Somebody told Catullus about the supper, I suspect it was Lalage--she is jealous of me, and Catullus made up to her years ago and then left her. He came to me and made a scene, and said he was coming too. Then he tried to find out who else was coming, and I refused to tell him. He said: “Of course, you have asked Julius Caesar,” and I said: “It’s not your business; I shall ask the people I choose to my own house without consulting you.” Then he said a lot of horribly unfair things about Julius Caesar, and a lot of absurd things about me; only I managed to calm him more or less. All this happened in the afternoon, and he went away really quite repentant and meek. He always was easy to manage if one had time, and I told him Cicero had praised his verses, which soothed him, although it wasn’t true. He never could resist flattery. The supper began very well. Julius Caesar was, I must say, brilliant. He can be really clever and pleasant sometimes, and he talked to me the whole time, and this made Lalage very angry; she was between Metellus and Bassianus, and she bored them. Then suddenly in the middle of supper, just as I was beginning to feel more or less happy about it all, Catullus walked in, very flushed and excited. I saw at once he had been drinking. He was given a place between Cicero and Lavinia, and opposite me and Julius Caesar; and no sooner had he settled himself on his couch than he began to monopolize the conversation. He talked at the top of his voice. He was rather amusing at first, and Cicero answered him back, and for a time everything went well; but I was dreadfully uneasy, as I felt certain something would happen, and there was a dangerous look in his eye. Besides which he drank off a great bowl of wine and water (with very little water in it), and grew more and more flushed and excited. He didn’t pay any attention to Julius Caesar at all, and talked across to me as though Julius Caesar hadn’t been there. But Julius Caesar didn’t seem to notice that Catullus was being rude, and he turned to me and really was charming. He said, among other things, that the only woman he had ever seen who could compare with me for wearing clothes _properly_ was Cleopatra, but that she was dowdy in comparison with me. He said, too, that I was the only woman he had ever met who had any real grasp of the fiscal question. This made Catullus mad; and he asked Lavinia in a loud whisper, which we all heard, who the gentleman sitting opposite might be who was slightly bald. I was dreadfully uncomfortable, because Julius Caesar can’t bear any allusions to his baldness (it’s so silly, as if it mattered to us), and he turned red in the face. Then Catullus began to chaff Cicero about his verses, but as Cicero knows him very well it didn’t much matter, he knew he didn’t mean it really. To make a diversion, I proposed that Bassianus should sing us a song. But Catullus broke in and said: “Rather than that I will recite a poem.”