that the reason why he insists on the napkin's restitution, on pain of a thorough lampooning, is this:—
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 Fabullus."
—(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 some prætor's staff; and so they had been to Spain with Cnæus Calpurnius Piso, a commissariat officer with prætorian powers, whom collateral evidence shows to have been a selfish and needy voluptuary, whose ménage 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 rôle of friend, and from which one gathers an idea of a literary lounger's interest in travellers' tales (C. ix.)—
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 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.
