Love, and poetry, and a lifetime all youth: what then, Catullus? And why this anguish of yours — wearing the garb of mourning at a wedding feast, and curses breaking from your lips in a temple?

What? The wellspring of your bliss is the wellspring of your grief, and the spring that enfolds you has struck you down an autumn? Is it love, and poetry, and youth, that make your body bone without covering and leave you a soul melting away?

Lesbia!

Your beloved — do you love loving her, or is it a captivity with no release? The inspirer of your poetry — from her you learned beauty, and from her you learned pain, and the beauty in your poetry and the pain are echoes. And youth — you knew her as a young man of twenty-three, the flower of life's years; and you left existence a young man, before thirty, by her doing...

Lesbia!

•

He came to Rome, and Rome was his ambition: might, and loftiness of station, and a house of learning. And he set about drinking in what the Greeks and the Latins had left behind, and swimming in the sea of culture.

Until he came to know Rome, and knew what might is, and what station, and what learning — until he abandoned all that, and his body was drenched in the waters of a new sea, wider, more tyrannical, quicker in its turnings:

the day he knew Clodia!

A woman of thirty: noble of father, noble of husband, and still in her second year with him. Her acquaintance with love began in childhood, and with seduction at the breast. Her brother planted in her the seed of love — and how abundantly the harvest yielded.

Catullus knew her as the first of his beloveds; Clodia knew him as one pebble among pebbles, without first and without last, gathered along the bank of her stream — their lips split open, and never yet are they sated.

Clodia, none other, is the Lesbia of his poetry. Some critics see in her a legend that lived between the folds of the diwan and not in life; it escaped them that the fragrance in every line the poet penned wafts from a living woman, who made him love, and hate, and dream, and suffer, and burn with jealousy, and be destroyed.

•

Society talked of that newborn love. And Catullus glimpsed in the faces of his companions, and upon their lips, marks of pity and smiles of mockery:

So Clodia and chastity had never met in harmony? What of it? Would not chastity, had it existed, have been a rival to drive off the love that filled his heart and left room for nothing else?

And her dignified husband? A consul — let him enjoy his influence, and toy with the problems of the province, and leave his wife alone; for Catullus is a master of toying, and how sweet are the problems he can entangle. And let the husband set his mind at rest: is there a day when she does not complain to him of Catullus, and show her vexation at his con-duct? No fear, then, of any bond between the two.

She loves Catullus — even his name is fragrant. So she repeats it in her husband's ear time after time, that her lips may taste its savor.

And he whose mind suspicion had poisoned — the balm of his wounds poisoned his body... and he died suddenly, without ever falling ill.

•

Where is what you write, O Catullus, while the companions of your age indite volumes? Is living poetry better than speaking it?

And he went on communing with Lesbia — enough for him that she should hear; and what business is it of ours, that we bring our ears close to steal the echo of his outpourings:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and breathe in love: the sayings of the old men are not worth, all together, a single dirham. See, the suns set and rise again: but our sun — once it sets at evening, our night is everlasting. Give me, then, a thousand kisses,