The poems written in the two last years of the poet's life do not indicate any emancipation from the coarser passions and the fierce animosities of the period immediately preceding the Bithynian journey. To this later time may be assigned the famous lampoons on Julius Caesar and Mamurra, the poems referring to some of his Veronese amours, those addressed to Juventius, and the reckless, half-bantering, half-savage assaults on 'Furius and Aurelius,' who were both the butts of his wit and the sharers of his least reputable pleasures. They seem to have been needy men, though of some social standing[576], probably of the class of 'Scurrae,' who preyed on his purse and made loud professions of devotion to him, while they abused his confidence and his character behind his back. Some of the poems of his last years, however, are indicative of a more genial frame of mind and of happier relations with the world. It was at this time that he enjoyed the intimate friendship of Licinius Calvus[577], to whom he was united by similarity of taste and of genius, as well as by sympathy in their personal and political dislikes. Four poems—one certainly among the very last written by Catullus—are inspired by this friendship, and all clearly prove that at least this source of happiness was unalloyed by any taint of bitterness. Two other poems, the final repudiation of Lesbia, and the bright picture of the loves of Acme and Septimius, which, by their allusions to the invasion of Britain, and to the excitement preceding the Parthian expedition of Crassus, show unmistakeably that they belong to the last year of his life, afford conclusive evidence that neither the exhausting passions, the rancorous feuds, nor the deeper sorrows of his life had in any way impaired the vigour of his imagination or his exquisite sense of beauty. Perhaps the latest verses addressed by Catullus to any of his friends are those lines of tender complaint to Cornificius, in which he begs of him some little word of consolation—
Maestius lacrimis Simonideis.
The lines—
Malest, me hercule, et est laboriose,
Et magis magis in dies et horas—
might well have been drawn from him by the rapid advance of his fatal illness, and the phrase 'lacrimis Simonideis' is suggestive of the anticipation of death rather than of the misery of unfortunate love[578]. Yet, if we are to regard Catullus as himself responsible for the final arrangement of his poems, and if we suppose that there was any principle in their arrangement, the position of the poem between those two utterly incongruous in tone, 'Salax taberna,' and 'Egnatius quod candidos habet dentes,'—both directed against his rivals in the last stage of his liaison with Lesbia,—leaves some doubt as to whether the poem may not belong to the period of his fatal passion.
The length as well as the diction, rhythm, and structure of the 64th poem—
Peliaco quondam prognatae, etc.—
shows that it was a work of much greater labour and thought than any of those which sprang spontaneously out of the passion or sentiment of the moment. Probably in the composition of this, which he must have regarded as the most serious and ambitious effort of his Muse, Catullus may have acted on the principle which he commends so warmly in his lines on the Zmyrna of Cinna—