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In unrelated news, have some more Catullus.
Catullus 3
Mourn, you Venuses and Cupids,
and as many of the more beautiful people as there are;
the sparrow of my girl is dead,
the sparrow of my darling girl,
whom she loved more than her own eyes.*
For he was sweet and did not know
his own mother so well as the girl,
nor would he move himself from her lap,
but leaping about here and there
was always chirping to his only mistress.
And now he passes through that shadowy journey,
whence they say no one returns.
But let it go poorly for you, the evil shadows
of Orcus**, which devour all beautiful things:
you carried away such a beautiful sparrow from me.
O wickedly done deed! O poor little^ sparrow!
Now your deeds are reddening my girl’s
swollen little^ eyes with crying.
---
* Given how often “eye” is used as an endearment in Latin (the way we might use “heart”), this is probably a discreet joke that she loved the bird more than she loved her boyfriend.
** Also known as Dis, god of the underworld. Funny how everyone is always all Pluto/Hades!!! and never gives these names. (Maybe because he kinda sounds like a green-skinned warleader in a D&D campaign with an unimaginative DM. Poor guy.)
^ In both these cases, the diminutive is actually attaching to the adjective (poor, swollen) rather than the noun (sparrow, eyes). The editor points out that this verges on baby talk: cutesy-wootsy little sparrowkins! But the joke of the poem--or at least one of them--is in doing an entire dirge for a sparrow, and setting very colloquial expressions beside formal elegiac ones.
Catullus 3
Mourn, you Venuses and Cupids,
and as many of the more beautiful people as there are;
the sparrow of my girl is dead,
the sparrow of my darling girl,
whom she loved more than her own eyes.*
For he was sweet and did not know
his own mother so well as the girl,
nor would he move himself from her lap,
but leaping about here and there
was always chirping to his only mistress.
And now he passes through that shadowy journey,
whence they say no one returns.
But let it go poorly for you, the evil shadows
of Orcus**, which devour all beautiful things:
you carried away such a beautiful sparrow from me.
O wickedly done deed! O poor little^ sparrow!
Now your deeds are reddening my girl’s
swollen little^ eyes with crying.
---
* Given how often “eye” is used as an endearment in Latin (the way we might use “heart”), this is probably a discreet joke that she loved the bird more than she loved her boyfriend.
** Also known as Dis, god of the underworld. Funny how everyone is always all Pluto/Hades!!! and never gives these names. (Maybe because he kinda sounds like a green-skinned warleader in a D&D campaign with an unimaginative DM. Poor guy.)
^ In both these cases, the diminutive is actually attaching to the adjective (poor, swollen) rather than the noun (sparrow, eyes). The editor points out that this verges on baby talk: cutesy-wootsy little sparrowkins! But the joke of the poem--or at least one of them--is in doing an entire dirge for a sparrow, and setting very colloquial expressions beside formal elegiac ones.