apart, save for the occasional weeks of a soldier's furloughs. Their
outward paths had certainly diverged very widely. He had chosen
literature and Valerius the army. In politics they had fallen equally
far apart, Catullus following Cicero in allegiance to the
constitution and the senate, Valerius continuing his father's
friendship for Caesar and faith in the new democratic ideal.
Different friendships followed upon different pursuits, and
divergent mental 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 grea