22. And his perturbed soul was still further wrenched by another heavy blow that fell upon him at about the same time with these disclosures. His dearly loved brother was dead, and, to heighten the anguish of the moment, dead far away in the Troad, without a single relative near him to close his eyes, utter the last formal farewell, and place upon his tomb the customary funeral offerings. The news either reached Catullus when on a visit to his father's house at Verona, or summoned him suddenly thither from Rome. For a time this emotion dulled his sensibility to every other. He could think of nothing else. He foreswore the Muses forever, save to express the burden of his woe (cc. 68.19; 65.12). To the request of the influential orator Hortensius for verses, he could send only a translation from Callimachus, and the story of his tears. He must even deny (c. 68a) an appeal from his friend Manlius for consolation on the death of his wife, - perhaps the same Manlius for whose happy bridal he had but a short time before written an exquisite marriage-song (c. 61). And even when Manlius sought to recall him to Rome by hints concerning the scandal aroused by Lesbia's misdoings, the only answer was a sigh(c. 68.30).
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Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
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