Roads from Rome | Page 3

who kept her part of a bargain. It was surprising that a conversation so
trifling should recur in this hour, but he could see again before him his
brother's smiling face and hear him saying: "My Diogenes, never let
your lantern go out. It will light your own feet even if you never find a
truthful woman."
All this exquisite identity of daily life had ended eight years ago.
Catullus felt the weight of his twenty-six years when he realised that
ever since he and Valerius had ceased to be boys they had lived apart,
save for the occasional weeks of a soldier's furloughs. Their outward
paths had certainly diverged very widely. He had chosen literature and
Valerius the army. In politics they had fallen equally far apart, Catullus
following Cicero in allegiance to the constitution and the senate,
Valerius continuing his father's friendship for Caesar and faith in the
new democratic ideal. Different friendships followed upon different
pursuits, and divergent mental characteristics became intensified.
Catullus grew more untamed in the pursuit of an untrammelled

individual life, subversive of accepted standards, rich in emotional
incident and sensuous perception. His adherence to the old political
order was at bottom due to an aesthetic conviction that democracy was
vulgar. To Valerius, on the contrary, the Republic was the chief
concern and Caesar its saviour from fraud and greed. As the years
passed he became more and more absorbed in his country's service at
the cost of his own inclinations. Gravity and reserve grew upon him
and the sacrifice of inherited moral standards to the claims of
intellectual freedom would to him have been abhorrent.
And yet there had not been even one day in these eight years when
Catullus had felt that he and his brother were not as close to each other
as in the old Verona days. He had lived constantly with his friends and
rarely with his brother, but below even such friendships as those with
Caelius and Calvus, Nepos and Cornificius lay the bond of brotherhood.
In view of their lives this bond had seemed to Catullus as
incomprehensible as it was unbreakable. And he had often
wondered--he wondered now as he lay under the ash tree and listened
to the wind--whether it had had its origin in some urgent determination
of his mother who had brooded over them both.
She had died before he was six years old, but he had one vivid memory
of her, belonging to his fifth birthday, the beginning, indeed, of all
conscious memory. The day fell in June and could be celebrated at
Sirmio, their summer home on Lake Benacus. In the morning, holding
his silent father's hand, he had received the congratulations of the
servants, and at luncheon he had been handed about among the large
company of June guests to be kissed and toasted. But the high festival
began when all these noisy people had gone off for the siesta. Then,
according to a deep-laid plan, his mother and Valerius and he had
slipped unnoticed out of the great marble doorway and run hand in
hand down the olive-silvery hill to the shore of the lake. She had
promised to spend the whole afternoon with them. Never had he felt so
happy. The deep blue water, ruffled by a summer breeze, sparkled with
a million points of crystal light. Valerius became absorbed in trying to
launch a tiny red-sailed boat, but Catullus rushed back to his mother,
exclaiming, "Mother, mother, the waves are laughing too!" And she

had caught him in her arms and smiled into his eyes and said: "Child, a
great poet said that long ago. Are you going to be a poet some day? Is
that all my bad dreams mean?"
Then she had called Valerius and asked if they wanted a story of the
sea, and they had curled up in the hollows of her arms and she had told
them about the Argo, the first ship that ever set forth upon the waters;
of how, when her prow broke through the waves, the sailors could see
white-faced Nereids dance and beckon, and of how she bore within her
hold many heroes dedicated to a great quest. It was the first time
Catullus had heard the magic tale of the Golden Fleece and in his
mother's harp-like voice it had brought him his first desire for strange
lands and the wide, grey spaces of distant seas. Then he had felt his
mother's arm tighten around him and something in her voice made his
throat ache, as she went on to tell them of the sorceress Medea; how
she brought the leader of the quest into wicked ways, so that the glory
of his heroism counted for nothing and misery pursued him, and how
she still lived on in