characteristics became intensified.  Catullus grew more untamed in the pursuit of an untrammelled individual life, subversive of accepted standards, rich in emotional incident and sensuous perception.  His adherence to the old political order was at bottom due to an aesthetic conviction that democracy was vulgar.  To Valerius, on the contrary, the Republic was the chief concern and Caesar its saviour from fraud and greed.  As the years passed he became more and more absorbed in his country’s service at the cost of his own inclinations.  Gravity and reserve grew upon him and the sacrifice of inherited moral standards to the claims of intellectual freedom would to him have been abhorrent.

And yet there had not been even one day in these eight years when Catullus had felt that he and his brother were not as close to each other as in the old Verona days.  He had lived constantly with his friends and rarely with his brother, but below even such friendships as those with Caelius and Calvus, Nepos and Cornificius lay the bond of brotherhood.  In view of their lives this bond had seemed to Catullus as incomprehensible as it was unbreakable.  And he had often wondered—­he wondered now as he lay under the ash tree and listened to the wind—­whether it had had its origin in some urgent determination of his mother who had brooded over them both.

She had died before he was six years old, but he had one vivid memory of her, belonging to his fifth birthday, the beginning, indeed, of all conscious memory.  The day fell in June and could be celebrated at Sirmio, their summer home on Lake Benacus.  In the morning, holding his silent father’s hand, he had received the congratulations of the servants, and at luncheon he had been handed about among the large company of June guests to be kissed and toasted.  But the high festival began when all these noisy people had gone off for the siesta.  Then, according to a deep-laid plan, his mother and Valerius and he had slipped unnoticed out of the great marble doorway and run hand in hand down the olive-silvery hill to the shore of the lake.  She had promised to spend the whole afternoon with them.  Never had he felt so happy.  The deep blue water, ruffled by a summer breeze, sparkled with a million points of crystal light.  Valerius became absorbed in trying to launch a tiny red-sailed boat, but Catullus rushed back to his mother, exclaiming, “Mother, mother, the waves are laughing too!” And she had caught him in her arms and smiled into his eyes and said:  “Child, a great poet said that long ago.  Are you going to be a poet some day?  Is that all my bad dreams mean?”