9. The only relative mentioned by Catullus is his brother, whose death was the occasion to him of such intense and lasting grief (cc. 65, 68, 101). But Suetonius (l.c.) speaks of the father as a host of Julius Caesar even so late, apparently, as the close of the poet's life. Why he (to say nothing of the mother) is never mentioned by the poet, we cannot tell. Not improbably, however, he did not have the same active sympathy with the tastes and inclinations of Catullus as the father of Horace had with those of his son. Catullus, moreover, was not the only son, and was probably younger than the one whose untimely death in the Troad he records.
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Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
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