Note 27 — Chapter XV
Reading edition
The play on the word pulcher might be illustrated by many parallel allusions in Cicero's Letters to Atticus. The gratitude expressed by Catullus to Allius27, a man of rank and position, for having made arrangements to enable him to meet his mistress in secret, clearly shows that she could not have belonged to the class of libertinae, in whose case no such precautions could have been necessary: and the language of Catullus in the first period of his liaison—