Wandering through many countries and over many seas, I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes.

These lines are from Catullus’s elegy for his deceased brother (commonly numbered Poem 101), composed in the late Roman Republic (1st century BCE). Catullus imagines—or records—having traveled far to reach his brother’s grave, a journey that underscores both the physical distance and the emotional cost of bereavement. The poem belongs to a small group of Catullan poems of mourning and family feeling, distinct from his more famous erotic and invective pieces. It reflects Roman funerary practice (offerings at the tomb, formal rites) while also conveying an intensely personal voice characteristic of Catullus’s lyric style.

The speaker frames grief as a pilgrimage: crossing “many countries” and “many seas” to perform the final duties owed to the dead. The “last guerdon of death” suggests a ritual offering—both a conventional funerary gift and a symbolic payment of love and obligation. Yet the act is shadowed by futility: he speaks “in vain” to “silent ashes,” acknowledging the irreversibility of death and the one-sidedness of mourning. The power of the passage lies in its tension between public rite and private anguish, culminating in a stark recognition that language cannot reach the dead, even as it becomes the only medium left for the living to honor them.