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Updated: June 27, 2025
From Catullus to Juvenal, the poets accuse and celebrate the degeneracy of the times; and the reformation of manners was feebly attempted by the reason and authority of the civilians till the most virtuous of the Cæsars proscribed the sin against nature as a crime against society. Part VIII.
I have been reading Catullus very recently, and was so much pleased with his gracefulness, that I thought it no bad practice to translate one or two of his small pieces: as I translated I became more and more aware of the clear elegance of his diction. We will be, or at least believe ourselves to be, "Et cantare pares et decantare parati."
Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal, in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil.
Among the short pieces called Catalecta we have some of exquisite beauty, as the dedicatory prayer to Venus and the address to Siro's villa; others show a vein of invective which we find it hard to associate with the gentle poet; others, again, are parodies or close imitations of Catullus; while one or two are proved by internal evidence to be by another hand than Virgil's.
Here, as in the elaborate imitations of Callimachus with which he tested his command of the Latin elegiac, he is weak because he wanders off the true line, not from any failure in his own special gift, which was purely and simply lyrical. It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets.
William Grotius was no doubt astonished at his brother's vivacity, and probably gave him some check for it; for Grotius afterwards writes to him, "What I wrote to you, relating to my son and Blondius, I did it not because I approved of such things, but because that or something worse might happen." M. Huet is mistaken: it was not Rivetus whom Grotius meant by this verse of Catullus, but Laet.
This regulation of language is the proper domain of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero, by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting the revolution which had affected the field of language as remorselessly as the field of politics.
To divers worn copies of Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Ovid, Cæsar's Commentaries, and Catullus; to ditto ditto of Homer, Lucian, Aristophanes, Balzac, Anacreon, Bacon's Essays, and Moore's Melodies; to Dwight's Theology uncut copy, Heine's Poems very much thumbed, Saint Simon very ragged, two volumes of Les Causes Célèbres, Tone's Memoirs, and Beranger's Songs; to Cuvier's Comparative Anatomy, Shroeder on Shakespeare, Newman's Apology, Archbold's Criminal Law and Songs of the Nation; to Colenso, East's Cases for the Crown, Carte's Ormonde, and Pickwick.
The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and confessors. It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to live by. The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty simply. It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the bard of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and sculptor.
We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth any fresh growth; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy drew its best strength; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus; and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate introduction to the second book of Cicero's treatise De Legibus a green oasis amidst the fearful desert of that equally empty and voluminous writer.
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