Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/27

sions a correspondent of Cicero. But, like her sisters, she was notorious for her infidelities; and, like her brother, was not nice as to methods of getting rid of such as slighted her advances or tired of her fickleness. Even Cicero was credited with having stirred her passion unwittingly. A gay friend of Catullus, Cælius Rufus, had incurred her persecutions and false accusations of an attempt to poison her, by freeing himself from his liaison with her; and Cicero had defended him in a speech which furnishes the details of her abandoned life of intrigue and profligacy. With her husband she was at constant war; and his death by poison in 59 B.C. was freely laid at his wife's door. So, at least, we gather from Cicero's defence of Cælius, delivered in the following year, which saddles her with epithets betokening the depths to which she had descended in her career of vice and licence. After her husband's death, and her release from a yoke which she had never seriously respected, she appears to have given herself over to the licentious pleasures of Baiæ, kept open house with the young roués of the capital at her mansion on the Palatine, and consorted with them without shame or delicacy by the Tiber's bank, or on the Appian Road. In such company Catullus, as an intimate of Cælius, Gellius, and others whose names were at one time or another in her visitors' book, most probably first met her; and the woman had precisely the fascinations to entangle one so full of the tender and voluptuous, and withal so cultivated and accomplished as Catullus must have been. It has been epi-