Could pathos go further? How exquisite, too, is the following:-- Si quidquam mutis gratum acceptumque sepulcris Accidere a nostro, Calve, dolore potest, Quum desiderio veteres renovamus amores, Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias: Certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est Quintiliæ, quantum gaudet amore tuo.[48] Shakespeare merely unfolded what was included here, when he wrote those haunting lines:-- When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight. Never, too, has any poet given such pathetic expression to a sorrow, which to the young is even harder to bear than the loss inflicted by death, the perfidy and treachery of friends. The verses to Alphenus (xxx.), to the anonymous friend in lxviii., and the epigram to Rufus (lxxvii.), are indescribably touching. What infinite sadness there is in:-- Si tu oblitus es, at Dii meminerunt, meminit Fides, Quæ te ut pæniteat postmodo facti faciet tui. What passion of grief in:-- Heu, heu, nostræ crudele venenum Vitæ, heu, heu, nostræ pestis amicitiæ! But nothing that Catullus has left us equals in fascinating interest, or exceeds in charm, the poems inspired by the woman who was at once the bliss and the curse of his life-- Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plusquam se, atque suos amavit omnes. Whether she is to be identified with the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, and the wife of Metellus Celer, seems to us, in spite of the arguments of Schwaber, Munro, Ellis, and Sellar, extremely doubtful. It is a point which need not be discussed here, and is, indeed, of little importance. That she was a woman of superb and commanding beauty, a false wife, a false mistress, and of immeasurable profligacy, Catullus has himself told us. There could only be one end to a passion of which such a siren was the object; and, exquisite as the poems are which precede the breaking of the spell, it is in the poems recording the gradual process of disenchantment, and the struggle between the old love and the new loathing, that Catullus touches us most. How piercing is the pathos of such a poem as the _Si qua recordanti_ (lxxvi.), or the epigram in which he says that he loves and loathes, but knows not why, only knows that it is so, and that he is on the rack:-- Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio: sed fieri sentio et excrucior. Or where he says that, pest as she is, he cannot curse a love who is dearer to him than both his eyes:-- Credis me potuisse meæ maledicere vitæ, Ambobus mihi quæ carior est oculis? Non potui, nec, si possem, tam perdite amarem.