. In this respect
they may be compared with the letters of Cicero.

The poems extend over a period of seven or eight years, from 61 or 62
till 54 B.C. Among the earliest are those which record the various
stages of the author's passion for Lesbia. It is in connexion with this
passion that he is generally mentioned, or alluded to, by the later
Roman poets, such as Propertius, Ovid, Juvenal and Martial. Her real
name, as we learn from Apuleius, was Clodia. The admiration of Catullus
for Sappho, the Lesbian poetess, which is clearly indicated by the
imitation of her language in his fifty-first and sixty-second poems,
affords an obvious explanation of the Greek name which he gave to his
Roman mistress. Clodia was the notorious sister of Publius Clodius
Pulcher, and in the year 56 she charged M. Caelius Rufus, after tiring
of him, as she had of Catullus, with an attempt to poison her. It was in
defence of Rufus that Cicero described the spell she exercised over
young men, in language which might have been applied to her previous
relations with the youthful poet, as well as those with the youthful
orator and politician.

Poems concerning Lesbia occur among both the earliest and the latest of
those contained in the series. They record the various stages of passion
through which Catullus passed, from absolute devotion and a secure sense
of returned affection, through the various conditions of distrust and
jealousy, attempts at renunciation, and short-lived "amoris
integrationes," through the "odi et amo" state, and the later state of
savage indignation against both Lesbia and his rivals, and especially
against Caelius Rufus, till he finally attains, not without much
suffering and loss, the last state of scornful indifference. Among the
earliest of the poems connected with Lesbia, and among those written in
the happiest vein, are ii. and iii., and v. and vii. The 8th, "Miser
Catulle, desinas ineptire," perhaps the most beautiful of them all,
expresses the first awakening of the poet to a sense of her
unworthiness, before the gentler have given place to the fiercer
feelings of his nature. His final renunciation is sent in a poem written
after his return from the East, with a union of imaginative and scornful
power, to his two butts, Furius and Aurelius (xi., "Furi et Aureli,
comites Catulli"), who, to judge by the way Catullus writes of them,
appear to have been hangers-on upon him, who repaid the pecuniary and
other favours th