPERTIES. 139
Craasi ome unbidden across the field of compliment
opened by the emperor's successes in the East, but
chronology satisfies the reader that poetic flourishes
about vanquished India, and about " Arabia's homes,
untouched before, reeling in grievous terror," could
not rearrange or unsettle the order of fate, that not
very long, probably, after the composition of this elegy
the expedition sent against Arabia under the command
of ^Elius Gallus should come to unlooked-for defeat
and disaster. Propertius's sounder mind falls ever
back upon themes that involve no such risk of mis-
adventure from flattery or false prophecy ; and if he
plumes himself for a higher flight, it is in the strain
of undisguised deprecation of his daring
" As when we cannot reach the head of statues all too
high,
We lay a chaplet at the feet, so now perforce do I,
Unfit to climb the giddy heights of epic song divine,
In humble adoration lay poor incense on thy shrine :
For not as yet my Muse hath known the wells of Ascra'a
grove :
Permessus' gentle wave alone hath laved the limbs of
Love. / (III. i. ad fin.)
It is hard to conceive with what justice, when such
was the poet's deprecation of the court laureate's task
(to say nothing of other inconsistencies in the theory),
it can have occurred to some critics and speculators to
identify Propertius with the " bore " who pestered
Horace through the streets and ways, as ho describes
in his satire.* The weight of Dean Merivale's name
* I l<>r., Sat. I. ix. jxusim.
140 PROPERTIUS.
and knowledge may, it is true, impart strength to
tliis conjecture ; but assuredly a fair comparison of
all the data we can collect from external and in-
ternal sources towards the life of Propertius does
not lead to the conclusion that he was one
to intrude himself on the great or the success-
ful, or that lack of opportunities of introduction to
the court of Augustus, or the villa and gardens of
Maecenas, drove him to annoyance and importunity
of such as had the entree to either. It has always
seemed to us a strong note of difference, that Horace's
babbling fop is represented as addressing his victim
in short cut-and-dried interjective remarks, the very
opposite of the high-sounding, learned, and perhaps
stilted language which might have been expected of
Propertius, a poet who, one should fancy, spoke, if he
did not care to write, heroics even as Mrs Siddons is
said to have been, and talked, the queen, even off the
stage. Considering the field open to him, and the
invitations profusely given to him, this poet is entitled
to the credit of extreme moderation as regards the
incense heaped, after the fashion of his poetic con-
temporaries, upon the shrine of Augustus. His noted
poem on the " Battle of Actium " * is a fine and
grand treatment of a theme upon which to have been
silent would have been as much an admission of in-
ability to hold his own as a poet, as a proof of indif-
ference or disloyalty to the victor in that famous fight;
and who of his contemporaries would have thought
anything of the pretensions of a bard who did not
* V. vi.
LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. HI
embody in such glowing verse as he could compose
the engrossing subject of the discomfiture and subse-
quent tragedy of Cleopatra? There is little heed to
be paid to the inference from the name of Propertius
not being mentioned by Tibullus or Horace, that either
held him in contempt, the former because he resented
his claiming to be the Eoman Caflimachus. As we
have seen, Tibullus did not affect Alexandrine erudi-
tion ; and Propertius is entitled to his boast without
controversy on Tibullus's part, though he might have
found it hard to maintain it seriously in the face of
Catullus. But of that poet's fame his elegies make
but a small portion ; and we are to remember that what
Propertius prides himself upon was the introduction
of the Greek or Alexandrine elegy into Latin song.
If neither Tibullus nor Horace names him, at least
Ovid makes the amend for this ; and the fact that the
poet is equally silent as to them, need not be pressed
into a proof of insignificance, or churlishness, or lite-
rary jealousy, seeing that he is proven to have known,
appreciated, and mingled familiarly with other scarcely
less eminent poets of the period, not to omit his gen-
erous auguries of the epic poems of his friend Virgil.
With Ponticus, a writer of hexameters, and author of
a lost Thebaid, ho was on terms of pleasant friendship,
and not of rivalry in poetry or in love. He could
pay graceful compliments to the iambics of his cor-
respondent Bassus, though not without a feigned or
real suspicion that that poet's design in seeking to
widen the range of his admiration for the fair sex was
an interested motive of stepping into Cynthia's good
142 PROPERTIUS.
graces. As to Virgil, Propertius, in an elegy to
tragic poet Lynceus (who probably owes the preser-
vation of his name to his having presumed to flirt
with Cynthia at a banquet), commends that great poet
as being more fruitfully and worthily occupied ; and
commemorates his poetic achievements in strains that
have not the faintest leaven of jealousy or grudge :
" But now of Phoebus-guarded Actian shore,
And Caesar's valiant fleets, let Virgil sing,
Who rouses Troy's JEneas to the fray,
And rears in song Lavinium's walls on high :
Yield, Roman writers bards of Greece, give way
A work will soon the Iliad's fame outvie.
Thou sing'st the precepts of the Ascnean sage,
What plain grows corn, what mountain suits the vine
A strain, O Virgil, that might well engage
Apollo's fingers on his lyre divine.
Thou sing'st beneath Galsesus' pinewood shades
Thyrsis and Daphnis on thy well-worn reed ;
And how ten apples can seduce the maids,
And kid from unmilked dam girls captive lead.
Happy with apples love so cheap to buy !
To such may Tityrus sing, though cold and coy :
happy Corydon ! when thou mayst try
To win Alexis fair his master's joy.
Though of his oaten pipe he weary be,
Kind Hamadryads still their bard adore,
Whose strains will charm the reader's ear, be he
Unlearned or learned in love's delightful lore."
(C. III. xxvi.)
LIFE OF PROPERTIUS. 143
Our quotation is from Mr Cranstoun's well-considered
version, which in this instance embodies and repre-
sents the rearrangement of the original elegy by Mr
Munro. It gives us allusions in inverted sequence
to the '^Eneid,' the ' Georgics,' and the 'Eclogues,' and
contains a reference to the neighbourhood of Taren-
tum, which draws from the editor of Lucretius the
remark that Virgil may have taken refuge thereabouts
in the days when he and his father lost their lands
along with other Mantuans. " When I was at Taren-
tum some months ago, it struck me how much better
the scenery, flora, and silva of these parts suited many of
the ' Eclogues ' than the neighbourhood of Mantua." *
It is needless to say that the " precepts of the Ascrsean
Hesiod " refer to Virgil's imitation of that poet in his
' Georgics,' whilst the names of Thyrsis, Daphnis,
Corydon, and Alexis recall the ' Eclogues,' and Tity-
rus represents Virgil himself. Galesus, celebrated also
by Horace on account of its fine-fleeced sheep, was a
little river in the neighbourhood of Tarentum, ap-
parently the locality in which some of the ' Eclogues '
were written.
Amongst other less specially literary friends of Pro-
pcrtius, to whom his elegies introduce us, were J-'.lius
Gallus, already mentioned as the leader of an ill-starred
expedition to Arabia ; Posthumus, who, according to
our poet in El. IV. xii., left a faithful wife for another
campaign to the East, and whoso wife's laments arc
supposed to be described in the pleasing third elegy
of the fifth book, that of Arethusa to Lycotas. Of
* Journal of Philology, vi. 41.
144 PROPERTIUS. . -
Volcatius Tullus and his patronage we have taken
notice above. The poet's elegies to him* affection-
ately speed his parting for the East, and in due
course long to welcome his return to the Rome of
his friends and ancestors. The first supplies, inci-
dentally, evidence that Propertius had not, up to the
date of it, visited Athens ; and it is very doubtful
whether though in IV. xxi. he seems to contemplate
a pilgrimage thither in the fond hope that length of
voyage may make him forget his untoward loves, and
though iu I. xv. he gives a graphic picture of the
dangers and terrors of a storm at sea he ever really
left his native shores, or indulged in foreign travel.
There is much reason to agree with Mr Cranstoun that
the absence of direct testimony on this point negatives
the supposition ; and his periodical threats of taking
wing, and thrilling pictures of perils of waters, may
perhaps be interpreted as only hints to his mistress
to behave herself, and suggestions of desertion, which
she probably valued at a cheap rate from a knowledge
of her influence and attractions. Though full of the
mythic lore of Greece, the poetry of Propertius betrays
no eyewitness of its ancient cities or learned seats ;
and it is a more probable conclusion that he was a
stay-at-home, though not xmimaginative, traveller.
His continued attachment to Cynthia a long phase
in his life-history to be treated separately tends to
this conclusion ; and we know so little of him after
the final rupture with her, that silence seems to con-
firm the unlocoruotiveness of his few remaining years.
* I. vi. and IV. xxii.
LIFE OF PROPER! 1 US. 145
In one so wedded to Greek traditions, a treading of
classic soil must have reawakened long-banished song ;
but Propertius died comparatively young, like Catul-
lus and Tibullus, and he probably ceased to write and
to live about the age of thirty-four, or from that to
forty. Though Pliny's gossip credits him with lineal
descendants which involves a legal union after Cyn-
thia's death there is everything in his extant remains
to contradict such a story. He doubtless sang his
mistress in strains of exaggeration for which one makes
due allowance in gleaning his slender history ; but
substantially true was his constant averment that
Cynthia was his last love, even as she was his first.
It is irresistible to cling to the belief that the com-
paratively brief space of life he lived without her and
her distracting influences was the period of his finest
Roman poems, and of the philosophic studies to M'hich
his Muse in earlier strains looked forward. He is
supposed to have died about B.C. 15. In his poetry
he contrasts strongly with his co-mates Catullus and
Tibullus. As erotic as the first, he is more refined
and less coarse without being less fervent. On tlie
other hand, he can lay no claim to the simplicity and
nature-painting of Tibullus, though he introduces into
his verse a pregnant and often obscure crowding of
forcible thoughts, expressions, and constructions, which
justify the epithet that attests his exceptional learn-
ing. In strength and vigour of verse he stands pre-
eminent, unless it be when he lets this learning have
its head too unrestrainedly. And though the verdict
of critics would probably bo that he is best in the love
A.c.8.8., vol. iii. K
146 PROPERTIUS.
elegies, and in the less mythologic portions of these,
where pathos, fervour, jealous passion supply the
changing phases of his constant theme, it may he
doubted if some of the more historic and Roman
elegies of the fifth book do not supply as fine and
memorable a sample of his Muse, which inherited
from its native mountains what Dean Merivale desig-
nates " a strength and sometimes a grandeur of lan-
guage which would have been highly relished in the
sterner age of Lucretius." His life and morality were
apparently on the same level as those of his own gen-
eration; but if a free liver, he has the refinement to
draw a veil over much that Catullus or Ovid would
have laid bare. And though his own attachment was
less creditable than constant, that he could enter into
and appreciate the beauty of wedded love, and of care-
ful nurture on the elder Roman pattern, will be patent
to those who read the lay of Arethusa to Lycotas, or
peruse the touching elegy, which crowns the fifth
and last of his books, of the dead Cornelia to .^Emilius
Paullus.
CHAPTER II.
CYNTHIA'S POET.
As with Catullus and Tibullus, there would be scant
remains of the poetry of Propertius scant materials
for a biography of him if his loves and the story of
them were swept out of the midst. With the poets of
his school Love was the prime motive of song; and he
was truly a sedulous example of his own profession :
" Many have lived and loved their life away :
Oh, may I live and love, then c^ie ps, they !
Too weak for fame, too slight for war's stern rule,
Fate bade me learn in only Love's soft school."
(I. vi. 27.) M.
Yet it must be confessed that, however forcible and
fervid the verse in which he commemorates this love,
the results fail to impress us with the same reality and
earnestness as his predecessors, partly perhaps because
" he makes love by book," and ransacks the Greek
poets and mythologists for meet comparisons with his
mistress ; and partly because occasionally his verses
betray the fickleness of a man of pleasure and gal-
lantry, whose expressions and protestations are to be
taken only at their worth. Famous as the elegies
148 PROPERTIUS.
to Cynthia have become in after-time, and customary
as it is to regard Propertius as the sympathetic friend
of ill - used lovers, we fear that Cynthia had too
much justification for her inconstancy in his be-
haviour; and that however tragic his threats and
resolutions, his passion for her was much less absorb-
ing and earnest than that of Catullus for Lesbia, or
Tibullus for Delia. His own confession (IV. xv. 6)
acquaints us with an early love-passage for a slave-girl,
Lycinna, before he was out of his teens ; and though
he assures Cynthia that she has no cause for un-
easiness lest this passion should revive, a number of
casual allusions make it manifest that at no period
was he exclusively Cynthia's, though her spell no
doubt was strongest and most enduring. Who, then,
was this lovely provocative of song, to whom love-
elegy is so much beholden ? It seems agreed that
the name of Cynthia is a complimentary disguise, like
those of Delia and Lesbia : and according to Apuleius,
the lady's real name was Hostia, derived from Hostius,
a sire or grandsire of some poetic repute, and not im-
probably an actor or stage-musician, an origin which
would explain her position as born of parents of
the freedman class. It would be consistent too with
the tradition of her accomplishments and cultiva-
tion, which we find from Propertius to have been
various and considerable, as indeed they had need
to be, to appreciate the compliments of a bard whose
escritoire must have teemed with classical and mytho-
logical parallels for her every whim and humour, for
every grace of her form and every charm of her mind.
CYNTHIA'S POET. 149
To borrow his manner of speech, Phoebus had gifted her
with song, Calliope with the Aonian lyre : she excelled
in attractive conversation, and combined the char-
acteristics of Venus and Minerva. It cannot have
been in empty compliment that Propertius styles her
" his clever maid," and prides himself on his success
in pleasing her in encounters of wit and raillery, or re-
gards her appreciation of " music's gentle charms " as
the secret of his favour in her eyes. The whole tone
of his poetic tributes bespeaks a recognition of her
equality as to wit and intellect, and we may fairly
credit her with the mental endowments of the famous
Greek hetaerae. Amongst her other attractions was a
skill in music and dancing, commemorated by the poet
in II. iii. 9-22 :
" 'Twos not her face, though fair, so smote my eye
(Less fair the lily than my love : as snow*
Of Scythia with Iberian vermil vie ;
As flout in milk the petals of the rose) ;
Nor locks that down her neck of ivory stream,
Nor eyes my stars twin lamps witli love aglow ;
Nor if in silk of Araby she gleam
(I prize not baubles), does she thrill me so
As when she leaves the mantling cup to thread
The mazy dance, and moves before my view,
Graceful as blooming Ariadne led
The choral revels of the Bacchic crew ;
Or wakes the lute-strings with ^Eolian quill
To music worthy of the immortal Nine,
And challenges renowned Corinna's skill,
And rates her own above Erinna's line." C.
150 PROPERTIUS.
The quatrains above quoted express the two-fold
charm of intellectual and physical grace, and, with
lover-like caution, weigh warily the preponderance of
compliment to either side of the balance. If Cynthia's
dancing is graceful as Ariadne's, and her music recalls
the chief female names in Greek lyric poetry, Pro-
pertius introduces a subtle and parenthetic make-
weight in praise of her exquisite complexion (which
he likens, after Anacreon and Virgil, to rose-leaves
in contact with milk, or " vermilion from Spain
on snow"), her flowing ringlets, and her star-like
eyes. Elsewhere he sings explicitly of her form and
figure:
" The yellow hair, the slender tapering hand,
The form and carriage as Jove's sister's, grand ; " D.
or again twits the winged god, Cupid, with the loss
to the world he will inflict if he smite him with his
arrows :
" If thou shouldst slay me, who is left to hymn
Thy glory, though the champion be but slight,
Who praises now her locks and fingers slim,
Her footfall soft, her eyes as dark as night ? " D.
"With these and many more hints for a portrait of his
lady-love, to be gleaned from Propertius's impassioned
description, it is no marvel that he was so plain-spoken
in declining solicitations of Maecenas to exchange
the elegy for the epic. To quote Mr Cranstoun on
this subject in his version of the first elegy of the
second book :
CYNTHIA'S POET. . 151
" It is not from Calliope, nor is it from Apollo,
But from my own sweet lady-love my inspiration
springs.
If in resplendent purple robe of Cos my darling dresses,
I'll fill a portly volume with the Coan garment's praise :
Or if her truant tresses wreathe her forehead with caresses,
The tresses of her queenly brow demand her poet's lays.
Or if, perchance, she strike the speaking lyre with ivory
fingers,
I marvel how those nimble fingers run the chords along ;
Or if above her slumber-drooping eyes a shadow lingers,
My tranced mind is sure to find a thousand themes of
song.
Or if for love's delightful strife repose awhile be broken,
Oh ! I could write an Iliad of our sallies and alarms ;
If anything at all she's done if any word she's spoken
From out of nothing rise at once innumerable charms."
A charmer with so perfect a tout ensemble was cer-
tain to command the passionate admiration of so
inflammable a lover ; and hence the history of his
erotic poetry consists in an alternation of his rap-
tures, his remonstrances, his despairs, according as
Cynthia was kind, or volatile, or cruel. And to tell
the truth, a lover of Cynthia could have had little
smooth sailing on a sea where the winds of jealousy
were evermore rising to a hurricane. He may not
have been worthy of ideal fidelity, but certainly from
the traits we have of Cynthia's faulty character, she
must have given her bard and lover only too much
cause for uneasiness. Fitful in her fancies, alike jeal-
ous and inconstant, she was expensive in her tastes,
152 PROPERT1US
extravagant in her addiction to dress, unguents, and
ornaments ; and a victim to the indulgence of the
wine-cup, though the poet does not seem to have
found so much fault with this, as with her partiality
for the foreign worship of Isis, for which it will be
recollected that Delia also had a weakness. All these
proclivities suggest the costliness of such a union as
that which, as far as we can judge, subsisted between
Propertius and Cynthia, not a union recognised by
law, but a connection occupying the borderland be-
tween recognised respectability and open vice. Whilst
a touching elegy (II. vii.) congratulates Cynthia on
the throwing out or postponement of a law which
would have obliged Propertius to take a wife and to
desert his mistress, it is obvious that he enjoyed his
immunity at a very costly price, to say nothing of her
keen eye to the main chance, which made him justly
fearful of the approach of richer admirers. Mr Crans-
toun infers from the twentieth elegy of the fourth
book "that a marriage of some sort existed between
Propertius and Cynthia, in which the rights and
duties of the contracting parties were laid down and
ratified;" and doubtless such compacts were really
made at Eome, even where, as in this case, legal matri-
mony was out of the question. But the bond was of a
shifting and elastic nature ; and if Propertius hugged
his chain, it must have been with a grim sense at
times of the cost and disquiet which it entailed upon
him. Cynthia was dressy and extravagant, and if
she took the air, loved to tire her hair in the newest
fashion, wear the diaphanous silk fabrics of Cos, and
CYNTHIA'S POET. 153
to indulge in perfumes from the banks of the Syrian
Orontes. Her poet perhaps may have had a doubt
whether these adornments were all for his single sake,
and this may have given a point to the praises of
simplicity and beauty unadorned, which in several
elegies gem his poetry. Thus in El. ii, B. I. :
u With purchased gauds why mar thy native grace,
Nor let thy form on its own charms depend ?
No borrowed arts can mend thy beauteous face :
No artist's skill will naked Love befriend.
See of all hues the winsome earth upsends,
How ivy with no training blooms the best !
How rarest grace and growth the arbute blends
In mountain dells remotest, loneliest !
And streams that glide in wild unstudied ways,
And shores with native pebbles glistering,
Outvie the attempts of art : no tutored lays
Sound half so sweet as wild bird's carolling." D.
It is indeed hardly to be wondered that poetry ot
so didactic a strain had slight influence upon a lady
of Cynthia's proclivities. Whilst there were others,
if Propertius failed her, who, if they could not dower
her with song or elegy, had purse-strings to relax at
her bidding, when
a For fan a peacock's tail she now demands,
Now asks a crystal ball to cool her hands ;
Begs me, grown wroth, to cheapen ivory dice,
And Sacra Via's glittering trash "
and were fain to win her smiles by lavish presents
from the fancy-ware shops of that frequented lounge,
154 PROPERTIUS.
it was labour lost in the poet to preach to one, who
weighed her lovers "by their purses, of Eomulean sim-
plicity, or to sigh
" Would none were rich in Rome, and Caesar's self
Could be content in straw-built hut to dwell !
Our girls would then ne'er barter charms for pelf,
But every home of hoar} 1 - virtue tell."
(III. vii.) CL
Yet he could not forbear to address her ever and anon
in verses, now complimentary, now spiteful, and not
seldom a mixture of both in pretty equal proportions.
One of his complaints against her is that she dyes
her hair and paints her face ; for which causes, in an
exaggerated strain of fault-finding, he likens her to
the " woad-stained Britons."* Where in the same
passage he vows vengeance against those "who dye
their own or wear another's hair," he testifies to the
prevalence of a mistaken resort to hair-dyes on the
part of the fair sex in all ages, as well as, we may
add, to the consensus of the lords of the creation
against such disfigurement of nature's gifts ; yet it is
just possible, from several hints here and there in the
Elegies, that Cynthia was driven by the inroads oi
time to these resorts. According to one reading of
El. xxiv. 6 in the third book, her poet represents
her as " treading with aging foot the Appian Way ; "
and there are several other passages which render it
probable that she was older than Propertius, whom
we know that she predeceased : if so, it was in
* III. ix. 6
CYNTHIA'S POET. 155
keeping with her character and avocations that she
should repair the ravages of time, and seek to disguise
her grey hairs and her crow's-feet. Whatever her
years, however, her spell must have been more than
commonly lasting; for seldom have a lover's verses
recorded so many and diverse endeavours to win,
retain, or recover his mistress's good graces, as the
first four books of the Elegies of Propertius. And
this in spite of several drawbacks which usually
estrange or impair love. Though he had saws and
instances by the score to quote against the abuse of
wine, Cynthia is an exception to the general rule :
" Though beauty fades, and life is wrecked by wine,
Though wine will make a girl her love forget,
Ah ! how unchanged by cups this maid of mine !
Unspoilt 1 unhurt ! drink on, thou'rt beauteous yet !
Whilst low thy garments droop towards the bowl,
And with unsteady voice thou reod'st my lay,
Still may the ripe Falernian glad thy soul,
And froth in chalice mellower every day."
(III. xxv.) D.
Though he is ever more or less a prey to jealousy
not without foundations, and suffers no slight pangs
from stumbling upon her in company with those
convenient " cousins " whom all flirts from time im-
memorial have " loved in a sisterly way "
" Sham cousins often come, and kiss thee too,
As cousins always have a right to do ; "
(II. vi. 7, 8.)
156 PROPERTIES.
or, worse still, from learning that he is excluded for
the sake of a rich and stupid praetor from Illyria, of
whom he writes
" From the Illyrian land the other day
Your friend the praetor has returned, I learn,
To you a fruitful source of welcome prey,
To me of inexpressible concern.
Yet reap the proffered harvest, if you're wise
And fleece, while thick his wool, the silly sheep ;
And when at last in beggary he lies,
For new Illyrias bid him cross the deep "
(III. vii.) C.
in spite of these provoking rebuffs and infidelities, the
poet still courts and sighs for his inconstant charmer ;
and whether she be near or far, follows her in fancy and
with the breath of cultivated song. Allowance must
of course be made for the change of winds in the
course of a love which could not be said even by
courtesy to run smooth. It is a rare phenomenon to
find Propertius in such bliss and rapture as the fol-
lowing lines betoken :
" With me if Cynthia sink in longed-for sleep,
Or spend the livelong day in dalliance fain,
I see Pactolus' waters round me sweep,
And gather jewels from the Indian main.
My joys then teach me kings must yield to me ;
May these abide till Fate shall close my day !
Who cares for wealth, if love still adverse be ?
If Venus frown, be riches far away ! "
CYNTHIA'S POET. 157
Much oftener he is (if we are to believe him, aud not
to set dovn his desperate threats and bemoanings to
an appeal for pity) on the eve of a voyage, to put
the sea between himself and the faithless one. There
is strong reason to suspect that these voyages never
came off, and that the poet's lively pictures of ship-
wreck were drawn from imagination rather than ex-
perience. But it was a telling appeal to herald his
departure, picture his perils, and reproach the fair
one with her indifference :
As airily thou trimm'st thy locks as thou didst yester-
morn,
And leisurely with tireless hands thy person dost
adorn ;"
and not less effective to return to the subject, after
the supposed disaster had occurred, with a slight in-
fusion of generous blame towards himself. There
would have been infinite pathos in the elegy which
follows, if only it had been founded on facts. But
it was a dissuasive to Cynthia's fickleness, not the
description of a fait accompli ;
" Rightly I'm served, who had the heart to fly !
To the lone halcyons here I make my moan :
Nor shall my keel its wonted port draw nigh
Adrift on thankless shore my vows are thrown.
Nay, more! the adverse winds espouse thy side!
Lo ! in rude gusts how fiercely chides the gale!
Will no sweet Peace o'er yon wild tempest ride ?
Must these few sauds to hide my corpse avail /
158 PROPERTIUS.
Nay, change thy harsh complaints for milder tones .'
Let night on yonder shoals my pardon buy.
Thou wilt not brook to leave unurned my bones :
Thou wilt not face my loss with tearless eye.
Ah ! perish he who first with raft and sail
The whirlpools of a hostile deep essayed !
Liefer I'd let my Cynthia's whims prevail,
And tarried with a hard, yet matchless, maid
Than scan a shore with unknown forests girt,
And strain mine eyes the welcome Twins to sight.
At home had Fate but stilled my bosom's hurt,
And one last stone o'er buried love lain light,
She should have shorn her tresses o'er my tomb,
And laid my bones to rest on cushioned rose,
Called the dear name above the dust of doom,
And bade me 'neath the sod uncrushed repose.
Daughters of Doris, tenants of the deep,
Unfurl the white sail with propitious hand ;
If e'er sly Love did 'neath your waters creep,
Oh ! grant a fellow-slave a kindly strand."
(I. xvii.) D.
Perhaps upon the principle of omne ignotum pro
magnifico, the theme of shipwreck was a favourite one
with Propertius, who elsewhere vouchsafes to Cynthia
an elegy depicting his dream of such a fate betiding
her in the Ionian sea :
" Thy vessel's shivered timbers round thee strewn,
Thy weary hands for succour upward thrown,
Confessing all the falsehoods thou hadst told,
While o'er thy matted hair the waters rolled."
CYNTHIA'S POET. 159
It will be seen in the third line that he was not
above administering a covert reproof in the midst
of poetic compliments ; but the latter certainly pre-
dominate, as he declares that in her extremity, as it
seemed, he often feared lest
" In the Cynthian sea,
Sailors should tell thy tale, and weep for thee ; "
and lest, if Glaucus had beheld her bright eyes as she
sued for help
" The Ionian sea had hailed another queen,
And jealous Nereids would be chiding thee,
Nisoea fair, and green Cymothoe."
The dream, says the poet, became so painful, that ho
awoke amidst the imaginary operation of taking a
header. But in his waking thoughts, and in con-
templation of a real voyage, he volunteers to bear her
company, witli protestations that
" If only from mine eyes she never turn,
Jove with his blazing bolt our ship may burn :
Naked, we'll toss upon the self-same shore
The wave may waft me, if thou'rt covered o'er."
(III. xviii.) C.
In another elegy of the same book we learn that her
poet clearly believed that his mistress's destiny after
such a catastrophe would be that of a goddess or a
heroine. When an autumn and winter at Home had
endangered her life with malaria, he contemplates her
apotheosis with the satisfaction of thinking of the com-
pany she will hereafter keep :
1GO PROPERTIUS.
" Thou'lt talk to Semele of beauty's bane,
Who by experience taught will trust thy tale ;
Queen-crowned 'mid Homer's heroines thou'lt reign,
Nor one thy proud prerogative assail."
(III. xx.)
On the whole, the round of topics of which Proper-
tius avails himself for the poetic service of his lady-
love is extensive enough to furnish the most assiduous
lover's vade-mecum. He has songs for her going
out and coming in. He has serenades for her door at
Borne, which remind us of the famous Irish lover ; he
has soliloquies on her cruelty, addressed to the winds,
and woods, and forest-birds ; he has appeals from a
sick-bed, and the near prospect of death, out of which
he anon recovers, and proposes, after the manner of
lovers in all time
" Then let us pluck life's roses while we may,
Love's longest term flits all too fast away."
(I. xix. 25.)
And there is one elegy in which he descends to threats
of suicide, and another where he gives directions
for his funeral, and prescribes the style and wording
of his epitaph :
" On my cold lips be thy last kisses prest,
While fragrant Syrian nard one box thou'lt burn ;
And when the blazing pile has done the rest,
Consign my relics to one little urn.
Plant o'er the hallowed spot the dark-green bay,
To shade my tomb, and these two lines engrave :
Here, loathsome ashes, lies the bard to-day,
Who of one love was aye the faithful slave." (III. iv.)
CYNTHIA'S POET. 161
More amusing, perhaps, than most of his expressions
cf poetic solicitude for this volatile flame of his, is the
elegy he indites to her, when she has taken it into her
head to run down to the fashionable watering-place of
Baiae, where his jealousy no doubt saw rocks ahead,
though he is careful to disown any suspicions as to
her conduct, and only urges in general terms that the
place is dangerous. Here is his delicate caution in the
eleventh elegy of the first book :
" When thou to lounge 'mid Baiao's haunts art fain,
Near road first tracked by toiling Hercules,
Admiring now Thesprotus' old domain,
Now famed Misenum, hanging o'er the seas;
Say, dost thou care for me, who watch alone ?
In thy love's corner hast thou room to spare ?
Or have my lays from thy remembrance flown,
. ' Some treacherous stranger finding harbour there ?
Rather I'd deem that, trusting tiny oar,
Thou guidest slender skiff in Lucrine wave ;
Or in a sheltered creek, by Tenthras' shore,
Dost cleave thy bath, as in lone ocean cave,
Than for seductive whispers leisure find,
Reclining softly on the silent sand,
And mutual gods clean banish from thy mind,
AB flirt is wont, no chaperon near at hand.
I know, of course, thy blameless character,
Yet in thy fond behalf all court I fear.
Ah ! pardon if my verse thy choler stir,
Blame but my jealous care for one so dear.
A.C.S.S., vol. iii. L
162 PROPERTIU&.
Mother and life beneath thy love I prize,
Cynthia to me is home, relations, bliss ;
Come I to friends with bright or downcast eyes
'Tis Cynthia's mood is the sole cause of this.
Ah ! let her, then, loose Baise's snares eschew
Oft from its gay parades do quarrels spring,
And shores that oft have made true love untrue :
A curse on them, for lovers' hearts they wring." D.
In contrast to his disquietude at her sojourn, by the
seaside should be read his calmer contemplation of
her proposal to rusticate in the country a poem which
evinces an exceptional appreciation of the beauties of
nature, to say nothing of a rare vein of tenderness.
Here she is out of the way of tempters and beguilers
by day and by night, afar from fashionable resorts, and
the fanes and rites which cloak so many intrigues :
" Sweet incense in rude cell thou'lt burn, and see
A kid before the rustic altar fall ;
With naked ankle trip it on the lea,
Safe from the strange and prying eyes of alL
I'll seek the chase : my eager soul delights
To enter on Diana's service now.
Awhile I must abandon Venus' rites,
And pay to Artemis the bounden vow.
I'll track the deer : aloft on pine-tree boughs
The antlers hang, and urge the daring hound ;
Yet no huge lion in his lair I'll rouse,
Nor 'gainst the boar with rapid onset bound.
My prowess be to trap the timid hare,
And with the winged arrow pierce the bird,
Where sweet Clitumnus hides its waters fair,
'Neath mantling shades, and laves the snow-white herd."
CYNTHIA'S POET. 163
Yet even into this quiet picture creeps the alloy of
jealousy. The poet concludes his brief idyll with a
note of misgiving :
" My life, remember thou in all thy schemes,
I'll come to thee ere many days be o'er ;
But neither shall the lonely woods and streams,
That down the mossy crags meandering pour,
Have power to charm away the jealous pain
That makes my restless tongue for ever run
'Tween thy sweet name and this love-bitter strain :
' None but would wish to harm the absent one.' "
(III. x.) C.
Without professing to note the stages of Propertius's
cooling process a process bound to begin sooner or
later with such flames as that which Cynthia inspired
we cannot but foresee it in his blushing to be
the slave of a coquette, in his twitting her with her
age and wrinkles, nay, even in the bitterness with
which he reminds her that one of her lovers, Panthus,
has broken loose from her toils, and commenced a
lasting bond with a lawful wife. According to Mr
Cranstoun's calculation, the attachment between Pro-
pertius and Cynthia began in the summer of B.C. 30,
and lasted, with one or more serious interruptions, for
five years. The first book which be dignified with
her name, was published in the middle of B.O. 28.
The others, and among them the fourth, which records
the decline of the poet's affections, were left unfinished
at his death. In the last two elegies of the fourth
book, it is simply painful to read the bitter palinodes
164 PROPERTIUS.
addressed to her whom he had so belauded. He .8
not ashamed to own that
" Though thine was ne'er, Love knows, a pretty face,
In thee I lauded every various grace "
and to declare his emancipation in the language of
metaphor :
" Tired of the raging sea, I'm getting sane,
And my old scars are quite skin-whole again."
(IV. xxiv.)
And one sees rupture imminent when he indites such
taunting words as follow :
" At hoard and banquet have I been a jest,
And whoso chose might point a gibe at me ;
Full five years didst thou my staunch service test,
Now shalt thou bite thy nails to find me free.
I mind not tears unmoved by trick so stale ;
Cynthia, thy tears from artful motives flow ;
I weep to part, but wrongs o'er sobs prevail ;
'Tis thou hast dealt love's yoke its crushing blow.
Threshold, adieu, that pitied my distress,
And door that took no hurt from angered hand ;
But thee, false woman, may the inroads press
Of years, whose wrack in vain wilt thou withstand.
Ay, seek to pluck the hoar hairs from their root ;
Lo, how the mirror chides thy wrinkled face !
Now is thy turn to reap pride's bitter fruit,
And find thyself in the despised one's place :
Thrust out, in turn, to realise disdain,
And, what thou didst in bloom, when sere lament :
Such doom to thee foretells my fateful strain ;
Hear, then, and fear, thy beauty's punishment."
(IV. 25.) D.
CYNTHIA'S POET. 165
After this, one should have said there was scant open-
ing for reconciliation ; yet Mr Cranstoun, with some
probability, adduces the seventh elegy of the last book
in proof that Cynthia, if separated at all, must have
been reunited to her poet before her death. In it
Propertius represents himself as visited in the night-
season by Cynthia's ghost, so lately laid to rest beside
the murmuring Anio, and at the extremity of the
Tiburtine Way, as the manner of the Romans was to
bury. Whether he was in a penitent frame there
might be some doubt, if the ghost's means of informa-
tion were correct ; but certainly his testimony with
regard to her
" That same fair hair had she, when first she died ;
Those eyes though scorched the tunic on her side "
points to his presence at her death and obsequies, and,
presumably, to his reconciliation, prior to that event.
Not, indeed, that the ghost's upbraidings testify to
much care or tenderness, on her lover's part, before or
after. She hints that she was poisoned by her slave
Lygdamus, and that Propertius neither stayed her
parting breath, nor wept over her bier :
" You might have bid the rest less haste to show,
If through the city gates you feared to go."
liut the truth was, another and a more vulgar mistress
had stepped into her place :
"One for small hire who plied her nightly trade,
Now sweeps the ground, in spangled shawl arrayed,
And each poor girl who dares my face to praise,
With double task of wool-work she repays.
166 PROPERTIUS.
My poor old Petale, who used to bring
Wreaths to my tomb, is tied with clog and ring.
Should Lalage to ask a favour dare,
In Cynthia's name, she's flogged with whips of hair :
My gold-set portrait well the theft you knew,
An ill-starred dowry from my pyre she drew."
To cruelty towards her predecessor's servants the
now mistress has added, it seems, the appropriation of
her gold brooch. As Mr Cranstoun acutely notes,
Cynthia must have died under Propertius's roof, or
care, for him to have had the disposal of her personal
ornaments ; and the inference is that death aione, as
the poet had often vowed in the days of his early devo-
tion, finally and effectually severed a union so famous
in song. Even the ghost, whose apparition and whose
claims on her surviving lover we have given from Mr
Paley's version of the fifth book, seems to rely upon
an influence over him not quite extinct, where she
enjoins him
" Clear from my tomb the ivy, which in chains
Of straggling stems my gentle bones retains.
Where orchards drip with Anio's misty dew,
And sulphur springs preserve the ivory's hue,
Write a brief verse, that travellers may read,
As past my tombstone on their way they speed,
' In Tibur's earth here golden Cynthia lies ;
Thy banks, O Anio, all the more we prize.' "
(V. vii.) P.
And she vanishes with a fond assurance that, who-
ever may fill her place now, in a short time both will
be together, and "his bones shall chafe beside her
CYXTHIA'S POET. 167
bones." "We have slight data as to the fulfilment of
this prophecy none, in fact, except the tradition of
his early death. It is pleasant to assume that his
latter years were free from the distractions, heart-aches,
and recklessness of his youth, and that, as time sped,
he wrapt himself more and more in the cultivation
of loftier themes of song, inspired by stirring history
and divine philosophy. And- yet, the world of song
would have lost no little had Cynthia's charms not
bidden him attune his lyre to erotic subjects, and taught
him how powerful "for the delineation of the master-
passion in its various phases of tenderness, ecstasy,
grief, jealousy, and despair, was the elegiac instrument,
which he wielded with a force, earnestness, pathos,
and originality most entirely his own."
CHAPTER TIL
PROPEETIUS AS A SINGER OP NATIONAL ANNALS
AND BIOGRAPHY.
IN the ninth elegy of the fourth book, Propertius had
promised, under the guidance and example of Maecenas,
to dedicate his Muse to grander and more national
themes. He had encouraged the hope that he would
some day
" Sing lofty Palatine where browsed the steer
Rome's battlements made strong through Remus slain
The royal Twins the she- wolf came to rear
And loftier themes than these, shouldst thou ordain :
I'll sing our triumphs won in East and "West, '
The Parthian shafts back-showered in foul retreat,
Pelusium's forts by Roman steel opprest,
And Antony's self-murder in defeat :" C.
and that hope he appears to have satisfied in the latter
years of his life by re-editing some of his earlier Roman
poems, and enlarging the list of them by added elegies.
In the first half 'of the first elegy of his last book
appears a sort of proem to a volume of Roman ' Fasti,'
to which were to belong such elegies as " Vertumnus,"
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 169
"Tarpeia," the "Ara Maxima" of Hercules, and the
"Legend of Jupiter Feretrius," and the " Spolia Opima,"
as well as such stirring later ballads of the empire in
embryo as the " Battle of Actium." It would seem
that the poet was either disinclined for his task or
dissatisfied with his success ; for it is probable that
most of those we have enumerated are but revised
and retouched copies of earlier work, whilst the gems
of the book, " Arethuse to Lycotas " and " Cornelia,"
are in another vein, of another stamp, and, as it seems
to us, of a more mellow and perfect finish. That
Propertius never approached the task of historic elegy
with his whole heart, or even with the liveliness
nd versatility with which Ovid afterwards handled
kindred topics in his ' Fasti,' peeps out from the ab-
rupt cutting short of the " Early History of Home " in
the first elegy, and the supplement to it in a wholly
different vein, where we are introduced to a Babylonian
seer, and made acquainted with several data of the
poet's personal history. The earlier portion has been
ascribed to the period before his connection with
Cynthia : the latter, which is not now to our purpose,
belongs to his later revision-period. Perhaps it was
the grandness of the programme that eventually con-
vinced him of its intractability; yet nope can regret
that the poet did not burn the half-dozen proofs of
what ho might have achieved as a poetic annalist or
legend-weaver. To take for example the first elegy
from the version of Mr Paley, who in these Iloman
elegies is/always accurate and often not unpoetical
there it fancy aiftl picturesqueness in the description
170 PROPERTIUS.
of the olden abode of the founders of Rome on the
Palatine, which was twice burnt in the reign of Augus-
tus, but the commemoration of which was dear to the
powers that were in Propertius's day :
"Where on steps above the valley Remus' cottage rises
high,
Brothers twain one hearthstone made a mighty principality.
By that pile, where now the senate sits in bordered robes
arrayed,
Once a band of skin -clad fathers, clownish minds, their
council made.
Warned by notes of shepherd's bugle there the old Quirites
met ;
Many a time that chosen hundred congress held in meadows
wet.
O'er the theatre's wide bosom then no flapping awning
swung ;
O'er the stage no saffron essence cool and grateful fragrance
flung.
None cared then for rites external, none did foreign gods
import,
Native sacrifice the simple folk in fear and trembling sought.
No Parilia then the people kept with heaps of lighted hay,
Now with horse's blood we render lustral rites of yesterday."
(V. i. 10-20.)
The Parilia, or Palilia, were the rural festival already
described in the third chapter of the sketch of Tibullus
(p. 126), and a contrast is intended here between the
rude bonfire of early days and the later lustration, for
which the blood of the October horse was de rkgle.
The poet proceeds to surround early Rome with all
the proud vaunts of its legendary history its Dardan
origin, its accretions from the Sabine warriors and
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 171
Tuscan settlers, its glory in the legend of the she-
wolf:
"Nought beyond the name to Roman nursling from his
kin remains :
Save that from the wolf that reared him wolfish blood he
still retains"
a sentiment which Lord Macaulay embodies in his
" Prophecy of Capys:"
* But thy nurse will bear no master,
Thy nurse will bear no load,
And woe to them that shear her,
And woe to them that goad !
When all the pack, loud baying,
Her bloody lair surrounds,
She dies in silence, biting hard,
Amid the dying hounds."
The historic part of the elegy closes with a fine rhap-
sody, in which its author aspires to the glories of a
nobler Ennius, and repeats his less ambitious claim to
rank as the Roman Callimachus. In the second elegy
of this book, Vertumnus, the god of the changing year,
is introduced to correct wrong notions as to his name,
functions, and mythology, with an evident penchant
for that infant etymology which is so marked a feature
in the ' Fasti' of Ovid. In the fourth a most beauti-
ful and finished elegy the love-story of Tarpeia, if an
early poem, has been so retouched as to make us regret
that Propertius had not resolution to go on witli his
rivalry of " father" Ennius. It opens with a descrip-
tion of the wooded dell of the Capitolino hill, beneath'
172 PROPERTIES.
the Tarpeian rock where, to the native fancy, La
belle Tarpeia still is to be seen at intervals, bedecked
with gold and jewels, and dreaming of the Sabine
leader for whose love she was content to prove trai-
tress. To a stream or fountain which it enclosed she
had been wont to repair to draw water for Vesta's
service, and thence chanced to espy Titus Tatius, the
Sabine leader, engaged in martial exercises. With
no sordid thirst of gold, as the Tarpeia of Livy, but
smitten by the kingly form, the maiden lets Vesta's
fire go out in her preoccupied dreams :
" Oft now the guiltless moon dire omens gave,
Oft to the spring she stole her locks to lave :
Oft silver lilies to the nymphs she bare,
That Koman spear that handsome face might spare:"
and so often did she brood and soliloquise over her
comely knight, that at last her scheme of treachery
took form and substance, and the rural festival, which
was Eome's founder's holiday, - afforded meet oppor-
tunity for her betrayal of the city by the secret postern,
from which she found daily egress :
" To slack the watch the chief his guards had told,
The trump to cease, the camp repose to hold.
Their time is hers : Tarpeia seeks the foe,
The contract binds, herself the road to show.
The ascent was hard, the feasters feared no fraud,
The barking dogs are silenced by the sword :
Fatigue and wine brought slumber : Jove alone
Wakes that the traitress may her crime atone.
The gate is opened, passed ; the fort betrayed ;
The day of marriage chosen by the maid.
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 173
But Rome's proud foeman is by honour led :
' Marry,' he cried, ' climb thus my royal bed ! '
He spoke : his comrades' shields upon her thrown,
She sank o'erwhelmed meet treachery for her own.
From him, the sire, the rock received its name :
He lost a daughter, but he gained a fame."
(V. iv. ad fin.) P.
Treachery akin to Tarpeia's is familiar to the readers
of the legends of many lands ; and there is in the
Norman-French legend of "Fulk Fitzwarin" in our
own chronicles an account of the capture of Ludlow
Castle, or Dynan, through the treachery of one
Marion de la Bruere, who was led to it by a secret
passion for a captive knight, Sir Ernald de Lisle.*
We must barely glance at the two poems in which
Propertius, with the same eye to early topography and
to explanatory etymology, recounts the legends of
Hercules and Cacus, and the origin of the title of
Jupiter Feretrius. The former poem has a fine par-
all-l in the eighth book of the ' ^Eneid ; ' the latter
strikes the reader as an early effort of the poet, which
would scarcely have been missed if it had not sur-
vived. With the foundation by Hercules of the Ara
Maxima after his punishment of Cacus for stealing the
oxen of Geryon, he connects the low part of the city
called the Velabrum (where he and his oxen rested,
and near which Cacus plied his nefarious trade),
through the sails (vela) which the first inhabitants
used to navigate the swamp. The so-called Forum
* Se Chronicle of Ralph de Coggesluill, p. 275 d eq. Master
of the Rolls' Series.
174 PROPERTIVS.
Boarium of local topography is referred to the lowing
herds in the verses :
"My oxen, go, my club's last toil,
Twice sought for, twice the victor's spoil.
Give tongue, my beeves, the sounds prolong :
Hence men shall celebrate in song,
For memory of my matchless might,
The Forum from ox-pastures hight."
(V. ix. 15-20.) P.
And the refusal of the maidens of the cell and spring
of the Bona Dea to admit Hercules to approach, when
athirst, the precincts which no male might enter under
pain of blindness, is made the immediate cause of his
dedicating a mighty altar, turning the tables on the
other sex, and serving by its consecration to com-
memorate the hero's Sabine title of " Sancus."
It may be a fair question whether these learned ety-
mologies are as attractive an element in Propertius's
poetry as the phases of his love, or the praises of
Maecenas and Augustus, to say nothing of the laments
over Psetus and young Marcellus. Of the same fibre
as these last-named elegies is the " Battle of Actium,"
in the fifth book, a sort of Epinician poem of a date
near the end of our poet's life, on the occasion of the
quinquennial Actian games established by Augustus.
As if in act to sacrifice, the poet assumes the functions
of a priest, and prefaces his song of triumph with all
the concomitant ceremonies which Callimachus intro-
duces into his hymns. Our quotation shall be taken
from Mr Paley's translation when it is fairly launched,
a sample of descriptive poetry of high merit :
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 175
"A gulf called Phoebus' Bay retires on Athamaniau
shores
Where pent within the Ionian wave no longer chafes and
roars.
Here memories meet of Julian fleet, of deeds at Actium
done,
Of safe and easy entrance oft by sailors' offerings won.
'Twas here the world's vast armies met ; the pine-built
galleys tall
Seemed rooted in the sea, but not one fortune favoured all.
The one Quirinus, Troy-born god, had with his curse
pursued,
Nor brooked the thought of llonian fleets by woman's
lance subdued.
On that side Caesar's fleet, the sails well filled with breezes
free,
And standards that in many a fight had flown victoriously.
Moved now the fleets, in crescents twain, by Nereus' self
arrayed :
The sheen of arms upon the waves in dimpling flashes
played.
Then Phoebus from his Delos came, and bade it wait
awhile
Nor dare to move : for angry winds once bore that floating
isle.
On Caesar's ship astern he stood, and ever and anon
A wondrous sight, a wavy light as from a torch there
shone.
No flowing locks adown his neck the vengeful god had
brought,
Nor on the shell to wake the spell of peaceful music
sought,
But as with looks of death he glared on that Pelopid
king,
And caused the Greeks their dead in heaps on greedy pyre*
to fling ;
176 PROPERTIUS.
Or when he scotched the Python-snake, and all the might
disarmed
Of those huge serpent coils, which erst the unwarlike
Muse alarmed." (V. vi. 15-36.) P.
Here, as in the address of Phoebus from the stern of
Augustus's galley, the poet is quickened to a fire and
enthusiasm which befits his subject, and of which the
accomplished scholar from whom we have quoted is not
insensible. In one line of it, the sentiment,
" It is the cause that overawes or lends the soldier might,"
is an anticipation of Shakespeare's adagial lesson,
" Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just ;"
and the bard's conclusion takes the form of pervading
festivity, whilst it merely glances at the principal
military exploits of Augustus, and hints that he
should leave some " fields to conquer " to his sons.
Yet after the taste of this heroic vein already given,
it would be hard to part with Propertius upon ground
where there is little room for his rare gift of pathos.
And so two beautiful elegies which exhibit him at
his best, and in his tenderest mood, have been kept to
the last. The one is the letter of Arethuse to her hus-
band Lycotas on a campaign ; the other the imaginary
appeal of the dead Cornelia to her husband, Paullus.
The first is proof positive that Ovid does not deserve
the credit which he claims in his ' Art of Love ' of
having originated the style of poetry which we know
as Epistles ; and Ovid never wrote anything so really
pathetic and natural. Of both we are fortunate in
having free yet adequate translations in graceful verse
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 177
by a late scholar and man of affairs and letters, Sir
Edmund W. Head, to which we give the preference
in presenting them to English readers. For "Are-
thuse to Lycotas" it has been suggested with pro-
bability that we might read in plain prose " JElia.
Galla to Postumus," since in the twelfth elegy of
the fourth book Propertius has addressed verses to
the latter on his leaving his wife for an expedition
against the Parthians. The question is unimportant.
It suffices that the love-letter in the fifth book is a
copy of the lorn bride's heart-pourings, very true to
nature in its struggle between the pride of a soldier's
wife and the love and jealous misgivings of a doting
woman :
" Men tell me that the glow of youthful sheen
No longer on thy pallid face they see :
I only pray such changes in thy mien
May mark the fond regret thou feel'st for me.
When twilight wanes and sinks in bitter night,
I kiss thy scattered arms, and restless lie, .
And toss complaining till the tardy light
Hath waked the birds that sing of morning nigh.
The scarlet fleece, when winter evenings close,
I wind on shuttles for thy warlike weeds ;
Or study in what course Araxes flows,
And how the Purthians press their hardy steeds.
I turn the map, and struggle hard to learn
Where God hath placed the land and where the sea,
What clinles are stiff with frost, what summers burn,
And guess what wind may waft thee home to me."
A.p.8.8., vol. iii. M
178 PROPERTIUS.
The simple expression of her lonely days, and the
little lap-dog that whines for its master sharing her
hed by night, of her dread lest her lord should rashly
provoke some single combat with a barbarian chief,
and of her delight could she see him return safe,
triumphant, and heart-whole, are unmatched by any-
thing in Propertius, unless it be the elegy on the
premature death of Cornelia, in which she is supposed
by the poet to console her widower husband, -ZErnilius
Paullus, the censor and friend of Augustus. The
theme had elements of grandeur in Cornelia's ancestry
(she was daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio and Scrib-
onia), and in the vindication, as from the dead, of her
fair fame and due place among honoured elders, which
had seemingly been unjustly assailed. Cornelia died
in 16 B.C. ; and if the poet's death occurred in B.C. 15,
we may take this elegy, as it would be pleasant to do,
as his swan's song. It is not, like many poems of Pro-
pertius, prodigal of mythology and Roman annals, yet
it appeals to both with force and in season. Where
the speaker proclaims her blameless life and high
descent before the infernal judges, she opens with
the boast
" If any maid could vaunt her sires in Eome,
Ancestral fame was mine on either side :
For Spam and Carthage decked with spoil the home,
Where Scipio's blood was matched with Libo's pride."
E. W. H.
And afterwards she pleads her readiness to have sub-
jected her character and innocence to such tests as
NATIONAL ANNALS AND BIOGRAPHY. 179
uhose of the famous Vestals, Claudia and Emilia (the
former the mover of a vessel that had foundered in
Tiber, the latter rekindler of Vesta's fire with her
linen robe), if it needed
"Judge or law to guide
One in whose veins the blood of all her race .
Swelled with the instinct of a conscious pride,
And bade maintain a Koman matron's place/
In other stanzas breathes the distinctive pride of a
mother who has borne sons to inherit an ancient
lineage, and of a wife, who, even in death, has
cherished her ambition of winning honour. But the
climax of pathos is in the last verses, where she
addresses her husband and children in order :
" Be careful if thou e'er for me shalt weep
That they may never mark the tears thus shed :
Let it suffice thyself to mourn in sleep
The wife whose spirit hovers o'er thy bed :
Or in thy chamber, if thou wilt, aloud
Address that wife as if she could reply :
Dim not our children's joys with sorrow's cloud,
But dj#y the tear, and check the rising sigh !
You too, my children, at your father's side
In after years a step-dame if you see,
Let no rash word offend her jealous pride,
Nor indiscreetly wound by praising me..
Obey his will in all : and should he bear
In widowed solitude the ills of ajje,
Let it be yours to prop his steps with care,
And with your gentle love those woes assuage.
180 PROPERTIU&
I lost no child : 'twas mine in death to see
Their faces clustered round : nor should I grieve
If but the span of life cut off from me
Could swell the years in store for those I leave."
E. W. H.
It is meet to part from Properties with this lay on his
lips, which might make us fain to believe what, in
truth, the facts and probabilities appear to forbid
the story of Pliny that, after Cynthia's death, the poet
contracted a lawful union, and transmitted to a lawful
issue the inheritance of his name and genius. It is
pretty certain that the poems to Cynthia are the chief
memorial and representatives of these ; and indeed
the sole, if we were to except the two exquisite poems
last quoted, one or two others to his patrOns, and
a song apropos of his " Lost Tablets." His compara-
tively early death allows us, by the light of a brief but
brilliant life, to conceive what he might have been.
His extant books, and the loving pains bestowed on
them by commentators and translators, have been of
use in picturing, in some measure, the man and the
poet as he was.
THE END.
643
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