CATULLUS' 4th POEM. THIS poem is a fascinating example of the gentler manner of Catullus. Though it will not bear comparison with some of his more impassioned pieces, it has an exquisite beauty and finish in its own style which will not be readily matched in Latin or any other language. Fortunately too the blunders of the manuscripts are so plain and have been corrected with such success by the older critics that there are only two words in the whole poem about which there is any difference of opinion: vocaret in 1. 20, for which Lachmann, followed by Haupt, reads vagaret, and novissime in 1. 24 for which many editors, old and recent, read novissimo. In both cases I keep the manuscript reading, in the former with a good deal of hesitation, in the latter with an absolute conviction that the change adopted by so many seriously interferes with the right understanding of the poem. Clear and limpid however as the language may appear at first sight, when it is more carefully examined, its right interpretation is found to be by no means so simple, and seems to have been often missed; for Catullus here, as in his other pure iambic poem, owing perhaps to the restrictions of the metre, is very abrupt and allusive and requires much expansion in order to be fully apprehended. Believing that a minute dissection of the poem and a careful comparison of it and the tenth elegy of the first book of the Tristia, which Ovid has written with Catullus in his mind, probably in his hands, will clear up much that is obscure, I offer the following remarks, first printing the Latin, as precision is needed and careful punctuation is of importance. Phaselus ille quem videtis, hospites, neque ullius natantis impetum trabis 5 opus foret volare sive linteo. et hoc negat minacis Hadriatici negare litus, insulasve Cycladas Rhodumque nobilem horridamque Thraciam 10 ubi iste post phaselus antea fuit sibi esse facta, cum veniret a marei senet quiete seque dedicat tibi, gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris. In these verses Catullus represents himself as pointing out and praising to some guests, who were with him at his villa in Sirmio, the phaselus, now laid up beside the Benacus or Lago di Garda, which had carried him from Bithynia to Italy. This at least is the sense in which Catullus' words have been almost universally understood. But one of his latest expositors Westphal in his translation and commentary, pp. 170-174, says that the poem contains much that is obscure (viel Dunkles), and proceeds to explain it very differently. The ship had to cross the sea; it was not therefore a mere 'barke'; it could hardly then have come up the Po and Mincio to the Lago di Garda; Catullus too seems first to have gone on board at Rhodes, and to have performed the first part of the journey by land; the ship therefore was not his own; he only hired a passage on it from Rhodes; the erum of v. 19 was the owner or master of the ship; the limpidus lacus was not the Benacus, but a saltwater bay of the Adriatic, perhaps on the Grecian shore; the hospites were not Catullus' guests, but the hosts who entertained him on his landing on the coast. This explanation gives a very lame and impotent meaning to the piece, the 'viel Dunkles' of which we will endeavour to clear up in a different way, partly by the assistance of Ovid. The phaselus was unquestionably built for Catullus or purchased by him in Bithynia, and must have been a light galley constructed for great speed and provided with both sails and oars. It need not have been of any great size: a friend of mine during the war with Russia went to the Baltic, cruised there for some time and returned to England in a yacht of seven tons; and we know from a late memorable trial that the 'Osprey' of 66 tons, built for mere trading purposes, could circumnavigate more than half the globe, whether or not it bore in addition the weight and fortunes of Sir Roger. And what feats of discovery were performed of old by heroes like Baffin in their craft of 40 tons! We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that our phaselus was of a burden somewhere between 20 and 50 tons and that this would be the size of Ovid's ship too, of which we are now going to speak. Ovid on his sad journey to Tomoe had come by sea to the Isthmus of Corinth; he there quitted the ship, crossed the Isthmus and purchased a vessel at Cenchreae, which was to convey him and all his property to his final destination. He sailed in it as far as the entrance of the Hellespont, where he seems to have encountered contrary winds and been obliged to beat about, and to have been carried back first to Imbros and then to Samothrace, where he made up his mind to send on his own vessel, doubtless with all his impedimenta and most of his servants, through the Hellespont, the Propontis, the Bosporus, and along the left shore of the Euxine to Tomoe; while he himself, weary of the sea, crossed over to Thrace and performed the rest of his journey by land. All this he tells us in the elegy already spoken of, which was written while he was staying in Samothrace. It is the most cheerful in the whole series of the 'Tristia' and the Ex Ponto.' The poet finds himself in a cultivated place after the dangers and discomforts of the sea and before he had learnt what Tomoe really was, or rather the aspect it assumed to his diseased imagination which succeeded in persuading him, though fresh from the astronomical studies of the Fasti, that a town, in the latitude of Florence, lay far within the Arctic circle. Were it not for Ovid's minute diffuseness, his meaning would perhaps have been more obscure to us than the curt and allusive language of Catullus, which we will now endeavour to illustrate, partly from this elegy. The first five lines of our poem we will thus translate : 'That yacht, my friends, which you see, claims to have been the fastest of ships; no spurt of aught which swims of timber built but she could pass, she says, whether need were to fly with blades of oars or under canvas.' These verses are thus imitated by Ovid, who shews himself here too 'nimium amator ingenii sui' and pushes to hyperbole the simple thought of Catullus: Est mihi sitque precor, flavae tutela Minervae, navis, et a picta casside nomen habet. sive opus est velis, minimam bene currit ad auram, nec comites volucri contenta est vincere cursu, occupat egressas quamlibet ante rates. We will next take vv. 6—21 of Catullus: 'And this the shore of the blustering Adriatic will not, she says, gainsay; no nor the Cyclad isles and Rhodes renowned and the rough Thracian Propontis; no nor the surly Pontic gulf, where, afterwards a yacht, she was before a leafy wood; for often on Cytorus' ridge with her talking leaves she gave a whispering forth. To you, Amastris-upon-Pontus, and to you, box-clad Cytorus, these facts, the yacht declares, were and are known right well from her earliest birthtime on your top she stood, she says, in your waters handselled her blades; and next she carried her master over so many raging seas, whether on her left the breeze invited or on her right, or Jupiter propitious had fallen at once on both her sheets.' In these lines Catullus twice over in his very rapid manner, with the simplest copulae, indicates the voyage of his yacht from the time it was launched in the Pontus, probably at Amastris or perhaps at Cytorus, till it reached the shores of Italy: first in 6-9, and again in 17-21. In the former verses the voyage, as the commentators have observed, is described in reversed order by one looking back on it from Italy. It is divided into three main sections by the particle ve, as I have tried to indicate by the punctuation of both my text and my translation. The yacht was built in Amastris or in Cytorus, the town and hill having both the same name. These two great emporia for the box and other woods of the Cytorian mount are mentioned together in the Iliad (Β 853) Οἵ ῥα Κύτωρον ἔχον καὶ Σήσαμον (old name of Amastris) dupevéμovтo. This part of Paphlagonia, of which ἀμφενέμοντο. Amastris was the capital, now belonged to the province of Bithynia, and it was natural that Catullus should get his yacht there. But when he left Bithynia in the year B.C. 58, he was in Nicaea far down to the south-west and not far from the Propontis: comp. 46 4 ‘Linquantur Phrygii, Catulle, campi Nicaeaeque ager uber aestuosae: Ad claras Asiae volemus urbes.' It is pretty certain then in itself that Catullus would not make the long and almost impracticable hill-journey from Nicaea to Amastris or Cytorus; and this will appear more clearly from what will be said presently. He would order his yacht to be brought round along the 'surly' Pontus, through the Bosporus into the Propontis, and would embark with all his belongings either at Cios, which Mela (1 100) calls Phrygiae opportunissimum emporium,' or at Myrlea (Apamea), to both of which there was a short and easy road from Nicaea. Then in 7-9 'insulasve-Propontida,' Catullus briefly indicates the second division of the yacht's voyage, he himself being now on board. It coasted along the Propontis, then through the Hellespont, and along the shore of Mysia, Lydia, etc., or the islands Lesbos, Chios, etc. to Rhodes, which the poem intimates to have been the most eastern point to which |