His affection for both comes out incidentally in his remonstrance with Marrucinus Asinius[50] for having filched after dinner, 'in ioco atque vino,' one of his napkins, which he valued as memorials of the friends who had sent them to him, and which he endows with some share of the love he felt for them,—
Haec amem necessest
Ut Veraniolum meum et Fabullum.
The lampoons on Piso and his favourites, Porcius and Socration, show that those who wronged his friends could rouse in him as generous indignation as those who wronged himself.
Other poems express the pain and disappointment of a very sensitive nature, which expects more active and disinterested sympathy from others than ordinary men care either to give or to receive. Of this sort are his complaint to Cornificius[51],—
Malest, Cornifici, tuo Catullo—
and the affectionate reproach which he addresses to Alphenus (xxx):—
Certe tute iubebas animam tradere, inique, me
Inducens in amorem, quasi tuta omnia mi forent.
Inde nunc retrahis te ac tua dicta omnia factaque