a wish to offer the last tokens of respect and affection at the tomb of his brother, who had died and been buried in the Troad, were among the motives that led Catullus to seek recreation and other scenes by joining Cinna as a member of the staff of C. Memmius,' who in 57 B.C. went to Bithynia as propraetor. Restive and sad as he was, we cannot think that he waited a whole year more to perform the mournful rites at his brother's grave, but must believe that he visited this spot and took his farewell of it on the outward journey to Bithynia. Even if we discount the violent expressions of disgust for his chief, found in Nos. 10 and 28 of the Catullus collection, it is clear that Memmius was no help or inspiration to Catullus. Yet the year's travel and novel experiences, including some contact with Greek, as well as even more eastern civilization, did not fail to leave its mark upon the impressionable poet: his "Peleus and Thetis" and his remarkable " Attis," e.g., probably owe much local color, and perhaps even their very existence, to this sojourn. The two years, more or less, that remained for Catullus after his joyous home-coming were spent partly in Verona and his favorite Sirmio, and partly in Rome. They were years of storm and stress. There were new alliances with men and women; old hatreds were reopened. The growing power of Caesar and his favorites was attacked with intense bitterness; but a reconciliation with Caesar as the friend of Catullus's father was not long in forthcoming. Clodia thought it worth her while to make advances toward a renewal of relations with one whose fortunes seemed in the ascendant, but the heart of the poet was utterly steeled against her forever. Very soon the career, all too short, of one for whom the best in life seemed perhaps just about to open, came to an end, with only a verse or two to indicate final weakness and gathering gloom before the lamp went out. 1 Probably the same Memmius to whom Lucretius, the other great poet of this age, dedicated his De Rerum Natura; cf. Lucr. 1, 26 and 42. 16. Although Ovid does not include Catullus in his wellknown canon of the Roman elegists,' he elsewhere recognizes him as belonging to the same group 2 and Propertius3 names as his series of erotic elegists, Varro Atacinus, Catullus, Calvus, Gallus, and himself. If there was any reason why his contemporaries should omit Catullus from any list of the leading Roman elegists, it was doubtless because even thus early it was realized that it was the rest of his poems rather than his elegies that formed his surest title to immortality. But the evidence is clearly ample that even then he belonged to the group in which the logic of fate has confirmed his membership, and that not mere accident has from the time of the renaissance produced successive editions of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. If in the more exact use of terms Catullus is a greater lyric than elegiac poet, nevertheless the elegies that he has left us form an invaluable link between the poetry of Alexandria and that of Tibullus and Propertius. Something of the debt owed him directly by his successors in the field of elegy will be seen from a study of the selections in this book. The genius of Horace led him mostly in other lines, so that his literary connection with Catullus is relatively slight. Vergil, on the other hand, had evidently been a careful student of Catullus, as is clear not merely from those disputed poems of the so-called Appendix Vergiliana, but from many parallels in his certainly authentic works. And in Martial reminiscences of Catullus abound. On the other hand, the influence of the Alexandrian school is 1 Successor fuit hic [Tibullus] tibi, Galle, Propertius illi; quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui. — Trist. 4, 10, 53. 2 E.g. Am. 3, 9, 59-65; Trist. 2, 427 sqq. 8 2, 34, 85 sqq. 4 Propertius nowhere names Tibullus, though he surely owed much to him. Cf. also Mart. 8, 73, 8, where Catullus is grouped with Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. 5 Cf. E. K. Rand, in Harvard Stud. in Class. Phil., Vol. 17 (1906), pp. 15 sqq. For a list of real or assumed parallel passages in the Augustan poets cf. Simpson, pp. xxxvii sqq. For a list of authors that mention or cite Catullus, cf. Schwabe, pp. vii sqq. nowhere so definite and obvious in Roman poetry as in Catullus. The mere fact that of the 116 poems in the extant Catullus collection, nearly one half (Nos. 65-116) are in the elegiac meter is unique in a poet of essentially lyric tastes and genius. The forms of his measure constantly betray Alexandrian influence (cf. $$ 42, 43). Not merely the considerable proportion of epigrams and the subjects of various elegies but also the wealth of mythological learning displayed in such poems as No. 68 show that even in treating a matter of deep personal interest he at that period of his work believed it necessary to assume the Alexandrian manner. And finally the translation of the Coma Berenices of Callimachus (No. 66) brings us straight back to Alexandria as no other existing poem in Latin does. In some of those elegies we have a young poet trying his hand at the new style of verse just imported; while in the later elegists, even in Propertius, the influence of their models is much more artfully concealed, if indeed it is ever as direct. This is not the place to discuss the first 60 (shorter) poems of the Catullus collection, in various meters, or the group of four longer poems (61-64)-the two epithalamia, the "Attis" and the epyllion of Peleus and Thetis, which precede the elegies in the existing collection. 17. “Other Roman poets have produced works of more elaborate composition, and have shown themselves greater interpreters of nature and of human life: none have expressed so directly and truthfully the great elemental affections, or have uttered with such vital sincerity the happiness or the pain of the passing hour." The fire of youth burned into furious love or furious hate, according to the fuel of the hour. Whether he admires a beautiful lake or a beautiful woman, or hates a vulgar society villain, the language of Catullus is that of absolute frankness -a frankness sometimes too complete for our tastes, yet compelling by its perfect revelation of every mood and tense of the writer. It is therefore natural that in the instrument of 1 Sellar 3, Rep., p. 436. 2 such expression we find less artificial refinement in versification, a closer approximation to the language of everyday life, and a simplicity of expression that makes his language usually as transparent as his thought. The diction of Catullus has been analyzed by Simpson,' who shows the prominent elements in it to be the language of everyday life and of society, a welldeveloped lover's vocabulary, a remarkable mastery over diminutives with their varying shades of meaning, some archaisms and contracted forms, some new descriptive terms coined with a poet's facility, and an abundance of inceptive, frequentative, and prepositionally-compounded verbs. Some of these features. are, however, better illustrated elsewhere than in the elegies.* While most of the familiar grammatical and rhetorical figures are amply illustrated in Catullus, his skill in the employment of simile, metaphor, and metonymy is especially noteworthy.5 6 18. Since Lachmann in 1829 brought out his epoch-making edition of Catullus, basing it upon two Berlin Mss., the Datanus (D) and the Laurentianus (L), both of the fifteenth century, great progress has been made in establishing the text of this author. In 1830 the Sangermanensis (G), No. 14137 of the National Library at Paris, written at Verona in 1375, was described by J. Sillig; and in 1867 Robinson Ellis published the Oxoniensis (O), No. 30 of the Canonici Latin Mss. of the Bodleian Library. In 1896 W. G. Hale discovered the Romanus (R) in the Vatican (Cod. Ottob. 1829), a Ms. which he believes to be of about the same age as G and O, viz., the latter part of the fourteenth century.7 A complete collation of R has not yet been published. Meanwhile the controversy that has arisen over the relative value of these various important Mss. and their relation to a lost archetype and to the host of 1 Pp. 180 sqq. 3 Index verborum in Schwabe. 5 Cf. e.g. No. 68, vv. 53, 57, 63, 73, 2 Cf. Platner in AJP., Vol. 16 (1895), p. 186. 4 Cf. Riese, pp. xxiv sqq. 109, 119, 125. 6 Jahrb. f. Phil., Vol. 13 (1830), pp. 261 sqq. 7 Cf. PAPA., Vol. 28 (1897), p. liii; Class. Rev., Vol. 20 (1906), p. 160; Mag nus in BPW., Vol. 30 (1910), p. 780; etc. later copies from one source or another, has resulted in more diligent search for Catullus Mss.1 The result up to the present appears to be that our text must be constituted chiefly on the three Mss., O G R, which are all derived from a lost Ms., V (Veronensis), which was seen by Petrarch and other scholars of his day; and that all the other existing Mss. were derived from these. O may have been a direct copy of V; G and R were copied probably from an intervening copy of V. 19. Besides the editions of Lachmann (1829) and Ellis (1867 and 1878) before mentioned, the most important editions in modern times have been those of Haupt (1853) (published with Tibullus and Propertius, and several times revised by Vahlen7th ed., 1912), Schwabe (1866 and 1886), Baehrens (1876; revised by K. P. Schulze, 1893), Riese (1884), Merrill (1893), the large commentary of Ellis (1876) and his later Oxford text (1904), and Friedrich (1908). The editions of Baehrens, Schulze, Riese, Merrill, and Friedrich have full exegetical commentaries. Several of the most important elegies are annotated in the selections made by Simpson, Jacoby, Schulze, and others; and the critical and epexegetical activity still centered upon Catullus remains unabated. The translations by Martin (1861), Ellis (1871), and Cornish (1912) deserve mention. TIBULLUS 20. Although at first sight it would seem that we have a considerable body of valuable data for the life of Tibullus, careful sifting of the authorities makes these sources appear rather sterile. At the end of the Mss. is a brief epigram attributed to Domitius Marsus, as follows: Te quoque Vergilio comitem non aequa, Tibulle, mors iuvenem campos misit ad Elysios, ne foret, aut elegis molles qui fleret amores 1 Cf. Class. Phil., Vol. 3 (1908), p. 233. |