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.

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."1 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.