Note 16 — Chapter XV

It seems, therefore, most probable that he was born in the year 84 b.c., and that he died at the age of thirty, either late in 54 b.c. or early in 53 b.c. The much less important, but still more disputed question as to his 'praenomen,' appears now to be conclusively settled, in accordance with the evidence of Jerome and Apuleius, in favour of Gaius, and against Quintus. In the large number of places in which he speaks of himself, he invariably calls himself 'Catullus'; and in the best MSS. his book is called 'Catulli Veronensis liber.' His Gentile name Valerius is confirmed by Suetonius in his life of Julius Caesar; and the evidence of inscriptions shows that that name was not uncommon in the district near Verona. How it happened that this Roman patrician name had spread into Cisalpine Gaul we do not know; but that the family of Catullus was one of high consideration in his native district, and maintained relations with the great families of Rome, is indicated by the intimate footing on which Julius Caesar lived with his father, and also by the fact that the poet was received as a friend into the best houses of Rome,—such as that of Hortensius, Manlius Torquatus, Metellus Celer,—shortly after his arrival there. It is quite possible that the last of these, who was Proconsul in Cisalpine Gaul in 62 b.c., and to whom Cicero writes when governor of that province, may have lived on the same footing as Julius Caesar did with Catullus' father at Verona, and that, in that way, Catullus obtained his first introduction to his wife Clodia, the Lesbia of the poems. Although some humorous complaints of money difficulties—the natural consequences of his fashionable pleasures—occur in his poems16, yet from the fact of his possessing, in his father's lifetime, a country house on lake Benacus and a farm on the borders of the Sabine and the Tiburtine territories, and of his having bought and manned a yacht in which he made the voyage from Bithynia to the mouth of the Po, it may be inferred that he belonged to a wealthy senatorian or equestrian family. One or two expressions, such as 'se atque suos omnes,' and again, 'te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua17,' seem to speak of a large connexion of kinsmen: but we only know of one other member of his own family, his brother, whose early death in the Troad is mentioned with very genuine feeling in several of his poems. The statement of Jerome that he was born at Verona is confirmed by Ovid and Martial, and by the poet himself. He speaks of the 'Transpadani' as his own people ('ut meos quoque attingam'); he addresses Brixia (the modern Brescia), as—