Kathulos

“ The seven poems just described contain many beautiful passages, but they show us Catullus chiefly as the learned, skillful, and successful imitator of Alexandrian Greek models. The short poems. His real genius appears in the shorter poems, which deal with the feelings of his own heart. In these also he is an imitator, so far as his metres are concerned, but the feelings are his own, and he expresses them in words that burn. No translation can do justice to the sharp, quick strokes of his invectives or to the passionate outpourings of his love. ”

“ It was in the youth of Catullus that the power of Greek studies was first felt by the impressionable race, half-Italian, half-Celtic, of Cisalpine Gaul, which still remained outside of Italy, and is called by him 'Provincia.' Among the men of letters belonging to the last age of the Republic, Cornelius Nepos, Quintilius Varus, Furius Bibaculus, Cornificius, and Caecilius, most of whom were among the intimate friends of Catullus, came from, or resided in, the North of Italy. ”

“ The Style of Catullus, called by the ancients “the Accomplished,” is lively, graceful, and vigorous; he writes in the language of nature, and excels in suiting his words to the sentiments expressed. The musical measures of the Greeks, adapted by him to his native tongue, lent intensity to his words, and there were “lutes in his very lines.” From the Greek writers, particularly Sappho and Callimachus of Alexandria, he borrowed largely. One of his odes to Lesbia is evidently an imitation of Sappho’s celebrated love-song quoted on p. ”

“ And Catullus, after many of the Greeks, relates, that divine visions were made to men before their great and manifold crimes did, as it were, hinder God, and those Spirits that attend him, from holding any correspondence with men. We almost every where, in the Greek and Latin historians, meet with the savage life of the Giants, mentioned by Moses. ”

“ Whatever may have been its origin, it is the finest specimen we possess, in either Greek or Latin literature, of that kind of short poem more common in modern than ancient times, in which some situation or passion entirely alien to the writer, and to his own age, is realized with dramatic intensity. But the genius of Catullus is, perhaps, even happier in the direct expression of personal feeling than in artistic creation, or the reproduction of tales and situations from mythology. The warmth, intensity and sincerity of his own nature are the sources of the inspiration in these poems. ”

“ The metre is galliambic, a rhythm proper to the hymns of Cybele, but of which no primitive Greek example remains. The poem cannot be perused with pleasure, but must excite astonishment at the power it displays. The language is tinged with archaisms, especially compounds like hederigera, silvicultrix. In general Catullus writes in the plain unaffected language of daily life. His effects are produced by the freshness rather than the choiceness of his terms, and by his truth to nature and good taste. ”

“ It has, however, been remarked, that while to Lucretius, to Horace, even to Virgil, the sea is a thing of dread rather than of admiration, from which they shrank as a treacherous creature, Catullus felt the grandeur of its immensity, and rejoiced in the laughter of the waves in calm, and in their changing colors beneath the storm.
Germans have written learned books, some to maintain, others to deny, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had any feeling for Nature, or, as the phrase goes, were inspired by the sentiment of Nature. ”

“ Catullus spent his hours of relaxation at his villa in the suburbs of the Latian town of Ti’bur, or at his favorite Sirmio on a lovely lake in northern Italy, the subject of one of his most graceful odes. Toward the close of his life, in the hope [Pg 353] of refilling a purse which his extravagance had depleted, he went to Bithynia in Asia Minor as a staff-officer of the prætor Memmius, to whom Lucretius inscribed his poem. But in consequence of the selfishness of his superior, Catullus came back with wallet still lighter. ”

“ In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, [88] or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. ”

“ A philosopher is assisted, his mind is enriched, by the speculations of his predecessors; and the fact of his writing in verse is but an accident which in no way detracts from the truth of this remark. His strength of mind and matchless powers of description make his poem one of the finest monuments in the Latin language. Catullus had so much sweetness and tenderness, a cast of thought at once so fiery and so natural, that even the study of the most laboured performances of Alexandrian pedants could not rob him of his spontaneity and [Pg 5] freshness. ”

“ The epitaphs composed for themselves by Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, and Pacuvius, and the assertion of their own originality and of their hopes of fame, which occurs in the poetry of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, were dictated by a strong sense of their own personality, and of the importance of the task on which they were engaged. Catullus, although he is much preoccupied with, and most frank in communicating his feelings and pursuits, has much less of the consciousness of genius, is much more humble in his aspirations, and more modest in his estimate of himself. ”

“ Pure in an age of corruption, disinterested in an age of greed, devotedly patriotic in an age of selfish ambition, faithful unto death in an age of shameless tergiversation, and withal of singularly mild and gentle character, Cato lived and died for the law of conscience, proving by his example that if a revival of old Roman virtue were still possible, only through the lessons of Greek philosophy could this miracle be wrought. ”

“ Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him; he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries and trifles." ”

“ A smile, both bitter and wistful, came upon Catullus's lips as he remembered a letter he had had yesterday from Lucretius, bidding him listen to the voice of Nature who would bring him peace. "What is so bitter," his friend had urged, "if it comes in the end to sleep? The wretched cannot want more of life, and the happy men, men like Valerius, go unreluctantly, like well-fed guests from a banquet, to enter upon untroubled rest. Nor is his death outside of law. From all eternity life and death have been at war with each other. ”

“ Not before she had turned her burning eyes from that one
she received a flame in the whole body
and whole blazed up utterly in the deepest marrows.
Alas stirring up the furies from the miserable one with cruel heart
sacred boy, you mix the cares (and) joys of men,
and you who rule Golgi and leafy Idalium,
with what kind of waves have you tossed the girl having been
inflamed in the mind, often sighing in the golden haired guest!
What great fears that one carried in the weak heart! ”

“ Though the poem may have been partly founded on Greek materials, yet Catullus has treated the subject in a thoroughly original manner. It is difficult to believe that any translation could produce that impression of genuine creative power, which is forced upon every reader of the Attis. There is nothing at all like the spirit of this poem in extant Greek literature. No other writer has presented so life-like an image of the frantic exultation and fierce self-sacrificing spirit of an inhuman fanaticism ”

“ The accident of its being the only Latin poem extant in the peculiar galliambic metre has combined with the nature of the subject [3] to induce a tradition about it as though it were the most daring and extraordinary of Catullus' poems. The truth is quite different. It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already introduced several others into Latin. ”

“ When he uses the elegiac verse to express his own feeling, as in the attacks on political or personal enemies, it has the same direct lucidity (as of an extraordinarily gifted child) which is the essential charm of his lyrics.
It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second time. His imperious lucidity is perfectly unhesitating in its action ”

“ If not perfectly dithyrambic, the numbers of the Atis of Catullus are, however, strongly expressive of distraction and enthusiasm. The violent bursts of passion are admirably aided by the irresistible torrent of words, and by the cadence of a measure powerfully denoting mental agony and remorse. In this production, now unexampled in every sense of the word, Catullus is no longer the light agreeable poet, who counted the kisses of his mistress, and called on the Cupids to lament her sparrow. ”

“ All which having slipped from the whole body here and there
the waves of salt were playing with before the feet of she herself.
But she caring for the plight neither then of the of the headdress
nor then of the floating cloak, she having been destroyed, was
depending on you Theseus out of her whole chest, whole spirit, whole mind.
Wretched one, whom the Erycinian maddened with constant griefs
sowing thorny cares in the chest,
in that age, out of which time bold Theseus
having set forth from the curved shores of Piraeus
touched the Gortynian temples of an unjust king. ”

“ Unwillingness to associate the graceful verse of Catullus with a theme so unworthy has perhaps led the critics to question without reason the identity. But the portrait drawn by the poet when at length his eyes were opened, answers but too truly to that of the orator. Few things in all literature are sadder than the spectacle of this trusting and generous spirit withered by the unkindness, as it had been soiled by the favours, of this evil beauty. [113] The life which began in rapturous devotion ends in hopeless gloom. ”

“ The inhabitants have a very high notion of their own superior intelligence, which they express by saying, that they only of all the people on earth have two eyes; to the Latins they allow one, and consider all other nations as blind. The Kathayans have small eyes and no beards. Their money consists of small square pieces of paper, impressed with the seal of their emperor. To the west, this empire is bounded by that of the Tarsae; to the north by the desert of Belgian; and to the south by the sea, in which there are innumerable islands. ”

“ Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.
Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. ”

“ Catullus certainly possessed great excellences and talents of the most alluring and captivating kind. No genius ever displayed itself under a greater variety of aspects. He has the playfulness and the petulance of a girl, the vivacity and simplicity of a child. He has never been surpassed in gracefulness, melody, and tenderness. No one, unless he possessed the coolness and self-command of a Cæsar, could have avoided wincing under the sharp attacks of his wit: he had passion and vehemence, but he had not the grandeur and sublimity either of Lucretius or Virgil. ”

“ Then Catulus, like a good and perfect general, showed that he valued the reputation of his countrymen more than his own. Not being able to induce his soldiers to stand, and seeing that they were making off in alarm, he ordered the eagle [93] to be moved, and running to those who were first in the retreat, he put himself at their head, wishing the disgrace to fall on himself and not on his country, and that the army should not appear to be flying, but to be following their general in his retreat. ”

“ Attis accompanied by the drum, leader through the shaded forests.
Just like an untamed young cow trying to escape the burden of the yoke
the fast Gallae follow the swift of foot leader.
So as they, tired, the home of Cybele reached,
from the excessive exertion they catch sleep without Ceres.
Lazy slumber covers them the eyes with wavering drowsiness;
the rabid fury of the soul disappears in soft rest. ”