Contemporary with Lucretius, but, unlike him, living in the full whirl and glare of Roman life, was a group of young men who were professed followers of the Alexandrian school. In the thirty years which separate the Civil war and the Sullan restoration from the sombre period that opened with the outbreak of hostilities between Caesar and the senate, social life at Rome among the upper classes was unusually interesting and exciting. The outward polish of Greek civilisation was for the first time fully mastered, and an intelligent interest in art and literature was the fashion of good society. The "young man about town," whom we find later fully developed in the poetry of Ovid, sprang into existence, but as the government was still in the hands of the aristocracy, fashion and politics were intimately intermingled, and the lighter literature of the day touched grave issues on every side. The poems of Catullus are full of references to his friends and his enemies among this group of writers. Two of the former, Cinna and Calvus, were poets of considerable importance. Gaius Helvius Cinna--somewhat doubtfully identified with the "Cinna the poet" who met such a tragical end at the hands of the populace after Caesar's assassination--carried the Alexandrian movement to its most uncompromising conclusions. His fame (and that fame was very great) rested on a short poem called _Zmyrna_, over which he spent ten years' labour, and which, by subject and treatment alike, carried the method of that school to its furthest excess. In its recondite obscurity it outdid Lycophron himself. More than one grammarian of the time made a reputation solely by a commentary on it. It throws much light on the peculiar artistic position of Catullus, to bear in mind that this masterpiece of frigid pedantry obtained his warm and evidently sincere praise.
The other member of the triad, Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus, one of the most brilliant men of his time, was too deeply plunged in politics to be more than an accomplished amateur in poetry. Yet it must have been more than his intimate friendship with Catullus, and their common fate of too early a death, that made the two names so constantly coupled afterwards. By the critics of the Silver Age, no less than by Horace and Propertius, the same idea is frequently repeated, which has its best-known expression in Ovid's beautiful invocation in his elegy on Tibullus--