CHAPTER III.
CATULLUS BEFORE AND AFTER THE MISSION TO BITHYNIA.
The fever of Catullus for Lesbia asserts for itself a first 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. lxviii. 15-19, he says, according to Mr Ellis's "Longs and Shorts"—
Whiles in jollity life sported a spring holiday,
Youth ran riot enow; right well she knows me, the Goddess—
She, whose honey delights blend with a bitter annoy,"—
he probably wrote those poems of a more or less scurrilous and unproducible 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, more than other poems distinctly later in date, the urbanity which Catullus could assume upon occasion. Some of them are simply reproductions of local gossip and
