Catullus's kisses under an everlasting night
the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus
Catullus's poem 5 offers a particularly close illustration of the distinction being drawn. Its invitation to Lesbia to live and love dismisses censorious old men, then moves directly from mortality to an exuberant accumulation of kisses. Suns return after setting; human life, once extinguished, faces an unending night. In Robinson Ellis's 1871 translation, the lover urges repeated thousands and hundreds of kisses before deliberately scrambling their total. See poem V, lines 1–13.
The pleasure and the darkness are therefore intertwined within one playful poem: mortality supplies urgency to delight. This supports Chesterton's literary distinction between sweetness in particular experiences and darkness in the larger prospect. It does not establish that Catullus was miserable about existence, still less that all pagan theology entails despair. Nor does Chesterton identify poem 5 as his intended example; it is an illuminating comparison rather than a recovered quotation. The ancient poem belongs to the first century BCE; its precise original publication date is unknown. The inspected witness is Ellis's The Poems and Fragments of Catullus (London: John Murray, 1871), digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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