Note 64 — Chapter XV

The 'Hymn to Diana' occupies an intermediate place between the poems founded on personal feelings and the longer and more purely artistic pieces. Like the first it seems unconsciously, or at least without leaving any trace of conscious purpose, to have conformed to the conditions of the purest art. It is, like them, a perfect whole, one of those, to quote Mr. Munro, '"cunningest patterns" of excellence, such as Latium never saw before or after, Alcaeus, Sappho, and the rest then and only then having met their match64'. It resembles some of the longer poems in being a creation of sympathetic imagination, not an immediate expression of personal feeling. It must have been written for some public occasion; and the selection of Catullus to compose it would imply that he was recognised as the greatest lyrical poet in his lifetime, and that it was written after his reputation was established. It is a poem not only of pure artistic excellence, but of imaginative conception, like that exemplified in the 'Attis' and the 'Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis.' The 'Diana' of Catullus is not a vague abstraction or conventional figure, as the Gods and Goddesses in the Odes of Horace are apt to be. The mythology of Greece received a new life from his imagination. In this poem he shows too, what he hardly indicates elsewhere65, that he could identify himself in sympathy with the national feeling and religion of Rome. The Goddess addressed is a living Power, blending in her countenance the human and picturesque aspects of the Greek Artemis with the more spiritual and beneficent attributes of the Roman Diana. Yet no confusion or incongruity arises from the union into one concrete representation of these originally diverse elements. She lives to the imagination as a Power who, in the fresh morning of the world, had roamed in freedom over the mountains, the woods, the secret dells, and the river-banks of earth66,—and now from a far away sphere watched over women in travail, increased the store of the husbandman, and was the especial guardian of the descendants of Romulus.