and hear him saying: "My Diogenes, never let your lantern go out.
It will light your own feet even if you never find a truthful woman."

All this exquisite identity of daily life had ended eight years ago.
Catullus felt the weight of his twenty-six years when he realised
that ever since he and Valerius had ceased to be boys they had lived
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