[30] On the whole question compare Mr. Munro's Criticisms and Elucidations, etc., pp. 194-202.
It has been argued on the other side that public opinion would not have tolerated the publicity given to an adulterous intrigue, especially one with a Roman matron so high in rank as the wife of Metellus Celer. But the state of public opinion in the last years of the Republic is not to be gauged either by that of an earlier time, or by that existing during the stricter censorship of the Augustan régime. Catullus himself (cxiii) testifies to what is known from other sources, the extreme laxity with which the marriage tie was regarded in the interval between 'the first and second consulships of Pompey.' Perhaps, however, if Metellus Celer had survived Catullus, the Lesbia-poems might never have been publicly given to the world. After his death Clodia by her manner of life forfeited all claim to the immunities of a Roman matron.
[31] lxviiib. 105-6.
[32] The poem lxviii—
Quod mihi fortuna casuque oppressus acerbo—
was addressed to Manlius just after Catullus had heard of his brother's death, i. e. probably late in the year 60, or early in the year 59 b.c. Manlius was himself suffering then from a great and sudden sorrow. The expressions in lines 1, 5, 6, 'casu acerbo,' 'sancta Venus,' 'desertum in lecto caelibe,' make it at least highly probable that this sorrow was the premature death of his young bride. If this generally accepted opinion is true, the Epithalamium must have been written some time before 59 b.c.
[33] That of Westphal.
[34] Schmidt supposes that poems ix, xii, xiii belong to a later date, 56 b.c., when he thinks that Veranius and Fabullus were with some otherwise unknown Piso in the Province of Hispania Citerior, and that the poems xxviii,
Pisonis comites, cohors inanis,
and xlvii,