Note 54 — Chapter XV

That he possessed no ordinary share of 'piety,' in the Roman sense of the word, appears from the poems which express his grief for his brother's death. He died in the Troad; and we have seen how, some years after the event, Catullus turned aside from his pleasant voyage among the Isles of Greece and coasts of Asia, to visit his tomb and to offer upon it the customary funeral gifts. His words in reference to this great sorrow, in all the poems in which he speaks of it, are full of deep and simple human feeling. He does not venture to comfort himself with the hope which he suggests to Calvus, in the lines on the death of Quintilia, of a conscious existence after death; but he resolves that his love shall still endure even after the eternal separation from its object. Yet while yielding to the first shock of this affliction, so as to become for the time indifferent to the passion which had swayed his life, and to the delight which he had taken in the works of ancient poets and the exercise of his art, he does not allow himself to forget what was due to living friends. It is characteristic of his frank affectionate nature, that, while dead to his old interests in life and literature, he finds his chief comfort in unburthening his heart to his friends and in writing to them words of delicate consideration. He cannot bear that, even in a trifling matter, Hortalus should find him forgetful of a promise: and he longs to lighten the sorrow of his friend Manlius, who had written to him in some sudden affliction,—probably the loss of the bride in whose honour Catullus had, a short time previously, composed his great Nuptial Ode. Though all other feelings were dead, and neither love could distract nor poetry heal his grief, his heart was alive to the memory of former kindness54, to the natural craving for sympathy, and to the duty of thinking of others.