(Et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
Asservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis),—
was utterly careless of her, and insensible to the perils to which she was exposed. To rouse him from his sloth and stupor, Catullus asks to have him thrown head over heels—
Munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus—
from a rickety old bridge into the deepest and dirtiest part of the quagmire over which it was built. In another piece Catullus laughs at the affectation of one of his rivals, Egnatius,—a black-bearded fop from the Celtiberian wilds,—who had a trick of perpetually smiling in order to show the whiteness of his teeth;—a trick which did not desert him at a criminal trial, during the most pathetic part of the speech for the defence, or when he stood beside a weeping mother at the funeral pyre of her only son. In another of his elegiac pieces he gives expression to the relief felt on the departure for the East of a bore who afflicted the ears of the polite world by a superfluous use of his aspirates—
Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet
Dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias, etc.[58]
Just as the ears of men had recovered from this infliction—
Subito affertur nuntius horribilis,
Ionios fluctus, postquam illuc Arrius isset,