43. With him died the clearest, if not the richest, poet-voice ever lifted in Rome. He lacked the lofty grandeur of Lucretius, the polished stateliness of Vergil, the broad sympathies of Horace. For on the one hand, he was no recluse to be filled with heavenly visions, and on the other, his personality was too intense to allow him to cultivate a tolerant spirit. He delighted in life with a vigorous animal passion. Not without charm to him was nature in her sylvan aspect (cf. e.g. 34.9 ff.) yet his highest enjoyment was in the life of men. And this life he did not study, as did Horace, from the standpoint of a philosopher. Indeed, he did not study it at all, but simply felt it. For he was not outside of it, but a part of it to the fullest degree, swayed by its ever-changing emotions. Such a nature must of necessity ever remain in many essential aspects the nature of a child. And such was the nature of Catullus throughout his brief life,--warm in quick affections, hot in swift hatreds, pulsing with most active red blood.
This text is part of:
Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.