SOURCE: "Hymen, O Hymenwe!" and "The Roman-Alexandrine and Longer Poems of Catullus," in Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1877, pp. 62-75, 76-92.

In the following chapters from his Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, Davies offers a discursive reading of Catullus's most notable poems among the poet's epithalamia and alexandrines.

[Catullus may be seen, at first glance] rather as the writer of passionate love-verses to Lesbia, or vers de societe to his friends, literary or light, as the case might be. There are yet two other and distinct aspects of his Muse. That which he borrowed from the Alexandrian school of poetry will [be considered later]; but in the present it will suffice to give some account of his famous epithalamia, the models of like composition for all time, and the loci classici of the ceremonial of Roman marriages, as well as exquisite pictures of the realisation of...