Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius/Chapter 1
CATULLUS.
CHAPTER I.
THE LIFE OF VALERIUS CATULLUS.
Valerius Catullus—about whose prænomen 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 evidence 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.C., the death of Clodius in 52, and the civil wars in 49-47 amongst the number, forbids the probability 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 Poem lii. 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,"[1] and so that the poet ridiculed a mere prospect, and not an accomplished fact—
By when he shall be consul swears!"
Similarly, the argument for a much later date than 57 B.C. for Catullus's lampoons on Cæsar 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 oversight 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.C. 54 and in 53,[2] 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 admonitus locorum, like Horace, and does not deal in playfully-described miracles to 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. He does not indeed utterly ignore the locality, for one of his most graceful pieces is a rapture about Sirmio (C. xxxi.), 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 age for his education must have begun the weaning process; 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 seems to have retained 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 Rome; 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 Rome, 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 volatility 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 Rome," wrote the poet to Manlius—
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 Cæsar 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 prætor'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 scanty exchequer and shabby equipment whilst in the suite of Memmius in Bithynia, cut rather at that ill-conditioned and illiberal prætor 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-
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 prætor, Caius Memmius, in Bithynia, attracted by the literary prestige of that governor, who was the friend and patron of Lucretius. From him, however, he derived 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—
My prætor—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, we know that he had two country-houses,—one at the Lago di Garda (which some have thought is still represented by the ruins of a considerable edifice at the extremity 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 extent 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 a housekeeper;[3] 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 manipulation all his own, characterises his other than erotic poetry. It is possible that the imitations of Alexandrine 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 whose 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 imperfect 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 have just named may be set beside the touching and pathetic poem to his brother as proofs of his exquisite command of very different veins, although in his hours of youthful gaiety he could throw off light lays on passing 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 Rhætean headland; and to this landmark, as it were, of his life, this heartbreaking journey, and the desolation of the home to which he returned, must be referred his sad lines to Hortalus, Manlius, and Cornificius. If to this we add the late realisation of Lesbia's utter wantonry (a chapter in the poet's history 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 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 Roman matrons. This idol shattered, its worshipper undeceived, and the brother whom he loved with a pure affection torn 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 discovered, for collecting the volume of his poems, which he 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 verse illustrates the binding and preparing of a Roman 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:—
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!"—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 consul'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 circulated against Catullus. And to our apprehension the defence of the poet—
But wherefore should their lines be so?"—
- ↑ Cic. in Vatin. Interrog., 2. 6. 5. 11.
- ↑ Some allusions in C. xii. to Furius and Aurelius, and in C. xxix., are later than Cæsar'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 Cæsar's instance defended in B.C. 54.
- ↑ "To my domains he set an ampler bound,
And unto me a home and mistress gave." - ↑ Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 342.