[bshimmin]

Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus

Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

[Jun8]

And, of course, speaking of Lesbia (traditionally identified as Clodia Metelli, otherwise known as Quadrantaria), one should mention her “sparrow” mentioned in Catullus 2: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/catul.... Reading that article again I saw a tidbit I missed before: “As Richard Hooper has recently pointed out, ‘in Egyptian hieroglyphics the determinative for “little, evil, bad” was … śerau, the sparrow’”. And so it is: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sparrow_(hiero....