Note 14 — Chapter XV

are thought to indicate the anticipation of approaching death. But if 54 b.c. is to be accepted as the year of his death, one of Jerome's two other statements, viz. that he was born in the year 87 b.c. and that he died at the age of thirty, must be wrong. Most critics and commentators hold that the first date is right, and that the mistake lies in the words 'xxx. aetatis anno.' Mr. Munro, with more probability, believes the error to lie in the 87 b.c., and that Jerome, 'as so often happens with him, has blundered somewhat in transferring to his complicated era the Consulships by which Suetonius would have dated.' He argues further, that the phrase 'iuvenalia tempora,' in the passage quoted above from Ovid and written by him at the age of twenty-five, is more applicable to one who died at the age of thirty than of thirty-three. A further argument for believing that the 'xxx. aetatis anno' is right, and the date 87 b.c. consequently wrong, is that the age at which a person died was more easily ascertained than the date at which he was born, owing to the common practice of recording the former in sepulchral inscriptions. It is easy to see how a mistake might have occurred in substituting the first of the four successive Consulships of Cinna (87 b.c.) for the last in 84 b.c.; but it is not so obvious how the substitution of xxx. for xxxiii. could have taken place. The only ground for assuming that the date of 87 b.c. is more likely to be right, is that thereby the disparity of age between Catullus and his mistress Clodia, who must have been born in 95 or 94 b.c., is somewhat lessened. But when we remember that she was actually twelve years older than M. Caelius Rufus, who succeeded Catullus as her lover, and that Cicero in his defence of Caelius speaks of her as supporting from her own means the extravagance of her youthful ('adulescentis') lovers14, there is no more difficulty in supposing that she was ten than that she was seven years older than Catullus. Moreover, the brotherly friendship in which Catullus lived with Calvus, and his earlier intimate relations with Caelius and Gellius, who were all born in or about the year 82 b.c., seem to indicate that he was nearer to them in age than he would have been if born in 87 b.c. Between the age of twenty and thirty a difference of five years is not frequent among very intimate associates, who live together on a footing of perfect freedom. Again, the expression of the feelings both of love and friendship in the earlier poems of Catullus—written about the year 61 or 60 b.c.—seems more like that of a youth of twenty-three or four, than of twenty-six or seven, especially when we remember that, by his own confession, he had entered at a precociously early age on his career both of pleasure and of poetry. The date 84 b.c. accordingly seems to fit the recorded facts of his life and the peculiar character of his poetry better than that of 87 b.c.; and there seems to be more opening for a mistake in assigning the particular date of the poet's birth and death, than in recording the number of years which he lived15.