Catullus wasted alike his love and the finest lyrics of which the Latin boasts. The coquettish beauty at first gloried in her conquest of Rome’s most popular poet, and appears for a time to have been true. Then she grew cold, and cast him off for new admirers. But Catullus, though outraged by her fickleness, could not overcome his unworthy passion:—
“I curse her every hour sincerely,
Yet hang me—but I love her dearly.”
At last, however, he renounced his faithless mistress, bidding her adieu in an ode which closes with one of his most beautiful similes:—
“Nor give that love a thought which I
So nursed for thee in days gone by,
Now by thy guile slain in an hour,
E’en as some little wilding flower,
That on the meadow’s border blushed,
Is by the passing ploughshare crushed.”