As a finale at once to his love epistles and amorous relationships, he invites Phyllis to an entertainment in his country villa on Maecenas's birthday; and among the provisions for this festive occasion he mentions a caskful of Albanian wine, upward of nine years old, besides parsley for the weaving of chaplets, and ivy to bind her hair. "Come, then, last of my loves: learn with me such measures as you may recite with your lovely voice; our gloomy cares shall be mitigated with an ode." Through Ovid we learn of Corinna, who was his mistress and the heroine of his love elegies; but his passion for her was no more sincere than we should expect from that manual of libertinism--his _Ars amatoria_. This work is the glorification of animalism and indirectly a defamation of woman. It assumes with the most undisguised frankness that the root and source of the principal part of the attention which men pay to women is their availability for the purpose of satisfying amatory desire, and it alleges the theory that any woman will capitulate the citadel of her honor, if only it be besieged with indefatigableness and resource. It was by such poetry as this that the women of Rome were prepared for that carnival of vice into which they threw themselves with such frenzied abandonment in the days of Claudius and Nero. In the eroticism of Latin poetry is revealed a society in which illicit love is put to the experiment; in Roman history is made manifest the resulting moral chaos. The master of this school was Catullus; and he immortalized one Lesbia, who was the principal heroine in his love poems. It has been said by one of the best-informed students of Roman literature that the poems of Catullus to Lesbia are unique in Roman letters for the intensity and self-oblivion of the passion they portray. We learn from Apuleius that Clodia was the real name of Lesbia; and it is supposed that the latter name was given her by her lover because of his admiration of the Lesbian poetess. Many have concluded from the statement of Apuleius that Lesbia was the notoriously fascinating sister of Clodius, the woman whom Cicero so mercilessly pilloried before the judges; but the possibility of this seems to be precluded by the fact that Catullus incited a poem to Cicero in which he terms him the "best of all advocates "--a courtesy which hardly could have been overlooked or forgiven by the woman to whom the advocate had given such ample cause for hatred. Many of Catullus's brightest pieces are addressed to Lesbia; but all are touched by the poet's consciousness of her inconstancy. At last she leaves him, and he bids her adieu in the lines which have thus been so beautifully rendered by Moore: "Comrades and friends, with whom where'er The Fates have willed through life I've roved, Now speed ye home, and with you bear These bitter words to her I've loved.