essential Roman than all the rest of Roman literature put together. We have the innocent pleading of the April lover in:
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit breuis lux
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.[24]
and the awful simplicity of his wrath at betrayal:
Cæli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,
nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.
We have a more genuine-sounding love of nature in his praises of Sirmio, and a more natural pathos in the famous lament for his brother, than any other Latin poet can give us. In one species of composition, the Epithalamium, he is supreme. For example:
flere desine, non tibi Au-
runculeia, periculum est
nequa femina pulchrior
clarum ab Oceano diem
uiderit uenientem.
talis in uario solet
diuitis domini hortulo
stare flos hyacinthinus.
sed moraris, abit dies:
prodeas, noua nupta.
prodeas, noua nupta, si
iam uidetur, et audias
nostra uerba. uiden? faces
aureas quatiunt comas:
prodeas noua nupta.[25]
The music of this, with its beautiful imagery and refrains, is no doubt based upon an Alexandrian foundation. There is a distinct echo of Theocritus. But it is also distinctively Italian, and the greatest of modern Italian poets, Carducci, writes like a legitimate descendant of Catullus. Catullus has as little biography as Lucretius. He must have died at an early age in the fifties B.C. He was a poor man. He had only a town house and two villas, one on the Lago di Garda and one at Tivoli. He hated Cæsar and loved Cicero. That his “Lesbia” was the infamous Clodia is generally asserted. I do not believe it.
These two poets, Lucretius and Catullus, then, stand almost alone as representatives of Republican Roman literature on the poetical side. Both are Romanising various Alexandrian Greek modes, but both have something genuinely Roman, a quality which we may best describe as virility, to add to their originals. This was the point from which a genuine Roman literature might have taken its departure. Instead of that, the next era is that of a courtly school of classicists, largely writing to order, who gave to Latin its distinctively classical bent.