23. Possibly other news also reached him concerning his faithless mistress. At all events when, shortly afterward, he did return to the capital, his eyes were fully opened. Not that he now ceased to love Lesbia, for that was beyond his power, and therein lay his extremest torture. He had lost all faith in her, he knew her now to be but an abandoned prostitute, and yet he could not break the chain of his old regard. 'I hate and love,' he cries, 'I know not how, but I feel the anguish of it' (c. 85).
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Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
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