Contemporary with the great didactic poet, but nine years his junior in age, flourished C. Valerius Catullus. He was a member of a good family, residing on the Lago di Garda, in the neighbourhood of Verona,[500] and his father had the honour of frequently receiving Cæsar as his guest.[501] At an early age he went to Rome, probably for education, but his warm temperament and strong passions plunged him into the licentious excesses of the capital. During this period of his career, passed in the indulgence of pleasure and gayety, and in the midst of a dissipated society, he had no more serious occupation than the cultivation of his literary tastes and talents. The elegant tenderness of his amatory poetry made him a favourite with the fair sex, for its licentiousness was not out of keeping with the sentiments and conversation prevalent in the Roman fashionable world. It must not be supposed that the tone of society amongst the higher classes was pure and moral, like that of Cicero and his friends, or that it was not marked by the same licentious freedom which polluted some even of their most graceful poems. The poetry of Catullus was such as might be expected from the tenor of his life. The excuse which he made for its character was not a valid one;[502] for the line in Hadrian’s epitaph on Voconius could not possibly be applied to him:— Lascivus versu, mente pudicus eras.[503] His mistress, whom he addresses under the feigned name of Lesbia, was really named Clodia.[504] It has been said that she was the sister of the infamous Clodius; but there are no grounds for the assertion. A career of extravagance and debauchery terminated in ruin, and though his fortune had been originally ample, his affairs became hopelessly embarrassed; and in order to retrieve them by colonial plunder, he accompanied Memmius, the friend of Lucretius, when he went as prætor to Bythinia. Owing, however, to the grasping meanness of his patron his expectations were disappointed. He returned home “with his purse full of cobwebs.” Still he enjoyed the privilege of visiting those cities of Greece and Asia which were the most celebrated for literature and the fine arts. When he went to Asia he visited the grave of a brother who had died in the Troad, and who was buried on the Rhætian promontory; and a poem which he addressed on the occasion to Hortalus, the dissipated son of the orator Hortensius, as well as another dedicated to Manlius, bear witness to the warmth of his fraternal affection. The former is a beautiful and touching specimen of his elegiac style:—