their own experiences. It was under this influence that
Catullus wrote the _Coma Berenices_, the 68th poem, which, after the
manner of the Alexandrines, interweaves the old tale of Protesilaus and
Laodamia with the personal experiences of the poet himself, and the
_Epithalamium_ of Peleus and Thetis, which combines two pictures from
the Greek mythology, one of the secure happiness of marriage, the other
of the passionate despair of love betrayed. In this last poem Catullus
displays a power of creative pictorial imagination far transcending that
displayed in any of the extant poetry of Alexandria. We have no means of
determining what suggested the subject of the _Attis_ to Catullus,
whether the previous treatment of the subject by some Greek writer, some
survival of the myth which he found still existing during his residence
among the "Phrygii Campi," or the growth of various forms of Eastern
superstition and fanaticism, at Rome, in the last age of the Republic.
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 most elaborate and one of the finest
of them is the _Epithalamium_ in honour of the marriage of a member of
the old house of Manlius Torquatus with Vinia Aurunculeia, written in
the glyconic in combination with the pherecratean metre. To this metre
Catullus imparts a peculiar lightness and grace by making the trochee,
instead of the spondee as in Horace's glyconics and pherecrateans, the
first foot in the line. His elegiac metre is constructed with less
smoothness and regularity than that of Ovid and Tibullus or even of
Propertius, but as employed by him it gives a true echo to the serious
and plaintive feelings of some of his poems, while it adapts itself, as
it did later in the hands of Martial, to the epigrammatic terseness of
his invective. But the perfection of the art of Catullus is seen in his
employment of those metres which he adapted to the Latin tongue from the
earlier p