calvus

The poets of the Ciceronian age,—Hortensius, Memmius, Lucretius, Catullus, Calvus, Cinna, &c.—either themselves belonged to the governing class, or were men of leisure and independent means, living as equals with the members of that class.

We may suppose too that the cultivation of music had some share in eliciting the lyrical movement in Latin verse from the fact mentioned by Horace, that the songs of Catullus and Calvus were ever in the mouths of the fashionable professors of that art in a later age.

He does not venture to comfort himself with the hope which he suggests to Calvus, in the lines on the death of Quintilia, of a conscious existence after death; but he resolves that his love shall still endure even after the eternal separation from its object.

He thinks it probable that Catullus' reconciliation must have taken place about the same time or subsequently to that of Calvus, who was likely to have influenced Catullus' political action, and that Calvus could not have desired to be reconciled till after the autumn of 54, when he prosecuted Vatinius.

If Catullus required to be induced by any one to make an apology, it is more likely that his father's influence moved him to do so than the example and influence of Calvus.