In the matter of the rhythms, caesuras and elisions which it allows, the metrical treatment is much more severe than that of Catullus, whose elegiacs are comparatively rude and barbarous; but it is not bound hand and foot, like the Ovidian distich, in a formal and conventional system.
It is celebrated from its connexion with Catullus, for the large ruins of a Roman villa on the promontory have been supposed to be his country house.
Its chief distinctions are that during the later Republic and earlier Empire it yielded excellent soldiers, and thus much aided the success of Caesar against Pompey and of Octavian against Antony, and that it gave Rome the poet Virgil (by origin a Celt), the historian Livy, the lyrist Catullus, Cornelius Nepos, the elder and the younger Pliny and other distinguished writers?
I also read Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, Horace (with Dacier's and Torrentius's notes), Virgil, Ovid's Epistles, with l"leziriac's commentary, the Ars amandi and the Elegies; likewise the Augustus and Tiberius of Suetonius, and a Latin translation of Dion Cassius from the death of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus.
Her abandonment and awakening are celebrated in the beautiful Epithalamium of Catullus.
