meet with the melodious lament
of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual
and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting
of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved
amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling
and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life
of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures
of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently
the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest
amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo
touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart
of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial
who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently
and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people
is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened
by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free
from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us
alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet
is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based
on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self-
consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town,
on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely
municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually
maltreat their humble friends--as that contrast was probably felt
more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing
and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul. The most beautiful
of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda,
and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written
a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death,
or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius
and Aurunculeia. 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, no