CATULLUS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH SWEETEST of Roman singers, Catullus has won the hearts of his readers both in ancient and in modern times by his perfect sincerity, his exquisite tenderness, his absolute ingenuousness. Strange anomaly, a love poet with a really great love, he has told his story with simple directness, expressed its varying phases with compelling candor, traced its course, which ran any way but smoothly, with a range of feeling that places his lyrics among the truest and most spontaneous utterances in literature. At once buoyant and moody, with equal capacity for great happiness and for great suffering, his poems show him now striking the stars, now plunged in depths of woe. Yet all told, after reading his "little book," with its alternate sunshine and shadow, it is the more sombre tone that prevails; and the lighter pieces, while of lasting charm in themselves from their exuberance of spirits, their air of good fellowship, their humorous and satirical touches, have another and perhaps, from the point of view of the book as a whole, a still more striking effect in that they act as foils to those poems of the Lesbia group in which the poet's feelings find their most passionate expression. These are of singular intensity, some of them written in the heyday of his hopes and happiness, some in times of doubt and disillusion, some telling of his struggle between his love for Lesbia and his knowledge of her faithlessness, more than one a renunciation, all examples of genuine self-revelation, the record of a rare spirit who happened upon misfortune. He was born at Verona in 84 B. C. Almost the whole period of his literary activity, however, was spent in Rome, and it was there that he met Lesbia, as she is called in his poems, who seems to have given the first stimulus to his lyrical gift. While her identity has not been finally determined, it is probable that she was none other than Clodia, the sister of Clodius, the notorious enemy of Cicero. His affair with her lasted about four years, from 61-58. In 57 he joined the suite of the propraetor Memmius, who was going out to Bithynia. On returning to Rome in the following year, he showed an increased interest in politics, bitterly opposing Caesar and his party. There is no reference in his writings to any event later than 54, and it is assumed that he died soon after that year. Besides the Lesbia lyrics, the verses to different friends, and other occasional pieces, we have a number of epigrams and some longer poems, among which may be mentioned the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, an epyllion or miniature epic, into which is woven the story of Theseus and Ariadne; the Attis, describing the self-mutilation of a young devotee of Cybele; the Epithalamium of Julia and Manlius, one of the finest products of the poet's genius; and Berenice's Hair, in which the hair itself gives the true history of its elevation from the head of Berenice, the sister, wife, and queen of Ptolemy Euergetes, to a place in the heavens. While these, in contrast to the best of the shorter poems, show in many respects the influence of the tenets of the group of "new poets," among whom Catullus' closest literary friends were, and who, in violent reaction from the standards of the older national school, looked to Alexandrian poetry as the only means of literary salvation, yet there are in almost all of them striking manifestations of those qualities of imagination and true poetic insight which make Catullus one of Rome's greatest poets. ON THE DEATH OF LESBIA'S SPARROW (III.) 1 1 LOVES and Graces mourn with me, Poor bird, thy doing 't is, that now My loved one's eyes are swollen and red, SIR THEODORE MARTIN. 1 The number of the poem in the complete collection. 10 15 20 DEDICATION OF HIS PINNACE1 (IV.) THAT pinnace, friends, can boast that erst 'T was swiftest of its kind; Nor swam the bark whose fleetest burst This boast, it dares the shores that bound The Cyclad islands sea-girt round, The wide Propontis to gainsay, There, ere it swam 'mid fleetest prows, 10 15 1 Pointing out to some friends an old pinnace beached somewhere near his villa on the shore of the Lago di Garda, Catullus tells how it had once borne him home from Asia Minor. After mentioning the most important places touched at or passed on the voyage, he dedicates the hulk to Castor and Pollux, twin gods of navigation. 2 The Adriatic Sea. The voyage is traced backward from Italy to Asia. 3 In the Aegean Sea. 4 Sea of Marmora. 5 A hill near the south coast of the Black Sea. A city on the Black Sea. Ye knew it then, and all its race, And know the pinnace too, Thy lofty summit grew; And in the waves that wash thy shores Thence many vainly raging seas Or prosperous to its course the gale Spread full and square the straining sail. For then no storm could shake; When erst from that remotest wave It sought this limpid lake: 1 But, ah! those days are fled at length, And fled with them are speed and strength. Now old, worn out, and lost to fame, It dedicates this shatter'd frame, GEORGE LAMB. 40 1 Lake Benacus, now the Lago di Garda. The last part of the voyage was up the rivers Po and Mincio. 2 The constellation Gemini was supposed to be Castor and Pollux. |