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The Virgilian movement differs not more from the Homeric, than does the Horatian sapphic or alcaic from the same metres as treated by their Greek inventors. The success of Horace may be judged by comparing his stanzas with the sapphics of Catullus on the one hand, and the alcaics of Statius on the other.
"Well, sir, if it isn't too great a liberty, I am a neighbour of yours, for you'll find my little bookshop at the corner of Church Street, and very happy to see you, I am sure. Maybe you collect yourself, sir; here's 'British Birds, and 'Catullus, and 'The Holy War' a bargain every one of them. With five volumes you could just fill that gap on that second shelf.
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.
Having in The Arabian Nights given the world the fruits of his enquiries in Eastern lands, and said his say, he might with advantage have let the subject rest. He had certainly nothing new to tell us about the manners and customs of the Romans. Then again, for the translating of so delicate, so musical and so gracious a poet as Catullus he was absolutely and entirely unqualified.
When Socrates, at the point of death, assents to the request that he should show grounds for his faith The doubtful authority for Caesar's answer to it is the statement in the Life of Julius Caesar by Suetonius that, on the day of its appearance, Catullus apologized and was invited to supper; Caesar abiding also by his old familiar friendship with the poet's father.
Because they had lain upon the same mother's breast and danced with her upon the Sirmian shore, Catullus had always known that his older brother's sober life was the fruit of a wine-red passion for Rome's glory. And Valerius's knowledge of him ah, how penetrating that had been! Across the plain below him stretched the road to Mantua.
AQUILIUS. The first piece Catullus offers is his dedication it is to an author to whom I owe a grudge, and perhaps we all of us do. He has caused us some tears, and more visible marks, and I confess something like an aversion to his concise style. It is to Cornelius Nepos. How much more like a modern dedication, than one of Dryden's day, both as to length and matter. GRATIAN. Probatum est.
He mounts to the central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a corresponding series. In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the epyllion which the author of the Ciris clearly had in mind, Catullus used an intricate but by no means balanced form. The poem opens with the sea voyage of Peleus on which he meets the sea-nymph, Thetis.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus, by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.
His library was probably not a large one, for he had but a few favourite authors, the Latin historians, moralists, and anecdotists, and for mere amusement Terence and Catullus, Boccaccio and Rabelais. His thoughts fell asleep, he says, if he was not walking about, and his utter want of memory made notes and note-books necessary to him.
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