Plate XXI ARRETINE POTTERY
aufer abhinc lacrumas, barathre, et compesce querelas ...
cedit enim rerum nouitate extrusa uetustas
semper et ex aliis aliud reparare necesse est;
nec quisquam in barathrum, nec Tartara deditur alta.
materies opus est ut crescant postera sæcla;
quæ tamen omnia te, uita perfuncta, sequentur:
nec minus ergo ante hæc quam tu cecidere cadentque.
sic alid ex alio nunquam desistet oriri;
uitaque manciplo nulli datur, omnibus usu.[22]
Death has no sting for him:
num quid ibi horribile apparet? num triste uidetur
quidquam? non omni somno securius exstat?[23]
Lucretius was, of course, set down by Cicero, as was Shakespeare by Dryden, as being rude and unpolished. His poem is indeed sheer didactic argument with occasional digressions, and he strings his points together with the bald transitional words and phrases of argumentative prose. But in virility of thought and expression, even in majesty of sound and force of vivid imagery, he is, when he cares to be, on a plane quite above and away from the ordinary sphere of classic Latin poetry. Almost alone among Roman writers he has a message of his own to deliver. His fellow-countrymen thought little of him, and failed to preserve any details of his biography. The monks of the Middle Ages consigned him to the hell he had flouted, and Jerome provided him, five hundred years after his death, with an end edifying to piety, but quite incredible to any one who has read his work with sympathy. He was said to have died of a love potion, and to have composed his poem in the intervals of delirium. He appears to have lived between 100 and 50 B.C.
In addition to the tragedies and epics which noblemen threw off as an elegant pastime for their superfluous leisure hours, love-poetry, pasquinades, and vers de société travelled merrily from salon to salon. If Lucretius carries the heaviest metal of Latin poets, Catullus has by far the lightest touch. He writes with an ease which makes Horace seem laboured, and with a simplicity which makes Propertius and even Ovid look like pedants, though Catullus himself, like all Romans, thought fit occasionally to adopt the classical pose, and fill his verses with learned allusions. If it were not for the influence of the schoolroom, to which most of Catullus’s work is for the best of reasons unknown, he would be recognised as possessing far more of the vital spark of poetry than Horace. Roman culture, being mainly second-hand, is almost entirely lacking in the quality of fresh youth which we enjoy in such writers as Chaucer and the early Elizabethan singers. Catullus, therefore, the earliest important lyric poet of Rome, is by no means unsophisticated. On the contrary, he is a clever son of the forum—a boulevardier, one might say—with a pretty but savage wit in reviling democrats like Cæsar and Mamurra. But, with his truly Italian scurrility, he combines the quintessence of Italian charm. When the inspiration takes him he is simple, direct, and natural. Indeed, the shorter poems of Catullus seem to me to reveal more of the
Plate XXII COIN PLATE I