Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady’s sparrow is dead, the sparrow, my lady’s pet.

These lines open Catullus’s short elegiac poem on the death of Lesbia’s pet sparrow (traditionally numbered Carmina 3). Catullus (c. 84–54 BCE), a leading “neoteric” poet of the late Roman Republic, wrote many poems addressed to “Lesbia,” generally identified with the aristocrat Clodia Metelli. The sparrow poems (Catullus 2 and 3) belong to the Lesbia cycle and play with Hellenistic epigram and lament conventions: the poet calls on mythic figures of beauty and desire (the Graces and Loves) to join in mourning a tiny domestic loss, elevating an intimate scene into stylized literary grief.

The poem’s opening turns a trivial event—the death of a pet bird—into a mock-solemn public lament. By invoking the Graces and Loves, Catullus frames Lesbia’s private affection as something worthy of ritual mourning, while also hinting at erotic subtext: the sparrow is closely associated with Lesbia’s play and intimacy. The exaggerated elegiac tone can be read both as tender empathy for Lesbia’s sorrow and as witty literary performance, compressing genuine feeling, erotic symbolism, and Alexandrian polish into a miniature “funeral” for a creature whose importance lies in what it represents within the lovers’ world.