may be seen about Eastern bazaars helping themselves to whatever dainties they prefer from the stalls of the
faithful. See Agriculture, vol. i. p. 387.CATTOLICA, a town of Sicily, in the province of Girgenti, and 15 miles north-west of the town of that name. In the vicinity there are extensive deposits of sulphur and rock salt. Population, 6380.
CATULLUS, C. Valerius, one of the most brilliant and original among Latin authors, belongs to the Ciceronian age, and is one of the two poets whose works adorn and illustrate the last years of the Roman republic. Our knowledge of his life is almost entirely derived from his own writings. The few statements concerning him which have been received on external evidence require to be confirmed or corrected by reference to allusions con tained in these writings. The most important of these external evidences are the statements of Jerome, in the continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, under the year 87 B.C. : " Gaius Valerius Catullus, scribtor lyricus Veronaa nascitur," and, under 57 B.C. : " Catullus xxx. aetatis anno Romse moritur." Questions have been raised, and variously answered, in regard to the correctness both of the names assigned to the poet, and of the dates of his birth and death given in these passages. Although he appears to speak of himself in his poems only by the name of Catullus, there is no controversy as to the Gentile name, Valerius. Suetonius, in his Life of Julius Caesar (ch. 73), mentions the poet by the names " Valerium Catullum." Other persons who had the cognomen Catullus belonged to the Valerian gens. Among these, the best known is M. Valerius Catullus Messalinus, one of the Delator -es in the reign of Domitian, and one of the personages introduced in the famous scene at the Alban Villa of the emperor, described in the fourth satire of Juvenal:—
"Et cum mortifero prudens Veiento Catullo."
The testimony of inscriptions shows, further, that this name was common in the native province of Catullus, and belonged to other inhabitants of Verona, besides the poet and his family (Schwabe, Qu&stiones Catullianae, p. 27). Scholars are still divided in opinion as to whether his ftrcenomen was Gaius or Quintiis. In the best MSS. the volume is called simply Catulli Veronensis liber, and this is the title which his English editor, Prof. Robinson Ellis, adopts. For the name Gaius we have the undoubted testimony, not only of Jerome, which rests on the much earlier authority of Suetonius, but also that of Apuleius. In support of the second, a passage is quoted from the Natural History of Pliny (xxxvii. 6, 81), where in some editions the prSenomen Q, is prefixed to the name. The Q. is, however, omitted in the best MSS., and in other passages of the same author the poet is spoken of as " Catullus Veronensis." The mistake is supposed to have arisen from a confusion with Q. Catulus, the colleague of Marius in the Cimbric War, himself also the author of lyrical poems. The only other ground in favour of adopting the latter name is a conjectural emendation of ScaKger in the 67th poem (line 12), where he changes the quite of the MSS. into " Quinte." Though a question on which such eminent scholars as Mommsen, Haupt, L. Miiller, and apparently Mr Ellis, take one side, while Schwabe, W. S. Teuffel, and Mr Munro (Journal of Philology, iii.) take the other, can scarcely be considered absolutely settled, yet the arguments adduced by Schwabe and Mr Munro for accepting the authority of Jerome and Apuleius seem difficult to answer. A more important question is raised concerning the dates of the poet s birth and death. It is quite certain, from allusions contained in the poems, that the date of his death given by Jerome (57 B.C.) is wrong, and that Catullus survived the second consulship of Pompey (55 B.C.) (cf. Iv. 6, cxiii. 2), and was present in August of the following year at the prosecution of Vatiuius, by Licinius Calvus (cf. liii.) From the allusion in Hi. 3.—
" Per consulatuin perierat Vatinius,"
it was assumed, till the appearance in 1862 of Schwabe s Quaestiones Catullianae, that Catullus must have lived to witness the consulship bestowed on Vatinius in the end of 47 B.C. This consideration induced Lachmann to fix on 77 B.C. instead of 87 B.c. as the date of the poet s birth. It has, however, been shown by Schwabe, arid is now generally admitted, that the line " Per consulatum," &c., refers to the fact that Vatinius, after being praetor in 55 B.C., was in the habit of boasting of the certainty of his attaining the consulship, as Cleopatra was in the habit of confirming her most solemn declarations by appealing to her hope of one day administering justice in the Capitol (cf. Haupt. Quaestiones Catullianae," contained in voL i. of his Opuscula, 1875). We have thus certain evidence that Catullus lived till the month of August 54 B.C., but there is no allusion in his poems to any event of a later date than the prosecution of Vatinius. Some of the poems (as xxxvii. and Iii.) may very probably have been written during his last illness. He seems to have lived just long enough to collect his works together, to dedicate them to Cornelius Nepos, and to see his
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"lepidum novum libellum Arido modo pumice expolitum."
If he died in 54 B.C. or early in 53 B.C. there must be a further error either in the first or the second of Jerome s statements. Catullus must either have been born later than 87 B.C. or have lived to a greater age than thirty. The difficulty in regard to the first supposition is that it increases the disproportion between the ages of the poet and his mistress Clodia, who must have been born about 94 B.C. But as he was supplanted in her affections by a still younger man, M. Caelius Rufus, who appears for a time to have been equally infatuated by her, and as Cicero in his defence of Caelius describes her as one " qua? etiam aleret adolescentes et parsimoniam patrum suis tumptibus sustentaret" (Pro M. Ccelio, ch. xvi. 1), this difficulty is not a serious objection to the date. Catullus is described by Ovid, in true keeping with all the characteristics of his poetry, as " hedera juvenilia cinctus Tempora" (Amor., iii. 9, 61); and this description seems more applicable to a man who dies in his thirtieth year than to one who dies three or four years later. Further, the age at which a man dies is more likely to be accurately remembered than the particular date either of his death or of his birth. The common practice of recording the ages of the deceased in sepulchral inscriptions must have rendered a mistake less likely to occur in that respect, than in respect of the consulship in which he was born. Other instances can be given of the carelessness of Jerome in respect to dates, and Mr Munro gives a probable explana tion of the mistake in the confusion between the first and the last of the four consulships of Cinna.[1] It seems, there fore, on the whole most likely that the words " xxx. aetatis anno" are correct, and that Catullus was born in 94 B.C., in the consulship of Cn. Papirius Carbo II. and L. Cornelius Cinna IV.
by passages in Ovid and Martial. Pliny the elder, who was born at Como, speaks of Catullus in the preface to his Natural History, as his " countryman " (conterraneus), and the poet speaks of Verona as his home, or at least his temporary residence, in more than one place (Ixvii. 34,
Ixviii. 27, xxxv. 3) ; and in mentioning the Transpadani
- ↑ This ia also suggested as possible by Schwabe, who, however, pre fers adhering to the date 87 B.C.
