Sexual intimacy between a married couple was a private matter, and not usually the subject of literature. An exception was the epithalamium, a genre of poetry that celebrated a wedding. A wedding hymn by Catullus, for instance, praises the love goddess Venus because "nothing is possible without you". Ovid, whose love poetry early in his career was directed at fictional mistresses, wrote elegies during his exile in which he longed for his wife. Among the collected letters of Pliny "Minor" is one he writes about his feelings for his wife: