Laudator Temporis Acti

Tenney Frank (1876-1939), Catullus and Horace: Two Poets in Their Environment (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928), pp. 3-5:

Verona may recall to us Theodoric, Can Grande, Romeo and Juliet and colorful medieval romances, or the massive amphitheatre of the stolid commercial city of the Roman Empire. When Catullus was born there in 84 B.C. it was a small unkempt frontier town where barbarians of half a dozen diverse tongues gathered to barter and drink in the market place. The rustics of the neighborhood were tall husky blue-eyed Celts dressed in blankets and breeches. On market days the long-haired Raetic tribesmen, girded with dagger-belts, came down from the Alps, and the Venetic peasants plodded in with their donkey packs of wool and wheat and copper-ware. Here and there was a burly Teuton trader who had brought amber and fur and war captives all the way over the Brenner Pass to trade for wine, steel blades, glass beads and pretty scarfs, or a group of short stocky Etruscans from their mountain refuges above Lake Garda where the Celts three centuries before had driven their ancestors.

There are also a few Romans in flowing white togas moving about through the polyglot rabble with an air of self-assurance. These are the sons of Roman and Italian frontiersmen who a century before, when Rome had established peace, began to penetrate into this country. Backed by an all- powerful government that guaranteed law and order they had bought plantations, laid out villas, grown rich on the abundant native labor and had taken charge of the administration of the district. Five years before Catullus was born Verona had been given a town-charter by Rome and all the free-born natives there then were declared to be “Latins.” This meant that they could vote at the town-meeting, could legally intermarry with Romans and on election to a magistracy could become Roman citizens. They were expected of course not to disregard the Roman landlords when they voted. If the wild mountaineers should raid the country or the town a Roman magistrate was convenient to have in office, for his word met with a quicker response from the officers of the garrison. These Roman lords were not as yet very numerous, and before the charter was given they had lived quite apart from the rest of the population. Civis Romanus sum meant much in those days, and intermarriage with barbaric folk deprived the children of such a marriage of the use of the magic phrase. That legal barrier was removed in 89, but for the most exalted citizens a social barrier quite as effective still existed.