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