robber. Mr. Palmer quotes Plaut. (Poen. 5, 5, 13; Pers. 3, 4, 5; Bacch. 2, 3, 40), and others.—R. F. B.
v. 6. Involasti, thou didst swoop—still metaphor of the prey-bird.—R. F. B.
C. xxvi. v. 3. Still the "Bora" of the Adriatic, extending, with intervals, from Trieste to Bari. It is a N.N. Easter of peculiar electrical properties, causing extreme thirst, wrecking ships, upsetting mail-trains, and sweeping carriages and horses into the sea. Austral, the south wind, is represented in these days by the Scirocco, S.S.E. It sets out from Africa a dry wind, becomes supersaturated in the Mediterranean, and is the scourge of Southern Italy, exhausting the air of ozone and depressing the spirits and making man utterly useless and miserable.—R. F. B.
C. xxviii. v. 10. These expressions, like those in carmen xvi. ante, are merely terms of realistically gross abuse.
C. xxviiii. v. 5. Cinaede Romule. The epithet is here applied in its grossest sense, which again is implied in the allusion to the spoil of Pontus; for this, as Vossius proves, can only be understood to mean the wealth obtained by Caesar, when a young man, through his infamous relations with Nicomedes, king of Pontus—as witness two lines sung by Caesar's own soldiers on the occasion of his triumph:
Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Galliam;
Nicomedes non triumphat, qui subegit Caesarem.
v. 13. Defututa Mentula = a worn-out voluptuary. Mentula is a cant term which Catullus frequently uses for a libidinous person, and particularly for Mamurra.
v. 24. Pompey married Caesar's daughter, Julia, and is commonly supposed to be the "son-in-law" here meant; but Vossius argues with some force, that socer and gener apply, not to Caesar and Pompey, but to Caesar and Mamurra. Those words, and the corresponding terms in Greek, were often used in an unnatural sense, as for instance in an epigram on Noctuinus, attributed to Calvus, in which occurs this very line, Gener socerque perdidistis omnia.