Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/29

will not seem unlikely that Catullus should choose for the nom de plume of his enslaver a name recalling Sappho the Lesbian, especially as it was probably by a sympathetic translation into Latin sapphics of her famous ode to Phaon that he first announced his suit and evinced his passion. After this is granted, it will remain to decide from internal evidence whether there are grounds of identification between the Lesbia of Catullus's poetry and the famous or infamous sister of Publius Clodius. They need only be summarised to establish a verdict in the affirmative, and confirm the statement of Apuleius that she whom Ovid tells us Catullus loved under the feigned name of Lesbia, was the Clodia whose character Cicero painted in such undisguised force of colours. First, both lay under the stigma of guilty relations with a brother. Secondly, both appear to have at one time indulged an amour with Cælius Rufus, and both were unmistakably married women. Thirdly, the characters of both coincide in point of wit, learning, and cultivation, their persons in exceptional beauty, and their tempers in caprice and occasional violence. Fourthly, the rank of Clodia was distinctly high and patrician; and though an evil name attached to her on Cicero's showing, there is no reason to suppose that she utterly disregarded appearances. Lesbia's rank, indeed, is not indicated in plain terms by her poet, but it comes out in a probable interpretation of some expressions in an elegiac poem to Allius, that she was certainly no vulgar intriguante, but met her lover at the house of that noble, and so far paid the outward respect to