Donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque—
show that they were written in the heyday of his passion. The lines in the poem, welcoming Veranius,—
Visam te incolumem audiamque Hiberum
Narrantem loca, facta, nationes—
seem to speak of some adventures encountered in Spain: and from the fact that three years later the two friends, who are always coupled together as inseparables by Catullus, went together on the staff of Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Caesar, to his Province of Macedonia, it seems a not unwarranted conjecture[572] that they were similarly engaged at this earlier time, and had gone to Spain in the train of Julius Caesar, and had returned with him to Rome in the middle of the year 60 B.C. The twelfth poem, which is interesting as a testimony to the honour and good taste of Asinius Pollio, then a boy of sixteen, was written somewhat earlier, while Veranius and Fabullus were still in Spain.
The first hint of any rift in the loves of Catullus and Clodia is contained in the 68th poem, written in the form of a letter to Manlius—
Quare, quod scribis Veronae turpe Catullo, etc.
Catullus had retired to Verona on hearing of the death of his brother, and he was for a time so overwhelmed with grief as to become indifferent both to poetry and love. He is as sincere and unreserved in the expression of his grief as of his former happiness, and as completely absorbed by it. He writes to Hortensius, enclosing, in fulfilment of an old promise, a translation of the 'Coma Berenices' of Callimachus, but at the same time expressing his loss of all interest in poetry owing to his recent affliction,—
Etsi me adsiduo confectum cura dolore
Sevocat a doctis, Ortale, virginibus, etc.