poetry, belonged, like most of this group, to a wealthy and distinguished
family, and was introduced at an early age to the most fashionable
circles of the capital. He was just so much younger than Lucretius that
the Marian terror and the Sullan proscriptions can hardly have left any
strong traces on his memory. When he died, Caesar was still fighting in
Gaul, and the downfall of the Republic could only be dimly foreseen. In
time, no less than in genius, he represents the fine flower of the
Ciceronian age. He was about five and twenty when the attachment began
between him and the lady whom he has immortalised under the name of
Lesbia. By birth a Claudia, and wife of her cousin, a Caecilius Metellus,
she belonged by blood and marriage to the two proudest families of the
inner circle of the aristocracy. Clodia was seven years older than
Catullus; but that only made their mutual attraction more irresistible:
and the death of her husband in the year after his consulship, whether or
not there was foundation for the common rumour that she had poisoned him,
was an incident that seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the first
fervour of their passion. The story of infatuation, revolt, relapse,
fresh revolt and fresh entanglement, lives and breathes in the verses of
Catullus. It was after their final rupture that Catullus made that
journey to Asia which gave occasion to his charming poems of travel. In
the years which followed his return to Italy, he continued to produce
with great versatility and force, making experiments in several new
styles, and devoting great pains to an elaborate metrical technique.
Feats of learning and skill alternate with political verses, into which
he carries all his violence of love and hatred. But while these later
poems compel our admiration, it is the earlier ones which win and keep
our love. Though the old liquid note ever and again recurs, the freshness
of these first lyrics, in which life and love and poetry are all alike in
their morning glory, was never to be wholly recaptured. Nor did he live
to settle down on any matured second manner. He was thirty-three at the
utmost--perhaps not more than thirty--when he died, leaving behind him
the volume of poems which sets him as the third beside Sappho and
Shelley.
The order of the poems in this volume seems to be an artificial
compromise between two systems--one an arrangement by metre, and the
other by date of composition. In the former view the book falls into
three sections--the pure lyrics, the idyllic pieces, and the poems in
elegiac verse. The central place is occupied by the longest and most
elaborate, if not the most successful, of his poems, the epic idyl on the
marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Before this are the lyrics, chiefly in the
phalaecian eleven-syllabled verse which Catullus made so peculiarly his
own, but in iambic, sapphic, choriambic, and other metres also, winding
up with the fine epithalamium written for the marriage of his friends,
Mallius and Vinia. The transition from this group of lyrics to the
_Marriage of Peleus and Thetis_ is made with great skill through another
wedding-chant, an idyl in form, but approaching to a lyric in tone,
without any personal allusions, and not apparently written for any
particular occasion. Finally comes a third group of poems, extending to
the end of the volume, all written in elegiac verse, but otherwise
extremely varied in date, subject, and manner. The only poem thus left
unaccounted for, the _Atys_, is inserted in the centre of the volume,
between the two hexameter poems, as though to make its wild metre and
rapid movement the more striking by contrast with their smooth and
languid rhythms. Whether the arrangement of the whole book comes from the
poet's own hand is very doubtful. His dedicatory verses, which stand at
the head of the volume, are more probably attached to the first part
only, the book of lyrics. Catullus almost certainly died in 54 B.C.; the
only positive dates assignable to particular poems, in either the lyric
or the elegiac section, alike lie within the three or four years
previous, and, while no strict chronological order is followed, the
pieces at the beginning of the book are almost certainly the earliest,
and those at the end among the latest.
Among the poems of Catullus, those connected with Lesbia hold the
foremost place, and, as expressions of direct personal emotion, are
unsurpassed, not merely in Latin, but in any literature. There are no
poems of the growth of love among them; from the first, Lesbia appears as
the absolute mistress of her lover's heart:
_Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
Rumoresque senum severiorum
Omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda:--_
thus he cries in the first intoxication of his happiness, as yet ignorant
that the brief light of his love was to go out before noon. Clodia soon
showed that the advice not to care for the opinion of the world was, in
her case, infinitely superfluous. That intolerable pride which was the
proverbial curse of the Claudian house took in her the form of a flagrant
disregard of all conventions. In the early days of their love, Catullus
only felt, or only expressed, the beautiful side of this recklessness.
His affection for Clodia had in it, he says, something of the tenderness
of parents for their children; and the poems themselves bear out the
paradox. We do not need to read deeply in Catullus to be assured that
merely animal passion ran as strong in him as it ever did in any man. But
in the earlier poems to Lesbia all this turns to air and fire; the
intensity of his love melts its grosser elements into one white flame.
There is hardly even a word of Lesbia's bodily beauty; her great blazing
eyes have only come down to us in the sarcastic allusions made to them by
Cicero in his speeches and letters. As in a few of the finest lyrics of
Burns, with whom Catullus, as a poet of love, has often been compared,
the ardency of passion has effected for quintessential moments the work
that long ages may work out on the whole fabric of a human soul--
_Concretam exemit labem purumque reliquit aetherium sensum atque aurai
simplicis ignem_.
But long after the rapture had passed away the enthralment remained.
Lesbia's first infidelities only riveted her lover's chains--
_Amantem iniuria talis
Cogit amare magis;_
then he hangs between love and hatred, in the poise of soul immortalised
by him in the famous verse--
_Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris;
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._
There were ruptures and reconciliations, and renewed ruptures and
repeated returns, but through them all, while his love hardly lessens,
his hatred continually grows, and the lyrical cry becomes one of the
sharpest agony: through protestations of fidelity, through wails over
ingratitude, he sinks at last into a stupor only broken by moans of pain.
Then at last youth reasserts itself, and he is stung into new life by the
knowledge that he has simply dropped out of Lesbia's existence. His final
renunciation is no longer addressed to her deaf ears, but flung at her in
studied insult through two of the associates of their old revels in Rome.
_Cum suis vivat valeatque moechis
Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos
Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium
Ilia rumpens--_
so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the
long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all--
_Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem
Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati
Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est._
Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal
reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in
the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that
journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never
been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every
other line has become a household word, the _Iam ver egelidos refert
tepores_, and the lovely _Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque_, whose
cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a
higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's
death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these
has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists,
Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the
specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its
opening hexameter, _Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus_, to
the sobbing wail of the _Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale_ in
which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of
Shakespeare's sonnets.
It is in these short lyrics of personal passion or emotion that the
genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in
the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the
_Ode to Diana_, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the _Atys_.
The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner
which--as in the noble fragment of Keats' _Ode to Maia_--lift it into the
rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with
which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large
in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the
marriage-song which stands at the end of _In Memoriam_ is than the other
sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the
finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music
what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world
that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had
invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to
love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of
Solomon, the verses clash and swing: _Open your bars, O gates! the bride
is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!... Even
so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the
torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go
forth, O bride!_ And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's
lap--
_Torqutatus volo parvulus
Matris e gremio suae
Porrigens teneras manus
Dulce rideat ad patrem
Semihiante labello--_
is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth
century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.
Over the _Atys_ modern criticism has exhausted itself without any
definite result. The accident of its being the only Latin poem extant in
the peculiar galliambic metre has combined with the nature of the
subject[3] to induce a tradition about it as though it were the most
daring and extraordinary of Catullus' poems. The truth is quite
different. It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a
poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has
chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or
elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already
introduced several others into Latin. As a _tour de force_ in metrical
form it is remarkable enough, and probably marks the highest point of
Latin achievement in imitation of the more complex Greek metres. As a
lyric poem it preserves, even in its highly artificial structure, much of
the direct force and simplicity which mark all Catullus' best lyrics.
That it goes beyond this, or that--as is often repeated--it transcends
both the idyls and the briefer lyrics in sustained beauty and passion,
cannot be held by any sane judgment.
How far elaboration could lead Catullus is shown in the long idyllic poem
on the _Marriage of Peleus and Thetis_. Here he entirely abandons the
lyric manner, and adventures on a new field, in which he does not prove
very successful. The poem is full of great beauties of detail; but as a
whole it is cloying and yet not satisfying. For a few lines together
Catullus can write in hexameter more exquisitely than any other Latin
poet. The description in this piece of the little breeze that rises at
dawn, beginning _Hic qualis flatu placidum mare matutino_, like the more
famous lines in his other idyllic poem--
_Ut flos in septis secretum nascitur hortis,
Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro,
Quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber;
Multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae--_
has an intangible and inexpressible beauty such as never recurs in the
more mature art of greater masters. But Catullus has no narrative gift;
his use of the hexameter is confined to a limited set of rhythms which in
a poem about the length of a book of the _Georgics_ become hopelessly
monotonous; and it finally stops, rather than ends, when the writer (as
is already the case with the reader) grows tired of it. It is remarkable
that the poet who in the lightness and speed of his other metres is
unrivalled in Latin, should, when he attempts the hexameter, be more
languid and heavy, not only than his successors, but than his
contemporaries. 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. When he uses the elegiac verse to
express his own feeling, as in the attacks on political or personal
enemies, it has the same direct lucidity (as of an extraordinarily gifted
child) which is the essential charm of his lyrics.
It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that
puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others
labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained
expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second
time. His imperious lucidity is perfectly unhesitating in its action;
whether he is using it for the daintiest flower of sentiment--_fair
passions and bountiful pities and loves without stain_--or for the
expression of his fiery passions and hatreds in some flagrant obscenity
or venomous insult, it is alike straight and reckless, with no scruple
and no mincing of words; in Mr. Swinburne's curiously true and vivid
phrase, he "makes mouths at our speech" when we try to follow him.
With the death of Catullus and Calvus, an era in Latin poetry definitely
ends. Only thirteen or fourteen years later a new era begins with the
appearance of Virgil; but this small interval of time is sufficient to
mark the passage from one age--we might almost say from one civilisation
--to another. During these years poetry was almost silent, while the
Roman world shook with continuous civil war and the thunder of prodigious
armies. The school of minor Alexandrian poets still indeed continued; the
"warblers of Euphorion" with their smooth rhythms and elaborate _finesse_
of workmanship are spoken of by Cicero as still numerous and active ten
years after Catullus' death. But their artifice had lost the gloss of
novelty; and the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the Eclogues
was due less perhaps to their intrinsic excellence than to the relief
with which Roman poetry shook itself free from the fetters of so rigorous
and exhausting a convention.
CICERO.
Meanwhile, in the last age of the Republic, Latin prose had reached its
full splendour in the hands of the most copious and versatile master of
style whom the Graeco-Roman world had yet produced. The claims of Cicero
to a place among the first rank of Roman statesmen have been fiercely
canvassed by modern critics; and both in oratory and philosophy some
excess of veneration once paid to him has been replaced by an equally
excessive depreciation. The fault in both estimates lay in the fact that
they were alike based on secondary issues. Cicero's unique and
imperishable glory is not, as he thought himself, that of having put down
the revolutionary movement of Catiline, nor, as later ages thought, that
of having rivalled Demosthenes in the _Second Philippic_, or confuted
atheism in the _De Natura Deorum_. It is that he created a language which
remained for sixteen centuries that of the civilised world, and used that
language to create a style which nineteen centuries have not replaced,
and in some respects have scarcely altered. He stands in prose, like
Virgil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and modern world.
Before his time, Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one
among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands, it had become a
universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek
included, as the type of civilised expression.
Thus the apparently obsolete criticism which ranked Cicero together with
Plato and Demosthenes, if not above them, was based on real facts, though
it may be now apparent that it gave them a wrong interpretation. Even
Hellenists may admit with but slight reluctance that the prose of the
great Attic writers is, like the sculpture of their contemporary artists,
a thing remote from modern life, requiring much training and study for
its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But
Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of
the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and
Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance,
and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the
modern world to which the Renaissance was the prelude.
The life of Cicero as a man of letters may be divided into four periods,
which, though not of course wholly distinct from one another, may be
conveniently treated as separate for the purpose of criticism. The first
is that of his immature early writings--poems, treatises on rhetoric, and
forensic speeches--covering the period from his boyhood in the Civil
wars, to the first consulship of Pompeius and Crassus, in 70 B.C. The
second, covering his life as an active statesman of the first prominence,
begins with the Verrine orations of that year, and goes down to the
consulship of Julius Caesar, in 59 B.C. These ten years mark his
culmination as an orator; and there is no trace in them of any large
literary work except in the field of oratory. In the next year came his
exile, from which indeed he returned within a twelvemonth, but as a
broken statesman. From this point to the outbreak of the Civil war in 50
B.C., the third period continues the record of his great speeches; but
they are no longer at the old height, nor do they occupy his full energy;
and now he breaks new ground in two fields with works of extraordinary
brilliance, the _De Oratore_ and the _De Republica_. During the heat of
the Civil war there follows a period of comparative silence, but for his
private correspondence; then comes the fourth and final period, perhaps
the most brilliant of all, the four years from 46 B.C. to his death in 43
B.C. The few speeches of the years 46 and 45 show but the ghost of former
splendours; he was turning perforce to other subjects. The political
philosophy of the _De Republica_ is resumed in the _De Legibus_; the _De
Oratore_ is continued by the history of Roman oratory known as the
_Brutus_. Then, as if realising that his true work in life was to mould
his native language into a vehicle of abstract thought, he sets to work
with amazing swiftness and copiousness to reproduce a whole series of
Greek philosophical treatises, in a style which, for flexibility and
grace, recalls the Greek of the best period--the _De Finibus_, the
_Academics_, the _Tusculans_, the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De
Divinatione_, the _De Officiis_. Concurrently with these, he continues to
throw off further manuals of the theory and practice of oratory, intended
in the first instance for the use of the son who proved so thankless a
pupil, the _Partitiones Oratoriae_, the _Topica_, the _De Optimo Genere
Oratorum_. Meanwhile, the Roman world had again been plunged into civil
war by the assassination of Caesar. Cicero's political influence was no
longer great, but it was still worth the while of younger and more
unscrupulous statesmen to avail themselves of his eloquence by assumed
deference and adroit flattery. The series of fourteen speeches delivered
at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43
B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final
extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of
their unreality--of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the
capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out
elsewhere--is indicated by the name that from the first they went under,
the _Philippics_. In the epoch of the _Verrines_ and the _Catilinarians_
it had not been necessary to find titles for the weapons of political
warfare out of old Greek history. Yet, in spite of this unreality, and of
the decline they show in the highest oratorical qualities, the
_Philippics_ still remain a noble ruin of eloquence.
Oratory at Rome had, as we have already seen, attained a high degree of
perfection when Cicero entered on public life. Its golden age was indeed,
in the estimation of some critics, already over; old men spoke with
admiring regret of the speeches of the younger Scipio and of Gaius
Gracchus; and the death of the great pair of friendly rivals, Crassus and
Antonius, left no one at the moment who could be called their equal. But
admirable as these great orators had been, there was still room for a
higher formal perfection, a more exhaustive and elaborate technique,
without any loss of material qualities. Closer and more careful study led
the orators of the next age into one of two opposed, or rather
complementary styles, the Attic and Asiatic; the calculated simplicity of
the one being no less artificial than the florid ornament of the other.
At an early age Cicero, with the intuition of genius, realised that he
must not attach himself to either school. A fortunate delicacy of health
led him to withdraw for two years, at the age of seven and twenty, from
the practice at the bar, in which he was already becoming famous; and in
the schools of Athens and Rhodes he obtained a larger view of his art,
both in theory and practice, and returned to Rome to form, not to follow,
a style. Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the foremost representative of the
Asiatic school, was then at the height of his forensic reputation. Within
a year or two Cicero was recognised as at least his equal: it is to the
honour of both, that the eclipse of Hortensius by his younger rival
brought no jealousy or alienation; up to the death of Hortensius, about
the outbreak of the Civil war, they remained good friends. Years
afterwards Cicero inscribed with his name the treatise, now lost, but
made famous to later ages by having been one of the great turning-points
in the life of St. Augustine[4], which he wrote in praise of philosophy
as an introduction to the series of his philosophical works.
The years which followed Cicero's return from the East were occupied,
with the single break of his quaestorship in Sicily, by hard and
continuous work at the bar. His speeches of this date, being non-
political, have for the most part not been preserved. The two still
imperfectly extant, the _Pro Roscio Comoedo_ of 76, and the _Pro Tullio_
of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his
visit to the East, the _Pro Quinctio_ and _Pro Roscio Amerino_, and, with
his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the _De Inventione_, the body
of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods.
These early speeches are carefully composed according to the scholastic
canons then in vogue, the hard legal style of the older courts
alternating with passages of carefully executed artificial ornament.
Their chief interest is one of contrast with his matured style; for they
show, no doubt with much accuracy, what the general level of oratory was
out of which the great Ciceronian eloquence sprang.