One of the most famous poems of Catullus is 101, his lament at his brother’s grave. (I recently completed a version of this and hope to find an outlet for it somewhere down the road.) Here is the Latin text, followed by Guy Lee’s translation.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
     advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
     et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
     heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
     tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
     atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Travelling through many nations and through many seas

     I have come, brother, for these poor funeral rites,

That I might render you the last dues of the dead

     And vainly comfort your dumb ashes,

Because Fortune has robbed me of your self, alas,

     Poor brother, unfairly taken from me.

But now, meanwhile, accept these gifts which by old custom

     Of the ancestors are offered in sad duty

At funeral rites, gifts drenched in a brother's tears,

     And forever, brother, greetings and farewell.

Kenneth Quinn has noted a possible link between Catullus’s leavetaking in the last line (in perpetuum…ave atque vale) and Vergil, Aeneid 11.97-98, where Aeneas bids farewell to Pallas (salve aeternum…et aeternum vale, “Greetings forever…and forever farewell”)–not necessarily as a conscious allusion, but as a potential reflection of traditional funeral lament with which Catullus and Vergil were both familiar.

I hear an echo of an earlier part of the poem at the end of the Aeneid. Catullus says that his brother has been “unfairly (indigne) taken” from him. Compare the very last lines of Vergil’s poem when Aeneas kills the subjugated Turnus:

...ast illi solvuntur frigore membra
vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.

...and his limbs are loosened in death's chill
and his life, considering it unworthy, flees to the shades below.

I don’t know whether Vergil intended us to hear Catullus in this passage. But consider the possibility that he did. Aeneas had been on the verge of showing mercy to Turnus–until he saw the sword-belt of Pallas, whom Turnus had earlier killed and despoiled. Then, he changes his mind and opts for vengeance.

Remember that the bit quoted above from Book 11 comes from the scene of Pallas’s death. Might we say more than Quinn does? Might we suggest that these are, in fact, two allusions that are meant to be read together? If so, a complex relationship emerges.

In the first, we have a sympathetic relationship similar in kind to that found in Catullus 101: a tender expression of lamentation, coupled with a sense of its futility (Aeneas’s words just before the lines quoted are “The same horrible fates of war call me from here to other tears”).

In the second, we have what appears to be pure vengeance. But if Vergil is again alluding to Catullus on the death of his brother, matters get immensely more complicated. For, although the character Aeneas is showing anything but sympathy for Turnus, Vergil, the author, would be nudging us toward a negative evaluation of Aeneas’s fit of fury: What he does is unworthy–unfair–and we should respond to it in the way we respond to what Catullus portrays as the unjust death of his brother. There would be a kind of triangulation here. Where the audience’s sympathy is accessed directly through Catullus as both author and “character” in the poem, in the case of the Aeneid the audience’s sympathy is mediated through Vergil and against the motives and self-understanding of the character in question.

Does Vergil want us to think of Catullus at the end of the Aeneid? Again, I can’t say for certain. But I am confident he wants to think of the passages of his own Book 11 and Book 12 together; they are both about Pallas, and they are further linked by the use of gemitu in each (11.95 and 12.952). Furthermore, those can both at least plausibly be linked, in turn, to Catullus. Given the combination of those two factors, I am inclined to conclude that he does, indeed, want us to be thinking of Catullus’s poem.

The ending of the Aeneid is one of the most controversial passages in all of ancient literature, and I don’t pretend that this solves anything conclusively. But it may shed a little light on what Vergil was up to.