The Cambridge Companion to Catullus 1107193567, 9781107193567

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THE C AMBRIDGE COMPANION TO CATULLUS

Catullus is one of the most popular poets to survive from classical antiquity. Above all others he seems to speak to modern readers with a modern voice. The distinguished contributors to this Companion discuss the principal subjects which drew Catullus’ affection and disgust, above all his famous affair with the woman he calls ‘Lesbia’, and situate him in the social, historical and intellectual context of first-century bc Rome. One of the so-called ‘new poets’, Catullus had a profound effect on subsequent Latin poetry, and this is explored especially for the Augustan age and the late first century ad. A significant part of the volume is concerned with Catullus’ survival into the modern world. There are discussions both of the manuscript tradition and of the interpretative scholarship which has been devoted to his poetry, as well as his reception by Renaissance and later poets. Students in particular will appreciate this book. ian du quesnay was formerly Bursar of Newnham College and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge. He has published extensively on Latin poetry and co-edited, with Tony Woodman, Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers (Cambridge, 2012). tony woodman is Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Professor of Latin at Durham University, and is currently a Visiting Professor at Newcastle University. He has published twenty-five books and numerous articles on many aspects of Latin poetry and prose, especially Horace and Latin historiography, and co-edited, with Ian Du Quesnay, Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers (Cambridge, 2012). He also edited The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (2009).

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO CATULLUS edited by IAN DU QUESNAY University of Cambridge

TONY WOODMAN University of Virginia

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107193567 doi: 10.1017/9781108147859 © Cambridge University Press 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Du Quesnay, Ian M. Le M., 1947– editor. | Woodman, A. J. (Anthony John), 1945– editor. title: The Cambridge companion to Catullus / edited by Ian Du Quesnay, Tony Woodman. other titles: Cambridge companions to literature. description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Series: Cambridge companions to literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2020024967 (print) | lccn 2020024968 (ebook) | isbn 9781107193567 (hardback) | isbn 9781108147859 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Catullus, Gaius Valerius – Criticism and interpretation. classification: lcc pa6276 .c264 2020 (print) | lcc pa6276 (ebook) | ddc 874/.01–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024967 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024968 isbn 978-1-107-19356-7 Hardback isbn 978-1-316-64471-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Notes on Contributors Preface

page vii xi 1

Introduction 1 Situating Catullus

7

Cynthia Damon

2 Literary Liaisons

26

Tony Woodman

3 Catullan Intertextuality

47

Richard F. Thomas

4 Gender and Sexuality

70

K. Sara Myers

5 Catullan Themes

89

Bruce Gibson

6 Language and Style

116

Anna Chahoud

7 Catullus and Metre

143

David Butterfield

8 Catulli Carmina

167

Ian Du Quesnay

9 Catullus and Augustan Poetry

219

Monica R. Gale

10 Rewriting Catullus in the Flavian Age Carole Newlands

v

242

Contents

vi

11 The Manuscripts and Transmission of the Text

263

S. P. Oakley

12 Editions and Commentaries

291

Dániel Kiss

13 Catullus in the Renaissance

318

Alex Wong

14 Catullus and Poetry in English since 1750

343

Stephen Harrison

Abbreviations and Bibliography Index Locorum General Index

363 399 401

Notes on Contributors

david butterfield is a Senior Lecturer in Classics, and a Fellow of Queens’ College, in the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Latin poetry, especially Lucretius’ De rerum natura, of which he is preparing the new Oxford Classical Text. Other interests include textual criticism, codicology, and the history of classical scholarship. anna chahoud holds the Chair of Latin at Trinity College Dublin and is the Public Orator of the University of Dublin. Her research focuses on Early Latin and fragmentary texts, Latin linguistics, and the transmission of Latin texts from antiquity to the early modern period. She is especially interested in the interaction between literary and spoken language. She is the author of C. Lucilii Reliquiarum Concordantiae (1998), of articles on Republican Latin and the grammatical tradition, and co-author, with E. Dickey, of Colloquial and Literary Latin (2010), and, with J. N. Adams and G. Pezzini, of Early Latin: Constructs, Diversity, Reception (forthcoming). She is writing the first English-language commentary on Lucilius (Cambridge University Press) and producing an edition of fragmentary Latin satire and popular verse for the Loeb Classical Library. cynthia damon is a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of Roman Patronage (1997), a commentary on Tacitus, Histories 1 (2003), a translation of Tacitus’ Annals in the Penguin series (2013), and, with William Batstone, Caesar’s Civil War (2006). She recently published an OCT of Caesar’s Bellum Civile (2015), a companion volume on the text of the Bellum Civile (2015), and a new Loeb edition of Caesar’s Civil War (2016). She is the co-editor, with Joe Farrell, of Ennius’ Annals: Poetry and History (2020). Current projects include a critical edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum for the Library of Digital Latin Texts and a new Loeb edition of Caesar’s Gallic War. vii

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ian du quesnay was formerly Bursar of Newnham College and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge. He is author of various studies of Republican and Augustan poetry and co-editor of Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers (2012). monica r. gale is Professor in Classics at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (1994), Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge, 2000) and Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V (2009). Other publications include articles and book-chapters on Late Republican and Augustan poetry and on Greek and Roman didactic, and edited volumes on Latin literature, including most recently Texts and Violence in the Roman World (with David Scourfield, 2018). She is currently working on a commentary on the complete poems of Catullus for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. bruce gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Liverpool. His publications include a text, commentary and translation of Statius, Silvae 5 (2006), Polybius and his World: Essays in Memory of Frank Walbank (coedited with Thomas Harrison, 2013), and Pliny the Younger in Late Antiquity (Arethusa 46.2, 2013, co-edited with Roger Rees), as well as articles and chapters on a wide range of Latin texts in prose and verse. He is currently writing a commentary on Pliny’s Panegyricus. stephen harrison is Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Latin Literature in the University of Oxford. He is author and/or editor of many books on Latin literature and its reception, including commentaries on Virgil, Aeneid 10 (1991) and Horace, Odes 2 (2017) and several volumes on Apuleius, and co-editor of a number of multi-author volumes, including Life, Love and Death in Latin Poetry (2018), Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature (2018), Roman Receptions of Sappho (2019), and Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses (2019). da´ niel kiss has taught and held research positions at universities in Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy and Spain, and is currently a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the University of Barcelona. He is creator of Catullus Online: An Online Repertory of Conjectures for Catullus, and editor of What Catullus Wrote: Problems in Textual Criticism, Editing and the Manuscript Tradition (2015). He has written many articles on classical subjects and scholarship and has particular interests in Catullus and the neoteric poets,

Notes on Contributors

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Latin textual criticism and textual transmissions, Latin codicology, and digital philology. He is currently working on a book entitled The Manuscripts of Catullus. k. sara myers is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Ovid’s Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (1994) and Ovid: Metamorphoses Book XIV in the series Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (2009), as well as articles on Latin poetry, Columella, Pliny the Younger, and representations of gardens in Latin literature. carole newlands is University Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include classical and medieval Latin literature and cultural and reception studies. She is the author of over forty articles on classical and medieval topics, and she has published several books: Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (1995), Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (2002), Statius: Silvae Book II (2011), Statius: A Poet between Rome and Naples (2012) and Ovid (2015). She is also co-editor of A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (2014) and Brill’s Companion to Statius (2015). stephen oakley is Kennedy Professor of Latin in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College; previously he taught at the University of Reading. His principal publications are The Hill-forts of the Samnites (1994), A Commentary on Livy, Books VI-X (4 vols., 1997–2005), and Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts, Volume 1 (2020). richard f. thomas is George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. His teaching and research interests are focused on Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature, intertextuality, translation and translation theory, the reception of Roman literature, and the lyrics of Bob Dylan. He has published more than 100 articles and reviews as well as the following books: Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition (1982), Reading Virgil and his Texts: Studies in Intertextuality (1999), Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), and commentaries on Virgil, Georgics (1988) and Horace, Odes 4 and Carmen Saeculare (2011). He has co-edited and contributed to Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry (2007), and the threevolume Virgil Encyclopedia (2014). alex wong teaches English at St John’s College, Cambridge, and is a scholar of English literature with ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’. He has written critical essays on various aspects of English poetry and prose in

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the early modern period and in the nineteenth century, sometimes in connection with Neo-Latin verse and the classical tradition. He is the author of a monograph, The Poetry of Kissing in Early Modern Europe: From the Catullan Revival to Secundus, Shakespeare and the English Cavaliers (2017), and he has published verse translations from classical and Renaissance Latin in several places. His own verse is published by Carcanet (Poems Without Irony, 2016), for whom, as an editor, he has also prepared annotated anthologies: Selected Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne (2015) and Selected Essays of Walter Pater (2018). At present he is occupied principally in research on topics related to Victorian Aestheticism, and is working towards a monograph concerned with the legacies of John Ruskin and Walter Pater in twentieth-century aesthetic writing. tony woodman, Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Professor of Latin at Durham University, is currently Visiting Professor at Newcastle University. He is author or coauthor of ‘orange’ commentaries on Velleius Paterculus (1977, 1983) and Tacitus, Annals Books 3 (1996), 4 (2018) and 5–6 (2016), and likewise of ‘greenand-yellow’ commentaries on Tacitus, Annals 4 (1989) and Agricola (2014). He is author of Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (1988), Tacitus Reviewed (1998), From Poetry to History: Selected Papers (2012), and Lost Histories: Selected Fragments of Roman Historical Writers (2015), co-author of Latin Historians (1997), and translator of Tacitus’ Annals (2004) and Sallust (2007). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (2009) and co-edited Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry (1974), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (1979), Poetry and Politics in the Age of Augustus (1984), Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing (1986), Author and Audience in Latin Literature (1992), Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition (1993), Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace (2002), Latin Poetry and Historiography in the Early Empire: Generic Interactions (2010), Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers (2012) and Word and Context in Latin Poetry (2017). Currently he is finalising a commentary on Horace, Odes Book 3 for the series Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, starting a commentary on Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae for the same series, and preparing a new edition of Tacitus’ Annals for the series Oxford Classical Texts.

Preface

From the very long list of Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics one of the world’s most famous and best loved poets has been conspicuous by his absence. This oversight we have tried to rectify in the present volume by inviting leading scholars to apply their expertise to Catullus’ poetry, to the transmission of his poems, and to the influence which the poems have had in both the ancient and the modern worlds. Given the scholarly popularity of Catullus and the innumerable questions which his poetry raises, it is naturally impossible to cover the full range of topics in a single volume; but we hope that we have dealt with most of the major issues and that the volume will be thought to constitute a reasonable and representative selection. Above all we would like to think that the volume, while providing the ‘authoritative guide’ which readers of a Cambridge Companion are entitled to expect, will also make a genuine contribution to Catullan scholarship and will act as a stimulant to further research on this most beguiling of poets. It is inevitable that a wide-ranging Companion, involving numerous contributors, will take a considerable time to produce, and this volume is no exception. Nevertheless our contributors, to whom we are extremely grateful for their scholarly efforts, have tried to ensure that their chapters are as up to date as was compatible with the editorial process. I. M. Le M. Du Q. A. J. W.

xi

Introduction

If Catullus had been born fifty years earlier, in the midst of the Gracchan revolution, or fifty years later, on the eve of the battle of Actium, he would have had a very different life from the one which he did have – and he would have been a very different poet. But this presupposes that we know when Catullus was in fact born; do we? According to St Jerome (Chron. 1930), he was born in Verona in 87 bc (‘Gaius Valerius Catullus scriptor lyricus Veronae nascitur’). The reference to Verona tallies with what can be inferred from the poems. In one poem he begs a fellow poet to visit him in Verona (35.3), in another he appears to write from Verona but explains that his primary residence is in Rome (68a.27–8, 34–5).1 Elsewhere (31.9, 12) he refers to home as Sirmio, a peninsula which juts out from the southern shore of Lake Garda less than thirty miles west from Verona and of which he describes himself as ‘master’; visible there today are the remains of an impressive Roman villa. At some point, like many ambitious young men from the north, he moved to Rome.2 Whether further references to Verona (67.32–4, 100.2), or his amusing account of a provincial ritual (17), were written after his move to Rome is unknown. Several of the persons whom he mentions, such as his dedicatee Cornelius Nepos (1), were Transpadane – that is, from across the River Po in Gallia Cisalpina.3 Jerome’s date for the poet’s birth is more problematic and is to be seen in the light of the saint’s further information (Chron. 1959) that Catullus died at Rome in his thirtieth year in 58/57 bc (‘Catullus xxx aetatis anno Romae moritur’). This latter date cannot be right, since in Poem 113 Catullus refers to Pompey’s second consulship (113.2) and in Poem 11 to the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar (11.10–12; cf. 29.4, 20; 45.22): as Pompey’s consulship fell in 55, Catullus must still have been alive then; and, since Caesar 1 2 3

Poem 44 implies that, like Horace, he also had a country villa to the east of Rome. One of these young men was Virgil: see esp. Jenkyns (1998) 73–127. For the background to Catullus see esp. Wiseman (1985) and, for his family and Sirmio, Wiseman (1987) 307–70 and (2007) 57–71.

1

2

introduction

invaded Britain twice, in 55 and 54, Catullus may still have been alive in 54. Many scholars – probably the majority – believe that 54 is the latest date which Catullus mentions, and, putting this together with Jerome’s (admittedly suspicious) round figure for Catullus’ life-span, conclude that Catullus was perhaps born in 84 bc. Since that was the year of the fourth and last of L. Cornelius Cinna’s consecutive consulships, it is possible that Jerome confused the year with 87, the year of Cinna’s first. Apart from a relative dating for the death of Catullus’ brother, all datable references in the Catullan corpus lie between 56 and 54 bc and all are to be found in the short poems and epigrams (1–60 and 69–116). If the death of his brother in the Troad and Catullus’ visit to his grave (101) are, as most believe, connected with the poet’s time in Bithynia (57–56 bc), then the long elegies (65-68b) probably derive from that period. A date of 54 bc for Catullus’ death is compatible with one of the interpretations of the joking statement in Poem 52 that ‘Vatinius is swearing falsely by his consulship’ (52.3 ‘per consulatum peierat Vatinius’), namely that Vatinius was swearing by the consulship which in 63 he famously boasted that he would hold (cf. Cic. Vat. 6, 11). Others, however, take Poem 52 at face value as a reference to Vatinius’ actual consulship, which he did not hold until 47 bc, and then only for a short time at the end of the year;4 scholars of this persuasion simply accept that the Catullan corpus displays no other datable event between 54 and 47,5 although this would be a convenient period in which to slot the non-elegiac long poems (61–64). It is possible to infer from Ovid’s Amores (3.9.61–2), where it is implied that Catullus and Licinius Calvus died as iuuenes (technically under 45), that Catullus may have died at roughly the same time as Calvus, who is known to have been dead by 46 bc (Cic. Brut. 279 adulescens). It may be that Jerome’s error lies not in the year of Catullus’ birth (87 bc) but in his age and that the poet died not in his thirtieth year (‘xxx aetatis anno’) but in his fortieth (‘xxxx’), i.e. 48/47 bc.6 But we simply do not know.7 Catullus’ poetry is replete with the names of friends, acquaintances and enemies.8 Few can be identified with anything approaching certainty; and 4 5 6 7

8

See Broughton (1968) 2.286. There is a useful survey of the evidence by Barrett (1972), who himself favours 47. So Skinner (2011) 127; Jerome may have misread his source or used a text in which the numeral had already been corrupted. For the corruption of numerals, see e.g. Oakley (2005) 330–2. For the suggestions that Catullus married and had children and followed up the surviving poems by writing others, including mimes, which have not survived, see Wiseman (2007) 59–65 and (1985) 189–98 respectively. The persons mentioned by Catullus are listed and discussed by Neudling (1955), now inevitably out of date in some respects.

Introduction

3

even when they are most securely identified, as with Manlius Torquatus (61), we do not have enough evidence of the right kind to shed much light on the poems. When Varus, who has been variously identified as the Epicurean and critic Quintilius Varus or as Alfenus Varus the lawyer and future suffect consul (39 bc), took Catullus to see his girlfriend, the girl engaged the poet in a conversation from which it is clear that Catullus and another friend, the poet Helvius Cinna, had served on the staff of the governor of Bithynia, in Asia Minor (10.7, 30).9 We know from another poem (28.9) that the governor in question was Lucretius’ addressee, C. Memmius, who governed Bithynia in 57/56 bc. Other poems give the impression that Catullus was pleased to leave Asia Minor and return home (46, 31), although we know that his brother, also in Asia Minor but for an unknown reason, died there (65.5–14, 68b.91–100; cf. 101). The person mentioned most memorably in the poems is of course the woman whom he calls by the pseudonym Lesbia (cf. Ov. Tr. 2.427–8), named in thirteen poems and evidently alluded to in a similar number.10 Apuleius says that her real name was Clodia (Apol. 10), and she is conventionally identified with the notorious wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus, who was consul in 60, and the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher, who was tribune in 58;11 some scholars, however, have suggested that she is Clodia’s homonymous sister, wife of L. Licinius Lucullus, who was consul in 74, while the most recent notion is that she is a daughter of Ap. Claudius Pulcher (the consul of 54) and the wife of Cn. Pompeius Magnus (elder son of Pompey the Great).12 Since Catullus very frequently refers to his beloved as his puella, a word which implies youth rather than middle age, this last suggestion has its attraction; but, whoever she was, her name has been inextricably associated with that of Catullus almost from the start (cf. Prop. 2.34.87–8). Catullus’ poetry is so exceptionally varied, and raises so many problems, that it is impossible to deal with every aspect in a single volume. Contributors to the present Companion have done their best to provide 9

10 12

Helvius Cinna (tribunus plebis 44 bc) was murdered following the assassination of Julius Caesar by an angry mob who confused him with the alleged conspirator Cornelius Cinna (praetor 44 bc): the paucity of Roman names in use were a problem not just for modern scholars, as Helvius Cinna discovered to his cost! For discussion of Lesbia’s identity see Wiseman (1969) 50–60. 11 See Skinner (2011). That Lesbia/Clodia was one of the daughters of the consul of 54 was the suggestion of J. D. Morgan; that she was the daughter married to Cn. Pompeius as opposed to M. Junius Brutus was the suggestion of J. T. Ramsey. The identification is supported by the fact that Catullus refers to Lesbia’s husband as ‘illi fatuo’ (83.2), a term notoriously associated with Cn. Pompeius (cf. Cic. Fam. 15.19.4 ‘scis Gnaeum quam sit fatuus’). See Hutchinson (2012) 56 n. 16. For a different view of Poem 83, see Du Quesnay (below) p. 206.

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a wide variety of perspectives from which his poems can be profitably explored. Catullus was writing, as we have seen, in the period following the Social Wars 91–88 bc. The integration into Italy of the various areas south of the Po, with Rome as the dominant city (often simply Vrbs), was still not complete. The existing Roman elite resisted the increased competition from those they considered to be rustic, ill-educated and uncouth, whether they came from Arpinum or were domi nobiles, like the Valerii Catulli, who had held magistracies in the municipalities of Gallia Cisalpina, which remained a province until 42 bc; throughout the 50s its proconsul, appointed by the Roman Senate, was Julius Caesar. And throughout these decades Rome continued to expand, taking in new provinces, including Macedonia, where Veranius and Fabullus went as comites to the proconsul Calpurnius Piso, and Bithynia and Pontus, where Catullus was among the comites of the governor C. Memmius. His journey afforded the opportunity to visit not only the Troad, both the site of his brother’s grave and the setting for Homer’s Iliad and the myths associated with it, but also the famous cities of Asia (now a Roman province). Damon explores how Catullus, from his newly adopted home (68a.34–5), enthusiastically embraces its sophisticated perspective on these shifting relationships with the peoples and places of both Italy and the expanding provinces that increasingly defined the areas around the Mediterranean in which Roman power held sway. Rome’s expansion eastwards not only offered opportunities for travel to lands familiar from literature and legend but also resulted in an influx of Greek scholars, poets and philosophers to Italy. Some came of their own accord, like the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, a friend of both Calpurnius Piso (28; 47) and Manlius Torquatus (61), or as captives, like Parthenius of Nicaea in Bithynia. The latter had a formative effect both on the Neoterics and then on the early Augustans. The loss of so much of almost all the work of poets contemporary with and earlier than Catullus makes it difficult to appreciate fully his achievement. Woodman examines a number of passages in which there is clear connection between Catullus and his contemporaries, not just the Neoterics but also orators (Sestius, 44) and Lucretius (the only contemporary poet to survive more or less complete). For the most part, the reader has to deal with Catullus’ text on its own terms, bearing in mind the wider context. Gibson provides an overview of the themes that run through his entire corpus, emphasising the varied nature of the material, and the versatile treatments of related themes that are to be found not only between shorter and longer poems but also within individual poems. Myers uses the frameworks of Feminist and Gender

Introduction

5

studies to explore some aspects of the interpersonal and sociopolitical relationships represented in Catullus’ poems and the importance of gender in his treatment of social relationships, similes, his representation of marriage and the nature of the invective used against men and women. Du Quesnay re-examines the long-standing question of the nature of the liber Catulli as transmitted, and concludes that it is a compilation of a varied selection of smaller libelli with 1–60 comprising perhaps four original books arranged by Catullus, while 69–116 comprise two such books and 65–66 another, with each of 61–64 and 67-68b originally circulating as individual poems. Chahoud exploits recent advances in Latin linguistics and the renewed interest in the fragments of older Latin (including Lucilius) to illustrate the range of Catullan linguistic registers, from the obscenities at home on the walls of Pompeii to the elevated and exotic styles derived from learned Greek poetry. Butterfield demonstrates the importance of Catullus’ metrical achievements as an integral and important part of his claim to be a doctus poeta, advancing his right to be recognised as a ‘metrical revolutionary’. Thomas examines the various ways in which Catullus appropriates, incorporates and transforms his inheritance from Greek literature, ranging from close imitation or translation to the subtle allusivity of Poem 64. The variety of Catullus’ work is reflected in its reception. Gale explores not only the deep impact he had on Augustan elegy but the more complex relationship with Horace in both his lyrics (Odes) and in his Epodes and the more nuanced and extensive importance of Catullus for Virgil throughout his career, from the Eclogues to the Aeneid. In the Flavian period, Catullus took on a further significance as a source of renewal (alongside other late Republican writers) in an age which sought to differentiate itself from the Julio-Claudian period. Newlands examines the various ways in which the elder and younger Pliny appropriated Catullus (a fellow Transpadane) to develop their own images; Martial promoted phalaecian (hendecasyllabic) and elegiac epigram into a Latin genre destined for an influential future; and Statius, who in his epic Thebaid exploited Catullus as Virgil had done before him in his emulation of his Augustan predecessor, not only transformed Catullus’ epithalamia (61 and 62) but also some of the epigrammatic themes (e.g. Poems 2 and 3) into the influential genre of more elevated occasional poetry (usually in hexameters). The next phase in Catullus’ story is the rediscovery of his poems in a codex which resurfaced in Verona around the start of the fourteenth century. Oakley provides a fresh examination and overview of the manuscripts and concludes, in support of Hale, that there is no reason to

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suppose, on present evidence, that any of the other existing manuscripts derives from other than T, O, G and R (and their various correctors). His account, which is based on a fresh examination of the recentiores, includes an updated list of all the manuscripts, a fresh stemma of the older manuscripts, and much information about the early circulation of the ‘new’ Catullus in the fifteenth century, as well as a much needed introduction to reading the apparatus criticus, essential for serious students of Catullus. Attempts to produce a readable text of Catullus and to build a scholarly framework within which it might be better understood are traced by Kiss from the earliest printed editions through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In spite of the many difficulties presented by the text, still far from fully resolved, Catullus had an immediate and a lasting impact on subsequent literature. Wong explores the themes felt to be particularly Catullan (including the ‘kissing poems’, the distinction between the poet’s morality and that of his poetic persona, and the wedding hymns) by the Neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance and the early efforts to create a distinctive and recognisably Catullan style in French and English vernacular poetry. Harrison traces the richness of Catullus’ reception from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first in English translations and in allusive imitations. For all the difficulties that persist in establishing and understanding the text of his poems, Catullus’ ability to speak in a convincing first-person voice and express immediately recognisable emotions about things that are perennial gives him wide and enduring appeal even to those coming to Latin literature for the first time.

Further Reading In addition to the various printed editions of Catullus, of which Mynors’ OCT is regarded as standard, there is the remarkable online Catullus by Dániel Kiss, complete with a very full apparatus criticus and explanatory bibliography (www.catullusonline.org). There is an online Oxford Bibliography by D. Konstan (www.oxfordbibliographies.com), and a full bibliography by Skinner (2015).

chapter 1

Situating Catullus Cynthia Damon

I Situating Catullus? The desire to situate Catullus and his poems at the tumultuous midpoint of first-century bc Rome is both hard to resist and hard to satisfy. The basic problem can be glimpsed through a confrontation of two scholarly positions represented in a collection of influential papers on Catullus: There can be no denying that in the Catullan corpus . . . social issues are so intimately united with the poet’s aesthetic programme that they constitute an unavoidable dimension of interpretation. (Tatum (2007) 398) Any reading that attempts to recuperate the poet’s life and times on the basis of his work will have to do so ultimately at the cost of philological precision, and any critical examination of the poet’s words is bound to expose such readings as naive, incompetent, or blind. (Selden (2007) 511)

The poet, it seems, both situates himself insistently in contemporary milieux and withholds the details that would allow readers confidently to place those milieux on our ‘map’ of late-Republican Rome. Denis Feeney puts it well: ‘The poems . . . tease us with the possiblity of making the data fit.’1 Catullus’ poems introduce us to a society of vividly realised friends, lovers and enemies. He tantalises the reader, particularly the historicising reader, with their names – ‘some forty contemporaries are named in his poems’ – only to involve her in ‘insurmountable prosopographical problems’.2 Is the Cato addressed in Poem 56 the literary figure P. Valerius Cato, or the political figure M. Porcius Cato or another Cato altogether?3 Is the Rufus of Poems 69 and 77 the same person as the Caelius of Poems 58 and 100, and is either of them to be identified 1 2 3

Feeney (2012) 44. Quotations from Du Quesnay and Woodman (2012) 262 and Bellandi (2012) 48 ‘incertezze insormontabili di prosopografia’. See recently Cowan (2015).

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with Cicero’s friend and correspondent M. Caelius Rufus?4 Periphrases such as ‘fag Romulus’ (cinaede Romule: 29.5, 9) multiply the uncertainties – is the addressee Caesar? or Pompey? – as do pseudonyms (Lesbia, Lesbius, Mentula, Socration, etc.). Of the 40-odd named contemporaries only about a third are securely identified.5 And even where Catullus provides enough context to permit the identification of individuals who are independently known to us, the relationship evoked in his poems often remains hard to define.6 Readers from Catullus’ own world might have found the prosopographical fog less impenetrable, but they would also have been aware of the generic obstacles to historicising the addressee of an apparently ‘personal’ poem, particularly a poem involving invective, and to trusting the speaker.7 Furthermore, Catullus’ readership is no more bounded by space and time than the poems of his libellus (however defined) are confined to the physical object in which they were presented to their dedicatee in Poem 1.8 In short, the social world in which Catullus shows himself enmeshed is constructed by the poet, and the degree to which it is useful to align that construct with historical reality is a matter of critical debate.9 Critics are likewise divided on the question of Catullus’ political engagement. The number of poems in which politically prominent figures such as Caesar and Cicero are named, or politically significant themes such as the profits of empire are overt, is small – Bellandi counts a dozen10 – and the function of the political discourse is hard to pin down, with interpretations ranging from active (attack or critique) to passive (commentary or complaint) to detachment and even indifference.11 Hindsight may delude us into seeing Catullus as a Sallust avant la lettre, identifying corruption as the 4

Names involving prosopographical uncertainty include, e.g., Veranius (Poems 9, 12, 28, 47), Varus (10, 22), Furius (11, 16, 23, 26), Suffenus (14, 22), Juventius (24, 48, 81, 99), Piso (28, 47), Cornificius (38), Hortalus (66), Gellius (74, 80, 88–91, 116), Arrius (84). For preliminary orientation see Neudling (1955) and Thomson (1997) ad locc. 5 E.g., Caesar (Poems 11, 29, 57, 93), Cicero (49), Cinna (10, 95, 113), Junia and Manlius (61), Licinius Calvus (14, 50, 53), Mamurra (29, 57), Memmius (28), Pollio (12), Pompey (29, 113), Sestius (44), Vatinius (14, 52, 53). 6 On Cicero in Poem 49 see Selden (2007); on Memmius in Poem 10 see the contrasting positions of Braund (1996) and Cairns (2003/2012a). 7 On possible fictional addressees in the collection see recently Holzberg (2002a) 26–7, Hawkins (2011), Ingleheart (2014), Kronenberg (2014), Shapiro (2014); on the generic expectations of poetic invective more generally see Rosen (2007), esp. ch.1, ‘The dynamics of ancient satirical poetry’. 8 Cf. Feeney (2012) 38: ‘The poems will eventually outstrip the particular social nexus between Catullus and Nepos as much as they outstrip the material text.’ 9 Skinner (2015) 171, for example, sees sociopolitical contextualization as a growth area in Catullan studies, but Gale (2005) is critical of the ‘social criticism’ angle in Nappa (2001) and Skinner (2003). 10 Bellandi (2012) 47. For some key figures see n. 5 above. 11 For a survey see Skinner (2015) 176–82.

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key political problem of the day, or as an early exponent of the protest against Caesar’s social engineering. The undeniable pleasure that we derive from Catullus’ outspoken disrespect (to put it no more strongly) for Caesar needs to be calibrated against Caesar’s own reaction: though stung, he responded with a social gesture, treating it as a faux pas not a political attack (Suet. DJ 73, quoted below). And here too one has to take genre into account: it is clear that political invective was inherently personal in the ancient world, but that is no guarantee that personal invective was inherently political.12 As a number of recent discussions have shown, the temptation to see ‘the political’ in a broader sense as widespread in Catullus’ poems is strong; we embrace Catullus as a spokesperson for our own disapproval of lateRepublican mores.13 But no matter how broadly we construe ‘the political’ in Catullus, it aligns poorly with political realities in an age when ‘the direction of the Roman world was decided by men who had the brains to accumulate military power, the stomach to think out its implications, and the nerve to act accordingly’.14 The military dimension of mid-50s politics is trivialised or ignored in Catullus’ poems, and the nature of the poet’s engagement with the political context more generally remains elusive. If we want to understand poems that their author situates in a realistic (if not necessarily real) world, we need to find a framework for interpretation that is general enough to be relevant to a substantial portion of the collection and robust enough to hold up despite some wobbly textual and historical props. Instead of trying to align the sociopolitical world evoked in the poems with its historical correlate, this chapter examines the poet’s own alignment of disparate worlds: Verona and Cisalpine Gaul, the Roman empire, the world beyond Rome’s control, and the metropolis with its immediate environs. The expressive possibilities of such geographic entities are particularly clear when Catullus uses one place as a foil to another, as he often does, or assembles them into a catalogue. In Poem 44, for example, with its opening quibble ‘whether Sabine or Tiburtine’ (44.1 seu Sabine seu Tiburs), we see a distinction between the categories ‘Sabine’ and ‘Tiburtine’ as applied to a ‘country estate’ (fundus), and more generally a distinction between Italian hinterland (‘Sabine’) and Rome’s suburbs (‘Tiburtine’). Relative values are assigned as the poem continues: whereas those who do not want to offend the estate’s owner call it ‘Tiburtine’, his enemies eagerly avail themselves of the nomenclatory weapon ‘Sabine’ (44.2–5), and he himself defends the more flattering label as the truer of the two (44.5 uerius Tiburs). A similar 12 13

See, e.g., Tatum (1993, 2007), Heyworth (2001), Cowan (2015). 14 See, e.g., Konstan (1977, 2000, 2007) and Skinner (2003). Krostenko (2007) 229.

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contrast between Rome and Italy contributes to the paradoxical likeness of Caesar and his military subordinate Mamurra in Poem 57: they are ‘stained with equivalent stains’ (3), but one stain is from Rome, one from Formiae, a town half-way to Naples (57.4 urbana altera et illa Formiana). In Poem 39 the cleanliness of Italians living anywhere from Rome to the Po valley (urbanus . . . Sabinus . . . Tiburs . . . Vmber . . . Etruscus . . . Lanuuinus . . . Transpadanus) stands as foil to the filthiness of a man who learned his dental hygiene routine in Spain (39.17 Celtiberia in terra).15 Zones of Roman military and administrative activity such as Spain serve as foil to the wilderness in Poem 45, where the narrator adduces Syria and Britain as more realistic threats than Septimius’ Libyan and Indian lions (45.22 Syrias Britanniasque, cf. 45.6–7 in Libya Indiaque . . . leoni). Toponyms can even structure the contrast between mythological past and banal present, the former represented in Poem 95 by the ‘waters of Satrachus’ in Zmyrna’s homeland on Cyprus, the latter by Padua in the Po valley, where Volusius’ Annals will serve to wrap fish for cooking.16 In these poems and many others contrast and contestation show Catullus making meaning out of worlds identified geographically. In fact, each of the four geographic worlds mentioned above – Italy, the empire, the world beyond Rome’s reach, and the metropolis with its immediate penumbra – is evoked in more than a dozen poems, while geographic references occur in more than half of the poems in the collection and in every type of poem. The importance of geography for situating Catullus is even inscribed in the miserable scrap of the ancient biography that has come down to us, according to which he was ‘born at Verona’ and ‘died at Rome’.17

II

‘My people’

Italian origin is a defining feature for a number of the inhabitants of Catullus’ literary world, including the recipient of the gift-libellus described in Poem 1, Cornelius Nepos, whose literary endeavours are the more admirable because ventured by him ‘alone of the Italians’ (1.5 unus Italorum).18 ‘From Bologna’ is the first thing we hear about the sordid Rufa 15 16 17

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Journey poems, too, feature catalogues of toponyms: 4, 11, 29, 36, 46, 84, 101. See Armstrong (2013). See Noonan (1986), esp. 302. The locations are given (with problematic dates: 87 and 57 bc) in Jerome’s Chronicle. See also Dench (2005) 328 on Catullus’ ‘studiedly dislocated persona strung out between towns of Italy, Rome, and the Greek world’. On the emotional and metapoetic aspects of Catullan geography see Armstrong (2013). Catullus’ assertion that a fellow Transpadane (Plin. HN 3.127 Padi accola) is ‘Italian’ engages with a contemporary issue: this area was territorially but not politically Italian (Dyson (1985), Wiseman

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of Poem 59 (59.1 Bononiensis Rufa), while the cognomen of the gauche napkin thief Asinius Marrucinus (12.1) suggests derivation from the Marrucini, a people based on the ‘wrong’ side of the Apennines.19 Mamurra is persistently Formianus, ‘a man from Formiae’ (41.4, 43.5, 57.4, 114.1), and it requires a concerted effort to detach Caecilius from Comum and its attractions (35.1–10). Even inanimate objects are marked as Italian: the cart of Poem 97 by Transpadane terminology (6 ploxenum; cf. Quint. 1.5.8), the door of Poem 67 doubly so, by its location in Verona and affection for Brixia (67.34 Brixia Veronae mater amata meae). As we will see in the present section, Italy is a complex signifier: a foil for urbanity, a world unto itself and a constituent of personal identity. Poem 81 offers a good introduction to the Catullan themes associated with the contrast between Italy and Rome.20 Italy is here represented by Pisaurum, a trans-Apennine community separated from Rome by geography and history. Founded as a colony of Roman citizens in ‘territory taken from the Gauls’, ager Gallicus, in 184 bc, and repeatedly repopulated in the first century bc, Pisaurum was an instrument of Roman hegemony in the Italian peninsula.21 Nemone in tanto potuit populo esse, Iuuenti, bellus homo, quem tu diligere inciperes, praeterquam iste tuus moribunda ab sede Pisauri hospes inaurata pallidior statua, qui tibi nunc cordi est, quem tu praeponere nobis audes, et nescis quod facinus facias? Was no one in this vast crowd adequate, Iuuentius, not enough of a looker, to initiate affection in you, except this outsider of yours from the forlorn site of Pisaurum, paler than a gilt statue, the man who is now your delight, whom – the nerve! – you prefer to me, not knowing what it is you are doing?

The figure of central interest for the present argument is the object of the addressee Iuuentius’ affections, iste tuus . . . hospes. He is a visitor to a city that is the presumptive home of the sizeable populace mentioned in line 1 (in tanto . . . populo), of the speaker, of Iuuentius himself and of a non-negligible number of homines belli, ‘good-lookers’. The identity of the unnamed city matters less than its characteristic vitality and style. The drawbacks of the

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(2007) 57–9), and had to wait until 49 bc for the two statuses to merge. Dench (2005) 330–42 offers a case study of Catullan poems concerned with Italian identity. See Krostenko (2001a) 243, Dench (2005) 336, Watson (2012) 165. Poem 81 is discussed at length in Zicàri (1955/1978), more briefly in Watson (2012). For details see Watson (2012) 167. On the function of the region more generally see Dyson (1985).

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visitor’s Italian paese, by contrast, are specified in a line of pointed inconcinnity: the prosaic praeterquam and the conversational iste give way to a mock-epic periphrasis that both personifies Pisaurum and declares it to be a miserable backwater (moribunda ab sede Pisauri).22 A similarly elevated expression conveys the unattractiveness of the man himself: he is like a gilded statue (inaurata . . . statua), yes, but only in his presumably shiny pallor (pallidior). The visitor, it seems, has brought Pisaurum with him and thereby cast a pall over the entire scenario: the place is on its deathbed, its representive is pale and statue-still, and Iuuentius has succumbed to a fatal attraction, oblivious to his lapse (nescis).23 Such is the argument with which the speaker tries to pry loose the object of his own affections (see also Poems 24, 48 and 99): in the big city, Catullus’ Italian origin is no recommendation.24 Other poems show us a self-sufficient Italian hinterland. The unnamed colonia of Poem 17, for example, is a vividly realised entity complete with a community, some urban infrastructure and a festival calendar.25 It does not see itself in relation to Rome, nor does it need a name to go about its business of planning ludi, worrying about the practical details and listening to a possible solution.26 The relevant portion comes at the beginning of the poem (lines 1–9): O colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere longo, et salire paratum habes, sed uereris inepta crura ponticuli axulis stantis in rediuiuis, ne supinus eat cauaque in palude recumbat: sic tibi bonus ex tua pons libidine fiat, in quo uel Salisubsali sacra suscipiantur, munus hoc mihi maximi da, colonia, risus. quendam municipem meum de tuo uolo ponte 22

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See Zicàri (1955) 65–7 (= (1978) 192–5). Another Italian town is personified in Poem 17, which begins ‘o colonia’. See also Dench (2005) 340–1 on Poem 31, ‘almost a love song in which [Sirmio] is addressed in terms that might be used of a lover’, and Poem 67 ‘Brixia herself . . . plays the part of the gossip’. It is tempting to see the focus on Pisaurum as a consequence of the poet Ennius’ association with the town. Though born in Rudiae, he gained Roman citizenship when enrolled as a citizen of the new colony in 184 (Cic. Brut. 79; Livy 39.44.10); the foundation was carried out by the son of one of the poet’s patrons, M. Fulvius Nobilior. For more of this geographically-figured rhetoric of exclusion (Fitzgerald (1995) 87–113) see Watson (2012) on Poems 12, 39, 43, 59, 95 and 97. On the strength of ‘my fellow townsman’ (17.8 municipem meum), and despite historical and rhetorical obstacles, the colonia is often taken to be Verona; see, e.g., Cenerini (1989) with discussion. Skinner (2003) 45 and others stress the poem’s broadly Transpadane element (cf. Kloss (1998) 58). For other self-referential municipal worlds see Poem 100, in which Catullus uses names to build an apparent ‘circle’, and Poem 67, which features both a ‘circle’ at Brixia and recherché mythological and historical allusions. colonia is not a name but a personification. The relationship with Rome implicit in the ‘colonia’ label is not made explicit in the poem. See section 3 below for other poems in which there is a perceptible tension between Catullus’ representations of places and their real-world counterparts.

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ire praecipitem in lutum per caputque pedesque. You want to stage your festivals on a long bridge, o colony, and you have prepared to caper but worry about the absurd legs of your feeble span standing on recycled sticks: you don’t want it to fall flat on its back and loll in swampy hollows. I’d like a fine bridge to be built for you according to your own specifications, a bridge on which rites can be performed even for Salisubsalus. Just provide me with this spectacle, colony, a hugely funny one: I want a certain townsman of mine to plummet from your bridge into the muck, head over heels.

The remainder of the poem contains gossip: the nosy, not to say interfering, speaker’s critique of his fellow townsman’s inadequacies as a husband, on account of which he wants him to be given a ducking from the town bridge. In return for the gratification he will derive from this ‘hugely funny spectacle’ (munus . . . maximi risus), he proposes a typically municipal benefaction, a new bridge.27 The bridge, he says, will meet the colony’s specifications (ex tua . . . libidine): it will be strong enough even for the rites of . . . Salisubsalus. Who? As any commentary will tell you, this deity is utterly obscure; his name now communicates no more than an etymological hint that the sacra involve jumping (-sal-, cf. 17.2 salire paratum habes).28 That, however, is perhaps sufficient: the learned reader can make provisional sense of the recherché allusion(s), and every reader can see that the colonia is a lively place even if one of its inhabitants is as lifeless as the man from Pisaurum (17.21 iste . . . stupor) and the poem ends ‘stuck in the mud’ (17.26 tenaci in uoragine). Poem 17 shows us the colonia close up, without any framing by the metropolitan ‘other’.29 And yet in the first century bc it must have been hard to look at places like Pisaurum, Verona and Brixia without seeing Rome. The hospitality extended by Catullus’ father, as representative of Verona’s elite, to Caesar, as Rome’s governor for Cisalpine Gaul in the 50s, is a good indication of the forces that were drawing Italians into the ambit of Rome (Suet. DJ 73): Although Caesar had not hidden the fact that the scars inflicted on him by Catullus’ poetic squibs about Mamurra were going to last, he invited Catullus to dinner on the very day he apologised and continued to make his habitual use of the hospitality of Catullus’ father. 27 28 29

For some parallels see Wiseman (1987) 340–2. Hints of a ritual specific to Rome have also been detected; see Cenerini (1989). The apparent irrelevance of Rome to this world is particularly visible in poems such as 35 and 67 that emphasise connections between Italian communities (35.3–4 ‘let him leave the fortifications of Novum Comum and come to Verona’; 67.34 ‘Brixia, beloved mother of my Verona’). Pliny the Elder coins the term ‘my countryman’ (conterraneus) to communicate the confraternity between himself and his fellow Transpadane Catullus (NH pr. 1).

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Father and son clearly have different relationships with the visiting grandee: whereas the father entertains Caesar, presumably at the family property in Sirmio, on Lake Garda, the son is Caesar’s dinner guest and what he discusses with Caesar – his invective against Caesar’s chief engineer Mamurra – pertains to Rome. Cicero, who himself had attachments to both hometown and Rome, argues that Roman citizenship was more complicated for citizens of municipal origin, municipes, than for those born Roman (Leg. 2.5).30 Catullan geography sheds a particularly clear light on the competing loyalties of such citizens, for a body cannot be in two places at once. In Poem 68 the poet in Verona misses his house and home in Rome (68.27–36, esp. 34–5 illa domus, | illa mihi sedes), but in Poem 31, after having been released from his ‘overseas assignment’ in the Roman province of Bithynia, he is happily back at the family hearth in Sirmio (31.9–10 peregrino | labore fessi uenimus larem ad nostrum). The doubleness is such that when Catullus speaks of setting out from home for his provincial tour (46.10 a domo) it is unclear which home he means; the relevant distinction is now between home and abroad.31 And municipal origin is not just a matter of a person’s sense of self; it also affects what others see in you. When Catullus wants to communicate the utter failure of Volusius’ versified Annals to achieve poetic viability, for example, he predicts that they will perish ‘while still at Padua’ (95.7 Paduam . . . ad ipsam). Textual corruption earlier in Poem 95 occludes the point somewhat, but ipsam surely suggests that Padua was where they (and Volusius) started.32 Even this modest selection of passages suffices to show that Catullus is attentive to the manifold significances of the Italian birthplace he claims in Poem 39: ‘ . . . or a man from Transpadane Italy, to mention my people, too’ (39.13 aut Transpadanus, ut meos quoque attingam).33 As we will see in the next two sections of this chapter, however, he is also attentive to the lure of the wider world, both the places ruled by Rome and those beyond her reach. 30

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Apropos of Cicero’s assertion that Rome had the superior claim, Dench comments ([2005] 132) ‘Cicero is pushing the significance of the local community into second place, and emphasizing the political and emotional significance of Rome in a manner that would surely have seemed alien to most Italians.’ The fact that his friends set out at the same time (46.10 simul) – and perhaps for similar provincial roles – suggests that the journey began at Rome or at least with a Roman concern, namely, provincial government, but homecoming is achieved at Sirmio (31.10; cf. 4.24). The point is clarified by emendations that convert the unwanted Hortensius of 95.3 into a geographic modifier ((H)atrianus in, (H)atriensis in) associating Volusius with Atria, a town near Padua. See Solodow (1987) and Trappes-Lomax (who deems the line an interpolation) (2007) ad loc. The complexities are well treated by Fitzgerald (1995), esp. ch. 8 (‘an anxious exploration of the poet’s complicated cultural affiliations’; quotation from 211).

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‘The monuments of “Caesar the Great”’

In Catullus’ day the Roman empire stretched from Spain to Syria and already included most of the Mediterranean coastline, but it was still expanding. Its magnitude is the focus of the opening stanzas of one of Catullus’ most geographically ambitious poems, Poem 11, in which he juxtaposes the territory in which ‘great Caesar’ – or, more provocatively, ‘Caesar the Great’ (11.10 Caesaris . . . magni) – operated with geographies evocative of other ‘Greats’, including Alexander and (perhaps) Pompey.34 The poem opens with a hypothetical expedition aiming to reach (penetrabit) the inhabitants of India where the eastern shore meets Ocean, or the Hyrcanians in the north, or the Arabs in the south, or the Scythians, the Parthians, the Nile. Or will Catullus’ expedition head north and west instead, across the Alps to tour (uisens) Caesar territory: Gaul with the Rhine on one side and ‘rough water’ on the other, and Britain at the end of the earth?35 None of the above, as it turns out, and Poem 11 itself moves to a different theme at this point. Following in the footsteps of great conquerors is not for Catullus. His empire is a place of opportunity and excitement, yes, but on a personal scale, as we see in the homecoming scene he evokes in Poem 9, addressed to his friend Veranius (lines 5–8): uenisti. o mihi nuntii beati! uisam te incolumem audiamque Hiberum narrantem loca, facta, nationes, ut mos est tuus. You have come: delightful news! I will behold you unscathed and hear you telling Spain stories – its places, events, and peoples – with your customary flair.

What took Veranius to Spain was probably his pursuit of opportunities for social and political advancement in the entourage (cohors) of a provincial governor.36 In the first book of his Gallic War Caesar gives us a contemporary glimpse of what a Veranius looked like from the perspective of the governor, when he explains why his army was panic-stricken at the thought of fighting Ariovistus and his German troops in 58 bc (BG 1.39.2–4): 34

35 36

For discussion of the geographical allusions in Poem 11 see Heath (1989), Greene (1997), Krebs (2008), Woodman (2012a) 17–23; connections have been drawn between the geographical allusions of 11.5–8 and a number of different individuals, including Pompey. The geography of Poem 115, which reaches the ends of the earth in a couplet, is even more hyperbolic; see n. 51 below. ‘Rough water’ renders horribile aequor (11.11), which is one of several plausible emendations of a corrupt text, none of which affects the point at issue here. See Thomson (1997) ad loc. Veranius’ time in Spain is alluded to again in Poems 12 and 25, his time in a governor’s entourage in Poems 28 and 47. It is unclear whether the five poems pertain to the same experience.

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cynthia damon The fear originated in . . . [sc. those] who had followed Caesar from Rome for friendship’s sake but did not have much experience in military matters. They began to request his permission to leave, with different excuses offered by different men, which they said necessitated their departure. Some stayed, induced by shame, in order to avoid the suspicion of fear. These men were not able to maintain their composure or, at times, to hold back tears. Hidden away in their tents they were either lamenting their own fate or commiserating with their friends about the common danger. Wills were being sealed throughout the entire camp.

In the military world of an as yet unconquered Gaul the unmilitary cohors of Caesar’s propertied ‘friends’ was clearly a liability.37 But conditions were more settled in Spain and in the province of Bithynia, where Catullus himself spent a year in the entourage of C. Memmius (57–56 bc). What Veranius brought home from Spain was stories (9.7 narrantem) and souvenirs (12.13 mnemosynum), not – at least not so far as Catullus tells us – glory or wealth or even useful connections.38 Catullus’ haul – again, so far as he tells us – was even more meagre: weariness (31.8–11, esp. fessi) and a disappointing sense of having been exploited (28.9–10, quoted below). In Poem 10 he sketches a scene, set in Rome, from his own homecoming (10.6–13): sermones uarii, in quibus, quid esset iam Bithynia, quo modo se haberet, et quonam mihi profuisset aere. respondi id quod erat, nihil neque ipsis nec praetoribus esse nec cohorti, cur quisquam caput unctius referret, praesertim quibus esset irrumator praetor, nec faceret pili cohortem. There were various topics of conversation, including current events in Bithynia, the condition of the place, and my take. I gave a straight answer, that the place had nothing for the inhabitants themselves or for the praetors (i.e., the governors) and their entourage, no way for anyone to come home more loaded, especially anyone who had a prick of a praetor, who didn’t give a damn for his entourage. 37

38

The aitch-challenged Arrius who was ‘sent to Syria’ (84.7 misso in Syriam) may be another cohort member, possibly the advocate Q. Arrius who played ‘second fiddle’ to Crassus (Cic. Brut. 242; see Fordyce (1961) ad loc.). But for Catullus his salient characteristic is his linguistic gaucherie. The list of urgent conversational topics is dominated by geography-related themes, loca and nationes. The third topic, facta, is interestingly vague: impossible to say whether this refers to military achievements (res gestae) or business affairs (res priuatae) or something else altogether. On the business interests of Catullus (and perhaps his brother) in Bithynia see Wiseman (1987) 336–40; on the province more generally Harris (1980).

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At the very least, his friends expected, Catullus brought back some of the sturdy litter-bearers for which Bithynia was famous? (10.14–16). But no. The place was impoverished and the governor, his boss, was . . . a prick (10.12 irrumator). Apart from the possible reference to military affairs in the above mentioned ‘events’ (9.7 facta; see n. 38), in fact, the empire experienced by Catullus and his friends is a demilitarised zone yielding nothing but napkins, at least in material terms. The predominant theme is the contact – mostly unhappy – between cohors and governor. Although Catullus in Poems 10 and 47 decries obstacles to advancement in this world, he also signals indifference to its possibilities with an attack on his own governor in Poem 28 (lines 9–10): o Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti. I was down, Memmius, and you gave me a good long leisurely reaming with the full length of that pole of yours.

So much for the career-advancing advice to ‘seek out noble friends’ (28.13 pete nobiles amicos! ).39 For a Roman of Catullus’ day, however, the empire was hard to ignore. As we saw earlier, the Roman empire contained monuments to Caesar’s greatness (11.10). But the monumenta mentioned by Catullus are in fact features of the natural and human landscape: the Rhine, the sea, and the Britons were there before Caesar. The glorious narrative of how they became Caesar’s monuments is not told here.40 What we are told instead is that his military campaigns resulted in corruption on a monumental scale (29.1–4, 11–14): Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati, nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo, Mamurram habere quod Comata Gallia habebat uncti et ultima Britannia? ... eone nomine, imperator unice, fuisti in ultima occidentis insula, ut ista uestra diffututa mentula ducenties comesset aut trecenties? Who can watch this, or tolerate it, Mamurra’s having everything that hairy Gaul used to have, and far-off Britain? Only a shameless fellow, a glutton, 39 40

For a more subtle reading of the politics of Poem 10 see Braund (1996). In Poem 35, too, Catullus mentions one of Caesar’s monuments – the colonial foundation dating to 59 bc at Novum Comum (Suet. DJ 28.3) – without mentioning Caesar.

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cynthia damon a gambler. . . . Was this the reason, o peerless commander, that took you to the furthest island in the west, so that that stuffed prick of yours could gulp down twenty or thirty million?

Mamurra was an officer in Caesar’s army, not a member of the civilian entourage described above, and he apparently served as the general’s prosthetic prick (ista uestra diffututa mentula). The sexual element of that image is developed elsewhere in this poem and in Poem 57, but in the lines quoted here the invective is directed at Caesar’s tolerance of, or even backing for, his subordinate’s rapacity: Gaul and Britain, Caesar’s monuments, risk being stripped of their riches (cf. 29.20 nunc Galliae timetur et Britanniae).41 And beyond the greed for goods we see a greed for glory – ‘peerless commander’ (29.11 imperator unice, cf. 54.7 unice imperator) – that recalls the competing ‘greats’ with which we began this section. Before turning to Catullus’ depiction of the world beyond Rome’s reach, or at least a world without Roman reference points, it is worth returning briefly to Bithynia, where Catullus saw provincial administration close up and Caesar, ‘Queen of Bithynia’, got his first lessons in the sexual side of international relations.42 Bithynia was bequeathed to the Roman people by Caesar’s alleged lover, Nicomedes IV, in 74 bc, within a decade of Caesar’s much mocked visits to the kingdom in around 80 bc. In Poem 10 Catullus presents Bithynia as a Roman province complete with praetor. In Poem 46, however, he speaks of ‘the plains of Phrygia and the fertile soil of sweltering Nicaea’ (46.4–5), highlighting Bithynia’s nature and preRoman history, and of the ‘famous cities’ he will visit in the neighbouring province of Asia on his way home, Greek cities all, and celebrated in Greek literature.43 The tension between Roman and non-Roman frames of reference here is palpable.44 The magnitude of the empire, then, encourages huge appetites and yields glory and lucre for men like Caesar and Mamurra. Catullus, after testing the waters of the Propontis, the fertile plains of Bithynia and the political and 41

42 43

44

The treatment of Gaul and Britain of course pales in comparison to the ‘universal destruction’ for which Caesar and Pompey are blamed at the end of the poem (29.24 perdidistis omnia). On the indictment of empire in 29 see Konstan (2000/2002 and 2007) and Bellandi (2012). For (and against) the story see Osgood (2008). The same point could be made about Lampsacus in fr. 1 (Mynors), which Catullus situates with reference to its location on the Hellespont, its cult of Priapus and its oysters, but which was well integrated into the administrative, social, and commercial ambit of Rome, as can be seen for example in Cicero’s long account of Verres’ criminal activities there (II Verr. 1.63–85). The same tension may be felt in Catullus’ references to Spain in Poems 37 and 39: Rome had been administering two provinces in Spain since 197 bc and fought a long series of wars there, but Catullus labels it ‘Celtiberia’ (37.18 cuniculosae Celtiberiae, 39.17 Celtiberia in terra).

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social milieux that supported the exploitation of the provinces, retreats to his clear lake and finds other frameworks for experiencing loca and nationes.

IV

‘Sailing through many peoples and many seas’

Catullus’ treatment of Troy makes the point succinctly. Not only is its administrative identity as a community in the Roman province of Asia irrelevant to what he says about it, so is its claim to be the progenitor of Rome.45 He associates Troy instead with endings: it is the site of his brother’s grave (65.7–8, 68.99–100) and the commune sepulchrum of Asia and Europe (68.89 Troia (nefas!) commune sepulchrum Asiae Europaeque). The relevant reference points, that is, are personal and, as we shall see, literary.46 The literary valence of Catullus’ Troy comes through particularly clearly in Poem 101, whose opening line supplies the title at the head of this section. As Conte (1986) observed, ‘the “many peoples” and “many seas” . . . belong to Homer’s Odysseus’ (32). Conte also, however, points to ‘the metrical and rhythmical foregrounding of multa’ (33): once untethered from Rome, Catullan geography can take us to many different worlds.47 Troy’s Homeric heritage is inescapable, of course, but it is not exclusive, and Catullus is attentive to scenes that other authors had contributed to the literary tapestry of the Troy story. In Poem 65, for example, he associates Troy with ‘the Rhoetean shore’ and thereby with Ajax and the Hellenistic poet Euphorion, who situated an aetion pertaining to the hero’s death ‘on the Rhoetean sands’ (fr. 44.2 Lightfoot; cf. 65.7 Troia Rhoeteo . . . subter litore tellus).48 In Poem 68 the reference to the graves at Troy emerges from Catullus’ utterly unHomeric version of the story of Laodamia and Protesilaus.49 Still other authors surface in Poem 101, including Aeschylus (for the speaker’s Orestes-like arrival in lines 1–2), Apollonius (for aspects of the language of line 1) and Meleager (for the offerings to the dead in lines 7–9).50 45

46 47 48 49 50

In focusing here on the non-Roman associations of Catullus’ toponyms I do not mean to rule out the presence of Roman undercurrents or even countercurrents. T. P. Wiseman has taught us much about, e.g., the empire-spanning commercial interests of the Valerii Catulli (e.g., Wiseman (2007)), and such background does illuminate the poet’s work, but the argument here explores the implications of the fact that he denies us direct access to it. On the devastating effect of their collision see recently Stevens (2013) chapters 4 and 5 on ‘The natural silence of death’. For a full list see Chevallier (1977). See recently Woodman (2012b) with discussion and bibliography. Catullus’ literary sources for this episode are obscure (Fordyce (1961) ad loc.), but for some see recently Gale (2012), esp. 196–207. For the details see Landolfi (1996) and Bellandi (2007).

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Catullus’ Troy is a mournful place or worse, an ‘unpropitious and unlucky’ one (68.99 Troia obscena, Troia infelice). But the poet can also use literary geography to great comic effect, as in the imaginary expedition of Mentula, ‘The Prick’ (alias Mamurra) to ‘the Pipleian mountain’, an allusively named haunt of Greek Muses, whence the custodians of poetic values promptly pitch him out (105.2 Musae furcillis praecipitem eiciunt).51 Similarly humorous is a small boat’s account of another dehistoricised journey in Poem 4. (This talkative little boat, which ‘seems to speak Latin with a Greek accent’, simultaneously evokes and distances itself from the epic Argo with its vocal ‘beam’.52) Travelling through lands and waters long controlled by Rome – the Adriatic, the Cyclades, Rhodes, Thrace, Propontis, Pontus – the ‘bean-pod’ (phaselus) encounters no indications of Roman hegemony but plenty of cultural landmarks, including ‘illustrious Rhodes’ (8), ‘rough Thracian Propontis’ (8),53 ‘unfriendly Pontus’, ‘Pontic Amastris’ (13) and ‘wooded Cytorus’ (13); each of the adjectives challenges the reader’s erudition.54 Another itinerary, that of Venus in Poem 36, evokes – not very seriously – the Greek religious imprint on the same part of the world, which included cult sites from ‘holy Idalium’ to ‘Dyrrachium, dive-bar of the Adriatic’, with Urii, Ancona, Cnidos, Amathus and Golgi in between (lines 12–15).55 And several equally irreverent geographies are given in Poem 66: the moon conducts her dalliances on ‘the crags of Mt Latmos’ in Caria (66.5–6), for example,56 and the newlywed Ptolemy Euergetes of Egypt makes a punitive military expedition to ‘Assyrian lands’ and Asia 51

52 53 54

55 56

Mamurra’s financial overreaching, too, is figured geographically, in a country estate that extends ‘all the way to the Hyperboreans and waters of Ocean’ (115.6 usque ad Hyperboreos et mare ad Oceanum). Konstan (2000/2002) discusses both poems in connection with Catullus’ critique of empire. Quotation from Sheets (2007) 198. Or possibly ‘Propontis made rough by the Thrascian wind’ (reading Thrascia for Thraciam). See Trappes-Lomax (2007) ad loc. On the literary itinerary of Poem 4, which complicates the task of identifying the historical circumstances of the phaselus’ journey (Courtney (1996–7)), see recently Massaro (2010). Poem 64, with its opening allusions to Euripides, Apollonius and Ennius, likewise anchors its literary play with a geographic reference to Mt Pelion (64.1 Peliaco . . . uertice). In this poem, too, as well as in Poems 62–63, we find a host of Greek place names without any Roman ‘tether’; for a representative selection see n. 60 below. Other cult sites: oraclum Iouis (7.5), Priapus’ lucus at Lampsacus (fr. 1), and, for the poetically inclined, Batti . . . sepulcrum (7.6). Godwin (1995) ad loc. comments: ‘Catullus’ decision to describe the moon’s movements in these romantic terms here is perhaps surprising. He could simply have alluded to the waxing and waning of the moon . . . which is the point of the praise of Conon.’ The poem’s other learned allusions to terrestrial geography include Ethiopia (52), Zephyrium and Locris (54–56), Canopus (58) and Rhamnus (71). On the Callimachean underpinnings of Catullus’ geographic erudition see recently Du Quesnay (2012).

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while still bearing the marks of nocturnal embraces (66.11–14, 35–36). Later another geographical reference point is provided for the Persian king Xerxes’ ambition as his fleet sails through the Athos peninsula in the Aegean (66.46). Beyond the literature, cult and history of the Greeks (and one Persian),57 Catullus gives us a geographically-inflected catalogue of the natural world, with particular attention to commercially viable resources such as Syrian olive oil (6.8), Cyrene’s silphium crop (7.4), Bithynian litter-bearers (10.14–16), a Ligurian axe (17.19), Assyrian perfume (68.114), the aforementioned Cytorian boxwood (4.13) and Lampsacene oysters (fr. 1).58 Geographical specifics are also given for animals both marketable and wild: lions from Libya and India (45.6–7, 60.1, 61.119) and dogs from Gaul (42.9).59 The world Catullus stocks with Ligurian axes and Lampsacene oysters is perhaps less warehouse than map. The poems we have considered in this section show the world as a literary, cultural, historical and natural phenomenon, not as a Roman one, a world more fully experienced in the imagination than in the flesh and one that Catullus celebrates for its multiplicity rather than its magnitude.

V

‘Rome is where I live’

That multiplicity is nowhere more visible than in Poem 61, a richly Greek script for a real Roman wedding, which takes us from divine dwellings on Mount Helicon (61.1) to traditional mockery in the streets of Rome (61.119–43).60 In the wedding procession we experience some of the jostling diversity of the Rome that, as we shall see, Catullus calls home. The master of ceremonies in Poem 61 shows us the scented bridegroom with his former well plucked bedmates, some boys and housekeepers, a barber and the shining bride and her attendants. In the Roman piazzas evoked in other poems we encounter people going intently about their business (15.7–8 in platea . . . in re praetereunt sua occupati), in the city’s crossroads and alleyways some sordid sex (58.4–5 nunc in quadriuiis et 57 58 59 60

Poem 90 introduces more Persians, or at least some purveyors of Persian lore. The Spanish and Bithynian wares of Poems 12 and 25 seem to have been personally significant mementos rather than wares typical of Spain and Bithynia. A particularly interesting case if Hallett and Heyworth – cited by Ingleheart (2014) 52 n. 6 – are right in seeing an analogy between the catulus Gallicanus and the Catullus born in (Cisalpine) Gaul. The waystations, most of which also appear elsewhere in Catullus, include Idalium (61.17; cf. 36.12), Phrygia (61.18; cf. 46.4, 66.2, 20, 71, 64.344), Asia (61.21; cf. 46.6, 66.36, 68.89), and ‘the Aonian caves of Thespiae’ (61.27–9); mountains comparable to Helicon include Olympus (62.1, 105.1), Oeta (62.7, 68.64) and of course Pelion (64.1, 278).

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angiportis | glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes). Public opinion is shaped at open-air trials in the Forum (53.1 corona, 108.1 populi arbitrio) and gathered at the baths (33.6–7 notae sunt populo). The city’s other amenities include bookstores (14.17–18 librariorum . . . scrinia) and at least one disreputable bar (37.1 salax taberna). The fortunate few with ample resources (or with friends with ample resources) can recuperate in a country house nearby (44.1, 14–15; cf. 26.1 uillula). For the most part the topography of the metropolis is conveyed with generic terms (streets, piazzas, baths, etc.), but there are occasional specifics. The above mentioned taberna, for example, can be found ‘nine columns down from the freedom-capped brothers’, in the portico, that is, that leads to the Temple of the Dioscuri in the Forum.61 The fullest tour comes in Poem 55, in which the speaker crosses the city from the Caelian Hill to the Campus Martius in search of his friend Camerius (lines 3–6):62 te Campo quaesiuimus minore, te in Circo, te in omnibus libellis, te in templo summi Iouis sacrato. in Magni simul ambulatione . . . I hunted for you in the lesser Campus, in the Circus (sc. Maximus), among all the books, in the temple consecrated to Jove most high and likewise in the colonnade of (sc. Pompey) the Great.

Against the backdrop of landmarks associated with official celebrations (Campus minor, Circus maximus), the market for literary culture (if libellis is the right reading in line 4), imperial conquest (Magni . . . ambulatione) and state cult (templo summi Iouis sacrato), we see the speaker searching for a friend in the throes of an apparently embarrassing love affair and questioning some ‘truly naughty girls’ (55.10 pessimae puellae) that he meets en route. The landmarks are mentioned to prove his friendly concern, not for their intrinsic interest: Pompey and Caesar may be striving to outdo each other in the ‘magnus’ stakes, but the speaker of 55 barely notices.63 Like the Roman empire, the official face of the capital city is repurposed by the poet. No survey of Catullus’ Rome would be complete without a reference to his domus. This is less a location than a concept, and a rather unstable one at that. The term domus is used of (at least) two settings in Rome and associated with two very different worlds. The first is the domus that 61 62 63

For the shops see Nielsen (1993) 242. On the route and some of the inferences it permits see Wiseman (1987) 176–86. Some key terms in Poem 55 pertain to size (minore, summi, Magni, and the missing Maximo) but signify place. See recently Nappa (2018).

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a friend made available to Catullus and Lesbia, the ‘house in which we played our games’ (68.156 domus . . . in qua lusimus). The ephemeral and illusory domesticity that this domus offers occasions palpable regret in Poem 68.64 The second domus is the setting for Catullus qua poet. Outside of Rome, he says, he finds it impossible to write the verses that would communicate his concern and affection for a friend in need (68.33–5): nam, quod scriptorum non magna est copia apud me, hoc fit quod Romae uiuimus: illa domus, illa mihi sedes, illic mea carpitur aetas. For the fact that I have no great stock of writers here (sc. in Verona) comes about because Rome is where I live: that is my house, that is where I’ve settled, where my life comes to fruition.

Verona and its surroundings, it seems, provide a haven from grief (68.19– 26) and pain (31.7–11), but for poetry the poeta doctus needs Rome.

VI

Conclusions

Has this survey of Catullan geography circumvented the problem discussed at the beginning of this chapter, namely, the difficulty of situating Catullus in precise social and political milieux? Yes and no. We are no closer to clarifying the prosopography of his poetic world or to establishing the sincerity (or otherwise) of his invective on social and political themes. But we have caught some glimpses of the context in which he lived. The sociopolitical range of Catullan geography is encapsulated in Poem 10; only the headliners – Caesar et al. – are missing. The poem starts in the Roman Forum, but the nerve-centre of Roman political life functions here as a meeting place for friends currently disengaged from, not to say disaffected with, the political world and all it entails. Varus and Catullus leave the Forum behind (10.1–2 Varus me meus . . . duxerat e foro otiosum) to focus on personal concerns, as befits men who are at leisure, otiosi: friends and lovers, gossip and possessions (or the lack thereof ). As we saw earlier, Rome’s empire figures prominently in the ensuing banter about Bithynia with its prick of a praetor and brawny litter-bearers. But Catullus’ attempt to convert his provincial post into social capital with Varus’ girl (10. 16–20 ego, ut puellae | unum me facerem beatiorem, etc.) is a complete flop. He 64

On the domus – qua building and qua family – as a key theme in Poem 68 see recently Armstrong (2013) 64–9 and Leigh (2015).

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protests that he really does have access to Bithynian litter-bearers, it’s just that they belong to a friend (10.29–30 meus sodalis | – Cinna est Gaius – is sibi parauit). And the name of Cinna, author of an exquisitely learned poem about a figure from Greek myth (95.1 Zmyrna mei Cinnae), brings us back both to the Po valley, with which Cinna and Catullus declare affiliation, and to literature as an escape from mundanity.65 Although Italian, not Roman, in origin, Catullus had access to Rome’s social and political elite, both contacts and opportunities for personal advancement. Julius Caesar visited his home in Cisalpina, and Catullus and his brother travelled from Verona to Rome’s eastern territories. Catullus came back from Bithynia to Sirmio and Rome; his brother’s story ended at Troy. His acquaintances also included the subsequent generation, the men currently in the governors’ entourages, from among whom – at least in normal times – the replacements for Pompey, Caesar and Memmius would arise, and some of their womenfolk. But in the middle of the first century bc the times were distinctly abnormal, and Catullus gives vivid expression to his sense that the personal and political behaviour of Rome’s political elite was indefensible. As was mentioned earlier, it is hard to identify the aims of his invective, and the behaviours that spark his expressions of outrage do not allow us to develop a coherent system of behaviours that he would have admired in their place, but we can see one of their consequences in his (occasional) detachment from this high-stakes environment. For it he substitutes a new context with its own much more clearly formulated codes of behaviour and style, a context from which he firmly excludes the likes of Cicero. This alternative context gave him access to a much wider world than that of Rome, both temporally and spatially, a world focused on literature in which style was the coin of the realm. In this world, richly endowed with cultural, historical and natural features, the concerns of a Mamurra look myopic and Caesar himself is irrelevant. Both Caesar and Catullus went to Troy, but Catullus’ visit was the more consequential: Poem 101 continues to move us today.66 The sociopolitical themes explored in Poem 10 and in the other poems considered above are a rich source of poetic energy for Catullus. So by examining the poet’s alignment of disparate worlds – Cisalpine Gaul, the 65

66

On Bithynia as both a personal and a poetic link between Cinna and Catullus see Courtney (1996–7), who cites Cinna’s fr. 11, with its reference to a poetic cargo conveyed by a small Bithynian boat (haec . . . carmina . . . Prusiaca uexi munera nauicula). In fr. 9 Cinna alludes to his origins in Cisalpine Gaul with a reference to the Galli Cenomani and by using the Gallic word raeda (at nunc me Genumana per salicta/ bigis raeda rapit citata nanis; cf. 97.6 ploxeni). For a beautiful recent response to Poem 101 see Carson (2010).

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Roman empire, the world beyond Rome’s control, and Rome itself – we have indeed gone some way to situating Catullus, or at least to understanding his poetry of historical situatedness.

Further Reading Catullus’ social and political world is discussed early in many commentaries and books about the poet as useful contextualisation for his poems. For a variety of approaches ranging from the more historical to the more literary see Wiseman (1985, ch. 1 ‘A world not ours’), Gaisser (2009, ch. 1 ‘The young poet in Rome’), Skinner (2007, Part 2 ‘Contexts of production’), Godwin (2008, ch. 1 ‘A writer’s world’). The remaining chapters in Wiseman (1985), along with Dyson (1985), Cairns (2003/2012), Wiseman (2007) and Stroup (2010), illuminate facets of that world with reference to Rome, Transpadane Italy and the provinces. The interplay between Catullus’ Transpadane and Roman identities is treated by Dench (2005, 330–42), and his political themes are summarised by Konstan (2007) and Bellandi (2012). In other studies this late-Republican context, particularly the distinctive diction of social relations and politics, is treated as poetic content, as the matter of Catullus’ verse rather than the framework in which it originated: Maselli (1994, on business affairs), Fitzgerald (1995, on social positioning), Nappa (2001, on Rome), Holzberg (2002a, on love affairs), Skinner (2003, on Verona), Krostenko (2007, on elite discourse), and Tatum (2007, on invective). Further reading on all of these topics can be found in a recent generously annotated bibliography, Skinner (2015, 116–29, 174–82).

chapter 2

Literary Liaisons Tony Woodman

I On an October afternoon two hundred years ago the poet John Keats paid a visit to his friend and literary mentor, Leigh Hunt. They were so absorbed in their conversation that they forgot the time, and Keats was obliged to spend the night in Hunt’s cottage, where an extemporary bed was made up for him in the library. But he failed to drop off to sleep, so stimulated was he not only by the conversation with his friend but also by his literary surroundings. He therefore resorted to writing part of the poem later known as Sleep and Poetry, in which he describes the circumstances of the poem’s genesis, attacks the poets of a previous generation, and delivers a manifesto for the new poets such as Hunt himself.1 Readers of Catullus will recognise the similarity to Poem 50, addressed to C. Licinius Calvus:2 Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi, ut conuenerat esse delicatos, multum lusimus in meis tabellis:3 scribens uersiculos uterque nostrum ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc, reddens mutua per iocum atque uinum. Atque illinc abii tuo lepore incensus, Licini, facetiisque, ut nec me miserum cibus iuuaret nec somnus tegeret quiete ocellos, sed toto indomitus furore lecto uersarer, cupiens uidere lucem, ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem. 1 2 3

3 2 5

10

See Woodman (1974). On Leigh Hunt see further below, p. 346. B. 82, d. before 46; son of C. Licinius Macer, trib. pleb. 73 and historian. See Courtney (2003) 201–11 and 514–15, Hollis (2007) 49–86. The transposition of lines 2 and 3 was suggested by Palmer (1879) 336.

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At defessa labore membra postquam semimortua lectulo iacebant, hoc, iucunde, tibi poema feci, ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem. (1–17)

15

Yesterday, Licinius, at leisure (just as sensualists should have been), we played a lot on my tablets: writing verselets, each of us would play now in this metre and now in that – give-and-take over jokes and wine. And I left there feverish, Licinius, from your charm and wit: in my wretched state, food was no help and restful sleep would not close my eyes, but, uncontrolled in my delirium, I tossed all over the bed, yearning to see the dawn so that I could speak with you and be in your company. But, after my limbs, tired out by their exertion, had been lying half-dead on my bed, I did this poem for you, my delightful friend, from which you could appreciate my distress.

Scholars have detected a serious message behind the carefree scene of the opening lines (1–6).4 ludere implies the composition of light verse,5 an implication complemented by the diminutive uersiculi and the reference to metrical variety: these poets are rejecting the higher genres of poetry, perhaps especially epic. Moreover the announcement that the two friends had indulged in otium and are to be described as delicati suggests that their iconoclasm was sociopolitical as well as literary: some years later Sallust still felt obliged to defend the practice of writing – of history, in his case – by claiming that ‘greater advantage would accrue to the state from my otium than from the negotia of others’ (Jug. 4.4). The seriousness of the two poets’ versifying is underlined by the after-effects that Catullus proceeds to describe: he gives Calvus to believe that his friend’s charm and wit have left him with a temperature (50.8 ‘incensus’) which has made him ill (50.9 ‘miserum’): he cannot eat or sleep, and, after tossing and turning on his bed, he wrote the present poem to give Calvus some idea of his pain (50.17 ‘dolorem’). If Calvus was the man of the same name who wrote a medical work, referring to problems of digestion (Charis. 1.81 K.23–4),6 he will have had a special interest in such symptoms; however, since the only cure for Catullus’ present ailment is another day spent in Calvus’ company (50.13, 18–21),7 Catullus’ selfprescription of a sympathetic cure may not have gone down well with a medical man (see Plut. De tuenda sanitate 127f). 4 6 7

See Pucci (1961), Segal (1970). 5 Wagenvoort (1956) 30–42 (our poem features prominently). On this question see Neudling (1955) 106, Leary (1996) 262. For this notion see Tosi (2007) 728–9 §1629 (cf. §1628, §751).

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Whether or not Keats knew Catullus’ poem,8 in the early second century ad the younger Pliny describes to a friend how literary stimulation led to sleeplessness which in turn led to Pliny writing poetry (Ep. 7.4.3–5). Pliny gives no hint that he has Catullus in mind, but he was of course a great admirer of his fellow Transpadane, as the poet Augurinus recognised when he used Catullus and Calvus as a foil for praising Pliny himself (Ep. 4.27.4): Canto carmina uersibus minutis, his olim quibus et meus Catullus et Caluus ueteresque. I sing songs in short verses, those in which my Catullus and Calvus and the ancients once sang.

There is some irony in aligning the two self-consciously modern poets with the ueteres, a term used by Catullus himself (68a.7) in contrast with his own poetry, especially since Augurinus’ language seems to recall that with which Ennius rejected even older poets (Ann. 206–7 ‘scripsere alii rem | uorsibus quos olim Faunei uatesque canebant’, ‘others have written on the matter in verses which the Fauns and bards once sang’);9 but the significant point is that Augurinus – like Horace, Propertius and Ovid amongst numerous others – saw Catullus and Calvus as a pair: each of them was a doctus poeta, a ‘learned poet’.10 Propertius testifies to Calvus’ doctrina when he refers to the man’s lament for Quintilia, who was either his wife or mistress (2.34.89–90). This famous poem is also commemorated by Catullus in Poem 96, where the final couplet certe non tanto mors immatura dolori est Quintiliae, quantum gaudet amore tuo (5–6) Assuredly Quintilia is not so greatly pained by her early death as she rejoices in your love

happens to allude to the one complete line of Calvus’ poem that survives (16C/28H ‘forsitan hoc etiam gaudeat ipsa cinis’, ‘perhaps your very ash rejoices at this too’). ‘It is clear’, says Courtney, ‘that hoc must be understood to mean “your love, Calvus, for Quintilia”, and that with certe Catullus seeks to remove the doubt conveyed by forsitan.’11 8 9 10 11

Stead (2016) 283–6 argues in favour. minutis may have a further Ennian resonance, since Ennius apparently called the hexameter ‘long’ (Cic. Leg. 2.68, Isid. Etym. 1.39.6). For a list of the passages where the names of Catullus and Calvus are linked see Hollis (2007) 49–50. Courtney (2003) 208–9.

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Catullus addresses his friend again in Poem 14: if he were not so fond of Calvus, he would hate him with a ‘Vatinian hatred’ for trying to kill him with a gift of bad poetry (14.1–5); should he live to see the dawn (14.17), he will go out immediately to buy Calvus a return gift of bad poets, including the Suffenus who is ridiculed in Poem 22 (14.18–20). As a person Suffenus is urbane (22.9), but as a poet he is more inept than that home of ineptitude, the countryside (22.14–15).12 In view of this disparaging reference (again at 36.19), it is perhaps significant that one of Calvus’ fragments refers to the countryside (2C/35H): durum rus fugit et laboriosum flees the harsh and toilsome countryside

The context is completely unknown, but it is undeniably tantalising that et + laboriosus, in exactly the same place in the hendecasyllabic line and with a very similar meaning, is used twice by Catullus in poems to his fellow authors Cornelius Nepos and Q. Cornificius (1.7 ‘doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis’, 38.2 ‘malest, me hercule, et laboriose’).13 Catullus’ phrase ‘Vatinian hatred’ refers to the antagonism generated when Calvus in a series of speeches (one of them seemingly praised in Poem 53) attacked P. Vatinius.14 Another to attack Vatinius was Cicero, whose In Vatinium was delivered in 56, but the two speakers had very different views of oratory. Although Cicero thought highly of the much younger Calvus as a speaker and wrote to him encouragingly (their correspondence was extant in antiquity),15 Calvus ‘was the originator and leader of the Atticist movement’, of which Cicero disapproved.16 Cicero, who almost single-handedly transformed Latin prose style, as Nepos observed (fr. 58 Marshall), was at the height of his oratorical powers in the mid-50s and is addressed by Catullus in Poem 49 as ‘the most eloquent of the descendants of Romulus’; but whether the poem is ironical remains a matter of scholarly controversy. Calvus, like Catullus (Poems 29, 54, 57, 93), attacked Julius Caesar and Pompey (17C/38H): Bithynia quicquid et pedicator Caesaris unquam habuit

12 13 15 16

Nisbet (1995) 411 has suggested that Suffenus and Alfenus Varus, the addressee of Poem 22, are one and the same person. See also below, pp. 126, 131. 14 Trib. 59, praetor 55, consul 47. See further below, pp. 195–7. See Cic. Fam. 15.21(207).4 and Shackleton Bailey (1977) ad loc. Douglas (1966) on Cic. Brut. 284.

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tony woodman all that Bithynia and the bugger of Caesar17 ever possessed

pedicator reminds us of the occasions on which Catullus uses the verb as an insult (16.1, 16.14, 21.4), while Calvus’ manner of expressing the profits of pedicator and province is remarkably like the way in which Catullus talks about Caesar’s henchman Mamurra (29.3–4): Mamurram habere quod Comata Gallia habebat uncti18 et ultima Britannia that Mamurra possesses the affluence which Gallia Comata and distant Britain used to possess

(It is true that Catullus here uses quod rather than quicquid, but he does couple the latter with habere at 1.8 and 6.15.) When Calvus attacks Pompey, ‘quem metuunt omnes’ (18C/39H), the emendation omnes (for the transmitted homines) would be supported if we could be certain that he was alluding to hunc metuunt omnes (69.7), Catullus’ attack on Rufus. (Thus, for example, Calvus’ cara . . . | corpora (6C/ 31H) arguably alludes to Catullus’ caro corpore (66.32), since the latter perhaps translates a lost phrase in Callimachus’ Aetia.) On the other hand both poets may be remembering Cicero’s attack on Catiline a decade earlier (Cat. 1.17 ‘te metuunt omnes ciues tui’), an attack which Quintilian was able to quote almost one and a half centuries later (8.4.10). Perhaps Calvus’ most famous poem was his Io. We know that Virgil alluded to this now lost epyllion in his sixth Eclogue,19 and scholars have argued that it also lies behind substantial portions of the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris,20 but there survive today only a very few fragments, such as 13C/24H: sol quoque perpetuos ║ meminit requiescere cursus even the sun remembers to rest his everlasting journeys

Although this line twice found favour with Virgil (G. 1.438 ‘sol quoque’, Ecl. 8.4 ‘requierunt . . . cursus’), there is no trace of it in Catullus; but the way in which Calvus has positioned the adjective in the first half of the hexameter line (in this case immediately before the caesura) and the noun 17 18 19 20

Nicomedes IV Philopator, the last king of Bithynia (c. 94–74); for his alleged sexual relationship with Caesar see Suet. DJ 2, 49.1–4. uncti is Faernus’ emendation of the transmitted cum te; it is impossible to capture in an English translation the resulting play between ‘Hairy Gaul’ and hair oil. See e.g. Coleman (1977) or Clausen (1994) on Ecl. 6.47. See Lyne (1978b) 39, 154–67; Thomas (1981).

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at the end, a pattern which we see also in 11C/22H and 12C/23H, is exactly the same as that found in Poems 62 and 64 and in Catullus’ ‘neoteric elegiacs’.

II The expression ‘neoteric elegiacs’ was used by D. O. Ross to distinguish poems such as 65 from most of the elegiac poetry which constitutes the final third of Catullus’ oeuvre (69–116),21 and the term ‘neoteric’, like its companion ‘new’, is found frequently in Catullan scholarship. The use of both terms derives from Cicero.22 In November of 50 bc Cicero wrote to Atticus as follows (Att. 7.2.1): Brundisium uenimus vii Kalend. Decembr. usi tua felicitate nauigandi, ita belle nobis ‘flauit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites’ (hunc σπονδειάζοντα si cui uoles τῶν νεωτέρων pro tuo uendito). We reached Brundisium on 24 November, having enjoyed your good luck on the voyage, so nicely for us did ‘the softest Onchesmites blow from Epirus’ (you can sell this spondaic verse as your own to any of the neōteroi that you like).

Four years later, in 46, we find Cicero referring to the way in which, unlike Ennius at e.g. Ann. 63 ‘qui est omnibu’ princeps’, some contemporary poets declined to elide final –s (Orator 161): ‘Ita non erat ea offensio in uersibus quam nunc fugiunt poetae noui’, ‘so there was not the offensiveness in their verses which the new poets now shun’.23 The tone of these remarks has been variously interpreted. Since originality was highly prized by Latin authors, it is not surprising that nouus is a standard term for claiming or attributing literary novelty.24 Catullus himself makes such a claim in the very first line of his very first poem (1.1 ‘nouum libellum’), while Virgil credits Asinius Pollio – his patron, and brother of the Asinius addressed by Catullus in Poem 12 (cf. lines 6–7) – with ‘new poems’ (Ecl. 3.86 ‘noua carmina’). At the same time, however, nouus can be used neutrally of ‘recent’ or ‘modern’ writers, as in Livy’s reference to ‘noui . . . scriptores’ (praef. 2) or Quintilian’s to ‘noui . . . 21 22 23 24

See Ross (1969) 115–37. For discussion see Crowther (1970), Wiseman (1974) 50–6, Lyne (1978a)= (2007) 60–84, Lightfoot (1999) 54ff., each with further references. Note Coleman (1999) 33–4; for a detailed study of this phenomenon in Lucretius see Butterfield (2008c); also his chapter in this volume. See Nisbet-Hubbard (1970) on Hor. Carm. 1.26.6 and 10.

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declamatores’ (9.2.42). These latter examples carry an implicit comparison with previous writers, and often, on the basis that things were always better in the past, the comparison reflects badly on the moderns,25 as when Cicero, referring to ‘the new Atticists’ of his own generation (Orat. 89 ‘noui Attici’), implies an unfavourable comparison with the classic authors of fifth-century Athens. But such comparisons are not inevitably critical: Quintilian recommends reading the moderns as well as the ancients, since the former ‘also have a lot of quality’ (2.5.23 ‘antiquos legere . . . et nouos, quibus et ipsis multa uirtus inest’); and, given that the terms are essentially relative, Horace finds considerable irony in the question of how one defines ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ (Epist. 2.1.37–8).26 We must not forget that, by comparison with Homer, fifth-century authors were themselves classified as νεώτεροι.27 What, then, is the tone of Cicero’s references? Although the majority of scholars detect criticism, some believe that his usage is entirely chronological and therefore neutral; yet, whatever the tone, perhaps more pressing questions are the significance of his parodic verse and the identity of the νεώτεροι and poetae noui. Since the statement in the Orator concerns prosody, and since in his letter Cicero describes his parody in metrical terms as a ‘spondaic verse’, a minimalist view has it that the great orator is referring exclusively to metre and to the ways in which contemporary poetic practice differed metrically from earlier. On the other hand, Cicero in his letter to Atticus may have wanted to stress ‘this particular spondaic line’, as if the emphasis were on hunc and the line were one of which Cicero was especially proud, and Lyne has drawn attention to its ‘antonomasia, euphonic sibilance, and mannered rhythm (the five-word line with fourth foot homodyne; the spondaic fifth foot)’; while the fact that Cicero translates two of his words into Greek may imply that a significant element of neoteric poetry ‘had to do with Grecising’.28 On either of these interpretations Catullus would qualify as a poeta nouus or νεώτερος. Since he both has many spondaic hexameters in Poem 64 and nowhere elides final –s (except in a parody at 116.8), he displays the metrical mannerisms to which Cicero alludes in each passage. Lyne, however, goes 25 26 27 28

Wiseman (1974) 51, Cameron (1980) 127–8, 135–9. For discussion see e.g. Bramble (1974) 180–4, with further references. Cameron (1980) 136–7. Schironi (2018) indeed refers to all post-Homeric poets, including Hesiod, as ‘neōteroi’. Lyne (1978a) 167–8 = (2007) 60–2. ‘Antonomasia’ is the substitution of one name for another, in this case the replacement of e.g. Eurus by the pseudo-learned coinage Onchesmites (the port from which Cicero had set out was Onchesmos in Epirus); ‘homodyne’ refers to the coincidence of word accent and metrical stress in lēnīs’sı˘mu˘s.

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further and sees Cicero’s verse as parodying Catullus’ whole technique in Poem 64, of which line 28 (‘tene Thetis tenuit pulcherrima Nereine?’) is adduced to indicate the kind of mannered composition which Cicero had in mind.29 Since Cicero’s plural references could be rhetorical, it is theoretically possible to argue that he is thinking of a single poet and that that poet is Catullus. But, if Catullus died around 54, as is generally believed,30 that is some years before Cicero wrote his letter to Atticus and almost a decade before he wrote the Orator. It seems unlikely that Cicero would go out of his way to describe as nouus and even to parody a poet who was already passé.31 Therefore, since it is implausible to think that Cicero would refer to a later poet who is not Catullus but whose poetry displayed the same characteristics, the likelihood is that his references are genuinely plural and that he is referring to an identifiable group of poets, some of whom survived at least to the mid-40s.32 Unfortunately our relative ignorance does not permit us to proceed much further. We often have insufficient knowledge of the lives of the individual poets of whom we have poetic fragments: Licinius Calvus, for example, is known to have been dead by 46 but we do not know whether his death had happened several years previously or whether it was recent (and hence whether he was one of the poets referred to by Cicero). Conversely the fragmentary nature of almost all surviving contemporary verse makes it extremely difficult to identify literary characteristics which are also found in Poem 64 of Catullus: Valerius Cato, for example, is known to have been important and to have lived well beyond the 40s, but not a single word of his output survives.33

III Cato, who is addressed by Catullus in the humorously risqué Poem 56, is the subject of two hendecasyllabic poems by Furius Bibaculus:34 in one of them he ridicules Cato in punning language for having to sell his grand 29 30

31 32

33 34

So too Hollis (2007) 2; contra Lightfoot (1999) 55–6. Some scholars believe that at 52.3 (‘per consulatum peierat Vatinius’) Catullus is referring to Vatinius’ actual consulship in 47 rather than to his anticipation of it (e.g. Cic. Vat. 11): see Skinner (2015) 119–20. ‘The expression poetae noui can have nothing to do with Catullus who . . . would have been middleaged by 46 even if he had been alive’ (Trappes-Lomax (2007) 7). Since both nouus and νεώτερος are relative terms and were always available to describe contemporary authors of every period, they could in theory refer to a new, post-Catullan generation of poets; but this possibility seems excluded by the similarity of Cicero’s parody to Poem 64. See Hollis (2007) 429. For Furius Bibaculus, whose name and identity are much disputed, see Courtney (2003) 192–200 and 513–14, Hollis (2007) 118–45.

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house to pay off his debts (2C/85H), in the other he wonders at the man’s present ramshackle dwelling (1C/84H ‘Si quis forte mei domum Catonis | . . . miratur’, ‘If by chance anyone wonders at the home of my friend Cato . . . ’). A Furius is addressed in several poems of Catullus (11, 16, 23, 26); is he Bibaculus? The two men are thought to have been coevals, although Bibaculus lived on until the 20s. It is suggestive that the wording of Poem 14b (‘Si qui forte mearum ineptiarum | lectores eritis’, ‘If by chance any of you will read my nonsense’) resembles that of the second of Furius’ ‘house’ poems, and at first glance it seems even more suggestive that Poem 26, in which Furius himself is ridiculed in punning language for the large mortgage he has on his own house, is interpretable as a response to Furius’ other ‘house’ poem. Unfortunately, however, the latter poem is thought to have been written long after Catullus’ death.35 Another of Catullus’ addressees is Cornificius (38), presumably identical with the poet of whom three tiny fragments survive and whose work is compared to that of Valerius Cato by Ovid (Tr. 2.436),36 and possibly also identical with the author of a De Etymis Deorum on Greek divine names; the Q. Cornificius who enjoyed a political and military career (praetor in 45) before being killed near Utica in 42 was presumably the same man.37 His sister Cornificia also wrote poetry, and according to the inscription on her (now lost) tombstone was married to one Camerius, doubtless the addressee of Poems 55 and 58b.38 In Poem 35 Catullus praises a poem on the subject of the Great Mother by his learned friend Caecilius on the grounds that it has been begun ‘charmingly’ (17 ‘uenuste’); it is presumably no coincidence either that the Great Mother is also the subject of Poem 63 or that transsexualism, which features prominently in the latter, was also the subject of a probably contemporary Greek poem by one Sostratus.39 It is clearly possible to infer from such evidence, and in particular from the persons addressed or mentioned in Catullus’ poetry, that there existed a group of like-minded littérateurs who responded to one another both personally and poetically. Whether those of them who are known to have survived into the 40s were in Cicero’s mind when he referred to the poetae noui or νεώτεροι is uncertain,40 but probably C. Helvius Cinna was one of 35 36 38 39 40

See Courtney (2003) 193, Hollis (2007) 139–40. See Courtney (2003) 225–7, Hollis (2007) 149–54. 37 See Rawson (1978) = (1991) 272–88. See Wiseman (1976) = (1987) 219–21. No fragments of Caecilius survive. For Poem 63 see Nauta and Harder (2005); for Sostratus see O’Hara (1996). Catullus and Caecilius are regarded as similar by Lyne (1978a) 175 = (2007) 70 but are differentiated by Hollis (2007) 421.

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them.41 Addressed by Catullus in an obscene squib (113), Cinna is described in Poem 10 as Catullus’ companion (29 ‘meus sodalis’), where the context implies that the two men had served together in Bithynia. If they did, they will have been on the staff of Gaius Memmius, who governed the province in 57/56 and evidently made himself very unpopular with his entourage (10.9–13, 28.9–10).42 The few surviving fragments make it clear that Cinna favoured the adjective ~ noun word-order which has already been noted in Catullus and Calvus: indeed one of the latter’s fragments (15C/25H ‘partus grauido portabat in aluo’) is not unlike one of Cinna’s (7C/9H ‘at scelus incesto Smyrnae crescebat in aluo’). Cinna’s line comes from his epyllion Smyrna, famously praised by Catullus in Poem 95,43 and the pattern is also found in a surviving line of his Propempticon Pollionis, ‘Send-off for Pollio’ (2C/H ‘lucida quom fulgent alti carchesia mali’). Elaborate variations on this word-order are found in what may possibly be a complete epigram of Cinna’s (11C/13H): Haec tibi Arateis multum uigilata lucernis carmina, quis ignis nouimus aerios, leuis in aridulo maluae descripta libello Prusiaca uexi munera nauicula. These night-time ponderings under Aratean lamps, verses by which we know the fiery stars, written on the dry bark of a smooth mallow, I have brought on a little Bithynian ship as a gift for you.

This note in verse was written to accompany a copy (whether in the original Greek or in a Latin translation done by Cinna himself) of the learned astronomical verses of Aratus, which Cinna was bringing back from Bithynia (Prusiaca is a learned substitution for Bithyna) as a gift for an unknown friend. Not only do the three diminutives recall the frequency of such forms in Catullus but there are two striking phraseological similarities as well. Haec tibi . . . carmina reappears in Poem 65 (15–16): ‘mitto | haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae’, ‘I am sending you these translated verses of Callimachus’. Since Poem 65 is a verse letter to 41

42

43

In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination in 44 Cinna (tribune at the time) was murdered by the Roman mob, who mistook him for his namesake Cornelius Cinna, an enemy of Caesar. Helvius Cinna, like Catullus, came from northern Italy: he refers to the territory of the Cenomani (9C/11H), whose capital was Brixia (mentioned by Catullus at 67.34). See Wiseman (1974) 44–58; for the fragments see Courtney (2003) 212–24 and 515–16, Hollis (2007) 11–48. Memmius, married to the notorious Fausta (daughter of Sulla), had been praetor in 58; he stood unsuccessfully for the consulship in 54. He was patron and addressee of Lucretius (see further below); his date of death is unknown. Clausen (1964), Solodow (1987).

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Hortensius Hortalus,44 accompanying the translation of Callimachus which constitutes Poem 66, the identity of context with Cinna’s epigram suggests that one poet is alluding to the other. But which way round is the allusion? It is of course impossible to tell, but, since scholars have argued that Cinna had had an earlier sojourn in Bithynia (with Pompey in 66–65 bc) and that his epigram results from that time, it is possible that Catullus is alluding to Cinna.45 The second verbal similarity is, if anything, even more complicated. It seems natural to compare aridulo . . . libello in line 3 with the opening of Poem 1, another poem which accompanies a gift of poetry: ‘libellum | arida modo pumice expolitum’, ‘a booklet which recently dry pumice has polished’. The difference is that in Cinna libellus is not being used to mean ‘booklet’ but in its original sense of ‘bark’. The same two words of Cinna also invite comparison with Catullus’ description of the Fates in Poem 64 (316): ‘laneaque aridulis haerebant morsa labellis’, ‘morsels of wool clung to their dry lips’. Since these are the only two occurrences of aridulus in Latin, there seems clearly to be a relationship between the two lines; but one poet has varied the other in much the same way as Cinna himself (1C/6H ‘aceruos | innumerabilibus congestos undique saeclis’) was varied by Horace (Sat. 1.1.70 ‘congestis undique saccis’). This link between Cinna and Poem 64 is not the only one. Isidore, Archbishop of Seville in the early seventh century ad and encyclopaedist author of the Etymologiae, accompanies a reference to a breast-band (strophium) with the words: ‘de quo ait Cinna “strofio lactantes cincta papillas”’, ‘about which Cinna says “her lactating teats surrounded by a band”’ (Etym. 19.33.3). Scholars refuse to accept this as a genuine quotation from Cinna because it is almost identical to line 65 of Poem 64 (‘strophio lactentis uincta papillas’, ‘her lactating teats bound by a band’): the assumption is that Isidore has misquoted and has misattributed his misquotation.46 But, since Latin poets regularly change only a single word when appropriating a quotation, it is not clear why this should not be a further example of interaction between Cinna and Catullus. The Memmius in whose entourage Cinna and Catullus both served is compared in Poem 28 with one Piso, under whom Catullus’ friends Veranius 44

45

46

For the problems associated with his identity and name see Du Quesnay (2012) 153–62. He is usually regarded as a new poet, although only the single word ceruix survives of his verse (Courtney (2003) 230–2, Hollis (2007) 155–7). See Woodman (2012b) 145–6. Courtney (1996–97) 121 has suggested that the nauicula in which Cinna made this earlier journey, and to which he refers in line 4, is identical with the phaselus of Catullus 4. See e.g. Hollis (2007) 24.

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and Fabullus served at roughly the same time; if Piso is to be identified with L. Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law of Julius Caesar, their service will have been in Macedonia, where Piso governed in the years immediately after his consulship in 58. Catullus returns to Piso in Poem 47 and contrasts his two friends with two other companions of Piso, whom he addresses as ‘Porci et Socration’. The latter has sometimes been identified with Philodemus, the Epicurean philosopher, literary critic and poet of whom Piso was patron – an identification perhaps supported by his being coupled with the suggestively named ‘Porcius’.47 In one of his epigrams Philodemus described the poets Antigenes and Bacchius as ‘at play yesterday’ (29.7 ἐχθὲς ἔπαιζον), a striking similarity to the situation described by Catullus in Poem 50 (above, pp. 26–7): perhaps he took the phrase as his cue for the account of himself and Calvus, changing third-person to first in the same way as he transposed Callimachus’ Epigram 25 in Poem 70. Likewise Catullus’ anticipation of ‘nine continuous fucks’ with his sweet Ipsitilla (32.8 ‘nouem continuas fututiones’) bears more than a passing resemblance to the nine which the aged Philodemus regrets he can no longer sustain (Epigram 19.1).48 Influential Greeks such as Philodemus had always been a feature of Roman life, and Cinna (or perhaps his father) is credited with having brought to Rome as a captive Parthenius of Nicaea.49 Parthenius is thought to have been responsible for introducing to Rome, amongst others, the obscure, third-century Hellenistic poet Euphorion,50 whose work elicited a well known comment from Cicero in 45 bc. After quoting some lines of Ennian tragedy, he exclaimed (Tusc. Disp. 3.45): ‘O poetam egregium! Quamquam ab his cantoribus Euphorionis contemnitur’, ‘What an exceptional poet! Though he is despised by the present chanters of Euphorion’. Are these cantores identical with the poets whom Cicero had earlier described as neōteroi or poetae noui?51 And do they include Catullus? Although scholars have detected some allusions to Euphorion in Catullus,52 the general view is that Cicero is alluding to Cinna himself or to Cornelius Gallus, both of whom are known to have imitated Euphorion.53 Gallus, to whom Parthenius addressed his Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα (‘Sufferings in Love’),54 lived on until 27/ 47 48 49 50 51 53 54

For the association of Epicureans with pigs see Nisbet (1961) on Cic. Pis. 37. For Philodemus’ epigrams see Sider (1997). See e.g. Lightfoot (1999) 9–16. The date is disputed. Euphorion is conveniently found in Lightfoot (2009) 189–465; note also Sider (2017) 293–310. 52 See Tuplin (1977) and (1979), Crowther (1979). See Lightfoot (1999) 58–9. For Cinna see Watson (1982), Courtney (2003) 213, Hollis (2007) 35; for Gallus see Lightfoot (1999) 59–64. For Parthenius’ work see Lightfoot (1999) 215ff. and Francese (2001).

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26.55 Although it is difficult to discern any direct link between Cinna and Gallus, the former’s miseras audet galeare puellas (‘he dares to helmet wretched girls’: 12C/15H) would be explained by a passage in Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, which is assumed to derive from Gallus’ own verse and in which Gallus’ mistress has left him for a soldier (10.22–3 ‘tua cura Lycoris | perque niues alium perque horrida castra secuta est’).56

IV Cicero’s contrast between the cantores Euphorionis and his admired Ennius echoes that which he drew between the poetae noui and Ennius in the previous year, and from both passages together it might be inferred that in the late Republic there was an aesthetic division between traditionalists (represented by Cicero himself) and moderns: if so, the point would be important, since, for all the attention which scholars pay to Catullus and the poetae noui, Cicero was regarded by contemporaries not only as the Romans’ best orator but also as their best poet (Plut. Cic. 2.4). Not only would his judgement of Ennius carry a weight corresponding to his status, but the popular estimation of Cicero implies that the literary taste of the majority resembled his own. Since Ennius’ most famous poem is his historical epic Annales, and since Catullus denigrates a poem entitled Annales (36.1, 20, 95.7) and champions the poetry of Callimachus (e.g. 65, 66), it seems possible to construct a series of antitheses with Cicero and Ennius on the one hand and Catullus and Callimachus on the other. The picture is complicated, however, by the knowledge that Cicero in his younger days translated the Hellenistic poet Aratus and wrote such works as his Pontius Glaucus, a subject which was treated not only by Callimachus himself but also by the neoteric Cornificius (above, p. 34).57 Knox explains this apparent paradox by observing that many other Hellenistic poets wrote on Glaucus and that, while Cicero throughout his career was always a Hellenistic poet, he was never an adherent of the Callimachean poetics which defined the poetae noui.58 Yet, while such points (if accepted) help to explain Cicero’s position, they do not eliminate 55

56 57 58

B. c. 70 and made the first praefectus of the new province of Egypt by Octavian; but various manifestations of arrogance led to his recall and suicide. He wrote four books of Amores addressed to his mistress, Lycoris. For him see Courtney (2003) 259–70 and 518–19, Hollis (2007) 219–52. The link would depend on whether Lycoris’ absence on campaign and Gallus’ lamenting thereof preceded Cinna’s murder in March 44: see Nisbet (1995) 126–7 for some possible dates. For the translation of Aratus see e.g. Clausen (1986). See Knox (2011), who applies similar arguments to the other issues.

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a further difficulty. Ennius had begun his Annales, as Callimachus had begun his Aetia, by describing a dream he had experienced. To imagine that Ennius could have been unaware of ‘the famous dream of the most famous poet of the century’, in the memorable words of Otto Skutsch, ‘is to imagine that a modern literary man could write of a scholar’s pact with the devil without being aware of Goethe’s Faust.’59 Callimachus seems inextricably entwined with Latin literature almost from the start; it should have been impossible to champion Ennius and simultaneously to denigrate Callimachus. Moreover, Catullus himself imitates Ennius in his epyllion, Poem 64; and, while the principal references may be to Ennian tragedy, there are also allusions to the Annales.60 One cannot draw a line down the centre of Rome’s literary history in the first century bc, with the neoterics on one side and the traditionalists on the other. There is no better illustration of this than Catullus’ contemporary, the Epicurean poet Lucretius, who addressed his six books of verse to the same Gaius Memmius whom Catullus accuses of having mistreated him in Bithynia (above, p. 35). Since Ennius was Lucretius’ chief poetic model,61 it is not surprising that Lucretius’ verse, even making allowances for his intractable subject-matter, does not read like the hexameters of Catullus 64. On the other hand Lucretius’ claim to novelty auia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante trita solo. iuuat integros accedere fontis atque haurire iuuatque nouos decerpere flores (1.926–8) I traverse the Pierides’ pathless places, untrodden by any foot before. It is a pleasure to reach untouched springs and to draw from them, a pleasure to pluck new flowers

is expressed passionately in terms clearly modelled on Callimachus (Aetia 1.25–7), while his subsequent reference to ‘the Muses’ charm’ (1.934 ‘musaeo . . . lepore’) lays claim to the key quality which Catullus expressed by the adjective lepidus (1.1). E. J. Kenney has made a powerful case for Lucretius’ literary doctrina and, after an analysis of his proem, has concluded as follows:62 The combination of powerful rhetoric, vividly pictorial language, and etymological word-play with symbol and allegory, allusion and suggestion, and what may be called a general thematic artfulness, heralds a poem on 59 61 62

Skutsch (1968) 8. 60 Thomas (1982), esp. 156–7. See Nethercut (2020), who argues that the tradition of Latin epic between Ennius and Catullus is far less uniform (i.e. far less ‘Ennian’) than scholars have generally allowed. Kenney (1977) 16–17, based on Kenney (1970).

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tony woodman a high literary plane and above all, in the historical context of the middle of the first century bc, a modern poem. All the characteristics of the ‘new’ poetry . . . are in evidence. It is no mere paradox to style Lucretius, different as he is from Catullus in several essential ways, just as much a New Poet.

If this conclusion is right, it is natural to enquire about the relationship between Catullus and Lucretius. Classical scholars have always been interested in parallels and it is not surprising that commentators and others have produced a list of linguistic similarities between the two poets. Most of the similarities are between the De Rerum Natura and Poem 64, such as 6.728 procliuis . . . undis and 64.270 procliuas . . . undas,63 but who was reading whom? A collocation such as quae quoniam, which occurs once in Catullus (64.198) but seven times in Lucretius, suggests that Catullus is the borrower, a suggestion strengthened by 64.198 ‘quae quoniam uerae nascuntur pectore ab imo’, which combines the Lucretian formula with a line from his Book 3 (57 ‘uerae uoces tum demum pectore ab imo’). On the other hand, consider lines 43–6 of Catullus 64: ipsius at sedes, quacumque opulenta recessit regia, fulgenti splendent auro atque argento. candet ebur soliis, colluc-ent pocula mensae, tota domus gaudet regali splendida gaza.

There is clearly a relationship between this passage and the opening of Lucretius Book 2:64 nec domus argento fulget auroque renidet (27) ... quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae proficiunt neque nobilitas nec gloria regni (37–8);

but it is here more difficult to make out who is imitating whom, perhaps especially because of Catullus’ characteristically relentless assonance (underlined): has he ‘added’ this feature to his Lucretian original or has Lucretius simply eliminated it from his model in the same way as he has eliminated the repetitions regia ~ regali and splendent ~ splendida? Matters would perhaps be simplified if the verbal similarities were restricted to Poem 64;65 but this is not the case. The otherwise unique expressions dulcis . . . fetus (‘sweet fruits’: Lucr. 2.1159) and solis nitor (‘sun’s brightness’: 63 64 65

Not mentioned by Giesecke (2000) 181–2 in her list of parallels; cf. also 10–30. No suggestion of such a relationship in Fowler (2002a) ad loc. For discussion of these similarities see Tamás (2016).

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Lucr. 2.1032, 5.668) occur at 65.3 and 66.3 respectively; while the striking commune sepulchrum (‘common sepulchre’: Lucr. 5.259) occurs in 68b.89 (and was later picked up by Cicero at Off. 1.55) and notho . . . lumine (‘borrowed light’: Lucr. 5.575) in 34.15–16. Another complication is the possibility of a common source. Both Lucretius (2.592) and Catullus (63.7) use the expression sola terrae (‘soil of the earth’), which is also explained by Varro in his book De Lingua Latina (5.22): had Varro picked it up from either of the poets, or was it a more common phrase which happens to have survived only in these three authors? One of the ‘standard’ parallels is caeca . . . caligine (‘impenetrable darkness’: 64.207), which occurs twice in Lucretius (3.304, 4.456); but the same expression occurs in one of the first speeches Cicero delivered as consul in 63 (Agr. 2.44), as well as thrice in his translation of Aratus (Phaen. 345, 478, Progn. 1.2), which also preceded both poets: either Catullus and Lucretius were each imitating a Ciceronian turn of phrase or (more likely, perhaps) all three authors were imitating a lost passage of Ennius. The situation would perhaps be clarified somewhat if we could be sure of the relative dates of the poets and their works. As has been seen, Catullus is usually assumed to have died in or shortly after 54 bc (above, p. 2). Cicero famously refers to Lucretius’ poetry in a letter of mid-February 54 bc (Q.Fr. 2.10(14).3), but scholars do not agree on whether he was then already dead; on the basis of verbal similarities between Lucretius and Books 5–7 of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, covering the years 54–52 bc, it has been argued that Lucretius’ poem first became available in 54.66 On the conventional chronology, therefore, matters are not only controversial but also extremely tight; perhaps we should take refuge in the fact that there was no such thing as a ‘date of publication’ in the Roman world: texts or parts thereof were recited preliminarily to groups of varying size and intimacy or exchanged between friends, and it was only after a considerable period of time that a work would eventually be ‘published’. It is obviously possible that Catullus and Lucretius, already linked by their association with Memmius, came to know each other’s work during this preliminary period and that each influenced the other.67 66

67

Krebs (2013). He detected no distinct echoes between Lucretius and BG 1–4, but Fletcher (1968) 884 had compared Lucr. 5.1136 ‘uolneribus clamore fuga terrore tumultu’ with BG 3.69.4 ‘omniaque erant tumultus terroris fugae plena’. Whether Caesar published individual books of the BG annually, as Krebs’ argument requires, is itself debated. Hutchinson (2001) proposed a significantly later date (49) for Lucretius, Courtney (2003) 171 a very much earlier one (‘between 65 and 60’). The conventional date has been reasserted by Morgan and Taylor (2017) in a discussion of Memmius. So e.g. Gale (2007) 69.

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V In the surviving fragments of the late-Republican Latin poets we sometimes sense that we can catch echoes of such literary liaisons. Cinna’s phrase innumerabilibus . . . saeclis (1C/6H) recurs in Q. Mucius Scaevola’s canescet saeclis innumerabilibus (1C/91H), where the juxtaposition of the first two words resembles cana . . . saecula in Catullus 95.6 – a poem in praise of Cinna. Cinna’s line saecula permaneat nostri Dictynna Catonis (14C/H) recalls plus uno maneat perenne saeclo, the final line of Catullus’ first poem (but note also Cic. Tusc. Disp. 2.16 ‘philosophia tot saecula permanet’). The way in which Cinna here refers to Valerius Cato as ‘our friend’ is echoed by Furius Bibaculus’ reference to the same poet (1C/ 84H ‘mei . . . Catonis’), which in turn is like Catullus’ reference to Cinna (95.1 ‘mei Cinnae’). The repeated use of the possessive adjective suggests the poets’ need to identify themselves as members of a perhaps beleaguered group. Some scholars believe that the historian and biographer Cornelius Nepos – a Transpadane, like Catullus – had mentioned the poet in his now lost Chronica and that in Poem 1 Catullus was repaying the compliment when he dedicated his poetry to Nepos.68 Whether or not the hypothesis is true, it seems very likely that Catullus is complimenting Nepos by means of allusions to his work. omne aeuum in line 6, for example, looks like a translated reference to Nepos’ title and may perhaps echo an explanation provided by Nepos himself in his preface.69 Allusions are not always so straightforward, however. In Poem 44 Catullus jokingly addresses his farm in gratitude after a period of recuperation there (6–15): O funde noster seu Sabine seu Tiburs (nam te esse Tiburtem autumant quibus non est cordi Catullum laedere; at quibus cordi est quouis Sabinum pignore esse contendunt) sed seu Sabine siue uerius Tiburs, fui libenter in tua suburbana uilla malamque pectore expuli tussim, non immerenti quam mihi meus uenter, dum sumptuosas appeto, dedit, cenas. nam, Sestianus dum uolo esse conuiua, orationem in Antium petitorem plenam ueneni et pestilentiae legi. 68 69

5

10

So e.g. Goold (1974) 257, 261–2. See Wiseman (1979) 170; for other possible examples see Woodman (2003) 193–4 (= (2012a) 123–4).

Literary Liaisons Hic me grauedo frigida et frequens tussis quassauit usque dum in tuum sinum fugi et me recuraui otioque et urtica. Quare refectus maximas tibi grates ago, meum quod non es ulta peccatum. Nec deprecor iam, si nefaria scripta Sesti recepso, quin grauedinem et tussim non mi, sed ipsi Sestio, ferat frigus, qui tunc uocat me, cum malum librum legi.70

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Farm of mine, whether Sabine or Tiburtine (for you are styled Tiburtine by those who have no desire to hurt Catullus; but those who have such a desire maintain at any price that you are Sabine) – well, whether Sabine or (more truly) Tiburtine, I was glad to be in your suburban villa, and I got rid of the bad cough from my chest which, in my pursuit of sumptuous dining, my stomach quite rightly gave me. For, with my appetite for being a Sestian guest, I read his speech Against the Candidacy of Antius – full of poison and plague. At this point a heavy cold and constant cough convulsed me, until I fled to your embrace and restored myself with rest and nettle soup. Therefore, having recovered, I offer you very great gratitude because you took no vengeance for my sin. And I now have no objection if, were I to be given Sestius’ unspeakable writings, their frigidity should inflict cold and cough not on me but on Sestius himself, who only invites me when I have read one of his bad books.

The humour of the poem depends partly on the extravagant conceit whereby an inanimate object – a mere farm – is addressed as if it were a great divinity and is treated to all the prayer-features and archaising language that one would expect in a real prayer. At the same time there is the sustained pun on frigus, which is both a physical cold and stylistic frigidity: thus nettle soup (15) is recommended for coughs because it is bland (Celsus 4.10.4 ‘utilis etiam in omni tussi est . . . cibus interdum mollis, . . . ut urtica’), but mollitia will also counteract the hacking style of Sestius. The punchline of the poem comes at the end, where, in keeping with the prayer-style, the tables are turned and Catullus prays that the next victim be Sestius himself (19–20). Catullus’ view of Sestius’ style is echoed by Cicero in his letters. Since on two occasions Cicero’s criticisms use the adjectival form of Sestius’ name (Fam. 7.32(113).1 ‘dicta . . . Sestiana’, Att. 7.17(141).2 ‘scriptum Σηστιωδέστερον’), it is presumably no accident that Catullus does the same with his ludicrously inflated Sestianus . . . conuiua (10): although not 70

The text of the end of the poem is uncertain.

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a single word of Sestius has survived to enable us to check, both authors are presumably parodying one of his notable mannerisms.71 Whether Catullus’ poem displays further parody is impossible to know, but it is interesting to note that Cicero in the former letter proceeds to list (§2) a series of four stylistic phenomena for criticism; while he attributes none of them to Sestius, three of them coincide with the above sources of humour in Catullus’ poem: hyperbole, ambiguity and unexpectedness (παρὰ προσδοκίαν). It is tempting to suggest that, when Cicero listed his phenomena, he continued to have Sestius in mind and that Catullus is (as it were) showing Sestius how some of his characteristic foibles should be carried off.72

VI The criticism and praise of fellow writers constitutes a striking feature of Catullus’ work (Poems 1, 14, 22, 35, 36, 44, 49, 50, 53, 95, 116). Although we can identify most of these writers, their writings have generally survived, if at all, only in fragments, and, in the case of the poets, the fragments do not disclose whether their authors expressed literary views that coincided with his. Yet, despite the paucity of the evidence, there are sufficient intertextual allusions to suggest that these poets were very familiar with one another’s work, while the intimacy of such references as ‘our friend Cato’ implies a certain degree of collegiality. It therefore seems more than simply coincidence that Cicero should go out of his way, on more than one occasion, to mention nameless poets whose manner resembled that of Catullus: whoever they were, and whatever they were doing, their verse was sufficiently influential – and sufficiently different from Cicero’s own – to attract the great man’s attention and elicit a reaction. We may wonder how Catullus differed from Laevius, who is thought to have written more than three decades before him.73 One of the latter’s poems evidently began Mea Vatiena, amabo (28C), just as Catullus’ Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla (32). One of Laevius’ titles was 71

72 73

It is interesting that, in the famous poem ridiculing Arrius’ pronunciation, Catullus uses similar language to that with which ‘Crassus’ in Cicero’s De Oratore (55 bc) talks of his mother-in-law (84.5–6 ‘credo, sic mater, sic . . . auunculus eius, | sic maternus auus dixerat atque auia’ ~ De Or. 3.45 ‘sic locutum esse eius patrem iudico, sic maiores’). A striking feature of Poem 44 is the dislocation of dedit (9): this is perhaps a further parodic element, although Williams (1968) 714–16 sees it as a typically Catullan attempt to outdo Callimachus. Courtney (2003) 118; Lightfoot (1999) 53 maintains that he could have been ‘a couple of decades later’.

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Protesilaodamia,74 seemingly a combination of the names of Protesilaus and Laodamia who feature so significantly in Poem 68b. Courtney’s list of Laevius’ ‘striking features’ of diction – neologisms, diminutives, compounds, words given a new meaning through etymology – could equally well be applied to Catullus.75 Yet it seems an inevitable inference from Cicero that Catullus was different. When we read the poets of the next generation, such as Horace in the Satires or Virgil in the Eclogues, we seem to be in a different literary world from that which saw Cicero acclaimed as the best poet. The difference is accounted for by the poets discussed in this chapter, and, even if we find the difference difficult to define, it is impossible to imagine the achievements of the triumviral and Augustan ages without the intervention of Catullus and the poetae noui.

Further Reading Catullus’ lifetime (traditionally 84–54 bc) overlapped with the writing life of Cicero (81–43 bc), whose literary dominance is reflected in the sheer number of his surviving speeches, treatises and letters (see May (2002) and, on the letters, Hutchinson (1998) and White (2010)); only his poetry is not fully represented today. Another famous contemporary was Caesar, on whom see Grillo and Krebs (2017); other historical writers of the period have survived, if at all, only in fragments (see Cornell (2013) and, for further discussion, Woodman (2015a)). The general intellectual background of the period is surveyed magisterially by Rawson (1985); a significant role is played by the polymath, Varro, on whom see Butterfield (2015b), Arena and Mac Góráin (2017). The annotated editions of the fragmentary poets by Courtney (2003) and Hollis (2007), the latter with translation, are indispensable and provide a wealth of detailed information to which it is impossible to do justice above; when discussing the new poets, both editors place ‘New’ within socalled ‘scare quotes’. Scholars differ on who constitutes the new poets: Lyne (1978a) (= (2007) 60–84) focuses on Caecilius, Calvus, Cinna, Cornificius and Valerius Cato, whereas A. Traglia’s edition, boldly entitled Poetae Novi (1962, 21974), adds Bibaculus, Scaevola, Ticida, Hortensius Hortalus, Memmius, Volumnius, Julius Caesar, Varro Atacinus, and Gallus. For further bibliography see Skinner (2015) 124–9. For Hellenistic poetry and 74 75

Courtney (2003) 130–5; also Lyne (1998) 204–5 (= (2007) 216–17). Courtney (2003) 118. See also Hinds (1998) 74–83.

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Rome see Wimmel (1960), Cameron (1995) 454–83, Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 444–85, Hunter (2006); the standard commentary on Callimachus’ Aetia is Harder (2012), and there is commentary on a selection of Hellenistic poets in Sider (2017). For the survivors of Catullus’ generation see Nisbet (1995) 390–413, and note too Hollis (2007) 6–8.

chapter 3

Catullan Intertextuality Richard F. Thomas

Roman literature was by nature intertextual from the beginning, taking on the genres it inherited from the Greeks and adapting them within the constraints and realities of native Roman prosody, Latin language, and Roman cultural differences. No longer seen under the sign of ‘influence’ or as part of the struggle to look or behave like the father – even when it is a matter of translation – this reality is rather seen as part of the dynamism of a literature that is as contentious, rivalrous and as preoccupied with dominating as the culture and state of which it was a part. Nor is the rivalry simply with the Greeks. Ennius takes an emulative and corrective stance with Naevius, updating his metre and much else. The prologues of Terence show that internal contention is as much a part of the game as any struggle to come to grips with and rearrange the sources in the poets of New Comedy. Intertextuality and intratextuality are cumbersome terms, but convenient for the overall phenomenon of the relationship between the source text (ST) and target text (TT), with, in the case of intratextuality, ST and TT sharing the same author.1 Since Catullan intertextuality includes what is generally agreed by any definition to be translation (Poem 66), and shades through Poem 51, which starts out as translation and then does other things, to Poem 70, which no one would call translation, but which has a distinct source model, I will use the abbreviations ST and TT to describe the text referred or alluded to and the alluding or referring text respectively. The 1980s and 1990s in particular saw contestation and a lively and productive debate about the terminology, mechanics and theoretical status of intertextuality, involving various issues: the question of ‘allusion’ or ‘reference’; the relationships among texts, authors and readers; and the always present – but frequently finessed in various ways – issue of the 1

‘Source text’ and ‘target text’ are terms found mostly in translation theory to define the text-to-betranslated and the translation respectively: see e.g. Munday (2008) 5, 82–5.

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intentional fallacy. The terminology and discourse could smack of religious extremism (‘fundamentalism’, philological and other)2 or the possibility of nuclear extinction:3 A Cold War exists between those who study ‘allusion’ and those who study ‘intertextuality’, and each term is a shorthand for a complex web of affiliation to, or distaste for, particular critical and methodological assumptions and those who hold them.

What seemed to be of some moment almost a quarter of a century ago, when ‘New Latin’ (as it called itself ) was new, has perhaps become an interesting episode in the history of classical scholarship, but has also brought real gains in how we go about writing on, and teaching, Latin poetic texts. A recent book on Ovid’s intertextual relationship with the text of Homer, Barbara Boyd’s Ovid’s Homer, is subtitled Authority, Repetition, and Reception, thus avoiding the language of allusion, reference, and the like. The ‘Classical Tradition’ became ‘Reception Studies’, a move which parallels the move from thinking about ‘influence’ to thinking about ‘allusion/reference/intertextuality’. The interest in reception looks to have a broader hold on the imaginations of classicists, and has done away for good with the boundaries that defined what classicists could work on and think about. The tension between the philological and the theoretical, and again anxieties about what is even meant by reception, still linger, but in productive ways. In the early 1980s I became interested in Catullus’s engagement with Hellenistic poetry, partly as a consequence of attending, in the spring semester of 1981, the seminar on Catullus 64 of my Harvard senior colleague Wendell Clausen, in which I was to cover the opening lines.4 I wasn’t even aware we were in, or about to find ourselves in, a Cold War – which I suppose is in the nature of the early stages of Cold Wars. To the extent that I was aware of much in the way of my own theoretical engagement, I looked back mainly to the grandfather of intertextuality, Giorgio Pasquali.5 It was from Pasquali that I took the essential notion of 2 4 5

The term is coined by Hinds (1998) 17–51. 3 Kennedy (1995) 86. This would be the basis for Thomas (1982). Also to the work of Giuseppe Giangrande. Gian Biagio Conte, whose work, however, was available only in difficult Italian until Charles Segal’s 1986 translation, was unknown to me during these years. It is important to remember, and to remind, that email and electronic library catalogues effectively arrived only in the late 1980s and 1990s, which greatly assisted both in the ability to search for information and in the formation of networks of the like-minded. See Hinds (1998) for the priority of Conte’s Italian versions. It is worth noting that Conte appears only by way of the 1986 English version in the bibliography of Farrell (1991), whose introductory chapter (‘On Vergilian intertextuality’) remains the best primer for what was happening in this area in the preceding years. The same is true

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‘reference’, indicating a collaborative engagement between author and reader who sees where the author is, as noted also by Lowell Edmunds (2001): ‘allusions do not produce their intended (voluto) effect except on a reader who clearly recalls the text to which reference is made.’6 For the practical purposes of a Companion to Catullus, and in the context of setting out some of the intertextual realities of his poetry, Pasquali’s position still seems best. It is also a position that leads me to lemmatise poems of Catullus, rather than periods, genres, or the individual poets with whom he is engaging.7

Translation The phenomenon of translation can be treated somewhat separately. Particularly since the appearance of the Dis Exapaton fragments of Menander, it becomes clear that ‘translation’ will hardly do to describe the manner in which Roman literary genres took on the Greek models.8 The prologues of Terence show that he is no different: neither Plautus nor Terence is simply involved with ‘the transformation of a literary text written in one language into an “equivalent” literary text written in another language’, as Possanza puts it.9 For our present purposes a translated text may be imagined as one that could, at least in principle, be translated back into something like the original by someone unaware of that original.10 This would never actually happen, since there is no single idiom by which the language of the TT represents the ST, so the idiom of the source will necessarily be concealed. But in theory a putative Greek poet, bilingual in Latin and a master of the dactylic hexameter, in a universe where the first half of Aratus’ Phaenomena had been lost, but the complete Latin versions of Cicero and Germanicus survived, would have a chance of producing something close to the original, and in many lines would make an exact hit. The meaning, moreover, of this reconstructed Phaenomena would be much the same as that of the lost original, under such a hypothesis.

6 7

8 10

of the bibliography of O’Hara (1990). Insufficient attention was paid in these years, by myself and others, to the contributions in West and Woodman (1979). Pasquali (1968) 275; Edmunds (2001) xii. For approaches by way of ST, see the comprehensive treatment of Braga (1950), and for individual authors, Greene (2007) on Sappho, Knox (2007) on Callimachus, and Gutzwiller (2012) on the Greek Anthology. 9 See Bain (1979) on the relationship of Menander and Plautus. Possanza (2004) 29. See Bing (2009) 65–82 for consideration of such possibilities by way of discussion of Callimachus and Catull. 66.

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richard f. thomas Poems 65–66

Traditionally two poems of Catullus have been labelled ‘translations’, Poems 51 and 66. Of the two only the latter really qualifies in the terms just set out, and with reservations. As only emerged with any detail in 1929, in a first-century bc papyrus (with some fragmentary additions in 1953), Poem 66 is a fairly close translation of Callimachus’ Lock of Berenice, the aetiological poem that was, or was later inserted as, the final episode (fr. 110 Pfeiffer) of Callimachus’ famous four-book poem, the Aetia.11 As Clausen noted, ‘Catullus tends to follow Callimachus closely, but without hesitating to depart from him where he had to or wished to.’12 The translation is idiomatic and creative, but, for the most part, it is on the surface just that, with little or no trace of an independent Catullan voice or personality, ‘the translated verses of Battus’ son’, as he himself called the poem in introducing it (65.16 expressa . . . carmina Battiadae). The notorious issue of Catull. 66.79–88, lacking anything in the Greek, need not detain us. Suffice it to say that current critical thinking favours Catullus’ having worked from a version containing the lines, or possibly having imported them from elsewhere in Callimachus.13 The lock, catasterised as the newlydiscovered constellation ‘Coma Berenices’, curses the inventors of iron, without whose discovery the scissors that cut her lock would not have been: τί πλόκαμοι ῥέξωμεν, ὅτ’ οὔρεα τοῖα σιδή[ρῳ εἴκουσιν; Χαλύβων ὡς ἀπόλοιτο γένος, γειόθεν ἀντέλλοντα, κακὸν φυτόν, οἵ μιν ἔφ⌊ηναν πρῶτοι καὶ τυπίδων ἔφρασαν ἐργασίην.

Callimachus, Aetia 4.110.47–50

What are we locks to do, when such mountains yield to iron? | May the race of the Chalybes perish, | who first revealed it, rising from the earth, an evil plant, | and taught the work of hammers. quid facient crines, cum ferro talia cedant? Iuppiter, ut Chalybon omne genus pereat, et qui principio sub terra quaerere uenas institit ac ferri stringere duritiem!

11 12

13

Catullus 66.47–50

See Harder (2012) 1.67 for details. Clausen (1970) 88; cf. 85–92 for details of where Catullus omitted or changed the original, whether through incomprehension of Callimachus, difficulties in representing the Greek, or reasons undeterminable. Most recently on Poem 66, see Du Quesnay (2012) and (2017). Du Quesnay (2012) 162–75 is persuasive in seeing the lines as looking to a Callimachean source. See also Harder (2012) 1.846–8. Hollis (1992) has shown how Callimachean the lines are, contra Putnam (1960), who wants them to be Catullan invention. See also Knox (2007) 162.

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What will locks do, when such things yield to iron? | Jupiter, may the whole race of the Chalybes perish, | and he who first taught how to seek out veins beneath the earth | and to forge the hardness of iron.

The sets of lines are similar to each other, particularly when rendered into English, but there are differences and it is through difference that the target text creates interest and can establish meaning. The invocation of Jupiter has no analogue in the Greek, and might have the feel of a metrical filler, necessitated by the difficulties of line-by-line translation. But that conclusion should be the last resort when thinking about the art of a great poet. Catullus’ invocation of Jupiter introduces a level of irony into his translation. To invoke Jupiter, god of the age of iron, in calling for a curse on the race that invented iron, is a nice piece of Catullan wit. Roman Jacobson usefully defined ‘interlingual translation or translation proper’ as ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’.14 Even where that is undeniably the way to categorise Catullus 66, there will still be a sense of emulation, of putting one’s own poetic self into the text. For that matter, why translation, and why translation of the Coma Berenices? The choice has to do with the larger programmatic importance of Callimachus for Catullus.15 Perhaps a few years before Catullus was born, Cicero, ‘still a teenager’ (admodum adulescentulus),16 translated Aratus’ Phaenomena, the start in a long and distinguished line of translations and imitations, including Varro of Atax (frr. 13-14C/120-21H), Virgil, Ovid and Germanicus. It is possible to see in Poem 66 a translation of Callimachean astronomical aetiology to match or cap that of Cicero and others, putting Callimachus into lists of Roman translation, along with Aratus. This might also give added significance to the addressee of Poem 65 and recipient of the translation, Q. Hortensius Hortalus, the famous orator and rival of Cicero. Catullus surely knew Callimachus’ epigram (Epigram 27 Pfeiffer) praising the ‘slender sayings’ (λεπταὶ ῥήσιες) of Aratus, mark of his ‘intense wakefulness’ (σύντονος ἀγρυπνίη).17 Cinna fr. 11C/13H is a four-line epigram, addressing an unknown friend for whom the poet has brought (from Bithynia) a copy of Aratus’ Phaenomena: haec tibi Arateis multum uigilata lucernis | carmina . . . uexi. I brought you these verses on which Aratus burned much midnight oil. 14 16 17

Jakobson (1959). 15 For which see Knox (2007). Cic. Nat. D. 2.104. Scipio, admodum adulescentulus (‘still quite young’) at Rep. 1.23, is 17 years old, for which see Kubiak (1981) 12 n. 9. Or ‘seal of his wakefulness’ (σύμβολον ἀγρυπνίης).

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As Hollis notes, ‘[s]peculation about the friend’s identity – some have fancied Catullus – is fruitless, but no doubt the recipient shared Cinna’s tastes.’18 While Catullus may or may not be the addressee, Tony Woodman is right to suggest a close relationship to this epigram and Catullus’ address to Hortensius at 65.15–16:19 Sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Hortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae Nevertheless, Hortalus, in the midst of such great sorrows, I send you these translated verses of Callimachus’

While Hollis adduces carmina (referring to a single poem) at Catullus 65.16 as a parallel usage to that in Cinna’s fragment (along with carminibus Arateis, ‘Aratean songs’, at Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.104), there is more to be said. The unusual use of the plural, along with the close similarities between Cinna’s fragment and Catullus 65.16, points towards an intertextual relationship, with Catullus nodding to his friend Cinna. Woodman suggested that the epigram of Cinna may have referred to a gift of a translation of Aratus. If so, that gift would have had an even closer relationship to Poem 66. But, assuming it was just a deluxe version in Greek, the Catullan lines constitute an even stronger connection. The move from haec . . . uigilata . . . carmina, to haec expressa . . . carmina suggests emulation: Cinna gave a poem that Aratus worked on, I give my translation of a poem of Callimachus. The Catullan lines thereby constitute an allusive affiliation with Cinna, just as Poem 95 does more openly, but they also express contestation, so often a part of the intertextual process.20 Poem 51 As T. S. Eliot noted in a 1920 essay that juxtaposed the intertextual methods of Shakespeare and his younger contemporary, the playwright Philip Massinger,21 Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something 18 19

20

Hollis (2007) 42–3. Woodman (2012b) 144–6; cf. also Skutsch (1912) 227–8. Contra Du Quesnay (2012) 154 n. 4. For the gift of an anthology of Greek poems, in Greek, to a Roman, cf. e.g. Crinagoras, Anth. Pal. 9.239 = 7 G–P; 545 = 11 G–P. 21 See Woodman pp. 34–5 in this volume for treatment of Poem 95. Eliot (1928) 125.

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different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Scores of articles and notes have been written about Catullus 51 and its relationship to its model, Sappho 31, many focused largely on whether and, if so, how Catullus’s fourth stanza relates to Sappho’s (fragmentary) fifth.22 Few would call it a translation. If Poem 66 is truly a translation, in a tradition familiar from Cicero’s Aratea, Poem 51 is something else, a poem that works on its own terms, that has stopped being, again in Jakobson’s words to describe translation proper, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’. It has aesthetic integrity and meaning in its own right, both as a discrete poem and as part, indeed the opening movement, of the Lesbia cycle. The traces of the model are there, and the model matters, but the model is now being transformed into something different from translation. This, as far as we can tell, is a new form of intertextuality.23 Of course, what we do with the final stanza of Poem 51 matters, but does not change the points I am making about emulative intertextual methodologies. The reader who has access to the Greek intertext can be in no doubt about it. The first known Sapphic stanza in Latin literature displays its model with ostentation, its six Latin words getting Sappho’s opening but compressed into a single line: Ille mi par esse deo uidetur ~ φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισι | ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ. This strong intertextual opening, in narrative and dramatic terms capturing the first moments of the affair, achieves a number of essential goals. First, Catullus stakes out for himself his position as the Roman successor to the greatest woman poet in antiquity, and, arguably, the greatest love poet. This he does as surely as Livius Andronicus did by adapting the first line of the Homeric Odyssey. By the time the reader encounters the name Lesbia in line 7, the divergences from the Sapphic model, including the naming of the object of the poet’s 22 23

For a full discussion of the topic, see Bellandi (2007) 223–53. This is the point at which those scholars for whom Catullus is not to be thought of as revolutionary bring up the name of Laevius, whose 33 fragments are from time to time seen as indicating some form of neotericism. The predominance of critical opinion suggests that Laevius, in spite of the ‘bizarre novelty’ of his writing (diminutives, odd neologisms, compounds, etc.: see Courtney (2003) 118–20), looks more to Anacreon and to the lyric of archaic and classical Greece than to the Hellenistic and Callimachean focus of the neoterics. On Laevius, see Ross (1969) 155–60; also Woodman pp. 44–5, for a sense, confirmed by Cicero, of the essential difference between Laevius and Catullus.

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desire, have already begun to accumulate. Imitatio immediately turns to aemulatio, a fact somewhat obscured by critical thinking that has centred on Sappho 31 and on the notion that what is in her poem should somehow be represented in its totality in that of Catullus, that its absence constitutes a shortcoming of some sort. By the second line of the poem Catullus is no longer simply translating Sappho, as the precision of his translation turns to emulative intertextuality. His beloved is not just equal to the gods, rather outdoes them (superare diuos), if such a thing is permissible (si fas est). The trope is absent from Sappho, and from this point on the Sapphic intertext comes in and out of sight, informing the Catullan poem but imposing nothing on it. The addition of frequency in the Roman poem (3 identidem, ‘again and again’) underscores the misery the poet feels. Famously, this word will recur only one other time in Catullus, in the only other poem in Sapphics, more or less at the end of the cycle. There, in Poem 11, the repeated action, in a brilliant intratextual moment, is not the single individual’s repeated watching and listening, but now Lesbia’s repeated sexual coupling with all three hundred of her lovers. Depending on how we read Catullus, that descent only emerges if we get to 11 after 51. Another purposeful interpolation comes with misero, underscoring the wretched state of the poet, and its masculine inflection draws attention to the greatest switch from the original, that of gender.24 Catullus switches the gender of the gazer from female to male, but maintains the gender of the desired woman and of the rival who shares her company. Change of identity will elsewhere be part of the difference that activates meaning and interest in the target text. What changes is artful, emulative, and by active choice of the Roman poet. Where the man in Sappho ‘listens nearby to her sweetly speaking and laughing delightfully’ (single verb, double participial object each with an adverbial accusative), Catullus switches to ‘watches and listens to you sweetly laughing’ (double verbs, single participial object also with an adverbial accusative, and not of a nameless girl, but of Lesbia, identified in line 7). He collapses the doubled phrasing of Sappho by taking the adverbial adjective (ἆδυ/dulce) that goes with one participle (φωνείσας, ‘speaking’, which he omits) and transferring it to his representation of the other (ridentem/γελαίσας, ‘laughing’).25 The addition of the rival’s gaze (spectat), absent from the model, takes on additional power when it is 24 25

See further Myers in this volume (p. 75). Just as Catullus corrected the Sapphic model, so Horace at Carm. 1.22.23–4 corrected Catullus against the model of Sappho, restoring the element of speech, appropriately for a beloved whose name means ‘chatter’ (λαλαγέω): dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, | dulce loquentem, ‘I shall always

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repeated, and intensified by way of a compound, in Catullus: 51.6–7 nam simul te, | Lesbia, aspexi. It is the art of Catullan creativity, rooted in Sappho’s poem of beauty and power, but never tied down by that model, that should be the focus of intertextual interest – as always how theft happens, not what the thief leaves behind. The addition of spectat may be seen as an instance of Catullan ‘correction’. Since one cannot see laughter, there is an ellipse of thought in Sappho between lines 3–5 and 7; Catullus fills in that ellipse, as it were, with spectat, so that for his poem aspexi (= Sappho’s ἴδω, also in line 7), follows more easily. Yet there is complexity in the shift from the present of the frequentative verb spectat, capturing the continuous gaze, to the momentary aoristic of the regular verb, aspexi (Goold: ‘the moment I set eyes on you’), whose immediacy causes the onset of speechlessness and paralysis. Clearly Catullus wanted to terminate this part of his poem, the account of the effects, after three stanzas, where Sappho took four. That part of the poem is complete by the end of line 12. If we approach the two poets with Catullan emulation as the operating principle, we may, with the help of Vine (1992), also suggest that Catullus has imported some of the four symptoms from Sappho’s fourth stanza into his third. Vine has noted that a number of elements in Catullus’ third stanza find resonance in Sappho’s fourth, and well defines the effect achieved by the Roman poet:26 I suggest that Sappho’s ‘missing’ fourth stanza has not been suppressed at all: rather, we can better understand Catullus’ third stanza as a partial compression of Sappho’s third stanza together with certain elements of her fourth stanza – a conflation that is visible precisely in Catullus’ more salient deviations from Sappho, in particular the phrase sub artus and the verb demanat.

Vine convincingly connects sub artus (‘under my limbs’), for Sappho’s χρῶι . . . ὐπα- (‘under my skin’) by way of Sappho’s fourth-verse detail τρόμος δὲ | παῖσαν ἄγρει (‘trembling seizes me all over’) to the Homeric cliché ὑπὸ τρόμος ἔλλαβε γυῖα (‘trembling seized their limbs’) at Iliad 14.506 and elsewhere, supported by the intratext at Catull. 76.21 subrepens imos ut torpor in artus, ‘creeping down like paralysis deep into my body’ (cf. torpet at Catull. 51.9, just before sub artus).27 Vine detects a further conflation from Sappho’s fourth stanza, and importation into Catullus’ third, in

26 27

love sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking Lalage.’ For ‘correction’ as a particular type of emulative intertextuality, see Thomas (1986) 185–9. Vine (1992) 254. The Homeric phrasing turns up in Latin epic in Ov. Met. 1.547 torpor grauis occupat artus (‘a heavy paralysis takes hold of her limbs), a variant of tremor occupat artus (‘trembling takes hold of the limbs’) at Virg. Aen. 7.446 and elsewhere.

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the verb demanat (‘pours down’) to describe the flame’s progress through his limbs. While the verb does not translate the process in Sappho 31.10 (ὐποδεδρόμηκεν ‘has run under’), it does connect to the verb at 31.13 κακχέεται (‘pours down on’). Catullus took the verb, but he was happy to leave its subject (ἴδρως, ‘sweat’) there in the omitted stanza. Critics have noted that Catullus may well have been reluctant to have himself going greener than grass (Sappho’s seventh detail) at the sight of Lesbia. He may have been even more reluctant to portray himself sweating heavily, a striking image in Sappho, but perhaps challenging the limits of decorum for the Roman poet.28 This omission and compression is another instance of intertextual correction. In the case of the greener than grass figure, and the image of sweat, Catullus’ poem gets us thinking about the aesthetics precisely of those images. They are not right for Catullus, but are they even right for Sappho? This is the essence of emulative intertextuality. There is one detail, the final one, that Catullus would not have wished to omit or suppress: 15–16 τεθνάκων δ’ ὀλίγω ’πιδεύης | φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτ̣[αι ‘and I seem to myself to be little short of dying’. Catullus saw the beauty of this image and so ended his third stanza with a passing reference to it. Where Sappho had in her third stanza simply written ‘I see nothing with my eyes’, Catullus introduced a metaphor with transferred epithet: gemina teguntur | lumina nocte ‘the lights of my eyes are covered by twin night’. As Vine notes (257), ‘the eyes covered over with “night” naturally suggest the darkness of death, and so may reflect Sappho’s own climactic concluding reference to death’. In the process Catullus uses the Homeric language of real death to rewrite Sappho’s ‘I see nothing with my eyes’ into his metaphor: e.g. Iliad 5.310, 11.356 ἀμφὶ δὲ ὄσσε κελαινὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψε ‘dark night covered over his eyes’.29 So Catullus has one stanza for Sappho’s two, with four symptoms instead of her eight, with oblique reference to three of the second four symptoms that come in her extra, fourth stanza. One is reminded of Ovid’s epigram to the Amores, which McKeown allows ‘may be wittily simplifying Callimachean poetic principles’: ‘We who had been the five books of Naso, 28 29

Horace, at Carm. 1.13.6–7 has ‘moisture running down the cheeks’, but cf. Valerius Aedituus 1.3C manat . . . mihi sudor; and note sudor at 23.16 and 68b.61. I do not here address his much discussed final stanza, other than to state my view that it is unrepresented by what we have in his model. But, as Vine (1992) 257–8 notes, ‘whether or not the otium stanza is more or less directly related to a fifth stanza of Sappho (if that is what the enigmatic and corrupt concluding fragment preserved by ‘Longinus’ represents) remains as mysterious as ever’.

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are now three: the author prefers this to the prior one.’ Length and shortness are also the essence in Poem 95 of Catullus, with its decided preference for the artful epyllion of Helvius Cinna over the artless works, half a million lines long, perhaps of Hortensius and Volusius.30 Poem 70 I will return to Catullus and some other epigrams of the Greek Anthology later, but this is the place for a similar instance of intertextual engagement by difference, in a widely acknowledged case. Callimachus is not himself exempt from the emulative intertextuality of Catullus. Poem 70 alludes closely to Callimachus, Epigram 11 G–P (= Anth. Pal. 5.6): Ὤμοσε Καλλίγνωτος Ἰωνίδι μήποτ’ ἐκείνης ἕξειν μήτε φίλον κρέσσονα μήτε φίλην. ὤμοσεν· ἀλλὰ λέγουσιν ἀληθέα, τοὺς ἐν ἔρωτι ὅρκους μὴ δύνειν οὔατ’ ἐς ἀθανάτων. νῦν δ’ ὁ μὲν ἀρσενικῷ θέρεται πυρί, τῆς δὲ ταλαίνης νύμφης ὡς Μεγαρέων οὐ λόγος οὐδ’ ἀριθμός. Callignotus swore to Ionis that he would hold neither boy nor girl dearer to him than her. So he swore, but it is a true saying that the oaths of lovers do not sink into the ears of the gods. He now is being kept warm by the fire of a male passion, but of the poor girl as ‘of the Megareans there is neither reckoning nor count’.

This poem is generally seen as the source model for Catullus 70: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat. dicit; sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua. My woman says she would rather be married to nobody more than me, not even if Jupiter himself should woo her. So she says, but what a woman says to a lover who desires her should be written on the wind and in the running water.

As David Ross noted, Catullus’ epigram represents a new stage in Roman intertextuality. Unlike Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus and Q. Lutatius Catulus – those earlier writers who responded thematically in Latin to the Greek anthology of Meleager – ‘Catullus refers to his original not by 30

The difficulties around the names of this poem are well known. There is much to be said in favour of the removal of line 3, and with it the name of Hortensius, by Trappes-Lomax (2007) 269–70.

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repetition of theme . . . but by rendering Callimachus’ anaphora Ὤμοσε . . . ὤμοσεν· ἀλλὰ by dicit . . . dicit sed. Such interest in verbal imitation is entirely neoteric.’31 Or, for all we know, entirely Catullan. That stylistic allusion provides unmistakable evidence of an intertextual connection to Callimachus, precisely as did the first line of Poem 51 to Sappho 31. As in the case of those poems, then, it is a matter of comparison. First, six lines have become four, so the same ‘Callimachean’ abbreviation and compression. The final couplet of Callimachus, as often in that poet, delivers a twist: Callignotus has broken his oath, and has indeed gone off with a male lover (φίλον). The poem, one of only two in the heterosexual Book 5 (the other, Epigram 16 G–P, adds Berenice to the three Graces),32 could have ended after line 4 – he swore, but the gods don’t hold lovers to their oaths. But a final couplet adds a twist, as often in Callimachean epigram: Callignotus has gone to a male lover, so breaking the oath. This sets up a learned proverb about Megareans, amusing, but with the smell of the lamp. Within the stylistic signature from lines 1 and 3, Catullus not only removes the final couplet, he also changes the third-person setting and makes the situation about him and his woman, thereby personalising the poem and bringing it into the orbit of the Lesbia story. Most importantly, of course, Catullus has not just changed but greatly improved the metaphor expressing the non-binding nature of lovers’ oaths. The combined figures of writing on the wind and on the running water are unparalleled in Latin before Catullus.33 Catullus has taken from Greek the conceit that a woman’s oath should be written on water. Commentators point to a fragment of Sophocles,34 but Catullus may have found the image closer to hand, in a poem by Meleager, placed next but one to that of Callimachus in the Greek Anthology (Anth. Pal. 5.8). The woman complains that she and her lover swore never to part, but he is now with another and says that ‘those oaths are carried off on the water’ (νῦν δ’ ὁ μὲν ὅρκιά φησι ἐν ὕδατι κεῖνα φέρεσθαι).35 To this conceit Catullus has added the figure of writing on the wind, a daring variation of the figure, in Greek and Latin, of giving one’s words to the winds as a sign of their fruitlessness.36 That more usual 31 33 34 35

36

32 Ross (1969) 153. There are twelve in the pederastically selected Anth. Pal. 12. The signature pairing is taken up at Prop. 2.28.8 and Ov. Am. 2.16.45–6. Fr. 742 N. ὅρκον γυναικὸς εἰς ὕδωρ χρὴ γράφειν, ‘the oath of a woman one should write down on water’. Whether Anth. Pal. 5.6–8 was a short Meleagrian sequence is a matter of speculation (see Gutzwiller (1998) 292–3). Given the debt his epigram shows to that of the great Callimachus, it is hard to imagine Meleager not bringing the two poems together. For which see Pl. Phdr. 276c.

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figure he would use in a context relevant to Poem 70.3 (mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, ‘what a woman says to her eager lover’). In Catullus 64.143, Ariadne, playing ‘Catullus’ to Theseus/Lesbia, reverses the gender from the epigram: nunc iam nulla uiro iuranti femina credat ‘now let no woman believe the sworn oath of a man’. The preceding line sets up the intratext, as Ariadne uses the more traditional figure for what has happened to Theseus’ promises of marriage: 142 quae cuncta aerii discerpunt irrita uenti (‘all of which the breezy winds tear up and render vain’). So it is that Catullus 70, and Catullus 51 for that matter, successfully steal from Callimachus and Sappho respectively, precisely as Eliot described such theft, and himself put that theft into practice. Callimachus also had a change from past to present: νῦν δ’ ὁ μὲν ἀρσενικῷ θέρεται πυρί. Catullus reserves this for 72, the twin of 70, where he repeats Callimachus’ adverb and imagery: 72.5 nunc te cognoui: quare etsi impensius uror ‘now I know you; and so I burn even more ragingly’.

Poems 61–62 Given what Catullus did with Sappho and Callimachus, in the case of those source texts that have survived, it may seem vain to speculate about models in the case of other Catullan poems. This holds particularly for the epithalamia, Poems 61 and 62. We know that the Alexandrian collection of Sappho contained a book of such poems, probably the ninth. The metre of 61 (a strophe of four glyconics and one pherecratean) survives only in Anacreon (fr. 12 Page). Poem 62 is in dactylic hexameters, a metre found in a number of Sapphic epithalamia or possible epithalamia (fr. 104, 105, 106, perhaps 107, 108, 109).37 The 228 lines of Poem 61 doubtless show some unknowable debt to one or more Greek wedding hymns, but the cultural setting is Roman and Italian, with Fescennine, Sabine, and other non-Greek traditions activated. The Roman names ( Junia, Aurunculeia, Manlius, Torquatus) serve to domesticate this example of the genre in spite of its Aeolic metre. The single Greek mythological reference, an oblique nod to the virtue of Penelope (222–3 Telemacho . . . Penelopeo) is proverbial and almost a cliché – as it would have been in any putative Greek model.38 Poem 62 is slightly different, ‘a fanciful composite picture in which Greek and Roman motifs are combined’ (Fordyce (1961) 254). The tradition, bred of Romanticism, that assumed that anything of merit in Roman poetry must have had a Greek original, led some scholars to think the poem was 37

Page (1955) 123.

38

For a recent, full treatment of Catull. 61, see Feeney (2013).

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a translation (‘die Sapphoübersetzung des Catull’).39 But, as Fraenkel noted, ‘we need not waste more words on such improbabilities’.40 Here he follows Wilamowitz, who noted the eclecticism of the Catullan wedding song. Though in the absence of evidence we cannot be certain, the competing choruses of boys and girls would appear to belong to no Greek or Roman wedding but rather spring from the mind of Catullus.41 Those fragments of Sappho in dactylic hexameter to which Catullus 62 shows a similarity suggest that the Roman poet’s use of her epithalamia is selective. In Catullus the choruses of girls and boys both address the Evening Star, showing diametrically opposed attitudes to its arrival: 20 Hespere, quis . . . crudelior ignis; 26 Hespere, quis . . . iucundior ignis (‘Evening Star, what . . . more cruel/more delightful fire’ – cruel for the girls because its coming tears the daughter from the embrace of her mother). Sappho fr. 104a L–P is a two-line fragment, which likewise addresses Hesperus, so could be a model for Catullus, but need not be his only source text. Wilamowitz was right to note the Callimachean affiliation (Hecale fr. 291.3Pf. = 113H ἑ σπέριον φιλέουσιν, ἀτὰρ στυγέουσιν ἑῷον, ‘they love the Evening Star, but hate the Morning’) of Catull. 62.34–5 (fures, quos idem saepe reuertens, | Hespere, mutato comprendis nomine Eous, ‘thieves, whom you often catch, Evening Star, returning with name changed to Morning Star’), the Greek line inverted by the poet of the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris: 352 Hesperium uitant, optant ardescere Eoum, ‘they avoid the Evening Star, long for the light of the Morning Star’.42 There is no evidence that Sappho’s poem was part of an amoebean exchange between boys and girls at a wedding, a so far unattested scenario but the primary feature in the imagination of Catullus. Another fragment (105a) comes from a simile in which something or someone is compared to a sweet-apple which reddens on the top of the bough, the top of the topmost, which the gatherers have forgotten, or rather couldn’t reach. The context is given by Himerius (Or. 1.16): ‘the girl, like the apple, remains intact despite the zeal of her pursuers’.43 Critics point to the plucking of a flower standing for the loss of virginity that comes with marriage (Catull. 62.43–6): idem [flos] cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui . . . sic uirgo . . . cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem ‘when that same [flower] plucked by 39 41

42

Robert (1900) 659, with support from Kroll. 40 Fraenkel (1955) 7. See Heyworth (2015) 147–51, for the final section of the poem as marking the ‘victory’ of the male side: ‘The male voices have won by going on beyond what is equal, beyond 58. There is here a wonderful combination of realism and idealism: the Roman man will always conquer his wife, but there is also room for a sense of equality in marriage, of harmony.’ That seems to me to be a literary construction reflecting a cultural reality, rather than reflecting ritual language. Heyworth does not imply otherwise in this very astute chapter. 43 Wilamowitz (1924) 2.279. Cf also Cinna fr. 6C/10H. Page (1955) 121 n. 3.

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sharp fingernail has been deflowered . . . so the girl . . . when, her body defiled, she has lost her virginal flower’. The Sapphic fragment could well have come from an epithalamium, as could fr. 105c L–P, generally assigned to Sappho, which Page adds as a possible source for Catull. 62.39–47: οἴαν τὰν ὐάκινθον ἐν ὤρεσι ποίμενες ἄνδρες | πόσσι καταστείβοισι, χάμαι δέ τε πόρφυρον ἄνθος . . . ‘like the hyacinth which shepherds tread under foot, and on the ground the purple flower . . . ’. The crushing of a flower is certainly suggestive, but this fragment serves an additional function, one that takes us outside the epithalamia to the last stanza of Poem 11, the poem in Sapphics that captures the end of the affair, and so forms a ring composition with Poem 51: nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est. And she shouldn’t, as before, expect my love, which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of the meadow after it has been nicked by a passing plough.

Scholars have long connected these similes in Sappho and Catullus, and the erotic contexts they conjure up, with the Virgilian similes on the death of Euryalus (Aen. 9. 435–7) and the funeral of Pallas (Aen. 11.68–71).44 Indeed, once Virgil combined these disparate elements though his own intertextual and intratextual weaving, he created a form of commentary on the process whereby he binds together and emulously caps the Catullan and Sapphic images: Aen. 9.435 flos succisus aratro Aen. 9.435 purpureus Aen. 9.436 languescit Aen. 11.69 hyacinthi Aen. 11.68 uirgineo demessum pollice florem

Catull. 11.23–4 flos . . . tactus aratro Catull. 62.40 nullo conuulsus aratro Sappho 105e πόρφυρον ἄνθος Aen. 11.69 languentis Sappho 105e ὐάκινθον Catull. 62.43 tenui carptus defloruit ungui

Just as Catullus drew from Sappho in creating his epithalamia – as he drew also from the Hymns of Callimachus and Idylls of Theocritus45 – so Virgil alludes to both of his predecessors and so brings the context of the 44 45

Griffith (1985). See also the commentaries of P. Hardie (1994) on Aen. 9 and Horsfall (2003) on Aen. 11. Wilamowitz (1924) 2.280; Braga (1950) 60–1.

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epithalamion to its new epic setting, where the erotic metaphors of his source texts are activated in new and powerful ways. The effect is essentially Virgilian, but Catullus helped show him the way.

The Greek Anthology Poem 1 The strongest intertextual relationship between Catullus and the epigrams of the Greek Anthology has already been covered. Catullus clearly had access to the poems that reached Rome in the anthology of Meleager around the time of his birth. Kathryn Gutzwiller is right to begin her study ‘Catullus and the Garland of Meleager’ with the claim that the ‘Catullan corpus is permeated with phraseology, motifs and themes taken from Hellenistic epigram’.46 That is what we would expect, certainly in the shorter works in elegiac couplets, Poems 69–116, but caution is needed. The question has to do with when permeation reaches the level of what we might call intertextuality, or stealing in the sense meant by Eliot, involving a commonly agreed upon presence of the source text in the target text. That clearly is happening with Poem 70, as it is with Meleager’s preface and the opening poem of the Catullan corpus – simply by virtue of the questions with which each begins: Μoῦσα φίλα, τίνι τάνδε φέρεις πάγκαρπτον ἀοιδάν, ἢ τίς ὁ καὶ τεύξας ὑμνοθετᾶν στέφανον; Meleager, Anth. Pal. 4.1.1–2 Dear Muse, to whom do you bring this song of varied fruits, Or who was he who made this garland of song? Cui dono lepidum nouum libellum arida modo pumice expolitum?

Catullus 1.1–2

To whom do I give this new and witty little book Just now polished with dry pumice?

In just these two lines unmistakable intertextuality and departure from the source model go hand in hand, as with Poems 70 and 51. Anth. Pal. 4.1 was the opening of Meleager’s anthology as surely as Poem 1 opened (and opens) the Catullan corpus, so the questions of the opening line come into complete alignment: ‘to whom (τίνι / cui) does the Muse bring / I give this varied song of varied fruit / new and witty book’, with the object the reader 46

Gutzwiller (2012) 79. See Hinds (1998) 34–47 for exploration of ‘Topoi and accountability’.

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has in his or her hands at line end. Frustration of a parallel to the second line of Meleager (‘who wrote it?’) gives rise to what has replaced it in Catullus, a description of the book, both literal and metaphorical: ‘just now polished with dry pumice’ – a Callimachean touch, which tells the reader what to expect, not epigrams or not just epigrams, but something fundamentally new.47 Poem 101 Similarly Meleager’s lament on the death of his beloved Heliodora (Anth. Pal. 7.476) has been seen by many as a source or intertext for the famous Poem 101, the moving epitaph for Catullus’ dead brother.48 Braga and Paratore enumerate many correspondences, both stylistic and verbal, that are ultimately supportive of the proposition that Catullus was engaging with the Meleagrian poem. To the question why Catullus, in writing an epitaph to his brother, would invoke a poem to a dead lover, Paratore points to Catullus 68, a poem whose structure and themes alternate between the death of the brother and the recollections of his relationship with Lesbia, unnamed in the poem but recognisable enough. The core of Poem 101 is reused in strong intratextual echoes in Poem 68.49 Through intertextual activation of the Greek source text of Meleager’s epitaph for Heliodora, Catullus’ epitaph for his brother may be seen as allusively continuing this pairing of loss of brother/vicissitudes of Lesbia affair. Poems 2 and 3 Then there is the case of Catullus’ sparrow, the subject of Poems 2 and 3. In 1993, I wrote in support of those who since Politian, almost certainly since Martial (11.6.16), have seen the passer as having metaphoric status (= phallus). To those who deny there is evidence for passer with this sense in antiquity, it should be sufficient to cite Festus p. 410 L, probably the source (with Martial 11.6) for Politian:50 47 48 49

50

For the Callimachean associations of (ex)polire see Thomas (1983) 76 and n. 36. See Braga (1950) 210–14; also Paratore (1963) 563–5; Gutzwiller (2012) 103–5. So, with many other partial echoes in surrounding verses, 101.5–6 quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, | heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi (‘since fate has taken from me the living you, | ah! poor brother, so cruelly taken from me’) ~ 68.20 o misero frater adempte mihi, 92 ei misero frater adempte mihi (‘o, brother, taken away from poor me’), in the last two cases with the adjective miser transferred from brother to poet, indicating the shared tragedy of the loss. Gaisser (1993) 74–6.

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richard f. thomas strutheum in mimis praecipue uocant obscenam partem uirilem, a salacitate uidelicet passeris, qui Graece strouthos dicitur. Especially in mimes they call the lewd phallus ‘strutheum’, evidently from the salaciousness of the sparrow, which in Greek is called strouthos.

Nor is there any other way of making sense of Martial 11.6.14–16: ‘Give me kisses, but of the Catullan type. If they be as many as he stated, I’ll give you the “sparrow” (passerem) of Catullus.’51 In support of such a reading I adduced a poem of Meleager, an epitaph for Phanion’s dead hare (Meleager 65 Page = Anth. Pal. 7.207), in which Catullus found a model for his metaphor. Just as Lesbia liked to hold her sparrow at her breast (2.2 in sinu tenere), and it never moved from her lap (8 nec sese a gremio illius mouebat), so Phanion cherished her pet hare in her lap (65.3 ἐν κόλποις στέργουσα), feeding her on spring flowers, those being highly suggestive of female sexuality. As for hares having such a double meaning in Greek, the lack of evidence is not decisive, particularly if we consider the double entendre at Petronius, Sat. 131.7, uttered in Latin by the Greek-named old woman Proselenos upon inducing an erection in Encolpius: ‘ “Do you see, my Chrysis,” she said, “that I’ve stirred up a ‘hare’ (leporem) for others.”’52 In context this can mean only one thing. Even if λαγώς is not to be found in the metaphoric sense in Greek, the fact that lepus could have that status would allow Catullus to read Meleager accordingly, in which case his poem becomes an intertext.

Cross-generic Intertextuality: Poem 8 Fifty years ago David Ross put it in a way that still seems to me to say it best:53 Roman literary history tells only one story: the creation of any new genre at Rome is always the result of a Greek mind stimulating native writers at a particularly auspicious time, after which the development of the genre proceeds only as long as it takes Roman poets to work their language and native literary techniques into the molds supplied by the Greek exemplars of the genre.

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Shackleton Bailey, in his Loeb translation of Martial’s poem, realises the necessity of so taking the line, but cannot bring himself to what would seem to be the obvious conclusion, that Catullus too was using a metaphor: ‘clearly with an obscene double sense here, but that is M.’s contribution. Catullus meant no such thing, nor is M. likely to have thought he did.’ See Thomas (1993) 134–5; Adams (1982) 34; Gibson on Ovid, Ars Am. 3.662. Ross (1969) 161.

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I return to another topic I addressed also many years ago, to the literary debt of Catullus 8, the poet’s portrayal of his struggle to come to his senses and end the relationship. This poem seems to look not so much to the epigrams of the Greek Anthology; rather it is better seen as giving inter-generic intertextuality.54 For over a century critics have seen the debt that the poem owes to New Comedy, and its continuation in the works of Plautus and Terence. Differences of opinion about what precisely is the nature of the debt to comedy were to some degree settled by P. J. Connor, who first rejected vague characterisations involving ‘comic overtones’ and humour and put it well: ‘the language of comedy, as consistent and obtrusive as it is, provides the stuff out of which the tone is shaped’.55 Wheeler had said of the affinities of Poem 8 to comedy: ‘[n]o close parallel from the original Greek has happened to survive, but the frequent recurrence of the motive in both Roman comedy and elegy prove beyond a doubt that it occurred in Greek comedy.’ It was in 1969 that Kassel and Austin published the substantial remains of the Bodmer Samia of Menander. In 1984 I argued that a passage from that play (lines 326–56), as famous as any lines in Menander, could be seen as intertextually connected to Catullus 8. Demeas, father of Moschion, who he wrongly believes has had an affair with the Samian woman, delivers a soliloquy including a named self-address in which he urges himself to get over his love for her and throw her out of his house. I will not rehearse the argument, which seems to have been persuasive, at least in some quarters.56 It will however be useful to point to the similarities: Openings: 326–7 τί, Δημέα, βοᾶις; τί βοᾶις, ἀνόητε; Why shout, Demeas? Why shout, you fool? Frames: 327 κάτεχε σαυτόν, καρτέρει

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55 56

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1 Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire57 Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool 11 sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura

Gutzwiller (2012) 84–6 seems to suggest that Meleager’s address to his soul at Anth. Pal. 12.132.1–6, 13–14 is the inspiration for Catullus 8, but at the risk of sounding like a philological fundamentalist I would say this seems quite unlikely. The address in the epigram φέρε τὸν πόνον means ‘put up with the pain (of love), since that’s what you chose (αὐτὴ ταῦθ’ εἵλου)’. Catullus on the other hand is urging himself to be strong in rejecting Lesbia. Connor (1974) 94. Cf. Fowler (1989) 100 ‘R. F. Thomas has argued, successfully I think, that Catullus 8 stands in a close relationship to Demeas’ monologue in Menander, Samia 325–56’; Woodman (2000) refers to ‘R. F. Thomas’ decisive demonstration that the key text is Menand. Samia 326-56’. The rare verb ineptio comes from comedy (Ter. Ad. 934, Phorm. 420) and is otherwise absent from Republican and Augustan Latin. Similarly, ἀνόητος is a favourite of Aristophanes (Lys. 572 and Henderson ad loc.).

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(cont.) Control yourself, endure 356 δακὼν δ’ ἀνάσχου, καρτέρησον Bite your lip and bear up, endure Self-exhortation and naming: 349–50 Δημέα, νῦν ἄνδρα χρή | εἶναι σ’· ἐπιλαθοῦ τοῦ πόθου, πέπαυσ’ ἐρῶν. Now’s the time to be a man, Demeas. Forget your desire, stop loving her Curses lover / desolate future: 348–9 χαμαιτύπη δ’ ἃνθρωπος ὄλεθρος. ἀλλά τί; οὐ γὰρ περιέσται. The woman’s a whore, a bitch. So what? She’s not going to survive it.

Harden your heart and persist, endure 19 destinatus obdura Stay resolute and endure 8–12 nunc iam illa non uult: tu quoque impote . . . iam Catullus obdurat She doesn’t want you now: so stop wanting her, you weakling . . . now Catullus endures. 15 scelesta, uae te, quae tibi manet uita? Bitch, screw you, what life’s left for you?

In his commentary on the Samia, Alan Sommerstein, referring to my suggestion, finds it ‘likely that Catullus knew the passage and adapted some of its ideas and phrases to fit his own very different situation’.58 Generic differences between source text and target text can create a powerful effect. Drawing from a dramatic moment of high emotional power (never mind that Demeas in the Samia is deluded) lends to Poem 8 a quality unlike that of any of the other Lesbia poems, once the generic intertext is activated.

Further Thoughts on Poem 64 If Catullus 8 shows an engagement with a single source model, whose structure and details are transformed into a different situation, Poem 64, the epyllion, engages in intertextuality also across genres, but in a more holistic manner. Many years ago I wrote an article on ‘the complex of references and allusions that inhabit the opening tableau’ of the poem, to which the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ dicuntur points the way in the second line of the poem.59 Kenneth Quinn had noted that the ‘first sentence is shot through with reminiscences of Ennius’ version of Euripides’ Medea’.60 To the extent that Catullus was drawing from the Ennian intertext, he was, in the process of writing narrative (which is a form of epos), drawing from the 58 59

60

Cf. Sommerstein (2013) 205. Thomas (1982) 145. For dicuntur, along with other such markers (ut ferunt, traditur, etc.), see Norden (1957) 123–4 (‘das alexandrinische Manier’), and Ross (1975) 77–8 (‘Alexandrian footnote’), spelled out by Hinds (1998) 1–2. Quinn (1970) 299.

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mimetic genre of Roman tragedy. But he also had before him a number of other texts which he was subsuming into the opening of his poem, starting with the Euripidean ‘archetype’. So the relevant lines of all three: εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ . . . μηδ’ ἐν νάπαισι Πηλίου πεσεῖν ποτε τμηθεῖσα πεύκη . . .

Euripides, Medea 1–4

I wish the pine had not been cut down and felled in Pelion’s grove utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus caesae accidissent abiegnae ad terram trabes

Ennius, Medea Exul 1–2 (=208–9 Jocelyn)

I wish the firwood planks in Pelion’s grove had not been cut by axes And felled to the ground Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas

Catullus 64.1–2

Once upon a time, they say, pines born on the peak of Pelion swam Through the watery waves of Neptune

With pinus Catullus corrects Ennius’ abiegnae . . . [trabes] ‘firwood beams’, showing that he was aware of the Euripidean model (πεῦκη = ‘pine’). He further changes the Ennian adjective Pelius, coining Peliacus, whose rare Greek equivalent is the adjective of Peleus, not (as for Catullus) Mt Pelion. The Ennian adjective abiegnae (‘firwood’) appears in Catullus a few lines later, but in a way that corrects Ennius by modifying not the timber of the ship, but its oars (abiegnis . . . palmis, ‘firwood oars’) and thereby refers to another Greek source, not the Medea, but the epic of Apollonius of Rhodes, which soon takes over as the source model: his Argonautica has ἐλάτηισιν (lit. ‘firwood’) a number of times as a metonymy for oars, deriving from the Homeric example at Odyssey 12.172. By putting his three poetic predecessors in play, Catullus is then able to allude to them in an emulative way. Euripides (Med. 1), Apollonius (Arg. 4) and Ennius (Med. Exul 5 = 212 Jocelyn) all name the Argo at the beginning of their works. Catullus does not, thus capping his intertexts by introducing a ‘kenning’, the phenomenon whereby something is unnamed and to be identified by a periphrasis. Catullus does identify the Argonauts (lecti iuuenes, Argiuae robora pubis, 4 ‘chosen men, the strength of Argive youth’), so that would seem to do the job by implication, with the help of Ennius’ lines in which Medea’s nurse sounds more like a scholiast (4–6 = 210–13 Jocelyn): nauis . . . quae nunc nominatur nomine | Argo, quia Argiui in ea delecti uiri |

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uecti . . . ‘ the ship which now by name is named Argo, because chosen Argive men, travelling in it . . .). But, as I suggested, there is more going on in Catullus’ avoidance of the name, something that perhaps helps to explain the remarkable phrasing in Ennius, which comes close to breaking the dramatic illusion and exiting the mimetic frame of the tragedy. Apollonius does not connect the Argo with the Ἀργεῖοι / Argiui (i.e. Greeks in general rather than Greeks from the Peloponnesian Argolid). The etymology of Ennius is not found in Greek before Ennius, and may be his own invention.61 At the same time the nurse’s etymological intrusion does raise the likelihood of a Hellenistic debate, or zetema,62 about the etymology, as does the fact that Apollonius feels the need to state emphatically, three times in the space of 200 lines at the start of the Argonautica, that the ship was named after its builder Argus (1.18–20, 110–11, 226–7). Catullus corrected the Alexandrian poet by removing the appearance of Argus, but keeping the Apollonian model visible. Where Apollonius had Athena helping Argus (1.111–12 αὐτὴ γὰρ καὶ νῆα θοὴν κάμε, σὺν δέ οἱ Ἄργος | τεῦξεν . . ., ‘and she herself, joined by Argus, fashioned the swift ship . . . ’), Catullus insisted on having the goddesss alone (64.9): ipsa leui fecit uolitantem flamine currum ‘she herself made that seachariot that flies in the light breeze’. While that leaves us with what might seem to be an endorsement of the Ennian etymology, the second half of this line puts in play another possibility. A ‘chariot flying with the breeze’ is moving pretty quickly, as stated also in Arg. 1.111 (θοὴν).63 But the language of Catullus, which includes the only instance of currus = ‘ship’ in Latin, is deliberately excessive. I suggested that that language puts in play a third etymology, one first found in Catullus’ contemporary, Diodorus Siculus. At 4.41.3 the Greek universal historian reports that ‘some say’ the Argo was so called because of its speed, since for ‘the ancients’ (i.e. Homer) ἀργός could mean ‘swift’. I further suggested that Callimachus was at least a possible source, given his interest in the Argonauts.64 61 62

63 64

As suggested by Jocelyn (1967) 354 ‘Ennius probably concocted the etymology.’ See also Thomas (1982) 149 n. 17. For discussion of the Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian putting and solving of ζητήματα, problems or questions, particularly concerning Homeric textual and other matters, see Pfeiffer (1968) 69–71, 263. Cf. also 64.6 cita decurrere puppi, and Thomas (1982) 152. Hyginus (Astr. 2.37) is aware of the etymology: hanc nonnulli propter celeritatem Graece dixerunt Argo appellatam, ‘some have said it was called Argo on account of its speed’. It is not clear that he knows how ‘Argo’ relates to ‘speed.’ He mentions Callimachus in the same paragraph, so this only strengthens the case for Callimachean origin.

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Why is the beginning of Poem 64 a site of such marked and complex intertextuality? I suggested that it had to do with the nature of the epyllion in which we encounter the effort ‘to modify, conflate and incorporate prior treatments. Through this method the poet rejects, corrects or pays homage to his antecedents, and – the ultimate purpose – presents his own as the superior version.’65 The rest of the poem is more restrained in its intertextual profile, but, in its affinities to the epyllion of the Alexandrian poets, it may be seen as enacting the polemical programme to which the allusiveness of the first fifteen lines pointed so brilliantly.

Further Reading For theoretical as well as practical reading on the topic of intertextuality readers are referred to Pasquali (1968), Conte (1986), Thomas (1986), Farrell (1991), Hinds (1998), and Edmunds (2001). A number of the essays in West and Woodman (1979) remain useful, again not specifically on the subject of Catullan practice. Among those works focusing on Greek source texts are Braga (1950) – still the only comprehensive treatment; for Sappho Bellandi (2007) and Greene (2007); for Callimachus, Ross (1969), Knox (2007), and Bing (2009); for the Greek Anthology, Paratore (1963) and Gutzwiller (2012). For a focus on specific target texts, see Clausen (1970), Thomas (1982), (1984), and Du Quesnay (2012) and Woodman (2012b). 65

Thomas (1982) 163.

chapter 4

Gender and Sexuality K. Sara Myers

Gender issues are deeply implicated in many, if not all, aspects of Catullus’ poetry: sexual invective, politics, persona theory, the character of Lesbia, poetics and intertextuality, and the representation of social relations.1 In fact, isolating such concerns and approaches within a chapter is somewhat misleading.2 One of the central contributions of feminist and gender studies is the insight that Roman discourses about sexual behaviour and gender may be deployed in the ‘pursuit of non-sexual (as well as sexual) ends’ and that it is impossible to separate off discourses about sexuality and gender from other discourses, especially those involving ‘other hierarchical systems of power’.3 Although Catullus’ sustained engagement with issues involving gender and sexuality has long been recognised, more recent scholarship has illuminated Catullus’ use and exploration of gender positioning and sexual invective to articulate such concerns as masculinity, social and political power and poetics. While early feminist scholarship of the 1970s sought traces of real women’s lives and experiences in ancient literature, subsequent work shifted to ‘a broader concern with issues of gender, the relation between representations of femininity and masculinity, and the inscription of gender onto other discourses of power’.4 In more recent decades scholars have maintained that one of the main features of Latin erotic poetry, beginning from Catullus, is its destabilisation of gender roles and categories. The position of the love poet is always paradoxical in terms of gender: he is both virile (as poet and as penetrative partner) and effeminate (as 1 2 3 4

See Holmes (2012) 3–13 for the development of the concept of gender; also Skinner (1993) 107–8. Cf. Henderson (1989) 53 ‘“Woman”, then, cannot be a “Theme” among themes, a tidy chapter to set alongside others.’ Edwards (1993) 67, Wyke (2002) 3. Wyke (2002) 3. See Richlin (1991), Skinner (1993). The work of Michel Foucault (1990) has been central to articulating the idea that sexuality ‘is an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’ (103).

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a male not engaged in manly political or military pursuits and subordinate to his mistress). The notion, however, that Catullus and the Augustan love elegists might be contesting traditional gender categories and even exhibiting a sympathetic identification with female values that constitutes a ‘counter-cultural’ strategy of elevating the social power of women5 has been widely challenged. Gender studies suggest that ‘representations of women often have little to do with women per se, serving rather to mediate assertions of masculine identity or status’.6 Maria Wyke rightly warns of the ‘asymmetrical and gendered relations that are at work when woman is constructed in and through male literature’.7 The textuality of both Clodia Metelli and Lesbia is now widely acknowledged.8 Much Catullan scholarship in the twenty-first century has focused on the ‘the troubled masculinity of the authorial narrator and its grounding in late Republican culture’.9 Underlying this approach is the proposition that gender is constituted by a set of culturally constructed norms or traits, and thus that ‘masculinity in the ancient world was an achieved state, radically underdetermined by anatomical sex’.10 The attainment and maintenance of this dominating masculinity has been understood to have been particularly fragile in elite Roman society, as evidenced especially by the persistent use of sexual and gender terms in Roman rhetoric and oratory.11 Within the ‘forest of [male] eyes’ ‘vigilance was crucial’12 for elite Roman males, who achieved and performed ‘manliness’ (being a uir) through oratory, political competition and military victory.13 Failures in speech and comportment could lead to a ‘slide towards femininity’.14 The charge of effeminacy (failed masculinity) entailed political, social and moral weakness and loss of self-control, on the understanding that ‘to be feminine is to embody all the negative opposites of real masculinity’, to exhibit the worst of feminine moral characteristics: promiscuity, retirement, laziness, indulgence, softness, passivity, sexual 5

Hallett (1973). Cf. Rabinowitz (1993) 14 ‘It would be a mistake, even a waste of time, to try to decide if Euripides was a misogynist or a feminist.’ 7 Burrus (2007) 5. Wyke (2002) 161. 8 Edwards (1993) 34–65 on the function of ‘new women’ as literary symbols of moral decline. 9 Wyke (2002) 2–3 10 Gleason (1995) 59. 11 Edwards (1993) 63–97, Gleason (1995), Corbeill (1996) 128–73, (2004) 107–39, Connolly (2007) on rhetorical virility. 12 Gleason (1995) 55, Williams (2010) 156. 13 See Manwell (2007) 116 ‘the slippage between status as a vir (in its fullest sense) and a soft man means that a man is potentially always renegotiating his gender status’. The idea of repeated gender performance is indebted to Butler (1990). 14 Holmes (2012) 111. Cf. Winkler (1990) 50 ‘“woman” is not only the opposite of a man, she is also a potentially threatening “internal émigré” of masculine identity’. 6

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excess15 – negative connotations embodied by the figure of the cinaedus, a deviant male.16 Within the spectrum of masculinity, the positive end is represented by ‘real men’ and at the negative end men are ‘like women’.17 Many recent gendered readings suggest that Catullus in his poetry expresses anxieties about his own position in Roman elite (male) culture, as a provincial Transpadane and as a poet. David Wray places Catullus’ poetry into the context of male political and social rivalry and argues that his poetry represents a ‘performance of manhood’, that is, a demonstration of masculine excellence that encompasses both virility (‘force’, uis) and cultural sophistication (‘wit’, uenustas) and is directed towards an audience of elite Roman men.18 Catullus’ aggressive invective poems show him to be sufficiently male, dominating and thus ‘hard’ (durus), but his poetry also exhibits self-conscious aspects of sophisticated softness (mollitia) that he admits might attract charges of effeminacy and reflect contemporary anxieties about the moral and social effects of Greek learning and Hellenisation.19 In a series of important studies, on the other hand, Marilyn Skinner has argued that Catullus deliberately adopts a feminised or effeminate pose of masculine weakness, similar to that of the later Augustan elegists. She reads this pose along with his invective attacks as a critique of the state of masculinity in the late Republic and ‘despair over real decreases in personal autonomy and diminished capacity for meaningful public action during the agonized final years of the Roman republic’.20 Catullus expresses his feelings of social, economic, and political impotence in sexual terms, such as when in Poem 28 he claims he has been orally raped by his praetor Memmius (cf. Poem 10.9–13).21 Critics have seen in Augustan elegy a similar use of sexuality and gender ‘as a matrix for addressing larger 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

Wyke (2002) 173–4, Edwards (1993) 78–81. Williams (2010) 202 defines the cinaedus as the foil for true Roman masculinity, a ‘“necessary negative” to confirm dominant ideological values’; see also Edwards (1993) 96–7, Richlin (1993), Corbeill (2004) 134–7 (on Caesar’s deliberate adoption of effeminate male adornment to express his alignment with popularis politics). See Burrus (2007) 5: the positioning of women is always ‘mapped as a secondary effect of assertions made by and for masculinity’. Wray (2001). The work of Krostenko (2001) places Catullus in his contemporary socio-linguistic context. Feldherr (2007) 99, cf. Edwards (1993) 22–8, 92–6. Skinner (1993) 117; see also (1989) and Holmes (2012) 123: ‘these poets . . . may also be registering a growing sense of impotence among social and political elites as the Republic was changing into an empire where power was concentrated in one man’; similarly, Nappa (2001) 23, Konstan (2000/2), Selden (1992), Feldherr (2007) 104. Thomson (1997) 277: ‘not to be taken literally of course’.

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power issues’.22 Other scholars suggest that, rather than engaging in sexrole reversal, Catullus might instead be seen as interrogating ‘male subjectivity, which is in dialogue with but distinct from normative Roman gender identity’.23 In his combination of aggression and vulnerability, Greene suggests Catullus may be attempting to define ‘an alternative construct of masculinity itself ’.24 Catullus’ interest in sexuality and gender is also bound up with his neoteric poetic innovation and experimentation. Three main strategies have been proposed as features of Catullus’ play with gender in his poetry: his identification with female figures (so-called gender transposition); sexual invective against men and women (as both aggressive, asserting his masculinity, and defensive, admitting his masculinity has been impugned); and his capitulation to erotic passion and ‘weak’ position in his erotic relationship with Lesbia. This chapter will examine and interrogate these strategies, which are bound up with the perceived tensions between Catullus’ alternating poses of masculine aggression and emasculation (or effeminate sophistication), by looking at a number of Catullus’ poems, some of which have received a great deal of attention in gender scholarship, while others are less often considered.

When is a Man Like a Woman? Gender Positioning in Catullus As it happens, the question of gender arises in Catullus’ first poem, where at the poem’s end the loss of a syllable has led to two main lines of emendation. In line 9 Catullus invokes as his patron either a Muse (qualecumque; quod patrona uirgo) or Cornelius Nepos, the poem’s dedicatee (qualecumque quidem , patroni ut ergo Bergk).25 Recent studies have brought out the ways in which this poem’s dedication represents an act of literary exchange between men (homosocial) and how the poet emphasises the materiality of his text.26 Gender studies have 22 23 24 25

26

Skinner (1993) 116. Manwell (2007) 116. Cf. Fox (2015) 336 ‘sex and sexuality need to be understood, at least in part, as the manifestation of emotional processes as much as social or political ones’. Greene (2006) 61; similarly Janan (1994), Nappa (2001). Heyworth (2008) 32 supports the suggestion of Gratwick (2002) qualecumque quid, patroni ergo. Giardina (2011) proposes quod, patrone, uulgo. Trappes-Lomax (2007) 35–6 finds uirgo too resonant of Medieval Christianity and proposed Thaleia uirgo. Gärtner (2007) 3–4 adduces the allusions in Priap. 2 to Catull. 1 as support for patrona uirgo (Priap. 2.4–5 nec musas tamen, ut solent poetae, | ad non uirgineum locum uocaui; Cairns (1969) in support of uirgo cites the Muse in Meleager’s dedicatory poem (Anth. Pal. 4.1); see also Bellandi (2007) 97–118; and Agnesini (2011), (2013) (arguing for: libelli. | qualecumque quidem, patrona uirgo, . . .). Feeney (2012) 35–8. Cf. Feldherr (2007) 102 on the ‘socialized network of reciprocal composition’.

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also shown how the well-known Callimachean descriptive terms of Catullus’ book and poetry (1–2: ‘a charming new little book which recently dry pumice has polished’ lepidum nouum libellum | arida modo pumice expolitum)27 can be understood simultaneously as denoting aesthetic refinement (‘polished’, expolitum) and in sexual terms as ‘provocatively effeminate’.28 Within Roman gendered discourse, the Hellenisation of the poetry book is always in danger of being seen as unmanly. It would, however, be unparalleled for Catullus (and any Roman poet) to address an actual dedicatee as patronus, thereby acknowledging his position of social subordination.29 Krostenko argues that the phrase patrona uirgo encapsulates the ‘tension of political vaunt (patrona) and marginal social status (uirgo)’.30 The transference of this term of patronage to the Muse, however, is also unique.31 Catullus’ subordination to the Muse participates in the long tradition of the female gendering of creativity and inspiration,32 and signals his exploration of gender positioning in his corpus. The invocation of the Muse is required for Catullus’ request for immortality for his poetry: ‘may it go on year after year for more than one lifetime’ (1.10 plus uno maneat perenne saeclo),33 as at 68.41–6 where Catullus calls on the Muses as deae and similarly requests longevity for his verses (68.43–4).34 In further support of patrona uirgo it has been argued that the Muses appear elsewhere in Catullus’ corpus at potentially significant points of transition.35 Finally, Catullus here may also be gesturing towards the tradition that Sappho, to 27

28

29

30 31

32 34 35

On the applicability of the language describing Catullus’ physical book to the metaphorical qualities of his poetry, see Baehrens (1876/1885) 66, Cairns (1969) 154–5, Wiseman (1979) 169–70, Feeney (2012) 35–7. For the translation, see Woodman (2003). Servius (Aen. 12.587) says Catullus made pumex, normally masculine, feminine here (arida). Usually understood as a learned allusion to the Greek (fem.) form of pumice (Klotz (1931) 342, Wiseman (1979) 167–71), it may also signal the gender switch to patrona at the poem’s end. On Catullus and grammatical gender change, see Corbeill (2015) 86–100. Fitzgerald (1995) 40–1 argues that the phrase pumice expolitum ‘plays on the fact that pumice was used as a depilatory’: also Richlin (1992) 162 Catullus ‘pimps his book’; Krostenko (2001a) 254–6 on lepidus as ‘socially polished’. Cf. Hor. Epist. 1.20.1–3 pumice mundus. See Feldherr (2007) 105 on the poet’s ‘implicit rejection of any social superior as patronus’; also Thomson (1997) ad loc., White (1993) 31–4. The only other appearance of patronus is in Poem 49.7, where Cicero is called optimus omnium patronus. Krostenko (2001a) 255. At 68.46 Catullus’ poem is an old woman (carta anus). Note, however, that Aurelius Opillus (Suet. Gramm. 6.2 Kaster) ‘judged that writers and poets were the Muses’ clients’ (scriptores et poetas sub clientela Musarum), and Sulpiciae conquestio 11 where the speaker as ‘client’ calls on the Muse (Calliope) (precibus descende clientis et audi). See Fowler (2002b). 33 Cairns (1969) 155–8. Cf. Lucr. 1.28 quo magis aeternum da dictis, diua, leporem; Gärtner (2007) 3. Wiseman (1979) 176–9 argues that the Muses are evoked in three ‘opening’ poems of what Quinn (1972) 19 first suggested was a three-book libellus, 1.9, 61.2 Vraniae genus, 65.2 doctis . . . uirginibus; cf. 65.3 Musarum . . . fetus; 68.7 Musae, 10 munera . . . Musarum . . . et Veneris, 41 deae). On the unusual

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whom Catullus’ Lesbia owes her name, was identified as the tenth Muse.36 Poem 1 asserts the value of Catullus’ poetry by comparing it positively with Nepos’ masculine and national work of history,37 while underlining its own refinement. Specific poems tend to recur in gender scholarship (mainly 11, 16, 50, 51, and 63). Catullus’ adaptation of Sappho 31 in Poem 51 has been a central text and I would argue that his Sapphic intertextuality in this poem tends to be treated differently from his imitations of and allusions to other authors, such as Callimachus (see especially the translation of Callimachus’ ‘Coma Berenices’ in Poem 66). Catullus in Poem 51 is frequently said to be ventriloquising Sappho or identifying with her female voice in a transvestite performance. While it is true that later male poets, Greek and Roman, read and valued Sappho as a ‘feminine voice’,38 in Catullus 51 the perspective is wholly male and Lesbia is made the erotic object; there is no real sex-role reversal.39 Catullus acknowledges Sappho’s literary importance and inspiration as a model for the expression of erotic passion through his translation. The speaker’s masculine gender, however, is made clear at the beginning of the poem at 51.5, as opposed to the female speaker in Sappho’s poem (31.14).40 While Wray observes that the Catullan speaker is ‘rendered powerless by love and so by the logic of binary gender ideology is “feminized”’,41 Clark observes that, despite the fact that the poet may ‘play the other’ emotionally, he ‘maintains rigid control of his external appearance’ and ‘displays no loss of the controlled bodily behavior expected of elite men’.42 The final stanza recalls ‘Catullus’ to proper masculine activity and reminds us that the poem has nothing to do with female subjectivity, and rather, ‘its femininity is in service to a masculine competitive discourse’.43 This reading should not, however, preclude understanding the poem as also a genuine exploration of passion, whether erotic or poetic, or both.44

36 37 39

40 42 43 44

use of uirgo/uirgines for the Muses, see Woodman (2012b) 133. uirgo appears elsewhere in Catullus in only Poems 61–2, 65–8. Catull. 35.16–17 Sapphica puella | musa doctior; Antipater Anth. Pal. 7.14, 9.506, Strabo 13.2.3; Woodman (2002). For the positive comparison, see Woodman (2003). 38 See De Vos (2014). According to Greene (1999) 2, Catullus ‘reconstructs Sappho’s poem as an expression of male (poetic) desire’; Woodman (2002) 58, Skinner (1981), Miller (1994) 102. Ancona (2002) 171 observes that it is Sappho who ‘transgresses gender roles in her position as female speaker and as subject of desire’. 41 Edwards (1989) 594, Thomson (1997) ad loc. Wray (2001) 92; cf. Wiseman (1985) 154. Clark (2008) 257; she observes that Catullus does not sweat or exhibit pallor. Manwell (2007) 125, cf. Wray (2001) 98. Young (2015) 174 reads the poem as an allegory of ‘the fraught passions of the Roman translator’.

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Catullus has long been seen as identifying with women and exhibiting ‘feminine aspects’.45 The meaning of these claims has, however, changed with time. When Havelock in 1939 wrote of Catullus’ ‘strong dash of the feminine’, he meant the poet’s ability to identify with Lesbia’s ‘feelings’.46 Where previous critics might have seen in Catullus’ frequent depictions of women and female emotion an identification with the female position, modern scholars are more likely to see interrogation of male gender norms and constrictions.47 A closer look at his poems suggests that, when Catullus seems to identify with female vulnerability and loss of self-control, he may take on an effeminate pose, but not a feminine, nor a feminist pose.48 Poem 16 famously presents and contrasts two sides of Catullus’ selfpresentation: he admits his verses are soft and effeminate (4, 8 molliculi) as well as sexually explicit and provocative (8 parum pudici), while his attack is priapic and hypermasculine. In this poem Catullus threatens Aurelius and Furius with anal and oral rape (16.1 Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo) because they have charged him with having ‘no shame’ (4 parum pudicum)49 and with being ‘unmanly’ (13 male . . . marem).50 They stand accused of being unsophisticated readers who have misread Catullus’ poetry – specifically, it seems, they have assumed from his kiss poems (viz. 5, 7, 48) that he does not take on a properly masculine penetrative role in sex (12–13 ‘because you have read many thousands of kisses’, quod milia multa basiorum | legistis).51 The poem is about the poetics of reading, but the use of sexual abuse shows how aesthetic and moral judgements are often combined in Roman thought. Although softness (mollis, mollitia) becomes a common term for love poetry in Augustan elegy,52 Catullus does not use it elsewhere for his verses, though it reappears as a description of effeminacy or femininity (e.g. 25.1 cinaede Thalle, mollior cuniculi capillo, 45.16 mollibus . . . in 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52

See e.g. Adler (1981), Wiseman (1985) 121–2, 146, 176, 178, Miller (1994) 103–13, Skinner (1993), Woodman (2002) 50, Holzberg (2000) 37–8. Havelock (1939) 118. E.g. Burrus (2007) 5 ‘Representations of women often have little to do with women per se, serving rather to mediate assertions of masculine identity or status.’ Wyke (2002) 173 on the elegiac ego. See Kaster (2005) 57 on pudor as a regulatory masculine virtue representing the ‘seen self ’; also Langlands (2006) on pudicitia. Wiseman (1987) 222–4, Fitzgerald (1995) 57 on kisses as a sign of effeminacy, also Wray (2001) 147–9. It is interesting that modern critics have come to Catullus’ defence, e.g. Cairns (1973) 15 ‘Too many recent accounts of Catullus’ basia poems turn the poet into a sentimental schoolgirl.’ Feeney (2012) 43 ‘Catullus keeps reminding us that our only access to a poet is via his text’; cf. Kennedy (1993) 89 who suggests Catullus may be making fun of widespread ancient reading practices which treated poetry as confessional. See also Graver (1998). E.g. Prop. 1.7.19 mollem . . . uersum, Ov. Ars 3.343–4, Am. 1.9.42, see Kennedy (1993) 24–45. On mollitia, see further Edwards (1993) 63–97, Miller (1998) 180–4.

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medullis, 68.70 molli . . . pede). In Poem 50 Catullus characterises his poetic activities as a male activity of leisure: ‘Yesterday, Licinius, at leisure we composed many verses in my tablets, since we had agreed to be frivolous’ (1–3 Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi | multum lusimus in meis tabellis, | ut conuenerat esse delicatos). Delicatus hints at unmanly luxury and sensuality53 and Catullus’ excitement is phrased in language that suggests a loss of masculine self-control: he is ‘enflamed’ (8 incensus) and ‘uncontrolled’ (11 indomitus). Catullus’ poem valorises his urbanity, displayed in the composition of sophisticated, Hellenised poetry, while gesturing towards possible negative judgements about leisure activities (as opposed to conventional male political and military pursuits).54 In Poem 45 Catullus similarly impugns the lover Septimius’ masculinity through the use of diminutives that suggest he is unmanned by his emotional absorption in his affair with Acme (13 Septimille (spoken by Acme), 21 misellus). Septimius avoids the traditional male military pursuits (22 mauolt quam Syrias Britanniasque) in favour of a life of love (3–5). Although in Poem 8 Catullus recalls himself from similar unmanly behaviour (loss of self-control 1 ineptire, 9 inpote) to a properly male hardness and resolve (11 obstinata mente, obdura, 12 obdurat, 19 obdura), his relationship with Lesbia does not involve the same inversion of sex/gender roles as is depicted in the Augustan elegists. Lesbia exerts an erotic hold on Catullus (cf. 8.4 ‘you used to go where your girl led’, cum uentitabas quo puella ducebat) and he experiences unmanly and ‘feminine’ suffering from the relationship, but he never adopts the subordinate social and gender role embodied in the elegiac ‘slavery of love’ (seruitium amoris). The sole instance of the language of domination used of Lesbia is in Poem 68, where the poet speaks of his friend’s gift of ‘his home to me and my mistress’ (68 isque domum nobis isque dedit dominae, cf. 156 domina, 136 erae).55 Catullus’ use of the term domina, the common term used by Gallus (2.6 Courtney), Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid of their dominating ‘girlfriends’, needs to be understood within this complex poem as part of his 53

54 55

On delicatus as ‘urbane’ vocabulary, see Ross (1969) 105–6. As a term of opprobrium in Cicero, see e.g. Cic. Att. 1.19.8, Cat. 2.23, Pis. 70, Krostenko (2001a) 86–8. Cf. Poem 17.15–16 ‘a girl more delicate than a tender little kid’ puella tenellulo | delicatior haedo. Cf. the final stanza of 51.13–16. There is a textual, as well as an interpretive, problem here; the manuscripts read dominam, which is retained by Kiss (2009) ad loc., who translates the word with ad quam as ‘a lady (chatelaine) at whose house’ (similarly Fordyce (1961) 352; Courtney (2003) 267); and points to the paronomasia domum . . . dominam in this line and at 156 and 61.31); cf. Maggiali (2008) 153–4, who argues for dominam by suggesting instead that by his gift of a domus Allius has made Lesbia the domina (‘housewife’) (by prolepsis (as in 61.31)). Cf. Kennedy (1999) 36–7.

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representation of their assignation as a sort of pseudo-marriage: ‘and anyway she didn’t come as a bride, led to me by her father’s right hand to a home fragrant with Syrian perfume’ (143–4 nec tamen illa mihi dextra deducta paterna | fragrantem Assyrio uenit odore domum). Lesbia is given no voice;56 she is only by implication ‘learned’ (docta) as the recipient of Catullus’ urbane poems, unlike the elegiac mistresses of Propertius and Ovid (and Caecilius’ girlfriend in 35.16–17 Sapphica puella | musa doctior).57

‘Reverse-sex’ Similes Another way in which Catullus is sometimes understood to be taking on a feminine role is a series of ‘reverse-sex’ similes (2b, 11, 65, 68), in which he seems to identify himself with female figures or images. The tradition of these similes goes back to Homer. Helene Foley has looked at this phenomenon in the Odyssey, where male similes are used of Penelope (19.108–14, 23.233–40) and female similes for Odysseus (8.523–31, 10.410–15).58 She sees their function as exploring different gender positions and expressing the social inversions in Ithaca. Although this is not a common technique in elegy, Propertius in 2.14 identifies his erotic pleasures (9 gaudia) with the pleasure experienced by Agamemnon, Ulysses, Electra, and Ariadne (2.14.1–10). Catullus’ flower simile at the end of his Poem 11 has perhaps borne the greatest weight in discussions about his identification with Sappho and the female. In the poem Catullus speaks of his girlfriend’s (15 mea puella, usually identified with Lesbia) abandonment of him for 300 lovers, and uses a flower simile to describe the destruction of his love (21–4): nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est. let her not look back for my love as before, which through the misconduct of that woman has fallen like a flower at the meadow’s edge after it has been touched by a passing plough. 56 57 58

Dyson (2007) 262 sees two possible instances of Lesbia’s voice, in Poems 7 and 36 (unnamed in the latter). Holzberg (2000) 33, Hejduk (2011) 266. Foley (1978). On the comparison of Patroclus to a girl at Iliad 16.7–11, see Gaca (2008). Cf. Apollon. Argon. 4.167–70 (Jason compared to a young girl), Virg. Aen. 8.408–13 (Vulcan compared to femina).

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The Sapphic metre of the poem lends support to the suggestion that the simile at its end is indebted to Sappho, who frequently uses flowers in her poetry as symbols of virginity in hymeneal contexts.59 A fragment attributed to Sappho (105c), which is usually assumed to come from an epithalamium, describes a hyacinth trampled by shepherds in the mountains.60 It is impossible to know what Sappho’s hyacinth might have represented (virginity of the bride, overlooked woman?),61 which complicates Catullus’ use of this image in his complex and much-discussed poem. The destruction of the flower at the edge of a pastoral meadow by a plough (a phallic symbol and associated with civilisation)62 participates in the images of the rest of the poem, which seem to associate the sexually voracious puella with the (masculine) violence of epic and empire.63 The poem’s concerns are both poetic and erotic, combining epic and invective with lyric.64 Some have suggested that the flower imagery is meant to recall the epic use of the image for the untimely death of youths, which, in the context of this poem, might play on the epic aspects of the imperialism of the preceding lines.65 Catullus uses flower imagery a number of times in his poems, of both virginal girls (17.14, 61.57, 89, 62.39, 46, 64.402) and boys (24.1, 63.64, 100.2). While the cut flower seems to represent the vulnerability of Catullus’ love and perhaps also his marginality, thus impugning his masculinity,66 his threats against his puella earlier in the poem (16 non bona dicta) assert the masculine power of his poetry.67 In two other poems Catullus uses similes in which he seems to be comparing himself to females in possible gender role-reversals. Poem 2b, understood by some critics as a conclusion to Poem 2 and by others as a poetic fragment, contains a simile that likens the narrator’s feelings of 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67

See Fedeli (1983) 35–6 for other possible sources of the flower image. Wray (2001) 182 draws attention to a poem attributed to Hipponax (115 W). Courtney (1985) 87. For the difficulty of reconstructing the original Sapphic context, see e.g. Snyder (1997) 105. The flower similes for virginal brides in Catullus’ epithalamia differ significantly in being located in protected gardens (61.87–9, 62.39–47). See also Stehle (Stigers) (1977). Adams (1982) 154. Putnam (1982) 15 suggested the language of imperialism is sexualised (2 penetrabit, 5 molles); cf. Janan (1994) 64, Fitzgerald (1995) 181–4; however Adams (1982) 151 notes: ‘penetrare does not occur in a sexual sense in the Classical period’. Putnam (1982) 22–3. Celentano (1991): see Hom. Il. 8.306, Virg. Aen. 11.67ff. See also Edwards (1992) 182–3, Fedeli (1983) 35–6. Wiseman (1985) 146 likens the image to rape, while more recent scholarship sees castration (Greene (1995) 82, Miller (1994) 102–19). Fitzgerald (1995) 180 ‘the revelation of poetic power is set . . . . into an elaborate anatomy of power relations in other dimensions, particularly those of gender and empire’.

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pleasure (1 tam gratum est mihi) to Atalanta’s welcome of the end of her virginity when the golden apple ‘loosened her girdle so long bound’ (2b.3 zonam soluit diu ligatam, cf. 61.52–3).68 Skinner made the important observation that we do not, in fact, know the gender of the speaker of these lines.69 This is not the usual version of the story, and Catullus perhaps here humorously and tendentiously attributes such pleasure to Atalanta, who traditionally was not eager to be wed. The simile of 2b has been seen as similar to a passage at 65.19–24, where a virgin blushes when a secret apple from her lover falls from her lap upon her standing up at the arrival of her mother (19 ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum).70 This apple, like that in 2b, seems to represent a ‘deflowering apple’.71 Catullus is interested in this liminal moment of sexual awakening and elsewhere quite pruriently speculates on the hidden eagerness of the virginal bride for sex (61.31–2 dominam . . .cupidam, 66.15–20, 68.73–4), in a manner that suggests less female sympathy than male fantasy. Female (sexual) emotion is again activated as a comparison in 65, but the identification and interpretation of the simile is much debated. The analogy suggests that the forgetful girl stands for Catullus and the apple for Hortalus’ request for a poem,72 but the incongruity may itself be humorous.73 Earlier in Poem 65 at lines 13–14 Catullus compares his own ‘unhappy songs’ (maesta carmina) to those sung by the Daulian bird (Procne, a woman transformed into the nightingale who killed her own son Itylus/Itys).74 Famously Penelope uses this simile in the Odyssey to express her years of grief over Odysseus’ absence (Hom. Od. 19.518–22). Woodman, observing that Daulias occurs elsewhere only in the Epistula Sapphus (154), suggests that Sappho’s poetry is the possible origin of the conceit and that Catullus is therefore ‘likening his songs to those of a female bird as she appeared in two different authors: Homer, where the nightingale simile is applied to herself by the female Penelope, and Sappho, most famous of female poets’.75 Catullus’ identification with Procne 68 70

71 72 73 74 75

Cf. 61.53 zonula soluunt sinus. 69 Skinner (2002) 423. On the literary models for the simile see Woodman (2012b) 150, Syndikus (1990/2001) 197–8. Hunter (2006) 88–102 argues for Callimachus’ Acontius and Cydippe (fr. 67–75), while AcostaHughes (2010) 76–7 proposes Sappho as model. Wray (2001) 200–2 on apples as erotic emblems not only symbolising but effecting passage from maidenhood to sexual awakening. See Skinner (2003) 14–19, Woodman (2012b) 150. See Fitzgerald (1995) 195–6, Hunter (2006) 101–2, Stevens (2013) 166–69. For the myth see Woodman (2012b) 141–2, Monella (2005). Woodman (2012b) 142–3 (also on the traditional comparison of poets to nightingales), also (2002) 50. Virgil uses the same comparison for Orpheus’ grief at Geo. 4.511–15 (qualis . . . maerens philomela).

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activates a common gendered association of women with the emotion of mourning and compares the sadness of a mother bereft of her child to a brother’s loss of his brother.76 In Poem 68, a poem ‘saturated with similes’,77 Catullus makes an analogy between himself and Juno, both of whom must endure without anger (139 ‘she suppressed her anger in the face of her husband’s misconduct’ coniugis in culpa flagrantem contudit iram)78 the frequent infidelities of their ‘spouses’ (68.135–140). This comparison, however, contains, like many of the other similes in the poem, tensions within it, which Catullus may acknowledge by his immediate repudiation of the analogy: ‘although it is not right to compare men with gods’ (141 atqui nec diuis homines componier aequum est). For one thing, Juno is not known for suppressing her anger; for another, Catullus and his mistress are not married (68.143–4). The description of ‘allloving Jove’s many affairs’ at line 140 (omniuoli plurima furta Iouis) resonates with, but is also contrasted with, his mistress’ ‘few affairs’ 136 (rara . . . furta). Furthermore, if Catullus’ (unnamed) mistress is like Jove in her promiscuity, gender reversal is enacted again as Jove’s epithet ‘desirous of everyone’ omniuolus (140, above) recalls the ‘wanton woman’ (multiuola . . . mulier) of line 128. The final comparison highlights again what Feeney terms the slippage in the similes throughout this poem, with its ‘minute insistence on the difficulty of simile as a figure’.79 Critics have also suggested that the long mythological simile of the suffering figure of Laodamia in the poem corresponds more to Catullus’ excessive emotions than to Lesbia (whose emotions we are never privy to).80 Again, in this simile, analogies ‘are qualified by no less significant contrasts’ between Catullus and Laodamia, between the relationships of marriage and Catullus’ affair.81 Catullus’ identification with female figures is never straightforward role-reversal.

Marriage and its Failures Catullus’ undoubted interest in, if not identification with, different gender perspectives is most thoroughly displayed in Poems 61–68, which cannot 76 77 78 79 80 81

If the full implications of the myth are activated, Catullus’ repressed feelings of guilt about his brother’s death may be involved: see Skinner (2003) 14, Oliensis (2009) 28–9. Feeney (1992) 33. The emendation contudit (Hertzberg) seems preferable to Mynors’ choice of concoquit (Lachmann’s emendation of the corrupt line); see Maggiali (2008) 238–40, Kiss (2009) ad loc. Feeney (1992) 41. Cf. Kennedy (1999) 43 on 68 as a ‘poem on similarity and difference’. See Macleod (1974) Macleod (1974) 88. It is possible that the gender inversions underline the contrastive nature of the similes.

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be extensively treated here, though they are prominent in scholarship on gender.82 The themes of love, loss, and marriage are widely shared and, although only Poem 68 deals with Catullus’ own affair, they are frequently read as self-revelatory and in relation to ‘Catullus’ own experience in love’.83 Instead we might acknowledge that Catullus shows a deep interest in how the varied literary traditions give voice to female perspectives and emotions. The dual perspectives on marriage in Poems 61 and 62, focalised and presented through both young men and young women, provide a meditation on the compromises involved in marriage.84 Catullus sensitively portrays the traditional anxiety and reluctance of the bride to leave her family and lose her virginity (61.3–4, 79–81, 62.20–4, 39–47).85 The groom too must relinquish his ‘boyfriend’ (concubinus, 61.124–41) in the transition to marriage and mature masculinity.86 The ideology of marriage as an ‘equal marriage’ (par conubium) is probed in 61 and 62, as Denis Feeney has discussed.87 The theme of marriage, its failure, and sexual desire is further explored in Poems 64 and 66. Poem 66, a translation of Callimachus’ poem for the newly married Ptolemaic Queen Berenice (Aet. fr. 110) narrated by a cut-off lock of her hair, depicts the female emotions of married erotic desire and loss. Poem 64, Catullus’ longest poem, a learned miniature mythological epic on the desertion of Ariadne by Theseus, framed by the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, creatively uses both tragic (Euripides, Ennius) and epic (Homer, Apollonius Rhodius) literary models in its focus on Ariadne’s feelings of betrayal. Her long tragic monologue as she watches Theseus sail away after deserting her shares many linguistic features with Catullus’ expressions of betrayal in his other poems and has led some critics to suggest that here again Catullus is expressing himself through a female figure.88 The ambiguities of marriage and the failure of marriage are further explored in the story of Peleus and Thetis, whose union (usually depicted as unhappy) produces the tragic, but heroic, figure of Achilles. Poem 63, an exotic poem written in the metre of galliambics, occupies a central position in gender scholarship, with its unusual exploration of 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Hutchinson (2012) 63–72 observes that 61–68 are dominated by female desire. Wiseman (1985) 175. Skinner (1993) 147 sees Poem 63 as a ‘fictive reprise of the Lesbia affair’. See Panoussi (2007) 278 on the competition between gender roles and society’s demands. See Feeney (2013) 77–8. Fedeli (1983) 96–7 on the tradition of this theme; also Panoussi (2007) 283. Feeney (2013); on par conubium, see Kroll (1959) on 62.56, Fedeli (1983) 145–6, Thomsen (1992) 163. At 62.60–4 the bride is told that only one-third of her virginity belongs to her (64 tertia sola tua est). E.g. Wiseman (1985). Stevens (2013) 215 points out that Ariadne’s speech is not in fact heard by Theseus in the poem and connects this with the theme of female silence.

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masculinity through the figure of the Greek youth Attis, who destroys his own masculinity through self-castration in a madness induced by the goddess Cybele, whose priests were eunuchs (Galli). The poem begins with a description of Attis’ violent self-castration (63.4–7), which, we are told, was done under the stimulus of a raging madness (4 stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, cf. 38), but in his following speech Attis claims he was motivated by an ‘excessive revulsion from sex’ (17 Veneris nimio odio). Upon castration, Attis is defined mainly by feminine adjectives and nouns, reflecting his ambiguously gendered condition as a ‘spurious woman’ (27 notha mulier). The poem focuses on Attis’ deep regret at his act (73 iam iamque paenitet) and his own gender confusion (62–71). Marilyn Skinner sees in the figure of Attis a rejection of the male dominant sexual and social role signalled by the transition to marriage89 and reads this emasculated male’s ‘self-destructive estrangement from the male body’ as an allegorical symbol of Catullus’ own feelings of ‘political impotence’.90 Vassiliki Panoussi connects the poem to the surrounding themes of gender and marriage and reads Attis as a figure who fails to achieve gender stability through marriage.91 Through his sex-change Attis loses home and family (49–59), which, as Nauta has suggested, testifies to the ‘close connection between the sexual and social order’.92 We should not overlook the issues of ethnicity in the poem, which often intersect with gender identity. Cybele’s cult is originally ‘Asian’ (Troy) and was regarded with ambivalence by Romans, who were not allowed to become one of her eunuch priests.93

Gendering Catullan Invective The predominance of invective poems is one of the distinctive features of Catullus’ collection and it distinguishes his collection from Augustan love elegy.94 More than half of Catullus’ poems contain insults and attacks against named and unnamed individuals, famous and obscure. It is primarily in and through these poems that Catullus performs and defends his own masculinity by attacking that of other men, often in aggressively 89 90 91 93 94

Skinner (1993) 113; also Quinn (1972) 249–51. Skinner (1993) 118. A different kind of autobiographical allegory based on Catullus’ affair with Lesbia is offered by Wiseman (1985) 181. Panoussi (2003); see also Nauta (2004). 92 Nauta (1985) 616. See Harrison (2004) (= Nauta and Harder (2005) 11–24). On the Cybele cult see Beard (1994). Cf. Williams (2010) 196 ‘to call a Roman man cinaedus is to associate him with the East’. Richlin (1992) 144–5, 62, Wray (2001) 113. On Archilochus as a model, see Wray (2001) and Hutchinson (2012) 75.

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coarse sexual terms, while also revealing his own vulnerability to attacks on his masculinity.95 From gender studies we have gained new insights into understanding the implications of Catullus’ sexual vocabulary. Catullus’ invectives against both men and women excoriate individuals for sexual debauchery or they threaten sexual aggression. Amy Richlin has designated the latter pose of hypermasculine aggressive obscenity, which threatens rape and thus emasculation of the male targets, as Priapic (named after the Roman ithyphallic garden guardian), and the other pose, which attacks men for their hypersexuality, as anti-Priapic.96 Catullus’ invectives cover a large range of perceived ‘crimes’, including lapses in ‘urbanity’ (which range from stealing dinner napkins (12, 25) to poor literary judgement (22, 44)), unmanly softness (25), sexual rivalry (e.g. 11, 15, 21, 40), but most often sexual misconduct (e.g. 29, 47, 57, 74, 80, 88). His invective shares many features of the contemporary gendered language of Roman moralising and its use as a weapon in oratory.97 Catullus consistently characterises his superiors’ social, economic and political power and oppression as metaphorical sexual penetration. Catullus’ phallic threats match his claims that he himself has been sexually penetrated and thus emasculated by his social and political superiors, such as the praetor Memmius in Poems 10 and 28 (10.12–13 irrumator /praetor, 28.9–10). By threatening to penetrate his enemies he reasserts his dominant male role. Threats of oral rape (irrumatio: 16.1, 14, 21.8, 37.8), as Richlin has observed, entail both physical humiliation (by forcing the victim into a ‘feminine’ passive role) and enforced silence.98 Famously in his attacks on Mamurra and Caesar in Poems 29 and 57 Catullus equates their financial rapacity and imperial greed with uncontrolled sexual profligacy,99 calling them pathici and cinaedi (29.5, 9, 57.1–2, 10, cf. 28, 47). At 115.8 ‘Mentula’s’ ‘great, threatening phallus’ (mentula magna minax) symbolises licentious and uncontrolled greed of all kinds. It is less certain whether we should understand Catullus’ invective against these political figures as genuine moral condemnation and revulsion. Catullus’ real threat is literary, as his poetry demonstrates.100 95 96 98 99 100

See Flemming (2010) 810 ‘constant attack on everything unmanly is what enforces dominant ideologies of masculinity’. 97 Richlin (1992). Connolly (2007) 86, Tatum (2011). Richlin (1992 108; see also Fitzgerald (1995) 64–72, Stevens (2013) 56–81. Edwards (1993) 180–3, Corbeill (1996) 133–4, Konstan (2000/2). Fitzgerald (1995) 101–3 ‘writing is part of the threat of vengeance’, cf. Heyworth (2001) 134. See Selden (1992) on the exposure of readers to the ‘penetrative ferocity of the aggressive act it names’. Cf. 78b.3–4 ‘for all generations will know of you’ (nam te omnia saecla | noscent), 40.6 ‘What do you want? to be famous no matter how?’ (quid uis? qualubet esse notus optas?).

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There are interesting intersections and important gendered differences between Catullus’ invectives against men and those against women. Catullus’ threatening priapic pose is notably absent from his poems attacking women. Catullus has no need to threaten women with sexual assault, as they are already subordinate to him. As a male, his social and sexual control is a given, though his poems to Lesbia show that this gendered configuration does not guarantee complete emotional domination. Wray sees in the invective against women (especially Lesbia) a ‘self-righteous and hyperbolically self-aggrandising tone’.101 Catullus’ attacks on women similarly use sexual abuse and terminology to effectively humiliate and downgrade his female victims to the status of prostitutes, the lowest social class.102 Catullus abuses women in around seventeen poems and Lesbia is specifically named in three of these (58, 72, 75), though a number of other poems are usually understood (with caution) to refer to her (8, 37, 60, 76); the misogyny is evident and conventional. Catullus’ criticism of Lesbia follows the gendered pattern of his abuse of a number of other women: she does not conform to ideals of female chastity (‘I don’t now ask, because it’s not possible, that she wish to be chaste’, 76.23–4 non iam illud quaero . . . aut, quod non potis est, esse pudica uelit). If indeed Lesbia is to be understood as married (68.145–6, 83), there is, of course, some irony in Catullus’ desire for her to be faithful to him (cf. 68.135–6). Instead, Lesbia’s crime (culpa 11.22, 75.1; iniuria 72.7) is characterised as sexual rapacity. In the three invective poems directed at Lesbia (11, 37, 58) her sexual activities liken her to a prostitute (11.17 ‘let her live and do well with her lovers, three hundred of whom she has embraced and holds, loving truly no one, but repeatedly bursting the loins of everyone’, cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis, | quos simul complexa tenet trecentos, | nullum amans uere, sed identidem omnium | ilia rumpens; cf. 37.11–15, 58.4–5).103 Prostitution is Catullus’ most frequent abuse of women and we need to be careful not to assume he is calling them this because they ‘actually’ were prostitutes, but rather to understand this abuse as being about social rank, as part of Catullus’ strategy of social, sexual, and literary dominance. Such abuse of female hyper-sexuality is also conventional. Cicero used exactly the same strategy in his attack on Clodia Metelli in the Pro Caelio (e.g. 38, 49).104 Other women similarly denounced as prostitutes include Flavius’ secret lover in 101 102

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Wray (2001) 112. Skinner (1989) 18: ‘The social subjection of non-elites and women is assimilated to the struggle for self-aggrandizement and esteem within the privileged orders.’ See Richlin (1984) on invective against women. 104 See Janan (1994) 87–8, Skinner (1993). See Skinner (1983).

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Poem 6, who is summarily dismissed as a whore of the lowest social order (6.4–5 ‘you are in love with some feverish lower-class whore’, uerum nescio quid febriculosi | scorti diligis),105 an accusation based only on Flavius’ silence (cf. 41.1 Ameana puella defututa,106 59.1 Rufa Rufulum fellat).107 With prostitution is associated the crime of financial greed (110, 111). In Poem 42 a woman (Lesbia?) is called a ‘disgusting and stinking adulteress’ (3 moecha turpis, 12 putida moecha, cf. 13 o lutum, lupanar) because she refuses to return Catullus’ tablets (pugillaria). Her walk and laugh betray her low moral and social status: ‘who you can see walks disgustingly and provocatively, like a mime actress, laughing with the mouth of a Gallic puppy’ (8–9 quam uidetis | turpe incedere, mimice ac moleste | ridentem catuli ore Gallicani).108 Varus’ girlfriend in Poem 10 is branded a ‘little whore at first glance’ (3 scortillum, ut mihi tum repente uisum est) and further abused at line 24 as cinaedior (‘sexually reprobate’) when she shows up the narrator by calling his bluff. These attacks centred on female sexuality constitute a social devaluation, which in many cases is meant as abuse of the male addressee, as in 6, 10, 41, 43. Catullus does, however, occasionally apply some of the same aesthetic and social criteria to women as he does to men, famously associating Lesbia with his poetry’s ‘sexual attractiveness’ (uenustas, 86.5–6, cf. 13.9–14).109 In Poem 10, though he is quick to denigrate Varus’ girlfriend as a whore, he allows at least at first that she may not be unsophisticated and uncharming (4 non sane illepidum neque inuenustum), whereas Flavius’ deliciae is condemned as illepidae atque inelegantes (6.1–2), as is Ameana, ‘girlfriend of the bankrupt of Formiae’ (decoctoris amica Formiani) in 43.4 ‘and, certainly without an over-refined tongue’ (nec sane nimis elegante lingua). Skinner observes that in these poems Catullus ‘has converted the language of urbanitas, itself overtly class-bound, into a potent instrument of gender and class oppression’.110 In Poem 36 the ‘worst of women’ (9 pessima puella) (Lesbia?) has judged her own vow ‘witty and charming’ in familiar Catullan positive aesthetic terms (10 iocose lepide), but is shown up by Catullus as having misjudged who was the ‘worst of poets’ (6 pessimi 105

106 107 108 109

See Morgan (1977) on febriculosus as a deliberately shocking term of abuse, pointing to the parallel at Plaut. Cist. 405–8. On febricula as a medical term see Langslow (2000) 329; Kroll (1959) ad loc. (malaria): so Wray (2001) 156; Gellius NA 20.1.27. See Skinner (1978) on Catullus’ attack on Ameana’s aspirations to social rank. Corbeill (2015) 95–9 argues that the poem’s play with grammatical gender might suggest to the careful reader that Flavius’ lover is in fact male. Fordyce (1961) ad loc. cites Cicero’s similar comments on Clodia’s deportment (incessus) at Cael. 49. Contrast Lesbia at 51.5 dulce ridentem. See Oliensis (1991) on ancient misogyny and canine imagery. See Krostenko (2001a) 235–41 on women and uenustas. 110 Skinner (1989) 16.

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poetae).111 The poem enacts the type of iambic attack that she has requested Catullus to stop (5 ‘I stop hurling sharp invective iambs’, desissemque truces uibrare iambos). In Catullus poetry always comes out on top. It is worth considering that Catullus’ exploration of emotional positions from different gender perspectives or ‘other voices’, such as the virginal male and female, the married woman, even the castrated male, may also be motivated by literary impulses.112 His interest in erotic passion and suffering, from both the male and female perspectives, seems to be a shared neoteric literary pursuit (cf. Calvus’ Io, Cinna’s Smyrna, and Parthenius’ collection of Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα (‘Sufferings in Love’)).113 Catullus experiments with the different (gendered) subject positions offered by such diverse poetic modes as epic (Poem 64), Sapphic lyric (Poem 51), tragic monologue (Poems 63–4, Ariadne and Attis), galliambic (Poem 63), wedding hymn (Poems 61–2), Hellenistic elegy (Poem 66) and the adulescens or miles gloriosus of comedy (Poems 8, 37),114 among others, in order to express the varying emotions of erotic passion. The reading of Catullus’ poetry within the contemporary Roman elite discourses about gender, masculinity and power offered by Feminist and Gender studies contributes to a deeper understanding of Catullus’ selfpositioning as a male and as a poet in his society; it adds to the complexity of his poetry, which, however, continues to resist, by its profound literariness and shifting tonality, any monolithic interpretation.115

Further Reading There are now many Feminist and Gender studies focusing on ancient Rome; Skinner (2014a, 2014b) provide excellent introductions, as do Hubbard (2014) and Masterson, Sorkin, and Robson (2015). Holmes (2012) is a lucid survey of the history of gender studies and its relevance. For the Foucauldian approach to ancient sexuality Winkler (1990) was a landmark; see Richlin’s critical response (1991). Collections of theoretical readings include Rabinowitz and Richlin (1992), Hallett and Skinner (1997), McClure (2002). Richlin (1992) was groundbreaking in understanding 111 112 113 114 115

See Wray (2001) 78. Skinner (1993) 120 sees a desire to occupy ‘alternate subject positions permitting scope for voluptuous emotive fantasy’. Woodman (2002) 51 ‘there may have been a vogue in literary gender-change at the time when Catullus was writing’. See Thomas (1984); Wray (2001) 85–7; Polt (2010). I would like to thank the editors for their many helpful suggestions, also John Miller, Tony Corbeill, and my Catullus seminar (fall 2017).

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Roman sexual invective, while Edwards (1993) showed how central the theme of sexual immorality was to Roman political discourse. Adams (1982) is a valuable resource for understanding Roman sexual vocabulary. On the social construction of male sexuality and identity, essential are Gleason (1995), Williams (2010), and Manwell (2007, on Catullus). Wyke (2002) includes her important essays on gendering elegy. Works on Catullus that take a feminist or gendered approach include the many important articles by Skinner in the bibliography. Wray (2001) reads the collection as performative male self-fashioning. Miller (1998) and Skinner (1993) engage with Foucauldian theory. Fitzgerald (1995) genders the power dynamics between poet and reader. Nappa argues that Catullus criticises traditional Roman morality. Janan (1994) and Miller (1998) offer readings indebted to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Greene (1998, 1999) discusses Catullus’ vacillation between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ voices.

chapter 5

Catullan Themes Bruce Gibson

Whereas the famous sepulchral epigram for Virgil recorded in the Vita Suetonii Donatiana (VSD 36) has the poet refer to his poetic accomplishment as pascua, rura, duces (‘pastures, the countryside, leaders’), summing up in broad terms the thematic content of the three canonical works of Virgil (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid),1 Catullus does not at any point in his extant poetic corpus offer any similar encapsulation of the themes of his works. When Catullus does describe his libellus in Poem 1, he gives a sense not of themes but of the character of the lepidum nouum libellum (‘charming new little book’, 1.1), which he offers to the historian Cornelius Nepos.2 Readers have come away from the text of Catullus with a sense of different themes: for many readers, especially those encountering the poet in their earlier stages of learning Latin, the love poetry addressed to Lesbia by name, together with poems referring to an otherwise unnamed mea puella (‘my girl’), are the classic Catullan theme; others focus on Catullus as a poet of friendship and enmity, while others have chosen to focus on the evocation of Rome in the last stages of the Republic. This chapter will attempt to give a sense of the breadth of Catullus’ poetry, but it will also show how Catullus is above all else a poet of versatility, so that categorising his works in terms of themes is not always straightforward: part of the special character of Catullus’ poetry is the way in which different thematic perspectives intersect, so that simply seeing groups of poems as being about his relationship with Lesbia obscures the way in which Catullus is perfectly capable of combining various topics such I am indebted to Ian Du Quesnay and Tony Woodman, and to Niklas Holzberg for their invaluable comments on this chapter in draft. The text of Catullus used, unless otherwise noted, is that of Mynors (1958). All translations are my own. 1 See further Laird (2009) 6–7, Kahane (2017), esp. 165–8. 2 On Poem 1, see e.g. Woodman (2003) 191–6, Roman (2014) 45–9. The poem’s opening focus (1.2) on the physical characteristics of the book may be felt to announce another important motif in Catullus’ works (see e.g. Poems 22, 36, 95): see further Feeney (2012) 29–47.

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as love, friendship, enmity and even mythological content within the same poem. This takes place both in the larger works and in very short poems. An opening example will illustrate this thematic flexibility by way of introduction, as a reminder that Catullus’ poetry cannot always be straightforwardly pinned down in thematic terms. In part, thematic concerns, as will be seen, also raise questions about tone and style. In Poem 37, Catullus mocks the denizens of a low tavern, scorning their claims to sexual prowess, and threatening to impose his own sexual dominance on them (37.1–8). That threat, however, soon turns out to be a written one, as Catullus explains that he will scrawl penises all over the tavern (37.9–10). However, the poem then changes direction, with Catullus referring to the loss of his puella (‘girl’) in the following lines (37.11–16): puella nam mi, quae meo sinu fugit, amata tantum quantum amabitur nulla, pro qua mihi sunt magna bella pugnata, consedit istic. hanc boni beatique omnes amatis, et quidem, quod indignum est, omnes pusilli et semitarii moechi; . . . For the girl, who fled from my embrace, loved by me as much as none will ever be loved, for whom I have fought great battles, has set up shop3 there. Good and blessed men, her you all love, and, even, which is a disgrace, all you paltry and itinerant adulterers; . . .

After the crude language of the poem’s opening, this sudden shift to Catullus’ lover who has left him is quite a surprise. Line 12, amata tantum quantum amabitur nulla, very closely parallels the intense language of Poem 8, a well-known poem where Catullus upbraids himself on the demise of his relationship with his puella (8.3–5): fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles, cum uentitabas quo puella ducebat amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla. The suns shone bright for you before, when you used to go where the girl led you, loved by us as much as none will ever be loved. 3

For consedit in the sense of ‘set up shop’, see Thomson (1997) 301–2.

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Poem 8 concentrates exclusively on Catullus’ love, and the lines quoted here reflect an intensity of tone in recording loss. The simple exposition of the uniqueness of Catullus’ love in Poem 8, amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla, is present in almost exactly the same words in Poem 37. Poem 37, however, is very different, with its concern with men who are to be found in the crude setting of a tavern. Yet in Poem 37, instead of Poem 8’s evocative context of the suns that formerly shone on Catullus and his beloved (which may also call to mind the sun imagery used in a seemingly happier yet also pessimistic context in 5.4–6, when Catullus tells Lesbia that, while suns can rise and set, when their light is gone all that is left is perpetual night), Catullus changes the tone back again to comment on how the woman for whom he fought so many battles, a metaphor of action, is content to consort with the degenerate figures whom Catullus is attacking. After that, Catullus picks out a single individual, Egnatius from Spain, who is condemned for his unsavoury habit of cleaning his teeth with urine (37.17–20). Egnatius’ personal hygiene, indeed, has an entire poem devoted to it (Poem 39).4 In Poem 37, Catullus thus offers a combination of thematic material, ranging from expressing sorrow at the loss of his lover to three different targets for attack, the men of the tavern, Catullus’ beloved, and finally Egnatius and his unpleasant habits, which at first sight may appear surprising. It reflects, however, the wider versatility which we can associate with Catullus. There are significant themes in Catullus’ poetry, as we shall see, but individual poems cannot always be categorised in terms of a single theme. Striking combinations and juxtapositions of different kinds of thematic material are a major feature of Catullus as a poet.

Love The relationship with Lesbia is a celebrated aspect of Catullus’ poetic corpus, and she is moreover a named presence both in the polymetric poems (1–60), and in the poems in the elegiac metre that make up the last part of the collection (65–116).5 If other poems in the polymetrics and the 4 5

For the possibility that urina here might denote semen, see Nappa (2001) 70, 80–1; cf. Adams (1982) 142. On Poems 37 and 39, see further Krostenko (2001a), O’Bryhim (2018). On the status of the Catullan collection and the debates over the extent to which Catullus’ own arrangement of his poems may be reflected in the ordering transmitted to us, see e.g. Hutchinson (2008) 109–30, Du Quesnay in Chapter 8 with the suggestions for further reading offered there. There has been much debate over how to group and subdivide the poems in elegiacs: see e.g. Skinner (2003) 60–1 for an overview of varying positions taken; cf. Holzberg (2002a), who divides Catullus’ collection into three books, taking Poems 61–4 and 65–116 as the second and third groupings in the

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elegiacs that deal with an unnamed woman, often referred to as mea puella (‘my girl’), also refer to Lesbia, then her presence is even more extensive. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that Lesbia is not the only erotic interest mentioned in the collection,6 and therefore that readers of the collection as a whole might not always have the same monolithic focus on the relationship with Lesbia that has characterised many approaches to Catullus. These poems dealing with other lovers include a series of poems dealing with the boy Juventius (Poems 15, 21, 24, 48, 81, 99),7 but also the poem addressed to Ipsitilla (Poem 32), if the name usually printed here is correct,8 who is importunately asked in very direct terms to prepare for a midday tryst with the poet. In addition, there are poems whose theme may be described as love involving others, such as the poem on the mutual love between Acme and Septimius (Poem 45), where Catullus describes how the embracing couple exchange elaborate declarations of love, before summing up by observing how they are the most fortunate pair of lovers.9 This poem, like so many, raises issues of the status of the broader collection: if Poem 45 forms part of a larger collection which includes poems concerning Lesbia, then the presentation of happy love here stands in marked contrast to Catullus’ presentation of his unhappy affair with Lesbia in other poems. This might also be said of the two marriagesongs, Poems 61 and 62, which indeed have been seen by some scholars as part of a wider focus in the longer poems on the theme of marriage.10 A striking approach to the love of others is also taken in Poem 96, where Catullus assures the poet Licinius Calvus that if there can be any pleasure for the dead, through the sense of longing with which old loves and lost friendships are renewed (quo desiderio ueteres renouamus amores | atque olim missas flemus amicitias, 96.3–4), then Quintilia’s pain at her early death will be surpassed by her delight at Calvus’ continuing display of love for her. If

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collection. Holzberg (2019) 441–50 raises the important question of whether it is possible to see Catullus as an epigrammatist both in respect of the polymetric poems and the poems in elegiacs. Compare Ov. Tr. 2.427–30 for the acknowledgement that Lesbia was often (saepe, 2.427) sung of by Catullus, though ‘not content with her he also made known his many love affairs in which he confessed his own adultery’ (nec contentus ea, multos uulgauit amores | in quibus ipse suum fassus adulterium est, 2.429–30). See also 15 and 21. On the role of the Juventius poems in the collection, see e.g. Stroh (2000). The main MSS here offer the following readings: ipsi illa (O), ipsi thili (G), ipsi thila (R, which also has the later variant ipsicilla, R2). See further Thomson (1997) 287–9, with suggestions for further reading, including Gratwick (1991) 547–8 who argues for Ipsicilla as a diminutive form of ipsa, noting that the possibility that the woman is married is not excluded. On Poem 45, see Cairns (2012b), who argues against the views of previous scholars who have detected irony in the presentation of the two lovers. For the significance of marriage in the longer poems, see e.g. Wiseman (1969) 20–5 and Myers in this volume; Sandy (1971) suggests that even Poem 63 can be linked to the theme of marriage.

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we accept the suggestion made by Fraenkel that there may have been some rupture in the relationship between Calvus and Quintilia before her death,11 we are also in territory where the regrets for the loss of love experienced by Catullus find a counterpart in the situation of Calvus; one might also note that here Catullus acknowledges the importance of friendship and its loss, echoing thematic material which plays a significant part in many of the epigrams, even if lost friendship often plays out as betrayal or enmity. In the case of the Lesbia poems, many readers have wanted to see some kind of autobiographical documentation of the progress of an ultimately unhappy love affair. While such attempts can be said to reflect the immediacy of Catullus’ love poetry, it remains true that such endeavours are fraught with difficulty, and are, moreover, unverifiable.12 As regards the identity of Lesbia, the starting-point is the claim made in the second century ad by Apuleius, who, as part of a more extensive list of pseudonyms employed by various poets in referring to their beloveds (Apol. 10), says that Lesbia’s real name was Clodia.13 Attempts to provide a more precise historical identification have won a measure of broad but not complete consensus focused on the patrician Clodia Metelli, as she is often referred to, one of the three daughters of Ap. Claudius Pulcher (the consul of 79 bc), wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer, the consul of 60 bc, and sister of P. Clodius, who was tribune of the plebs in 58 bc and a notorious opponent of Cicero.14 Poem 79, which alleges that Lesbia prefers ‘Lesbius’ to Catullus, has typically been seen as alleging an incestuous relationship between Lesbia and her brother Clodius; in the opening words, Lesbius est pulcer (‘Lesbius is pretty’), scholars have seen a play on the nomenclature of the Claudii Pulchri.15 11 12 13 14

15

Fraenkel (1956) 285–8; cf. Courtney (2003) 207–9. On C. Licinius Calvus, see Woodman in this volume. For salutary caution against biographical approaches to the poems, see e.g. Fitzgerald (1995) 19–33, Holzberg (2000), (2002a) 19–23. For scepticism as to the value of Apuleius’ evidence, see Stroh (1979) 332 n. 35, who notes inter alia that Apuleius’ reference to Clodia could refer to a freedwoman, and Holzberg (2000) 29–30. Wiseman (1969) 50–60 argues that we cannot be certain which of the three daughters of Ap. Claudius Pulcher is referred to by Apuleius. On Clodia Metelli, see e.g. Skinner (1983) and (2011), esp. 121–44 on Clodia as Lesbia, Dyson Hejduk (2008) 3–9, Dyck (2013) 12–14; on P. Clodius, see e.g. Tatum (1999). See also Hutchinson (2012) 56 n. 16 for the unpublished suggestion of Prof. J. T. Ramsey, which was mentioned by Prof. J. D. Morgan in a lecture given in Oxford in 2010, that Lesbia might be identified with the daughter of the Ap. Claudius Pulcher who was consul in 54 bc. On Poem 79, see further Skinner (2003) 80–3. A different view of the significance of Lesbius in Poem 79 is taken by Holzberg (2000) 39–40, who sees the word as denoting no more than a partner of Lesbia and interprets the two names in the poem as suggesting a penchant for oral sex on the analogy of the Greek lesbiazein; cf. Stroh (2000) 81 n. 13.

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A feature of the love poetry which has perhaps contributed to the sense of immediacy among Catullus’ readers is the use of the poet’s own name; the opening of Poem 8, Miser Catulle, is a famous example.16 On the one hand, this can be seen as drawing on the tradition of the sphragis (‘seal’), where poets include their own name in their verses as a means of conveying authority and authenticity, with examples in early Greek poetry such as Hesiod (Theogony 22–3; cf. Works and Days 633–40) and Theognis (22–3), as well as in Hellenistic poets such as Posidippus (Epig. 118).17 Yet at the same time the use of Catullus’ own name also points us to another distinctive feature of the poems which might be considered to be entirely at variance with the very notion of authenticity, since the use of Catullus’ name also allows Catullus to separate out an authorial voice from the character experiencing the love affair in his poems. Poem 8 is no exception to this, and here quotation of the entire poem is in order: Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, et quod uides perisse perditum ducas. fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles, cum uentitabas quo puella ducebat amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla. ibi illa multa cum iocosa fiebant, quae tu uolebas nec puella nolebat, fulsere uere candidi tibi soles. nunc iam illa non uolt: tu quoque impote, nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser uiue, sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura. uale, puella. iam Catullus obdurat, nec te requiret nec rogabit inuitam. at tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla. scelesta, uae te, quae tibi manet uita? quis nunc te adibit? cui uideberis bella? quem nunc amabis? cuius esse diceris? quem basiabis? cui labella mordebis? at tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.

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Wretched Catullus, stop wasting your time, and think that what you see has perished has been lost. The suns shone bright for you before, when you used to go where the girl led you, 16

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On Poem 8, see further Thomas (1984), who argues for the connection with a speech from the old man Demeas in Menander’s Samia (the argument is summarised by Thomas in this volume, pp. 64–6). On the sphragis-tradition, see e.g. Klooster (2011) 175–208.

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loved by us as much as none will ever be loved. Then, when those many amusing things were happening, which you wanted and the girl did not not-want them, truly the suns shone bright for you. Now she no longer wants them; you too, powerless, stop wanting them. And don’t follow her who runs away and don’t live wretchedly, but keep going with stubborn mind, endure. Goodbye, girl. Now Catullus endures, Nor will he look for you or ask for you when you are unwilling. But you will grieve, when you will be asked for not at all. Wretch, alas for you, what life awaits you? Who will now come for you? To whom will you appear beautiful? Whom now will you love? Whose will you be said to be? Whom will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite? But you, Catullus, endure fixedly.

Here, and very strikingly, Catullus’ own experience of the suffering (Miser Catulle) occasioned by unhappy love is distanced by being presented in the second person, creating an entirely different perspective on Catullus’ situation, which is straightaway underlined as something that is futile (desinas ineptire); the poet admonishes Catullus and tells him to abandon his pointless pursuit of a beloved who is now unwilling. After the first eleven lines, there is then a shift, as the second person is no longer used to address Catullus, but to address his puella. Indeed, Catullus’ name is also used in line 12 in the third person, as the poet (whose voice here blends with the voice of Catullus the character) remarks on the success of the instruction to endure and not give in to his hopeless love, with the imperative obdura (8.11) from the poet’s instruction to endure giving way to the indicative obdurat (8.12), denoting Catullus’ apparent success in heeding the instruction to hold firm. The second person is then used in repeated addresses to the puella warning her of the miserable life which awaits her. These lines also reflect an attempt of Catullus to enact both personal and poetic closure.18 The poem thematises the notion of ending from the first line (desinas ineptire), and arguably also offers a series of potential end points for Catullus’ poem, after the instruction to endure in line 11, after the simple farewell in line 12 (uale puella), at the end of the same line where Catullus proclaims his success in enduring the parting, at the end of the next line where he indicates that he will not pursue her, at the end of line 14 where he for the first time enunciates the wretchedness that awaits her, and indeed at the end of any of the succeeding lines in the poem. All these possible 18

For the false closure at line 12, see Fowler (2000) 261–2, who also cautions against the ‘misleading’ comma printed at the end of line 12 (by e.g. Goold (1989) and Mynors (1958)).

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end-points, however, highlight the instability of personal closure in the poem, reflected in the fact that the second person is used continually to address the girl, revealing a failure to withdraw from the situation. In the poem’s last line, the second person suddenly shifts back to Catullus, however, as the poet returns to addressing himself, and repeating the instruction to endure (destinatus obdura); as Fowler remarks, ‘if Catullus could not stop before, how seriously do we take him now?’.19 A key aspect of this poem’s effect is the use of Catullus’ name, which seems to authenticate the experience that is described, and the use of the second person, which creates distance between the experience of Catullus the character in the poem and Catullus the poet.20 It is a marker of Catullus’ ability to present the complexity of the experience of love that smaller-scale poems are as effective as the larger ones. The ambivalence and difficulty of Catullus’ feelings are conveyed in a similar fashion to what we have seen in Poem 8 in the much shorter Poem 85, where the bifurcation of his feelings towards the beloved is memorably expressed in the first three words:21 Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do that? I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am in agony.

Something less often noticed in this poem, however, is the manner in which even a simple expression of feeling in terms of the binary alternatives of love and hate is made more complex by the presence of an unspecified addressee (whose identity is unresolved), who is asking the cause of Catullus’ feelings. And the reply conveys not the clarity of the forthright expression of Catullus’ thoughts in the first three words, but the uncertainty (nescio) of his understanding of why he is experiencing such emotional turbulence. In terms of the characterisation of Lesbia herself when she is named within the poems, we can first note examples where in fact Lesbia is arguably a blank page on which Catullus writes of his own desire. Poem 51, a poem which closely echoes Sappho fr. 31,22 which has been seen by 19 20 21 22

Fowler (2000) 262. On destinatus here, a word which can strikingly be used in the feminine of betrothed women, see Koster (1981) 127–8; see also Holzberg (2002a) 90. Invaluable insight into the broader question of Catullus’ poetic voice and its relation to the author Catullus is found in Holzberg (2002a) 11–14. On Poem 85, see now Holzberg (2019) 451–2. On the link between Catullus 51 and Sappho, see e.g. D’Angour (2006); see further Myers and Thomas in this volume.

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some readers as reflecting the beginning of the relationship,23 describes the effect of Lesbia on Catullus as he watches another man sitting beside her. The poem is justly famed for its evocation of the physical effects of love (lines 9–12), but it is also the case that the only direct insight into Lesbia offered in the poem is the detail of her sweet laughter (dulce ridentem, 51.5), though the emphasis on both the other man and Catullus looking at her (spectat, ‘he looks at’, 4, and aspexi, ‘I saw [you]’, 7) conveys a strong but indistinct sense of Lesbia’s beauty. Likewise, the famous poem on kisses (Poem 5) is addressed to Lesbia with an exuberant encouragement to live and love (5.1), but, since the poem is a series of instructions to his lover, we get virtually no insight at all into Lesbia’s character, apart from the hint that she might pay some attention to the disapproval of old men (5.2). Poem 7, however, treats the same theme but does offer a moment of perspective on Lesbia, since the poem opens with Catullus noting how she is asking how many kisses will be enough or more than enough, to which Catullus replies with a set of witty examples for how such an impossible number might be calculated.24 Lesbia’s question, however, poses a conundrum for the audience as well: does Lesbia’s asking what the limit might be reflect a lesser enthusiasm for passion than that of Catullus, who describes himself here in the third person as uesano . . . Catullo (7.10, ‘insane Catullus’)? Poem 86 perhaps offers more insight, since Catullus rejects the conventional term of formosa, ‘beautiful’, which is regularly applied to another woman, Quintia, and explains that mere physical attractions do not match up to the qualities which Lesbia has in addition:25 Quintia formosa est multis. mihi candida, longa, recta est: haec ego sic singula confiteor; totum illud formosa nego: nam nulla uenustas, nulla in tam magno est corpore mica salis. Lesbia formosa est, quae cum pulcerrima tota est, tum omnibus una omnes surripuit Veneres. Quintia is beautiful to many. To me she is shining, tall, and upright: all these individual points, yes, I acknowledge them. But taking her as a whole I say she is not ‘beautiful’: for there is no attractiveness, no grain of salt in such a great body. Lesbia is beautiful, who is both the prettiest taken as a whole, and on her own has stolen all the qualities of Venus from everyone. 23 24 25

Holzberg (2002a) 84–6, however, offers an approach to Poem 51 based on its own local context within the collection of Poems 50 and 52. On the kiss poems, see e.g. Holzberg (2002a) 24–8. On Poem 86, see e.g. Skinner (2003) 96–9.

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Here, Lesbia is truly deserving of the epithet formosa, since she has uenustas, etymologically linked to Venus, the goddess of love, and also the mica salis, the ‘grain of salt’ or wit which, as will be seen later on, is a quality valued more broadly in the poems. Even poems which present her in a harsh light, such as Poem 58 (discussed below), do not always go beyond descriptions of her actions, and offer little insight into her inner character, in contrast to Catullus’ constant reference to his own inner thoughts and indeed contradictions. In Poem 72, Catullus remarks to Lesbia that he has come to know her, nunc te cognoui (72.5), but once again this is a poem which, apart from an opening complaint about Lesbia’s prior words to Catullus (lines 1–2, which significantly do not even contain a past declaration of love), tells us far more about Catullus, including the statements that his love for Lesbia was not like the crowd’s love for a mistress but a father’s love for his sons and sons-in-law (72.3–4). Catullus closes Poem 72 with the statement that her wrongdoing towards him makes him love her more, but have less goodwill towards her (72.7–8); very similar is the tone taken with Lesbia in Poem 75. Poem 83 again appears to promise a brief insight into Lesbia, with the detail that she is speaking harshly to Catullus in the presence of her husband, but this is really a cue for Catullus once again to speak of his own feelings in interpreting Lesbia’s anger as a sign of her depth of feeling for him. As Wiseman remarks, ‘the brute fact is that apart from her real name we know nothing about “Lesbia”, except what we can infer through the distorting medium of Catullus’ poems about her’.26

Friendship Friendship plays a major part in the poetry of Catullus. Intensity of feeling is something found in the poems of friendship, as well as in the poems of love. Thus Poem 9, which sees Catullus welcome the return of Veranius to Italy, begins with an extravagant statement of how Veranius surpasses all Catullus’ other friends (9.1–2) and ends with Catullus declaring that the arrival of his friend produces in him an unsurpassed joy. Similar to this is the humorous remark to Calvus (14.1–2) that, if Catullus did not love Calvus more than his own eyes, he would be full of hatred at Calvus’ sending him a collection of the writings of bad poets (14.3–5).27 This kind of language is also found in the erotic poems (thus in 104.1–2 Catullus 26

Wiseman (1985) 136.

27

On Poem 14, see now Roman (2014) 48–9.

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explains that he could not possibly speak badly of his beloved, ambobus mihi quae carior est oculis, ‘who is dearer to me than both of my eyes’; cf. also 3.5, where Lesbia is, perhaps tellingly, said to love her now dead sparrow more than her eyes).28 A key aspect of the presentation of friendship is the emphasis on conversation and shared company: the collection thus includes invitation poems, such as those addressed to Fabullus (13), and to Caecilius (35), who is asked to come to visit Catullus in Verona. Poem 35 is also a good example of how Catullus is able to combine different kinds of material in the same poem: the invitation to Verona is initially presented in terms of the friendship with Catullus, but Catullus then explains how Caecilius is detained from his travels by a girl who has fallen deeply in love with him (35.11–18) from the time when Caecilius began composing his poem on the Magna Mater. Another example of the multifold ways in which friendship can be deployed as a theme is Poem 65. This poem accompanies as a covering letter the following Poem 66, which is a translation of the ‘Lock of Berenice’, a section of the Aetia of the Hellenistic Greek poet Callimachus.29 Catullus sends Poem 65 and the translation of Callimachus in Poem 66 to his friend Hortalus, who may well be Q. Hortensius Hortalus, the orator and consul of 69 bc. 30 The poem begins with an expression of Catullus’ grief which has kept him away from the Muses and the practice of poetry (65.1–4). There is then a long parenthesis, where Catullus laments the death of his brother in the land of Troy, proclaiming that he will also lament him in song (65.5–14), before the poem concludes with Catullus explaining that he will send the translation from Callimachus, and so avoid reneging on the promise that he has made. In reassuring Hortalus that he has not cast his promise to the winds, Catullus ends the poem with a striking simile (65.17–24):31 ne tua dicta uagis nequiquam credita uentis effluxisse meo forte putes animo, ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum, dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur, 28 29

30 31

For such proverbial expressions of love and value involving the eyes, see Otto (1890) 249 s.v. oculus. On Poems 65 and 66, see further e.g. Tatum (1997) 488–94, Woodman (2012b), Du Quesnay (2012), and Thomas in this volume, who also comments on the intertextual issues raised by translation more broadly. For a useful overview of the debates relating to identification of Hortalus either with the well-known orator or with his son, see Tatum (1997) 489 and n. 46, and see also Du Quesnay (2012) 153–62. On this simile, see further Woodman (2012b) 149–51. For ‘reverse-sex’ similes in Catullus, see Myers in this volume.

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so that you should not perchance think that your words, entrusted in vain to the wandering winds, have flowed out from my mind, just as an apple, sent as secret gift from her betrothed, falls out from the chaste lap of a girl, which, placed beneath the soft clothing of the wretched girl who then forgot it, is shaken out while she leaps up at the arrival of her mother, and that apple is cast headlong in a downward path, and guilty blushing runs over her sad face.

In the simile Catullus proceeds from two metaphors, speaking of Hortalus’ fears that his words have been cast to the winds32 and have fallen from Catullus’ mind, to a very different image of a young girl who has received an apple as a secret gift from her betrothed, which then slips from its hidden location within her clothing as she rises up to greet her mother, leaving her embarrassed and blushing as the compromising apple falls to the ground. Catullus ends what is a short but complex poem – which has already referred to friendship with Hortalus and the loss of Catullus’ brother – with a hint at the theme of love.33 As is often the case with Catullus, questions of interpretation depend on what view one takes of the status of the collection: many scholars have seen the long poems 61 to 68 as a group, with some emphasising the role of marriage as a theme within them, while others, such as Skinner (2003), have suggested the possibility of reading all the poems in elegiacs (65–116) as a single libellus. In the case of Poem 65, the thematic complexity goes well with both of these possibilities, since the reference to the girl and her sponsus suggests future marriage, while a reading of Poem 65 as the first of a collection of poems in elegiacs also allows major themes such as friendship (and betrayal of friendship, as comes to the fore in many places in the elegiac poems), the death of Catullus’ brother and love to emerge as major concerns in this group of poems. There are also occasions where the presentation of the language of friendship, particularly when expressed with lavish praise, may verge on the ironic. Poem 49, a short poem addressed to Cicero is perhaps a good example of this:34 32

33 34

For this image of words left to be carried away by the winds, cf. 30.9–10, 64.142, 70.4. Contrast Woodman (2012b) 146–9 for the different view that the words have been entrusted to be carried on a sea-borne voyage. The connection with the theme of love becomes stronger if we are to see the apple in Poem 65 as alluding to Acontius and Cydippe from Callimachus’ Aetia, as suggested by Barchiesi (1993) 363–5. For a useful overview of Poem 49, see Tatum (1988). Selden (1992) 464–7 is an important discussion which emphasises the possibility of two modes of reading the poem, rather than a binary choice between praise and irony.

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Disertissime Romuli nepotum, quot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli, quotque post aliis erunt in annis, gratias tibi maximas Catullus agit pessimus omnium poeta, tanto pessimus omnium poeta, quanto tu optimus omnium patronus. Most eloquent of the descendants of Romulus, as many as exist now and as many as ever have, Marcus Tullius, and as many as will exist henceforth in other years, the greatest thanks to you Catullus renders, the worst poet of all, just as much the worst poet of all as you are the best advocate of all.

Here, an act of thanks is the ostensible basis of the poem, suggesting a possible connection of friendship, but the opening compliment to Cicero’s eloquence at the start of the poem is made more problematic by the way in which Catullus refers to himself as the very worst poet of all, an improbable statement of the harshest self-criticism, which is then linked correlatively (tanto . . . | quanto) with the final closing compliment to Cicero, who is said to be the best in his field of forensic oratory just as much as Catullus is the worst in his particular sphere of poetry. In similar fashion, Poem 11, one of only two poems written in the Sapphic metre in the entire collection, is addressed to two friends of Catullus who are praised in elaborate terms for their declared willingness to accompany Catullus to the remotest parts of the world (11.1–14),35 but in fact they are merely requested to pass on a few harsh words to Catullus’ puella (11.15–16). Though readers have often taken the poem as primarily concerned with love, and as marking the end of Catullus’ relationship with Lesbia, once again Catullus is able to combine different kinds of thematic material to produce a complex effect, with the opening elaborate list of locations to which Catullus’ friends would travel giving way to four lines which present Lesbia in negative and crude terms committing multiple adulteries, before another change of tone as Catullus compares his love for her to a flower that is destroyed by a plough as it goes through a field.36 35

36

Krebs (2008) argues that the places mentioned are designed to recall the military travels of Alexander, Caesar and Pompey, with allusion to the last two individuals evoking contemporary politics alongside the personal elements of the poem. Forsyth (1991) gives a good sense of previous approaches to Catullus 11, though arguing for thematic unity across the whole poem based on the theme of sexual violence. Not all scholars have seen Poem 11 as offering an ironic treatment of Furius and Aurelius: see e.g. Woodman (2012a) 23 and n. 28.

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Mythology The death of Catullus’ brother occurs as a subject in three of Catullus’ poems and illustrates the ability of Catullus to harness a single powerful thematic motif to differing purposes. His death at Troy appears as a theme in its own right in Poem 101, where Catullus presents himself as having travelled through many lands and places to bid farewell to his brother at his grave. The theme of travel, incidentally, is also something which links this poem with others of quite a different character: thus Poem 46, on the onset of spring, sees Catullus addressing himself on the occasion of travelling home from Bithynia via the famous cities of Asia (46.4–6), with cheerful farewells to his friends who had also served in the province with him, as each undertakes his own separate journey home.37 In Poem 101, the trajectory of travel is one of a long journey to Asia that has brought Catullus to the site of Troy, where Catullus presents himself arriving after his brother’s death to utter, in a manner which scholars have seen as echoing the conventions of funerary epigram, a lament for his lost brother.38 As well as Poem 65, which has already been discussed, the brother’s death also plays a key role in Poem 68, a lengthy work which has launched much debate on whether it is one, two or even three separate poems.39 Here, Catullus thanks a friend for his help in arranging a meeting with his (in this case) unnamed beloved. In the first part (68.1–26) Catullus explains that his previous delight in poetry (and in life) has been overwhelmed by the death of his brother, whom he directly addresses in lamentation; once again, we can see Catullus’ shifting use of the second person, which, as seen in the discussion of Poem 8 above, is a key aspect of Catullus’ poetic technique. Later, Catullus turns to describe the very moment of his lover’s arrival at the friend’s house for the assignation (68.69–72), which is then the cue for a lengthy mythological 37 38

39

On travel and Roman power in Catullus’ poetry, see Damon in this volume. On Poem 101, see e.g. Gutzwiller (2012) 103–7 on links with Greek epigram and Homer, and Feldherr (2000) on connections with funerary and sepulchral practice; see also Stevens (2013) 187–90. On the status of Poem 68, and whether it is a single poem, see e.g. Skinner (1972), Tuplin (1981). Döpp (2005) is a recent powerful voice arguing for the unity of Poem 68; for a concise summary of the opposing arguments for seeing the work as two poems, see Trappes-Lomax (2007) 227. Morgan (2008) has argued that the addressee of 68.1–40, different from that of 68.41–160, is Manius Curius, to be identified with the author of Cic. Fam. 7.29, who there describes himself as de meliore nota, a phrase which recurs in Latin only at 68.28. The edition of Goold (1989) prints the texts as three poems: 68a = 1–40, 68b = 41–148, 68c = 149–160; see Goold (1989) 258 for his argument for treating the last twelve lines as a separate poem. Syndikus (1984–1990) 2.239–96, Feeney (1992), Lowrie (2006) and Skinner (2003) 143–72 are major treatments; see also Gale (2012), who argues for the importance of connections between Catullus’ poem and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

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simile (68.73–134), where the woman’s arrival is compared to the arrival of Laodamia at the house of her husband Protesilaus, who would be the first of the Greeks to fall at Troy in the Trojan War. This famous myth of marital love thwarted by death in warfare, and of a widow’s inconsolable grief, is a disturbing point of comparison for Catullus’ love, even though Catullus simultaneously makes clear that he is not married to his lover and indeed notes her romantic transgressions which he is forced to treat as minor (68.135–6). The poem (if it is one poem) concludes with what is a troubling and unconvincing declaration that the sweetness of his life is all to be attributed to her (68.159–60). But within the long simile referring to Laodamia and Protesilaus, Catullus unexpectedly introduces a further passage of lament for his brother (68.87–104): nam tum Helenae raptu primores Argiuorum coeperat ad sese Troia ciere uiros, Troia (nefas!) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque, Troia uirum et uirtutum omnium acerba cinis, quaene etiam nostro letum miserabile fratri attulit. ei misero frater adempte mihi, ei misero fratri iucundum lumen ademptum, tecum una tota est nostra sepulta domus, omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra, quae tuus in uita dulcis alebat amor. quem nunc tam longe non inter nota sepulcra nec prope cognatos compositum cineres, sed Troia obscena, Troia infelice sepultum detinet extremo terra aliena solo. ad quam tum properans fertur undique pubes Graia penetralis deseruisse focos, ne Paris abducta gavisus libera moecha otia pacato degeret in thalamo. For at that time Troy, because of the abduction of Helen, had begun to draw the leading men of the Argives to herself, Troy (unspeakable!), the common tomb of Asia and Europe, Troy the bitter ash of men and of all virtues, which even brought wretched death to my brother. Alas, brother taken away from wretched me, alas, sweet light taken away from your wretched brother, together with you the whole of our house is buried, together with you have perished all our joys, which your sweet love nurtured when you were alive. But now, so far away, not among well-known tombs, nor laid to rest near the ashes of your relations,

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bruce gibson but buried at foul Troy, unlucky Troy, a foreign land detains you in its distant earth. To there in former times, it is said, the chosen youth of Greece hurried, abandoning on all sides their innermost hearths, lest Paris, rejoicing in the abduction of his adulteress, should spend a carefree leisure in a peaceful chamber.

The passage is worth quoting at length to show the thematic transitions which Catullus uses here in shifting from Troy as the site of the Trojan War to Troy as the location of his brother’s death.40 Within the broader context of the long Laodamia simile, Catullus begins by referring to the way in which Troy drew the Greeks to it because of the abduction of Helen, but then uses anaphora (Troia . . . | Troia) and the exclamatory nefas to raise the emotional tone, leading into lines on the loss of his brother, expressed in personal and intense language, culminating in the further repetition of Troia, now called obscena in line 99, after which Catullus reverts to the mode of mythical narration as he recalls how the Greek army abandoned their homes in hastening to arrive at Troy for the war that followed. The striking use of Troy here, as part of an intensely elaborate simile relating Catullus’ unhappy love to the marital love of Laodamia and Protesilaus, which was doomed to be destroyed by the Trojan War, just as Troy is also the site of Catullus’ brother’s death, is again a pointer to Catullus’ ability to combine different kinds of material within the same poem. Something similar can be seen in the use of Troy in another of the long poems, Poem 64.41 After an opening section dealing with the encounter between the Argo, the first ship, and the Nereids, the poem deals with the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, and also includes a long section relating the story of Theseus and Ariadne, which is depicted on a coverlet at the wedding. Here one mythical story, that of Peleus and Thetis, provides the frame for another myth, that of Theseus and Ariadne, so that the insertion of the Theseus and Ariadne narrative may be compared to Catullus’ technique with the Laodamia simile in Poem 68. After concluding his account of Theseus and Ariadne, Catullus then returns to narrating the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. This was a topic which had 40

41

The lines on his brother’s death (91–100) are framed by two sets of four lines each (87–90 ~ 101–4): for further discussion of the structure here and in some of Catullus’ other poems see Courtney (1985) 92–9. On Poem 64, see e.g. Laird (1993), Warden (1998), Holzberg (2002a) 132–50, Schmale (2004), Young (2015) 24–51, for an illustrative selection of the range of scholarship which this poem has generated in recent decades.

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featured in cyclic epic, in the Cypria (fr. 3 Bernabé; cf. Proclus, Chrest. 80), which narrates the origins of the Trojan War, and though Catullus’ poem of 408 hexameters does not have the extensive scale even of the cyclic epics, let alone Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, it nevertheless participates in the traditions of previous epic poetry. When the poem resumes its account of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, it includes a song of the Fates (64.323–81), which may be felt to be especially Homeric in subject matter, in that it anticipates the career and bloody achievements of Achilles, the central figure of Homer’s Iliad. At the poem’s close, however, Catullus turns aside from his mythical content to reflect on how the wedding of Peleus and Thetis was a turning-point in relations between gods and mortals, since after that occasion the gods were no longer in the habit of visiting mortals, and humans turned to wicked deeds of all kinds (397–408). In one sense, Catullus may seem here to be echoing the way in which Hesiod in the Works and Days had drawn a line between his own age of wickedness and the better epochs of human existence which had preceded it (Works and Days 174–201); nevertheless, the emphasis on immorality and wickedness in these last few lines of the poem draws the readers to Catullus’ own time in a surprising way. Thus even Poem 64, a poem which looks at the intersection of two of the most celebrated myths, the story of the expedition of the Argonauts, and the story of the Trojan War, to say nothing of the inset narrative of Theseus and Ariadne, contains a rich mix of subject matter, but also strikingly has a conclusion which brings the audience back to Catullus’ own time; note especially Catullus’ statement on how unspeakable crimes such as incest (64.402–4), a motif which features repeatedly in the epigrams (see below), have turned the mind of the gods away ‘from us’ (nobis, 64.406).

Anecdote: Occasional Poetry? A feature of Catullus’ poems is the way in which they often appear to spring from a particular incident which is then related in the poem; it should, of course, not necessarily be taken as read that ‘occasional poetry’ always provides exact representations of real occasions: occasions themselves can be mediated or even made up just as much as anything else.42 A couple of examples may be useful. Poem 10, which will be discussed further below, 42

On occasional poetry in Catullus, see further Stevens (2013) 24, 59, 97, Roman (2014) 47, 49, 52, 56–8; for useful remarks on the broader concept of occasional poetry, see Rühl (2006) 84–91.

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springs from Catullus’ friend Varus taking Catullus to visit his mistress, and how Catullus allowed himself to be embarrassed by pretending that his posting to Bithynia had been lucrative enough for him to have his own litter-carriers, prompting the girl to ask to borrow their services. The pair of poems on Lesbia’s sparrow and its death (Poems 2 and 3) might also be viewed as occasional (particularly the second), though at the same time it should be acknowledged that these poems are an opportunity for Catullus to convey something about the relationship with Lesbia as well.43 Similarly, Poem 95, though it arises from the occasion of Catullus’ friend Helvius Cinna publishing his learned mythological poem Zmyrna, is a work which offers broader thought in terms of poetics, while at the same time praising Cinna and attacking the poet Volusius. Volusius is also a target in Poem 36, which likewise depends on an anecdote, as Catullus tells the story of a promise by his puella to burn the poetry of the worst poet (implying Catullus himself ) if Catullus could be restored to her, so that the poem ends with instruction to Volusius’ poems to go into the fire (36.18–20).44 What characterises many of the ‘occasional’ poems is the way that a moment can then be an opportunity for praise or for blame: thus, in Poem 25, Thallus’ thefts from Catullus also provide the poet with the chance for broader attacks on this figure’s rapacity and implicit effeminacy. Many of Catullus’ shorter poems arise from particular incidents, but some of the longer poems, too, may be considered as arising from single moments, which then give rise to much more complex and elaborate works. The two marriage-songs (61 and 62) are obvious examples, but are not the only ones. Poem 68, which deals with Catullus meeting his beloved, hinges on a such a moment, with her arrival at the house put at the lovers’ disposal by a friend being compared to the arrival of the mythical Laodamia at the house of Protesilaus. Equally, longer poems that do not feature Catullus can also have ‘occasional’ aspects: the opening of Poem 64 deals with the precise moment at which the Nereids saw the Argo and when Peleus was first inflamed with love for Thetis, which then gives rise to the rest of the poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis; likewise, the internal narrative of Ariadne and Theseus operates by a focus on the precise instants of Ariadne’s falling in love with Theseus (64.86–93), 43

44

On the sparrow poems, see e.g. Harrison (2003), Ingleheart (2003), Holzberg (2019) 445–6. Gaisser (2007a) 305–40 collects papers ranging chronologically from the fifteenth century to 1985 on the debate over whether the sparrow poems can be read as obscene. See also Thomas above, pp. 63–4. For a recent discussion of Poems 36 and 95, see Roman (2014) 49–52. On C. Helvius Cinna, see further Woodman in this volume.

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her lament for her abandonment (64.126–201), and the arrival of Bacchus (64.251–64). Again, the poem on Attis and his self-castration in a frenzy of devotion to the goddess Cybele hinges on precise moments, the initial act on arrival in Asia (63.1–5) and his anguished lament and regret on the following morning after his madness has left him (63.39–73).45

Enmity and Moralising We have previously seen how Poem 64 ends with a focus on wickedness. Moral failings are found also in poems far removed from the epic and elevated content of Poem 64. Moralising plays a part in the love poetry on a number of occasions. A good example is Poem 76, where Catullus uses the language of piety to describe his own conduct in the relationship, remarking on how, if there is any reward for a man who has conducted himself truthfully and without betraying anyone, he can then expect many good things to come from what is unfavourably described as ingrato . . . amore (‘ungrateful love’, 76.6). The conclusion, indeed, has a prayer which plays on the generic feature of appeals to a god cast in the form of requests for reciprocity for previous good deeds on the part of the speaker: thus, Catullus asks the gods to look kindly on him and intervene, if he has lived a pure life (si uitam puriter egi, 76.19). In making this prayer, however, Catullus combines commemoration of his own good conduct with negative language about the beloved, whose effect on Catullus is referred to in strong terms as hanc pestem perniciemque (‘this ruin and destruction’, 76.20), while Catullus also refers to his love for her as a sickness in the penultimate line of the poem (76.25).46 Elsewhere, Catullus is ready to take an even more direct and harsh approach, as in Poem 58: Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes, nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes. Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia, that Lesbia, whom alone Catullus loved more than himself and all his relations, 45 46

For a sample of recent work on Poem 63, see the papers collected in Nauta and Harder (2005). On Poem 76, see e.g. Skinner (1987), Powell (1990) 199–202, Holzberg (2002a) 182–5. Note that Heyworth (1995) 133–6 suggests that Poem 76 may in fact be two poems, with a division between lines 16 and 17.

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bruce gibson now at the cross-roads and in the alleys debarks the descendants of great-souled Remus.47

Here, within a poem of only five lines, we can note Catullus’ remarkable capacity for tonal variation. The opening vocative, Caeli, might initially imply that this work is composed for a friend (compare e.g. Poems 6 and 9 for such friendly addresses), though the address to Caelius has often been seen as ironic by those who believe that the poem is addressed to M. Caelius Rufus, the alleged lover of Clodia Metelli and notorious defendant in Cicero’s Pro Caelio, a speech given in April 56 bc.48 The emphasis on the naming of Lesbia in lines 1–249 is then followed by an extraordinary direct statement of Catullus’ love for Lesbia in the past which is expressed simply in terms of being greater than his love for himself or for his family (for the use of family language in a context of love, compare 72.3–4 as discussed above). Quite different, however, is the crude abuse of Lesbia’s indiscriminate promiscuity in the final couple of lines (though even here one should note the juxtaposition of glubit with the grand reference to the descendants of Remus in the last line of all).50 In one very short poem, Catullus combines the language of disappointed love with both grandeur and crude obscenity, while the address to Caelius is also potentially one that may imply a friendship, or indeed a friendship that has gone disastrously wrong. More sustained enmities are found in the epigrams in the last part of the collection. Here, Catullus attacks two significant figures, Rufus (named in Poems 69 and 77) and Gellius (named in Poems 74, 80, 88, 89, 90, 91 and 116), who recur in a similar fashion to the repeated appearances of Lesbia elsewhere. These two individuals, indeed, have been seen as rivals for Lesbia’s affections; their presence would then provide an implicit and 47 48

49 50

The precise sexual sense of glubit in this line has provoked a rich debate: see e.g. the differing views of Arkins (1979), Jocelyn (1979) and Randall (1980). See also Adams (1982) 74, 168, Muse (2009). For scepticism as regards the identification of Caelius Rufus with Catullus’ Caelius, see Wiseman (1969) 55–6. On the context of the trial of Caelius Rufus, see Tatum (1999) 208–10. The only other reference to a Caelius in Catullus is in Poem 100, where it might seem that the tone taken is more positive as Catullus writes of Caelius’ love for Aufillenus; on this poem, see Skinner (2003) 124–7, who is sceptical about identifying the figure of Caelius here with the Rufus named in Poems 69 and 77. As noted by Syndikus (1984–1990) 3.102 n. 3, the Caelius of Poem 100, who is linked with Verona, cannot be plausibly identified with M. Caelius Rufus, whose family are likely to have come from Interamnia Praetuttiorum (modern Teramo), if the conjecture of Gruter at Cic. Cael. 5 (Praetut(t)iani) is correct, on which see Austin (1960) 146–7, Dyck (2013) 68–9; for a different view, see however Dyson Hejduk (2008) 7 n. 11. On the broader problems raised by identifying names in the poems with historical figures, see Damon in this volume. For the chiastic repetition of Lesbia illa | illa Lesbia here, see Wills (1996) 181. On Catullus’ techniques of invective used against women, see further Myers in this volume.

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troubling supplement to the poems complaining about Lesbia’s betrayals.51 In Poem 69 Rufus52 is directed not to be surprised if no woman wishes to sleep with him owing to the presence of a savage goat under his armpits, which might suggest the lighter tone adopted when Catullus upbraids the personal habits of Egnatius in Poems 37 and 39, as has been noted above. Poem 71, which deals with a similarly redolent goat, does not name Rufus, but is very likely to refer to him. Rufus is also named and attacked, however, for betrayal of friendship in Poem 77 in more forthright and emotive terms (compare for instance the emotive use of ei misero to refer to Catullus in 77.4 ei misero eripuisti omnia nostra bona, ‘alas, you have taken away from wretched me all our good things’ with the double appearance of the same words in relation to the loss of Catullus’ brother in 68.92–3, cited above). Gellius first appears in Poem 74,53 where he is accused of cuckolding his uncle, while in Poem 80 the whiteness of his lips is attributed to performing oral sex.54 The theme of sexual misdeeds continues in Poems 88, 89, 90 where Gellius is accused of committing incest with his mother and sister, while the crime against his uncle’s marriage is also mentioned again. Poem 91, however, shows Catullus’ versatility, as a poem again attacking Gellius for disloyalty in connection with Catullus’ own wretched love (in misero hoc nostro, hoc perdito amore, ‘in this wretched, this doomed love of mine’, 91.2), but using the bitterly ironic argument that Catullus did not expect such a betrayal because it was not the case that Catullus was in love with either the mother or sister of Gellius (91.3–6). Here, the biting allegations of incest found in the earlier Gellius poems are given a much more intense context, through being framed in terms of Catullus’ own overarching sense of personal betrayal. The last of the Gellius poems, Poem 116, which is also the last poem in the collection as we have it, has Catullus explain that, though he has often looked to send Gellius translations from Callimachus (suggesting a similar situation to the friendship of Catullus and Hortalus in Poem 65), this hope of softening Gellius’ enmity has proved futile; the final couplet (116.7–8) ends with a warning that Gellius will end up paying the penalty to Catullus. Here, in miniature, we once again see the combination of unexpected thematic material, as a concern 51 52 53

54

See e.g. Wiseman (1969) 27–9 on the role of these figures in Poems 69–92; cf. Skinner (2003) 60–1. On the Rufus poems, see e.g. Nappa (1999), Wray (2001) 109–10, Skinner (2003) 69–80. On the Gellius poems, see e.g. Skinner (2003) 83–8; on the identity and connections of Gellius, see Wiseman (1974), 119–29, who suggests that he may be identified with L. Gellius Publicola (cos. 36 bc). Skinner (2003) 84 links Poem 80 to the following Poem 81 (where Juventius is warned against a rival of Catullus).

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with learned poetry and friendship is set alongside the tropes of enmity and harm.55 Indeed, betrayed friendship is more broadly the context for poems expressing enmity elsewhere within the collection. This need not necessarily occasion surprise, especially as the tropes of praise were regularly regarded by rhetoricians as simply the opposite side of those which might be used for invective (see e.g. Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.13–14, where the author notes that qualities such as lineage or physical attributes can be the subject of either praise or blame). A good example is Poem 30, where Catullus reproaches Alfenus for a betrayal of friendship:56 Alfene immemor atque unanimis false sodalibus, iam te nil miseret, dure, tui dulcis amiculi? iam me prodere, iam non dubitas fallere, perfide? num57 facta impia fallacum hominum caelicolis placent? cum58 tu neglegis ac me miserum deseris in malis, eheu, quid faciant, dic, homines, cuiue habeant fidem? certe tute iubebas animam tradere, inique, inducens in amorem, quasi tuta omnia mi forent. idem nunc retrahis te ac tua dicta omnia factaque uentos irrita ferre ac nebulas aereas sinis. si tu oblitus es, at di meminerunt, meminit Fides, quae te ut paeniteat postmodo facti faciet tui. Alfenus, unmindful and false to your true-hearted friends, do you have no pity now, hard one, for your sweet dear friend? Now do you not hesitate to betray me, to deceive me, treacherous one? Surely the wicked deeds of deceitful men do not please the gods? When you neglect and abandon wretched me in evil circumstances, alas, tell me what men are to do, or whom they are to trust? Certainly you were telling me to entrust my life, wicked one, leading me to love, as if everything were safe for me. Now you, the same person, pull yourself away and all your words and deeds you let the winds and airy clouds carry off in vain, If you have forgotten, the gods however remember, Loyalty remembers, and she hereafter will make you repent of your deed. 55

56 57 58

For the links between Poems 65 and 116, which would be all the more important if these poems are the first and last poems of a books of poems in elegiacs, see e.g. King (1988), Skinner (2003) 1–5, and Barchiesi (2005) 334–6, who suggests a link between the first word of Poem 116, saepe (‘often’) and πολλάκι, ‘often’, the restored first word of Callimachus’ Aetia, on which see Harder (2012) 2.12–13. Macleod (1973) remains the classic treatment of Poem 116. On Poem 30, see further Wray (2001) 101–3, 105–6. num, printed in the edition of Goold (1989), is Schwabe’s emendation of the transmitted reading nec. cum, printed in the edition of Goold (1989), is Muretus’ emendation of the transmitted qu(a)e.

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Here, we can see similar language of crime and betrayal as occurs both in Poem 76 and at the end of Poem 64. Indeed, specific details of the language of betrayed friendship here parallel language used of betrayed love, such as the reference to Catullus himself as me miserum (30.5; cf. 76.19, and Catullus also uses the phrase in a more humorous context at 50.9, when he refers to himself in these terms when referring to the effect of no longer being in the company of his friend Licinius), or the reference to words being carried on the winds (30.10; cf. 64.142 where Ariadne reproaches the faithless departure of Theseus or 70.4 where Catullus comments that a woman’s promises should be written in winds and water59). There are also cases, however, where enmity seems entirely disconnected from the idea of prior friendship that has turned sour. This is evident, for instance, in some of the poems which have political themes. Thus Poem 29 contains attacks on the figure of Mamurra (also a target in Poem 57), and on Caesar and Pompey, referred to in the last line by way of their relationship as father- and son-in-law. Poem 29 concentrates on the extortionate greed of Mamurra, but also mocks Caesar for allowing such conduct to go on during his time in Britain, before Catullus eventually moves towards attacking both Caesar and Pompey at the end of the poem for their tolerance of the rapacious conduct of Mamurra. In this poem there is a hierarchy of focus: the poem presents itself as arising from a much deeper anger against Mamurra, whereas the behaviour of Caesar and Pompey is not really the focus of Catullus’ concerns.60 Mamurra indeed reappears elsewhere within the collection, especially if there is a connection between the Mamurra who is mentioned in Poems 29 and 57 (where Caesar is once again paired insultingly with Mamurra) and the figure of Mentula (‘penis’) who is a target in the epigrams (94, 105, 114, 115), recalling the use of the word mentula to refer to Mamurra’s activities in 29.13.61 In a poem such as this, it can be useful to observe gradations of enmity; the anecdote in Suet. DJ 73 about Catullus having caused offence to Caesar with the 59 60

61

On Poem 70, see further Thomas in this volume. There has been some debate over the degree to which the poem refers to these two figures: contrast e.g. Quinn (1970/1973) 176–7, who argues that the first ten lines of abuse are addressed to Pompey before the mock-politeness of the address to Caesar in lines 11–20, with Syndikus (1984–1990), 1.178 who argues that the first ten lines must refer to Caesar. See also Poem 43 for a comparison between Catullus’ Lesbia and Ameana, the mistress of a spendthrift from Formiae (43.5; cf. 41.4) who is generally thought to be Mamurra, whose origins from Formiae are also noted in Poem 57; on the construction of geographical place in the collection, see Damon in this volume. On the Mamurra poems more widely in the collection, see Deuling (1999).

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Mamurra poems, but then making up with Caesar (who was a friend of his father), provides a useful perspective: in a world where courtroom insults could be severe, it was nevertheless possible to smooth over even public insults.62

Conclusion: salem ac leporem The focus on obscenity and sexual insults that we find in Catullus should not occasion surprise or discomfort. Indeed, since it is an aspect of his poetry which Catullus openly acknowledges, it may be a useful way to close this chapter. In Poem 16, Furius and Aurelius, the same individuals who in Poem 11 are said to be willing to travel with Catullus to the ends of earth, are at the start of the poem threatened vigorously in sexual terms for their view of Catullus as a poet who is somehow to be seen as unchaste, with strong overtones of effeminacy (16.3–11).63 qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis, quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est; qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt mouere lumbos. [You] who have thought from my verses, because they are soft, that I am not chaste. For it is fitting that a pious poet is chaste himself, but for his verses there is no need; in short, then, the verses have salt and charm, if they are soft and not chaste, and they can stir up what might be exciting, I do not say for boys, but for these hairy ones who cannot move their stiff loins.

This poem perhaps is about as close as Catullus comes to offering any thematic hints at some of the contents of his work. The sexual threats 62

63

On this episode, see further Damon in this volume. On Poem 93, where Catullus declares himself indifferent as to whether Caesar is black or white, see Holzberg (2006) 44–5, who emphasises the erotic and ironic overtones in Catullus’ words. On Poem 16, see further e.g. Wiseman (1987) 222–4, Selden (1992) 476–89, Wray (2001) 185–6, Stevens (2013) 71–81.

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which precede and follow the passage quoted might be seen to point at a broader focus on enmities and indeed on obscenity in other poems. Catullus’ distinction between the life of the poet and his verses, which need not be chaste (castum), is well known (5–6); the two lines are crucial and problematic for those who would read the poems biographically. The following line perhaps also hints at the significance of content and tone: poems need to have salem ac leporem. These two motifs appear in a variety of contexts within Catullus’ poetry. First, lepos, which denotes pleasantness and charm. The word can be used of characters within a poem: thus Asinius Marrucinus’ brother Pollio is said to be leporum | differtus puer ac facetiarum (‘a boy stuffed full with pleasantness and wit’) in 12.8–9; and Ipsitilla is addressed as mei lepores (‘my delight’) in 32.2.64 And in Poem 50, separation from Licinius Calvus, with whom Catullus had spent the previous day composing poetry, inflames Catullus, who describes himself as tuo lepore | incensus, Licini, facetiisque (‘inflamed by your pleasantness and wit, Licinius’, 50.7–8), the same nouns that are used in relation to Pollio in Poem 12. Using an adjectival form, in Poem 10, Catullus talks of Varus’ girl in terms of these qualities when he describes her as a scortillum, ut mihi tum repente uisum est, | non sane illepidum neque inuenustum (‘a little tart, as it immediately seemed to me at that moment, not wholly without pleasantness and not without appeal’, 10.3–4). Similar is 6.2, where Catullus suggests that Flavius would want to talk about his mistress, unless it was the case that she did not possess such qualities, ni sint illepidae atque inelegantes (‘if she were not unpleasant and inelegant’). At the end of the same poem, however, Catullus moves away from describing a mistress to describing the poetry that might be written about her; he proclaims his wish to write about Flavius’ girl with lepido . . . uersu (‘pleasant verse’, 6.17), and thus implies that poetry that has lepos might embrace subjects like Flavius’ girl.65 Likewise, in Poem 36, the adverb lepide (‘pleasantly’) is used of Catullus’ girl’s vow (36.10) to burn the worst poetry, and the vow is likewise suggested to be something that is non illepidum neque inuenustum (‘not unpleasant and not without appeal’, 36.17). And in Poem 78, Catullus begins by remarking that one of Gallus’ brothers has a lepidissima coniunx (‘a very pleasant wife’, 78.1), while the other has a lepidus filius (‘a pleasant son’, 78.2). 64 65

The usage of lepidus by Catullus both in terms of poetics and as an erotic attribute is noted by Holzberg (2002a) 12. On Poem 6, see Cairns (2012a) 128–9.

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If we turn to sal, the word literally means ‘salt’, but denotes a sharpness and wit, suggesting stylish behaviour that will win approbation.66 There are hints of the literal meaning, but also of the transferred sense of ‘wit’, in Poem 13, when Catullus invites Fabullus to dinner, and tells him to bring the dinner with him, along with a girl, wine, sale, ‘salt’, and laughter (13.4–5), so that ‘salt’ reflects both the seasoning that might go with food and the wit of conversation that might go with the food and drink. Poem 12 offers an example of what it is not, when Catullus tells Asinius Marrucinus that he should not think that his habit of stealing napkins is salsum (‘salty’, 12.4).67 And in Poem 86, as we have seen, when noting that Quintia is regarded as beautiful by many, Catullus explains that the real appeal of Lesbia is not merely a matter of beauty, but her uenustas (‘attractiveness’) and also the mica salis, the ‘grain of salt’ that she possesses (86.3–4). Catullus’ statement in Poem 16 that poetry should have sal and lepos raises the question of where else these qualities might be found in the collection. Love and friendship are certainly themes which can exhibit these qualities, while the poems which attack individuals might also be seen as laying down a marker against those who are without them. While it is true that the opening poem of the collection as we have it identifies Catullus’ libellus (whatever set of poems that is taken to refer to) as being lepidus (1.1), it is of course rather harder to associate some of the longer poems with sal and lepos, and indeed it could hardly be said that these are qualities that can be associated with shorter poems such as 34, a hymnic address to Diana, and 101, the lament for Catullus’ brother. There are still, however, areas of connection between the longer poems and areas of Catullus’ poetry that are much more traditionally associated with sal and lepos, such as an interest in love and marriage (and the negative sides of love), and moralising; ribaldry even finds its way into the longer poems with the Fescennina iocatio (61.120) of the first of the two marriage hymns, which presents in the controlled but frivolous context of a wedding comment on the conduct of the husband-to-be and his male concubine which might remind us of some of the content found in the shorter poems. But, as always with Catullus, the poems are likely to yield more interesting readings if they are not forced too insistently into exclusive thematic groupings: Catullus is a poet who above all else achieves success through surprising juxtapositions and combinations of material. 66 67

On sal in Catullus, see further Nielsen (1987). Cf. 14.16, where Catullus calls Calvus salse for sending Catullus a collection of mediocre poets, if the variant reading salse (‘salty one’) in MS G is accepted in preference to the reading of MSS O and R, false (‘false one’): see e.g. Fordyce (1961) 137, and the editions of Goold (1989) and Thomson (1997).

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Further Reading Holzberg (2002a) is an important reading of the entire corpus of poems, with particular emphasis on erotic themes, while Dyson (2007) offers a sequential reading of the Lesbia poems (including poems where she is not addressed by name), and emphasises both the lack of chronological ordering of the poems about the relationship with Lesbia within the Catullan collection (whilst at the same time offering a linear reading going from Poem 2 to Poem 109), and the centrality of Lesbia as providing the collection’s ‘dramatic core, giving meaning and coherence to the whole’ (2007: 254). Skinner (2011) provides a biography of Clodia Metelli, including discussion of the Lesbia poems in Catullus. An important counterbalance to the tendency to focus on Lesbia in Catullus’ work is provided by Wray (2001), who offers a reading of Catullus’ poetry in terms of the poetics of manhood, with an emphasis on the importance of male rivalry and self-positioning within Catullus’ poetic corpus. On friendship in Catullus, Tatum (1997) explores friendship in terms of the wider political scene and offers analysis of different refractions of amicitia in Poems 1, 65 (and 66) and 116. On obscenity in Catullus, see e.g. Fitzgerald (1995) 59–86, Selden (1992). Scholars have of course also drawn attention to other themes in Catullus apart from those mentioned in this chapter: two striking examples are Stevens (2013), who concentrates on the motif of silence, and Young (2015), whose emphasis is on the role of translation in Catullan metapoetics.

chapter 6

Language and Style Anna Chahoud

Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d By ear industrious, and attention meet

(John Keats, ‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d’, 1819)

The collection of poems which the Italian Renaissance handed down to us under the title Catulli Veronensis liber documents an unprecedented revolution in the Latin poetic landscape. Catullus redefined the parameters of acceptable subject matter, ideological stance, and poetic persona; he accomplished that transformation through an exceptional ability to engage with inherited traditions of literary and colloquial language.1 Catullus was capable of refashioning the terminology of traditional Latin values, and of elevating traits of Latin usage that poets had previously rejected as inappropriate or discarded as outdated. He was the exquisite translator of Sappho and Callimachus, the ingenious recycler of Plautus and Ennius, the skilful epigrammatist capable of juxtaposing Hellenistic innovations, Latin conversational and inscriptional formulae, and his own personal elaboration of the language of the street. In so doing Catullus created a poetic diction that defies generic classifications and projects a distinctly subjective authorial voice.

Metre and Diction Readers of Catullus are presented with a collection of poems as varied in metre as they are diverse in content, style, and linguistic register. No less adventurously than his Latin predecessors (Ennius, Lucilius, Laevius), Catullus embraced a multitude of poetic forms, with the notable exclusion 1

Unless stated otherwise, I adopt Thomson’s text (1997) and Goold’s translation (1983), slightly adapted as appropriate.

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of the metres of comic dialogue (although not its imagery and phraseology). His book of poetry includes c. 60 poems in hendecasyllables, iambic verse, and lyric systems (1–60); four long poems in lyric metres (61, glyconic stanzas, and 63, galliambics) and hexameters (62 and 64); and a corpus of long elegies (65–68) and short elegiac epigrams (69–116). The adopted subdivision may be argued on points of detail,2 and is connected with the debate about authorial arrangement and publication of the poems; more relevant to the present discussion is the distinction in style and subject matter between the different metrical forms. The first group is traditionally referred to as the polymetrics, or poems written in the metres of Greek poetry: phalaecian hendecasyllables3 (the majority of poems), various types of iambic verse (trimeters: 4, 29, 52; tetrameters: 25; choliambs: 8, 22, 31, 37, 39, 44, 59, 60), and lyric systems (sapphics: 11, 51; greater asclepiad: 30; glyconics: 34 and 61; priapeans, i.e. glyconics + pherecrateans: 17, also in fragments 1–2). The inclusion of lyric poems in a polymetric corpus is unprecedented and paralleled in Greek and Latin poetry only in Statius’ Siluae.4 H. D. Jocelyn (1995, 1996a, 1999) sharply distinguished lyric (μέλη, ‘songs’) from phalaecians.5 He noted that the lyric poems are distributed throughout 1–60 and that stylistic differences mark out each lyric poem from its surrounding context. Phalaecians exhibit a closer affinity of themes and style with iambics than with lyric poems, which tend to avoid certain features such as everyday language and informal syntax;6 separation of adjective and noun (especially the type of ‘denotative’ adjectives which normally follow, e.g. possessives);7 alliteration, rhyme (e.g. 1.3–4), extended repetition (e.g. 5.7–9) and a long word in line end, all stylistic effects which provide a distinctive ‘extra-metrical colouring’ to hendecasyllabic clausulae.8 It is in the phalaecians that Catullus most evidently exploits his interest in the shape and sound of 2 3 4 5

6

7 8

See Hutchinson (2003), restated in Hutchinson (2012) 48–9; Du Quesnay in this volume. This term was used by e.g. the Neronian Caesius Bassus (20.9 Morelli/ 258K) to distinguish this metrical form from other eleven-syllable lines named after Alcaeus, Sappho and Archilochus. Cf. Jones (2008) 130 with n. 2. Jocelyn (1999) 335–45; he also argued that Poem 61 belongs not only metrically but also stylistically with the lyric metres of 1–60. For some examples of shared lexical features see below on diminutive adjectives (61.209), comparatives (61.84), and words in -arius (61.131). Jocelyn (1999) 362–7. The classic study of ‘colloquial’ Latin by J. B. Hofmann (most recent edition 2003) draws on thirty-four poems of Catullus, of which twenty are in hendecasyllables, two in iambics, four are long poems (not 64 or 65), and eight elegiac epigrams: even though Hofmann’s criteria for establishing the ‘colloquial’ register of a word or phrase should be used with caution (Chahoud 2010), it is striking that not a single example comes from the lyric poems. Jocelyn (1999) 355. Jocelyn (1995) 73–82, (1999) 341. Note, however, the alliteration and etymological word play at line end at 30.12 paeniteat postmodo facti faciet tui, anaphoric iam and diminutive amiculi at 30.2–3;

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words (long words, low words, new words) and fully deploys his ‘aesthetic word localisation’,9 positioning semantically or phono-rhythmically significant words (diminutives, superlatives, neologisms and exotic references) at the end of the line.10 A notable example in iambics is Poem 25, with its diminutives and words of similar sounds (25.1 cuniculi capillo, 2 medullula uel imula oricilla, 4 procella, 10 laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas, 11 conscribillent flagella), alliteration (5 ostendit oscitantes, 9 reglutina et remitte, 10 manusque mollicellas, 12 minuta magno, 13 uesaniente uento), long words (3 araneoso, 7 catagraphosque Thynos ‘Bithynian printed towels’), and colloquial idiom (6 ‘send me back my cloak which you’ve swooped on’, inuolasti).11 Poems 61–64, along with the long elegies (65–68), are arguably Catullus’ most ‘literary’ poems, in which full use is made of traditional poetic devices, from grand vocabulary (compounds, poetic and/or ‘archaic’ words) to elaborate repetition patterns. Some of these techniques are established peculiarities of Latin high-register poetry, others are Catullus’ innovations, such as the epanalepsis which binds the end of a line with the beginning of the next (e.g. 63.8–9 tympanum, 64.285–6 Tempe).12 Intensifying gemination also features more prominently in these poems than elsewhere, e.g. iam iam (63.68), etiam atque etiam (63.61), and notably magis magis (64.274, but also 38.3), which only Virgil will pick up (Aen. 4.311); in the elegiac 68.41, Catullus creates magis . . . atque magis, with more fortune in the Virgilian epic tradition.13 For the first time in Latin poetry there is extensive use of participial constructions as an alternative to subordinate clauses (e.g. seven in the first ten lines of Poem 64 alone), a feature that will become characteristic of Latin poetic diction.14 But even the most formal of genres are not exempt from Catullus’ injection of emotiveness, especially in direct speech, through diminutive adjectives (61.193 floridulo, 63.35 lassula, 64.131 frigidulos, 64.331 languidulos) or traits of ordinary speech, such ‘unpoetic’ adverbs as praeterea (in Ariadne’s polysyllables and homoioteleuton at 34.10–12 uirentium | . . . reconditorum | . . . sonantium. On other adjustments to Jocelyn’s analysis see Jones (2008) on Poems 46 and 50. 9 10 Loomis (1972) 100. See further below, p. 130. Cf. Jocelyn (1995) 73–82. 11 Inuolo for ‘steal’ is frequently used in Petronius’ Cena (43.4, 58.10, 63.8) and is formulaic in the Bath curse tablets: Adams (1992) 18, 24–5. 12 Wills (1996) 132–8; cf. Facchini Tosi (1983) 69–88. Combined with emotive interjection at 64.61–2 prospicit, eheu, | prospicit (for which, cf. 63.61 miser a! miser). 13 The standard form in all periods, genres and registers is coordinated magis magisque. The Catullan variations remain exclusive to Virgilian and post-Virgilian epic. Conversely, geminated non non in hendecasyllables (14.16) belongs to comic dialogue (Plaut. Merc. 765; Ter. Phorm. 303). 14 Coleman (1999) 84.

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speech at 64.184), ita (61.196, 63.44, 49 and 77, 64.84 and 315)15 or the quasiadverbial construction of mente with adjectives (63.46 liquida, 64.209 and 238 constanti, 64.254 lymphata).16 The third grouping consists of a bipartite corpus, showing the full Callimachean range of elegiac poetry.17 The long elegiac poems include Catullus’ translation of Callimachus’ Berenice (Poem 66), prefaced by a verse epistle (65), just as the epistle in 68.1–40 (= 68a) is juxtaposed with a composition extremely rich in mythical themes and Greek intertexts (68.41–160 = 68b).18 These poems are as diverse as the long lyrics and epic of 61–64, but here too the high style required by the content (65, 66, 68a) is interspersed with unexpected personal notes and linguistic novelties. Pathetic devices as old as Homer such as multiple repetition of a key word are deployed, for example, in the triplication of Troia at 68b.88–92,19 where the rising tricolon incorporates, with a sudden switch, what Troy means to Catullus – the death of his brother: pathos is sustained though repetition (92–3 ei misero fratri . . . | ei misero fratri iucundum lumen adeptum) and heightened by the emotive adjective iucundus, which Catullus elsewhere uses for warm addresses, mirroring a real epistolary practice.20 At 68a.30 Catullus has the earliest example of magis in adversative sense (as in Romance mais, mas, ma),21 as opposed to the established sed magis (66.87, already in Enn. Ann. 252Sk., Lutat. 1.4C).22 Some linguistic choices are shared between short and long elegiacs. These include the syncopated perfects in epigrams (77.3 subrepsti, 91.9 duxti, 99.8 abstersti), but also at 66.21 luxti (= luxisti) and 30 tersti (= tersisti).23 In his translation of Callimachus at 66.76, laetor . . . discrucior (ἀσχάλλω . . . φέρει χάριν), Catullus introduces a variation on his favourite ex-crucior (76.10, 85.2, 99.12), which is informal in both its intensifying preverb dis- and infinitive construction.24 Poem 67 is a dialogue (or ‘duologue’, Thomson) with 15 16

17 18 19 21 22 23 24

Also found in the long elegiacs (66.18, 67.9, 68.37), but not a single example in Poems 1–60, and only twice in elegiac epigrams (75.2, 97.1). Cf. Axelson (1945) 121–2; Ross (1969) 44. Also at 8.11, obstinata mente. The construction is often deemed a vulgarism (e.g. Sheets (2007) 196), but it may well be that this long-lasting innovation, which gave Romance the adverbial suffix -ment, -mente, originated in fact from poetic creativity: see Bauer (2010). The Callimachean reference Battiades in 65.16 and 116.2 is a strong argument for clustering together long and short elegiacs: Hutchinson (2003) 212, (2012) 49. See most recently Gale (2012). Wills (1996) 143–4. Contrast 58.1 Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa, | illa Lesbia. 20 See below, p. 135. First in prose in Sallust (Iug. 96.2; Hist. 3.48.17). Hofmann–Szantyr (1965) 497; Courtney (1993/2003) 75; cf. Rosén (2009) 396, 465. A conjecture of Avantius (cf. 99.8 abstersti) for transmitted tristi = triuisti. For the construction see Plaut. Bacch. 435; Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8.3.1; Cic. Att. 14.6.1 (‘it makes me sick to see that’, Shackleton Bailey). In elegiac epigrams Catullus has discupio (106.2, only in Plaut. Trin.

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a Door, as later in Propertius 1.16. The exchange is full of colloquial features: ‘unpoetic’ instrumental qui in the questions qui possum? (67.17)25 and qui tu istaec, ianua, nosti? (line 37), with following personal pronoun in a ‘highly stereotyped pattern of phraseology’;26 auscultare ‘to listen to’ (line 39) is a rare example of the verb in literary Latin of the classical period.27 The short elegiacs are closer in topics and tone to the phalaecians, but, it is generally argued, show less innovation. Poems 69–116 tend to preserve the formal structure of Latin inscribed epigrams, whereby the spatial arrangement of logical sequences leaves little scope for enjambment and other devices that would become characteristic of classical Latin poetry. Catullus’ predecessors in Latin verse epigrams were of course Hellenising poets themselves, but whether they wrote funerary epigrams (Ennius and the Scipio epitaph in CLE 958;28 Lucilius 579–80 M), erotic couplets (Lutatius Catulus, Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus: Courtney (2003) 70–1), or satirical epigrams (Papinius/Pomponius and Manilius: Courtney (2003) 109–11), they all deployed their poetic and pathetic devices without disrupting the autonomy of individual lines or couplets. The diction of the epigrams includes no poetic compounds and a much more restricted use of diminutives, especially diminutive adjectives, anticipating the selectivity that love elegists will embrace and Martial (and inscriptional epigrams) will ignore.29 Overtly Greek syntax is also avoided; there is nothing comparable to the nominative + infinitive construction of 4.1–2 or the Greek accusative at 51.3 (cf. Hor. Carm. 1.22.23). There is little merit in arguing that the language of these poems is less artful than in the others; it is only more formal. Coordination by atque, which is never found in Petronius (except for verse) or in Pompeian graffiti, occurs more often in the elegiac epigrams than in any other metrical form; before consonants,

25 26

27

28

932; Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8.15.2) and dispereo, in a formula (92.2, 4 dispeream nisi) which suggests verse representation of an informal register (Catal., Hor. Sat., Prop., Mart.: cf. TLL 5.1.1405.46–5) rather than elaboration of a comic exclamation (disperii occurs fourteen times in Plautus); cf. 14.11 dispereunt and parallels in Varro and Columella. On informal dis- compounds see Adams (2016) 199; on ‘affective middle voice’ discrucior see Marinone (1997) 195–6. Adams (1999) 115 notes Tab. Vind. ii 234; see also Chahoud (2010) 44. Adams (1999) 115 (cf. e.g. Plaut. Amph. 925 ego istaec feci uerba) and (2013) 458, reading qui with the Aldine and Kroll; transmitted quid has some appeal: quid? tu istaec, ianua, nosti? (Mynors, Thomson et al.). See also Ricottilli (1982) 136 n. 40. Outside quotation of early Latin (Varro, Ling. 6.83) the verb is found only in Cic. S. Rosc. 104 and Hor. Sat. 2.7.1, Columella, Seneca and Pliny the Elder. The distribution suggests that ausculto had become discredited and ‘descended into varieties of the language that were largely submerged’, such as Pompeian graffiti (Adams (2016) 224); see also Courtney (1995) 301. 29 Courtney (1995) 229. Milnor (2014) 214 with n. 36.

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atque remains artificially unelided only in three out of fourteen cases, contrasting with the proportions in hendecasyllables (elided 6: unelided 5) and iambics (elided 1: unelided 3): in this respect at least, the epigrams are closer to the long elegiacs (only two cases, 66.15 and 68.47) and to the hexameters, which avoid unelided atque altogether.30 But no genre of Catullus’ poetry is immune from some degree of linguistic innovation. Features normally avoided in classical Latin poetry are found even in the elegiac epigrams, such as the indicative indirect question at 69.10 admirari desine cur fugiunt, which appears only in Propertius outside informal prose,31 or the entirely isolated attestation of is in oblique case at 84.5.32 In a similar way, the more elevated of Poems 1–60 admit, for example, unus with quasi-article function (22.10, choliambics) or in genitive uni (17.17, priapeans), or prosaic intensifier + adj. in place of superlative (17.11 maxime profunda).33

Informality and Stylisation Lyric poets in all literatures have the same problem. They must use language not too different from that of ordinary life and at the same time elevate it with an infusion of ‘poetic’ vocabulary. Or in alternative terms, they must revivify traditional ‘poetic’ diction without debasing it by blending into it hitherto common or even vulgar vocabulary. This process in Latin poetry is difficult to discuss. Our limited knowledge of the Latin language often leaves us uncertain whether a word is prosaic, vulgar, refined or whatever. The difficulty is particularly acute in Catullus, because one source of his ‘nonpoetic’ vocabulary is clearly the smart clichés and elegant social idiom of the Roman upper classes. Such diction tends to contain an admixture of former vulgarisms purged of their vulgarity by use in unvulgar context. A further complication is that old vulgar or common words may in time become ‘archaic’ and hence ‘poetic’ through sheer hoariness.34

30 31 32 33

34

Butterfield (2008a) 388–90, also on the dubious evaluation of register in each case offered by Ross (1969) 26–44; cf. Jocelyn (1995) 79. The epigrams have unelided atque at 77.1, 88.2, and 101.10. Examples in the long poems are formulaic, with a verb of seeing and in parentheses (uide(n) ut 61.77, 94, 62.8; aspicite ut 62.12), as later in Virgil (e.g. Aen. 6.779): Adams (2013) 752–60. Butterfield (2008b) 162 with n. 39, with list of figures 166–7. With 69.7 mala ualde and Lucr. 2.1024 uementer noua, the only three cases of the construction in Classical Latin verse (Maltby (2016) 350–1). Valde is the lowest in register, mostly in Cic. Att. and Petronius (four examples, including the colloquial absurdity ualde audaculum, 63.5). Cairns (1974) 12 = (2012a) 30.

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anna chahoud The register of words

If readers of a ‘pretty and polished new book’ (1.1–2) are not surprised to find, as they turn the pages, a graceful love story (Poems 2, 3 and 5) and a sophisticated Callimachean journey (Poem 4), they are in for a shock with the reference to Flavius’ tam latera effututa in 6.13. Poem 6 initially strikes a familiar note by referring to the beloved as deliciae tuae (line 1, cf. 3.1) and to her lack of charm as inlepidae atque inelegantes (2); the language then takes a comic turn, exposing the girl as ‘some pasty-faced bit of skirt’ (3 nescioquid febriculosi | scorti), but here the affective carum nescioquid of 2.6 still resonates in readers’ minds, moderating the rudeness of the word ‘harlot’ (scortum);35 the ‘chattering and shuffling’ of the bed are nicely clothed in a pair of rhetorical terms (if Thomson is right about argutatio) that fill a whole line (11 argutatio inambulatioque). The obscenity of 13, tam latera effututa, is as unexpected as it is effective in its appeal to Flavius to share his love secret (16 dic nobis; cf. 67.7 dic agedum nobis) with Catullus, the self-proclaimed professional love poet (16–17 uolo te ac tuos amores | ad caelum lepido uocare uersu).36 The lively representation of ‘a day off’ in Poem 10 gives an insight on just how colourful the conversation of Catullus’ circle of friends could be, with references to Memmius as irrumator | praetor (12–13, cf. 28.9 irrumasti), and suggestions of comic dialogue (27 interjectional mane ‘wait!’, 33 insulsa male) and informal syntax (10.16 ad lecticam homines ‘litter-bearers’, 30 meus sodalis Cinna est . . . is sibi parauit).37 Here we have the full texture of Catullus’ neoteric diction, open as it was to the language of the street and that of comic dialogue, which supplied Catullus with material for neologism or recontextualisation. Primary obscenities, i.e. words with no ‘other sense to soften their meaning’ (Adams (1982) 1), are normally excluded from poetic diction in the same way as they are from polite conversation: Plautus does not have 35

36 37

A pejorative word for ‘prostitute’, as is the verb scortor in comedy (e.g. Plaut. Men. 124, Ter. Ad. 102): cf. Adams (1983) 324–5. The only other instance in Catullus is in an otherwise unattested diminutive used for Varus’ girlfriend at 10.3, scortillum . . . non sane inlepidum neque inuenustum: here too the traditionally disparaging word receives a neoteric treatment. Catullus has uenustus at 3.2, 13.6, 22.2, and 31.12 (choliambics), 35.17, and in the elegiacs 89.2, 97.9 (futuit earlier in the line). On this ‘unpoetic’ word (not a single time in Virgil or Ovid) see Krostenko (2001a) 99–111, 235–41. For this interpretation of the last two lines see Cairns (2012b) 129. Adnominal prepositional phrases are rare in stylised Classical Latin except in final or enclosed position in the noun phrase (e.g. Tac. Ann. 1.24.2 magna apud Tiberium auctoritate); the construction is ‘a habit of everyday speech’ (Wharton (2009) 205; Chahoud (2016) 22–5). For coordination in place of a relative clause cf. e.g. Cic. Att. 2.8.2 ludi enim Anti futuri sunt . . . eos Tullia spectare uult (Hofmann and Ricottilli (2003) 268). Jocelyn (1999) 362–7 gives a thorough illustration of the syntactical peculiarities of Poem 10.

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a single one of them, nor does Cicero at his most informal or playful.38 Catullus and his fellow poets turned coarse language into a feature of neoteric lepos, hurling sexual abuse against the same powerful targets: Caesar and Mamurra are ‘shameless pathics’ (57.1 improbis cinaedis); Caesar’s associates are called diffututa mentula (29.13 et al.) and pedicator39 (Calvus 3C/36H). In his use of blunt sexual vocabulary Catullus competes with the scribblers of verse graffiti, ‘display[ing] the influence of the lowest variety of current sexual phraseology’.40 From that repertoire Catullus borrows taboo words and improvises variations: futuo (71.5, 97.9; 6.13 effututa, 37.5 confutuere, 32.8 fututiones), fello (59.1), irrumo (10.9, 16.1 and 14, 21.8 irrumatione, 21.13, 28.9, 37.8, 74.5), pedico (16.1 and 14, 21.4); culus (23.19, 33.4, 97.2, 4 and 12, 98.4), cunnus (97.8), mentula (37.3; personified mentula at 29.13, 94.1 twice, 105.1, 114.1, 115.1 and 8) and its slang synonyms uerpa (28.12), sopio (37.10), and probably salaputium (53.5, admiring rather than insulting).41 As in Pompeian graffiti, action words are often used in threats or taunts, and nouns denoting body parts become abusive epithets. Fewer than half of these terms occur in the elegiac epigrams (five in the crude Poem 97). With the exception of the choliambic Poems 37 and 59, all other examples are in phalaecians. A similar distribution is found for the abusive terms pathicus (16.2, 57.2, 112.2) and cinaedus (10.24, 16.2, 25.1 (iambic tetrameters), 29.5 and 9 (iambic trimeters), 33.2, 57.1 and 10), the passive force of which is graphically illustrated by the threat at 16.1.42 Stylisation is at work in the elegiac epigrams too. The addressee at 98.1 has the abusive epithet putide, which may have been ‘a favourite word in the circle of Catullus and Calvus’ (98.1, Calvus 3C/36H, Catalepton 6.2).43 Primary obscenities are often incongruously combined with elevated 38 39 40 41

42 43

Cicero’s letter to Paetus discusses obscenities tectis uerbis ‘in guarded language’ (Fam. 9.22.4); cf. Adams (1981) 233, (1982) 9; Kruschwitz (2012) 9. The noun pedicator is not in Catullus (who has the verb pedico three times), and is attested only in Pompeii, CIL 4.4008: Hollis (2007) 83, Adams (1982) 123–5. See also Jocelyn (1996b) 247. Adams (1981) 233–4, noting the correspondence between 97.12 and 98.4 with CIL 4.4954 linge culu; see also Adams (2016) 226. All clearly offensive words, to judge from their distribution: literature has uerpa only in Martial 11.46.2, Priap. 34.5 (cf. Catull. 47.4 uerpus . . . Priapus ille), but the word populates Pompeian graffiti (CIL 4.1655, 1884, 2360, 2415, 4876, 8617; sopio only at uers. pop. 2 (Courtney (1993/2003) 470: see p. 124 below) and CIL 4.1700; salaputium is entirely obscure, but some connection with praeputium cannot be ruled out: see Adams (1982) 12–13, 64–5. At 37.9–10 uobis | frontem tabernam sopionibus scribam ‘I’ll write your names – “pricks” – all over the front of the tavern’, I take uobis . . . sopionibus (apposition) as instrumental ablatives with scribo (OLD s.v. scribo 2b). Krostenko (2001a) 279. For the word order pedicabo ego uos, and the focusing function of the personal pronoun, see Adams (1999) 107–11. Hollis (2007) 80.

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diction. The opening line of Poem 80 (1 rosea . . . labella | candidiora niue) does not quite prepare the reader for the graphic illustration in the closing line (8 emulso labra notata sero, with artful word order underscoring the shocking content). In the repulsive portrayal of Aemilius in Poem 97 the taboo words (culus and cunnus, the latter announced by the hideous alliterative half-line meientis mulae, 8) punctuate four of the six pentameters at the diaeresis.44 At 115.8 non homo, sed uero mentula magna minax Catullus combines an idiomatic phrase with an alliterative echo of Ennius, Ann. 620 Sk. machina multa minax minitatur maxima muris,45 just as Cicero quotes from an unidentified play in his version of the idiom at Att. 1.18.1, non homo, sed ‘litus atque aer’ et ‘solitudo mera’. The turn of phrase recalls the colloquial expressions of Petronius’ freedmen (38.16 phantasia, non homo; 43.3 discordia, non homo; 44.6 piper, non homo) and the anonymous abuse of Pompey 〈si〉 quem non pudet et rubet, non est homo sed sopio (uers. pop. 2: Courtney (2003) 470). It is worth noting the different word order in Petronius (‘x, not a person’) and in Catullus, Cicero and the Pompey lampoon (‘not a person, but an x’). Not only does the elaboration in Poem 115 involve a triple alliteration à la Ennius, but it shifts the asyndeton to the two adjectives, creating a crescendo: ‘a prick – big, threatening’.46 I now turn to a less vulgar register of informal Latin, namely the language of comedy. Plautus in particular offered Catullus material for imagery and expressiveness. The address to Aurelius (21.1) as pater esuritionum is a grotesque caricature of the insatiable comic parasite,47 with Plautine mock-tragic polyptoton of esse at 21.2–3,48 which Catullus reuses for Cicero (49.2–3 quot sunt quotque fuere . . . | quotque post aliis erunt in annis).49 At 112.1 multus homo means ‘busybody’, as in comedy, where it is always glossed with a more specific term (Plaut. Men. 316 et odiosum, 572; Afr. Com. 202 atque molesta); the term, however, may have been in common use, as it turns up in the late Historia Augusta (Aurelian. 8.3 44 45

46 47 48 49

For the two words combined in an obscene conceit, see the verse inscription 100a in Courtney (1995) 102. Whether the echo amounts to parody and what purpose it might have served is still a matter of some debate, given the uncertainties in the construction of the Ennian line (Skutsch ad loc., Timpanaro (1994) 48–9 and 79; Jackson and Tomasco (2009) 534–8). On Catullus’ ‘use of alliteration as a means of programmatic self-differentiation from Ennius’ (Goldsmith (2013) 49 n. 55) see also Zetzel (1983/ 2007), Agnesini (2012) 176. Transl. Adams (forthcoming), who observes that the pair ‘would probably have had a distinctive intonation’. I am very grateful to Jim Adams for sharing his draft with me. See Fontaine (2010) 221–30. Cf. Plaut. Amph. 553–4, Bacch. 1087 et al.: see Agnesini (2004) 76–7. On this poem see further below, p. 134.

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quanto sit Aurelianus seueritatis: nimius es, multus es, grauis es). Catullus puns on it in the first line and highlights it through emphatic word order as well as glossing in the second line: Naso, multus es et pathicus (‘you’re an active man – but passive’). Comic dialogue also supplies parallels for idioms such as sic abire ‘to go by’ (14.16 non non hoc tibi, salse, sic abibit ‘you won’t get away with this’), made all the more forceful by geminated non,50 or the colloquial formulae bene/male mihi/tibi est ‘I am/you are well/ in a bad way’,51 which receives emphasis through expansion and coordination (14.10, 23.15 bene ac beate) by means of ac, as often for nearsynonymous pairs of adverbs in Plautus and Terence, but never in Cicero.52 A striking nod to comic language is the old word erus ‘master’, which before Catullus is found almost exclusively in comedy.53 The colloquial tone of the word suits the affectionate personifications of the phaselus (4.19) and of Sirmio (31.12);54 in a loftier context it receives qualification (68b.76 caelestes . . . eros, i.e. gods). The literary term is dominus, which also provides a deferential address and extends to ‘private amatory language’55 (Lucil. 730 M and in Pompeian graffiti): Acme (a slave or freedwoman) refers to her lover Septimius as her dominus (45.14); at 3.10 Catullus’ puella is the passer’s domina; Diana is domina (34.9); the epithalamium knows only dominus, domina (61.31, 92, 129). The feminine era tells a different tale. It is used of goddesses since Ennius, inc. 46V Minerua era domina; Catullus too combines the two words at 63.91–2, dea magna, dea Cybebe, dea domina Dindymi,56 | procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo, echoing in his final authorial address the opening of Attis’ pathetic apostrophe, 50–1 dominos ut erifugae | famuli solent (sc. relinquere). Assonance highlights the old word as it marks willing subjugation in 68b, when Catullus forgives his ‘discreet mistress’ (136 uerecundae . . . erae) for not being content with him alone (she is mea diua, 68b.70; and here is compared to Jupiter), just as Hercules put up with the labours that Eurystheus (114 deterioris eri) inflicted upon him. The path is paved for the seruitium amoris of Latin love elegy.

50 51 52 53 54 56

Plaut. Merc. 765, Ter. Phorm. 303; Prop. 2.37a.27; Apul. Met. 7.3. On sic abire (e.g. Ter. Andr. 175; Cic. Att. 14.1.1) see Adams (2013) 458. E.g. Plaut. Truc. 745, but also Cato, Agr. 5.2. Ross (1969) 30–1 notes that Cicero uses this very phrase always in the forms bene et beate or bene beateque. The exception is Cic. Off. 2.24 ut eris in famulos. After Catullus a few instances are found in Horace, Virgil and post-Virgilian poetry. 55 On the latter see Cairns (1974) 11–12 = (2012a) 29. Cf. Dickey (2002) 83–4 with n. 19. Cf. 63.13 Dindymenae dominae, almost formulaic for Cybele (cf. 35.14).

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anna chahoud Some types of hyperbaton

The separation of syntactically related words is a native feature of Latin speech, which, exploiting the flexibility of word order, uses it as a focusing device with a semantic or pragmatic function, i.e. to create emphasis; but it is characteristic of poetic language to exploit hyperbaton to avoid inflectional homoioteleuton,57 and to establish visual/aural relationships between words by means of their collocation in the line: ‘paradoxically a separation (hyperbaton) may have the effect of juxtaposing (artificially, by the norms of prose) two words which enter into some sort of relationship in the meaning of the line’.58 I give some examples of Catullus’ variety across the liber. At 1.8 (cartis) doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis, and 38.2 male est, me hercule, et laboriose, the separation of two coordinated words highlights the relationship between them. This collocation technique (coniunctio, Rhet. Her. 4.38) is found throughout Latinity since Plautus and Cato, and often deployed by Cicero, especially for the sake of rhythm.59 In Poem 1 Catullus creates a connection between labor and poetic doctrina, a Callimachean programmatic statement. In Poem 38 the connection is between labor and suffering male, with the affirmative interjection me hercule (only here in Catullus: = ita me Hercules, ut subaudiatur, iuuet, Paul. Fest. 125 M) perhaps purposely chosen to emphasise the heroic scale of his grief.60 In this poem, as often, Catullus creates also vertical responsion: allocutione, 5 ~ allocutionis, 7; line 1, bound to the next one by anaphora (1–2 malest . . . malest), ends with Catullo, the last line (8) with lacrimis Simonideis, thus bringing together the grieving poet Catullus and the dirge poet Simonides of Ceos, evoked through an unusual adjectival formation;61 Catullus’ fellow poet addressed in this poem would know what misery is conjured up by such a connection. The main clause interrupts the syntax of a parenthetic formula at 66.18 non, ita me diui, uera gemunt, iuerint ‘theirs, so help me heaven, is no real grief’. The insertion of an execration in a negative sentence also recalls colloquial expressions familiar from comedy without such elaborate interlocking (e.g. Plaut. Mil. 862, ne dixeris obsecro huic uestram fidem, Ter. Haut. 953 non ita me di ament auderet),62 as at Poem 97.1 non (ita me di 57 58 59 60 61 62

Not only in Poems 1–60 (Jocelyn (1996a) 140, 155), but also, e.g. at 101.2 has miseras, frater, ad inferias. Adams and Mayer (1999) 17. Cf. Kühner and Stegmann (1976) 2.620–1, Hofmann–Szantyr (1965) 695; Devine and Stephens (2006) 586–91. I have discussed this feature with reference to Lucilius in Chahoud (2018) 146–9. I am grateful to Ian Du Quesnay for this observation. Jocelyn (1995) 70 n. 52, 81. On personal names see further below, pp. 133–6. Kroll (1959) ad loc.

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ament) quicquam referre putaui. Artificial collocation is found in a much lower context at 44.7–9, where the separated adjective and noun, taking the same position in their respective lines, produce a vertical correspondence between cause and effect: malamque pectore expuli tussim | non immerenti quam mihi meus uenter, | dum sumptuosas appeto, dedit, cenas (‘and from my chest I shook off a nasty cough, which – serve me right! – my stomach gave me while I was canvassing for sumptuous dinners’). At 80.6 grandia te medii tenta uorare uiri the substantival tenta (‘erections’) is separated from the adjective grandia, which takes first position both in the line and in the infinitive clause that reports fama’s whispers (‘Gellius’ secret’, Goold): what matters to this man is size, and as such the key word is brought forward to the head of the sentence. Here we have simply a pragmatic feature of speech easily paralleled in prose; but another hyperbaton, medii . . . uiri, placed at the end of each half of the pentameter, creates for the adjectives and respective nouns a pattern abAB in a quasi‘golden’ line, complete with alliteration (uorare uiri) of the earliest recorded type in Latin poetry, Liv. Andr. Od. 1 uirum . . . uorsutum (= uersutum). It has been noted that, if Catullus’s word order tends to be more ‘natural’ in iambics and hendecasyllables, and more artificial in dactylic poems (Aeolic metres taking an intermediate position), these are ‘merely tendencies’.63 Indeed.

Tradition and Innovation ‘Archaism’ How ‘archaic’ is Catullus? First of all, reuse of material from early Latin poetry must be distinguished from instances of seemingly obsolescent vocabulary, phonological or syntactical structures. Pronouncements about this or that ‘archaic’ feature require careful evaluation, as forms that had become excluded by high educated usage may still have had spoken currency, and if there is convergence between poetic, archaic and non-literary usage, it is difficult to establish the register precisely (as seen with era above). The New Poets discarded, on aesthetic grounds, some of the characteristics of third- and second-century Latin poetic diction. Cicero regrets their contempt for Ennius (Tusc. 3.45), and notes that they rejected as ‘somewhat 63

Sheets (2007) 203–4.

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uncultured’ (subrusticum) the elision of final -s in short syllables, which was ‘more refined’ (politius) in early Latin poets (Cic. Orat. 161) and occasionally in their contemporary, Lucretius; this trait of phonology was a feature of orality paralleled in early inscriptions.64 When Catullus writes dabi’ supplicium in the final line of his final poem (116.8) he is ironically marking the distance between his own versification and that of his authoritative predecessors, and hints at his addressee’s lack of refinement.65 Ironic use of ‘archaism’ in this sense of the word extends to the juxtaposition of an Ennian echo and a colloquial phrase in the final line of Poem 115 (mentula magna minax, see p. 124 above); to the alliterative signal, at 15.18 attractis pedibus patente porta, where Catullus is bathetically rewriting Enn. Var. 24V mi soli caeli maxima porta patet, in his prediction of Aurelius’ fate: not an apotheosis, but a raphanidosis;66 or to the choice, in Poem 44, of the archaic grates for gratias (line 16) and recepso for recepero/recipiam (19), and of high-style autumant (2) and deprecor (18), all appropriate to the parodic hymn of thanks to the Fundus. On the other hand Catullus draws extensively on archaising morphology or on established high-style poeticisms in the long poems and, to a lesser extent, in Poems 1–60, where these words elevate the language in appropriate contexts. Examples in the epic include 64.1 prognatae (cf. CIL 12.7.2), 150 creui for decreui (cf. Lucil. 122 M), 394 Mauors for Mars (cf. Enn. Ann. 99 Sk). An address to the gods motivates senet for senescet (4.26) and face for fac (36.16) in phalaecians, as is the case with sospites in the hymn to Diana (34.24)67 and with auctet (67.2, if that is really the end of Poem 66).68 The Ennian compound caelicola marks a quasi-legal formula in the lyric poem to Alfenus (30.4 nec . . . caelicolis placent, a variation on si dis (immortalibus) placet),69 the lost harmony between gods and men in the epyllion (64.386), and Catullus’ own god-like endurance in elegy (68.138 Iuno, maxima caelicolum, cf. Enn. Ann. 445 Sk. optima caelicolum, Saturnia magna dearum). Elegiac epigrams hardly ever exhibit words of such lineage, unless the content requires a grave note, as deprecor in the Lesbia poem 92.3. Some forms and constructions, however, are not easy to justify as allusions, whether deferential or parodic, to a specific early model. The phrase numero modo hoc modo illoc (50.5) exhibits a form of the deictic 64 66 68 69

65 For an overview of the phenomenon see Wallace (1982) 120–4. Cf. Coleman (1999) 34. Agnesini (2012) 177. 67 See further Jocelyn (1995) 66–7, 78–83. See Du Quesnay (2012) 181–3. If nec = non is correct here, it is a survival of an old usage recorded in the Twelve Tables (Fordyce ad loc.; contra, among others, Trappes-Lomax (2007) 92).

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pronoun illic, which, outside comedy, is attested from Livius Andronicus (trag. 28R3) to Lutatius Catulus (1.3C), Lucretius (4.1059, 1083), and, in fully deictic form illice, in ‘ancient’ formulae reported by Varro (e.g. Rust. 2.2.5); Cicero never uses it, nor does any literary author after him; but the pronoun survives in Pompeian graffiti (e.g. 4.1691 qui illunc pedicat), nonliterary letters and late Republican defixiones.70 The old form may have been substandard at the time of Catullus, who uses it to create a neat phrase (‘a jingle’, Adams (2013) 455). The grammatical gender of nouns is another case in point. When Catullus uses cinis ‘ash’ (of a dead person) in the feminine (101.4, 68b.90, but masc. for the plural cineres at line 98), the parallels in Calvus (15C/27H, 16C/28H) and Lucretius 4.926 may suggest an earlier poetic usage; a similar alternation is found for finis, masculine at 64.3 and 66.12, but feminine at 64.217. If neut. pugillaria ‘wax tablets’ (42.5) vs masc. pugillares may have had an archaic ring to it,71 the neuter nuntia for ‘news’ (63.75) vs nuntii can be paralleled in several renuntiumreports in the Vindolanda tablets,72 which unambiguously indicates survival of the neuter in some variety of spoken Latin. The loss of most pre-neoteric and neoteric poetry makes the inquiry tentative as to the archaic/colloquial or recherché/Callimachean flavour of a specific form or construction. At 69.1–2 noli admirari quare tibi femina nulla, | Rufe, uelit tenerum supposuisse femur (‘wonder not, Rufus, why none of the opposite sex wishes to place her dainty thighs beneath you’), the perfect for present infinitive with reference to the future is often described as a Hellenising mannerism;73 or is it a humorous nod to archaic prohibitions (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus 3, neiquis eorum Bacanal habuise uelet; Cato Agr. 5.4)? Adams (2003) 545–6 notes the ‘archaic character with an appeal to poets’ of –uisse, owing to its metrical convenience especially in the second half of pentameters; but that would not have been a concern of the otherwise substandard writer of Tab. Vind. ii.628, cras quid uelis nos fecisse rogo, domine, praecipias ‘Please order, master, what you’d like me to do tomorrow.’ Hellenising, archaic and colloquial usage are equally appropriate to Catullus’ refined epigram on the most unrefined Rufus, 70 71

72 73

Adams (1995) 101 and (2013) 454–5. Istic (37.14) tells a different story of wide comic/colloquial usage (Adams (2016) 44–5). The neuter is rejected as deviant in Char. 124.4B; Diff. Suet. p. 311.3; the singular is in Laberius 71R=49P (‘poetic form’, Panayotakis ad loc.) and Ausonius 2.7, perhaps pointing to an archaising mannerism, but we are in the realm of speculation here. Tab. Vind. ii.127–153. The neuter (also in Lucr. 4.704) had ‘some authority’ according to Nonius (317L aliquos doctos): Adams (1995) 124–5. Coleman (1975) 133; Calboli (2009) 134–6. See also Nisbet and Rudd (2004) on Hor. Carm. 3.18.15–16.

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malodorous as the rustic Grumio of Plaut. Most. 40 (rusticus hircus), a proverbial mala ualde . . . | bestia (69.7–8, cf. Plaut. Bacch. 55).74 The shape of words It has been noted that ‘the semantic concentration of Greek is on the phrasal unit, while that of Latin is on the individual word’.75 The process of Latin domestication of Greek poetry takes a dramatic turn with Catullus’ emphasis on polysyllables. His lines – especially his punchlines – do not discard alliteration and other traditional phrasal effects, but his recourse to long words – diminutives, superlatives, compounds and comparatives – becomes a hallmark of his style. The length of words is relevant in two respects. Careful alternation of long and short words is a notable aspect of Catullus’ rhetorical ability to convey emotiveness by a carefully controlled composition.76 Secondly, long words are the prerogative of poets. Quintilian (Inst. 9.3.63–66) remarked that a four- or five-syllable word ‘gives a very soft effect in poetry’ (in carminibus est praemolle) and should be avoided in oratorical clausulae.77 It is precisely in line end that Catullus favours these words, to the point of inventing new ones, when a certain prosodic shape suits his purpose. Such metrically facilitated, and characteristically Catullan, types of words78 exploit some unexpected suffixation resources. Verbal derivative nouns in -tio conveniently supply (cretic) line endings in the phalaecians and once in glyconics (61.120 iocatio); these words are naturally excluded from hexametrical poetry, but their limited occurrence in tragedy suggests that they were generally not at home in the higher poetic registers. Catullus has the only attestations of argutatio (6.11, perhaps a rhetorical term like its companion in the line, inambulatio: so Thomson ad loc.), irrumatio (21.8), and fututio (32.8).79 The last two may be humorous ad hoc coinages, as often in Plautus,80 others are quasi-technical, as are aestimatio ‘value’ (12.12), uocatio ‘summoning’ (47.7), and ambulatio ‘colonnade’ (55.6). One is rather reminded of conversations in Petronius, whose freedmen speak of uilicatio ‘the management of a country estate’ (69.3), cenatio ‘dining hall’ and cellatio ‘a series of chambers’ (77.4). But what matters here is 74 75 78 79 80

Agnesini (2004) 38–41. The high-register word is fera (Coleman (1999) 53). Catullus uses bestia in contrastive alliteration with bella. 76 Loomis (1972) 139. Cf. Cairns (1974) 3–5 = (2012a) 20–3. 77 Jocelyn (1999) 338. See Traina (1998b) 43–4. Ross (1969) 111–12, with full list n. 267; also Jocelyn (1995) 77–8. E.g. parasitatio (Plaut. Amph. 521), suauisauiatio (Bacch. 116): Jocelyn (1995) 77 with n. 108. Another suffix for funny words (and innuendos) in Plautus is -icus: see Fontaine (2010) 110–12 and 155–7.

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not the register, but the length and phonic effect of words. It would be equally pointless to try and group -osus adjectives under one undifferentiated register;81 these words supply Catullus with another favourite polysyllabic line end (e.g. 1.7 laboriosi, cf. 38.2; 3.11 tenebricosum, 6.4 febriculosi, 7.11 curiosi; 10.2 otiosum, cf. 50.1; 36.13 harundinosam, 41.9 imaginosum).82 Nouns/adjectives in -arius, denoting profession or habit, are strangers in poetry before Martial. The suffix is very productive at the spoken level, as the ubiquitous presence of these words in inscriptions and letters shows.83 Catullus uses them, all in line end of hendecasyllables (14.17 librariorum, 33.21 balneariorum), choliambs (37.16 semitarii), and glyconics (61.131 cinerarius).84 Comparatives achieve a similar rhythm in the phalaecians85 (e.g. absolute comparatives 10.17 beatiorem and 24 cinaediorem; 3.2 uenustiorum, 5.2 seueriorum, 9.10 beatiorum, 12.3 neglegentiorum, 23.18 mundiorem, 27.2 amariores and 4 ebriosioris, 33.3 inquinatiore and 4 uoraciore, 45.15 maior acriorque, 45.25 beatiores and 26 auspicatiorem), but also at 61.84 (pulcrior). In the elegiacs (65.10 amabilior; 72.6 uilior et leuior, 97.4 mundior et melior) a comparable effect is also produced by words of similar sound (66.76 discrucior, 85.2 excrucior), again all at the end of a pentameter. Although comparatives, unlike long words in -tio and -arius, are not restricted to a preferential position in the line or to a specific metre,86 the sheer quantity of them is nevertheless striking. Analytical forms of the comparative are of little interest to this poet: the intensifier magis + positive is rare in Catullus (23.13 aridus, 57.8 uorax, 62.58 carus) compared to his contemporary Lucretius (forty-one examples).87 Finally, diminutives. This feature of Catullus’ diction distinguishes the phalaecians from the short elegiacs, and his long poems are characterised by the juxtaposition of (traditional) long compounds and (new) long diminutives.88 As with other formations, diminutives vary in register. Diversification of nouns includes colloquial words (e.g. 28.2 sarcinulis ‘small 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88

See most recently Adams (2013) 571–4, with extensive literature. Not so much in dactylic poetry (but 64.96 frondosum). Elegiac Ovid would go to town with fivesyllable adjectives in -iosus in pentameters: Kenney (2002) 37. See Adams (1995) 106, (2003) 544–5 on the Vindolanda tablets; Kay (2010) 328–30 on Martial. I discard the only case not in line end, 25.5 †mulier aries†, variously emended to nummularios (or mulierarios). Cf. Jocelyn (1995) 76–7. Comparatives feature in places other than line end in hendecasyllables at 23.12 and 19, 35.15 and 17, 42.18, and 48.5; in iambics at 22.14, 39.16 and 20 (choliambs), and 25.1 and 4; in priapeans at 17.15; in hexameters at 62.20 and 26, 64.215; in elegiacs at 66.28, 67.20 and 21, 68a.28; 68b 114, 117, 148 and 159; 76.1, 80.2, 81.4, 82.3, 4 and 5 (carius), 83.5, 107.6 and 7. Maltby (2016) 349. Ross (1969) 17–26; Jocelyn (1995) 75–6, (1996a) 151; Sheets (2007) 198–203.

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packs’, 23.19 salillo ‘little salt-cellar’, 61.22 ramulis ‘little spray’, 105.2 furcillis . . . eiciunt, idiomatic as in Cic. Att. 16.2.4 furcilla extrudimur), affective (e.g. 28.6, 8 lucellum ‘slight profit’, 2.7 solaciolum, 68.16 lacrimulas), derogatory (10.3 scortillum ‘little slut’, 26.1 uillula ‘small farm’) and false diminutives, namely words that have lost their originally diminutive force and acquired a specialised meaning (13.8 palmula ‘oar blade’, 57.7 lecticulus ‘couch’, 84.5 auunculus ‘maternal uncle’) or replaced the base word altogether, as puella.89 The diminutive puellula is used of erotic pursuits (57.9; 61.57, 182 and 188), as in two comic passages (Ter. Phorm. 81, Pomp. Atell. 67) and nowhere else in Classical Latin. Catullus plays with the ambiguity of uersiculi ‘little verses’ (16.3, 6, and 50.4), and uses libellus affectively for his own poetry (1.1) and contemptuously for that of others (14.12); he invents a new diminutive (25.2 oricilla) to replace a banalised one (oricula, auricula ‘ear lobe’) or to create a graphic effect (67.61 sicula, the ‘little dagger’ of the inadequate husband).90 His interest is further proved by the number of words which are not diminutives, but sound like them, e.g. tremulus (6.11, 17.3, 61.161, 64.128, 68.142), tinnulus (61.13), medulla (35.15), loquella (55.20), querella (66.19), and of course mentula.91 One must differentiate between diminutive nouns and diminutive adjectives, for only the latter are unequivocally a signal of emotive, informal, or comic speech, the three categories being quite distinct. Contrast, for example, the delicacy of Catullus’ uuidulam ‘a little damp’ of the Coma rising from the Ocean (66.63, ὕδασι λουόμενον) with the colloquial integellum ‘pretty untouched’ (15.4, only in Cic. Fam. 9.10.2, ‘as good as new’, Shackleton Bailey), or with the denotative quality of a colour reference (29.8 albulus columbus, as in Varro, Rust. 3.14.4 of snails). The disparaging connotation of uetulus in comedy (e.g. Plaut. Most. 275, cf. Cic. Att. 13. 28.4) is reversed for ‘good old wine’ (27.1 uetuli . . . Falerni). These adjectival forms draw attention to themselves by their length alone, which is enough to fill a clausula (e.g. 15.4 castum . . . et integellum), but often their effect is amplified by pairing with diminutive nouns, comparatives and words of similar sound, in erotic contexts (e.g. 3.18 turgiduli . . . ocelli, 17.15 puella tenellulo | delicatior haedo,92 cf. 55.17 89 90 91 92

The base form puera (Liv. Andr. Trag. 40R) was already obsolete in the early period (Prisc. 2.231.1 dicebant antiquissimi). An otherwise unattested sexual metaphor, probably Catullus’ ad hoc coinage: Adams (1982) 21 and 220. Unlikely to have been a diminutive form of menta ‘spearmint stalk’, notwithstanding Cicero’s wordplay at Fam. 9.22.3: Adams (1982) 9–10. Cf. Laevius fr. 4.2C manu | lasciuola ac tenellula. The double suffixation may have been motivated by the loss of emotive force in tenellus (Plaut. Cas. 107), almost technical for ‘tender’ roots (cf. Varr. Rust. 1.41.1, 1.45.2, 2.7.11).

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lacteolae . . . puellae; 35.14–15 misellae | . . . medullam) or in invectives (e.g. 57.7 uno in lecticulo erudituli ambo). The long poems occasionally use these formations, mostly with pathetic force (63.35 lassula, but 63.56 pupula is ‘the pupil of the eye’; 64.131 frigidulos, 316 aridulis labellis, 331 languidulos). The only examples in elegiacs are 65.6 pallidulum . . . pedem ‘the death-pale foot’ of Catullus’ brother, 69.4 perluciduli . . . lapidis ‘transparent gems’ (not attested elsewhere), and the stereotype miselli for worn-out Victor at 80.7. What these adjectival forms have in common is their general exclusion from high poetry. Famously, Virgil has only one such word in the Aeneid, for childless Dido (4.328 siquis mihi paruulus aula | luderet Aeneas); the very same word marks the young bride’s hope in Catullus (61.209 Torquatus uolo paruulus | . . . dulce rideat).

The Force of Direct Address Approximately 75% of Catullus’ poems are constructed as a message intended for a named addressee and only implicitly (except for 14b.2 lectores eritis) for the reader, who, it has been suggested, is positioned as an ‘outsider who overhears a conversation, perhaps surreptitiously’.93 But the reader is in fact more similar to a stranger reading either a private letter, intended only for the addressee, or a public graffito, designed to be read by all rather than the ‘formal’ addressee (who is often the target of shaming). Catullus and his addressee are frequently named together, just as a Latin letter writer would identify himself early on in the communication, and the display of personal names – a pronounced feature of Pompeian inscriptions – becomes an act of assertion inscribed in the materiality of the text.94 Personal names Only five of Poems 1–60 do not contain a personal address;95 the frequency of this practice decreases in the long poems and elegiacs (thirty-three of Poems 61–116).96 In thirty-five of all poems the vocative takes either the first position in the opening line (mostly in 93 95 96

94 Sheets (2007) 207. Cf. Milnor (2014), esp. 160–4. 41 (but direct address comes at 41.5–8), 57; the vocatives at 10.25, 45.2, 53.5 belong to direct speech embedded in the poem. Poems 61, 62; 65 (line 2 Hortale), 67, 68a, 68b; 69 (2 Rufe), 71 (4 Quinti), 72 (2 Lesbia), 75, 76 (5 Catulle), 77, 79 (2 Catulle), 80, 81, 82, 88, 91, 93, 96 (2 Calue), 98, 99, 102 (4 Corneli), 103, 104

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Poems 1–60),97 or, less frequently, the last (with equal distribution across phalaecians and elegiac epigrams).98 It is in Poems 1–60 that adjectives, appositions, and subordinate clauses may extend the address to fill the entire first line (e.g. 2.1 passer, deliciae meae puellae), overflowing into the next (e.g. 47.1–2 Porci et Socration, duae sinistrae | Pisonis) and, sometimes, beyond (25.1–5 cinaede Thalle, mollior cuniculi capillo | uel . . . | uel . . . | idemque, Thalle, . . .).99 A spectacular case is the choliambic Poem 37, which begins with a two-line address to the salax taberna and ends by turning to the infamous Egnatius, named and qualified across four lines complete with alliteration and typical variation of long and short words (17–19 une de capillatis | cuniculosae Celtiberiae fili | Egnati). The only comparable example of extended address in the elegiac epigrams is of the simplest type, at 77.1, Rufe mihi frustra ac nequiquam credite amici. Catullus’ preferred form of address is by name alone, either cognomen (e.g. Varus, Rufus, Fabullus) or, less frequently, gentilicium (e.g. Cornelius, Furius, Aurelius). The poem dedicated to Cicero (49) is unusual. The address praenomen+gentilicium Marce Tulli (line 2) is unique in Catullus,100 and not only matches the position of Catullus in the next line, but also mimics Cicero’s practice in addressing men of less than noble status.101 In this elaborate expression of thanks, ‘sender’ and ‘recipient’ meet at the centre (49.4 gratias tibi maximas Catullus | agit) of a masterpiece of ironic formality.102 At the other end of the spectrum we have intimate epistolary addresses ‘my dear’: mea (Lesbia, 5.1 and 75.1; uita, 109.1, cf. 45.10; dulcis, 132.1; genetrix, 63.50); and mi (mi Fabulle, 13.1, 28.3; mi Alli 68a.11; mi Catulle 10.25, addressed by Varus’ scortillum), with typically feminine position (notably without a vocative; Goold would restore mi Tappo in line 4), 107 (4 Lesbia), 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116 (6 Gelli). In all unmarked cases the vocative comes in the first line of the poem. 97 The vocative is the first word in the opening line of Poems 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 36, 37, 44, 47, 49, 58; 77, 82. Vocatives take (near-)central position in the first line of Poems 5, 13, 22, 31, 38, 42, 48, 50, 52, 56; 68b, 75, 80, 88, 91, 93, 109, 112, 113. Some phalaecians and elegiac epigrams name the addressee with a simple vocative beyond the first line: 14.2, 15.2, 16.2, 54.2, 54b.2, 69.2, 72.2, 96.2, 101.2; 1.3; 102.4; 29.5 and 9 (cinaede Romule); 116.6. 98 In Poems 3, 4, 32, 40, 48; 98 (cf. line 5), 99, 103, 110, 111; fr. 1 (cf. line 2). Vocatives in line- end within the body of the poem are found at 23.24, 39.9, 64.69 and 133 (Theseu), 68a.11. 99 Expanded opening addresses are found in Poems 2, 11, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 36, 37, 42, 44, 47, 49, 67 (unless 67.1–2 is in fact the closing of 66: Du Quesnay (2012) 181–3). 100 Dickey (2002) 70 with n. 61. 101 Cognomina were aristocratic in origin: Adams (1978); Dickey (2002) 56–73; Woodman (2012b) 133 with n. 11. 102 Cf. Traina (1998c) 55. For parodic features of this poem see also p. 124 above.

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before the personal name.103 The warmest address is provided by iucunde (50.16, to Licinius) and iucundissime (14.2 Calue), with elaborations in the long poems (64.215 gnate . . . iucundior . . . uita, cf. 62.26; 67.1). The register of this adjective is emotive, not informal, if Augustus could use it in a letter to Tiberius (Suet. Aug. 21.4 iucundissime Tiberi) and Pliny the Elder in his dedication to the future emperor Titus (HN. Praef. 1 iucundissime Imperator).104 Direct address is only the most evident aspect of Catullus’ emphasis on personal names. In cases other than the vocative, names feature in the opening line of seventeen poems: 10 (Varus), 22 (Suffenus iste), 34 (Dianae), 39 (Egnati), 41 (Ameana?), 45 (Acmen Septimius), 59 (Bononiensis Rufa); 74 and 89 (Gellius), 78 (Gallus, with triple anaphora in 1, 3 and 5) 79 (Lesbius), 83 and 92 (Lesbia), 86 (Quinctia, contrasted with Lesbia in the same position, line 5), 94, 105, 114 and 115 (Mentula), 95 (Zmyrna, repeated with anaphora and polyptoton in 5 and 6) and 100 (Caelius). At 57.2 the datives Mamurrae . . . Caesarique are delayed to line 2 to follow an abusive reference, just as the vocatives Aureli . . . Furi at 16.2 come after a threat .105 Personal names may fill an entire line (100.1 Caelius Aufilenum et Quintius Aufilenam) or provide a frame for it, as in three notable combinations of direct address and self-reference (6.1 Flaui, delicias tuas Catullo | . . . uelles dicere; 11.1 Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli; 102.4 Corneli, et factum me esse puta Harpocratem). The iconic display of a name at the start of the poem has an epigraphic quality, which may explain this technique recurring in elegiac epigrams (74, 78, 84, 89, 90, 105, 115) more often than in phalaecians (45, 57), choliambs (59) and long poems (63, 64).106 Poems other than elegiac epigrams tend to place personal names last in the line, and they are mostly grand names: the few examples of real, contemporary names (12.15–17, 22.19, 45.21, 97.2) are given a stylised treatment in phalaecians (intertwined polyptoton at 12.15–17, Fabullus | . . . Veranius . . . | . . . Veraniolum . . . Fabullum; artful word order 103

104

105 106

Hofmann and Ricottilli (2003) 296 note that the gender-differentiation is evidenced in comedy (e.g. Ter. Haut. 406 [male speaker] salue animi mi :: [female] o mi Clinia, salue). Over time, however, the difference would disappear in practice, leaving only the intimate/epistolary tone of the possessive (e.g. in Augustus’ private letters: see Adams (2016), 193–4). On mi (originally = Gk. μοι) vs possessive meus (75.1, 87.2, 109.1), the former avoided in poetry except for comedy, see Dickey (2000) 36–45 and (2002) 214–24. On iucundus, stronger than gratus, in Vindolanda tablets, in the letters of Caelius, Cicero and Augustus see Adams (2016) 193, 264; Axelson (1945) 35 n. 18; Krostenko (2001a) 11 n. 22, 286 n. 126; Bellandi (2007) 36 with n. 62; Du Quesnay (2012) 182. I discard the dubious Maeciliam (moecillam) in 113.2. Sheets (2007) 207 speaks of ‘public’ poems, in which the reader is comparable to the viewer of a work of art, inscription or graffito.

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aBbA at 45.21, unam Septimius misellus Acmen).107 As we have seen, line end is the preferential position for words that carry a special sound or significance in these poems as in the long ‘literary’ ones. No word is more special in both respects than ‘Catullus’.108 When not addressing himself in pathetic apostrophes (8.1, 12 and 19, 46.4, 51.13, 52.1 ~ 4, 76.5 end of line, 79.2), the poet draws attention to his own name by placing it always at the end of the line (11.1, 13.7, 14.3, 38.1, 49.4, 56.3, 68a.27, 68b.135, 72.1, 79.3, 82.1). These poems are distributed evenly across metrical forms and exhibit varied stylisation. Enjambment is at work in three phalaecians (13.7, 14.13, 49.4) and in 68a.27 (Veronae turpe Catullo | esse). Otherwise in the elegiacs the name rounds off the syntactical unit at the end of the hexameter, with an effect of naturalness (e.g. 68b.135 etsi uno non est contenta Catullo, 72.1 dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum) or of informality (79.3 sed tamen hic pulcer uendat cum gente Catullum).109 At 82.1 Quinti, si tibi uis oculos debere Catullum | aut aliud si quid carius est oculis the positioning of the two names highlights the close relationship between the two friends; the language is emotive (emphatic word order in 82.3 eripere ei noli; polyptoton of the keyword oculos/oculis and jingly triple repetition of carius and oculis). Illocution Catullus addresses people (gods, places, himself) to make requests, give instructions, or express wishes (or curses). He has one imperative every sixteen lines, nearly twice as often as Horace (one in twenty-six lines); the function of imperatives is only occasionally conventional or ritualistic, as is

107

108

109

Personal names in the line ends of Poems 1–60 are found in five phalaecians (12.15 and 17, Fabullus/ Fabullum; 28.15 Romuli Remique, 45.21 Acmen, 56.6 Dionae, 58b.3 Perseus), one choliambic poem (22.19 Suffenum), and three lyrics (34.6 Iouis, 7 Deliam, and 22 Romulique). The majority of examples come from the long poems (six in elegiacs): 61.16, 30, 86–7, 134, 198 (Venus, cf. 202; 66.90, 68a.10), and 230 (adj. Penelopeo, cf. 64.28 Nereine, 66.66 Lycaonia, 68b.112 Amphitryoniades and compare 68b.74 line-initial Protesilaeam), 63.36 (Cerere); 64.73 (Theseus, cf. 110, 207), 79, 239, 251, 278 (Pelei, cf. 336 and 382), 294, 338, and 383; 65.16 (Battiadae, cf. 116.2), 66.94, 68b.133. Only four cases are found in the elegiac epigrams: 74.4 (Harpocraten), 88.5–6 (Thetis | . . . Oceanus), 95.10 (Antimacho), 97.2 (Aemilio). The cognomen Catullus is of course not a diminutive, just as puella no longer was to his ears; ‘[n]evertheless, Catullus’ frequent use of these words could not be accounted stylistically neutral’: Jocelyn (1995) 75 n. 98. Note ‘sociative’ cum, which returns in more stylised fashion at 64.53 Thesea . . . celeri cum classe, and expressing characteristic at 98.3, ista cum lingua . . . possis | culos et crepidas lingere carpatinas ‘you with that tongue of yours’ (Adams (2013) 296). Kroll calls the construction ‘early Latin’ at 64.53 and ‘vulgar’ at 98.3.

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often the case in Horace.110 Our poet calls for action far more often than he advises against it (caue, noli, ne): only 13% of Catullus’ imperatives are syntactically or semantically negative, as opposed to 30% in Horace.111 Directives other than imperatives include uses of the subjunctive, whether or not accompanied by so-called metadirective expressions (‘make sure’, ‘tell me’), or markers of politeness (‘please’, which may be ironic and/or hostile); greetings, prayers and curses; questions amounting to commands (‘why don’t you . . . ?’). The frequency and distribution are set out in the table below, which does not include volitional future indicatives used, for example, in threats (16.1 and 14 pedicabo . . . irrumabo; 21.8 tangam).112 The bracketed figures in the second column represent the total without the generically motivated occurrences of the wedding songs (61 and 62) and the song of the Parcae in the epyllion (currite . . . currite, fusi, twelve times from 64.327). 1–60 (898 lines)

61–64 (795 lines)

65–116 (646 lines)

42 5 10 4 2 3 11

86 (32) 3 (1) 0 5 (0) 8 (2) 4 (4) 0

15 1 1 3 9 2 2

3

4 (1)

2

10

4 (3)

7

uolo, uelim

5

1 (0)

0

peto, oramus

2

0

0

quaeso, sodes, si uis, etc.

3

0

3

100

115 (55)

45

Directive Expressions Imperative Negative Subjunctive Metadirectives Questions Expressions of necessity Greetings, wishes, curses ‘Please’: Volitional expressions Performative expressions Formulae

110 111 112

ne, noli, caue 1st person (plural) 2nd person 3rd person dic, fac e.g. quin, cur, quid necesse, oportet, gerundive e.g. uale, sis felix, male sit

Traina (1998b) 33–4. Conventional imperatives are of course no less effective: both Homeric poems begin with such addresses: see Fain (2008) 19. Traina (1998b) 34. I adopt the terminology and classification of Risselada (1993), whose study draws on comic dialogue and Cicero’s letters. My count of all directive expressions in Catullus answers, in a humble belated offering, an appeal of my unforgotten teacher (Traina (1998b) 34 n. 39).

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The distribution requires some comment, as figures alone do not adequately reflect what Catullus is doing across the corpus. The high frequency of directive expressions in Poems 1–60 reflects a characteristic of phalaecians, eleven of which begin with a request variously expressed;113 one example is in iambics (25.6 remitte pallium), and three in lyric poems, where the request comes after a long preamble (11.15, 17.7) or in the form of a recrimination (30.2 and 3, with triple anaphoric iam). Twelve out of forty-five total directives in Poems 65–116 come from the long 65-68b; that leaves us with thirty-three instances in the short elegiacs, a mere third of the number in Poems 1–60. Eight of these expressions occur in Poem 76. Catullus’ reflections on his own fides114 yield to questions amounting to commands (10–12 cur te iam amplius excrucies? quin tu . . . offirmas . . . reducis | . . . desinis . . . ?); after considering what action is required in such a predicament (15 hoc est tibi peruincendum, 16 hoc facias), Catullus turns to the gods for consideration and deliverance (19 aspicite, 20 eripite) in a respectful, yet forceful request (17 si uestrum est misereri). Before returning to the theme of fides and requesting the reward due to it (26 reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea), Catullus rejects the option of asking (23 non illud quaero) that Lesbia might change her mind, or her nature (an even more unfulfillable wish, 24 quod non potis est), and states his wish for himself simply ‘to be well’ (25 ipse ualere opto): a small thing, it seems, expressed by the most conventional word of greeting (ualere). The frequency of directive expressions contributes to the depth and complexity of this poem, giving readers the impression of an expressive elaboration of Poem 73, with its one-word initial exhortation desine. The other short elegiacs exhibit similar pragmatic brevity (e.g. 103.1 aut sodes mihi redde decem sestertia . . . 3 aut . . . desine quaeso | leno esse), if not mere formulae (e.g. 92.2, 4 dispeream nisi; 100.8 sis felix . . . sis . . . potens). In this respect – and many others – Poem 76 is unique among the epigrams. That personal address and directive verbs characterise Poems 1–60 is further confirmed by the frequency of the combination of the two features in exordia. A vocative accompanies the imperative in Poems 3, 8, 32 and 42, the exhortation of 5.1 (uiuamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus) and the advice of 8.1 (8.1 miser Catulle, desinas ineptire); an evaluative question, a vocative, 113

114

Imperative: 3.1, 27.2, 32.3 (1 amabo), 36.2, 42.1, 43.1 (salue); subjunctive: 5.1 (uiuamus . . . atque amemus), 8.1 (desinas); volitional: 24.4 (mallem . . . dedisses), 35.2 (uelim . . . dicas); interrogative: 33.5–6. But fides, just as amicitia, urbanitas, lepos in Catullus’ vocabulary, is ‘often double edged, with key words having both a literary and a more broadly social significance’: Nelis (2012) 10, with ref. to Krostenko (2001b) and (2007).

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and a directive question amount to half of Poem 52 (lines 1 ~ 4 quid est, Catulle? quid moraris emori?). In some cases the imperative follows a direct question, which is another characteristic opening of Poems 1–60,115 as in many Hellenistic epigrams as well as two Pindaric odes (Olymp. 2 and Isthm. 7).116 Directive addresses feature much less in the short elegiacs: 69.1–2 noli admirari . . . Rufe, 73.1 desine, 90.1 nascatur; only Poem 103 amounts to a sustained request throughout its two couplets. The epigrams seem to favour an argumentative ‘If’ exordium, which is curiously paralleled in contemporary Ciceronian oratorical practice:117 si quis/qui (71, 76), si quicquam (96, 102, 107), with vocative of personal name (82, 108). Of all Poems 1–60, only 14b begins (perhaps) in this way.

Epilogue The loss of Lucilius makes Catullus the first author of Latin personal poetry whose work survives (almost) complete. Even if we had the whole thirty books of the satirist’s sermones ac ludi, it is unlikely that we would find in them – judging from the extant fragments – anything approaching the reasons for Catullus’ unique place in the heart of readers of every generation. Some correspondences may nevertheless be detected. Just as in the case of his predecessor’s satire, Catullus’ poetry is informed by a pronounced subjectivity, by variety of themes, metres, styles and linguistic registers, guided by an extraordinary ear for literary and spoken Latin. But if Lucilius was unanimously recognised (or constructed) as the father of Roman satire by his classical successors, Catullus – lyric and iambic, epigrammatic, epic and elegiac Catullus – had a pervasive influence on all genres of Latin poetry. Poets often have a particular word that may be seen as emblematic of their authorial persona. This tendency is most clearly marked in poets who allow a strong personal voice to be not only the medium but also largely the unifying element of their verse. Lucilius, who anticipated Catullus in the obsessive inclusion of his own name in his poetic diction,118 seems to have had a preference for the adjective improbus, 115 117

118

116 1, 9, 28, 29, 30, 33, 37, 40, 47, 52, 60. See Fain (2008) 18 with n. 10. 14 out of 58 (c. 25%) of Cicero’s surviving speeches begin with si (Div. Caec., Caec., Arch., Red. Sen., Sest., Vatin., Cael., Prov. Cons., Balb., Rab. Post., Phil. 14) or etsi (Rab. Perd., Mil., Phil. 12), notably not from the earliest decade 80–71 bc, and clustering in the mid 50s. On ‘epistolary’ etsi (65.1) as the first word of Catullus’ dedication to Hortalus (and of over thirty letters of Cicero) see Woodman (2012b) 132–3. Lucil. 254, 366, 580, 688, 712, 774, 822M.

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a ‘bad’ person:119 ‘immoral’ (385, 1224, 749 M), ‘dishonest’ (1283 M), ‘disreputable’ (394 M), ‘shameless’120 (417, 1024, 1066 M); satire is about infamous characters who do not conform to standards; neither does satire, for that matter (821, 1026 M of Lucilius himself). If an adjective jumps off the pages of Catullus, that is miser, which recurs thirty-one times in the corpus,121 from the first self-address of 8.1 (miser Catulle) to the farewell to his brother at 101.2 and 6. This adjective is more revealing than one of Catullus’ ‘neoteric’ words, mollis (fifteen examples).122 Before Catullus, miser had its poetic home firmly in the comic register, with over 300 occurrences in Plautus and over 100 in the smaller corpus of Terence; but the word suits also pathetic contexts, which explains its occasional use in the tragedies of Ennius123 and some of the uses in Catullus. Our poet is now the wretched love-sick adulescens of comedy,124 a fool (8.1)125 whose entire life is affected (8.10 nec miser uiue);126 love itself is wretched (91.2, 99.15), a disease: miser is Catullus’ personal signature in his translation of Sappho at 51.5.127 In the long poems, context elevates comic expressions of the type perii miser to the pathetic self-apostrophes of Attis (63.61 miser a! miser) and Ariadne (64.71 a misera). The diminutive conveys sympathy (35.14, 45.21) or scorn for the unhappy lover (40.1, 80.7); but Catullus, who knows very well that misellus is formulaic for the departed (3.16),128 does not use it of his own elegiac bereavement (68b.93 ei misero fratri, 101.2 miseras . . . inferias). In short, miser is an emotive word. The love elegists of the following generation would turn it into a generic catchword; Catullus explores its every nuance. 119

120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128

The term qualifies a person guilty of misconduct in legal texts from the Republican period (e.g. CIL 12.698) to late antiquity (TLL 7.1.690.29); but Lucilius often uses it as Plautus did before him, simply as a term of abuse. In this sense alone in Catullus, in two references to reproachable sexual behaviour (57.1 and 10; 68.126). Cf. McCarren (1977) 111–12. Ten in the longer poems (63.38 and 44; 64.88, 129, 293, 311 and 318; (elegiacs) 65.21, 67.33, 68a.5, 68b.70), but also in the variously sexual contexts of 25.1, 45.16 and 80.4; diminutive forms are derogatory molliculi (uersiculi, 16.4 and 8) and mollicellas (manus, 25.10). Perhaps also Naevius, unless 134R = ROL inc. 17 is a comic fragment. E.g. Plaut. Asin. 617 miser est homo qui amat; Ter. Eun. 98 misera prae amore. See also Gaisser (2009) 56. Plaut. Cas. 366 miser errat; Hor. Sat. 1.2.64 miser . . . deceptus. E.g. Plaut. Amph. 1023 ut . . . uiuas aetatem miser; Rud. 520; Ter. Hec. 566; Hor. Sat. 1.2.21 Terenti | fabula quem (sc. patrem) miserum gnato uixisse fugato | inducit. Morisi (1999) 120. On the medical language describing the physical effects at 51.5–6 see Woodman (2006) 610–11. CIL 12.2525 heic situs misellus beimus (= bimus ‘two-year old’); Petron. 65.10 (with Schmeling (2011) 272); cf. Hofmann and Ricottilli (2003) 380–1; Dickey (2002) 186–8.

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Genre in the literary system is comparable to register in the system of language: an agreed convention. Style is an individual matter. The poetry of Catullus reveals an individual capable of moving between genres and registers while remaining distinctly recognisable. What I am advocating for Catullus is stylistic unity within generic variation, both remarkable in their own right. Here’s my pennyworth to the perennial critical dilemma about ‘two Catulluses’ – the natural born poet of hic et nunc, and the Callimachean poeta doctus.129

Further Reading A comprehensive discussion remains Ross (1969), with its detailed analysis of Catullus’ poetic vocabulary (compounds, diminutives, adjectives, interjections, connectives and particles), metre and word order. Poems 1–60 receive special attention in Loomis (1972), a systematic study of patterns of vocabulary selection and word order, and in Jocelyn (1996a, 1996b, 1999), who analyses the linguistic distinctions between lyric metres, iambics and hendecasyllables, and argues for a deliberate design underlying the arrangement of poems in the collection. Some differences in syntax and word order between Poems 1–60 and 69–116 are analysed in Evrard (2005, in French). Sheets (2007) gives a comprehensive concise overview of Catullus’ characteristic vocabulary and rhythm. Recent approaches to Catullus’ vocabulary of urbanitas and lepos (including obscenities) and its relation to neoteric poetics (whichever way it may be defined) include Krostenko (2001a), (2007), Morelli (2012, in Italian), and Bellandi (2007, in Italian). Insightful comments on generic, stylistic and structural aspects are in Traina (1998b and 1998c, in Italian), in Thomson’s commentary (1997, with bibliography on each poem), and in Du Quesnay and Woodman (2012). For figures of repetition the fundamental reference work is Wills (1996); readers of French and Italian may usefully consult Evrard-Gillis (1976) and Facchini Tosi (1983). No comprehensive study of Catullus’ reuse of early Latin material is available in English except for Zetzel’s analysis of Catullus’ ‘poetic of allusion’ with reference to Ennius (1983/2007); in other languages, Agnesini (2004, on Plautus and 2012, on Ennius) mark an advance on Heusch (1954) and Granarolo (1971). Likewise, a systematic treatment of Catullus’ convergence with colloquial and 129

See Du Quesnay and Woodman (2012) 255–72.

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non-literary Latin is yet to be written; the present chapter draws extensively on the numerous comments on Catullus’ register, morphology, syntax and word order in Adams’ studies of informal Latin (2013 and 2016), non-literary Latin (1992, 1995, 2003), and specific features of vocabulary, syntax and word order (1978, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1999, and forthcoming).

chapter 7

Catullus and Metre David Butterfield

Among the many accolades that critics bestow on Catullus, one is often absent: metrical revolutionary. This is strange, for we know of no other Roman poet who combined so many poetic forms across so many genres for so many purposes. In what, by other standards, was a brief poetic career – perhaps not even a decade long – we find no fewer than fourteen different metrical forms, two of which may well have been his own innovation. And far from this being an incoherent medley of disparate metres for variety’s sake, it emerges as a coherent and inventive collection curated by a masterful hand.1 The purpose of this chapter is to survey the range of Catullus’ deployment of metrical forms and to demonstrate the nuanced flair of his practice.2 It has long been observed that Catullus’ corpus of poems, as transmitted to us, displays a tripartite arrangement by metre and form: (i) the first 60 poems (1–60),3 the so-called ‘polymetrics’, which comprise a wide array of metres; (ii) nine longer poems (61–68b), the carmina maiora, which again show a broad range of metres and generic inheritance; (iii) finally, 49 epigrams (69–116) in elegiac metre.4 It is almost certainly deliberate that the carmina maiora are arranged with the five elegiac poems (65–68b)

1 2

3

4

For a balanced assessment of the history of scholarship on Catullus’ collection and its arrangement, see Skinner (2007b); also Du Quesnay in this volume. A striking summary of Catullus as metrical virtuoso was given by Sedgwick (1950) 65: ‘No poet gives a stronger impression of complete ease, and mastery of verse-technique, from the simplest hendecasyllables to the galliambics of 63 and the sustained artistry of 61 – to many the very summit of Latin lyric.’ Throughout this chapter I use the Oxford text of R. A. B. Mynors, unless otherwise stated. I treat 2b, 14b and 51b as separate poems, fragments of larger works (lost or never completed), but regard 54.6–7 as part of the same poem as the preceding lines; 19 and 20 are, of course, non-Catullian accretions, whereas ‘Poem 18’, preserved only by Terentianus Maurus (6.2755–8K) and now designated as ‘fragment 1’, is a four-line extract from a lost priapean poem by Catullus, which presumably did not form part of the libellus: see below pp. 152–3. I treat 78b as a separate poem, but regard 95.9–10 as part of the same poem as the preceding lines.

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placed after other long poems of various metres (61–64), thereby providing a smoother segue into the epigrams.

Poems 1–60 Let us begin with the first section, which has been convincingly analysed as Catullus’ own libellus (so introduced at 1.1) – albeit with some subsequent editorial finessing. The arrangement of these poems by metre seems relatively haphazard: 41 poems in phalaecian hendecasyllables (1–3, 5–7, 9–10, 12–16, 21, 23–4, 26–8, 32–3, 35–6, 38, 40–3, 45–50, 53-8b), 5/6 poems in other aeolic metres (sapphics 11, 51, 51b?; greater asclepiads 30; glyconics 34; priapeans 17), 12 poems in iambic metres (scazons 8, 22, 31, 37, 39, 44, 59–60; iambic trimeters 52; pure iambic trimeters 4, 29; iambic tetrameters catalectic 25).5 The array is remarkable – and the various theories advanced about Catullus’ artistic juxtaposition and patterning of the polymetric poems have failed to show metrical form to be an organising principle. We are able to gesture towards Laevius – active in the generation immediately preceding – as a possible inspiration for Catullus’ metrical freedom: throughout his 32 extant fragments we find twelve metres deployed, including iambic, dactylic and anapaestic systems, scazons, and hendecasyllables.6 Among Catullus’ contemporaries, too, metrical diversity was frequent. To judge by the scanty scraps surviving from contemporary poets, it is clear that metrical variety was a hallmark of the neoterics: Calvus and Cinna composed in hexameters, elegiacs, hendecasyllables, and scazons; in addition to these verse-forms, we have evidence that Calvus also deployed glyconics and the iambic tetrameter catalectic. Catullus’ metrical fluency and freedom seems to match with the experimentation of his age. Wilamowitz soundly observed that ‘Catullus did not ask whether he might do so, when in the creative mood of the moment this or that form of Greek poetry came to his lips.’7 Indeed, the term famously coined by Wilhelm Kroll, Kreuzung der Gattungen (‘Mixing of Genres’),8 is best exemplified by Catullus among all extant Roman poets. 5 6 7

8

The structure and workings of each of these metres will be set out in the discussion that follows. Courtney (2003) 118 has spoken of Laevius’ ‘bizarre novelty, which appears both in metre and diction’. ‘Catull fragte eben nicht danach, ob er es dürfte, wenn ihm in der schöpferischen Stimmung des Augenblicks diese oder jene Form der griechischen Poesie auf die Lippen kam’ (WilamowitzMoellendorf (1913) 293). See Kroll (1924) 202–24.

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Catullus’ most frequent metre – the phalaecian hendecasyllable ( × × – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – ⏑ – × ) – is his most free-flowing and versatile. This verse-form, which combines trochaic and dactylic rhythms (the technical term for which is logaoedic), spans a wide range of contexts and purposes over his 41 compositions (552 verses) in the metre: love poetry (5, 7, 32, 45, 48), epigrammatic play (2, 3, 6, 50), casually conversational pieces (9, 10, 12–13, 23, 24, 38, 53, 56), literary criticism (1, 14, 35–6), and even invective (16, 21, 33, 40, 57). The degree to which this metre had been deployed before Catullus is relatively unclear: it cropped up in Sappho and Anacreon, and was used occasionally in tragedy (e.g. Soph. Phil. 1140), but perhaps did not find its own stride until the Hellenistic period, when the little-known Phalaecus (late 4th cent. bc) apparently deployed it especially often in successive verses (κατὰ στίχον). It seems that its other common form, where it alternates with another metre (e.g. Call. Epig. 38 Pf., with catalectic iambic dimeters, and 40 Pf., with Archilocheans) did not appeal.9 The hendecasyllable, whatever the status it held in Alexandrian poetry as a whole, was transported first into the Latin tradition by two poets of the preceding generation – Laevius (32C/31B) and Varro (49 Bimarcus, 565–8 Virgula diuina Astbury) had made use of it. But it seems to have been Catullus who worked it into a supple and polished verseform.10 It may seem that the arrangement of Catullus’ hendecasyllables throughout his libellus (however arido (arida Mynors) modo pumice expolitus: cf. 1.2) is haphazard. However, it is possible to observe some changes in practice. Catullus retained the freedom of deploying all three possibilities in the so-called ‘aeolic base’ (××, the two opening syllables, one of which must be long), namely a spondee (– –), trochee (– ⏑) or iamb (⏑ –).11 However, his practice in this regard was by no means random; in fact, Catullus’ metrical habits allow us to discern distinct phases of composition. In an important article, Skutsch (1969) analysed Catullus’ treatment of the aeolic base. His starting observation was significant: in Catullus’ celebrated lyric epithalamium (Poem 61), which consists of five-line glyconic stanzas with a pherecratean close,12 the first 105 lines begin only with trochees; in 9 10

11 12

But see n. 21 below for an interesting, if unlikely, possibility. Martial, for instance, was left in no doubt as to its central importance to Roman casual poetry: after elegiacs (79%), hendecasyllables (15%) are the second most common metre in his 1,561 epigrams. It seems, too, that the dominant presence of the hendecasyllabic metre determined how subsequent Roman readers spoke of the libellus (or a collection very similar to it): Seneca Rhetor (Contr. 7.4.7) cites Catull. 53.5 with the reference in hendecasyllabis, as does Charisius (1.97.13K) 42.5; less revealingly, Priscian (Inst. 1.22) cites 2b.3 with the phrase inter hendecasyllabos Phalaecios. A pyrrhic (⏑ ⏑) was always excluded from this position, and resolution was not permitted. For more on this metrical form, see pp. 152–3 below.

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the last 130 lines (incorporating the eight lines lost in lacunae), a spondee occupies the first two syllables on fifteen occasions (12%). Disregarding the exceedingly unlikely possibility that this is the result of chance, or that it results from the pursuit of a now undetectable artistic effect, much the most natural explanation is that Catullus allowed himself more variation – or less rigidity – as this probably early composition13 progressed. Skutsch then turned to consider the phalaecian hendecasyllables of the polymetric poems, which emerged to show an analogous development: Poems 2 to 26 (263 lines) have spondaic bases throughout, with only three (1.1%) exceptions (all iambic);14 Poems 27 to 60 (279 lines), by contrast, have 63 (22.6%) non-spondaic bases (33 iambic, 30 trochaic), i.e. exceptions are over 20 times more common.15 Again, the natural conclusion is that Catullus (or a very well-informed editor) arranged these poems in roughly chronological order. It seems a safe assumption (notwithstanding some subsequent alterations)16 that the latter group is the later in composition, by which point Catullus felt free to adopt and adapt more metrical licences.17 It fits neatly with this theory that Poem 1, the ten introductory verses to the collection, follows the practice of Poems 27–60, with four (40%) lines exhibiting non-spondaic bases (one iambic, three trochaic): as a result, outside Poems 2–26, there are 67 exceptions in 289 lines (23.2%). The interesting consequences of Skutsch’s observation for analysing Catullus’ libellus may be set aside for the purposes of this chapter.18 There is evidence that, in his latest extant hendecasyllabic poetry, Catullus was able to push his metrical inventiveness into new grounds. In Poems 55 and 58b (the latter perhaps an unfinished fragment, rather than a complete poem damaged in transmission),19 he allowed 13 14 15 16

17

18

19

Neudling (1955) 119 suggests an approximate date of 60 B.C. Two (3.17, 7.2) involve forms of tuus; in the other instance (2.4) Catullus could have written atque for et and avoided the irregularity, but he seemingly did not. Although of small evidential value, the hendecasyllables attested in Laevius and Varro (see above) all begin with a spondaic base (– – in lieu of ××). Some curation has complicated this picture: Poem 46, for instance, was composed before 10, and matches the earlier group by presenting a spondaic aeolic base throughout. The other hendecasyllabic poems of 27–60 that display only spondaic bases are 28, 33, 43, 48, 56, 57, 58b. By ‘licence’ I mean a regulated irregularity, i.e. a departure from a basic metrical scheme permitted in specific circumstances. A common example is the placement of a single short syllable in a position where the basic scheme requires a single long syllable, or a single long syllable where the basic scheme normally requires two short syllables. It remains possible that the second section covered Poems 27 to 50, that 51 was the closing poem of the collection, and that 52–60 were posthumous additions of later poems not included in Catullus’ original libellus. The reference in Poem 55 to the porticus Pompei (l.6) places it after 55 bc; given that 58b concerns the same Camerius, it very probably belongs to a similar period.

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a decasyllabic variant of the phalaecian hendecasyllable: the fourth and fifth syllables were contracted into a single longum.20 In 55, this licence occurs thirteen times (59%) in 22 lines (with hints of a preference for alternating the two lines);21 in 58b, it is rarer, twice (20%) in ten lines.22 No specific explanation for this variation seems available, beyond Catullus wanting to craft a form that broke the stichic simplicity (and perhaps in other hands monotony) of hendecasyllables. Had he lived longer, perhaps this and other metres would have exhibited yet bolder innovations? The picture presented by Catullus’ iambic metres reveals great variety once more. The first thing that strikes a reader of these metres is that Catullus rejected in its entirety the iambic senarius of early Roman drama, which dominates the comedies of Plautus and Terence. He chose instead to revert directly to the Greek iambographers for form as well as content. Given its own dramatic associations, however, the standard iambic trimeter is used in only one poem (52) of a mere four lines (on which see below). The most frequent of his iambic metres is rather the scazon (or ‘choliambic’), i.e. the iambic trimeter with a long occupying the penultimate position, giving it a dragged molossian close of three successive longa (× – ⏑ – | × – ⏑ – | ⏑ – – –). This verse-form had a long history stretching back to its supposed inventor Hipponax (6th cent. bc). Catullus does not, however, follow his practice – and that of Callimachus, Theocritus, Herodas and other Hellenistic poets – in also permitting a fifth-foot spondee. Resolution (i.e. dividing a long element into two short syllables) is noticeably rare in Catullus’ scazons, occurring on only three occasions (1st foot 37.5, 2nd foot 22.19, 3rd foot 59.3) throughout 195 verses (1.5%, i.e. once every 65 verses). This greater strictness in metre was coupled with greater freedom in the generic associations of the metre, a trend first seen within Hellenistic poetry. While Catullus does use scazons for invective against named individuals, such as Egnatius (39), Rufa (59) and the poet’s own defeatist persona (8), he could also deploy the metre without any

20

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22

For instance, 55.1 oramus, si forte non molestum est. At 55.10, I take the opening word Cămēriūm to scan as a bacchiac (⏑ – –, the i being consonantal), although the name is naturally quadrisyllabic (Căme˘rı˘ūm, as at 58b.7); Catullus deploys the same licence with conubium, which probably scans as a molossus (– – –) at 62.57. It seems too extreme to demand regular alternation throughout the poem, as Goold did in his 1983 text, by reading Parthenius’ uideo for uidi at 8 and positing the loss of a hendecasyllabic line after 13. Simultaneously, Goold inserted 58b into 55 (before line 14), creating the oddity of a hendecasyllabic centre to a poem that supposedly opens and closes with alternating hendecasyllabic and decasyllabic lines. This difference in metrical freedom is a further reason to reject the insertion of 58b into 55 (see n. 21).

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strong element of rebuke.23 Poem 44, for instance, is a gently jocular reflection (addressed to a Tiburtine villa) on the frigid – and cold-inducing – style of Sestius. Poem 31, more remarkably, is a joyous paean to Sirmio and its charms. Commentators, left scratching their heads, have wondered whether the metre’s rhythm – with its closing dragged feet – reflected Catullus’ own weary progress home.24 Catullus’ simplest deployment of any metre is also one of his most striking. In two poems (4 and 29) he deployed the iambic trimeter, not in its standard scheme (as Poem 52, on which see below), but in a form that is nowhere attested in earlier literature (Latin or Greek): all six feet of the line appear as pure iambs (⏑ –), without recourse to ancipitia (i.e. doubtful positions, where long syllables could stand for short) and resolution.25 It is fitting that the first of these poems in an apparently Greeker-than-Greek rhythm is avowedly Greek in character: Catullus writes of his small sailing boat (or even a wooden model), the phaselus, and recounts its Greek origin and travel westward to a limpidus lacus. The poem flaunts its Hellenic origins with an abundance of Greek proper nouns;26 remarkably, it even appropriates Greek syntax in line 2 (after Parthenius’ certain emendation) by deploying the nominative and infinitive construction in a selfreferential indirect statement. In prosody, too, the Greek licence of ‘lengthening’ a final open short vowel before a mute-cum-liquid occurs once (9 Propontidā trucemue), and is even extended to f, an emphatically Latin phoneme (18 impotentiā freta). This same licence, which was presumably well attested across the full spectrum of Greek iambographers, is repeated 23

24

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26

At a push, ten of Catullus’ twelve iambic poems can be alleged to involve some kind of rebuke or reprimand: outside scazons, see Poems 25 (iambic tetrameters catalectic against Thallus) and 52 (iambic trimeters against Nonius and Vatinius). But Catullus did not limit his invective to iambic metres: many of his hendecasyllabic poems are just as aggressive in their attacks. Curiously, it is within hendecasyllabic poems that Catullus makes three references to his iambi (36.5, 40.2, 54.6; note too the hendecasyllabic fr. 3: at non effugies meos iambos), which seems to mean ‘poetry of attack’ rather than a metre-specific term. Elsewhere he refers to the metre as hendecasyllabi (12.10, 42.1) in contexts where their purpose is aggressive. A good case has been made by Fuhrer (1994) that Catullus’ freedom in this regard was inspired by Hellenistic poetry: particularly influential was Callimachus’ seventeen Iambi (i.e. thirteen iambi proper and four melic poems), which were treated by the Romans as a single work comprising multiple genres and metres. Ian Du Quesnay has suggested to me that some influence could have come from the tradition of mimiambi (or mimetic epigram), perhaps specifically the stock persona of a traveller returning home. It is unknowable whether Catullus assumed, as metricians such as Terentianus Maurus (6.2181– 2204K) and Marius Victorinus (6.80–1K) did, that the origins of the iambic trimeter were purely iambic; if he knew of no such predecessor, perhaps he worked up this artificially pared-back form of the metre as a tour de force of artistic innovation. 6 Hadriatici, 7 Cycladas, 8 Rhodum, Thraciam, 9 Propontida, Ponticum, 11 Cytorio, 13 Amastri, Pontica, Cytore, 27 Castor, Castoris.

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in the other purely iambic poem (29.4 ultimā Britannia) but does not feature elsewhere in Catullus.27 Several commentators have taken the hypnotic lilting effect of perfectly alternating shorts and longs to reflect the boat’s gentle rocking, or the rhythmic creaking of its mast. A much more curious case is presented by Poem 29, a vigorous attack28 on Mamurra, Caesar’s praefectus fabrum in Gaul. Once some minor and obvious corruptions are removed,29 there remain only two cases that defy the metre’s challenging strictures. One is a line that is manifestly corrupt – 20, hunc Gallie et timet Britannie – where it is poor critical method to defend the anomalous opening syllable alongside Latin that is unconstruable. The other is line 3, which begins with the proper noun Mamurram. It is linguistically more probable that the first syllable of this name is long, as later attested by Horace (Sat. 1.5.37) and Martial (9.60.1, 10.4.11). Are we to suppose that Catullus somehow understood the first syllable to be short, or rather that he mischievously chose to attack an individual whose unmetrical name compelled him to stand-out like an ill-placed misfit in otherwise cultivated surroundings? At any rate, these two bold experiments in pure iambics proved to be a success: not only did Horace a generation later experiment with further combinations of pure iambic lines in Epodes 14 and 15 (dimeters) and 16 (trimeters), but the author of Catalepton 10 took pains to parody Poem 4 with exquisite care. Poem 25 is an iambic composition unique in the collection: its thirteen verses are so-called septenarii, i.e. iambic tetrameters catalectic (× – ⏑ – | × – ⏑ – | × – ⏑ – | ⏑ – –: the suppression of the penultimate syllable of the line renders the line ‘catalectic’). In the context of Thallus’ boorish napkintheft, the verse-form presents a jauntier feel, reminiscent as it is of Aristophanic comedy.30 Nevertheless, Catullus is still careful to preserve the underlying iambic rhythm: six (46%) of the poem’s 13 lines consist entirely of iambs; of the poem’s 91 possible iambic sedes, only nine (9.7%) are occupied by spondees. No third-foot spondee is admitted, but in both halves of the line Catullus felt that a spondee could be deployed more freely: we find them seven times in the first foot, and twice in the fifth.31 27 28 29 30 31

That it was, even in pure iambics, an occasional licence is shown by lines 4.4 (nequisse˘praeterire) and 8 (horridamque˘ Thraciam). Quintilian (9.4.141) cites the poem as an exemplary case of how iambic poetry can contain aspera . . . et maledica. 17 prima Puccius : primum A; 19 amnis δ : amni A; 23 o potissimi Mueller : op(p)ulentissime A. The metre was perhaps also used by Calvus in fr. 21C/37H/21B. If reglutina in 9 is scanned with a long first syllable (cf. the second syllable of catagraphos in 7 and Raven (1965) 25), the figure rises to ten spondees overall, with three in the fifth.

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Diaeresis (i.e. word-ending coinciding with the end of a metron) at the mid-point of the verse is observed throughout. The lyric metres deployed elsewhere in the polymetrics tell a complex story. We may begin with the two – or three?32 – poems in sapphic stanzas. In the case of 51, his celebrated translation of Sappho fr. 31, it is perfectly natural that Catullus chose to maintain the metre of the original: it is probable that the very name he chose for his beloved – Lesbia – sprang from the appropriation of a verse-form honed on Lesbos to convey his blossoming infatuation. The final stanza, if indeed a separate poem 51b, is too brief to tell us anything about its origin: it could have been an unfinished fragment placed after 51 because of its metrical kinship (cf. the hendecasyllabic fragments 2b and 14b). But Catullus’ other sapphic poem (11) is astounding. Catullus here, in what is evidently a late composition (i.e. after the summer of 55), marks the brutal close of his relationship with Lesbia by returning to the metre where things began. The reader senses that something is going on in the background, as the first three-and-a-half carefully wrought stanzas serve as a cheerful welcome to Furius and Aurelius, ready to join him on any globe-trotting jaunt. The last three stanzas take a sharp turn and the lighting changes dramatically: omnia haec, quaecumque feret uoluntas caelitum, temptare simul parati, pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta. cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis, quos simul complexa tenet trecentos, nullum amans uere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens:

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20

nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati ultimi flos, praeter eunte postquam tactus aratro est.

The high-flown language of geographical learning is suddenly abandoned for the furious realism of Catullus’ attack on the whorish Lesbia. Lest we somehow miss the point that mea puella (15) is Lesbia, in the following stanza Catullus redeploys the rare word identidem (19), in the identical metrical sedes as at 51.3. Not only is the metre thrown back in her face, but 32

I am tentatively inclined to regard 51.13–16 as a separate poem 51b, posthumously placed after the preceding stanzas of Sapphic sapphics.

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Catullus’ deployment of it is indicative: in the first four stanzas, no use is made of synaphea (i.e. the treatment of adjacent metrical units as one) between lines, except when describing the far-flung Britons (ulti |mosque Britannos) at 11–12. In lines 19 and 22, however, Catullus deploys elision at line end to great effect: at 19–20 (the final lines of the stanza), Lesbia is described as ‘breaking the balls’ of everyone, lopping off omni(um) ilia; at 22–3, the two central lines of the stanza, as Catullus compares his failed love to the cutting of a flower by the plough, the meadow (prat(i)) is cut short by ultimi of 23. Catullus’ composition of this metre carefully reflects the original: a short syllable is allowed in the fourth position of the sapphic hendecasyllable (– ⏑ – × – ⁝ ⏑ : ⏑ – ⏑ – ×).33 He is also careful to preserve the strong or weak caesura after its fifth or sixth syllables: of 30 such lines, 19 (⁝ 63%) have strong, and 8 (: 27%) weak caesurae. As a sign of Catullus’ diligent handling of this aspect, we may note that in Poem 11 the change of tone in the fourth stanza is marked by three successive weak caesurae, the first in the poem. The four apparently non-caesural cases occur in Poem 11, but all show poetic artistry: in three cases the caesura is felt at a morphological word-break (6 sagitti|feros, 7 septem|geminus, 23 praeter|eunte); the last instance, Rhen(um) horribile, if the text is sound, requires a strong quasicaesura to be felt after the elision. Poem 30, in which Catullus decries the broken bonds of friendship, is composed in greater asclepiads (× × – ⏑ ⏑ – ⁝ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⁝ – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ×), which can be regarded as the extension of the glyconic (× × – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ×) by adding two choriambs (– ⏑ ⏑ –) after the aeolic base (× ×).34 The verse-form was used by Sappho and Alcaeus, but became commoner in Hellenistic poetry (e.g. Callimachus fr. 400 Pf., Theocritus 28, 30), when it was used with evident success by the eponymous Asclepiades (2nd cent. bc). Although Catullus keeps the initial base spondaic throughout, he does not insist on diaeresis after the first and second choriambs (see lines 4, 7, 8), as Horace later did in his three odes of this metre (1.11, 18, 4.10).35 Several commentators, most notably Fordyce (1961), have felt that Catullus struggles with the difficult metre; if this is an early poem, perhaps he subsequently decided to leave asclepiadic verse aside.

33 34 35

Nevertheless, it occurs in only three instances, at 11.6, 11.15 and 51b.13 (Cătulle). Horace, who deployed sapphics in 25 of his Odes, never admitted this licence. The name glyconic derives from a putative Glycon, who quite probably never existed. At line 11 we should read (after Muretus) at di meminere, at meminit Fides. See Lyne (2002) 602 = (2007) 285.

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Two other poems remain from the polymetrics, both glyconic in character. Poem 34, addressed to Diana, is strikingly different from the rest of the libellus by virtue of its sincere hymnic tone. Its four-line stanzas comprise three glyconics with a catalectic glyconic – i.e. pherecratean – close (× × – ⏑ ⏑ – ×).36 It is not impossible that Catullus was here working from a Greek original,37 for the addressee, Diana, reflects Greek associations with Artemis, Hecate and the moon. Since the glyconic is not attested in Hellenistic occasional poetry,38 Catullus’ practice presumably reflects earlier compositions, such as Anacreon’s hymn to Artemis (348 Page). The aeolic base is unusually free: the ten (42%) spondees are outnumbered by twelve (50%) trochees and two iambs (8%);39 it is unclear whether this phenomenon is to be explained by the poem’s Greek lyric origins or rather by its being a late composition. Synaphea is observed throughout, including verse-end elision at 11–12 and 22–3. The final poem to mention is among the oddest: Poem 17, which fuses the mockery of a rickety bridge with castigation of an inattentive husband. It is composed in priapeans, i.e. glyconic dimeters catalectic, where the latter glyconic is truncated into a pherecratean: × × – ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ – | × × – ⏑ ⏑ – ×. This metre is first attested in Sappho and Anacreon but became associated with priapic contexts by Hellenistic poets. Catullus presumably deployed the metre to give the poem inescapably sexual undertones: if the husband can’t keep his act up, his wife will continue seeking pleasures elsewhere. If a metre is to bear the baggage of erectile dysfunction, the priapean is the natural option. Synaphea is observed between the two halves of the line, such that the opening glyconic always ends with a syllable that scans long; elision even occurs at this mid-point (4, 11, 24, 26). The aeolic base is primarily trochaic: in seventeen of 24 cases (71%) in the glyconic opening, and 22 of 24 cases (92%) in the pherecratean close; the remainder are spondaic. That Catullus was aware of the priapean nature of the verse-form is supported by fr. 1 (quoted by Terentianus Maurus 6.2755-8 K): hunc lucum tibi dedico consecroque, Priape, qua domus tua Lampsaci est quaque < . . . >, Priape,

36 37 38 39

The name pherecratean derives from a fifth-century Greek comic poet Pherecrates, its supposed inventor. West (1987) 72–3 is suggestive on this point but not conclusive. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that both Ticida (fr.1C/102H/1B) and Calvus (fr. 4C/29H/4B) composed in glyconic stanzas, as did Varro in at least one case (Men. 437 Astbury). It is possible, if less likely, that Dianae and in lines 1 and 3, scan with a short first syllable, which would reduce cases of the spondaic base to 8 (33%).

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nam te praecipue in suis urbibus colit ora Hellespontia ceteris ostreosior oris.

The poetic context of such a dedicatory quatrain to Priapus is unclear. For our purposes we may merely note that synaphea again seems to be observed, that the trochaic base is favoured in the pherecratean (in all four lines, if quaque in 2 was not elided by the noun lost in transmission), while the spondaic base predominates in three of the four glyconic halves.

Poems 61–4 We come now to the non-elegiac poems that occupy the middle of the corpus. The first two poems are epithalamia,40 one (61) in glyconic stanzas (235 vv.) and apparently composed for a real Roman wedding, and one (62) in hexameters (66+ vv.) as an artistic reflection on a fictional Greek wedding. The following poem (63) is one of the most remarkable in Latin literature: a 93-line narrative poem in galliambics about a devotee’s ill-judged initiation into the cult of Cybele, the Magna Mater. Poem 64 is much the longest of the Catullian corpus, a neoteric ‘epyllion’ on Peleus and Thetis comprising 408 hexameters. The following five longer poems – 65–68b – are all in the elegiac metre. Poem 61 comprises 47 five-line stanzas of glyconics with a catalectic (i.e. pherecratean) coda. This same schema is found in Anacreon’s poem to Artemis (PMG 348.4–8), and a similar one, with a four-line stanza, in Catullus’ poem for Diana (34). More tellingly, the glyconic fragments of Ticida and Calvus (see n. 38) are both hymenaeal songs. Catullus’ handling of the metre reflects what we have seen in the polymetrics: synaphea is carefully observed through each stanza, but never between them.41 In five cases elision occurs between lines (115 uenire, 135 marite, 140 marito, 184 marite, 227 ualentem), and – as a sign of just how much metrical form triumphed over practical issues – at 82–3 the name of the bride, Aurunculeia, requires division between two glyconics (Au|runculeia) to fit into these stanzas. As discussed above (pp. 145–6), Catullus seems to have 40

41

Both poems seem to have had this informal title for their ancient and medieval audiences: in O, the oldest manuscript of Catullus (c. 1375), Poem 61 is followed by the coda explicit epithalamium (although the other poems in the corpus lack an explicit). This is more likely to relate to the preceding poem than to represent a garbled explicit and an incipit for Poem 62 (also an epithalamium), as argued by Butrica (2007) 29–30; on this point it is interesting but inconsequential that Quintilian, about 150 years after the poem’s composition, quoted 62.45 (at Inst. 9.3.16) with the clipped reference in epithalamio. At 215–16, Dawes’s transposition (omnibus | noscitetur ab insciis) removes the problem of retaining omnibus at the close of 216, which could not be lengthened by et opening 217.

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allowed himself greater freedom in handling the aeolic base in the latter phases of this poem. The hexameters of Poem 62 are striking for the proliferation of Greek features – of vocabulary, setting and tone.42 Devised as an amoebean song between a groom’s party and a bridal party, it is a remarkably balanced and smoothly constructed composition.43 This Greek character is also evidenced in the handling of the hexameter. Catullus is careful to make frequent use of the weak (trochaic: – ⏑ ⁝ ⏑) caesura in the third foot in prominent places towards the beginning and end of the poem (9, 13, 16, 60, 61, 65), a much commoner marker of the Greek hexameter.44 There is also a clear effort to secure disyllabic (– ×) or trisyllabic (⏑ – ×) closes to the hexameter: leaving aside the eight instances of the ritual Greek refrain Hymenaee (5, 10, 19, 25, 31, 38, 48, 66), only one polysyllabic word is deployed at the hexameter’s close (8 exsiluere). All three monosyllabic closes to the line (9, 13, 45, leaving aside the four cases of prodelision before est: 11, 57, 61, 62) are forms of esse that cohere closely with what precedes. It will be convenient at this stage to move to Poem 64 before returning to the extraordinary Attis poem (63). There can be no question that this is the most consummate example of ‘neoteric’ artistry surviving in Latin poetry. It is a highly mannered piece, not just in its intricate construction, and self-aware poetic bravura, but also in its careful deployment of some unusual and pointed metrical features. Most noticeably, it has long been observed that the calling card of neoteric verse was the spondeiazon,45 i.e. the deployment of a spondee in the fifth foot of the line, most commonly as part of a ponderous closing polysyllable. No fewer than 30 instances occur in Poem 64 (7%, i.e. once every fourteen lines). That this is an Alexandrian feature is demonstrated by comparison with Callimachus (7%), Aratus and Euphorion (17%) and Eratosthenes (24%).46 Lest it be assumed that these spondaic closes were the result of necessity or chance, Catullus draws each and every reader’s attention to the device at 64.78–80: 42 43 44 45

46

See especially Tränkle (1981). See Fordyce (1961) 255: ‘The poem owes much to Greek poetry: the careful symmetry, the calculated repetitions and the formal use of the refrain show how much Catullus had learned from it.’ In the Homeric hexameter, which set the tone for the rest of the Greek tradition, the trochaic caesura occurs at a ratio of 4:3 to the strong caesura (– ⁝ ⏑ ⏑). This term, as well as οἱ νεώτεροι, is owed to an offhand remark of Cicero in a letter to Atticus (7.2.1): flauit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites. hunc σπονδειάζοντα si cui uoles τῶν νεωτέρων pro tuo uendito. It is important to note the exotically Greek context of Cicero’s mock verse and that he deploys Greek to make his literary-critical comments. See above, Chapter 2 §II. Given its distinctly different feel and origin, it is unsurprising that Poem 62 contains no spondeiazon. We will return to spondaic closes when considering the hexameters of Catullus’ elegiac couplets below.

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nam perhibent olim crudeli peste coactam Androgeoneae poenas exsoluere caedis electos iuuenes simul et decus innuptarum Cecropiam solitam esse dapem dare Minotauro. quis angusta malis cum moenia uexarentur, ipse suum Theseus pro caris corpus Athenis proicere optauit potius quam talia Cretam funera Cecropiae nec funera portarentur.

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Alexandrianism is in the air, as seven Greek proper nouns fill this passage. But in 78–80, where three successive spondaic closes occur in unparalleled succession, it is two weighty Latin terms (78 innuptarum, 80 uexarentur) that surround a Greek proper noun (79 Minotauro). In fact, of the 30 words that occupy fifth-foot spondees, only eight (27%) are Greek proper nouns; seventeen (57%), by contrast, are Latin verbal forms. Catullus’ preference for using the device with native Latin terms is perhaps designed to demonstrate that this once-Alexandrian device has won its own properly Roman place in cutting-edge Latin verse.47 But the hexameters of Poem 64 are not simply ‘Greek-lite’: instead, as Fordyce (1961) outlined in his introduction to the poem (272–6), Catullus intermingles early Roman, especially Ennian, stylistic features with various Hellenic elements: end-stopped lines predominate, for instance, with only 55 verses (13%) containing a lineinternal pause. An intriguing rhythm is found at 64.141, where diaeresis at the end of the second foot is combined with a third-foot weak caesura: sed conubia laeta, sed optatos hymenaeos

The hexameter flaunts its Alexandrian credentials. But there is more: cued by the Graecising hymenaeos, its rhythm and feel allow the line to flow as if it were a glyconic followed by a pherecratean: sed conubia laeta, sed optatos hymenaeos

It is well within the bounds of Catullus’ hexametric virtuosity to gesture so clearly to the refrain of his joyous lyric epithalamium (61) in a context where the grim outcome contrasts so severely.48

47 48

A similarly mannered tricolon confronts the reader at 19–21, where three successive verses begin tum Thetidis . . . tum Thetis . . . tum Thetidi. A reader as close as Virgil was careful to echo this effect at Aen. 4.316: per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos.

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We may mention one last striking feature of the poem. At 64.298 we encounter the sole instance of dactylic hypermetric elision in both this work and the extant Catullian corpus as a whole: inde pater diuum sancta cum coniuge natisqu(e) aduenit

The final -que appended to the sixth-foot spondee (natis) is elided under the influence of the following aduenit.49 This licence – attested very rarely in Hellenistic elegiac poetry50 – was later taken up with relish by Virgil;51 whereas the epic successor deployed it often to striking effect, it is hard to discern any particular reason for its deployment by Catullus at this point of Poem 64. We may turn, then, to Poem 63, much the most remarkable in the collection. Not only are its contents and feel like nothing else we have from Catullus’ hand, but the metre deployed is astounding in its rarity and refinement. To depict Attis’ frenzied self-castration for Cybele, and his/her subsequent regret at this irreversible act of devotion, Catullus chose the outré galliambic verse-form.52 Our evidence for this metre is extremely scant. In the second century ad, Hephaestion (12.3) cited a pair of lines in the metre by an unknown (presumably ancient) author; a scholion to this passage – attributed to Georgius Choeroboscus (6th cent. ad) – informs us that Callimachus also made use of it. The verses cited by Hephaestion are ionic tetrameters catalectic, apparently mixing ionici a minore (⏑ ⏑ – –) freely with ionici a maiore (– – ⏑ ⏑); in one instance, the biceps (i.e. two adjacent shorts) is contracted into a single longum.53 49

50 51

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The instance transmitted at 115.5 (prata, arua, ingentes siluas saltusque paludesque) is corrupt: the most promising emendation is the fifteenth-century conjecture altasque (if not Pleitner’s uastasque) paludes. I am not convinced by the suggestion of D’Angour (2000), which introduces the elision of a hypermetric esse at 107.7: as the referee to that piece noted (617 n. 18), ‘It is not done in polite society to introduce a metrical anomaly by conjecture.’ And yet, two years later, Butrica (2002) suggested reading aut magis nostra, positing a second case of sigmatic ecthlipsis (alongside 116.8), on which see below. Much the most famous – and probably influential – example occurs in elegiacs, at Call. Epigr. 41.1; the first case in hexameters was perhaps deployed only in Latin literature, by Ennius. Leaving aside 115.5 (cf. n. 49), Soubiran (1966, 446–8) records 30 instances of hypermetre in Latin poetry from Lucilius to Silius Italicus, of which 23 (77%) occur in Virgil. Of the same total, 23 instances (77%) involve enclitic -que, quite possibly the least stressed final syllable in Latin. Almost all critics now treat the poem as Catullus’ own composition, rejecting the theory – going back to Joseph Wharton (1756, 313 n.*) but advanced with greater force by Wilamowitz (1879) and (1924) 2.291–5 – that it could be a translation of a lost Hellenistic original. Phrynichus (fr. 14.1) cites the ‘pure’ form as ionici a minore. Rather differently, if unconvincingly, Caesius Bassus (6.121K) regarded the first half of the line as a catalectic iambic dimeter following an anceps, and the second half as a repetition of that colon with the further loss of its final syllable.

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Catullus’ galliambic verses differ in two important respects from these paradigmatic lines: the ionic basis is always a minore, and there is anaclasis (i.e. the swapping of adjacent long and short syllables) between each of the two pairs of ionics in the verse.54 The result is that the first half of the line reads as an Anacreontic (⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ | – ⏑ – –). Further, in the latter (catalectic) half of the line (⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ | – ⏑ ×), Catullus standardised the resolution of the final metron’s first longum (e.g. 63.4 uăgu˘s ănı˘mīs), thus giving his galliambics the inimitably hurried close of four successive shorts and a final anceps (which regularly allows breuis in longo, i.e. a short syllable in lieu of a long): ⏑ ⏑ – ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ×. Catullus opens his poem with the notionally ‘purest’ form of his verse – Super alta uectus Attis celeri rate maria – and follows that basic format in 65 (71%) of the remaining 92 lines.55 Nevertheless, he shows over the remainder of the poem what great flexibility the galliambic could allow. Although diaeresis is regular throughout at the mid-point,56 contraction of bicipitia and resolution of longa are permitted at six positions.57 In four cases (76, 77, 86, 91) these variations occur twice within one line, and in two cases (22, 73) thrice. While these licences are in many cases admitted casually, they are often deployed for deliberate effect. In line 63, which exhibits resolution of the first two longa, we see the proliferation of short syllables at the very moment that Attis incredulously recounts his/her present and former identities: ego mulier, ego adolescens, ego ephebus, ego puer

The line, remarkably, contains fifteen short syllables – with an opening eight in succession – among its increased total of eighteen. By contrast, when Attis channels regret about his/her ill-fated decision, Catullus deploys the galliambic in its most contracted and ponderous form, by

54

55 56

57

The most useful discussion of the various forms of the galliambic is that given by McKie (2009) 64–9, finessing the statistics of Ross (1968–9). It is not a matter of great import whether Catullus was fully aware of the ionic origins of the galliambic – or indeed the anacreontic. It is also unclear how our two other Classical Latin poets who used the metre understood it: Varro (Cycnus 79, Eumenides 131–2, Marcipor 275 Astbury) and Maecenas (fr. 188H/5B). The first half of the line is normal in 69 (74%) lines, the latter half in 80 (88%). In one case elision is allowed over the diaeresis. At 37, perhaps to signal Attis’ drift into sleep, we read piger his labante languor(e) oculos sopor operit: see Knobles (1971); McKie (2009) 68 n. 11 compares Virgil Aen. 2.8 and 4.81 for the use of elision to mark the onset of sleep. The two final longa of the first half of the line never allow resolution, presumably to preserve the ionic feel of the rhythm. Line 54 is transmitted without anaclasis between the first two feet (et earum omnia adirem) but the need for emendation is accepted by almost all. The simplest solution is Mueller’s suggestion of opaca for omnia, giving ⏑ – (⏑) for – ⏑ (⏑).

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contracting the first bicipitia of both halves of the line, as well as restoring the original initial longum of the final foot (73): iam iam dolet quod egi, iam iamque paenitet.

The line is thus reduced to a mere twelve syllables, with the weighty monosyllable iam occurring four times, as contrition at last steals upon Attis. Catullus also reworked the line to striking effect to introduce the closing three-line coda addressed to Cybele herself (91): dea, magna dea, Cybebe, dea, domina Dindymi.

The resolution in the second foot (of dea in lieu of a longum) is unremarkable. But in the latter half of the line we have resolution of the longum of the third foot (do˘mı˘na) combined with the restoration of the original longum of the final foot. The result is that the line has a feeling of checking and reversing the flow of the preceding 90 lines, with the predominance of shorts (6 vs 4) – and syllables (9 vs 8) – occurring in the first half. The shift from Attis’ lament and the rebuke of Cybele to Catullus’ own apotropaic prayer is thus given added poignancy. Here, as throughout the poem, the galliambic pulses with the rising and falling heartbeat of the poet and his subject.

Poems 65–116 We may now turn to the final section of Catullus’ corpus: from Poem 65 to the end of the collection the sole metre deployed is the elegiac couplet. It is easy, however, to draw a further distinction between two (almost identically sized) groupings: Poems 65–8 (324 vv.), which may be termed the elegies, and Poems 69 to 116 (319 vv., ignoring lacunae), which are epigrams. The most obvious difference between these two sets of poems is that of scale: the two shortest poems among the elegies are 65 (24 lines) and 68a (40 lines), but both are written as introductory poems to what follows; the average length for the elegies is 65 lines. Among the epigrams, the longest two poems are 76 (26 lines) and 99 (16 lines); the average length of the other poems, by contrast, is only six lines, with several (85, 93, 94, 105, 106, 112) being mere couplets. Beyond these obvious differences in size, there is a notable gap in linguistic and stylistic register. David Ross carried out a ground-breaking survey exploring these distinctions, giving particular focus to Catullus’ vocabulary.58 58

Ross (1969).

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Before we consider the metrical features of the elegies and epigrams, a broader issue needs confronting. In contrast with the versificatory confidence and flair found in the various poems discussed so far, it has been commonly remarked that the artistry of Catullus’ elegiacs falls far short of that achieved by his Augustan successors. Faced with supposedly irregular rhythms, odd pauses and harsh elisions (on which see below), J. P. Postgate did not shrink from describing their style as ‘still semi-barbarous’.59 As part of a close study of Catullus’ elegiac practice, A. L. Wheeler sombrely noted that Catullus ‘was less successful in this metre than in any other. He was consciously endeavouring to transplant the Greek distich, but the result did not commend itself, in all respects, to the ears of those who succeeded him in the next generation.’60 This critical disappointment with Catullus’ elegiacs is unjust, not only because it judges a poet by anachronistic canons of style but also because it overlooks the precision and variety of Catullus’ compositional technique. It was not until well into the twentieth century that redress came. In an important article of 1957,61 David West was first to demonstrate the considerable extent to which Catullus’ elegiac poems (i.e. 65–116) were in line with the subsequent stylistic practice of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid throughout their elegies. For instance, as regards caesurae, in 91% of his elegiac hexameters the third foot has a strong break: his practice therefore lies between that of Tibullus (80%) on the one hand, and Propertius (95%) and Ovid (94%) on the other. Only once (0.3%) is a third-foot weak caesura left unsupported by a strong caesura in the fourth (68.39); although this licence is not found in Tibullus or Ovid, it occurs six times in Propertius. Again, only once (108.1, 0.3%) is the third foot devoid of any word break;62 across the Augustan elegists, this bold licence was adopted slightly more frequently: Tibullus 12x (2%), Propertius 45x (2%) and Ovid 9x (0.1%), i.e. communally 0.5%. Furthermore, Hermann’s Bridge – the avoidance of word-break after a fourth-foot trochee – was almost always observed: there are only four hexameters (1.2%)63 that breach this law, fewer than in Tibullus (1.5%), Propertius (4%) and Ovid (6%).64

59 61 62 63 64

60 Postgate (1881) cxxvi. Wheeler (1915) 160. West (1957). Further precision was given for Catullus’ practice by Duhigg (1967). populi arbitrio is itself Statius’ emendation of the unmetrical populari arbitrio; Calphurnius’ arbitrio populi would restore a strong caesura in the third foot. There is only one violation in the elegies (68b.49), alongside three in 69–116 (76.1, 84.5, 101.1). There is no perceptible break at 73.5 (nec acerbius urget). No breach occurs in the four hexameters that survive from the elegies of Cornelius Gallus.

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There remain, however, several significant differences between Catullus and his Augustan successors. For example, in seven of the 30 cases where Catullus has diaeresis at the end of the second foot, he deploys no caesura in that foot.65 This rhythm is not attested in Tibullus, and occurs only twice (0.02%) in Ovid;66 Propertius, by contrast, has nineteen cases (0.9%), closer to Catullus’ figure of 2%. Perhaps aware of the inconcinnity of this rhythm, Catullus deployed elision at the close of the second foot in five of these seven cases, and before it in three. The two examples that lack any mitigating elision occur in successive hexameters (97.3 nilo mundius hoc, 97.5 nam sine dentibus est), presumably not by chance.67 At the line’s close, Catullus introduces in six cases a meaningful break at the sixth-foot caesura,68 a feature occurring only four times in the Augustan elegists (Prop. 2.25.17, Ov. Am. 2.9.47, P. 4.2.47, 4.9.101). We may now return to how Catullus’ metrical practice differs between the elegies and epigrams. Of the twelve spondaic verses that occur in the hexameters of Catullus’ elegiacs, nine occur in the longer elegiac poems of the carmina maiora. Their role seems, as in Poem 64, to be to signal neoteric sophistication: four occur in Poem 66 (3, 41, 57, 61), the careful translation of Callimachus fr. 110 Pf., and four are deployed in overtly Graecising lines in 68b (65, 87, 89, 109). The one remaining instance in the longer elegies, 65.23 (atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu), not only has an Alexandrian feel but also conveys by its striking rhythm Catullus’ apple (like Acontius’) falling to the floor. This leaves three instances that occur in the epigrams: one (116.3 qui te lenirem nobis, neu conarere) again plays with poetic affiliations, at once occurring immediately after the mention of Callimachus (2 Battiadae), and being – alongside a line of Ennius (Ann. 31Sk) – one of only two holospondaic verses surviving from Latin literature.69 The role of the two other Catullian instances, is quite different: at 76.15 (hoc est tibi peruincendum) the polysyllabic gerundive seems chosen only to bear emphatic weight; at 100.1 (Caelius Aufillenum et Quintius Aufillenam) the necessary repetition of (prosodically immutable) proper nouns is simply part of the poet’s humorous play. 65 66 67

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66.27, 76.19, 90.3, 97.3, 97.5, 101.7, 110.5; the text of 67.27 is too disputed to inform these statistics. Her. 12.89, F. 6.443. Propertius also deployed elision in the majority of his 19 instances, in eleven cases after the second foot, in two before, and in three on either side; the three remaining cases without elision are 2.3.11, 2.24.19 and 3.6.25. 66.3 deum me, 66.91 tuam me, 68.19 mihi mors, 107.5 refers te, 107.7 hac res, 112.1 homo . This disregards the eighteen cases where the final monosyllable forms an integral unit with the preceding word. It is, of course, possible that some latent humour in 116.3 is lost upon the modern reader.

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As to general rhythm, the elegies show a greater concern in securing opening dactyls: 63% of hexameters in the elegies begin with dactyls, against 56% in the epigrams.70 The contrast is more marked in pentameters: 56% against 36%. Since the Latin language requires more work than from a Greek composer to secure dactylic word shapes, this discrepancy seems to suggest Catullus’ greater concern to establish the underlying dactylic rhythm in his higher-register elegies. His elegiac practice was, in general, more spondaic than his Augustan successors: 65% of the first four feet in Catullus’ elegiac hexameters are spondaic; in the Augustan elegists this gradually declined (Propertius 56%, Tibullus 51%, Ovid Am. and Trist. 46%). The same situation applies in the first hemiepes (half-hexameter, – ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | –) of the pentameter: two spondees occur in 34% of Catullus’ pentameters, which reduces to 15% in Tibullus, 12% in Ovid, and 11% in Propertius.71 Taking all of Catullus’ elegiac couplets together, we can see the emerging preference for a disyllabic close to the pentameters (not a feature of Greek or early Roman elegy): 38% close thus, compared with 30% quadrisyllabic, 26% trisyllabic and 5% of greater length. There are some notable variations here among the elegies: in 66, 40% of the pentameters have a quadrisyllabic ending, but only 26% disyllabic; in 65 and 68a disyllables close 35% of pentameters, rising to 41% in 67, and 46% in 68b.72 The figures for Augustan elegists are far higher: Propertius increasingly favoured the disyllabic close (1: 64%, 2: 89%, 3: 98%, 4: 99%), and this ending is almost ubiquitous in Tibullus (98%) and Ovid (99.9%, excluding the exilic poetry). In four cases Catullus closes the pentameter with two trisyllables: 74.6 faciet patruus, 81.6 facinus facias, 91.10 aliquid sceleris, 107.2 animo proprie. This ending, which places the natural word accent awkwardly in the middle of both closing dactyls (– ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | –), is nowhere attested in Augustan elegy. I come now to some more general remarks on one of the most striking features of verse after the choice of metre: the use of elision. As Fr Owen Lee once put it, ‘Catullus’ work is almost pock-marked with elisions.’73 In the elegies elision occurs in 39% of verses; in the epigrams the figure is appreciably higher, at 69%.74 Further analysis of the elegies reveals further 70 71 72 73

These figures are slightly higher in the two longest epigrams: 76 (69% dactylic) and 99 (63%). This rhythm is found in one of Gallus’ five (20%) surviving pentameters. The figures for the corpus 69–116 are 37% disyllabic, 34% quadrisyllabic, 18% trisyllabic and 10% pentasyllabic. Owen Lee (1962) 144. 74 These figures exclude prodelision with es / est.

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distinctions in their practice: in Poem 65 the figure is as low as 25% (6× in 24 lines) but in the more informal tone of Poem 68a it rises to 55% (22× in 40 lines). The contrast between 68a and 68b is also telling: compared with the rate of 68a (55%, i.e. one per 1.8 lines), in the 120 lines of 68b we find only 43 instances (36%, i.e. one per 2.7 lines).75 It fits in with this pattern that long vowels are elided only 30× (once every eleven lines) in the elegies, but in the more relaxed epigrams we find this 78× (once every four lines). Certainly, the overall rate of elision in Catullian elegiacs (59% of lines) is appreciably higher than for any Augustan poetic work: Tibullus averages 14%, Propertius 21% and Ovid 13%. It is also noticeably higher than for Catullus’ two hexametric poems 62 (26×, 39%) and 64 (130×, 32%). If prodelision is also included, the figure rises yet higher – to 60% overall, with 76% in the epigrams76 and 45% in the elegies. Catullus is also freer in where he permits elisions. Unlike his Augustan successors, he elides words at the diaeresis of the pentameter: four cases occur in the elegies, and eleven in the epigrams.77 Elision at this diaeresis is attested in subsequent Roman elegy only in Propertius, at 1.5.32 (quaerere non impun(e) illa rogata uenit, doubtless an early line, which may echo Gallus) and 3.22.10 (Herculis Antaeiqu(e) Hesperidumque choros, where the Greek content and/or the truncated pronunciation of the first -que, merging seamlessly into the following syllable, may explain the departure). In the hexameter, Catullus also allows elision three times over a fifth-foot strong caesura,78 which occurs only twice in Augustan elegy (Prop. 4.7.33, Ov. Her. 10.27). Thirteen elisions occur after a fifth-foot trochee, four of which are cretics ending in -m (66.27, 66.43, 67.31, 91.9); so rare is elision in this position that it occurs only once later in elegy (Ov. Am. 3.6.101). Likewise, in the pentameter, eight strong caesurae are allowed in the fourth 75 76

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This treats the editorial supplements lecta (101) and ipsa (156) as elided; the remaining figures for the carmina maiora are 66 (37%) and 67 (29%). The four lines of Poem 87 contain six elisions (reading Palladius’ supplement foedere in line 3) and two prodelisions (which, sometimes called aphaeresis, occurs when the initial syllable of the following word is elided, as here with mea (e)st). Zicàri (1964) 194–7 sought to defend the fifteen transmitted instances of elision at the pentametric diaeresis, eleven of which occur in the epigrams. He demonstrated that the practice was well attested in Hellenistic poetry, and that Catullus embraced it as a stylistic tool. In particular, Catullus often deployed the device to throw emphasis on the word occupying the pentameter’s third foot: omnis (68b.90, 75.4, 77.4, 104.4), ipse (71.6) and hinc (68a.10). In five other cases (68b.56, 68b.82, 73.6, 95.2, 99.12) the elided word was -que or atque; for the placing of a proclitic before the diaeresis, we may compare 76.18 in | morte, 87.4 ex | parte, and 111.2 ex | laudibus. In the light of this, it seems churlish to emend away the four remaining cases: 88.6 Nympharum | abluit, 90.4 Persarum | impia, 91.10 quacumque | est, and 101.4 nequiquam | alloquerer. In fact, 76.10 should also be added to these cases: see below. 66.25, 102.1, 110.3.

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foot of the pentameter, i.e. before the final three syllables, a licence entirely revoked in Augustan elegy.79 These are not mere idiosyncrasies of Catullus’ practice, for he regularly deploys elisions for artistic effect.80 For instance, in 68b we find relatively few elisions between verses 41 and 88 (14, i.e. 29%). And then, out of the blue, follows the striking couplet in which Catullus moves to recall the site of his brother’s death: Troia (nefas!) commune sepulcr(um) Asi(ae) Europaeque, Troia uir(um) et uirtut(um) omni(um) acerba cinis.

We suddenly face not just four-fold apposition, impassioned exclamation, and the emphatic repetition of Troia, but no fewer than five elisions in a single couplet. These include the violent elision of a diphthong (Asiae) at the beginning of the (here spondaic) fifth foot, elision over the pentametric diaeresis (uirtutum), and the elision of a cretic (omnium) in the latter hemiepes of the pentameter. An ancient reader could scarcely move through these lines without their own gasping delivery marking the sudden and striking change in tone. In the epigrams we find two other very striking cases. In 73.6 Catullus closes his despairing poem about a friendship betrayed with the astounding pentameter quam modo qui m(e) un(um) atqu(e) unic(um) amic(um) habuit. Here we have five elisions in succession – including over the diaeresis (atque), a cretic (unicum) and an elision in the fourth foot (amicum). It is hardly excessive to regard this as the breaking up of a once-united unit – and Catullus’ open-mouthed shock at that outcome.81 At 91.1–2, we find Catullus’ poem to Gellius on broken friendship: non ideo, Gelli, sperabam te mihi fidum, in miser(o) hoc nostr(o), hoc perdit(o) amore fore.

Again, it is no coincidence that a pentameter introducing the same ruptured bonds involves three harsh elisions of the long vowel -o, one of which (nostro) occurs strikingly in the final syllable of the first hemiepes. 79 80 81

66.2, 68b.106, 68b.152, 73.6, 76.4, 84.6, 97.10, 114.6. A broad range of such effects has been eagerly – if rather fancifully – surveyed by Owen Lee (1962). Oldfather (1943) sought to trump the claim of Murley (1943) 287 that this was ‘probably the most extreme case of elision in the Latin language’ by citing Caecilius Statius (Ephesio fr. 29 Ribbeck): sentire ea aetate eumpse esse odiosum alteri) and Lucilius 600M (frigore inluuie inbalnitie inperfunditie incuria).

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In considering elision, a brief comparison with the hendecasyllabic poems may be useful. Elision is certainly rarer in this metre: throughout the 41 poems elision occurs on average in 49% of verses. While the poem with most elisions, 26, contains six in five lines (and one instance of prodelision), the eight-line Poem 41 contains no instance. In neither case does the unusual frequency or rarity of elision seem to serve an artistic purpose. On occasion, elision seems the enforced result of working awkward proper nouns into a metre that does not permit ancipitia (after the aeolic base) or resolution (anywhere). In Poem 36, for instance, the first eleven lines contain only one elision (line 5, and probable prodelision at line 10: iocose Goold). Lines 12–15, however, contain seven elisions, at the very point that Greek place names enter the text: quae sanct(um) Idali(um) Vriosqu(e) apertos quaequ(e) Ancona Cnidumqu(e) harundinosam colis quaequ(e) Amathunta quaeque Golgos quaeque Dyrrachi(um) Hadriae tabernam . . .

In the remaining five lines, only two further cases (both unobtrusive) occur: 17 nequ(e) inuenustum and 18 uenit(e) in. Catullus’ poetic register, as we have seen, ranged from the avowedly conversational to high-flown mannerism. This distinction of tone is clear in how he handled hiatus, for which the carefully conditioned circumstances were convincingly established by G. P. Goold.82 Hiatus occurs only (i) in overtly Graecising instances, (ii) after exclamations (i.e. o and heu), and (iii) in prosodic hiatus. Examples of this last feature – which of course reflects colloquial language, as seen in Roman drama, rather than Hellenistic ‘epic correption’ – occur at 55.4 (te˘ in omnibus) and 97.1 (ita me dı˘ ament). I agree with Goold’s conclusions,83 with one exception: at 66.11 nouo || auctus hymenaeo should be retained, where the diastole (lengthening) of the final syllable of auctus is paralleled exactly in this position by the two instances of such lengthening before forms 82 83

Goold (1958) 106–11. The several transmitted instances that lie outside these circumstances are corrupt: 11.11 (horribilesque | ultimosque) is certainly unsound, and all cogent emendations dismiss the hiatus; at 38.2 Sillig’s est should be supplied after et; read Politian’s Chalybon (for -um) at 66.48; Calphurnius’ speraret at 67.44; at 76.10 I favour Housman’s quare cur iam tete; read Avancius’ utrum at 97.2; Lee’s mollibus for omnibus at 99.8; Avancius’ cupidoque at 107.1; and Housman’s/Morgenstern’s dum domino ipso egeat at 114.6 (see Butterfield (2015a) 124–5). At 68b.158 primo | omnia is very probably corrupt, although no conjecture hitherto advanced is compelling.

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of hymenaeus in Poem 62 (4, 20): it seems that the licence of Graecising hiatus has been extended to before auctus by virtue of its context. Catullus emerges once more as a very careful regulator of his poetic practice.84 One final remarkable prosodic feature occurs – as it happens – in the final line of the Catullian corpus as we have it, 116.8: at fixus nostris tu dabis supplicium. The suppression in dabis of a final preconsonantal s, so-called sigmatic ecthlipsis, is not attested elsewhere in Catullus’ corpus. In fact, it is not attested in any line of Latin poetry composed subsequently: Catullus’ near-contemporary Lucretius was the last poet to deploy it regularly.85 We also have near-contemporary evidence from Cicero that poetae noui deemed this prosodic licence ‘rather uncouth’ (subrusticum).86 Macleod suggested that this unique instance, far from being an occasional licence, is a case of Catullus’ deploying the language of his enemy, Gellius, against him. Others have supposed that it appropriates the language (and prosody) of Ennius (cf. Ann. 95Sk nam mi calido dabis sanguine poenas).87 Or perhaps Gellius himself deployed an archaising style reminiscent of Ennius? Catullus, then, deserves due recognition not just as a restlessly original poetic genius in reworking genres for all manner of new contents and contexts. He was also a consummate master of metrical innovation, able to repurpose and manipulate a remarkable array of verse-forms – the elegiac couplet included – in order to channel his thoughts in novel and arresting ways. Indeed, it is testament to the success of many of his most celebrated pieces that no subsequent Roman seems even to have contemplated imitation of Catullus in his full polymetric splendour. 84

85 86 87

Word-internal prosodic licences are less common than one may perhaps suspect. Instances of contraction (synaeresis) occur in five cases, either for metrical convenience or colloquial speech: 40.1 disyllabic Rauide, 55.10 trisyllabic Camerium (cf. n. 20), 62.57 trisyllabic conubium, 64.120 trisyllabic praeoptarit, and 82.3 monosyllabic ei. Five cases of diaeresis, by contrast, occur with soluere and uoluere (2.13, 61.53, 66.38, 66.74, 95.6; it is impossible to determine the prosody of uoluebat at 64.250, persoluit at 297, and soluent at 350). Leaving aside some consciously Graecising instances of diastole (lengthening of a naturally short syllable: 62.4 dicetur hymenaeus, 20 despexit hymenaeos), it may be correct to regard tepēfaciet at 64.360 and liquēfaciens at 90.6 as preserving an original –ē– rather than artificial lengthening (in which case, 68.29 tepe˘factet Bergk and 64.368 made˘fient reflect the subsequent licence of deploying a short vowel). For a survey of this phenomenon in Lucretius, and other Roman poets more broadly, see Butterfield (2008c). Macleod (1973). See above, Chapter 2 §II. See especially Timpanaro (1978) 179 n. 45. Either of these poetic allusions seems more probable than the suggestion of Sedgwick (1950, 67) that this is simply ‘a very early poem, and that Catullus soon gave up the practice’.

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Further Reading For an introduction to the principles of Latin metre, see Raven (1965); for a detailed survey of Greek metre, from which Roman poets inherited their understanding of quantitative metre, there is no better summary than West (1982). For good context about the subsequent refinement of elegiac composition under the Augustan elegists, see Platnauer (1951). More general remarks on Catullus’ style can be found in Ross (1969), Loomis (1972, on the polymetric corpus), and the commentaries of Fordyce (1961) and Thomson (1997).

chapter 8

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A Collection of Catullan libelli? Modern editions of Catullus probably derive, at one or two removes, from a single (now lost) manuscript called the codex Veronensis (V), which returned to or resurfaced in Verona around ad 1300.1 This text, which marks poem divisions somewhat haphazardly and often wrongly (especially in the elegiacs), was subsequently divided (as conventionally numbered) into c.116 poems. As extant it is a collection of unparalleled diversity: poems range from 2 to 408 lines in length written in a wide variety of metres – lyric, iambic (including choliambics or scazons), phalaecian hendecasyllables, hexameters, galliambics, and elegiacs – and dealing with subjects that include the intensely personal, the quotidian and the exotically mythical, tender expressions of love, jocular amicability and viciously obscene invective in language that reflects as appropriate the gutter, the elevated dignity of epic or the refinement of the selfconsciously learned urban elite. The codex Veronensis did not contain all the poems that Catullus wrote.2 He also wrote Priapea (Terentianus Maurus De metris 2755–60),3 poems in priapeans dedicated to the god Priapus. There are about fourteen fragments or testimonia which do not come from, or refer to, any of Poems 1–116. In the last century, editors were increasingly sceptical of their authenticity.4 But scholars are now somewhat more open-minded.5 If these fragments of and references to lost poems of Catullus occur with 1 2 3 4 5

For the manuscripts, see Oakley pp. 263–90 and the bibliography cited therein. See Wiseman (1985) 188–98; (2015) 88–93; 108–10; for the suggestion that Catullus also wrote mimes: see also Panayotakis (2010) 41–3; Goldberg (2005) 111; (2011) 214. See Cignolo (2002) (replacing Keil’s Grammatici Latini vi). For the date (late second/early third century ad), see Cignolo (2002) 1.xxv-xxvii; Zetzel (2018) 324–5. Ellis (1904) prints all (with doubts about xiv), Mynors (1958) five, Thomson (1997) and Ramírez de Verger (2005) only three. See Butrica (2007) 17–19, with the evidence assembled by Wiseman (1985) 246–62.

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a similar frequency to that with which Poems 1–116 are witnessed, there may be twenty to thirty poems unaccounted for (one or two libelli?), including at least one substantial poem. It seems very unlikely that our manuscripts represent a collection of all Catullus’ poems, whether arranged by Catullus or anyone else. Helvius Cinna and Licinius Calvus seem not to have collected their similarly diverse poetic output into a single or multivolume work but rather to have circulated their more ambitious works individually as libelli and to have gathered their shorter poems in libelli.6 There is no reason to suppose that Catullus chose to depart from the practice of his contemporaries. The ‘title’ Catulli Veronensis Liber, adopted by some editors, is almost certainly a scribal invention which appeared perhaps first in the now lost MS X, the common source of G and R, while O, in a late hand, has only the name of the poet Catullus Veronensis poeta. The striking and unusual use of the cognomen (rather than tria nomina) together with the toponymic seems to confirm that it is a late scribal innovation, not derived from V.7 Catullus himself would not have used the singular Liber if, as many now suppose, he had authorised an edition in three volumes (i.e. tres libri).8 Catullus gave final form to at least one collection of short poems, i.e. the libellus to which he refers in Poem 1 (1.1, 8) and which he dedicated formally to Cornelius Nepos, but which cannot plausibly be taken to refer to a collection consisting of (at least) 2,256 lines.9 The problem is not that papyrus rolls were physically incapable of containing long texts (a book of history could hold 4,000 lines, although c. 2,000 was more normal and more practical), but that poetic texts rarely contained much more than a thousand lines and often less.10 The slim or slender book-roll was the visible ‘branding’ of the Callimachean aesthetic adopted by Catullus and the noui poetae.11 In Poem 1, Catullus offers Cornelius Nepos a single such book-roll which he ‘modestly’ contrasts with the three rolls containing Nepos’ Chronica.

6 7 8 9 10 11

See Butrica (2007) 20–1; for the importance of personal contacts and networks for the dissemination of literary works, see Murphy (1998) 496–505. See especially Butrica (2007) 28. The anomalous use of Catulli Veronensis is well observed by Goold (1983) 235. Wiseman (1985) 285 attaches undue weight to the title. See Skinner (2007b) 45–6. See Kiss (2015c) 15: compare Virg. Ecl. (821); G. 1–4 (2,188); Aen. 1–3 (2,278). For example, Hor. Epod. (625); Odes 4 (582); Prop. 1 (587); Tib. 1 (812). See Johnson (2009) 264–5; and (2004) 143–55 for detailed discussion of the evidence and the problematic nature of any concept of a standard length of the papyrus roll. See also Nicholls (2010) 379.

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It is not known when the poems of Catullus preserved by the Veronensis were first gathered into a codex. The move from scrolls to codex seems to have started early in the second century ad (possibly a little earlier) but not to have been common before the fourth. The earliest use of the word liber with reference to Catullus is in Aulus Gellius (late second century), who refers to ‘copies made from corrupt exemplars’ (libros . . . de corruptis exemplaribus factos, NA 6.20.6).12 It may be that the ‘corrupt exemplars’ are ‘scrolls’ and the ‘copies’ (libri) are codices but it would be a very happy chance if we happened to have so casual a witness to the transition in process. Uncertainty also surrounds Martial’s earlier reference to a gift of ‘Catullus’ (14.194): it may refer to a complete ‘Catullus’ in codex form; or to a selection on a papyrus roll. But Martial seems elsewhere (1.7; 4.14) to refer to a collection of short poems headed by Poem 2 (Passer, deliciae meae puellae). This evidence is often dismissed, but Pliny the Younger (Ep. 9.25) refers to his own lusus et ineptiae as his passerculi et columbulae, which seems to allude to collections of poems by Catullus and Arruntius Stella identified by their first word or line.13 That there was a collection of Catullus’ hendecasyllabic poems beginning with Poem 2 is perhaps confirmed by Caesius Bassus (c. ad 54–68), who illustrates the basic scheme of the phalaecian hendecasyllable (a spondeo) with the opening line of Poem 2 rather than that of Poem 1 (De metris, fr. 11 p. 24.19 Morelli).14 That Catullus was available in codex-form, at least to those with a professional interest, by the late second/early third century may be implied by Terentianus Maurus. Unlike Caesius Bassus, his principal source, he cites all the permitted openings of the phalaecian hendecasyllable from Poem 1, which presumably served as a prologue in his codex, as it probably did in that familiar to Ausonius (cf. Praef. 4 Green, fourth century);15 Maurus refers to ipse liber as authorising his analysis of the

12

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15

The problem persisted: in 1375 the scribe of G complained of having had to make his copy a corruptissimo exemplari, with the added difficulty of its being the only exemplar available (see Oakley p. 266). See Nauta (2002) 156–7. Caesius Bassus GLK 6.260.37–261.3 and 261.20–1 (= Morelli, G. (2011) 24–5) cites Poem 2.1 for the spondaic opening and 1.1 to make a different point. For Caesius Bassus, see Zetzel (2018) 68–70; 285–6. The evidence of Galen suggests that authors at the end of the second century still produced their work in papyrus rolls; but Galen also possessed extremely valuable parchment codices containing his source or reference material (recipes for treatments): see Nicholls (2010); and Singer (2019). For Ausonius, see Auson. 15, lines 5–7 Green, where ἀμουσότερον ‘more lacking the Muse’, ‘less inspired’ may suggest he read patrona uirgo, 1.10.

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galliambic (citing Poem 63.1);16 and he is also familiar with Catullus’ Priapea (De metris 2755–60). In only one poem (1) does Catullus refer to a libellus in its final form, copied onto expensive papyrus and ready to be dedicated to a suitable recipient. It is this moment, when the author surrenders his control and releases it to the public (editio), that most closely approximates to modern ‘publication’.17 Pliny provides an instructive account of what then happened to a hendecasyllaborum uolumen: it is read, copies are made, it is sung or recited, and even performed with musical accompaniment as the reader rather than the poet thinks appropriate.18 Catullus himself (Poem 50) refers to writing, in the initial stages of composition, on tabellae, presumably wax tablets which allowed for easy erasure and correction.19 Poems might then be circulated to friends in codicilli or pugillaria (Poem 42), possibly on scraped previously-used papyrus or parchment, folded concertina-style. At this stage the poet was seeking comment or suggestions prior to final ‘publication’, as Caecilius did (cogitationes | amici) when he sent his draftpoem (incohata) on the Magna Mater to Catullus (Poem 35, itself written on papyrus, like a letter).20 The precise mechanism by which an author signalled that he was ready for his work to be freely distributed by his friends and copied is unclear: possibly simply by saying as much in a covering letter and perhaps by ensuring that copies found their way into libraries such as that of Atticus, whose biography was later written by Cornelius Nepos (Poem 1) and whose library may well have been one of the foundational collections placed in the Palatine Library.21 Some of Catullus’ poems may have been initially made public in even less formal ways, before being more formally collected together and ‘published’. In Poem 40, Catullus bitingly asks the wretched ‘Rauidus’(?) whether ‘he wishes to be on the lips of the masses’ (ut peruenias in ora 16

17 18

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Morelli (2005) argues that ipse liber refers to a codex containing all Catullus’ poems; but it may refer to a preserved title reflecting earlier separate publication of Poem 63, as happened with Horace’s Carmen Saeculare. See especially Starr (1987); and Winsbury (2009). Plin. Ep. 7.4.9: legitur, describitur, cantatur etiam et a Graecis . . . nunc cithara nunc lyra personatur. For the difference between cithara (the larger, heavier ‘concert instrument’, played standing) and lyra (smaller, lighter and less exacting and more comfortable, may be played sitting), both unhelpfully translated ‘lyre’ (OLD), see Landels (1999) 47–68: the former suited larger audiences and spaces and more formal occasions, the latter smaller and more informal gatherings. For tabellae, see Meyer (2001). For the suggestion that palimpseston (22.5) refers to parchment codices, see Brink (1971) 383–4: for early references to parchment, see Hor. Sat. 2.3.1–2; AP 386–90; Pers. 3.10–11; Quint. Inst. 10.3.31–10.4.1 (cf. Inst. 1.2). For reused writing materials, palimpsestum, see 22.5; Cic. Fam. 7.18.2. On the later significance of depositing works in a library, see Nicholls (2011) and Singer (2019).

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uulgi, 40.5) which most naturally implies the possibility of public performance of Catullus’ invective poems. Early in 56 bc, Cicero describes the raucous events during a trial in which Clodius Pulcher was speaking in opposition to Pompey (QF 2.3(7).2): when Clodius spoke, the supporters of Cicero and Pompey chanted, omnia maledicta, uersus denique obscenissimi in Clodium et Clodiam. Clodius responded with well-rehearsed questions and answers from his ‘hired gang’.22 One may readily suppose that Catullus’ invectives (e.g. Poems 29, 52, 57, 93) received similar street ‘performances’.23 It is impossible to know for certain how formally ‘published’ Catullus’ poems, including those not preserved by the surviving manuscripts, were at the time of his death. Both copies sent by Catullus to friends and copies of those will have survived in various private libraries. The first public library in Rome was built by C. Asinius Pollio more than a decade after the death of Catullus,24 and good copies of Catullus’ works were probably included. Subsequently the giving of a book, presumably equipped with inscription or subscription, to a library signalled the willingness of the author for his work to be copied and further distributed. Martial (5.5) hopes that his own libelli will find a place in the Palatine library alongside those of Albinovanus Pedo, Domitius Marsus and Catullus: the implication is that works were grouped by literary genre (epigrams separately from epic poems). Pliny (Ep. 4.14) says that there were various titles suitable for collections of short poems, and for his own nugae, written in imitation of Catullus, he decides on hendecasyllabi (compare Sen. Controv. 7.4.7), rather than epigrammata or poematia. But what, if anything, Catullus called the libelli containing Poems 1–60 and 69–116 is unclear. Quintilian refers to Poem 84 (in elegiacs) as nobile epigramma; and Suetonius refers to a poem by Maecenas written in hendecasyllables as an epigram (Maecenas 3C/186H).

Poems 61–68b In our manuscripts, the central position is given to nine long and ambitious poems, five in elegiacs (65–68b), four in metres other than elegiacs 22 23 24

For operae = ‘rent-a-crowd’ ruffians, see OLD 9b. See also Plut. Pomp. 48.7; Hollis (2007) 81–4 (Licinius Calvus 18C/39H). The repetitions of Poems 29 and 57 evoke carmina popularia. In 37.9–10, verses are scrawled on the front of the tavern (like graffiti), possibly a scenario familiar from mime. The Atrium Libertatis: see Suet. Aug. 29.5; LTUR 1. 233–5 (Coarelli); Louis (2010) 255–6. Catullus knew Pollio’s brother (12.8–9); both Virgil and Cornelius Gallus were friends of Pollio and influenced by Catullus. For the importance of libraries, see Nicholls (2010) and (2011).

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(61–64). Both groups are arranged with manifest attention to both metre and formal, generic features.25 Poem 61 celebrates and commemorates the wedding of a Manlius Torquatus, a member of an old Roman patrician family, to Vibia Aurunculeia, who belonged to a plebeian family of central Italian stock.26 Manlius Torquatus is almost certainly the son of the consul of 65 bc. He was an orator (Cic. Brut. 265), a poet (Plin. Ep. 5.3.5) and an Epicurean (Cicero Fin.). He was co-opted as XVuir sacris faciundis probably in 65 bc. The wedding was no doubt a major social event and there seems no reason to suppose that Poem 61 was not performed for the entertainment of the guests, possibly sung and accompanied by music.27 Those who had attended perhaps received (or made) copies as mementos of the occasion, and Manlius Torquatus presumably distributed further copies to his wider network of contacts.28 Catullus will have also sent his friends copies. It is as certain as can be that the poem was ‘published’ as an independent libellus. Quintilian (Inst. 9.3.16) cites the lacunose Poem 62, the shortest of the poems in this group (67+ lines), by title: Catullus in epithalamio, which suggests it still circulated as an independent poem in his time.29 An independent libellus would probably have a title and the name of the author and, where appropriate, of the dedicatee. The length of Poem 62 25

26

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28

29

Pliny (HN 28.19) refers to Catullus, alongside Theocritus and Virgil, as having written a ‘representation of love-inducing incantations’ (incantamentorum amatoria imitatio). Pliny is not likely to be mistaken about his fellow countryman, of whom he speaks fondly and with pride (HN pr. 1). Catullus’ poem was presumably in hexameters and comparable to Idyll 2 (166 lines) and Ecl. 8 (109 lines), in which case it might have been included with Poems 61–64 if they had been brought together before the mid-first century ad. As there are no quotations in Macrobius or the Virgilian commentaries, it is possible that the poem was lost early. For Manlius Torquatus see Neudling (1955) 116–25; Della Corte (1976) 87–94; Broughton (1986) 136; Berry (1996) 17–26; McKie (2009) 236–44; Feeney (2010) 207; 213–17. For Vibia (?) Aurunculeia see Neudling (1955) 185: the praenomen was conjectured by Syme and is supported by Wiseman (1985) 112; Berry (1996) 19; and McKie (2009) 203–4 n. 21; 245 n. 118 (for the manuscript readings, see Kiss (2013a) app. crit. 61.16). There is no evidence for the date of his marriage. Philodemus (De musica 4.col. 119.25–41 (Delattre (2007) 220–1; 413)) is sometimes taken as evidence that epithalamia were no longer sung in the 50s bc. That however sits oddly with the fact that ‘epithalamia’ (variously specified) were written in this period also by Calvus (poema and epithalamium (4–5C/29–30H)) and L. Ticida (hymenaeon (1C/102H)), and later by Ovid (Pont. 1.2.129–36), a hymenaeon for Paullus Fabius Maximus (cos. 11 bc); and Statius (Silv. 1.2 (epithalamium)). Sappho’s ‘epithalamia’ (so called in fr. 103.17 L–P) were in a separate book (Servius on Virg. G. 1.31); the word appears as a title for Theoc. Id. 18; and Callimachus and Parthenius (inter alios) also wrote such poems (see Lightfoot (1999) 40). Pliny (Ep. 4.7.2) says that the senator M. Aquilius Regulus had a ‘thousand’ copies made of one of his libri (mille conveys extreme extravagance). That scale of distribution for a private work is a credible extreme: the effect of ‘pyramid’ circulation and its compounding effect on much smaller circulations is not to be underestimated. See Butrica (2007) 19–20.

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poses no difficulty since there is credible evidence that Horace’s Carmen Saeculare (76 lines) also circulated independently as a libellus before being included in a codex.30 It is written in hexameters and mimetically represents exchanges between two choirs (one of young men, iuuenes, the other of unmarried girls, innuptae). Some of Sappho’s epithalamia were also composed in hexameters (e.g. fr. 105a and c Voigt) and may have been similar in type and structure to Poem 62.31 The poem reflects a contemporary fashion and was designed to demonstrate Catullus’ own mastery of Sapphic and Hellenistic poetic techniques. Calvus also wrote an epithalamium in hexameters (5 and 6C/30 and 31H) as well as one in the metre of Poem 61. Poem 63 (Attis) is, formally, a narrative hymn, most closely comparable in surviving literature to the hymns of Callimachus but written in galliambics, a metre particularly associated with hymns to Cybele, the Magna Mater.32 Callimachus himself probably wrote a poem in galliambics.33 In Latin, apart from this poem, interest in this exotic goddess is evident in Varro (from a Menippean satire),34 in a description of her Roman cult in Lucretius (2.600–60) and subsequently in Ovid (Fast. 4.179–352). Poem 35 praises Caecilius for a poem on the Magna Mater, which may also have been in galliambics,35 as Maecenas’ certainly was (5-6C/188H). The Attis was clearly an ambitious literary work and there is every reason to suppose it circulated separately. It has been suggested that the poem may have been written for performance at the Megalesia. But perhaps one should think of performance at the ‘feasts and conuiuia’ that were a conspicuous feature of the Megalesia rather than its being performed as part of the Romanised ritual itself.36 The 30

31

32 33

34 35 36

Poem 62 has the title epithalamium in T which Butrica (2007) 29–30 believes survived in a garbled form in O (contrast Butterfield p. 153 n. 40). In Greek, Bion Epitaphios Bionidos has 98 lines. The De metris Horatii (GL 6.183.17K) refers to a libellus qui inscriptus est carmen saeculare: this work is ascribed to Marius Victorinus by Keil; but modern opinion favours Aelius Festus Aphthonius (or Asmonius), for whom see Zetzel (2018) 280. For the epithalamia of Sappho, see Page (1955) 116–26; Courtney (1985) 85–8; Hollis (2007) 72; Agnesini (2007) 377–95: the standard view is liable to amplification and revision with new discoveries. With direct reference to Sappho, Himerius (9.4 Colonna) seems to refer to ‘contests’ and these may be taken to have dealt with ‘the question of marriage’ (τὴ ν ἐ πὶ τῷ γά μῷ θέ σιν). See Harrison in Nauta and Harder (2005) 18–21. The matter is controversial: the Greek galliambics (fr. 761Pf) may not be by Callimachus; but it seems likely that there were some Hellenistic Greek models. See Thomson (1997) 375; Morisi (1999) 49–51; Nauta (2005) 143–9 for discussion. See Wiseman (1985) 204–5; 269–72; Morisi (1999) 55–6. See Hollis (2007) 421; and, for some anonymous galliambics, Courtney (2003) 279–81; Hollis (2007) 412–13. See Wiseman (1985) 205–6; (2015) 108–9. For the cenae associated with the Megalesia, see Ov. Fast. 4.353–4; Fasti Praenestini (Inscript. It. 13.2).

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arrangements for the festival were overseen by the quindecimuiri sacris faciundis so it is possible (but inevitably speculative) that L. Manlius Toquatus, as a XVvir, might have encouraged or even asked Catullus to write such a poem to entertain the nobiles who attended the cenae and conuiuia. Poem 63 vividly describes how the devotees of Cybele are permanently cut off from both family and normal civilised life and are forever enslaved in a wild and bestial landscape as slaves of the goddess. The speaker’s final prayer that the goddess should keep such furor from his house is most simply seen as an explanation and justification of the prohibition on Roman citizens from participating in her worship. Poem 64 is Catullus’ most ambitious work and clearly intended to sit alongside the Smyrna of Helvius Cinna (celebrated in Poem 95) and the Io of Licinius Calvus (not explicitly mentioned by Catullus).37 It is a richly complex poem and its length alone makes it all but certain that it circulated as an independent work.38 It incorporates the first voyage of the Argo, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, a (prophetic?) ecphrasis telling the story of Ariadne and Theseus, the prophecy delivered by the Parcae as they weave the threads of the life history of the heroic Achilles; and a withering condemnation of the moral corruption of contemporary Rome. It is a distortion to reduce the thematic and tonal variety and its rich complexity of literary allusion to ‘reflections on marriage’.39 The scant evidence that we have suggests that these poems circulated as independent pieces until the end of the first century ad. If the poems of Catullus were not transferred to the codex form until the second century ad, then the arrangement in which we now read them derives from the aesthetics of the editor who compiled the collection. Whoever was responsible took some care: the two epithalamia (61 and 62) are juxtaposed, as are the two Hellenistic narratives (63 and 64). The first pair share generic topoi and there are several parallels between Attis’ situation and that of Ariadne in the embedded narrative of Poem 64. But formal characteristics dominate the arrangement. The shortest poem and the longest (62 and 64) are both written in hexameters, and that draws attention to the use of epithalamic topoi in the account of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis in Poem 64. 37 38

39

For the so-called Hellenistic epyllion, see briefly Fantuzzi–Hunter (2004) 191–224; Baumbach–Bär (2012). Poem 64 has 408 lines; Ciris 541; Culex 414. Works of comparable length circulating as separate ‘books’ are Virg. G. 1 (514 lines); Hor. AP (476 lines); Ov. Trist. 2 (578). Callimachus’ Hecale is a defining text in many ways for this type of poem but at 1200 (or more) lines clearly did not define the length. See Skinner (2007b) 44–6; Skinner (2015) 282–98 for an extensive bibliography.

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But it is extremely unlikely that Catullus himself intended that they be read together as a book with a meaning or overarching theme that transcends the sum of its parts.40 Poems 65–68b are all in elegiacs. Poem 65 takes the form of a verse letter in which Catullus explains to Hortensius Hortalus why he is sending, in response to his request for a poem, a translation of the final poem of Callimachus’ Aetia 4 (Poem 66, the so-called Coma Berenices).41 Catullus cannot, apparently, write the kind of original poem requested because he is overwhelmed by grief for his brother, who has died away from home in the Troad. Poem 66 tells of Berenice’s grief at the departure of her new husband for war in a foreign land and of the transformation of the lock of hair she had pledged for his safe return into a constellation. Poems 65 and 66 constitute an inseparable diptych and doubtless circulated as such. It is probable that Catullus’ choice of the Coma Berenices answered in some way to what Hortalus had requested.42 Hortensius Hortalus, cos. 69 bc, was an outstanding orator, a minor poet and historian. Like Manlius Torquatus, he will have had extensive contacts to whom he doubtless sent copies of the poems dedicated to him. There is no compelling reason to see Poem 65 as dedicating to Hortalus all the longer elegies (65-68b), still less all the poems in elegiacs (65–116).43 On the assumption that 68a and 68b are two independent poems, Poem 67 (excluding lines 1–2) stands at the centre of this group. Like 68a, it is set in Verona. There is no clearly specified dedicatee;44 and there is no reference to the death of Catullus’ brother. The poem seems best considered as an (urban) mime in elegiacs.45 The speaker seems to be the poet, who interrogates the door of a grand Veronese house and elicits in reply its 40

41

42 43

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45

Jocelyn (1996a) 336–7, who thinks that ‘a scholarly editor aware of the generic distinctions of verse writing’ is ‘at least as likely as the poet to be responsible’ for the design of the collection, argues that Poem 61 belongs with Poems 11, 17, 30, 34 and 51 as poems in ‘lyric metres’ (μέλη) and closes a libellus consisting of Poems 1–61; as does Butrica (2007) 22 for slightly different reasons. Poems 65–67 are presented as an undivided, single poem by most of the manuscripts. The translation of Callimachus ends with the lines that appear as 67.1–2 in most editions, including that of Mynors: but see Agnesini (2011) 521–40; Du Quesnay (2012) 181–3; and Portuese (2013) 76–81; 102–6; 141–53. For fuller discussion, see Du Quesnay (2012) 153–62. The verbal similarity between mitto . . . carmina Battiadae, 65.15–16 and carmina . . . mittere Battiadae, 116.2 is not, in itself, conclusive. Such a combination of elegies and epigrams seems to be without parallel. Della Corte (1976) 140–2 and Thomson (1997) 465 suggest that Caecilius (67.9) may be identical with the Caecilius of Poem 35, who might be thought of as the intended recipient: for discussion and problems see Portuese (2013) 186–8. Cf. Kroll (1924) 203: ‘Mimen im Hexameter sind eigentlich ein Unding’ (‘mimes in hexameters are actually a monstrosity’). Elegiacs are used in [Theoc.] Id. 8 in combination with hexameters.

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scandalous history. Catullus extends a ‘Callimachean’ technique, familiar from both the elegiac Aetia (fr. 114 Pf.) and the Iambi (7 and 9), where the poet interrogates statues of various gods and receives responses.46 The variety of metres used for mimes by Theocritus (hexameters), Herodas and his Roman imitator Cn. Matius (choliambics) and the Grenfell Fragment (lyric) suggests that Catullus may have had Hellenistic precedent for his elegiac mime.47 Poem 67 may be intended for the entertainment of local dignitaries at a local conuiuium, a performance piece which humorously relates scandalous gossip and (apparently) ‘learned’ and parochial aetiology in a sophisticated Hellenistic form.48 The debate as to whether ‘Poem 68’ is one poem or two continues.49 For present purposes, it is assumed that there are two poems, 68a (= 68.1–40) and 68b (= 68.41–160). Poem 68a is a verse letter written in elegiacs. Catullus is writing from Verona in response to a request from an amicus (9) in Rome who is distressed by the loss of his beloved. Catullus acknowledges his obligation (hospitis officium, 12) to respond but insists that, because he is overwhelmed with grief at the death of his brother (19–24), he cannot provide the poem his amicus has requested. The dominant themes are the tensions between friendship and familial obligations which have been triggered by his brother’s death. He sends the only response he can in the form of (the present) Poem 68a: it is a variation on the same set of themes as Poem 65. The death of Catullus’ brother appears to be recent enough for his addressee to be unaware of it. It may be a little earlier in time than 65: and its language and style, especially in its use of elisions, is less elevated and more epistolary.50 The name of the addressee is disputed: it is transmitted in a corrupt form at 68a.11 and 30.51 Many scholars read Manli, and ‘Manlius’ has, inevitably, been identified with L. Manlius Torquatus, the honorand of Poem 61. The 46 47 48 49

50 51

For the complex literary background, see Syndikus (1990) 226–8; Portuese (2013) 99–102; 105–113. Cf. Tibullus 1.4; Propertius 1.16; 4.2. Wiseman (1985) 128; cf. Jocelyn (1996a) 139, who suggests that Poem 17 was similarly ‘designed to entertain the leading citizens of a colonia’. Maggiali (2008) 40–57, reading mi Alli at 68. 11 and 30, reviews the arguments for reading 68 as a single poem and provides a full bibliography. The main arguments against unity are succinctly stated by e.g. Fordyce (1961) 341–3; Thomson (1997) 472–4. For discussion of 68a as an independent poem, see e.g. Woodman (2012a) (= 1983 revised)); Morgan (2008); McKie (2009) 191–248; Skinner (2015) 314–16. See Thomson (1997) 472–4. V seems to have read Mali (68a.11 and 30): for details, see Thomson (1997); McKie (2009) 193 n. 2; Kiss (2013a), all of whom read Manli, which is first found in two mid-fifteenth century manuscripts. Mynors accepts Lachmann’s Mani and prints Poem 68 as a single poem addressed to M’. Allius. A name beginning with a consonant seems to be required at 68a.11 where mi Alli makes a poor substitute (see Thomson (1997) 473); a name beginning with a vowel is necessary at 68b.41; 50.

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very distinct situations of the joyful bridegroom of Poem 61 and the despairing, bereft lover of Poem 68a can simply be reconciled by assuming that Poem 68a is earlier in time than Poem 61 (which cannot be dated) and belongs to Manlius’ bachelor years.52 If Catullus’ brother died some time in 58 bc prior to Catullus’ departure for Bithynia in spring 57 bc (as Poem 101 suggests), then Poems 65 and 66, as well as Poems 68a (all of which feature his death), may also belong to 58–56 bc. Poem 68b is, at more than 120 lines, the longest and most ambitious of the elegies. Generically, it is an expression of gratitude to his friend Allius expressly designed to immortalise him for the assistance he had provided to Catullus. The name Allius is widely attested, both in Rome and elsewhere in Italy (including Verona (CIL 6.3483) and other places in Cisalpina).53 But this is the only appearance of the name in non-inscriptional sources, and all we know of him is what Catullus tells us in this poem. He seems to be of lower status than Hortalus or Manlius Torquatus, possibly a domi nobilis. The service he rendered Catullus, namely lending his house for an adulterous liaison, was probably socially reprehensible if not actually illegal. No close analogies for 68b survive from either Hellenistic poetry or from Catullus’ contemporaries, although things might look different if we knew more about Parthenius’ Arete or Licinius Calvus’ Epicedion Quintiliae.54 It is clear that the poem was written after the death of his brother in 58 bc, and, given the intensely emotional apostrophe (68b.91– 100), perhaps not long after his visit to his brother’s tomb: possibly 56 bc, the year of his return from Bithynia.55 Catullus’ relaxed perspective on his relationship with his puella is strikingly unlike that found in the shorter poems. However, the formal purpose of the poem is to give full and proper thanks to his friend Allius for his help and support. Although Catullus does not name his beloved in this poem, it is hard to suppose that she can be other than the puella he elsewhere calls Lesbia. The reference to the poem as haec charta (68b.46) and the request to the Muses to ensure perennial 52

53 55

As McKie (2009) 244–9 attractively argues. Morgan (2008) argues that the addressee of 68a is M’. (i.e. Manius) Curius, a friend of Cicero, a gambler and (probably) the subject of an hendecasyllabus . . . elegans of Licinius Calvus (et talis Curius pereruditus, 1C/34H ‘and Curius thoroughly accomplished in dice-games’), noting that de meliore nota (28) occurs in Latin elsewhere only in in a letter of M’. Curius (= Cic. Fam. 7.29 (264). 1). It is perhaps unlikely that Catullus would have used, in this poem alone, the praenomen to address a friend: see Fordyce (1961) 342; Dickey (2002) 63–7 (whose points are not fully dealt with by Morgan (2008) 141; 148–9); Maggiali (2008) 42–3. Morgan’s identification is accepted by Woodman (2012a) 27. See TLL 1.1687.21–88; Morgan (2008). 54 See Lightfoot (1999) 28–35; Hollis (2007) 68–70. Cairns (2012a) 108–9 (= (2003) 174–7) suggests that Catullus was prompted to link his brother and Protesilaus by a visit to the ‘Tomb of Protesilaus’, a famous tourist site, while in Bithynia.

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fame for Allius (68b.41–50; 149–52) clearly imply that it was released to the public separately and intended to fulfil its purpose as a separate libellus. It seems, then, that Poems 65–68b are, like Poems 61–64, works originally composed for separate publication and circulation. Three (65, 67 and 68a) feature Catullus in Verona; three feature the grief felt by Catullus for his dead brother (65, 68a and 68b). Poem 66 is a learned translation of a Callimachean poem (fr. 110); Poem 68b is an elaborately structured display of mythological learning placed within a framework of the poet’s personal experience. Poem 67 contrasts strongly with the other poems in this group. Poems 65–68b may have first been gathered into a libellus soon after Catullus’ death: ‘books’ of Gallus’ elegies appeared in the forties and elegy was popular in the Augustan period.

Poems 1–60 Although there is no generally or even widely accepted understanding of the arrangement of these poems, there are at least subsets within this group that do show clear signs of being deliberately ordered. The challenge is to define those subsets. The process of compilation seems to have been accompanied by some dislocation or editorial (or other intermediate) intervention. It will be argued below that, on metrical grounds, Poem 1 belongs with Poems 27–60 rather than 1–60; that Poem 14b represents a fragmentary programmatic poem which is probably introductory (but possibly medial); no other prologues or epilogues are clearly preserved in the polymetric section. Skutsch’s important observation that the number and percentage of hendecasyllables with a spondaic base is dramatically lower in Poems 1–26 than in 27–60 serves to divide the polymetric group. But it seems unlikely, on the basis of datable references, that the order of the poems is, even roughly, chronological: Poem 31 is later than 46; Poem 11 almost certainly later than 29 which is probably later than 57. But there are undeniable difficulties: the few allusions to contemporary events provide only termini post quos which can usually only be fixed in terms of probability rather than with absolute certainty, although all lie within the relatively brief period 56–53 bc; and many of the persons named or addressed cannot be identified with any certainty. In spite of this uncertainty, I discuss subsets of the transmitted works as having been, at least potentially, libelli organised by Catullus.

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Poems 2–14 There is widespread, although not universal, agreement that Poems 2–14 (prefaced by Poem 1) constituted a Catullan libellus. Most poems in this group are written in stichic phalaecian hendecasyllables: just three poems allow a single exception to the spondaic base: 2.4; 3.17; and 7.2, all iambic.56 The name of the metre derives from a fourth-century epigrammatist (Phalaecus),57 but the metre was also used by the lyric poets Sappho and Anacreon58 and it is not clear whether the hendecasyllabic poems should be considered as sympotic epigrams or as lyric poems.59 The hendecasyllabic poems are interspersed with poems in other metres: Poem 4 in pure iambic trimeters; Poem 8 in choliambics; and Poem 11 in Sapphic stanzas, all of which also differ linguistically and stylistically from the hendecasyllabic poems.60 Two themes dominate Poems 2–14. The first is the ‘outline story’ of the poet’s love for his puella (identified by the pseudonym Lesbia in Poems 5 and 7): Poem 2 tells of his initial yearning for her; Poem 3 of his acceptance by her following the death of the passer; Poem 5 of the height of their passion and disregard for conventional morality; Poem 7 of her apparent incipient coolness; Poem 8 of Catullus’ attempts to accept his rejection by her; and Poem 11 of his final rejection and denunciation of her and of her promiscuity. Only two ‘Lesbia’ poems stand adjacent, Poems 7 and 8 (2 is separated from 3 by 2b), and they are differentiated by their metre as well as by the choice of literary model. If Catullus did publish a libellus opening with 2 and closing with 14, then Poem 8 introduces the second half in which both Lesbia-poems are in metres other than the hendecasyllabic. In the first half, the paired Lesbia poems are separated by poems different in theme (2 and 3 by 2b; 5 and 7 by 6 (Flavius’ affair), with 56

57 58

59

60

See Skutsch (1969) 38 and n. 2 = (2007a) 45 n. 2; Butterfield pp. 145–7. As occasional use of a nonspondaic base also characterises the phalaecians of Furius Bibaculus (84H/1C.7; 85H/2C.1; 86H/ 6C.1) and Maecenas (186H/3C.3) two decades after the death of Catullus, it seems more helpful to group together those hendecasyllabic poems which allow a single exception to the spondaic base with those allowing no exceptions and distinguish them both from those more freely allowing nonspondaic bases. See Gow–Page (1965) 2.458–64; only Anth. Pal. 13.6/3G–P is in phalaecians. Caesius Bassus (GL 6.258K = 20.11–12Morelli) says that the phalaecian hendecasyllable ‘is frequent in Sappho, in whose fifth book many of this kind are found, both stichic and interspersed with other metres (continuati et dispersi)’. Suetonius quotes a phalaecian ‘epigram’ of Maecenas (186H/3C). Jocelyn (1999) 338 suggests that their use in Greek ‘public inscriptions’ (3rd/2nd centuries) suggests they have ‘little musical character’: compare Courtney (1995) #105; 116; 186 and 204. But Plin. Ep. 7.4.9 (above) speaks of his hendecasyllables being performed both with musical accompaniment (as lyric poems) and without. See especially Jocelyn (1999) 335–75.

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Poem 4 at the centre with a different theme (the phaselus) and a different metre). The subject of the fragmentary 2b is unknowable but, at least, may have been about something other than Lesbia.61 In Poem 4 the poet invites his hospites ‘guest-friends’ to view the phaselus ‘light ship’ which most, although not all, believe brought Catullus back from Bithynia.62 Its story is told as the phaselus told it to him, in the garrulous tones of an old captain, and tells the story of its ‘life’ and final journey with gusto, bravura and a display of geographical learning. Poem 6 teases a friend, Flavius, about his ‘symptoms of love’ and speaks in derogatory terms of his scortum ‘courtesan’ whose identity he asks his friend to disclose so that he can immortalise the pair in his verse.63 The perspective Catullus adopts on Flavius’ affair stands in revealing contrast to his view of his own affair with the pseudonymous Lesbia, which others may not have so clearly differentiated from that of Flavius. In the second half of this putative libellus, the focus shifts to celebration of his friendships with Veranius and Fabullus (9, 12, 13), Varus and Helvius Cinna (10), and Licinius Calvus (14). All are in hendecasyllables, with two (9, 10) separating the pivotal choliambic Lesbia Poem 8 and the lyric ‘farewell to Lesbia’, Poem 11, and three following (12–14). If the design is Catullus’, we might suppose that the point is that, as he tears himself away from his obsession with Lesbia, he is able to reintegrate with his circle of male companions. In Poem 11 two friends, Furius and Aurelius, deliver his message of final and formal dismissal to Lesbia: it is noteworthy that the harsh abuse of Lesbia, part of the message they deliver, highlights the absence of abuse from the hendecasyllables, where it features only in the (relatively) mild and jocular threats of Poems 6, 12 and 14. There are very few datable references in these poems and none is without some degree of uncertainty.64 The earliest is the return of Catullus from Bithynia (mentioned certainly in Poem 10 and possibly in Poem 4), where he was in the cohors of the propraetor C. Memmius in 57–56 bc.65 Poem 10 is not obviously set immediately after his return in the late summer or 61

62 63 64

65

Many suppose Poems 2 and 2b to have constituted a single poem and emend the text to accommodate the simile: see especially Ghiselli (2005) 15–111; Skinner (2015) 231–3. I follow Mynors, Thomson (1997) 205–7 and Kiss (2013a) in treating 2b as a fragment of an independent poem. For a range of recent views, see Skinner (2015) 234–5: and note Griffith (1985), Thomson (1997) 212–18 and Courtney (1996–97). Flavius is unidentifiable. For some possibilities, see Neudling (1955) 67–8. There is no mention of any promagistrate in connection with the journey of Veranius and Fabullus to Spain from where they sent Catullus napkins (Poems 9 and 12): their visit, which might have been on private or family business, cannot be dated: see Syme (1979) 1.302–3. See Broughton (1968) 203.

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autumn of 56. On the assumption that he took his time visiting the cities of Asia (46.6) and then spent some time on family affairs in Verona, he may not have been much if at all in Rome before the winter of 56/55. Poem 14, addressed to Calvus, is set on the Saturnalia (17 December): the jocular reference to odio Vatiniano (‘with a hatred like that which Vatinius feels for you’, 14.3) suggests a dramatic date of December 55.66 Poem 11 envisages the possibility of Catullus, Furius and Aurelius all having accompanied Caesar to the Rhine and to Britain or going to the East (presumably with Crassus). That implies a dramatic date later than spring 54. If the Lesbia poems were written for the same book, then they were written in recollection and reframed in retrospect through a variety of literary models rather than written in tandem with the history of the affair they outline. There had been significant opposition to Caesar in 56–55, when he backed the elections of Pompey and Crassus, secured his second term in Gaul and promoted the careers of his adherents (including Mamurra and Vatinius). But following the first expedition to Britain, the Senate voted (in October 55) an unprecedented twenty-day supplicatio which marked the start of a period of enthusiastic support for Caesar, even from those who had previously opposed him (like Cicero): during the spring of 54, Cicero’s friend C. Trebatius Testa and his brother Quintus both joined Caesar as legati.67 Catullus’ reconciliation with Julius Caesar, famously related by Suetonius (DJ. 73), would fall naturally into this same period. Caesar was looking for someone to write a poem on his achievements and it is possible, but not certain, that the Annales Belli Gallici of Furius Bibaculus was one response and that the Furius of Poem 11 is Bibaculus.68

Poems 14b–26 This group of ten poems69 opens with a fragment (14b), a three-line conditional clause apparently addressed to Catullus’ ‘readers’ (14b.2) which may have been part of a formal prologue. Seven of the ten poems are in hendecasyllables, all with a spondaic base. Thematically, all the hendecasyllabic poems are concerned with Catullus’ relationships with 66

67 68 69

14.2–3 hyperbolically (iucundissime) express a very personal feeling of ‘hatred’ inspired by a particular act ‘because of this gift of yours’: so Fordyce (1961) 135 (contrast Thomson (1997) 244, Shackleton Bailey (1980) 180, Ellis (1889) 51). Vatinius was finally tried in August 54: see Gruen (1967) 215–33 and below pp. 195–8. See Shackleton Bailey (1977) 329; (1980) 198–9. See Courtney (2003) 198–200; Hollis (2007) 124–35. Poems 18, 19 and 20 are omitted as spurious by modern editors and derive from a sixteenth-century printed edition: see Gaisser (1993) 166–7.

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Furius, Aurelius and Iuventius. In Poem 15, Catullus entrusts his puer to Aurelius, in spite of his known pederastic predilections, relying on his friendship with Aurelius and the threat of a savage punishment normally inflicted on adulterers to safeguard him. The language is coarse and abusive, but the tone is laddish and jocular. In Poem 21, after two intervening poems, the abusiveness and the threats become coarser and more explicitly obscene as Catullus suspects that Aurelius is failing to resist the inevitable temptation. In Poem 23, the attention switches to Furius who is subjected to a tirade of coarse abuse for his poverty. There are hints that Furius is a pathic but in the end it seems that it is Furius’ constant requests for a loan of one hundred thousand sesterces that has provoked Catullus’ attack. Poem 26, after two intervening poems, briefly mocks Furius for mortgaging his villa for a relatively small sum, picking up on the themes of poverty and meanness in Poem 23. An ‘explanation’ of these abusive attacks is provided by Poem 24, in which Catullus formally reproaches Iuventius (his puer) for having welcomed the advances of Furius: Catullus would rather Iuventius had given the ‘riches of Midas’ to Furius ‘than that you allowed (sineres, 24.6) yourself, as you are doing, to be made love to (amari) by that man’. The reason for Catullus’ indignation is that he was not himself ‘allowed’ (si quis me sinat . . . basiare, 48.2) even to kiss Iuventius. This cross-reference to Poem 48 reinforces the case for supposing that 16.12–13 also refers to that poem and that Poem 48 is earlier than both. Furius is not named in Poem 24 but is identified as the unsuitable suitor by the triple reference (24.5; 8 and 10) to the opening insult of Poem 23. The interconnectedness of Poems 15, 21, 23, 24 and 26 suggests careful arrangement and mutual illumination. Poem 16 is addressed to both Furius and Aurelius. Catullus is coarsely abusive and threatens both of them. But the theme is not, overtly at least, their common interest in Iuventius or any betrayal of friendship felt by Catullus at their attempts to seduce his puer. Catullus robustly rebuts, in aggressively obscene language, the charge of mollitia (male marem, 16.13) levelled at him by Furius and Aurelius. Catullus first dismisses this as an unwarranted inference from the fact that his verses are molliculi (16.4; 8) but denies that this necessarily implies that he is ‘effeminate’.70 Their further inference (16.3: me . . . putastis ~ 16.13: me . . . putatis) from reading his milia multa basiorum (16.12, which in this context seems to refer most 70

For the Varronian etymology mulier a mollitie, see Maltby (1991) 397; for mollitia, see Williams (2010) 139–44 and, especially, 179–83. While mollitia is an inappropriate quality in a man (cf. 25.1: cinaede Thallus, mollior etc.), it is desirable in phalaecian hendecasyllables: see HN praef. 1.1 (emolliam).

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naturally to Poem 48) that he is male . . . marem (16.13) is then rejected with a ‘virile’ threat to penetrate them both orally and anally. Catullus’ qualities as a man are not to be inferred simplistically from those of his poetry. Poem 22, which separates the second Aurelius poem from the first Furius poem and opens the second half of this (possible) libellus, offers an interesting variation on the central theme of Poem 16: it is written in choliambics and addressed to Varus as a critique of the (unidentifiable) poet Suffenus.71 Varus may well be Quintilius Varus (as in Poem 10):72 if so, he came from Cremona in Cisalpine Gaul, was an Epicurean and familiar with Philodemus and Siro, subsequently a friend of Virgil and Horace and later had a reputation as an honest and candid critic (Hor. AP 438–52). Catullus argues that Suffenus’ qualities as a poet cannot be inferred from his qualities as a person (homo est uenustus et dicax et urbanus, 22.2; bellus ille et urbanus, 22.9) nor the qualities of his poetry from the high-quality physical appearance of his meticulously presented papyrus rolls (22.6–8): in spite of their splendid presentation, he is, as a poet, ‘a goat-milker’ or ‘ditch-digger’ and ‘witless’. The force of the criticism is softened in the closing lines where Catullus admits that ‘we’ all deceive ourselves in some respect and find it difficult to see our own faults. The careful and balanced nature of the criticism is reminiscent of the Epicurean approach to ‘frank criticism’ (parrhesia).73 Poem 25 offers a unique example of a poem in iambic tetrameters catalectic. It is a flagitatio – ‘a demand with menaces designed to shame a person into returning property’ – directed at a Thallus and demanding the return of pallium . . . sudariumque Saetabum catagraphosque Thynos, 25.6–7. The Greek name suggests that he was a freedman rather than a social equal, and non-citizen status is also suggested by the threat of a severe flogging if he fails to comply.74 The situation is reminiscent of comedy (or mime); the language and images are richly and exuberantly imaginative. Poem 17, which closes the first half, is the only complete poem of Catullus written in priapeans to be transmitted by our manuscripts. ‘Priapeans’ are a lyric metre composed of the same cola as 34 and 61 (in different proportions), used by Anacreon and later associated especially

71 72 73 74

Suffenus is named as a bad poet in 14.29; Varus is thought by some to be Alfenus (Varus?) (Poem 30): see Nisbet (1995) 411 for a more complex suggestion. For Quintilius Varus, see Neudling (1955) 151–3 (full but outdated); Nisbet–Hubbard (1970) 279; Brink (1971) 413–21; 515. For Philodemus and the Epicureans on ‘frank speech’, see Tsouna (2007) 91–118. For the genre flagitatio, see Cairns (1972) 93–4. Other examples in Catullus are Poems 12 and 42.

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with hymns to Priapus.75 The poem contrasts strongly both metrically and stylistically with the other poems in this group. Formally, the poem is a (mock) hymnic request addressed to an unnamed colonia which the Transpadane references suggest was near (if not identical with) Verona. Catullus asks the colonia to provide him with the amusing spectacle of a fellow Veronese being toppled headlong from the colonia’s rickety bridge into the marshy mud beneath (17.7–11) and in return (sic tibi . . . munus hoc mihi da, 17.5–7) the colonia will receive a sturdy new bridge. In the second half of the poem the focus is on the elderly and most un-Priapic Veronese inappropriately wedded to a frisky puella,76 whose total lack of awareness so ‘outrages’ Catullus that he wants personally to throw the dullard from the bridge (17.23). The poem seems to be a performance piece designed to entertain and amuse local notables of the colonia with its reference to its rickety bridge in need of replacement and its local ceremonial performances. Many of the details elude interpretation, as often with the poems set in Cisalpina. Even though Furius Bibaculus was from Cremona and Iuventius may belong to a Cisalpine family, Poem 17 stands out distinctively from the rest of Poems 14b-26 in much the same way as Poem 4 (Phaselus ille) does from Poems 2–14. Nevertheless, there seems no reason not to view this group too as a Catullan libellus.

Poems 27–60 The second half of the polymetric collection (27–60) differs markedly from the first half (2–26): metrically, thematically and in principles of arrangement. In Poems 27–60, the dominant metre is again the phalaecian hendecasyllable, which is used for twenty-two of the thirty-four poems. However, there is a striking increase in the number of such lines which open with a trochee or an iamb rather than a spondee.77 Even more striking is the concentration of hendecasyllabic poems admitting more than a single 75 76 77

For Anacreon, see fr. 373 Page. More generally, see Jocelyn (1996a) 137–51; Morgan (2010) 34–40; Butterfield pp. 152–3. See Morgan (2010) 34–40; on the distinctive style and language of Poem 17, see especially Jocelyn (1996a) 137–51. The most important and influential discussion of this metrical feature is that of Skutsch (1969) 38 = (2007a) 45–8, who sees it as simply ‘a change of technique’ and suggests that ‘The arrangement of the phalaecean poems would . . . seem to be roughly chronological’ (38 = 46), with Poem 1 written last (i.e. after Poems 2–26 and before 27–60) as a dedication poem for Poems 2–26. Others suggest that the difference is one of tone: Zicàri (1957) 252–3 = (1978) 125–6; Scherf (1996) 73–85. See Butterfield pp. 145–6.

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exception to the spondaic base. Of twelve such poems, nine are clustered between Poems 27 and 48 (27, 32, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45), all with between 25% and 54% of lines with a non-spondaic base; there are just five hendecasyllabic poems with no exceptions (28, 33, 43, 46 and 48) and only one (47) admitting a single exception (as in Poems 2, 3 and 7). Of Poems 49–60, nine are in hendecasyllables, four have only spondaic bases (56, 57 and 58b); four allow a single exception (50, 53, 55 and 58); and two allow more than one (49 and 54). These metrical differences between 27–48 and 49–60 are matched by noticeably different themes and principles of arrangement: it is worth considering the two groups separately, whether they reflect two parts of a single libellus or, perhaps more probably, two separate libelli.78

Poems 27–48 There are no clearly dominant themes in Poems 27–48 but there is some thematic continuity with the rest of the polymetric section (1–60). Lesbia features only anonymously in Poems 36 (mea puella, 2) and 37 (amata tantum quantum amabitur nulla, 12) and she is named, but only as a comparator, in 43.7. Iuventius appears only in Poem 48, a kissing poem in hendecasyllabics: all lines open with a spondee, as in Poem 24, but Furius and Aurelius are noticeably absent.79 In Poems 28 and 47, Veranius and Fabullus are associated with L. Calpurnius Piso, proconsul in Macedonia in 57–55 bc where, by implication, they served in his cohors. They also feature prominently in Poems 9, 12 and 13, but there (and indirectly, perhaps, in Poem 25 (sudariumque Saetabum, 7)) their absence is associated with Spain.80 There is clear evidence that the choice of metrical technique was deliberate. Caesius Bassus, who was a lyric poet and a writer on metrics in the Neronian period, states (De metris 24-5 Morelli = GL 260–1K): the hendecasyllable, which we call phalaecian, in ancient authors . . . used to begin sometimes with a spondee, sometime with an iamb, sometimes with a trochee. . . . all these kinds of hendecasyllable Catullus, following Sappho and Anacreon and other authorities (auctores), did not avoid as being 78 79 80

Scherf (1996) 83–5 suggests dividing Poems 27–60 before Poem 46, admitting that the choice is somewhat arbitrary. Iuventius also features in another kissing poem in the elegiac epigrams (99) where neither Furius nor Aurelius are named (and possibly in 81). For Veranius and Fabullus, see Syme (1979) 1.300–4. Most take Piso to be L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus: see Broughton (1968) 2.202–3; 210; 218; (1986) 3.47. Syme (1979) pointed out that Fabullus may have had family connections with Spain (1.302–3): see p. 180 n. 64.

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ian du quesnay ‘against the rules [governing the phalaecian hendecasyllable]’ (tamquam uitiosa uitauit) but inserted as ‘within the rules’ (sed tamquam legitima inseruit).81

The elder Pliny, a contemporary of Bassus, seems to side with those who thought that any hendecasyllabic lines with non-spondaic bases were uitiosa, to judge from his ‘softening’ of the iambic opening of Poem 1.4 (HN 1 praef. 1).82 The younger Pliny tells us (Ep. 1.16.5) that Pompeius Saturninus ‘of course inserts, but very deliberately, into his soft and smooth (sc. verses) some “rather harsh” ones’ (inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus leuibusque duriusculos quosdam) of the type in Catullus and Calvus (quales Catullus aut Caluus)’. And just as Pompeius Saturninus intentionally wanted to recall the metrical technique of Catullus and Calvus, so it seems likely that they in turn were deliberately seeking to evoke the metrical techniques of, inter alios, Sappho and Anacreon.83 If this is correct, then Poem 1, in which four lines out of ten open with a trochee (2, 8 and 9) or an iamb (4), is much more likely to have served as a dedication to a libellus which most freely admits this metrical practice, that is Poems 27–60 (or a subset thereof), rather than one that does not, that is Poems 2–14 (or 26). In Poem 1 Catullus dedicates to Cornelius Nepos a libellus containing poems which many consider to be nugae. Nepos was a fellow Transpadane, probably from Pavia (Ticinum) (Padi accola Plin. HN 3.127), perhaps twenty years (or more) Catullus’ senior, and the author, inter alia, of a work, which, he says, many will consider genus scripturae leue (praef. 1).84 In this programmatic poem, Catullus sets out more explicitly than in any other his Callimachean and neoteric aesthetic values. Nepos may assist in making his work widely known but Catullus also makes clear, in his request to the patrona uirgo (1.9) to grant immortality to his libellus, that he is resolved to make his name and gain social standing both in Roman and in Veronese society through his achievements as a ‘professional’ poet.85 Catullus is not seeking financial reward but lasting fame. 81 82 83

84 85

See also Newlands pp. 242–5. For the meaning of legitima (and uitiosa used here as its antonym), see Brink (1982) on Hor. Epist. 2.2.109; AP 274. See Morgan (2010) 84–92 (with further bibliography) on the possibility that Pliny here has in mind discussions of the relationship of hendecasyllables to iambi. The more ‘modern’ view that trochaic and iambic bases were uitiosa prevailed: all two and a half thousand hendecasyllables of Statius and Martial open with a spondee (Scherf (1996) 75 n. 295): but see Courtney (1995) #155 and p. 179 n. 60 above. For Cornelius Nepos, see FRH 1.395–401. patrona (-us) is seldom used of deities but see Plaut. Rud. 259–62 (a sacerdos referring to her goddess Venus); 906 (a fisherman) Neptuno . . . meo patrono; TLL 10.1.789.11–15; 790.56–7. Cf. Myers pp. 73–5 and n. 25 above, adding, for uirgo/Musa, Ovid Ars 3.168; Goldberg (1992) 62. The concept of the poet as a cliens of the Muse(s) is well established: see Suet. gramm. 6: Aurelius Opillus (early first

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Poem 27 has been taken to have the programmatic function of ‘introducing’ invective poems. This reading takes its cue from the description of the ‘cups of well-aged Falernian’ as ‘drier/ more bitter’ (27.1–2).86 Poem 27 is not in itself overtly concerned with invective: it is rather a ‘drinking song’, like Anacreon 356a–b Page, a poem in Anacreontics. This fragment is not the direct source, but similar ‘drinking songs’ were very probably written in other metres, including hendecasyllables, by Anacreon and others.87 If Poem 27 has a programmatic function and originally followed Poem 1, it might rather serve to authorise Catullus’ use of trochees and iambs to open hendecasyllabic lines by reference to the practice of the Greek poets, Anacreon and Sappho. There are two non-spondaic openings in the first and central lines (Poem 27.1 (iamb); 4 (trochee)) and, probably, another iamb in the last (27.7 migrate).88 In Poem 28 Catullus asks Veranius and Fabullus how they are getting on as the comites of Calpurnius Piso, the Caesarian proconsular governor of Macedonia in 57–55 bc. Catullus assumes that they are faring at least as badly as he did in his time with C. Memmius in Bithynia (Poem 10). The poem closes with a curse on both Memmius and Piso, opprobria Romuli Remique (28.15). In marked contrast with Poems 1 and 27, all the hendecasyllables have a spondaic base. That this is a deliberate choice is confirmed by the equally striking juxtaposition of Poems 32 and 33: the latter is purely spondaic (8 lines, assuming Vībennius) and the former (11 lines) allows iambs in lines 1–3 and 8 and trochees in 6–7. The languorous lustfulness of the request to Ipsitilla (?) for an invitation to post-prandial sex in Poem 32 contrasts with the disdainful and coarse vituperation of Vibennius (who has stolen clothes from the baths) and his son, a failed male prostitute. The paired poems (41 and 43) are concerned with ‘Ameana’ (if that is her name), the decoctoris amica Formiani. Both consist of eight hendecasyllables. In 41, which has two lines beginning with a trochee (2–3) and two with an iamb

86

87 88

century bc) . . . quia scriptores (‘writers’ or ‘historians’) et poetas sub clientela Musarum iudicaret; Sulpicia Epigrammata Bobiensia 37.1 . . . 11 (Butrica (2006)): Musa . . . precibus descende clientis et audi (and the rejection of carmina . . . Phalaeci,4); and for uirgo = Musa, cf. Poem 65.2; see further e.g. Wiseman (1979) 172–3; Bellandi (2007) 97–118. Agnesini (2011) 1–21 argues in detail the case for reading qualecumque quidem, patrona uirgo, | plus uno maneat perenne saeclo, 1.9–10 as an independent sentence. calices amariores, is the reading of V and accepted by Mynors: but for objections, see Trappes-Lomax (2007) 84; and for attempts to emend, see Kiss (2013a) ad loc. (note especially Giardina’s calices capaciores). Hendecasyllables appear, combined with other cola, in the carmina convivalia /skolia PMG 884–90; 893–6; 907 (Scherf (1996) 75 n. 294; West (1982) 59–60). The first syllable of migrare is short in Manilius 3.79 and four times in comedy: see OLD and TLL s.v.

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(5–6), Catullus addresses her crudely as puella defututa (41.1) and declares that non est sana puella (41.7); in Poem 43 all lines have a spondaic base: Catullus affects a disdainful, polite urbanity to express his disbelief that ‘Ameana’ or her prouincia could think she compared with Lesbia. Poems 27–34, as introduced by Poem 1 (nine poems in all), showcase Catullus’ metrical virtuosity and skill, a key aspect of his doctrina. Poem 29 is a vicious attack on Mamurra, Caesar’s long-serving praefectus fabrum, and the attack famously inflicted perpetua stigmata on Caesar (Suet. DJ 73.1). The juxtaposition with Poem 28 is intriguing: in that poem Catullus’ complaint is that neither he nor Veranius and Fabullus were allowed to exact riches from the provinces in which they served, while in Poem 29 he vents his sense of outrage that Caesar and Pompey turn a blind eye to the rapacious self-enrichment of the unworthy Mamurra, the decoctor Formianus of Poems 41.4 and 43.5. It is written in pure iambic trimeters, used also, to very different effect, only in Poem 4.89 In lines 3–4, there seems to be an allusion to Calvus 17C/38H Bithynia quicquid | et pedicator Caesaris unquam habuit,90 whose target may have been Mamurra: he had also served in Pontus (which included Bithynia) under Pompey in the Third Mithridatic War.91 Cornelius Nepos (Poem 1) also expressed his disapproval of Mamurra’s profligate extravagance.92 Poem 29 cannot be earlier than Caesar’s first invasion of Britain (September 55): its topical indignation suggests it would have been circulated in reaction to the news and designed to be chanted by operae at appropriate public gatherings in the final months of that year. Poem 30 is Catullus’ only poem in Greater Asclepiads, a lyric metre used by Sappho for the poems later collected in the third book of the Alexandrian edition.93 It is a reproach to Alfenus – who may well be P. Alfenus Varus from Cremona (cos. suff. 39 bc), for whom Horace wrote Odes 1.18 in the same ‘rare and difficult metre’94 – for his (unspecified) violation of the fides of friendship. Alfenus, if different, as seems likely, 89

90 91

92 93 94

With an exception made for the proper name Māmūrr(am), 29.3 (for which see Hor. Sat. 1.5.37). Sappho is said to have written iambics, but nothing is known of her targets: see Yatromanolakis (1999) 186–7; Rosenmeyer (2006) 11–36. See Woodman pp. 29–30. See 29.18 secunda praeda Pontica; Broughton (1986) 133. The war was started by Mithridates (74 bc) following the death of Nicomedes IV, the pedicator Caesaris and the King of Bithynia: the insult to Caesar is a casual sideswipe (see Osgood (2008)). See Pliny HN 36.48, who couples reference to Nepos with explicit allusion to this poem of Catullus. Disapproval of Mamurra was shared by others: Cic. Att. 7.7.6; 13.52.1. Hephaestion Ench. p. 34 Consbr.; Schol. on Theoc. 28; Hunter (1996) 172–3. See Nisbet-Hubbard (1970) 227–8.

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from the Varus of Poems 10 and 22, appears only here. The poem echoes contemporary debates about the true meaning of fides: fides . . . nomen ipsum . . . habere, cum fit quod dicitur (Cic. Rep. 4.7) and culminates in the reference to the Roman goddess Fides (30.11), who will ensure that Alfenus comes to regret his failure to abide by his sacred obligations.95 Poem 31 celebrates Catullus’ return to the family villa at Sirmio after his long financially unrewarding (Poem 10) and emotionally draining (e.g. Poem 101) absence in Bithynia. It is written in choliambics, the metre used by Matius in his Mimiambi. The returning traveller is a standard topos in comedy and may well have also featured in mime.96 Then, following the contrasting styles of hendecasyllables in Poems 32 and 33, Poem 34 provides an elevated hymn to Diana written in a combination of three glyconics and a pherecratean similar to that used in Poem 61 (four glyconics rather than three), the wedding hymn for L. Manlius Torquatus. The same metrical form is found in Anacreon (358, 360 and 361 Page), who used a similar metrical combination for his hymn to Artemis (348 Page), the first poem in the Alexandrian edition.97 Poem 34 may have been commissioned by Manlius Torquatus for a feast or entertainment which he organised as XVuir sacris faciundis, an office he had held since 65 bc.98 The dazzling display of metrical skill in Poems 27–34 is a striking if modest precursor to the ‘parade odes’ which similarly display Horace’s metrical range in Odes 1.1–9. Poems 35 and 36, both written in hendecasyllables that freely open with an iamb or trochee, are, indirectly and in combination, a programmatic reassertion of Catullus’ poetic allegiances. In Poem 35, Catullus deferentially asks his ‘papyrus’ to invite his friend, Caecilius, who is writing a poem on Cybele, the Magna Mater,99 to come to Verona: and abandon his Sapphica puella Musa doctior. The description of his puella suggests he also wrote about an affair with his own ‘Lesbia’. Catullus wants to share with Caecilius some reactions he has received to Caecilius’ Magna mater from a mutual friend: seeking and receiving comments from critical friends was part of the process of serious writing.100 Caecilius’ poetic interests and 95 96 97 98 99 100

For etymologies of fides, see Maltby (1991) 232. perfidia is the hall mark of Greeks (e.g. Plaut. Asin. 199; Eur. IA 1205), and Carthaginians (e.g. Sall. Iug. 108.3). For the comic background to Poem 31, see Agnesini (2004) 64–70; for Matius, see Courtney (2003) 102–6. Syndikus (1984) 194. As ingeniously suggested by McKie (2009) 245 n. 121: and compare Poem 63 (as suggested above, pp. 173–4). For ‘love’ as a distraction or obstacle to more serious ambition, see e.g. Hor. Epod. 14.6–12 with Watson (2003) 439–40 for possible antecedents in Sappho and Anacreon. The friend is at least as likely to be the Transpadane Cinna or Calvus as Cicero (pace Thomson).

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ambitions are very much in line with those of Catullus. By contrast, the following poem (36) is a prayer to the Annales Volusi, cacata charta (~ papyre, 35.2), an excremental papyrus roll containing the Annales of the worst of poets, requesting them to pay out the vow that Lesbia had made to Venus to sacrifice Catullus’ own poems if he was ‘restored’ (restitutus, 36.4) to her and ceased to write abusive iambi. The conditions for their reconciliation have clearly been met, since Venus is ‘summoned’ to leave her usual haunts and accept the substitute offering. Volusius is otherwise unknown but his Annales also appear in 95 as a foil to Cinna’s Smyrna and he appears to have been a Transpadane (95.7).101 His poem was presumably in the traditional manner of Ennius, although its subject might have been the more recent achievements of Caesar or Pompey. The complexity of Poems 35–6 is enhanced and revealed by their juxtaposition: both individually and together they illustrate the aesthetic qualities implicitly claimed in Poem 1 and, both metrically and thematically, Poem 35 (at least) acknowledges Anacreon as one of Catullus’ models, as probably implied by Poem 27.102 In Poem 37 Catullus appears in the role of rejected lover (exclusus amator), familiar from mime as well as elegy, standing outside the salax taberna and abusing its motley crew of patrons. Lesbia, unnamed but clearly identified (37.11–12), has deserted him and has set up as a whore available to all and sundry.103 The poem is in choliambics evocative of the iambist Hipponax as well as of mime; and the language and nature of the abuse is suggestive of the graffiti scrawled on brothel walls.104 Catullus, still in love with Lesbia, hurls his vicious iambics (36.5) against her lovers and, in the closing lines, picks out the ‘Spaniard’ Egnatius for special abuse. Egnatius is the sole focus in the paired poem (39), also in choliambics, where Catullus mocks him for his continuous broad grin and then reveals his ‘Spanish habit’ of using urine to clean his teeth.105 There is no mention of the puella; but the deliberate pairing of the two reveals that the ‘real’ reason for Catullus’ vicious attack in Poem 39 is his pre-eminence amongst her ‘lovers’ in 37: in isolation, Poem 39 might be read simply as abuse of unacceptable ‘non-Roman’ behaviour, coarser than, but comparable to, the attack on Arrius’ uneducated pronunciation (Poem 84). Two 101 102 103 104 105

See Hollis (2007) 429 and, for Smyrna vs Zmyrna, 29–30. Both Sappho 1 and 2 L–P are also kletic hymns to Aphrodite (Venus) but neither provides a direct model. Poem 35 is a different kind of ‘invitation’ poem. Compare Plin. HN 10.172; Juv. 6.114–32; Dio 61.31.1 (of Messalina). For sopio (37.10), see Adams (1982) 64–5. For Egnatius (no more a Spaniard than Catullus was a Gaul), see Wiseman (1987) 340.

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contrasting poems (38 and 40) flank the second Egnatius poem: both are in hendecasyllables, both consist of eight lines, half of which open with an iamb or a trochee, and both are concerned with a friend’s breach of his duty (the theme of Poem 30). Poem 38 is an angry reproach of his friend Cornificius for having failed to provide him with solace ‘sadder than Simonidean tears’ (38.8). The reference to Simonides of Ceos, famous especially for his ‘lamentations’ (threnoi), suggests that Catullus’ need for consolation is connected with the death of his brother rather than his rejection by Lesbia.106 Poem 40 attacks an unknown ‘Rauidus’ (?)107 for his madness and threatens, with reference to Archilochus 172 W, to make him the object of public scandal if he persists in his passion for Catullus’ beloved (meos amores):108 Poem 39 has made it clear both to readers and to ‘Rauidus’ that his punishment will be typically iambic abusive derision. Poems 41 and 43 form a pair directed at abusing the amica decoctoris Formiani, ‘the mistress of the bankrupt of Formiae’ (i.e. Mamurra): both consist of eight lines of hendecasyllables, but Poem 43 uses only a spondaic base and so breaks the run of hendecasyllabic poems (35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42 and 45) which freely admit trochees and iambs. In Poem 42 the poet summons his hendecasyllabi to demand the restitution of his writing-tablets (codicilli/pugillaria) from an unnamed moecha putida. Generically, this is another flagitatio (like Poems 12 and 25). Eleven of its twenty-four lines open with a trochee or an iamb. Pliny the Elder calls such verses ‘harsh’: here they may demonstrate the affinity of hendecasyllables with iambi declared in 36.5 and 40.2 (as in 54.6 and fr. 3).109 But the generic content is also evocative of a lively Roman or even Transalpine street-scene, and the ‘exuberant theatricality’ of its enactment deliberately suggests some scene (or typical scene) in comedy or mime.110 In Poem 44, 106

107

108

109 110

For Cornificius, see Courtney (2003) 225–7; Hollis (2007) 150–4; Woodman p. 34; and for Simonides, Nisbet–Hubbard (1978) 30–1. Catullus’ brother probably died in 58 bc, before Catullus’ visit to Bithynia; but Catullus’ grief may have been prompted by an occasion such as his birthday or anniversary of his death. Rauide Mynors (OGR); the name does not appear elsewhere and produces a hypermetric final syllable found nowhere else in hendecasyllables. Thomson reads Raude, also not attested as a name. Raui occurs in MS 118Kiss/Oakley (c. 1465) and was independently conjectured by Friedrich (1908) 206–7: Ravius is at least an attested name (Schulze (1904) 219) and avoids the metrical anomaly. The phrase is variously used: in 6.16 tuos amores refers to the deliciae of Flavius; in 10.1 suos amores to Varus’ scortillum, in 45.1 to Septimius’ Acmen; in 15.1 and 21.4 meos amores to Catullus’ Iuventius; in 38.6 the meaning is disputed but clearly different from that required here. In context, the phrase in Poem 40 seems most likely to suggest Lesbia. See Heyworth (2001); Morgan (2010) 84–92. See Goldberg (2005) 87–114 for an interesting and illuminating recent discussion of Poems 8 and 42 and their relations with palliata comedy: the quotation is from p. 111. See also Syndikus (1984) 226–30; Agnesini (2004) 43–52 (Poem 8); 91 (Poem 42).

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Catullus expresses his gratitude in a playfully hymnic prayer of thanks to his ‘Tiburtine’ villa for his recovery from a cold caught from reading Sestius’ ‘frigid’ speech against Antius.111 His choice both of addressee (the fundus) and of metre (choliambics) recalls Poem 31, where Catullus wearily greets his villa at Sirmio following his return from Bithynia.112 The dramatic occasion of Poem 44 may be 55 bc when Sestius was (probably) campaigning for the praetorship.113 Sestius’ distinctive and idiosyncratic oratorical style, which managed to earn the disapproval of both Catullus and Cicero, is the butt of Catullus’ humour and, as with Suffenus in the choliambic Poem 22, the criticism is directed against Sestius’ style rather than the man himself.114 The humour also reflects on Catullus himself for his willingness to endure the frigus of Sestius’ speech in his eagerness to secure an invitation (appeto, 44.9) to one of Sestius’ cenae sumptuosae. Poem 22 ends on a similar note of humorous self-criticism, which is perhaps more typical of mime than Hipponactean invective. Poem 45 is another relatively long poem in hendecasyllables: and, with eight of its twenty-four lines opening with a trochee or iamb, it demonstrates triumphantly the possibility of using this metrical style in a poem that epitomises mollitia and completely avoids duritia. The poem elegantly describes the sentimental exchange of pledges of mutual, faithful love between a Septimius115 and his beloved Acme (whose Greek name suggests she was a freedwoman). The generic affinities of this poem with Horace Odes 3.9 suggest that Catullus is adapting a type of poem (the so-called ‘oaristys’) familiar to his readers from Greek lyric poets such as Anacreon and Sappho and their Hellenistic successors: it can easily be imagined as a convivial performance piece.116 The possibility of service in Britain (with 111

112

113 114 115

116

Poem 44 is generically a soterion, an expression of gratitude for recovery from illness (see Cairns (1972) 73–4), as is clear from 44.7: pectore expuli tussim; 16–17: refectus maximas tibi grates | ago. It ends with a witty variation on the lex talionis ‘the law of full compensation’ (Watson (1991) 42–6), an anticipatory curse that turns the frigus and its consequences upon its author, Sestius. See also Woodman pp. 42–4. For choliambics, see Loomis (1972) 102–8; Morgan (2010) 115–30. The metre was also use by Varro, Helvius Cinna and Licinius Calvus. Matius was the first to use the metre at Rome in his Mimiambi (see Courtney (2003) 106). P. Sestius had been successfully defended by Cicero, Hortensius Hortalus (the recipient of Poems 65 and 66) and Licinius Calvus in spring 56 bc: for the trial, see Tatum (1999) 205–8. For Cicero’s views, see Att. 7.17.2; cf. Plut. Cic. 26.5. For Antius and Sestius, see Neudling (1955) 5; 160–2; Syme (1979) 2.563; Della Corte (1976) 230–2; Ryan (1996) 85–91. The augural language (discussed by Cairns (2012a) 40–6) might suggest identification with C. Septimius (Cic. Att. 12.13(250)2; 14(251)1 thought to be an Augur by some (e.g. BNP s.v. Septimius (1.3)) but not by most (see Shackleton Bailey (ad loc.) (and Septimius is not included among the Augures of the 50s or 40s bc in Rüpke (2008)). See especially Cairns (2012a) 77–88.

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Caesar) or Syria (with Crassus) rejected by Septimius (45.22) suggests a (probable) dramatic date of late 55 bc. In marked contrast with 45, the next three poems (46–48) are all in hendecasyllables, with a spondaic base (except 47.6), all relatively short but diverse in content and varied in tone. Poem 46 joyfully announces the arrival of spring, which allows Catullus, at last, to leave Bithynia in the spring of 56 bc. The poem is a nuanced and subtle ‘farewell’ (syntaktikon).117 It lacks any expression of regret for leaving Bithynia itself. The only hint of sadness is that Catullus will be separated from his outbound companions (46.9–10) with whom he confidently expects to be reunited on his return. The predominant emotion is one of relief and joy at the prospect of visiting the famous cities of Asia. This poem provides a clear counterpart to Poem 31 which describes Catullus’ final arrival back at the family villa at Sirmio and the connection is underpinned by a series of verbal echoes.118 In Poem 47, Catullus directs his invective (47.1–4) against ‘Porcius and Socration’, the undeserving and rapacious comites of the Caesarian L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (cos. 58), and Piso himself, Proconsul of Macedonia (57–55).119 In part, the poem recapitulates in a minor key the outrage expressed in Poem 29 against Caesar’s own indulgence of the unworthy Mamurra to plunder his provinces. But the poem is at least equally concerned to express sympathy for his dear friends Veranius and Fabullus, who have been abused by Piso as Catullus had been by Memmius (emphasised by uerpa | farti estis (28.12–13) ~ uerpus . . . Priapus (47.4)) – similarly thwarted in their hopes of proper financial reward, and left begging for invitations to extravagant dinners (like Catullus in Poem 44). Since the image of Veranius and Fabullus begging at the crossroad for invitations suits Rome better than Macedonia, the pair may have returned, possibly independently of, and months earlier than, Piso, who, in mid-55, returned, to face a predictable attack by Cicero on his depravity, love of luxury and fondness for banquets and the company of Greeks.120 Poem 48 is an elaborately sentimental request to Iuventius, who appears only here in the polymetric sequence 27–60,121 to be allowed countless 117 118 120 121

See Cairns (1972) 44–5; and (2016) 403–6 for the ‘arrival of spring’ topos and Leonidas (Anth. Pal. 10.1/85G–P). 119 See Thomson (1997) 284. See Cairns (2012a) 113–21. On the date and situation, see Nisbet (1961) 181–2 and Quinn (1970) 231. Some of Cicero’s lines of attack in the in Pisonem were trailed in the earlier De prouinciis consularibus. For Iuventius, see p. 213; for recent bibliography, see Skinner (2015) 123–4. For pederasty in Rome, see Williams (2010) 67–78.

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kisses. Generically, it is a ‘counting poem’ (arithmetikon) of the type which enumerates erotic activities (basia), like Poems 5 and 7.122 Although Greek examples are rare and late, there is no doubt they existed. Affairs with ‘boys’ were seen by traditional Roman moralists, along with affairs with prostitutes, married and widowed women, and drinking parties, as concomitants of the import of luxurious Greek and Asiatic culture. The standard Roman view, and Catullus’ dismissal of it, is reflected in Poem 5.1–3 and, probably with reference to Poem 48, in Poem 16. If Catullus’ self-description in Poem 48 is recognised as flaunting his defiance of traditional Roman mores, it can also be seen to be a counterpart to both Poem 32 (with which it has generic affiliations) and, especially, Poem 27, where Roman names (Falernum, Postumia) are introduced into a sympotic poem to underline the fact that Catullus has enthusiastically embraced the Greek ‘drinking party’ and the Greek lifestyle that it symbolises.123 Viewed in this light, Poem 48 would make a fitting epilogue to a libellus consisting of Poems 27–48 and dedicated to Nepos (Poem 1). Nepos is very aware that social and sexual mores are culturally determined and that what is viewed as disgraceful in Rome is seen differently by Greeks and others (praef. 1–5; Alc. 2.2–3; Ep. 1.5). The sense of closure is further reinforced by the similarly strong recall of Poem 28 and 29 in 47 and of Poem 31 in 46. The second half of this libellus would open with Poems 35 and 36, both, in their own ways, restating Catullus’ aesthetic principles.

Poems 49–60 The final group of poems has often seemed to critics to be exceptionally ‘disordered’. It is certainly difficult to be confident in the face of the major textual problems presented by Poems 51, 54; 55 and 58b: most editors and critics treat 51 as a single poem, but some think 51.13–16 part of a new poem; 54 may either be fragments of two poems (54.1–5 and 54.6–7) or a single lacunose poem; most editors treat 55 and 58b as two poems (with some reordering of the lines) but a few seek to combine them into one. In consequence, this group may consist of between twelve and fifteen poems depending on the view adopted. The group neither opens nor closes with clearly programmatic material. Metrically, hendecasyllabics predominate: Poems 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57 and 58 and 58b. Generally the hendecasyllables have a spondaic base but only three poems (56, 57 and 58b) are entirely free of exceptions: four allow 122

See Cairns (2012a) 6–12.

123

Note also the dismissal of seueri (27.6).

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a single exception (50.15, 53.3, 55.10 (Că-mēr-ium) and 58.2) and two allow exceptions more freely: 49 has four in its seven lines (1, 3, 4, 5); and 54 two (or three?) (1, 2(?), 5). Poems 55 and 58b, both addressed to Camerius, are written in a combination of hendecasyllabic and ‘decasyllabic’ lines, formed uniquely by ‘contracting’ the normally short fourth and fifth syllables into a single long.124 Poem 50 is followed by (?)one lyric poem in Sapphic stanzas (51: see below) and a poem in iambic trimeters (52) (for the juxtaposition, compare the order of Poems 29 (iambic), 30 (lyric) and 31 (choliambics)). Poems 59 and 60 are both five-line choliambic epigrams, a unique juxtaposition. Thematically, the first half is focused on Calvus. Poem 50 celebrates and advertises Catullus’ deep feelings of friendship for Licinius Calvus,125 feelings summarised in the emotive vocatives iucunde and ocelle (50.16, 19) and evidenced by the symptoms of ‘love’ experienced by Catullus when they part: exardescit siue amor siue amicitia; utrumque enim dictum est ab amando (Cic. Lael. 100). Their friendship is grounded in their shared enthusiasm for poetry; and Catullus is sending Calvus this poem (50.16 hoc . . . tibi poema feci, i.e. Poem 50). His express purpose is that Calvus should be aware of the distress (50.17), which Catullus feels at being separated from him and of his wish to talk with him and be with him again (50.13). These are implicitly the prayers which Catullus, with humorous exaggeration, warns Calvus against rejecting (50.18–21). While in Poem 50 Calvus appears as a fellow poet, Poem 53 celebrates his oratory and specifically his arraignment of P. Vatinius, probably during the latter’s successful campaign for the praetorship in early 55 bc, but possibly as late as early 54.126 In the tradition of Archilochus 168W, Poem 53 relates an amusing anecdote – a memorable reaction from a (presumably) representative member of the crowd (nescioquem . . . e corona) gathered to hear Calvus’ ‘amazing exposition’ (mirifice . . . explicasset) of the charges he wanted to bring or had brought against Vatinius (53.1–3). The laudatory judgement of Calvus’ friend (mirifice . . . meus . . . Caluos, 53.2–3) is echoed by the reaction of the unknown member of the crowd (admirans, 53.4), who 124 125 126

This ‘licence’ has no surviving precedent and no imitators: see Butterfield pp. 146–7. For the use of the gentilicium (Licinius) rather than the cognomen (Poems 14; 53 and 96) see Dickey (2002) 56–63. For Poem 50, see also Woodman pp. 26–7. The date is disputed: 58 bc (favoured by Fordyce) seems too early; there would be little point in praising Calvus for his speech after the acquittal of Vatinius in August 54 bc; and it is unlikely to be later than Catullus’ reconciliation with Caesar in spring 54 bc.

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exclaims: di magni, salaputium disertum.127 The precise meaning is not clear but the anecdote seems to be a pointed rebuttal of Calvus’ critics. A decade later, Cicero claimed (Brutus 283) that Calvus lacked ‘real vitality’ (uerum sanguinem) and was not appreciated by the ordinary people, but, when a true ‘Atticist’ speaks (Brut. 290), ‘silence is called for by the crowd (a corona) and is followed by many expressions of admiration (multae admirationes)’. It is tempting to think that when Cicero changed sides and agreed to defend Vatinius against the charges brought by Calvus (during 55 bc), he had also questioned Calvus’ standing as an orator in similar terms. Poem 53 is framed by two poems which show that Catullus shared the antipathies of Calvus. Poem 52 is a savage outburst of indignant disgust at the election of Nonius and Vatinius to curule offices, which, like Poems 29 and 57, expresses Catullus’ disapproval of the triumvirs and, especially, their promotion of their ‘unworthy’ followers. Nonius is probably but not certainly the Pompeian, M. Nonius Suffenas.128 P. Vatinius had been a loyal and important supporter of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus since 58, when he was tribunus plebis. He was elected as praetor in the delayed elections held in the tumultuous opening months of 55. A year before, Cicero had abusively called Vatinius struma ciuitatis (‘carbuncle’ Sest. 135) in allusion to his disfigurement.129 Catullus, perhaps pointedly, borrows the insult and applies it to Nonius: both are monstrously unfit for the high office they now both hold (sedet and peierat are present indicatives) and Vatinius now ‘swears falsely by the consulship’ which he is more confident than ever will be his.130 The feud between Calvus and Vatinius went back at least to 56, when Calvus undertook to arraign Vatinius.131 In the senate, Cicero had vigorously attacked Vatinius’ candidacy for the praetorship,132 and, presumably, Calvus made clear his intention to bring charges. But Vatinius’ immediate liability to prosecution was removed by a senatus consultum de ambitu on 11 February 55.133 Vatinius, once elected, was safe until he left office at the 127

128 129 130 131 132 133

Cf. 14.12: di magni, horribilem et sacrum libellum. For the manuscript readings, see Kiss (2013a) ad 53.5. The meaning of salaputium is unknown. For the general sense, critics mostly follow Adams (1982) 65 and 252. See now Weiss (1996), De Vaan (2008) 501 and Hawkins (2012) who suggest the (Oscan?) root-elements may be sala- ‘salt’ and put- ‘pure’: note salse (G) at Poem 14.16 (of Calvus). For M. Nonius Suffenas: see Broughton (1986) 148–9 with further bibliography; Thomson (1997) 331–2. Cic. Att. 2.9(30).2; Vat. 39; cf. Sen. Const. Sap. 2.17.3. Vatinius had predicted his future consulship when quaestor in 63 (Cic. Vat. 6; 11). Cic. Q. Fr. 2.4(8).1. So Cic. Fam. 1.9(20).19 cum quidem ego eius petitionem grauissimis in senatu sententiis oppugnassem. See Cic. Q. Fr. 2.8(13).3; Plut. Cat. min. 42. For the prosecution of designati, see Shackleton Bailey (1970).

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end of the year. Immediately on his election, first Pompey and then Caesar had pressed Cicero to be reconciled with Vatinius and take on his defence.134 Calvus, however, persisted and the trial finally took place in late August 54.135 Poem 52 expresses Catullus’ outraged disapproval of the election of Vatinius to high office and Poem 53 his approval for Calvus’ action in arraigning him. Poem 54 is textually corrupt to the extent that editors are divided as to whether it represents one poem or two.136 Three, possibly four, individuals are abused in 54.1–5; and 54.6–7 seem to be directed against Caesar (unice imperator: cf. 29.11); but two of the named individuals (Otho and Libo) seem most likely to be associated with Pompey.137 The poem (or poems) would well fit the political context of 55 bc but with so much uncertainty nothing can hang on it one way or the other. The poem(s) might pair with Poem 52, if Nonius is a Pompeian, serving to frame Poem 53: Calvus expressed his hostility towards Caesar and Pompey (and their supporters) in his poetry as well as in his legal speeches.138 Poem 49 is formally an expression of gratitude (a eucharistikon) to Cicero. Cicero is the donor or benefactor, Catullus is the recipient, but there is, conspicuously, no specific reference to any beneficium that prompted the expression of gratitude (gratias tibi maximas Catullus | agit, 49.5–6 (contrast quare refectus maximas tibi grates | ago, 44.16–17)). Scholars differ widely in what they think the benefit might have been and on whether Catullus is being sincere or ironic. It is clear that, when Catullus describes himself, twice, as pessimus omnium poeta (49.5–6), he is not to be believed.139 Cicero is addressed with scrupulously formal politeness (Marce Tulli, 49.2).140 The opening superlative, disertissime, stands in pointed contrast with disertum, the final word of Poem 53 and spoken in praise of Calvus.141 This flattering address is further enhanced by the ‘quasi-epic grandiose phrase’142 Romuli nepotum and then even further intensified by 134 135 136 137 139 140 141

142

Cic. Fam. 1.9(20).19. Vatinius was probably charged under a law de sodaliciis passed by the consul Licinius Crassus before June 55 bc: see Gruen (1967) 219–21; Alexander (1990) 141–2; Cic. Fam. 2.8(78).1. See ad loc. Thomson (1997); Ramírez de Verger (2005); Trappes-Lomax (2007) 130–1; Kiss (2013a). See Neudling (1955) 102–3; 135–6. 138 See Hollis (2007) 81–4. See Poem 36.6–7 (Volusius’ Annales); 14.22–3. For this form of address, used only here by Catullus, see Dickey (2002) 67; 70 n. 61; Chahoud p. 134. See Dickey (2002) 137–41: ‘adjectives conveying . . . praise are often weaker rather than stronger . . . in the superlative’ (p.137). Famously, even Vatinius conceded that Calvus was disertus (Sen. Contr. 7.4.6). See Fordyce (1961) 231; Dickey (2002) 344–5 (‘periphrastic patronymic’). Cicero’s comparison of his achievements with those of Romulus (Weinstock (1971) 179–80) was met with reminders of his

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the orotund tricola quot sunt quotque fuere . . . quotque post aliis erunt in annis (49.2–3),143 all of which might at least raise suspicions that the tone is ironic rather than encomiastic. The superlatives relentlessly persist: maximas, 4 (conventional: 44.16); pessimus omnium, 5–6; and optimus omnium, 7. The last need not be taken at face value: Cicero himself scornfully dismisses an apparently complimentary reference to him as optimus consul (Att. 12.21(260).1): quis enim ieiunius dixit inimicus? There is no evidence for any personal relationship between Catullus and Cicero. But, if Catullus is responsible for the collocation of this poem with those that follow (in particular 50; 52 and 53),144 then they may reasonably be taken to provide the context and suggest reasons why Catullus may be ‘thanking’ Cicero in such an enigmatic manner. Cicero had switched sides: no longer a potential prosecutor of Vatinius he had agreed to act for the defence. If Calvus felt let down or even betrayed by Cicero, then it seems reasonable to infer that Catullus shared his friend’s disappointment as he shared his disapproval of Vatinius. Poem 49 is then revealed as deeply ironic: Catullus ‘thanks’ Cicero ‘for nothing’. Poem 51 is a bold metrical experiment in Sapphic stanzas, a lyric form which is not known to have been used previously by any Latin poet: although Calvus also wrote love poems uariis modis (Ov. Trist. 2.232), he is not known to have written Sapphic stanzas. In Poem 50 the focus is on the deep personal friendship of Catullus and Calvus and their shared passion for poetry. They are described as scribens uersiculos uterque nostrum | ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc (50.4–5). Poem 51 well illustrates Catullus’ enthusiasm for such metrical experimentation.145 The poem begins (at least) as a close adaptation-cum-translation of the first three of the four stanzas of Sappho 31 as preserved by Longinus (10.2): there is, however, no such equivalent for Sappho’s fourth stanza, either by design (as some suppose) or as a result of a lacunose transmission. The status of Catullus’ fourth stanza (51.13–16) is controversial: it may be based, perhaps freely, on the subsequent stanza(s) of Sappho 31; or it may be

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municipal, non-Roman, origins (Berry (1996) 177; 182), most succinctly in [Sall.] Cic. 7: Romule Arpinas. Compare Cicero Red. Pop. 16: Cn. Pompeius, uir omnium qui sunt, fuerunt, erunt, uirtute sapientia gloria princeps. But the formulation is common and used to varied effect: see Plaut. Pers. 778; Catull. 21.2–3 and 24.2–3. Note also the similar treatment of the hendecasyllables in 49 and 54, both freely admitting nonspondaic bases (above pp. 194–5). Context makes it clear that hoc . . . tibi poema feci etc. (50.16) does not refer to Poem 51, as claimed by e.g. Wray (2001) 98–9: contrast mitto | haec . . . carmina Battiadae, 65.15–16 (etc.) and compare the juxtaposed poems 10 and 11.

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a Catullan innovation; or even a part of a separate poem (although juxtaposition of two poems in lyric metre (μέλη) would be without parallel in Poems 1–60).146 In 51.1–12, the translation follows the Greek closely. The beloved however is identified by the pseudonym ‘Lesbia’ (in homage to Sappho of Lesbos and also the name of Catullus’ beloved) and the lover is named, in line 13, as ‘Catullus’: the poem implicitly claims to offer a new and definitive Roman paradigm for what it is to be in love.147 Poem 58 opens with a lingering triple repetition of Lesbia’s name, a nostalgic evocation of his gentle, earlier love, and then moves through recollection of her unique place in his affections (unam ~ omnes, 58.2–3)148 before viciously and vituperatively denouncing her scandalous infidelity. If Poems 51 and 58 are read as marking the beginning and ending of the affair, they find, together and severally, a counterpart in 11.17–24, a poem also in Sapphic stanzas and linked by the striking use of identidem (51.3 ~ 11.19). Elsewhere in Poems 27–60, the name Lesbia is used only at 43.7, where Lesbia nostra is favourably compared to the decoctoris amica Formiani (43.5, i.e. Mamurra, 57.4); and in 5.1 and 7.2.149 It seems, on balance, easier to suppose that Poem 51 is a single entity and Catullus is looking back at the start of his affair, reframing it through Sappho’s classic account and supplementing her account with his own resigned account of how such infatuations end. Poems 55 and 58b are both written in hendecasyllabics (all but 55.10 with a spondaic base), uniquely combined, in very different proportions, with ‘decasyllabics’. Both poems are concerned with Catullus’ search for his friend Camerius.150 Catullus wants to be made privy to the details of Camerius’ (?) new amor (55.22), in which case this poem is a variation on the theme of Poem 6.151 Both 55 and 58b play out the exhausting impact of the ‘search’ on the ‘seeker’ in variations on a miniature mime-type scene (‘the wild goose chase’) in language reminiscent of comedy and the paratragic.152 Together they frame the final sequence of poems in ‘standard’ 146

147 148 149

150 151 152

The bibliography on Poem 51 is large and diverse: see e.g. Skinner (2015) 265–70; doubts continue about the unity of the poem: the case for the separation of 51.13–16 is well summarised by Fordyce (1961) 219; cf. Morgan (2010) 244–7; Butterfield p. 150. For earlier recognition of Sappho’s ‘classic’ status, cf. Valerius Aedituus fr. 1 with Courtney (1995): ‘strongly reminiscent of Sappho’; and see esp. [Long.] Subl. 10.1–3. Cf. also Poem 37.11–12. In the elegiac epigrams, it is used in 72; 75; 79; 83; 87; 92 and 107. If the pseudonym was devised for Poem 51, it must be earlier than all poems that use it. That assumption gives rise to more problems than it solves. Probably the (future?) brother-in-law of Cornificius (Poem 38): see Wiseman (1987) 219–21. Doubts about the text make detailed interpretation difficult. For the comic parallels, see Christenson (2000) 293; Agnesini (2004) 79–89. Many editors have tried to combine the two poems, albeit in slightly different ways.

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hendecasyllabics (56, 57 and 58). The reference to the Porticus Pompei at 55.6 (in Magni . . . ambulatione) provides a terminus post quem of September 55 bc.153 Poem 56 announces its purpose is to elicit ribald laughter: rem ridiculam, 1 ~ ride, 3 ~ res . . . ridicula, 4. As a comic anecdote, it balances Poem 53 (risi, 1), where the affectionate laughter is directed at the public reception of Calvus’ oration. In Poem 56, the anecdote is aimed at Catullus himself. The poem is addressed to a Cato, probably P. Valerius Cato (the grammaticus), and is a variation on an epigrammatic genre which deals with the ‘opportunistic pederastic predator’ (sometimes a tutor or teacher).154 Poem 57 is an attack on Caesar and Mamurra, Caesar’s praefectus fabrum since 58 bc.155 This poem is clearly linked thematically with Poem 29 and it is these poems in particular that offended Caesar (Suet. DJ 73). Mamurra is also the decoctor Formianus (Poems 41 and 43: compare Formiana, 57.4). In the more immediate context, Poem 57 is a counterpart to Poem 52 which is an attack on a prominent Caesarian supporter and so on Caesar himself. The repetition of the first line at the end of the poem and the strong rhythmic breaks in each line, also features of Poem 52, are perhaps intended to evoke the irreverent uersus populares (cf. Poem 29). Poem 57 is not precisely datable but may most easily be associated with Caesar and Mamurra wintering in Gallia Cisalpina and, since there is no mention of Britain, the dramatic date appears to be early 55 bc and therefore earlier than Poem 29. Throughout the spring of 55, the conspicuous and threatening presence of Caesar and his legions played a significant role in securing the delayed election of Pompey and Crassus to the consulship and then the election of such supporters as the monstrous Vatinius as magistrates (a focus for at least Poems 49, 52 and 53). The last two poems are formally united by their metre (both are in choliambics), length (five lines) and syntactical structure (each comprises a single sentence). Although they are the only juxtaposed choliambic poems, the thematic differences are at least as striking as the similarities. Poem 59 is an exquisitely polished ‘graffito’ directed against a woman 153

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155

The Theatrum Pompei (LTUR 5. 35–6; 120) was dedicated just before Caesar’s first incursion into Britain, for which see Ramsey-Raaflaub (2017) 175–6; Raaflaub-Ramsey (2017) 34–6. Pompey’s project began some years earlier but it is assumed that the Portico was not in use before the Theatre was dedicated. See Floridi (2007) 306–9; (2014) 216–9. Archilochus 168W suggests that there were earlier examples of such ‘comic anecdotes’ but most surviving examples are later than Catullus. For ridere and derivatives as a generic marker, compare Pampinius / Pomponius 1.1: ridiculum est (Courtney (1995) 109). For Mamurra, see McDermott (1983); Broughton (1986) 133.

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identified by name, place of origin and the name of her husband. The provincial setting and vigorous obscenity of the accusation and the abuse are reminiscent of some of the elegiac epigrams. Poem 60 is a high-flown expression of indignant (paratragic?) reproach directed against someone who has failed or rejected the speaker (presumably ‘Catullus’) in his hour of need. The person is neither named nor even identified by gender.

The Elegiac Epigrams: Poems 69–116 In the elegiac epigrams formal factors play no obvious part in determining the arrangement: length in itself has no clear role in the placement of either the longer poems (76 or 99) or those consisting of a single couplet (85, 93 and 94, [95b?], 105, 106 and 112). Personal names and variation on shared themes play a more significant part in structuring the collection(s). Two poems, 78b and 116, contain explicitly programmatic material. The latter is an ‘inverse dedication (anathematikon)’ (i.e. one that threatens and abuses the dedicatee rather than one that praises him): by virtue of its final position in the codex, the poem serves as an epilogue. Although addressed to Gellius, there is no reference to incest and no suggestion that the hostility that Catullus feels is on account of betrayed friendship and success with Lesbia as in the other Gellius poems (74; 80; 88–91). It has been taken as closing either the (or a) collection of epigrams alone; or (because of the similarity of 116.3: carmina . . . mittere Battiadae and 65.2–3: mitto | . . . carmina Battiadae) all the poems in elegiacs (65–116); or even the entire liber Catulli. But the poem’s narrow focus on Gellius’ unrelenting attacks on Catullus makes it unlikely that it served so big a purpose.156 It is possible that it originally served as prologue to Poems 69–92, with allusion to Callimachus prominent in 70 and 72 and the blistering attacks on Gellius in 88–91, and was removed to its present position to serve as epilogue to the Liber Catulli by whoever compiled the codex from which our manuscripts derive. Poem 78b is a fragment which has clearly lost at least an initial couplet in which the person threatened with everlasting ignominy was named.157 Textual problems, many still unresolved, 156 157

For a variety of views on Gellius and Poem 116, see especially Macleod (1983) 181–6; Tatum (2007) 393–7; McKie (2009) 179–88; Campana (2012) 45–60. The person has been variously identified as Rufus, Gellius and Lesbius. Some think that the lines are misplaced: see Kiss (2013a) app. crit. ad loc. sed nunc, 78b.1 suggests that an unreal conditional clause and more than a single couplet is missing. non impune feres, 78b.3 (a standard phrase: cf. Poem 99.3; OLD impune 1.b.2) is also found at Prop. 1.4.17, in a poem addressed to (the iambic poet?) Bassus (Hollis (2007) 421), and that might strengthen the case for Gellius, if his tela infesta (116.4) are iambic poems.

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compound the difficulties found in Poems 69–116.158 Even when there are named individuals, their identity may be unknown: this is the case with the Rufus of Poems 69 and 77, and it adds to the uncertainty as to whether he is also the person addressed in Poems 71 and 73, which in turn fuels debate as to whether he might be the Caelius of Poem 100 and whether either Rufus or Caelius is the M. Caelius Rufus defended by Cicero in 56 bc.159 There are very few datable references in the epigrams. The clearest is at 113.2, which refers to Pompey’s second consulship in 55 bc. At 84.7, the departure of Arrius for Syria is probably connected with the departure of Crassus for his province at the end of the same year.160 If Catullus visited his brother’s grave on his way to Bithynia, then Poem 101 is dramatically set in spring 57 bc, but it may have been composed on or after his return (September? 56 bc) for a memorial of some kind. On this scant evidence, it seems reasonable to suppose that the epigrams were written alongside Poems 1–60, perhaps during the year and a half following his return.

Poems 69–92 As transmitted, the sequence of elegiac epigrams opens abruptly and without any formal dedication or programmatic poem. Poem 69 is an elegantly composed attack upon the malodorous but otherwise unidentifiable Rufus: a generous suitor, whose chances of success are precluded by the nasty gossip, which this poem serves to corroborate and spread, that his body-odour is vile and, by implication, disqualifies him from the elegant social circles he aspires to.161 The poem is marked by ring-composition (1 noli admirari quare ~ 9–10 quare . . . admirari desine), and elegantly pervasive alliteration and assonance. A possible etymological play between femina, 1 and femur, 3 (Isid. Etym. 11.1§106: femora dicta sunt, quod ea parte a femina sexus uiri discrepet) is another way in which Catullus points up the real values acceptable to Catullus. The attack upon Rufus is continued in 158

159 160 161

In Poem 71.4, OGR read a te, which is obelised by Mynors and defended by McKie (2009) 161–5, while Goold introduces the vocative Quinti (cf. Poem 82), which runs counter to the obvious identification of the unnamed target as Rufus (69.6: alarum . . . caper and 71.1: alarum . . . hircus). In 73.6, most editors print the transmitted qui, but Goold accepts quae, the attractive conjecture of Birt and Skutsch, which results in two consecutive poems about Lesbia. I hesitantly adopt quae which means that Poem 73 is not about Rufus, whose betrayal of Catullus’ friendship is the subject of Poem 77. On the difficulties of identifying someone with so common a cognomen, see Wiseman (1974) 106–8; Dickey (2002) 62. See Broughton (1968) 215. See Nappa (1999), who points to the similarities with Poem 37; and McKie (2009) 165.

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Poem 71 (ualle sub alarum . . . caper, 69.6 ~ alarum . . . hircus, 71.1): paired epigrams (in all metres) are often separated by a contrasting poem on a different theme. Rufus suffers from gout as well as from body-odour; and he has an unnamed rival for the unnamed object of their desires (cf. Poem 57.9): the upside is that both are suitably punished for their betrayal (71.5–6). Poem 77 reveals at last that the ‘real’ reason for Catullus’ vituperation of Rufus is not lack of physical hygiene or disfiguring disease: he had been a trusted friend (77.1), he has stolen omnia nostra bona (presumably, the affections of Lesbia), cruelly poisoned ‘our’ life and destroyed ‘our’ friendship. The interlocking of the Lesbia and Rufus series serves to imply that the intensity of the abuse directed at Rufus is fuelled by Catullus’ own self-disgust and his unresolved love-hate relationship with Lesbia: the motivation for the attack on Egnatius (37 and 39) is similar. The first two Rufus poems frame the first of a long series of poems concerned with Lesbia. Poem 70, which refers to her as mulier mea without naming her, is an adaptation and variation of an epigram of Callimachus (25Pf.). Catullus dismisses her conventional protestation that she would favour him (nubere malle, 70.1), even over Jupiter (e.g. Plaut. Cas. 323), with the equally conventional reference to the meaninglessness of lovers’ declarations.162 Poem 72 picks up the theme, alludes to the same Callimachus epigram (uror, 72.5 ~ θέρεται πυρί, 25.5Pf ‘burns with fire’) and painfully expands the difference between, initially, her casual desire for him and his own ‘true love’ for her; and then his present anguish at being torn by his continuing sexual desire for her and his growing contempt and dislike for her promiscuity. In Poem 73 Catullus addresses himself. He is in bleak despair at his own gullibility, he painfully realises that his own impeccable loyalty (pius, 2) and generosity is unreciprocated and feels greater bitterness when it is not requited by one who had recently solemnly declared Catullus to be their ‘one and only (true) friend’. If the emendation quae (6) is accepted, then this poem marks the next stage in Catullus’ developing account of his feelings about Lesbia and the difficulty that arises from his view of their relationship as familial or a kind of amicitia with all the obligations that involves. In Poem 75, following what appears initially to be an unrelated attack on Gellius, Catullus addresses Lesbia163 and tells her that his ‘reason’ has performed its proper function (officio . . . suo) and brought him to the point where he can no longer feel kindly about her; but he still cannot stop 162 163

Otto (1890) 17–18; Lygd. [Tib.] 3.6.49b with Navarro Anatolín (1996) 513. Mynors, supported by Fordyce, takes mea with mens: Thomson with the vocative.

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wanting her, however reprehensibly she behaves (a theme also present in Poems 37 and 58). This tortured dilemma, which has built up through the preceding Lesbia epigrams, is dramatically played out in Poem 76, an unusually extended epigram. The ‘rational’ voice of the speaker, recalling the mens of the previous poem, insists that Catullus’ own behaviour is beyond reproach, that he should stop torturing himself (excrucies, 10) and immediately give up his amor, however difficult that may be. Unable to cure himself, Catullus turns to the gods with a plea that they release him from his extreme suffering, in recognition of his pietas, 26 (cf. pium, 76.2). This Lesbia sequence transcends simple ‘theme and variation’ for its own sake to build a convincing representation of the self-obsessed misery of the rejected lover. Poem 77 reveals that Catullus’ attacks on Rufus were a response to Rufus’ betrayal of the trust Catullus had placed in him and the destruction of Catullus’ amicitia with both him and Lesbia. The juxtaposition with Poem 76, reinforced by verbal echoes (subrepsti, 3 ~ subrepens, 76. 21; eripuisti, 4–5 ~ eripite, 76.20; pestis amicitiae, 6 ~ pestem, 76.20), brings a temporary closure to this theme. Poem 78a is witty mockery of a Gallus whose immoral match-making (untypical of a proverbially censorious patruus)164 between his niece and nephew backfires when the nephew, now schooled in immorality, seduces Gallus’ own wife. It seems likely, although the cognomen is extremely common, that Gallus was the patruus of Gellius: of the ten occurrences of patruus in Catullus, two occur in 78a (Gallus), 5 in Poem 74 (Gellius’ uncle); two in other Gellius poems (88 and 89, his uncle). At Poem 88.3 Gellius is described as patruum qui non sinit esse maritum which seems designed to solve the riddle posed by 78a.5–6. Poem 78b is a four-line fragment of a poem threatening everlasting ignominy for a person who has ‘wronged’ Catullus: the name is lost but, in view of the reference to oral sex in the first couplet, it seems most likely to refer to Gellius, whose predilection for this ‘perversion’ is memorably attacked in Poem 80. There Catullus vividly accuses Gellius of fellating the unknown Victor (if the name is correct). The charges build relentlessly to their conclusion, incongruously adorned with elegant arrangements of adjectives and nouns, the beginning and end stylishly marked by labella ~ labra, the opening marked by the conventional and stylised red–white colour contrast, normally a descriptor of natural beauty.165 The gleeful final inference of guilt from the metaphorical euphemism emulso . . . sero, 80.8 (‘with milked whey’) associates such 164

See Nisbet-Rudd (2004) 168.

165

See Nisbet-Hubbard (1970) 171–2.

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behaviour with the farmyard, possibly with a glance at the etymology of irrumatio ‘inserting the teat’.166 The attacks on Gellius resume in an unparalleled continuous sequence of four poems (88–91).167 The first three take a new line of attack against Gellius, unless he is the addressee of 78b and the pura puella (78b.3) is his uenusta soror (89.2). With obsessive and relentless variations, he is abused and pilloried for cuckolding his paternal uncle (Gallus 78a) and for his incestuous sexual relationships with his sister and, especially, his mother (90). But Poem 91 finally reveals Gellius’ ‘real’ crime. He had, like Rufus, been a friend; Catullus had hoped that he would be faithful (fidum, 91.1) and provide some kind of support during Lesbia’s infidelities (magnus amor, 91.6) not because Catullus was ignorant of Gellius’ moral depravity but precisely because of his awareness of its nature and the fact that Lesbia is neither his mother nor his sister. But Catullus has discovered, to his cost, that his close friendship with Gellius makes her close enough to be attractive and the friendship he had relied on to protect him has instead proved to be a weakness. Poem 79 picks up the theme of Lesbia and Catullus, now conjoined with Lesbius: the shared pseudonym clearly identifies Lesbius as having the same gentilicium as Lesbia: if she is a Clodia (or Claudia) (so Apul. Apol. 10), then Lesbius is a Clodius (Claudius) and he is normally identified as P. Clodius Pulcher (trib. 58 bc). The suggestion that Lesbius pulcer would sell Catullus and his clan into slavery implies that they are not Roman citizens but barbaric Gauls168 and well suits the reputation of the Claudii for superbia.169 But the point of the poem lies in its insinuation of oral sex (79.4) and incest, a charge to which its place amidst the Gellius poems (74; 78a; 80; 88–91) gives salience. The opening couplet, especially Lesbius . . . quem Lesbia malit |quam te, 79.1–2, echoes both nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle | quam mihi non si se Iuppiter ipse petat, 70.1–2, and dicebas quondam solum te nosse Catullum, | Lesbia, nec prae me uelle tenere Iouem, 72.1–2. The incestuous relationship between Clodius Pulcher and his sister(s) was highly topical when Catullus returned from Bithynia. During the trial of Caelius Rufus (spring 56 bc), Cicero famously made a ‘slip’ and referred to Clodius as the uir rather than the frater of Clodia,170 166 167 168 169 170

See Adams (1982) 126. Gellius was probably L. Gellius Publicola, cos. 36 bc; see Wiseman (1974) 119–29; and Campana (2012) 39–42. An easy taunt to level at someone from Cisalpina: see Cic. Pis. fr. ix; Nisbet (1961) 53. See Wiseman (1979) 124–5, Tatum (1993); (1999) ch. 2 ‘Handsome arrogance’. See Cic. Cael. 32: istius mulieris uiro – fratre uolui dicere: semper hic erro; 78: eadem mulier cum suo coniuge et fratre; it was probably a theme in uersus obscenissimi in Clodium et Clodiam (Q. Fr. 2.3(7).2 (Feb. 56 bc)). For further references, see Skinner (2011) 56–7; 158 n. 14; Dyck (2013) 111.

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and such references to the incestuous relationship of P. Clodius and his sisters had been current since at least autumn 57 bc.171 While Catullus’ target in this poem is Lesbius, the abuse slanders Lesbia by association and is presented as motivated by her ‘preferring’ Lesbius to Catullus. Lesbia next appears in Poem 83. Its opening line describes Lesbia as ‘badmouthing’ (mala plurima dicit) Catullus praesente uiro, ‘in the presence of her uir’. There seems to have been an unexplained break in their relationship (implied by nostri oblita, 83.3): Catullus clings to his belief that, since he remains in her mind (meminit, 83.5), it is just a (temporary) lovers’ quarrel and that Lesbia’s ira (83.6) is ‘really’ a symptom of her love for him.172 He abuses the uir for his stupidity (fatuo, 2; mule, nil sentis, 3) in taking her abuse of Catullus at face value. The verbs, predominantly present indicatives, vividly describe the incident as taking place in present time. If Lesbia is Clodia Metelli and if uir here means husband (as it must do in the retrospective 68b.146), then the dramatic date (at least) has to be before Metellus’ death in 59 bc, which is much earlier than the other indications of dates in the epigrams. Clodia Metelli did not, so far as is known, remarry.173 This problem can be circumvented by supposing that Lesbia is not Clodia Metelli but either one of her sisters, who must also be supposed to have remarried; or someone else, such as the daughter of Ap. Claudius Pulcher who married Cn. Pompeius, the elder son of Pompey and Mucia, probably around 55 bc;174 or that uir here refers to an unidentifiable ‘current lover’ or ‘prospective husband’. There is perhaps another, more shocking, possibility: the uir is P. Clodius Pulcher who was, during the years Catullus appears to be writing his epigrams, contemptuously referred to (and clearly identifiable) as the uir of Clodia by Cicero and others. The theme of Poem 83, the significance of Lesbia’s abuse of Catullus (mi . . . mala plurima dicit, 83.1), is picked up in Poem 92 (mi dicit semper male, 92.1). Lesbia is forever abusing him, not only in the presence of her 171 172 173

174

See Cic. Dom. 92: tu (P. Clodius Pulcher) sororem tuam uirginem esse non sisti. sed uide ne tu te soleas Iouem dicere, quod tu iure eandem sororem et uxorem appellare possis. The text of 83.6 and its precise meaning is disputed: see e.g. Fordyce (1961) 373 and Thomson (1997) 511. The case against an earlier dating for the ‘Lesbia affair’ is cogently stated by Wiseman (1969) 46–60; (1974) 108–14, who believes Lesbia was most probably the younger sister (Clodia Luculli). On Clodia Metelli and ‘Lesbia’, see more recently Skinner (2011), 132–5. See Hutchinson (2012) 56 n. 16, reporting the suggestion of J. T. Ramsey that she was a daughter of Ap. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 54 bc) who married Pompey’s elder son in the fifties (generally dated 56–54 bc, but Gruen (1974) 454 n. 21 places it in 52 bc and the marriage is first attested by Cic. Fam. 3.4(67).2 (June 51 bc)). For fatuus, 83.2, as a common term of abuse, see Opelt (1965) 270 index s.v., but note Cassius apud Cic. Fam. 15.19(216).4 (of Cn. Pompeius).

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uir. Catullus insists that she loves him ‘really’, and he justifies his interpretation of her behaviour by drawing a parallel with his own: deprecor illam | assidue, 92.3–4 (‘I am constantly running her down’).175 The repetition of the hyperbolic dispeream nisi (92.2 and 4) suggests (comic?) desperation: he is, surely, deluding himself about Lesbia’s feelings for him, a symptom of his own tortured suspension between love and loathing. Within the frame created by Poems 83 and 92, there is a sequence of three further Lesbia poems (85–87) which give way to the tirade of abuse directed against Gellius, one of Lesbia’s lovers and a treacherous friend (Poems 88–91). The justly famous Poem 85 (odi et amo) exquisitely miniaturises the tortured feelings of Poems 72, 75 and 76. Poem 86 expresses the love he still feels for Lesbia in a variation on the theme of Poem 43: a provincial beauty is compared with Lesbia who has what Quintia lacks and, uniquely, combines physical beauty and wit to be the very embodiment of Venus: the contrast is underlined by the enclosing echo of Quintia formosa est, 86.1 in Lesbia formosa est, 86.5. If comparison of Quintia with Lesbia was intended to serve as a remedium for his amor (cf. Ovid Rem. 709–10), it has conspicuously failed: Lesbia emerges as indisputably Lesbia . . . pulcerrima, 86.5.176 Poem 87 is formally addressed to Lesbia (87.4: in amore tuo ‘in my love for you’). Catullus dwells relentlessly on the uniqueness of his love for Lesbia and especially his (unrequited) faithfulness to her, a theme that looks back to Poem 76, and the connection of fides ~ foederis, 87.3 (as at 76.3) draws on an etymology that Varro (L 5.86) claims goes back to Ennius.177 In Poem 86, Quintia, presumably the sister of Quintius, the addressee of Poems 82 (and 100), is a member of Veronese high society (100.2). In Poem 82, Quintius appears to be a friend who is warned not to seduce Lesbia (a variation on the theme of Poem 40). The poem is remarkable for its emphatic triple repetition of quid/quod carius est oculis which conveys a sense of both desperation and menace behind Catullus’ warning to Quintius: eripere ei noli, 82.3: ignoring Catullus’ advice will, the wider context suggests, provoke the kind of invective directed against other treacherous friends, such as Rufus and Gellius. Two poems only in the sequence 69–92 appear to stand alone. Poem 81 is addressed to Iuventius. He is clearly not a rival for the attentions of 175

176 177

So Thomson (1997) 522 (see OLD 1c), noting that Aulus Gellius NA 7.16.2–5 equates its meaning here with detestor, exsecror, depello, abominor ‘curse, express loathing for, reject’: contrast Fordyce (1961) 382 who offers ‘I constantly pray for relief from her’ (and OLD 1a which cites this passage). The superlative looks back to Lesbius est pulcer, 79.1. In the elegiac epigrams, it recurs at 109.3–6: see pp. 216–17 and n. 221.

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Lesbia but he might have been a distraction or consolation if he had not rejected Catullus and taken up with the unnamed and love-sick or morally degenerate hospes from Pisaurum, characterised as a social inferior from a decaying provincial outpost. Catullus, betrayed by Lesbia and by his friends, has also been rejected by Iuventius for such an unworthy rival. Poem 84, one of Catullus’ most famous epigrams, stands apart from the rest in both its lightness of tone and its scathing caricature of the illeducated Arrius, who has no known connection with Catullus or any other individual named in Poems 69–92.178 He is plausibly believed to be a man of (relatively) low birth who nevertheless enjoyed some success as an orator, became praetor (64 bc?) and was an unsuccessful candidate for the consulship in 58 bc.179 The issue of the correct use of aspiration in Latin words was a matter of scholarly interest to both Caesar, who wrote on the subject in his de analogia (probably spring 54 bc),180 and Cicero, a decade later (Orat. 160).181 When Quintilian discusses aspiration and the sometime fashion for hypercorrection (Inst. 1.5.19), he follows the authority of Cicero but also acknowledges Catullus’ memorable contribution to the debate in his nobile epigramma. The poem opens with the illustrative contrast between chommoda and commoda 84.1: the contrast is implicit in the play between Lesbius est pulc(h)er ~ Lesbius est Pulcher, 79.1 and Lesbia . . . pulc(h)errima, 86.5. The correct pronunciation/spelling of pulcer was a standard part of the debates on aspiration.182

Poems 93–115 It seems likely that the epigrams originally comprised two libelli, with a division unmarked in the manuscripts.183 The first group (69–92, possibly prefaced by 116) consists of 25 (?26) epigrams almost exclusively concerned with Lesbia and attacks on Catullus’ rivals for her favours. The second group (93–115) consists of 23 (or 24, if Poem 95 represents two poems, as in Mynors), with only two poems (107 and 109) directly concerned with Lesbia and one (104) with a potential rival. The sequence opens with a devastatingly withering, two-line put-down of Caesar, a man to whom dignitas meant more than his life (Caes. Civ. 178 179 180 182

He is mentioned in the company of Vatinius (Cic. Vat. 30–1); he was close to Crassus (Cic. Brut. 242) and a friend of Cicero: Neudling (1955) 7–11 is to be read with caution. See Cic. Brut. 242: infimo loco natum; Douglas (1966) 179. For his career, see Broughton (1968) 161; (1986) 25. See Garcea (2012) 24–5. 181 See Allen (1965) 43–5; Adams (2007) 174. 183 See Allen (1965) 14–16; 26–7. Cf. Wiseman (1969) 26–9.

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1.9.2) and who spent his life in pursuit of honos and gloria. Catullus, with studied nonchalance, announces his complete indifference: he wants to know absolutely nothing about him and dismisses him with a contemptuous proverbial phrase.184 Quintilian paraphrases the poem, without attribution, as an example of insania.185 This is the only mention of Caesar in the epigrams and Catullus does not reveal what prompted it. It would fit well in early 55 bc when Caesar’s menacing presence was felt in Rome during the postponed elections, the outcome of which Caesar sought to determine. Poem 94 also consists of a single couplet concluding with a proverbial saying.186 It is the first of four abusive epigrams (94; 105; 114; 115) directed against ‘Mentula’. ‘Mentula’ is almost universally seen as a pseudonym for Mamurra, Caesar’s praefectus fabrum, who is attacked under his own name in Poems 29 and 57 and contemptuously dismissed with the circumlocution decoctor Formianus in Poems 41 and 43, a reference to his family’s importance in Formiae (Hor. Serm. 1.5.37: in Mamurrarum . . . urbe). The identification rests on the fact that in 29.13 Mamurra is clearly and obscenely referred to as ista uestra . . . mentula (where uestra refers to both Caesar and Pompey).187 In an unpublished paper, Professor John D. Morgan has made the attractive suggestion that ‘Mentula’ is a pseudonym for Q. Mucius Scaevola, tribune of the plebs in 54 bc.188 He points out that, unlike other known pseudonyms, Mēntu˘ lă, is not the prosodic equivalent of Māmūrră. Mentula’s estates (Poems 114 and 115) are near Firmum (mod. Fermo) in Picenum near the Adriatic, while Mamurra is firmly associated with Formiae in Latium (Poems 57, 41 and 43), on the Via Appia. Morgan neatly points to Varro’s etymology (L. 7.97) of scaeuola, an amulet in the shape of a phallus worn by Roman boys to avert harm and bring luck.189 This identification has significant advantages, as Morgan points out. Poem 105, placed at the approximate centre of the libellus, is a neat couplet 184 185 186 187 188 189

See especially Cic. Phil. 2.41; and OLD albus 4a; Otto (1890) 10. Quint. Inst. 11.1.38: negat se magni facere aliquis poetarum, utrum Caesar ater and albus homo est. insania. See Thomson (1997) 525; Tosi (2007) § 570 and, for similar sayings, 106, 109 and 544; Otto (1890) 254. For Mentula, ‘the basic obscenity for the male organ’, its use as ‘nickname for Mamurra (?)’, and as ‘an empty term of abuse’, see Adams (1982) 9–11. See Morgan (2007): I am extremely grateful to Professor Morgan for his permission to refer to his unpublished suggestion. See OLD s.v. Varro, LL 7.97: pueris turpicula res in collo quaedam suspenditur, ne quid obsit . . . scaeuola appellata. For the more familiar heroic explanation of the cognomen, see Liv. 2.13.1; Plut. Popl. 17.3.

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deriding Mentula’s aspirations to scale the poetic heights only for the Muses to repel him with pitchforks, presumably because of the intolerable ‘rusticity’ of his style. There is allusion here to the proverbial naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret (Tosi (2007) 49 § 109): the colloquial (and rustic?) bluntness hints at Mentula’s inability even to sustain an elevated (Ennian?) style. Mamurra is not attested as a poet (although he is referred to, with Caesar, as eruditulus, 57.7). But Q. Mucius Scaevola is (probably) included by Pliny (Ep. 5.3.7) in his list of prominent Republican figures who wrote verse. There are a few fragments that suggest that he was active in the mid-50s:190 the phrase lassas clunes (2C/92H), which is more likely to come from an abusive poem than an erotic one; an elegant bucolic epigram in Greek elegiacs (Anth. Pal. 9.217); a compliment, also in elegiacs (1C/91H), to Cicero’s poem Marius (Leg. 1.23) in which canescet saeclis innumerabilibus seems to allude to Cinna’s phrase innumerabilibus . . . saeclis (1.2C/6.2H). If ‘Mentula’ is Scaevola, then the juxtaposition of Poem 94 with Catullus’ enthusiastic welcome for Cinna’s Smyrna (95) is perhaps more pointed than it might otherwise seem. The final Mentula poems, 114 and 115, form a pair and provide variations on a single theme: both focus on his estates at Firmum, which, extensive as they are, fail to satisfy their owner’s insatiable demands. The precise point of these poems remains elusive, with textual difficulties, in part at least, responsible. But maximus ultor | non homo, sed uero mentula magna minax (115.7–8)191 echoes an elaborate alliteration in Ennius (620Sk/617Flores): machina multa minax minitatur maxima muris; and in Poem 105, Pipleium scandere montem | Musae may similarly allude to Ennius (208Sk/225Flores): neque Musarum scopulos .192 Although a similar allusion characterises the ending of Poem 116 for Gellius, Scaevola, given his avowed enthusiasm for Cicero’s Marius, may well have borrowed extensively from Ennius. Poem 113, which immediately precedes the last two Mentula poems, is addressed to Cinna, recalling the juxtaposition of Poems 94 and 95. The poem, which opens with a reference to Pompey’s consulships in 70 and 55 bc, is an attack upon the adulterous behaviour of a woman whose name is transmitted as ‘Mecilia’ (= Maecilia). Many have felt that the combination of the names Pompeius and ‘Mecilia’ might rather suggest a reference to 190 191 192

See Hollis (2007) 146–8; Gow–Page (1968) 2.405–6; Courtney (2003) 174–5; 186; 215. Mynors reads ultro; Thomson retains V’s ultor. The line is as supplemented by Flores, who compares Sil. It. 2.33–4: see Flores (2002) 190–1. The allusion is noted by Fordyce (1961) and Thomson (1997).

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Mucia, Pompey’s third wife (c. 80–62 bc), whom he divorced for her suspected adultery with Caesar.193 Mucia shortly afterwards married M. Aemilius Scaurus, praetor 56. When he faced trial in 54 bc on a charge de repetundis, he had (apparently) expected, as stepfather of Pompey’s children, more powerful support from Pompey than was forthcoming. Apparently Pompey had taken offence because he felt that Scaurus’ willingness to marry Mucia had made light of Pompey’s accusation of impudicitia.194 Critics inclined to this view are divided between emending Mecilia to Mucilla (as a pseudo-diminutive of Mucia (Pleitner; Goold)) or to Moecilla (Baehrens) or Moec(h)ilia (Ald. 1502).195 Certainly the emphasis on Pompey’s consulships (consule Pompeio primum . . . facto consule nunc iterum) makes it very hard to believe this is simply an amusingly elaborate dating-formula. The disrespectful reference to Pompey in 113 is followed by two Mentula-poems, balancing the disrespectful address to Caesar (Poem 93) which precedes the first Mentulapoem: the cuckold and the adulterer. That a poem addressed to Cinna immediately follows Poem 94 and precedes Poem 114 suggests that the arrangement is deliberate and the Mentula poems effectively frame the second half of the epigrams, with Poem 105 taking a central position. The emphatic repetition of moechatur (94.1) might favour restoring Moecilla or Moec(h)ilia (113.2) as a contemptuous diminutive nickname, ‘the wee adulteress’, based on moecha, with a deliberately transparent reference to Mucia: her adultery had become a topical issue again, at least by early 54 bc. And as noted above, Mucia was the older sister of Q. Mucius Scaevola, trib. pleb. 56 bc, who is (if Morgan is right) Mentula, the subject of the two following epigrams. Poem 95 is written in praise of the epyllion of C. Helvius Cinna, the recipient of Poem 113 and a close friend of Catullus from Brixia (Brixia Veronae mater amata meae, 67.34), who was probably with him in Bithynia (10.29–30). The general sense of the poem is clear: the time and effort expended by Cinna on its composition guarantees its immortality and universal fame in contrast with the execrable Volusi Annales, (95.7 cf. 36.1 and 21) which will never be known beyond the River Po, presumably identifying him as a Transpadane.196 Cinna’s Smyrna (or Zmyrna) became 193 194 195 196

The reasons for the divorce are variously given: Cic. Att. 1.12(12).3 (not specified); infidelity (Plut. Pomp. 42.7); adultery with Julius Caesar (Suet. DJ 50.1). For the trial, see Alexander (1990) 143–4. For Pompey’s attitude, see Ascon. Scaur. 19-20C; Cic. Att. 4.15(90).7. For details see Kiss (2013a). For oe>ū, see Allen (1965) 62. Poem 95 is textually problematic: Thomson (1997), Ramírez de Verger (2005) and Kiss (2013a) present it as a single poem; Mynors, Quinn (1970), Thomson (1978) and Trappes-Lomax (2007)

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the iconic embodiment of the neoteric poetic values derived from Callimachus and Parthenius. Catullus’ allusive and unequivocal celebration of the poem and its values also serves as a manifesto for his own values as implied in Poem 1 and on show in Poem 64. Poem 95b, possibly a fragment of a separate poem, dismisses Antimachus, who wrote both epic (the Thebais) and elegy (the Lyde) as tumidus, 95b.2: he provides a negative foil to both Cinna and to Calvus. Poem 96 is formally a consolatio for Calvus who is grieving for the death of his beloved Quintilia. Ostensibly Catullus is here performing a duty of friendship for a person close to him in his time of need (cf. Poem 38). But it seems extremely likely that, as Poem 95 undoubtedly alludes to Cinna’s poem in some detail, so here there are allusive echoes of Calvus’ Epicedion Quintiliae (15-16C/27–8 H). Calvus is the only leading neoteric poet not known to have connections with Cisalpina, so it is worth noting that the name Quintilia suggests a possible connection with Quintilius Varus from Cremona, the probable addressee of Poems 10 and 22; if she was the wife of Calvus, then she may be Varus’ sister; if his mistress, then his freedwoman. All these poems, 95, 95b and 96, have clear antecedents in Callimachus.197 The next two poems (97 and 98) are scintillating and animated displays of verbal excoriation and the art of invective. In neither case does the target have any known connection with Catullus and, in contrast with Rufus and Gellius, the poems offer no indication of personal motive. In 97, the coarse abuse is targeted at an Aemilius, who cannot be identified.198 The Gaulish ploxenus suggests a provincial; the brutally obscene hic futuit multas (9) his boorish low status; se facit esse uenustum (9) his pretentions to sophisticated fashionability.199 These are conventional features of invective here elevated by the sonorous assonance and brutally precise and vivid farmyard imagery. The man with a mouth indistinguishable from his anus appears in later Greek epigrammatists (Anth. Pal. 11. 241, 242 and 415) and that may

197 198

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272 as two poems, 95 and 95b. It is extremely unlikely that Hortensius should be read in 95.3: see Trappes-Lomax (2007) 269–70. For Helvius Cinna, see Woodman pp. 34–6. For Poem 95, see e.g. Anth. Pal. 9.507/ 27Pf./ 56G–P; for 95b, see Anth. Pal. 12.43/ 28Pf. / 2G–P; for 96, see Hollis (2007) 68–70. There are several possibilities: M. Aemilius Lepidus, the future triumvir (cos. 46 bc); L. Aemilius Paul(l)us, cos. 50 bc, witness alongside P. Vatinius (Poem 52) and Cn. Gellius (Poems 74, 80, 88–91 and 116) in the trial of P. Sestius (Poem 44); and M. Aemilius Scaurus, praetor 56 bc, husband of Mucia (? Poem 113); the Veronese poet Aemiliuis Macer (Hollis (2007) 93–117), but none suit the language of the poem. For ploxenus, see Adams (2007) 176–7; futuo, Adams (1982) 118–22; for uenustus as a fashionable term of self-definition, Fordyce (1961) 197.

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suggest that Catullus is expanding and transferring an established motif to a local and contemporary setting. This may also be the case in Poem 98 (compare Lucillius Anth. Pal. 11.148/53 Floridi).200 Poems 97 and 98 are linked by the crude vulgarity of culum lingere (97.12) ~ lingua | . . . culos . . . lingere (98.3–4): and in both poems the coarseness of the language stands in pointed contrast with the elegant structure of the poem and its careful alliterative patterning. Poem 99 is, like Poem 76, an epigramma longum.201 Catullus describes how Iuventius rejected, with an elaborate display of revulsion, Catullus’ attempt at giving him a kiss (a variation on the theme of Poem 48) and he ends with a promise that he has learned his lesson and will not try it on again. Catullus’ elaborate expressions of regret and apology deploy language that seems designed to raise a smile and heal the breach: his excruciating torture (99.3–4) lasted more than an hour (perhaps bathos: contrast the seemingly interminable torment inflicted by Lesbia)! But the poem sheds an interesting sidelight on the other Iuventius poems, widely dispersed as they are in our collection: for all that Catullus demonstrates his desire for Iuventius, it never goes beyond a refused or rejected kiss, while Iuventius seems, at least to the suspicious Catullus, to be open to more physical advances from others. Iuventius is not readily identified, but the gentilicium is that of an old Roman gens which is also found on inscriptions in Verona.202 Poem 100 is an elegantly composed and witty poem addressed to two Veronese friends, Caelius and Quintius (flos Veronensum . . . iuuenum, 2), whose courtship is directed, respectively, to Aufillenus and Aufillena, whose names suggest that they too are from Verona or nearby.203 The sodales, Caelius and Quintius, have ‘a truly brotherly friendship’: both want to win over the object of their desire.204 The brother and sister seem equally united in their apparent desire to resist their suitors. Friendship, tried and tested, dictates that Catullus should favour Caelius who had, as a good friend should, supported him when he was desperately in love. 200 202

203 204

201 See Schatzmann (2012) 106–7; 344–8. Cairns (2008). Iuventius is flosculus Iuuentiorum, 24,2; and for Veronese Iuventii, see Neudling (1955) 94. Some think he might be the son of Iuventius T(h)alna, a friend of Cicero and, in the forties, an unsuccessful suitor for the sister of Cornificius (Poem 38). For Iuventius T(h)alna: see Cic. Att. 13.21a(327).4, 13.28(299).4 with Shackleton Bailey ad locc.; Wiseman (1969) 58, (1985) 130–1, (1987) 176, 219–21). For Aufillenus/Aufillena, see Neudling (1955) 17–18. For the fraternum sodalicium, cf. Hor. Epist. 1.10. 3–4 (gemelli | fraternis animis of himself and his friend); and see Otto (1890) 170; Tosi (2007) 589–90 (§ 1310); for quod dicitur = ‘proverbially’, see Otto (1890) 19–20.

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Quintius has, by implication, failed the same test. Caelius may be the Caelius of Poem 58; Quintius is probably the insensitive friend of Poem 82. Aufillenus appears only here but Aufillena reappears in the Poems 110 and 111, forming an inner frame for a sequence of poems which seem largely set in Verona or nearby. In Poem 110, Catullus berates Aufillena for her bad faith: she promised and failed to keep her promise. Having accepted his ‘gifts’ (pretium, 110.2), she then, on the grounds that she is ingenua and pudica (110.5), cheated him of her ‘services’: that, says Catullus, makes her worse than a common prostitute. In Poem 111, Catullus counters her claims to being ‘completely faithful’ to her husband, normally the highest praise for a wife, with the vicious put-down that it is better to be wantonly promiscuous than to bear children for her paternal uncle, which suggests that her own relationship was (or could be represented as) incestuous.205 Poem 101 is the famous poem enacting Catullus’ personal performance of the final rites for his brother at his grave in the Troad. There are links with Poem 96, in which Catullus consoles Calvus who similarly grieves for the death of his beloved Quintilia: both feel the silence of the grave (mutis . . . sepulcris, 96.1 ~ mutam . . . cinerem, 101.4) and in both cases the mourner’s grief is intensified by the prematurity of the death (mors immatura, 96.5 ~ indigne . . . adempte, 101.6)206 and openly expressed through tears (flemus, 96.4 ~ manantia fletu, 101.9). These verbal and conceptual links are not particularly pointed and all are commonplaces of funeral epigram, although comparison of the two poems illuminates Catullus’ empathetic consolation of his friend in 96 and underlines his own isolation as he bids his brother a final farewell in a distant land.207 There seems to be no good reason to think that the poem was not inscribed on the tomb in Bithynia, and also on a memorial (cenotaph or other representation) in Verona, where Catullus’ brother was the son of one of its most distinguished citizens and, no doubt, himself a prominent member of Veronese society. Catullus’ heroic journey to a foreign land to carry out the final rites demonstrates through his fraternal pietas his adherence to traditional family values (prisco . . . more parentum, 101.7) and his acceptance of his own social position. Poems 102–4 all seem to involve persons connected with Cisalpina. The addressee of Poem 102 bears the common gentilicium, Cornelius: Cornelius 205 206 207

The precise nature of the charge made by Catullus is disputed and there are textual problems: see Thomson (1997) 548–9; Trappes-Lomax (2007) 293. For indigne, see Fordyce (1961) 389. That the sense of loss and grief is inevitably sharper when a close relative dies in a foreign land is acknowledged by Philodemus de morte 25.37–26.3 Henry.

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Nepos, the addressee of Poem 1, came from Ticinum (modern Pavia) in Transpadane Gaul; another Cornelius, from Brixia, features in 67.35, but nothing identifies the Cornelius of 102 with either of them. The implied setting is a conuiuium, where friends want to be able to speak frankly and openly and where wine might lead to indiscretion. Here Catullus, with amusing emphasis, assures Cornelius of his trustworthiness and his ability to keep confidences, in terms familiar from lyric and, perhaps, Lucilius.208 But the articulation of the argument through fido ab amico (1), fides animi (2) and iure sacratum (3) also underlines the central importance of fides to friendship. Poem 104 illustrates a violation of these ‘rules’. The addressee is, unusually, unnamed, and rebuked both for misrepresenting what Catullus has said about Lesbia (presumably during a conuiuium) and spreading hurtful gossip.209 The addressee is coupled as a scandal-monger with a Tappo, an attested cognomen used by the gens Valeria and relatively common in Northern Italy.210 Catullus expresses his indignation that his friends could possibly have believed that he was capable of ‘speaking ill of’ (maledicere) his beloved.211 Here, in stark contrast with Poems 83 and 92, Catullus denies the very possibility of his having spoken ill of someone he loved or of ‘loving to death’ someone he had maligned. Poem 103 is addressed to a Silo (another cognomen common in Cisalpine Gaul and in use, in the mid-first century, by the gens Iuuentia)212 who is berating Catullus with ‘rigid severity’ for some unspecified misdemeanour. Catullus has given Silo a significant sum of money213 which he tells him, with icy politeness (sodes, 103.1), to return, if he wishes to persist in his tirade of moral outrage. But, Catullus implies, Silo is too fond of money to put ‘principle’ before profit and, like a comic pimp (leno, 4),214 he will calm down and keep the money. Catullus does not say why he gave Silo the money or what he has done to outrage Silo. The only clue is in the abusive comparison of Silo to 208

Simonides 582 PMG; Hor. Carm. 3.2.25–6 with Nisbet–Rudd (2004); Hor. S. 1.4.80–5 (especially, fingere qui non uisa potest, commissa tacere | qui nequit, 84–5); S. 2.1.30–1: ille (Lucilius) uelut fidis arcana sodalibus | credebat; Epist. 1.5.24–5: ne fidos inter amicos | sit qui dicta foras eliminet; 1.18.37–8: arcanum . . . commissumque teges et uino et ira torta. 209 Lesbia is mea uita (109.1) and three times described as carior . . . oculis in Poem 82, which is addressed to Quintius, who is taken by some to be the addressee in 104 (cf. Poem 100). 210 For the name, see Konrad (1982) 224–7; the relevance, if any, of the lex Tappula de conuiuiis (cf. lex Postumiae, 27,3) is unclear: see Fordyce (1961) 392–3; Festus (pp. 496-7L); Lucilius (1307M/1239W/ 1323K): Tappulam rident legem; Val. Max. 8.1.8; Crawford (1996) 1.31–2. The existence of Tappo as the name of a character in farce (or the like) is at best hypothetical. 211 212 So, Thomson (1997) 541 against Fordyce (1961) 393. Neudling (1955) 163. 213 Cf. 41.2 (Ameana’s asking price); the rent Caelius paid for an apartment in Rome (Cic. Cael. 17); and 26.4 (Furius’ mortgage on his uillula). 214 For leno a leniendo, see Maltby (1991) 333.

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a leno, a ‘facilitator of illicit sex’ (conciliator stupri, Isid. Etym. 10§160) with a reputation for dealing in bad faith.215 Poem 106 is a variation on a similar theme. It is a playful attack on a puer (‘boy, slave boy’) bellus and a praeco (an auctioneer, a low status profession): the latter is perhaps a dismissive term for the boy’s older lover or guardian who is showing off the boy in public.216 One might suppose that Catullus had made a pass at the bellus puer and has been reprimanded either by the boy himself or by the praeco.217 Poem 112 is similarly elusive: Naso appears only here in Catullus but the cognomen is widespread (including Verona and the gens Valeria). Interpretation is also hampered by faulty text.218 It is clearly an elegantly phrased and scathing putdown of a self-important social climber whose pretentious efforts are thwarted by his notorious pathic predilections. In Poem 108, Cominius is attacked for having slandered good men (inimica bonorum | lingua, 3–4). He cannot be plausibly identified but the name is common both in Cisalpine Gaul and at Rome.219 He is an old man and whitehaired but his respectability is destroyed by his socially unacceptable sexual practices: no further details are given. Catullus assures him that the people would relish seeing him put to death and his unburied corpse left to feed the carrion-eating birds and beasts. The second half of the poem elegantly describes his dismemberment in grotesque and deliberately disturbing detail.220 Poems 108 and 112 are further variations on the style of invective found in Poems 97 and 98. In sharp contrast with Poem 108 is the emotional intensity of Poems 107 and 109, in which hope struggles with Catullus’ past experience of Lesbia’s infidelity. Their relationship has been ruptured but Lesbia is now ready to return. If mea uita (109.1) is taken to allude to Poem 104.1, it suggests that Catullus’ alleged maledictions were responsible. Poem 107 celebrates her ‘return’ with a joy bordering on disbelief, an emotional response bred of his passionate yearning to have her back and his loss of hope that it would ever happen. Poem 109 suggests that his disbelief may be well-founded: he wants the mutual and lasting love she offers but calls upon the gods to guarantee her promise as if recognising that she is not herself capable of doing what she has said she will do, the ‘true’ sense of fides, etymologically 215 216 218 219 220

See Otto (1890) 189; Plaut. Rud. 1386 fide lenonia, Pers. 243 lenae leuifidae. Cf. Poems 24 and 81. 217 See Trappes-Lomax (2007) 285. For full details, see Kiss (2013a). See Neudling (1955) 48 whose suggestions are rightly rejected by Fordyce, while Thomson is ambivalent. Cf. Ovid Ibis 169–72, possibly pointing to Callimachean influence, although such gruesome descriptions are not uncommon: see Hor. Epode 5.99–100 with Watson (2003) 248–9.

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implicit in the sanctae foedus amicitiae, 109.6.221 The juxtaposition of this pair of Lesbia epigrams with two (111 and 112) attacking Aufillena for her failure to honour her side of an agreement and then viciously insinuating her incestuous relationship with her paternal uncle serves as a vivid reminder of what it means to be on the receiving end of Catullus’ maledicta.

Conclusion This chapter seeks to set out the arguments for understanding the Catulli Veronensis Liber as a compilation of libelli originally arranged and ‘distributed’ by Catullus himself. It is assumed that Catullus is most likely to have followed the practices of his contemporaries in first trying out his works in readings or performances at conuiuia and by circulating to close friends written copies for comment, reactions and suggestions. They will then have been released for wider circulation through networks of social contacts and further refinement and revision would no longer be possible. Readers will make (or have made for them) copies which they can and did collate, annotate, reorder and perform as they thought appropriate.222 The long non-elegiac poems (61–64) circulated as individual libelli, each to be read on its own terms. Similarly, the longer elegies (65–68b) are, with the exception of the paired 65 and 66, individual pieces that are best understood as separate poems. The situation for the short poems (1–60 and 69–116) is the reverse. Some (such as 17, 34, 101) may have had separate formal ‘release’ prior to inclusion in a libellus. Generally however it seems more likely that they were distributed as libelli by Catullus rather than as either single pieces or even very limited ‘cycles’ of poems on such themes as ‘Iuventius’ or ‘Gellius’. The libelli are here (tentatively) identified as: 2–14 (for Calvus?); 14b–26 (for Quintilius Varus?); 27–48, prefaced by Poem 1 (for Cornelius Nepos); 49–60 (for Calvus?); 69–92, prefaced by 116; and 93–115. Neither of the books of epigrams has an obvious (potential) dedicatee. Each of these libelli has its own distinctive character and its own principles of organisation. The libelli were not assembled in chronological order, which is difficult to determine because the range of datable references is so narrow. It is possible that there was some overlap between the collections. The most likely order for the polymetric books seems to be, 221

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foedus a fide; fides . . . nomen habere, cum fit quod dicitur: the connection is found in Cicero and Varro and goes back in some sense to Ennius: see Maltby (1991) 237; and 232 (for the definition of fides). See Barchiesi (2005) and Skinner (2015) 141–2 for the implications of this.

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to judge by the termini post quos, 27–48 (+1); 49–60; 14b–26; 2–14. For the elegiac epigrams, the books are 69–92 and 93–115, with the latter group possibly the earlier of the two.

Further Reading Skinner 2007b provides an excellent account of the debate around ‘authorial arrangement’ in Catullus, which is complemented by her indispensable bibliography (Skinner (2015) 139–51). Thoughtful orientation is provided by Wheeler (1934) 1–32 for the early twentieth century and the arguments against Catullan arrangement. Wiseman (1969) made powerful and influential arguments for Catullan arrangement of the entire Liber, which he subsequently ((1979) 175–82) modified to take account of the ‘three book’ theory proposed by Quinn (1972) 9–20. There is detailed and stimulating discussion of the issues in Bellandi (2007) 13–32 and 63–96. For the metrical details which are important for the organisation of Poems 1–60, Skutsch (1969) is fundamental, with useful qualifications and expansions in Scherf (1996), and Jocelyn (1995), (1996a) and (1999). Useful discussions of possible Catullan libelli are offered by Segal (1968) and Hubbard (1983) and (2005). Insights into the freedom felt by readers to anthologise and reorganise the works they were transcribing or having transcribed have emerged from papyri of Philodemus, Posidippus, and Sappho. There are brief comments in Barchiesi (2005) and Skinner ((2015) 141–2). More may emerge in the future and the evidence we have is that at least some readers, like those who listen to modern music, liked to compile their own ‘playlists’ rather than, or as well as, accepting the author’s arrangement.

chapter 9

Catullus and Augustan Poetry Monica R. Gale

lasciuus Catullus and the Formation of Latin Love Elegy haec quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli, Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena; haec etiam docti confessa est pagina Calui . . .

(Propertius 2.34.87–9)

These [sc. love-affairs] were the subject of naughty Catullus’ poetry, too, thanks to which Lesbia is more notorious than Helen herself; to these the pages of learned Calvus also confessed . . . obuius huic uenias hedera iuuenalia cinctus tempora cum Caluo, docte Catulle, tuo

(Ovid, Amores 3.9.61–2)

May you come to meet him [Tibullus], learned Catullus, along with your friend Calvus, your youthful brows crowned with ivy.

The Catullus of the Augustans is, above all, a poet of love. Regularly paired with Calvus, as in the two quotations above, he is hailed for his doctrina (‘learning’) and lasciuia (‘licentiousness’, ‘playfulness’), and acknowledged as a founding father of erotic elegy: Propertius locates him in the canon of love-poets that also includes Cornelius Gallus, and to which he himself aspires; and Ovid imagines him as coming to greet his successor, the recently dead Tibullus, in a literary Elysium.1 The long-running debate about the ‘origins’ of Latin love elegy has regularly recognised that Catullus had an important part to play in the formation of this short-lived genre: Poem 68 (or ‘68b’) – with its introspective focus and complex use of mythological paradigms – is commonly 1

In addition to the passages cited, see also Prop. 2.25.4, Ov. Am. 3.15.7, Tr. 2.427–8; ‘Lygdamus’ cites Catullus’ Ariadne as an exemplum (in an erotic context) at [Tib.] 3.6.41. The only other Augustan poet to refer to Catullus by name is Horace, at Sat. 1.10.19 (discussed below).

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cited as a (if not the) foundational text.2 But perhaps more important for the elegists than any single poem is the model established by Catullus’ selfrepresentation in general, and the erotic ideal constructed in the Lesbia poems: precedents for what were to become defining conventions of the genre can already be found in the Catullan corpus. Most obviously, Lesbia stands in many respects as the prototypical elegiac puella. Characteristically, the elegiac lover’s single-minded devotion is never more than partially reciprocated, and its object is represented as at once infinitely desirable and ultimately inaccessible: elegy is above all the poetry of erotic failure. Whereas Catullus’ candida diua is explicitly another man’s wife (68.143–6; cf. Poem 83), the social status of the elegiac puella is notoriously difficult to pin down;3 but it is crucial to the elegiac scenario that she cannot be fully possessed by her lover, whether because she is already married or because she is a meretrix or at least an ‘irregular’ (in Paul Veyne’s phrase),4 with whom marriage would be socially unacceptable. Like Catullus, the elegiac lover typically oscillates between idolisation and denigration of the beloved: more particularly, both Propertius and Ovid echo the Catullan cycle of obsession, jealousy and disillusion, culminating in both cases in a renuntiatio amoris (Prop. 3.24 and 25; Ov. Am. 3.15) structurally equivalent to Catullus’ repudiation of his own puella in Poem 11. Characteristic, too, of the elegiac beloved – particularly Propertius’ Cynthia – is her doctrina: Propertius insists that Cynthia’s physical charms are the least of her attractions, outweighed by her skill as a performer and as a poet in her own right (2.3.9–22; cf. 1.2.27–30, 2.1.9–10, 3.20.7); elsewhere he identifies the docta puella as the preferred audience for his work (2.13.11; cf. 1.7.11, 2.11.6). Lesbia’s beauty is similarly more than physical (Poem 86): the sal – the wit or ‘sparkle’ – for which she is praised manifests itself performatively in the ‘witty vow’ of Poem 36 (hoc pessima se puella uidit | . . . lepide uouere, ‘the wicked girl was well aware that this vow she was making was a witty one’, 36.9–10), and perhaps in the reciprocal bad-mouthing of the lovers in Poem 92. If the elegiac poet’s narrative of heterosexual desire seems calqued on the relationship between Catullus and Lesbia, so too does the element of homosocial bonding and rivalry prominent particularly in Propertius’ 2 3 4

For bibliography and a historia quaestionis, see Bessone (2013), esp. 39–41 and (for Catullus 68 as ‘the recognized incunabulum of Latin love elegy’) 54 with n. 47. See e.g. Wyke (2002) 29–30 (but contrast James (2003) 36–41, who argues that the puella should be understood as a meretrix). Veyne (1988) 85 and passim.

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monobiblos, but present to a certain extent in all three of the major elegists.5 Propertius squabbles and commiserates with male amici in their erotic troubles and their attempts to supplant him in Cynthia’s affections (e.g. 1.4 (Bassus), 1.5, 1.10, 1.13 (Gallus), 1.9 (Ponticus)); while in Tibullus’ Marathus poems (1.8, 1.9), homosociality and homoeroticism are virtually elided, the speaker acting both as lover and as advocate for his young protégé in the complicated love triangle with Pholoe.6 Male addressees are fewer in Ovid’s Amores, but it is perhaps no accident that the sexual boasts of 2.10.23–8 are found in the context of one such elegy. Catullan loveobjects figure in a similar way as discursive vehicles, enabling interactions between men, whether as ‘coin of invective exchange’7 or as the ground of erotic rivalry. The boy Juventius is the object of contention between Catullus, Furius and Aurelius in Poems 15, 21, 24 and perhaps 81, while Poem 11, with its projected world tour in all-male company, can be read on one level as pitting the homosocial against the (failed) heterosexual bond with Lesbia. Poem 35, in which Caecilius’ girl threatens to keep him both from male amici and from the completion of his poem on the Magna Mater, rings another variation on the theme.8 These last two poems instantiate, too, the intense scrutiny of genderhierarchies and gender-roles which figures prominently in Catullus’ poetry (see Myers in this volume). The puella of Poem 11 appropriates the masculine role: the plough and the cut flower that trope her rejection of the speaker’s love in the final stanza are elsewhere very common symbols of male sexuality and the loss of young girls’ virginity. Though Caecilius’ girl is more sympathetically treated, Catullus hints – in juxtaposing her with Cybele, the subject of Caecilius’ unfinished poem – that she, too, is a castrating female, who threatens to reduce her lover to an effeminised, subordinate role like that of Attis in Poem 63. At times, Catullus appears to challenge prevailing gender norms: Ariadne’s complaints about the 5 6

7 8

For readings of Catullus and elegy which emphasise the homosocial element, see esp. Wray (2001) and Keith (2008) 115–38. Homoerotic desire is generally less prominent in elegy than in Catullus, however: with the exception of Tibullus’ Marathus elegies (1.4, 1.8, 1.9), pederasty features in elegy only as a foil for heterosexual amor (Prop. 2.4; cf. Ov. Ars 2.683–4), perhaps reflecting the centrality of lifelong commitment to the elegiac ideal (a commitment that the traditionally transitory nature of boy-love makes impossible). Wray (2001) 74, on Poem 41. For gender-focused readings of Poem 11, see especially Fitzgerald (1995) 179–84, Konstan (2000), Greene (2006); on the symbolic connections between Caecilius/the puella and Attis/Cybele in Poem 35, see e.g. Heine (1975). With Fredricksmeyer (1985) and others, I take it that the reference to a mutual friend at 5–6 gestures towards a broader circle of male acquaintance, and read 13 incohatam and 18 incohata as pregnant hints that the puella has – paradoxically – proved to be a distraction from work on the poem that inspired her love in the first place.

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untrustworthiness of male promises at 64.139–48, for instance, respond ironically to the misogynistic sentiments of Poem 70: at non haec quondam blanda promissa dedisti uoce mihi, non haec miserae sperare iubebas, sed conubia laeta, sed optatos hymenaeos, quae cuncta aerii discerpunt irrita uenti. nunc iam nulla uiro iuranti femina credat, nulla uiri speret sermones esse fideles; quis dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci, nil metuunt iurare, nihil promittere parcunt . . .

(Catullus 64.139–46)

These were not the promises you gave me once, with your flattering tongue, this was not what you bade this poor girl hope for, but a happy marriage, a longed-for wedding – all of which has come to nothing, torn apart by the airy winds. Let no woman now believe a man’s oath, let none expect a man’s words to be trustworthy; while they desire something and their mind is eager to possess it, there’s no oath they shrink from swearing, nothing they refrain from promising . . . dicit; sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

(Catullus 70.3–4)

So she says; but what a woman says to a lover in his desire should be written on the wind and running water.

The striking echoes of Poem 30 elsewhere in Ariadne’s speech suggest, too, a gender-bending identification on the poet’s part with his seduced and abandoned heroine.9 Looking back nostalgically to happier times in Poem 8, the speaker recalls how he ‘followed wherever the girl led’ (uentitabas quo puella ducebat, 8.4), apparently accepting or even welcoming the inversion of the traditionally active masculine and passive feminine roles; and elsewhere he promotes his erotic ideal – particularly through the idiosyncratic deployment of the ‘language of aristocratic obligation’ – in terms 9

The language in which Catullus deplores his friend Alfenus’ disloyalty in Poem 30 tends to assimilate the speaker to Ariadne and Alfenus to Theseus: both Theseus and Alfenus are immemor, ‘careless’ or ‘thoughtless’ (64.135; 30.1), and perfidus (‘disloyal’, 64.132–3; 30.3); compare also 30.6 with 64.143–4, 30.7 with 64.149, 30.10 with 64.142. For similar patterns of cross-gender identification in Poem 68b, see below. The echo of 70.3–4 at 64.142–8 is complicated by the fact that Poem 70 is itself adapted from Callimachus, Epigram 25 Pfeiffer, with reversal of the gender-roles (in the Greek original, it is the male, Callignotus, who swears falsely). Ironically, the two passages in which gender stereotypes are most categorically asserted interact with each other to produce a comprehensive blurring of boundaries.

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that suggest an equivalence with the highly-valorised institution of male–male amicitia.10 Yet, as we have already seen, the inversion of gender roles also appears as a source of anxiety or resentment, where the monstrous feminine is represented as emasculating or as threatening homosocial ties. This complex handling of gender-roles sets an important precedent for the elegists, for whom masculinity is a constant preoccupation, though gender is here more closely and explicitly bound up with genre. The elegists insist that their preferred style of poetry is mollis – soft or effeminate – particularly in contradistinction to the archetypally masculine style and concerns of epic. Generic hierarchy is brought into relation with Catullan erotics: thus the poet-lover is compelled to write elegy rather than epic because his (dominating, masculine) mistress has reduced him to a quasifeminine passivity and dependency. By the same token, he eschews other traditionally masculine pursuits – particularly warfare and public life in general – in favour of a uita iners or ‘inactive life’ of love and parties (or, in Tibullus’ case, rural obscurity). Yet elegy’s gender discourse, still more than that of Catullus, is slippery and double-voiced: the elegists both accept the lowliness of their genre and assert its superiority to other poetic kinds, reluctantly confess to their inability to engage in properly masculine pursuits, and declare a positive preference for love and peace over violence and bloodshed. Important here are the characteristic elegiac tropes of seruitium and militia amoris – both of which have precedents in Catullus, who refers to his beloved in Poem 68b as era and domina11 (respectively, the mistress of slaves and the mistress of a house; 68.136; 68, 156) and in Poem 37, in a moment of (almost) pure machismo, writes of the ‘mighty wars’ (magna bella, 37.13) he waged for her against his rivals.12 These two poems taken together embody two strikingly disparate aspects of Catullus’ written self, or what Amy Richlin refers to as his ‘Priapic’ and ‘anti-Priapic’ personae:13 the often violent self-assertion embodied in sexual threats to rivals and inimici, and the (sometimes willing) self-abasement that makes him Lesbia’s slave (see esp. 68.135–48). 10 11 12

13

See esp. Poems 72, 75, 76.7–9, 87, 109. On the ‘language of aristocratic obligation’ (the expression is Lyne’s) see esp. Ross (1969) 80–95, Lyne (1980) 23–38 and Fitzgerald (1995) 128–34. Reading dominae (Fröhlich) rather than dominam (V) at v. 68, with Mynors (1958), Kroll (1959), Fordyce (1961) 351–2, Syndikus (2001), 2.269–70 and others; cf. also Baker (1975). For the argument that the elegiac tropes of militia and seruitium amoris are anticipated also in Poem 45, see Gale (2018). On pre-elegiac precedents for militia amoris, see Spies (1930) 28–51 and Murgatroyd (1975); on seruitium, see esp. Lyne (1979) and Murgatroyd (1981). Richlin (1992) 144–56.

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The elegists develop militia and seruitium into all-pervasive mastertropes that serve to define both lover and beloved, and the relation between them. Contrasting militia amoris with real-world warfare, the poet both distances himself from tradition and respectability and gestures towards a kind of alternative heroism of his own, both challenging and reinforcing normative canons of masculinity; as the slave of his puella, he is both humiliated and helpless, unable to reject love(-poetry) for any other genre or way of life. Yet, at the same time, his erotic adventures will bring him glory equivalent (if not superior) to those of the epic hero.14 The elegists’ rejection of traditionally masculine pursuits has its precedents in Catullus, too, though his celebration of apolitical otium appears less wholehearted than that of his elegiac successors.15 Catullus’ engagement with public life seems, on the face of it, more direct than that of the elegists, though many scholars incline to read his numerous invective attacks against public figures as indicative of a profound disillusion with Republican institutions in general, rather than as partisan interventions (against Caesar and/or the Triumvirs).16 Be that as it may, abnegation of a public career in favour of the ‘life of love’ clearly means something rather different for the elegists, writing in what Gordon Williams refers to as the ‘moral climate’ of Augustan Rome.17 Thanks to his legislative intervention in the private life of the elite citizen through the leges Iuliae of 18 bc,18 Augustus himself now takes on a crucial role as a ‘blocking character’ – loosely equivalent to the senes seueriores of Catullus Poem 5 – who stands for the mos maiorum and the traditional morality against which elegy (at least on the face of it) rebels. 14 15

16

17 18

For helpful surveys of militia and seruitium amoris in elegy, with further bibliography, see Drinkwater (2013) and Fulkerson (2013). On Catullus and otium, see esp. Woodman (1966) and (2006), Segal (1970), Platter (1995), Stroup (2010) 37–65. A degree of ambivalence is suggested particularly by the juxtaposition of Poems 50 and 51: whereas in 50 otium is positively valued as the precondition for the writing of neoteric poetry (50.1 otiosi), the final stanza of 51 – in more traditionally moralising vein – links lack of occupation (13–15 otium . . . otio . . . otium) to the dangers of erotic obsession; cf. also 10.2, 68.104. See e.g. Quinn (1972) 267–77, Nappa (2001) 85–105, Skinner (2003), esp. 23–4, 137–42, Benferhat (2005), Konstan (2007), Roman (2014) 59–66. For the contrary view (Catullus as anti-Caesarian partisan) see esp. Syndikus (1986), with a useful survey of earlier scholarship at 34–5. Tatum (1997), esp. 482–5 and (2007), argues cogently against the imposition of rigid distinctions between the ‘political’ and the ‘personal’ in the interpretation of Catullus’ poetry. Williams (1962). Abortive marriage legislation already in the early 20s is suggested by Propertius 2.7, though the nature of the lex referred to at 2.7.1 remains uncertain. As has often been observed, Octavian/ Augustus is never mentioned by Tibullus, but it is worth noting that Messalla plays an analogous ‘blocking’ role in 1.3, where he is represented as having interrupted the poet’s relations with Delia by carrying him off to war.

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In understanding the part played by Augustus, and other public figures, in elegy, it is helpful to bear in mind elegy’s relationship with New Comedy, in whose stereotypical plots such blocking characters (most often the young hero’s father) figure prominently. Here, too, Catullus can be seen as a crucial predecessor, whose poetry mediates between the comic scripts themselves and their elegiac transpositions. As several scholars have argued, Catullus’ self-representation is coloured at various points in the collection by comic models: in effect, he takes on the persona of the vacillating comic adulescens, most obviously in Poem 8, but also through the sequence of Lesbia epigrams culminating in Poems 76 and 85.19 Other comic stereotypes are invoked in a more ad hoc fashion: the boastful speaker of Poem 10, for example, owes something to the miles gloriosus or ‘swaggering soldier’, and Varus’ girl – who catches him out in his self-aggrandising boast – to the clever meretrix; Porcius and Socration (but also the poet’s friends Fabullus and Veranius) figure in Poem 47 as comic parasites, willing to do anything for a free meal; and Catullus’ fruitless hunt for Camerius in Poem 55 recalls ‘wild goose chase’ routines, particularly that of Plautus’ titular character at Amphitruo 1009–14.20 If these hints lend a humorous – or self-ironic? – nuance to Catullus’ self-representation, the same is true a fortiori in elegy, where the cast of comic characters is broadened, but at the same time hardens into generic convention, becoming part of elegy’s defining code. Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid follow Catullus in appropriating the role of comic adulescens as a model for a (semi-?)serious rejection of traditional social values. At the same time, the puella absorbs aspects of the comic meretrix, modifying the Catullan archetype: her oscillation between matrona and meretrix – noted above – is perhaps in part a function of this dual heritage.21 Similarly, the poet–lover himself at times resembles the cunning slave, particularly when instructing his girl on how to outwit her uir or her custos (e.g. Tib. 1.2.15–24, 1.6.9–28, 1.8.55–60; Ov. Am. 1.4; cf. Prop. 1.10.15–30): another kind of doubleness, characteristic of elegy (and source of much of the humour of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria), arises here, in the poet’s selfrepresentation as alternately powerless and as master of erotic strategy. 19

20 21

See esp. Skinner (1971), Thomas (1984), Agnesini (2004) 43–59, Uden (2006). O’Bryhim (2007) argues, less persuasively, that the penniless Furius of Poem 23 is also assimilated to the comic adulescens. For comic stereotypes in Poems 10 and 47, see esp. Skinner (1979) and (1989); comic models for the ‘wild goose chase’ routine in Poem 55 (and 58b) are reviewed in detail by Agnesini (2004) 78–89. For the argument that Lesbia is herself modelled in part on the comic archetype – specifically, the eponymous hetaira of Menander’s Thais – see Harrison (2015).

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Alongside the central couple, other comic characters – the lena, or procuress; the wealthy rival, often a version of the miles gloriosus-type – have a prominent role in the elegiac mise en scène.22 The elegists are not, of course, the only poets of the Augustan period to write on erotic themes: Horace’s love-poems, too, can be seen to orient themselves against Catullan precedents (for all his tendentious claim at Carm. 3.30.13–1423 to be the first to have brought ‘Aeolian song’ to Italy). Generally speaking, Horace’s relation to his predecessor’s erotic ideal is critical, even antagonistic (in contrast, specifically, with that of the elegists): in Horace, verbal echoes tend to point an ‘anti-romantic reaction’24 to Catullus’ ideals of mutual fidelity and lifelong commitment. The pragmatic (Epicureaninfluenced) attitude towards sexual relations outlined in Sat. 1.2 is largely reflected in the erotic Odes, where the various women named as past, present or potential lovers rarely appear as objects of more than transitory interest. Horace frequently marks the distance between the erotics of the Odes and those of Catullus and his more immediate successors through near-parodic evocation of Catullan intertexts. Carm. 1.13, for example, with its itemisation of the symptoms of jealousy experienced by the speaker, is reminiscent of Catullus’ Sappho translation, Poem 51, albeit without close verbal echoes: Cum tu, Lydia, Telephi ceruicem roseam, cerea Telephi laudas bracchia, uae meum feruens difficili bile tumet iecur. tum nec mens mihi nec color certa sede manet, umor et in genas furtim labitur, arguens quam lentis penitus macerer ignibus. uror . . .

(Horace, Carm. 1.13.1–9)

When you, Lydia, praise Telephus’ rosy neck, Telephus’ waxen arms, oh how my burning liver swells with intractable bile. Then neither my mind 22

23

24

E.g. Prop. 4.5, Tib. 1.5.47–60, 2.6.44–54, Ov. Am. 1.8 (lena); Prop. 1.8, 2.16, Tib. 1.5.47–76, Ov. Am. 3.8 (wealthy rival). On elegy and comedy, see further James (1998) (with further bibliography at 3 n. 1) and (2012). princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos | deduxisse modos (‘the first to have brought Aeolian song to the verse of Italy’); cf. Epist. 1.19.26–33. As Putnam notes (2006: 67–8), Horace implicitly acknowledges Catullus even while pointedly ignoring him on the explicit level: aere perennius (‘more lasting than bronze’) in the first line of the final poem of Carm. 1–3 recalls plus uno . . . perenne saeclo (‘lasting for more than one generation’) in the final line of Catullus’ first poem. At the same time, the comparative perennius hints at a degree of poetic rivalry: cf. below on Carm. 1.22.24. The phrase is Lyne’s (1980: 203). On Catullan echoes in Horace’s love-poems, see esp. Putnam (2006); cf. also Commager (1962) 129–59 and Hubbard (2000).

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nor my complexion remains unmoved, and a tear slides furtively down my cheek, betraying the slow fire that is tormenting me deep within. I am ablaze . . . nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi < ... > lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte.

(Catullus 51.6–12)

For the moment I set eyes on you, Lesbia, there is no , but my tongue is numb, a slender flame runs deep within my limbs, my ears ring with a sound of their own, my eyes are covered in twofold night.

The powerfully physical language borrowed by Catullus from Sappho (fr. 31 Voigt) is reworked by Horace in distinctly prosaic-sounding terms: the medical overtones25 of ‘intractable bile’, together with the culinary resonances of macerer (literally, ‘steep’ or ‘soak’, though also used colloquially in the figurative sense, ‘torture’ or ‘torment’) create a far less romantic image than Catullus’ delineation of the instantaneous and overwhelming impact of erotic desire.26 Though, unusually for Horace, the speaker of this poem hankers after a lifelong bond of love (18 inrupta . . . copula, ‘an unbroken bond’), we may suspect in the context that the qualification nec malis | diuolsus querimoniis (‘[love] not destroyed by ill-tempered carping’, 1.13.18–19)27 amounts to a rejection of the turbulent passions characteristic of uesanus Catullus (‘crazy Catullus’, 7.10) and – still more – the elegists, in favour of a self-consciously less dramatic ideal.28 25 26

27

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For difficilis as a medical term, see TLL 5.1085.69–78 and 1087.42–53. Cf. West (1967) 66, ‘macerare is cook’s Latin’ (equally, the verb might be thought to evoke the technical terminology of the pharmacopoeia: it is amply attested in this connection by Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus); notably, the figurative usage is found most frequently in comedy (TLL 8.8.24–10.45). With Horace’s word querimonia, we might compare especially Propertius’ idiosyncratic use of queror/querela, which functions in the monobiblos as kind of generic label for elegiac verse (see esp. 1.7.8, 1.8.22, 1.16.39, 1.18.1, 29); in Catullus, the word is used of Ariadne’s lament at 64.130 and 195 (and cf. 164 conquerar). Segal (1973: 42) notes the Catullan associations of Horace’s perpetuum (14; cf. Catullus 109.2). For a different reading of Carm. 1.13, see Sutherland (2005), who proposes that Horace offers ‘a lyric version of the servitium amoris’; on my analysis, in contrast, Horace sets a self-conscious distance between his own, more controlled/controlling relations with female love-objects and the selfabasing stance of Catullus and the elegists.

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Catullus 51 is more closely echoed at the end of Carm. 1.22, Integer uitae, where Horace’s ‘sweetly laughing’ Lalage (dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo, | dulce loquentem, ‘I shall love Lalage sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking’, 1.22.23–4) both recalls and diverges from her Catullan model. The poem’s final line ostentatiously reinserts a phrase from the Sapphic model (ἆδυ φωνείσας, fr. 31.3–4) which Catullus had omitted, offering a challenge to the earlier poet on more than one level. The ‘correction’ of Catullus’ translation throws emphasis onto the theme of speech/song: where Catullus’ ‘sweetly laughing’ (dulce ridentem, 51.5) Lesbia annihilates the power of speech, along with the other senses, Lalage, ‘the Prattler’, inspires her lover to song (10 dum meam canto Lalagen, ‘while I was singing of my Lalage’), song which in turn offers quasi-magical protection from any danger (whereas the otium which allows Catullus to fixate on Lesbia is a source of peril: otium et reges prius et beatas | perdidit urbes, ‘before now, idleness has ruined kings and prosperous cities’, 51.15–16). Horace fantasises that his virtue29 and love of Lalage will serve as a kind of armour, ensuring his safety wherever on earth he may be: the far-flung places catalogued in stanzas 1–2 recall Catullus’ other Sapphic poem, 11, where (as we have seen) Lesbia is again represented as an annihilating, emasculating force. In Horace’s poem, in contrast, there is no tension between love and masculinity30 – or, if there is, its effect is merely humorous: the anecdote at 9–16, where the poet recalls how a monstrous wolf turned tail before him as he strolled, unarmed (12 inermem), beyond the boundaries of his estate, confers a degree of heroic glamour on the speaker, however incongruous the image of such an exaggeratedly ferocious beast (quale 29

30

Catullan intertexts may help to explain the (otherwise somewhat puzzling) sentiment of the poem’s opening stanzas, with their assertion that the man of integrity and virtue is impervious to any danger: what initially sounds like an austere Stoicising aphorism worthy of a Cato (so Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 262, 265–6) soon turns out to have a more limited application, referring instead to the divine protection supposedly enjoyed by the poet and the lover. In the background here is Catullus’ startling appropriation of the vocabulary of pietas and officium in affirming his own devotion to the poet’s craft and to his (adulterous) love affair: cf. 16.5 castum esse decet pium poetam, ‘the dutiful poet should be pure’, and 76.19 si uitam puriter egi, ‘if I have led a pure life’. (Ancona (2002) 177–8 argues that integer belongs to a generalised Latin erotic vocabulary; but in such contexts the adjective usually has the sense ‘virginal’ or ‘not touched [by passion]’, ‘not in love’, as at Carm. 2.4.22 and 3.7.22.) Putnam (2006) 37 notes that Horace’s integer (literally, ‘untouched’, 1) inverts Catullus’ tactus aratro (‘touched/grazed by the plough’, 11.24): whereas Catullus’ love is ‘cut off’ like a young girl’s virginity (cf. p. 221 above, and n. 48 below), Horace retains his masculine impenetrability. Cf. also Oliensis (1998) 109–11, Ancona (2002). The poem’s gender discourse is further complicated by the probable source for the wolf-anecdote in a series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology (6.217–20), in which a lion flees at the sound of a tambourine played by one of Cybele’s eunuch priests: the effect of the intertext will depend on whether we think Horace is assimilated to or contrasted with his effeminate counterpart in the epigrams (cf. Hubbard (2000) 35–6).

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portentum neque militaris | Daunias . . . alit, ‘such a monstrosity as not even the warlike realm of Daunus nurtures’, 13–14) fleeing from the unwarlike poet/lover. Whereas Catullus implicitly contrasts manly adventures at the bounds of Empire with the irresistible, effeminising force of Lesbia’s all-consuming desire, Horace integrates amor with the imagery of world travel, insisting that Lalage will continue to inspire him even at the ends of the earth. In the Odes, at least, love does not offer so grave or problematic a threat to normative gender-roles as it does for Catullus.31 Elsewhere in the Odes, Horace’s engagement with Catullan intertexts seems more sympathetic, particularly in poems dealing with the characteristically Horatian theme of passing time, and – unsurprisingly – those concerned with poetic composition itself.32 Nevertheless, the Augustan poet can be seen consistently to maintain a certain distance from his Republican precursor, moving away from the performative aspect of Catullan poetry, with its emphasis on the writing self, and typically adopting a more universalising, quasi-philosophical stance. Carm. 1.4 and 4.7, for example, take up the themes of natural versus human temporality which appear in the more personal contexts of erotic persuasion and of foreign travel in Catullus 5 and 46, and rework them (as Putnam shows) in the form of generalised reflections on mortality.33

tela infesta: Horace’s Epodes and Catullan Invective The gendered aspect which we have considered in relation to Horace’s erotic Odes is also of some importance for Horace’s response to and reworking of Catullan invective tropes in the Satires and especially the Epodes. Horace’s only explicit reference to Catullus, at Sat. 1.10.17–19, appears in the context of a retrospective programme for a modern, postLucilian mode of satire, which would combine the ‘masculine’ forthrightness of Old Comedy (illi scripta quibus comoedia prisca uiris est | . . . hoc sunt imitandi, ‘those men by whom Old Comedy was written should be 31 32

33

For a rather different analysis of Horace’s response to the ‘dualism of gender’ in Catullus’ poetry, see Woodman (2002), esp. 58–63. See esp. Putnam (2006) 11–32 for Catullus 4, 5 and 46 as intertexts for several of the Odes; 48–54 on Carm. 1.32 and Catullus 50–51; and 93–115 on Catullan echoes in the three odes addressed to or concerning Virgil (Carm. 1.3, 1.24 and 4.12, where Putnam argues, against prevailing opinion, that the addressee is to be identified as the poet Virgil). Putnam (2006) 16–23. Cf. also Traina (1975), who emphasises the Epicurean ethos of the Odes, with their thematisation of securitas and the protected angulus or ‘secluded nook’: for Traina, where Catullus is both nostalgic and outward-looking, Horace is oriented towards the inner being and manifests an overriding concern with security from the uncertainties of the future.

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imitated in this respect [sc. the use of humour as a vehicle for social criticism]’, 16–17) with the urbanitas (13) that is indispensable according to contemporary literary standards. With a certain sleight of hand, Horace distances himself both from the aggressive abuse (14 acer) characteristic of Catullus and his fellow Neoterics, and from the mollitia which he imputes to his precursor – or at least to Catullus’ effete admirers, ‘pretty’ Hermogenes and the unnamed ‘ape’ (simius) of 17–18.34 At the same time, the characteristically Catullan vocabulary of literary approbation is turned back against its originator, or his latter-day followers: the epithet doctus, ‘learned’ – one of Catullus’ highest terms of praise, regularly applied to the poet himself by later writers35 – is transferred to his hyper-refined but sterile imitators, whose ‘learning’ assimilates them merely to trained animals. Despite the ostentatious distancing of Sat. 1.10, however, Catullus offers an important model for Horace’s self-presentation in the Epodes. Analogously to the elegists’ comic models, the Archilochean manner of Horace in his more aggressive moments is mediated through Catullus. The indignant questions that open Epode 6, in which Horace explicitly references Archilochus and Hipponax (13–14), for example, recall Catullus’ similarly belligerent (and Archilochean)36 interrogation of Ravidus in Poem 40, while the attack on the anonymous social climber of Epode 4 combines the menacing posture of Poem 25, in which the effeminate Thallus is threatened with a (tongue-)lashing (25.10–11 ne laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas | inusta . . . flagella conscribillent, ‘or whips will scrawl your fleecy flank and soft paws and brand them’ ~ Epod. 4.3 peruste funibus latus, ‘branded on your flanks by the lash’, 11 flagellis, ‘whips’), with the righteous outrage directed at Mamurra in Poem 29 (6–7 superbus et superfluens | perambulabit, ‘will that arrogant spendthrift strut around?’ ~ Epod. 4.5 superbus ambules pecunia, ‘you strut around, arrogant in your wealth’).37 34

35

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37

On Horace’s use of gendered language in these lines, cf. Gowers (2012) 316 ad loc. 17 pulcher ‘pretty’, is implicitly opposed to uiris, ‘[real] men’, in the preceding line (itself reinforced by 15 fortius, ‘more forcefully’). On Horace’s handling of earlier invective here, and in general, cf. Ruffell (2003), esp. 42–3, with further bibliography at n. 35. In addition to Ovid, Am. 3.9.62 (cited at the beginning of this chapter), see [Tib.] 3.6.41, Martial 1.61.1, 7.99.7, 8.73.8, 14.100.1, 14.152.1, Terentianus Maurus, GL 6.401; for doctus as a term of praise in Catullus, see 1.7 and 35.17 (and cf. 65.2). With Catull. 40.1–5, compare Archil. frs. 172 and 210 West. Catullus echoes Archilochus again in the opening lines of Poem 56 (cf. Archil. fr. 168 West) and perhaps in the final lines of Poems 80 (cf. Archil. fr. 44 West) and 116 (cf. Archil. fr. 200 West, with Wray (2001) 189); cf. also Fordyce (1961) 161 for the speculation that an Archilochean ‘motto’ lies behind the indignant question that opens Poem 29. Also strikingly Catullan is Horace’s ironic praise of Canidia at Epod. 17.40–1 tu pudica, tu proba | perambulabis astra sidus aureum (‘you, chaste and virtuous, will traverse the heavens as a bright star’; cf. the similarly ironic pudica et proba, ‘chaste and virtuous lady’, at Catull. 42.24, as well as 29.6–7,

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Yet the aggressive, Archilochean pose as ‘watchdog’ of the community (6.5–8; cf. Sat. 2.1.84–5) coexists in the Epodes with the pervasive theme of erotic, sociopolitical and even literary impotence, which has been much discussed in recent Horatian scholarship:38 here, too, Catullan models seem important. The emasculating Lesbia of the Catullan corpus has her counterpart in the insatiable uetulae of Epodes 8 and 12, to whom Horace represents himself as perversely attracted, yet at the same time rendered unable to perform: the mollitia with which Catullus flirts in an erotic context is, paradoxically, assimilated by the speaker of the Epodes as part of his iambic persona. Programmatically in Epode 1, Horace characterises himself as imbellis ac firmus parum (‘unwarlike and insufficiently robust’, 16; cf. 12.3, nec firmo iuueni, ‘no robust youth’), and opens an apparent gap between himself and the non mollis uiros (‘un-effeminate men’, 10) who will join the Actium campaign: the iambist appears politically as well as sexually impotent, and can only express despair at the apparently incurable addiction of the Roman people to civil war (Epod. 7), advising those who are not mollis et exspes (‘effete and despairing’) to abandon Italy altogether and sail for the mythical Isles of the Blest (16.37–40). Even Catullus’ poems on his brother’s death are, arguably, drawn into the ambit of the mollitiatheme. Horace inverts the graceful apologies of Catullus 65 and 68a, where the poet attributes his inability to write (love-)poetry to grief in the wake of his bereavement: in Horace’s case, it is the enervating effect of erotic desire itself that obstructs the progress of the Epode-book (Epod. 14; cf. 11.1–4).39

38

39

quoted above); and the ‘anatomisation’ of the female addressees of Epodes 8 and 12 perhaps owes something to Catullus’ attack on Ameana in Poem 43 (so Watson (2003) 292), as well as male targets such as Rufus (Epod. 12.5 hircus in alis, ‘the goat in your armpits’ recalls Catullus 69 and 71) and Aemilius (Epod. 8.5–6 echoes the similarly graphic obscenity and animal imagery of Catullus 97.7–8). For Vetulaskoptik (‘invective against old women’) in Archilochus, see especially the attack on the ageing Neobule in the First Cologne Epode, fr. 196a.24–41 West. See esp. Fitzgerald (1988), Oliensis (1998) 64–101 and Gowers (2016). Watson (1995) (cf. Johnson (2012) 40–76) argues that the importance of the impotence-theme has been exaggerated, and suggests that Horace’s self-depiction should rather be understood in the light of the traditionally ‘buffoonish’ character of the iambist; but the specific nexus of inverted gender roles, political disempowerment and effeminisation seems more reminiscent of Catullus than of archaic or Hellenistic iambus. Phryne, the object of Horace’s desire in Epod. 14, has overtones of Lesbia as characterised in Catullus 68b – a poem which similarly weaves together the themes of erotic obsession/anxiety and literary composition (Epod. 14.15–16 libertina nec uno | contenta, ‘a freedwoman not content with one lover’ ~ Catull. 68.135 etsi uno non est contenta Catullo, ‘though she is not content with Catullus alone’). For the above interpretation of Epod. 11.1–4, cf. esp. Woodman (2015b), 674–8: Woodman notes that 11.2 scribere uersiculos echoes Catull. 50.4 scribens uersiculos, a further inversion (whereas Catullus derives a quasi-erotic pleasure from his impromptu exchange of verses with Calvus, Amor is for Horace an impediment to composition).

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At Epistles 1.19.23–5, Horace retrospectively characterises the Epodes as imitating the metre and spirit (numeros animosque) of Archilochean iambus, but diverging from its subject matter and style (res et . . . uerba), and emphasises his toning down of the personal attacks that supposedly hounded Archilochus’ victim Lycambes and his daughters to their deaths:40 certainly, there is nothing in the Epodes to match the physical and sexual violence threatened in Catullus 15, 16 or 37, and the death by shipwreck wished on ‘stinking’ Mevius in Epode 10 seems mild in comparison to the dismemberment of Cominius, imagined with such relish in Catullus 108.41 Even the hostile, and graphically physical, ridicule of female targets in Epodes 8 and 12, which has (appropriately) troubled modern readers, undermines itself as an assertion of aggressive masculinity.42 Intriguingly, for all the overt misogyny of the Epode-book, the female targets of Horace’s invective are granted the opportunity – unlike Catullus’ Lesbia – to have their say: the mulier nigris dignissima barris (‘woman most fit for black elephants’, 12.1) is given half the verses – and the last word – of Poem 12, while the monstrous Canidia closes the collection on a threat aimed, ironically, at the invective poet himself (Epod. 17.62–81), inverting the iambic threat to Gellius that ends the Catullan collection as we have it.43 The importance of Callimachus’ Iambi as a model alongside the harsher invective of Archilochus is regularly invoked by Horatian scholars as a partial explanation for the fluctuating persona of the iambist in the Epodes; and here, too, Catullus offers an important precedent. Most obviously in Poem 116, Callimachean urbanitas is contrasted with the rougher style and potentially greater impact of (Archilochean?) iambus; the poet’s request in Poem 27 for calices amariores (‘cups of bitterer wine’, 27.2) can be read programmatically along similar lines, as a dismissal of the ‘water-drinking’ Callimachus in favour of the virile, ‘wine-drinking’ manner linked by other writers with archaic poets, including Archilochus.44 40 41 42 43

44

On the version(s) of literary history embodied in this and other passages where Horace reflects on the generic character of the Epodes, see Barchiesi (2001). Cf. esp. Epod. 10.21–2 with Catullus’ more precise and gruesome parcelling out of Cominius’ bodyparts to predatory animals at 108.4–6. On the misogyny of the Epodes, see Richlin (1992) 109–13 and Henderson (1999). ‘Iambic’, that is, in so far as it manifests the elements of aggression and violent personal attack widely regarded as characteristic of Archilochean iambus (the metaphor of the poem as weapon in the final line is particularly telling: cf. Macleod (1973), Newman (1990) 45–6, 133–7, Heyworth (2001)). On female speakers in the Epodes, cf. Watson (1995) 193 and (2007) 102, Oliensis (1998) 94–6. For programmatic readings of Poem 27, see esp. Wiseman (1969) 7–13, Skinner (1981) 27–8, Wray (2001) 169–71; for Callimachus as water-drinker, Aet. frs. 1.33–4 and 178.11–20 Pfeiffer, with Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 447–9; cf. also the contrast between wine- and water-drinkers at Hor. Epist. 1.19.1–11. On Archilochus and Callimachus as alternative models for Catullan invective, see esp. Wray (2001) 167–203; for Horace, cf. esp. Harrison (2001) and Watson (2003) 4–17.

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Catullus and Horace negotiate rather differently between the two styles (Horace, for example, veers further from the forthright aischrologia (obscene abuse) characteristic of archaic iambus than does Catullus, who employs primary obscenities with considerable freedom); but it is noteworthy that for both poets stylistic considerations are strongly, if implicitly, gendered. For the iambic Horace, as for the elegists, Catullus provides a suggestive framework within which to work through the crises of masculinity, and the issues of social and generic hierarchy, that are so dominant in Triumviral and Augustan literature.

poeta doctus: Myth and Intertextuality Unsurprisingly, Catullan intertexts have a rather different role to play in the hexameter poetry of Virgil, where the personal voice is more muted, though arguably it is precisely as a spokesman for individualism and the ‘private’ sphere that Catullus figures most prominently, particularly in the Aeneid. As Petrini and Hardie have argued,45 Virgil’s ‘Catullan plots’ tend to revolve around moments of transition and separation – coming of age, departures, marriages and especially deaths – and to invite complex, even contradictory, reactions on the reader’s part. The Catullan poem most often recalled by Virgil is 64; but the other carmina maiora, especially the epithalamia 61 and 62, and occasionally the shorter poems, also come to prominence, particularly at moments of intense emotion and pathos. If the Aeneid is in part (to quote the title of Farron (1993)) ‘a poem of grief and love’, this aspect of the epic is articulated to a significant extent through the evocation of Catullan intertexts.46 The deaths of Euryalus and Pallas, for example, are marked by the use of erotic and epithalamial imagery:47 both young men are compared to drooping flowers, in language reminiscent of Catullus 11 and 62 respectively: 45

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Petrini (1997); Hardie (2012). Petrini’s (somewhat exaggeratedly ‘pessimistic’) study focuses on coming of age and the transition to adulthood, but usefully foregrounds Virgil’s intertextual engagement with Catullus’ epithalamia, Poems 61 and 62, and with the marriage theme in the carmina maiora in general. Catullan echoes in the Eclogues (with the exception of Ecl. 4) and Georgics follow a less obvious pattern: for (partial) lists, see Ferguson (1971–2) and Westendorp-Boerma (1958); on the Golden Age theme and Catullus 64, see below. Cf. also Crabbe (1977) on Catullus and the Aristaeus epyllion. Cf. also 11.581–2 multae illam frustra Tyrrhena per oppida matres | optauere nurum, ‘many mothers through the towns of Etruria longed in vain to have her as a daughter-in-law’: the doomed Camilla is destined never to be a bride, but to perish like the flower of virginity whose preservation is made paramount by the female chorus of Catullus 62 (ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis | . . . | multi illum pueri, multae optauere puellae, ‘like a flower that springs up apart in a secluded garden . . . many boys and many girls long for it’, 62.39–42). Conversely, Lavinia, whose nubile age is similarly

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monica r. gale uoluitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus it cruor inque umeros ceruix conlapsa recumbit: purpureus ueluti cum flos succisus aratro languescit moriens, lassoue papauera collo demisere caput pluuia cum forte grauantur.

(Virg. Aen. 9.433–7)

Euryalus collapses in death: the blood runs over his beautiful limbs, and his limp neck slumps to his shoulders; as when a crimson flower, cut by the plough, droops in death, or poppies bow their heads on weary stems when weighed down by a chance shower. nec meum respectet ut ante amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.48

(Catullus 11.21–4)

Let her not look for my love, as before: through her fault, it has fallen like a flower at the meadow’s edge, grazed by the passing plough. hic iuuenem agresti sublimem stramine ponunt: qualem uirgineo demessum pollice florem seu mollis uiolae seu languentis hyacinthi, cui neque fulgor adhuc nec dum sua forma recessit, non iam mater alit tellus uirisque ministrat.

(Virg. Aen. 11.67–71)

Now they raise the young man [Pallas] high on a rustic bier: like a flower plucked by a young girl’s thumb, a soft violet or drooping hyacinth, whose sheen and beauty has not yet departed, though mother earth no longer gives it nourishment and strength. idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui . . .

(Catullus 62.43)

When the same flower [representing the girl’s virginity] has been plucked by a tender fingernail and faded . . .

In Euryalus’ case, the eroticised language is overlaid on a Homeric foundation (the poppy weighed down by rain comes from Iliad 8.306–7, μήκων δ’ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ’ἐνὶ κήπῳ | καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί

48

marked by a Catullan echo at 7.54 (multi illam . . . petebant, ‘many sought her hand’) will bring death to her young suitor, Turnus. The Catullan simile in turn recalls Sappho fr. 105b Voigt, probably from an epithalamium: as noted above (p. 221), Catullus’ speaker implicitly adopts the role of the deflowered virgin, with a marked inversion of gender-roles. See also above, pp. 60–2.

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τε εἰαρινῇσι, ‘as a poppy in a garden bows its head on one side, weighed down by its seeds and the spring rain’, of the dying Gorgythion): Euryalus’ end is marked simultaneously as a heroic death in battle and as a Liebestod, the young man as both warrior and eromenos. But in general the Catullan imagery of the two passages underlines the pathetic fragility of these ephebic youths, ‘deflowered’ by death before they can complete the transition to mature adulthood.49 In addition to these epithalamial overtones, the death of Pallas evokes Catullus’ loss of his brother: in bidding his protégé a final farewell (salue aeternum mihi, maxime Palla, | aeternumque uale, ‘forever hail, mighty Pallas, and farewell forever’, Aen. 11.97–8) Aeneas borrows the famous closural formula of Catullus 101 (atque in perpetuum, frater, aue atque uale, ‘and for evermore, my brother, hail and farewell’, Catull. 101.10).50 Aeneas’ words here form part of a cluster of Catullan echoes that mark the critical moments at which Aeneas’ personal ties with wife, lover, father, and his young protégé are severed: the loss of Creusa in Book 2 recalls the bride’s separation from her mother and birth-family deplored by the girls’ chorus in Catullus 62;51 in his final encounter with Dido’s ghost, Aeneas famously (or notoriously) echoes the words of Berenice’s lock, Catullus 66.39;52 while the death of Anchises, and Aeneas’ final meeting with him in the underworld, are evocative at several points of Catullan intertexts, of which the most striking is Aeneid 6.692–3, quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora uectum | accipio (Anchises speaking : ‘after how great a journey over land and sea do I greet you!’; cf. Catull. 101.1–2 multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus | aduenio, ‘after journeying through many nations and over

49 50

51

52

On the mors immatura theme in the Aeneid, see further Conte (1986) 185–95, Fowler (1987), Hardie (1994) 14–18. Catullus draws in turn on what appears to be a traditional formula (cf. Horsfall (2003) 105 for epigraphic parallels); but that need not rule out a specific echo, particularly in the Catullan context established by Aen. 11.67–71. Aen. 2.746 aut quid in euersa uidi crudelius urbe? ~ Catull. 62.24 quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? The echo is well analysed by Hardie (2012: 218), who notes that Virgil both inverts his model (Aeneas is remembering the end a marriage, not anticipating the beginning of one) and gives it new significance, as the sack of Troy, ‘one of the great turning points in legendary history’, replaces the hypothetical and generic urbs capta of Catullus’ poem. We might add that Creusa’s ghost (not unlike the male chorus in Poem 62) will shortly urge her husband to turn to the future: like that of the bride who must part from her mother in order begin the next phase of her life, Aeneas’ loss is also a new beginning. inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi, ‘reluctantly, O Queen, I departed from your head’ ~ Aen. 6.460 inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi, ‘reluctantly, Queen, I departed from your shore’. The echo has been much discussed: see esp. Lyne (1994) 187–93, Griffith (1995) (with a useful review of earlier scholarship at 48–50), Wills (1998), Pelliccia (2011), Hardie (2012) 229–35.

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many seas I have come . . . ’).53 The echo of Catullus’ final farewell to his brother prompts the recognition that this is the very last time Anchises and his son will meet: the finality of their separation is underlined (with an echo of Creusa’s ghost in Book 2)54 by Aeneas’ inability to embrace his dead father. Yet contrasts with Catullus are also important here: Catullus thematises the impossibility of communicating with his brother,55 whereas Aeneas and Anchises are given one final chance to speak – and, importantly, the emphasis of the Virgilian exchange is not on the past but on the future, and the continuity of the family line. Whereas Catullus’ ‘whole house lies buried’ with his brother (68a.22 = 68b.94), Aeneas’ descendants will be the founding figures of a glorious and limitless empire. If the Catullan echoes foreground the personal cost (to Aeneas, and others), Virgil also suggests that his hero’s epic destiny transcends the sufferings of the individual. It seems important, too, that many of these echoes are associated with transitional points of familial succession and the passage from childhood to adulthood. Generational and dynastic continuity was, of course, a theme of considerable topicality during Virgil’s latter years – following the death in 23 bc of Marcellus, Augustus’ heir apparent – and is also symbolically important in a work which traces the rise of a new civilisation from the violent destruction of the old. But the tenuousness of inter-generational ties and the vulnerability of the bloodline (illustrated in the Aeneid by the premature deaths of a series of young sons, or surrogate sons – Polites, Astyanax, Marcellus, Euryalus, Lausus, Pallas – as well as by Dido’s childless state) are also strikingly thematised in Catullus, particularly in the carmina maiora. Catullus hints in Poem 68b that the sorrow occasioned by his brother’s death is compounded by his own failure to produce a legitimate heir – thanks to his commitment to the illicit relationship with Lesbia. Like the childless Laodamia,56 and unlike the old man with his late-born grandson, to whom she is compared at 119–24, Catullus appears in this poem as, by implication, the last of his line. This is a theme that resonates through the surrounding poems, from the paruulus Torquatus,57 53

54 55 56 57

On the Catullan and Homeric intertexts, Conte (1986) 32–9 is fundamental; cf. also Aen. 5.80–1 with Catull. 64.22–3b and 101.4, Aen. 5.724–5 with Catull. 64.215–16, Aen. 6.688–9 with Catull. 64.165–6, and perhaps Aen. 6.687 with Catull. 9.3–5, with the discussion of Putnam (1995–6) 93–9 and Hardie (2012) 222–3. Aen. 6.700–2 = 2.792–4. Catull. 101.4 et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem, ‘and to speak in vain to your dumb ashes’. For the theme of childlessness and its thematic importance in this poem, see esp. Janan (1994) 116–23, 134–7, Skinner (2003) 53–7, Gale (2012) 187–8, 205–6. Notably recalled by Virgil’s Dido, who longs for a paruulus Aeneas to console her for the loss of his father (Aen. 4.328–9).

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whose hoped-for birth is celebrated at 61.209–23, to the failures of Poems 63 (whose emasculated hero, Attis, will never complete the transition to manhood) and 67 (where familial continuity is scandalously disrupted by impotence, adultery and incest). The Aeneid, in contrast, is predicated on the idea that Aeneas’ direct descendants will survive, to become kings of Rome and eventually produce Augustus, as heir and typological counterpart to Virgil’s hero; but this triumphalist message is shadowed by an alternate (Catullan) narrative, in which the blood-line fails and no son survives to inherit. The themes of marriage/adultery and children/childlessness in the carmina maiora form one thread in the network of shifting associations suggested by Catullus’ multi-layered use of myth in these poems. This may be identified as a crucial aspect of the doctrina for which (as we have noted)58 Catullus is often praised by later writers: and again we can find clear parallels in Virgil, particularly in the Aeneid, on which this facet of Catullus’ poetic technique perhaps exerted a formative influence.59 Characteristic especially of Poems 64 and 68b is a kind of slippage between (real-world or mythical) characters and their paradigms: as is well known, Laodamia in Poem 68b, though initially introduced as a model for Lesbia and her arrival at the domus where she and her lover are to meet, comes to bear a far more obvious similarity to the speaker (both have lost a loved one at Troy; both burn with passion for the object of their desire, to whom they are more devoted than to life itself); Ariadne in 64 also resembles Catullus, as he represents himself in other poems, while evoking the Euripidean/Ennian Medea in a way that tends to complicate her overtly sympathetic depiction.60 Virgil’s Dido is similarly ‘layered’: her characterisation at various points in Books 1 and 4 looks back through Catullus’ Ariadne to her own intertextual ancestor Medea (evoking the Medeas of both Apollonius and Euripides/Ennius), and incorporates elements of several Odyssean females (Calypso, Circe, 58 59

60

See n. 35 above. Constraints of space preclude discussion of Catullus’ handling of myth in relation to other Augustan poets, but we might note in particular that Propertius’ mythological exempla often display a similar ‘slipperiness’ and lack of precise ‘fit’ with their overt comparanda: see e.g. Curran (1966), Gaisser (1977), Sharrock (2000), Robinson (2013). On Catullan intertexuality in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see Myers (2012). The classic discussion of Laodamia in Poem 68b is Macleod (1974); for more recent bibliography, see Gale (2012) 188 n. 15. On Ariadne in Poem 64, see esp. Putnam (1961), Zetzel (1983/2007), Gaisser (1995), Clare (1997): particularly reminiscent of Medea is her wish at 171–2 that Theseus had never come to Crete (recalling the nurse’s opening speech in the Euripidean and Ennian tragedies), as well as the reference to fraterna caedes, with overtones of the murder of Apsyrtus, at 181 (cf. 150).

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Nausicaa).61 To a still greater extent than in Catullus 64, it is this network of intertextual relations that determines the complexity of her character. The slippage between Laodamia/Lesbia and Laodamia/Catullus also has its parallels in the Aeneid, most obviously in the modelling of Aeneas and Turnus on the Homeric Achilles and Hector. Though the Sibyl’s speech at Aeneid 6.89–90 strongly suggests that Turnus is the ‘new Achilles’ whom Aeneas will have to confront in Latium, it is evident by the end of Book 12 that it is rather Aeneas who plays the role of Achilles to Turnus’ Hector: the narrative misdirection contributes very suggestively to the characterisation of both heroes, and to the larger themes of the poem, just as the gender-inversion and the theme of childlessness entailed by the implicit comparison between Catullus and Laodamia resonate with recurrent concerns of Catullus’ collection. Also of evident importance for Virgil is Catullus’ handling of the Golden Age theme in Poem 64. The Myth of Ages recurs in different configurations in each of Virgil’s major works, from the ‘wonder child’ of Eclogue 4, whose birth and growth to manhood will usher in a new Golden Age, to the ‘aetiology of labor’ in the first book of the Georgics, to the Trojans’ arrival in a Latium which has elements of primeval, pre-Iron Age innocence in Aeneid 7 and 8. A crucial forerunner for all these passages is the darkly pessimistic coda of Catullus 64, with its lurid images of modern-day sexual transgression and intrafamilial strife, as well as the apparently naively nostalgic appeal to an Age of Heroes ‘only too much desired’ (o nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati | heroes . . ., 64.22–3). Naturally, the purportedly stark opposition between idealised past and grim present has often been seen as ironised by Theseus’ less-than-heroic abandonment of Ariadne, as depicted on the coverlet of Peleus’ and Thetis’ marriage-bed, and by the bloodthirsty career of their son Achilles, as foretold in the Song of the Parcae. In Eclogue 4 Virgil sidesteps these ironies, suggesting that the Catullan pattern of decline can be put into reverse: Virgil’s second Argo and new Achilles are only a step on the way to the restoration of Golden Age peace and harmony (Ecl. 4.34–6).62 But the picture sketched in the Georgics and Aeneid seems to share some of the ambiguity of the Catullan model, in which the rupture between harmonious past and corrupt present is less clear-cut than it seems. 61

62

On the intertextual makeup of Dido’s character, see esp. Griffin (1985) 194–5 and Laird (1997) 289–90; for a more detailed review of Virgil’s ‘sources’ for Book 4, see Clausen (1987) 40–60. See also Seo (2013) 32–65, on Virgil’s Aeneas: Seo identifies Apollonius as a key model for the use of ‘palimpsestically layered characterization’ (31) in the Aeneid. Here again, I suggest, Catullus can be seen as mediating the Augustan reception of Hellenistic poetry. For detailed discussion of Virgil’s reception of Catullus in Ecl. 4, see esp. Du Quesnay (1977) 68–75 and Van Sickle (1992) 37–64; Hubbard (1998) 78–85 offers a less ‘optimistic’ reading (with full bibliography at 78 n. 65, to which add Trimble (2013), esp. 271–3 with n. 37).

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In the Georgics, agriculture is assigned, as often, to a post-Golden Age world at 1.125, and intertextually linked to the sailing of the Catullan Argo at the very beginning of the poem (1.50 ac prius ignotum ferro quam scindimus aequor, ‘and before we cut the unfamiliar surface with the iron [sc. ploughshare]’ ~ Catull. 64.12 quae simul ac rostro uentosum proscidit aequor, ‘as soon as it [sc. the Argo] cut with its prow through the windswept surface [of the sea]’); but the ‘Praise of Country Life’ at the end of Book 2 depicts the farmer rather as a ‘remnant’ of the Golden Age, and seems to confine the evils of the Iron Age to urban society, with echoes of both Catullus and Lucretius.63 Similarly, as has been observed,64 the Italy in which the Trojans arrive in Aeneid 7 has both Golden Age features and a more threatening, warlike aspect.65 Evander’s thumbnail history of primitive Italy in Book 8 (314–36; cf. also 6.776 and 8.355–8, with Hardie (1992)) points to a cyclical pattern of cultural development complementing (or contradicting?) the linear model implied elsewhere in the poem: can the new Golden Age prophesied by Jupiter (1.286–96) and Anchises (6.791–7) really last forever, or will it merely initiate a new cycle of decline? It is tempting, I suggest, to connect the Aeneid ’s uneasy juxtaposition of these disparate temporal paradigms with the complex temporality of Catullus 64.66 A final aspect of Catullus’ engagement with Greek myth which has been somewhat underdiscussed is his thematisation of the Trojan War and its aftermath – again, mainly in the carmina maiora, though we may think here, too, of the inverted Odyssey implicit in the opening line of Poem 101,67 of the 63

64 65

66

67

G. 2.510 gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum, ‘drenched in brothers’ blood, they rejoice’ ~ Catull. 64.399 perfudere manus fraterno sanguine fratres, ‘brothers drenched their hands in brothers’ blood’, and Lucr. 3.72 crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris, ‘cruelly, they rejoice in a brother’s tragic death’. See esp. O’Hara (1994) and (2007) 96–101. Golden Age features: esp. 7.45–6 ([Latinus] urbes | . . . longa placidas in pace regebat, ‘was ruling over tranquil cities in a time of long-lasting peace’, a pre-echo of Evander’s description of the Saturnian Golden Age at 8.325, [Saturnus] placida populos in pace regebat, ‘ruled over the people in tranquil peace’) and 8.91–2, where the ‘wonder’ of the Tiber and the surrounding woods at the sight of Aeneas’ fleet sailing upriver recalls that of the nymphs, aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes (‘the sea-nymphs, wondering at the strange sight’), at Catull. 64.15. Italians as (excessively?) belligerent: esp. Numanus’ speech, 9.598–620; cf. 1.263, 5.730, 8.55. On the paradoxical temporality of Catullus 64, in which the sailing of the first ship is somehow preceded by that of the fleet that carries Theseus to Crete, see esp. Weber (1983), Gaisser (1995), Feeney (2007) 123–7, O’Hara (2007) 34–41; for Virgil, see (in addition to Hardie (1992), cited above), Feeney (2007) 134, 163–6 and O’Hara (2007) 100–1. Myers (2012: 249–54) similarly argues that Catullus 64 offered an important model for the ‘narrative and chronological complexity’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus, ‘after journeying through many nations and over many seas’, 101.1 ~ Od. 1.3–4 (but Catullus has travelled away from home, towards Troy, whereas Odysseus attempts to return home after the Trojan War); for discussion, see esp. Conte (1986) 32–3.

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reges . . . et beatas . . . urbes destroyed by otium in the final stanza of 51, and perhaps of Poem 37’s magna bella (mentioned above in connection with the militia amoris trope). Alongside the song of the Parcae in 64, with its ambivalent foretelling of the career of Achilles, Poems 65 and 68b hint at an identification on the speaker’s part with the Odyssean Penelope; with Teucer, brother of Ajax; with Laodamia (whose bridegroom, Protesilaus, was the first Greek warrior to be killed at Troy); and with Paris (as adulterous lover of Helen/Lesbia).68 Significantly, the last of these mythical exempla is recognised by Propertius, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Notable in all these instances is a tendency to evoke tragic rather than heroic intertexts, and to thematise the sorrow and loss entailed by the war – Troy is the ‘common grave of Asia and Europe’ (68.89) rather than a proving-ground for martial uirtus.69 It is difficult to sum up briefly the extent to which poets of the next generation were influenced by Catullus’ idiosyncratic ‘take’ on the Trojan War – particularly his identification with the bereaved families of the war-dead, and with the unheroic Paris; but we may note in particular Virgil’s use of tragic models in Aeneid 2, the tendency of both Propertius and Tibullus to represent themselves as ‘failed’ Homeric heroes, and of the former to adopt Paris as a role model (particularly in Book 2), alongside the more obviously heroic Achilles, Hector and Odysseus.70 Horace too (as Michael Putnam has shown) follows Catullus’ lead in ‘eroticising’ the Trojan War, which becomes in the Odes an implicit paradigm for ‘battles’ between jealous lovers (1.17.19–20) or the ground for a Stesichorean palinode (1.16) in which the poet revokes the iambic irae previously directed against his ‘Helen’ in a scenario reminiscent of Catullus 36 and 42.71 In the opening pages of his Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry, Ross characterises the works of Virgil, Propertius and their contemporaries as 68

69

70 71

The nightingale simile of 65.13–14 recalls Penelope’s similar comparison of herself to the plaintive bird at Od. 19.518–23; Ajax, like Catullus’ brother (65.7), was buried on the promontory of Rhoeteum; for Laodamia and Paris, see 68.73–86, 103–4 (where the designation of Helen as moecha looks forward to the revelation at 143–6 that Catullus’ relationship is itself adulterous), and 105–30 (with Macleod (1974)). On tragic intertexts for these passages, see Skinner (2003) 5–13 (Poem 65 in relation to Sophoclean, Pacuvian and Ennian tragedies on the theme of Telamon and Teucer); Lyne (1998) 201–9 (Poem 68b and Euripides, Protesilaus), Gale (2012) (Poem 68b and Aeschylus, Agamemnon). See esp. Tib. 1.3 (Tibullus as Odysseus manqué), Prop. 2.8.39–40 (Propertius as a lesser Achilles), 2.2.13–14, 2.3.37–8, 2.15.13–14, 2.32.35–40, 3.8.29–32 (Paris as exemplum amoris). For the Catullan context of Hor. Carm. 1.16 and 17, see Putnam (2006) 72–92. As Putnam argues, the two poems, together with the narrative ode 1.15, Nereus’ prophecy to Paris and Helen, form a kind of Trojan cycle.

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‘a natural growth in the soil prepared by Catullus’.72 Ross had in mind mainly Catullus’ Callimacheanism, and the ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’ element in his poetry; this chapter has suggested, however, that his insight may be extended to many other aspects of Augustan poetic production, from its handling of gender roles to its multi-layered use of myth and intertextuality. Though, as we saw at the outset, Catullus is hailed by Augustan writers primarily as a love-poet, his importance for the iambic Horace and the epic Virgil should not be underestimated. The characteristically Catullan combination of violent passion (whether aggression or desire) with neoteric elegance and doctrina was to prove formative for the poets of the Augustan period, but perhaps equally important is the range and subtlety of Catullus’ own use of earlier models. When the Augustans read Plautus, Apollonius, Archilochus, and even Homer, it is often through a Catullan filter.73

Further Reading The best and most comprehensive study of any Augustan poet in relation to Catullus is Putnam (2006), which focuses mainly on Horace’s Odes; also helpful on the Epodes are Watson (2003) 17–19 and Barbaud (2008). Earlier surveys by Mendell (1935), Ferguson (1956), Lee (1975) and Traina (1975) on Horace, Westendorp-Boerma (1958) and Ferguson (1971–2) on Virgil, and Ferguson (1960) on Ovid remain useful. Recent work has largely been more piecemeal, concentrating on individual poems and passages; but see Putnam (1995–96) and Hardie (2012) on Catullus and Virgil, and the brief comments of Wray (2009) on Catullus and Ovid, with Myers (2012) on Catullan themes and intertexts in the Metamorphoses. Systematic studies of Catullus and Augustan elegy have been surprisingly sparse: on the whole, the relationship has tended to be taken for granted, Catullus being either regarded as an ‘early’ elegist (so e.g. Luck (1969) 56–69, Spentzou (2013) 1–24, esp. 23–4 on Poem 76 as ‘protoelegy’) or rather summarily treated as a ‘precursor’ (e.g. Miller (2002) 3 ‘Catullus is best considered not an elegist proper, but a precursor’; Bessone (2013) includes a brief discussion of Catullus under the rubric ‘Latin precursors’ (50–5)); but see the more expansive discussion in Miller (2004) 31–59, esp. 31–6, and the judicious comments of Wray (2012). 72 73

Ross (1975) 2. I am very grateful to David Scourfield for his incisive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and to Giacomo Fedeli for helping me to make sense of Horace, Satires 1.10.

chapter 10

Rewriting Catullus in the Flavian Age Carole Newlands

The Flavian Age marked a decisive political break with the Julio-Claudian past. And yet Flavian literature has been repeatedly defined through a sense of epigonality, one that it itself cultivated, as Hinds observes.1 But, as Hutchinson comments of modern European literature, which also defines itself through ‘an anxiety of lateness’, backward-looking paradoxically can be associated with forward-thinking; lateness is one of the animating impulses of aesthetic creation.2 I shall argue here that, despite their different political and social conditions, Catullus was a foundational author in the development of the short poem for the Flavian poets Martial and Statius and their close contemporary Pliny the Younger, whose political career began under Domitian.3 All three authors raise the question of the cultural status of a form of poetry that from Catullus onwards was often described as lusus (‘play’) or iocus (‘jest’). It is generally thought that the Flavian poets took the Augustans as their primary models, while incidentally being attracted to the idea of Catullan urbanity. Rather, the relationship of these Flavian authors to Catullus was not casual, not a matter of occasional ‘quotation-dropping’. Catullus, the nouus poeta, is the foundational poet for Martial and Statius in their development of the short poem for the Flavian Age. He provided the gateway to the Flavian rethinking both of literary history and of the cultural role of occasional poetry.

Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger I will start, however, with Pliny the Elder. It may seem somewhat surprising that the prose author of the Natural History, an encyclopaedia in thirtyseven books, would involve himself with Catullus. In fact, the Natural History opens by referring to Catullus’ prefatory poem. In his dedication of 1 3

2 Hinds (1998) 83–98. Hutchinson (2016) 2–38. See e.g. Gibson and Morello (2012) 19–35.

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his work to Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, Pliny writes (first quoting Catullus, then continuing with his own prose): Namque tu solebas nugas esse aliquid meas putare ut obiter emolliam Catullum conterraneum meum (agnoscis et hoc castrense uerbum): ille enim, ut scis, permutatis prioribus syllabis duriusculum se fecit quam uolebat existimari a Veraniolis suis et Fabullis (Plin. HN praef. 1). ‘For you used to think my trifles had some worth’ – to give a passing smoothness to my fellow countryman Catullus (you recognise too this bootcamp slang): for, as you know, by changing the first syllables he made himself rather harsher than he wanted to be in the estimation of his beloved Veranioli and Fabulli.

In his preface Pliny demonstrates his literary authority and his elite social status.4 He acquires cultural capital from sharing a fondness for Catullus’ nugae with Titus himself; his literary tastes match those of his imperial rulers. Moreover, he is on good social terms with Titus, both of them old soldiers, as Pliny acknowledges when he speaks of the ‘bootcamp slang’ he uses. He also has a personal bond with Catullus, whom he speaks of as conterraneum meum, for both of them were Transpadanes, from the far north of Italy, and Pliny is proud of the connection. Pliny cites here lines 3–4 of Catullus’ first poem, written in hendecasyllables, namque tu solebas | meas esse aliquid putare nugas. But he transposes some of the words in line 4. As a result, Pliny’s line begins with a spondee, nugas, not with Catullus’ iambic meas. And this metrical change, of starting a hendecasyllabic line with a spondee, is in line with regular Flavian practice, as we see in Martial.5 Furthermore, by putting nugas at the start of the line, Pliny ironically plays upon the idea of his massive work as being no more than ‘trifles’; he exploits the modesty topos with comic effect. Interestingly, Pliny does not claim that he himself changed the word order but that Catullus did: ‘for, as you know, by changing the first syllables he made himself rather harsher than he wanted to be’. For Pliny, the Flavian way of opening a hendecasyllabic line is the correct, more eloquent way. Pliny demonstrates his literary authority by acting the critic here, coining a new term to critique Catullus, duriusculus. It is

4

Roche (2016) 435–6.

5

For Catullus’ hendecasyllables see Chap. 7.

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a word that wittily acknowledges Catullus’ love of diminutives even as it criticises a fault in his poetics. Pliny’s own literary agenda in relation to Catullus is expressed by the verb emolliam.6 ‘Smoothing out’ describes a rhetoric of improvement that erases the harshness of Catullus, harshness that is not just stylistic but also political and social. From the letters of Pliny the Elder’s nephew Pliny the Younger, we learn that the aristocratic elite, Pliny the Younger included, enjoyed writing hendecasyllabic poetry. In the Flavian Age this fondness was indulged during respites from the business of the law courts or the halls of government. This witty style of poetry cultivated Catullan urbanity without the biting polemics of his verse; it maintained a subservient position to oratory.7 As Gaisser remarks, the hendecasyllable was ‘perfectly suited to the cultivated ease and informality of the Catullan persona’.8 Yet the air of Catullan bonhomie that Pliny the Elder assumes with Titus in his preface cannot entirely conceal the asymmetrical relationship between him and the imperial family. There would be no topical, political invective when the imperial family were the arbiters of literary tastes, no rough and tumble exchanges between poetic friends and enemies. Rather, Pliny the Elder suggests that ‘Catullus’ now means ‘playfulness’ in a clubby, elite society.9 In the circle of the two Plinys we see the gentrification of hendecasyllabic poetry. Pliny the Elder’s coinage duriusculus occurs only one other time in Latin literature, in the first book of his nephew’s Epistles. In Ep. 1.16.5 Pliny the Younger comments on the Catullan-style verses of a certain Pompeius Saturninus: praeterea facit uersus, quales Catullus meus et Caluus, re uera quales Catullus aut Caluus. quantum illis leporis, dulcedinis, amaritudinis, amoris! inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus lenibus duriusculos quosdam et hoc quasi Catullus aut Caluus. Furthermore he composes verses in the style of my Catullus and Calvus, indeed very much in the style of Catullus or Calvus. How much charm, sweetness, sharpness, passion there is in them! He also of course intentionally includes some rather harsh verses along with the soft and the smooth, again in imitation of Catullus or Calvus.

Saturninus’ poems are likened to those that ‘Catullus or Calvus wrote’, thus presumably epigrams and hendecasyllabic verse. Calvus was a fellow 6 9

7 Morgan (2010) 50. Gamberini (1983) 100. See Roche (2016) 441–3.

8

Gaisser (1993) 4.

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neoteric poet with whom Catullus was often paired.10 Saturninus tries to be so authentically Catullan that he even deliberately includes some rather harsh verses, duriusculos! With this allusion to his uncle’s preface, Pliny the Younger suggests that Saturninus imitates Catullus too closely. The expression Catullus meus, ‘my Catullus’, acknowledges that Pliny the Younger, like his uncle, is an admirer of Catullus but not a slavish imitator of him like Saturninus.11 Pliny’s criticism of Saturninus is allusive and nuanced; we are far from Catullus’ lively attacks on other poets and poems, such as the cacata carta of Volusius’ Annals (36.1). From Pliny the Younger’s letters Catullus emerges as stylistically important for a narrow range of poetry. As Roller has argued, Pliny describes his poetry mostly in terms used in Catullus’ polymetrics.12 Three of Pliny’s letters offer particularly detailed reflections on his poetry, Ep. 4.14, 5.3 and 7.7.4.13 In Ep. 4.14 Pliny introduces his first volume of hendecasyllables with the statement lusus meos prodo (‘I am publishing my playful verse’, 1).14 As Auhagen comments, this statement is programmatic for Pliny.15 With the concept of lusus Pliny consciously looks to a tradition of poetry as ‘play’ that can be traced back to Catullus 50.1–2, hesterno, Licini, die otiosi | multum lusimus in meis tabellis (‘yesterday, Licinius, at leisure we played a lot on my tablets’), and that continues through the Augustan poets to Statius and Martial.16 Pliny also refers here to his hendecasyllabic poems as meas nugas (‘my trifles’, Ep. 4.14.8), in allusion to Catullus’ programmatic meas . . . nugas (1.4); here he also acknowledges as a personal model many distinguished men of active political life, senators and emperors, who had written polished, witty verse in their spare time (Ep. 4.14.4).17 Writing hendecasyllables was not the risktaking activity it was for Catullus, who, for instance, attacked Julius Caesar and his second-in-command Mamurra (29, 54, 57); rather, it helped secure cultural distinction. As Dewar comments, for Pliny and his 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

Gaius Licinius Calvus is often closely associated with Catullus by later writers, e.g. Ov. Am. 3.9.61–2. See Courtney (2003) 201–11. In the opening line of Poem 95 Catullus referred to Cinna, author of the epyllion Zmyrna, as mei Cinnae. As Woodman notes in this volume, the affectionate possessive adjective is repeated among several other of the neoterics, suggesting their need to identify themselves as a mutually supportive group. Roller (1998) 285–7. For a list of the letters in which Pliny mentions Catullus’ poetry see Gibson and Morello (2012) 301. He claims their successful reception (Ep. 7.4.8–9). Auhagen (2003). See also Gamberini (1983) 82–121; Marchesi (2008) 53–96, esp. 71–8; Gibson and Steel (2010) 131–2; Gibson and Morello (2012) 91–4, who emphasise the influence upon Pliny of Cicero as both poet and letter-writer. 17 See the appendix of Roller (1998) 300–2. See also Ep. 5.3.5.

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associates literature was ‘the badge of their cultural status’.18 Pliny looked for approbation mainly from his peers. In Ep. 4.27.4 Pliny cites the epigram of an admirer of his who prefers Pliny’s poetry to that of Catullus (verses 1–4): canto carmina uersibus minutis, his olim quibus et meus Catullus et Caluus ueteresque. sed quid ad me? unus Plinius est mihi priores. I sing poems in slight verses, as my Catullus and Calvus and the ancients once did. But what do I care about them? Pliny alone in my opinion is the only predecessor I need.

The expression minutis uersibus suggests not only slight verse but also the metre in which they were written, hendecasyllables, in contrast to the longer verse of the dactylic hexameter.19 Catullus and Calvus, once noui poetae, are labelled now ironically as ueteres (4.27.2), representatives of a society whose political and social turmoil was long past.20 Pliny, so claims his acolyte, is the only predecessor that matters. Indeed, given the ambiguity of the word priores – ‘former’ or ‘first’ – he is not belated but represents in a sense the future as he adapts the short epigrammatic poem to new social and political circumstances. Although Pliny had reached the apex of his political career when he became a senator, he also, as Marchesi has argued, sought cultural power through the ‘modest’ promotion of his nugae.21 He preserves Catullus as a stylistic model while defusing his radical antisocial quality.22 Both Plinys suggest that the epigrammatic poem, with its distinguished Catullan heritage, was valuable as an aspirational literary form in Flavian society, a means of cultural advancement that was now embedded in a new tradition of aristocratic leisure. As Marchesi points out, the villa in particular was the space ‘in which it was possible to monumentalize one’s social standing, political reputation, and ethical character’.23 Pliny the Younger’s elegant villas provided self-reflexive space for perfecting the art of the short poem and the epistle, away from the hustle of the law courts. We might compare here the Flavian Silius Italicus, who embarked on his epic poem the Punica only once he had retired from politics and had retreated to Naples, where he lived in praiseworthy otium (Plin. Ep. 3.7). 18 20 21 22

Dewar (2014) 65. 19 Morgan (2010) 97–100. See Woodman in this volume on these lines. Marchesi (2008) 68–71. Cf. Auhagen (2003) 5. Marchesi (2008) 78. See also Gibson and Steel (2010) 135–7.

23

Marchesi (2015) 247.

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Allusions in Pliny the Younger’s epistles to his own poetry, whatever their actual merit, made him, however, a man of letters in the Ciceronian tradition of the poet/orator. Pliny’s published poetry may not have survived but it garnered publicity all the same by the devotion to his Catullan compositions that he expresses in his published letters. ‘Playing’ with Catullus constituted a crucial element of Pliny’s cultural self-fashioning not only in verse but in the genre in which he would indeed make a lasting mark, his Epistulae.24 While Pliny ‘played’ mostly in private and in his leisure time, Martial and Statius were career poets. With them the short poem comes into its own as experimental and often even daring verse intimately engaged with a vital and changing society.

Martial As a professional poet, not an aristocrat like Pliny, Martial represents himself as an author of mass appeal: street-wise, attention-seeking, and firmly vested in the urban fabric of Rome. Writing epigrams was his career. He mentions Catullus more than he does any other author.25 An unusually high percentage of Martial’s epigrams are in hendecasyllables, the dominant metre of Catullus’ polymetric poems (1–60).26 As Roman argues, Martial relies on ‘the lexicon and ludic tonality of Catullan “wit” – lepos, facetiae, sal, lusus’.27 And, as Lorenz points out, in the opening sentence of his prologue to Book 1 Martial acknowledges his debt to Catullus when he makes libellis its fifth word (spero me secutum in libellis), thus echoing the placement of libellum in Catullus’ dedicatory poem.28 Martial authorises his poetry by situating it within a distinguished Roman tradition of epigram emanating from Catullus.29 All the same, as Fitzgerald comments, ‘Martial reads Catullus from the perspective of his own very different world.’30 As an imperial poet, Martial exploits the tension between the smallness of his form and the expansiveness of his literary ambitions.31 His relationship to Catullus is likewise characterized by both reductive and expansive tendencies. In the prologue to Book 1 of his epigrams, Martial acknowledges Catullus as his primary model for ‘direct, lascivious speech, the 24 25 26 29

Gibson and Morello (2012) 197 argue that Pliny’s letters develop a prose genre ‘most appropriate to otium’. Swann (1994) 33–8. See also Gaisser (1993) 200–11; Holzberg (2002b); Lorenz (2007). 27 Watson and Watson (2003) 27. Roman (2001) 117. 28 Lorenz (2007) 420–1. 30 Citroni (1975) 10. Fitzgerald (2007) 173. 31 Canobbio (2017).

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language of epigram’ (lasciuam uerborum ueritatem, id est epigrammaton linguam, 1 praef. 9–10), that is, he represents Catullus as a poet of similar verbal frankness to himself. Yet this is a generically limited view that does not acknowledge the more elevated language and style of Catullus 6168b.32 As an imperial poet, toto notus in orbe (1.2.2), known throughout the world, Martial expresses expansive ambitions. His courting of popular fame runs counter to the intimacy of Catullus’ social world and to the Callimachean aesthetic embraced by Catullus; it is also in contrast to the exclusivity of the Flavian cultured elite, who appropriated the Catullan hendecasyllable mostly for private circulation among themselves.33 Martial took advantage of the possibilities for imperial epigram to circulate widely, thanks to a worldwide book trade and possibly also the portability of the new codex form.34 The tension between formal concision and imperial reach is reproduced in Martial’s both reductive and hyperbolic relationship with Catullus.35 For instance, in poem 1.7, which alludes to Catullus’ famous passer poem, Martial sets himself in direct competition with Catullus. Stella, Martial’s fellow poet and dedicatee of Book I of Statius’ Siluae, has written a poem about his girlfriend’s pet dove: Stellae delicium mei columba, Verona licet audiente dicam, uicit, Maxime, passerem Catulli. tanto Stella meus tuo Catullo quanto passere maior est columba. Maximus, I will declare, even though Verona is listening, that the ‘dove’, the delight of my Stella, has conquered the ‘sparrow’ of Catullus. My Stella is as much greater than your Catullus as the dove is greater than the sparrow.

In this hendecasyllabic epigram Catullus is taken down by Martial in particularly Catullan style. The opening line alludes to the famous start of Poem 2 of Catullus, Passer, deliciae meae puellae. Martial’s repeated use of the affectionate personal pronoun, Stella mei. . . Stella meus (1, 4) and tuo Catullo (4), is also a favourite Catullan device. The final two lines with their tanto. . . quanto construction allude, as Fitzgerald observes, to the final two lines of Catullus’ Poem 49 on Cicero, tanto pessimus omnium poeta | quanto 32 33 34 35

See the discussion of 4.49 and 10.4 by Hinds (2007) 136–9, arguing that Martial does not reject mythological themes per se but deflates pretentious attitudes associated with such poetry. Roman (2001) 116–17. Cf. the satirical reference to Callimachus’ Aetia at Mart. 10.4.12. Roman (2001) 126–30. On the imperial book trade see 7.88; 8.3.4–8; 11.3; 12.2. Hinds (2007) 114–15.

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tu optimus omnium patronus (‘as much the worst poet of all as you are the best advocate of all’, 6–7).36 In Martial’s poem the sparrow and dove are simultaneously names of birds and titles of poems. Both Catullus and Martial were fond of metaphorically linking sexual and literary play.37 But setting aside any explicitly salacious interpretation of this epigram, we can observe that Martial’s poem plays upon the double meaning of magnus in Latin, big in size or great in reputation.38 As the dove is bigger than the sparrow, so Stella’s poem is greater than Catullus’. A new generation of poets, of whom Stella is one of the finest representatives, is now outdoing Catullus in hendecasyllabic verse. The allusion to Poem 49 of Catullus prompts Fitzgerald to suggest that Martial is both banalising Catullus and hinting to Stella that praise should not be taken literally.39 Yet Martial’s poem has an affectionate tone absent from Catullus’ poem on Cicero. With the repeated possessive adjective my Stella (lines 1 and 4) contrasted with your Catullus (4), Martial aligns himself with his contemporary generation of poets. As Gaisser comments, ‘the very Catullan color emphasises the sense of distance and disjunction’.40 Martial’s addressee, Maximus, cannot be securely identified, but his name, ‘BIG BOY’, seems particularly apt for a slight poem that plays on magnus.41 The epigram is both very Catullan – short, elegant, urbane – and at the same time it magnifies the ‘bird poem’. It thus illustrates the contrastive tendencies in Martial’s relationship to Catullus. In Ep. 9.25.3 Pliny alludes to this epigram when he refers to his own poetry as passerculis et columbulis nostris (‘my little sparrows and doves’); he thus acknowledges the importance of the new epigrammatist as a critical reader of Catullus for his own times.42 The name Catullus occurs frequently in Martial’s epigrams, as does the name Lesbia.43 Whereas Martial tends to deflate epic and mythological poetry, he inflates Catullus’ erotic poetry, that is, he brings out its latent obscenity or exaggerates it, and no more so than with Lesbia herself.44 Morelli has noticed the particularly Catullan tone of Book 11 of Martial’s 36 38

39 41

42 43 44

37 Fitzgerald (2007) 77–9. Hallett (1996). Hinds (2007) 115: ‘whatever Catullus himself thought he meant by a passer, Martial’s Catullus knows that a passer is never just a passer’. See Howell (1980) 121–3 who argues that 1.7 is based on a doubleentendre; Citroni (1975) 42 argues contra that the poem evokes the kind of urbane exchange characteristic of Pliny’s circle. 40 Fitzgerald (2007) 79. Gaisser (1993) 201. Citroni (1975) 40–1 argues strongly for Vibius Maximus, a military prefect and man of letters who is mentioned by Statius in the preface to Book 4 of the Siluae as the recipient of a letter attached to the Thebaid; he is the addressee of Silv. 4.7 also. Marchesi (2008) 62–5. Mart. 1.34; 2.50; 5.68; 6.23; 6.34; 7.14; 8.73; 10.39; 11.62; 11.99; 12.44; 12.59; 14.77. Hinds (2007) 114–15.

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epigrams, which announces itself as Martial’s Saturnalian book.45 Here the name Lesbia occurs twice in two separate poems; both illustrate the antithetical poetic strategies that characterise Martial’s approach to Catullus. Let us begin with 11.62.1–2: Lesbia se iurat gratis numquam esse fututam. uerum est. cum futui uult, numerare solet. Lesbia swears that she has never been fucked for nothing. It’s true. When she wishes to be fucked, she usually takes a count.

The epigram recalls two particular poems of Catullus, Poem 7 about the impossibility of keeping count (pernumerare, 11) of the kisses that Catullus will give Lesbia; and, in contrast, Catullus’ vicious representation of Lesbia in Poem 58 pleasuring ‘the descendants of Remus’ in Roman alleys. Part of the shock of Poem 58, and of Martial’s epigram, derives from the shattering of the image of Lesbia as a figure of desire, capable, as represented also in Poem 51, of arousing complex emotions that could be expressed through a Sapphic, lyric voice. Martial’s Lesbia has descended to a stereotype of the money-grubbing whore, who ‘counts out’ in cash every sexual transaction. For Catullus in Poem 7, exact numerical calculations are impossible, such is the extent and boundlessness of his love. In 11.62 Lesbia is no longer the capricious, beautiful woman of Catullus’ imaginings but someone who precisely calculates sex. Martial’s demeaning of Lesbia is not simply a characteristically obscene move. Rather, by belittling her he can make his own lateness in the epigrammatic tradition become an asset. For example, Martial’s second ‘Lesbia epigram’ in Book 11, 99, challenges not only Catullus but also the Roman elegiac tradition that Catullus’ poetry on Lesbia inspired. Thus fittingly Martial’s poem is written in elegiacs. Here he addresses Lesbia directly: De cathedra quotiens surgis – iam saepe notaui – pedicant miserae, Lesbia, te tunicae. quas cum conata es dextra, conata sinistra uellere, cum lacrimis eximis et gemitu: sic constringuntur gemina Symplegade culi et nimias intrant Cyaneasque natis. emendare cupis uitium deforme? docebo: Lesbia, nec surgas censeo nec sedeas. Whenever you rise from your chair – I’ve often noticed it – your wretched tunic buggers you, Lesbia. You have tried to pluck it with now your right 45

Morelli (2017) 124–31.

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hand, now your left, you extract it with tears and a groan; so firmly is it constrained by the twin Symplegades of your arse as it enters your oversized Cyanean buttocks. Do you wish to correct this unstylish fault? I’ll teach you. Lesbia: I judge that you should neither get up nor sit down.

The opening address suggests respect. The cathedra was a special chair connoting high status and authority. It is one of the few items of furniture deemed worthy of mention by Pliny in his Laurentine villa (Ep. 2.17.21), and it is frequently associated with women as well as with teachers.46 In Martial’s poetry the cathedra seems to have involved a power play in gender relations. In Mart. 2.78 the parasitic Selius hangs out around the women’s cathedrae in the Temple of Isis hoping for a dinner invitation; in Mart. 3.63.7–8 bellus Cotilius wastes away his days in the company of women, inter femineas tota qui luce cathedras | desidet.47 Lesbia therefore rises from a position of female authority, as indeed she claims authority in the Roman literary tradition of erotic and elegiac poetry as the first poetic mistress; Propertius at 4.5.37–8 likewise uses the cathedra to signify the authority of the elegiac puella who writes while seated in a cathedra with her lover suppliant at her feet. In the first line of Martial’s epigram, Lesbia thus appears as physically and metaphorically a substantial figure whose dominant authority is signified by the cathedra in which she sits. As Ulrich comments, the cathedra ‘imparted some distinction to its occupant’.48 But the initial word of Martial’s second line, pedicant, swiftly demotes Lesbia from her pedestal. No longer a figure of exclusive beauty, she is instead a wretched and ridiculous object of sexual attention, reduced to buggery from the folds of her tunic, which do not enjoy the contact (miserae, 2). Epic allusion inflates Lesbia’s rear to monstrous proportions as the tunic itself is implicitly likened to an epic ship (such as the Argo) squeezing through the Symplagades (also called, with epicising inflation, the Cyaneae), the clashing, twin rocks that guarded the entrance to the Black Sea.49 Put into the service of a grotesque physicality, epic mythology loses its grandeur. Martial’s Lesbia is the butt of a joke about her enormous rear. The opening lines of 10.4, in which Martial chides the reader of mythological texts, could here apply equally to Lesbia: quid nisi monstra legis ? (‘what do you read of except monsters?’ 2). 46 47 49

Cf. Mart. 12.38 where cathedrae are also used to carry women through Rome; as a teacher’s chair cf. Hor. Serm. 1.10.90–1; Mart. 1.76.13–14; OLD 1b; Ulrich (2007) 214–15. My thanks to Jared Hudson inter litteras for references and discussion. 48 Ulrich (2007) 215. Kay (1985) 269 notes the translingual pun Cyaneasque natis/kuaneai nesoi.

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Several critics, among them Swann, have denied that Martial has Catullus’ Lesbia in mind here. Lesbia, they argue, was a fairly common name for a meretrix.50 But in a recent study of names of the meretrix in the epigraphical record at Rome, Keith has shown that the name ‘Lesbia’ appears as the name for a courtesan or freedwoman in the first century after Catullus, precisely because it carried literary as well as erotic prestige.51 Martial’s Lesbia is both the namesake of Catullus’ girl and her avatar. As Watson and Watson comment, the name of Martial’s hideously obese Lesbia evokes Catullus’ ‘incomparably beautiful mistress’ in an ‘ironically inapposite’ manner.52 Her demotion from the authoritative cathedra reconfigures Martial’s relationship to Catullus in strong terms. At line 7 the metapoetic resonance of emendare, which can also mean to emend a text, suggests that the fault goes beyond ‘this Lesbia’ and extends to her literary–historical position as the founding mistress of Roman love poetry.53 In 11.99 Martial brutally removes Catullus’ Lesbia from her position at the head of a line of poetic mistresses.54 With his hypercharacterisation of Lesbia, he also removes the uitium from Catullus’ poetry, the fault of extravagant emotion for a capricious woman. Rather, with docebo he assumes the didactic, calculated posture of the Ovid of the Ars.55 Not for Martial the elegiac, unmanly posture of slavery to a woman. His advice that Lesbia neither sit nor stand neutralises her, giving her neither authority nor mobility. And, if we interpret these verbs metapoetically, she will neither rise to further literary heights (surgas) as if in epic poetry, nor will she remain settled in her comfortable position at the fount of Roman love poetry. Martial’s appropriation of Lesbia for his own form of ‘womanufacture’ puts the male poet again in charge. Propertius comments on the notoriety of Catullus’ Lesbia at 2.34.87–8: haec quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli, | Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena (‘so sang too the writings of lascivious Catullus, through which Lesbia is more known than Helen herself’).56 Despite the tone of disapproval, the Augustan poet does not deny Lesbia’s beauty, which is more famous than Helen’s. In Martial’s epigram, Catullus’ alluring mistress now, nearly two hundred years after she dominated Catullus’ poetry, has gone to seed. This ‘late’ Lesbia, 50 51 53 54 55 56

Swann (1994) 78–9. He assigns only six of Martial’s epigrams that name Lesbia to Catullus’ Lesbia. 52 Keith (2016) 69, 80–1, with notes 57 and 58. Watson and Watson (2015) 66–7. Cf. Mart. 6.64.6 emendare meos. . . libellos. Cf. Mart. 8.73, a list of the mistresses of Roman love poets; Ov. Tr. 2.427–70. See Hinds (2007) on Martial’s close engagement with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Cf. also on Lesbia Prop. 2.32.41–6.

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swollen with age, does not suit the materialist but neatly packaged poetics of Martial, who describes himself in the following epigram as a connoisseur of flesh – but not of excess flesh, carnarius sum, pinguiarius non sum (‘I’m a man for flesh, not flab’, 11.100.6).57 Thus in 11.99 Lesbia is deprived of any active presence or allure. Like mythological characters, she is an antiquated irrelevance in Martial’s new poetry. Metonymically she represents the paradoxical tendencies in Martial’s relationship to Catullus. By appropriating Lesbia, Martial presents himself not only as a writer of sharp social commentary, but also as a rewriter of literary history.

Statius Less well studied has been Statius’ relationship with Catullus, despite his experiment with the short poem in the Siluae. Unlike Martial or Pliny, Statius never mentions Catullus by name.58 Although he acknowledges a general debt to the epigrammatic tradition (2 praef. 14–18), he writes only four poems in hendecasyllables, Catullus’ trademark metre – in a novel and arresting way, however, as Morgan argues.59 Statius never writes in elegiacs; hexameter is his metre of choice. Statius composed his Siluae for a range of wealthy patrons, men of senatorial rank as well as nouveaux-riches, cultural aspirants; his over-all tone is encomiastic. His social and political world is very different from Catullus’ tight-knit circle of poetic friends; he could not, for instance, display the Republican poet’s forthright manner of speech.60 He frames his first book of Siluae with poems for the emperor Domitian (1.1 and 1.6), thus upping the cultural stakes for the short poem. In Latin literature the Siluae are unique; they do not belong to any established genre.61 However, they owe much to Catullus in their bold experimentation with genre, theme, and form. For instance, Statius tacitly acknowledges his debt to Catullus at the very beginning of the Siluae by writing an epithalamium, Silv.1.2, a form that had become so emblematic of Catullus.62 Statius’ epithalamium is influenced not only by Poems 61 and 62 of Catullus but, through its extensive use of myth, particularly by Poem 64, as Vessey has argued.63 But it is not only in individual poems that Statius demonstrates the importance of Catullus. Although the Siluae are 57 58 59 61 63

Kay’s (1985) 270 translation. Hardie (1983) 152 argues that there is no Republican model for the Siluae; the only extant poetry collections that approximate the Siluae in overall conception are Ovid’s exile poems. 60 Silv. 1.6; 2.7; 4.3; 4.9. Morgan (2010) Chapter 2. Damon (1992) 306–8. See Bonadeo (2017). 62 Vessey (1972); Roberts (1989); Hersch (2007). Vessey (1972) 178.

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characterised by a stylistic and thematic decorum, shifting, for instance, the focus away from Catullan lasciuia to conjugal love and parental love, the Republican poet was important in several foundational ways for both Statius’ Siluae and his epic poetry. For instance, in the Siluae Statius furthers Catullus’ Hellenising revolution of Roman poetry. Statius, also a doctus poeta (Silv. 1.2.259), responds to contemporary Greek literary trends of display poetry and extemporaneous rhetoric. As Hardie observes, Statius was influenced by the kind of publicly recited Greek poetry that he would have heard in Naples at, for instance, the Neapolitan games, and of which his own father was a master.64 In Roman imperial culture, moreover, an engagement with the visual was central to the construction of cultural identity as well as to the performance of political power.65 Ecphrasis, a prominent feature of Catullus 64, becomes a new, distinctive feature of this display poetry. It is not, however, devoted to mythological themes, as in Catullus 64, but to new phenomena reflective of contemporary imperial society and encomiastic in approach; myth plays a subsidiary role in elevating descriptions of a patron’s villa (Silv. 1.3, 2.2, 3.1), the collector’s precious work of art (Silv. 4.6), and Domitian’s new road to the Bay of Naples (Silv. 4.3). Statius takes the Catullan Hellenistic inheritance into epideictic. And this move was in keeping with a new imperial culture of self-fashioning display, through grand houses, gardens, and also public recitation. As Reitz argues, with ecphrasis Statius forges a new category of poetic achievement that ties in with a major preoccupation of the Siluae, miraculous building in Flavian Italy.66 Catullus also provided Statius with an important precedent for the concept of the poetry book and the formal advertisement of its playful verses in an opening dedication.67 Catullus’ first poem introduced the reader to the technical, often diminutive and affective language of Catullus’ new poetry; it established a textual community of literary aspiration between the patron Cornelius Nepos and Catullus. Martial and Statius developed the prefatory poem into the more detailed epistolary prose preface.68 Like Catullus, Statius uses the preface to defend his new poetry, and, to a greater extent than Catullus, possibly because of his socially inferior position, he cultivates the role of patronal friendship. He 64 67 68

65 66 Hardie (1983) 5–14. Goldhill (2001). Reitz (2013) 137–72; Newlands (2013a). Roman (2001) 120–4. While epistolary prose prefaces derived from Hellenistic literature, their application to a collection of ‘light, occasional’ poetry seems to have been a Flavian innovation. See Johannsen (2006); Pagán (2010); Newlands (2011) 57–8.

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composes his poems not at leisure, like Pliny, but often at request and in swift response to a variety of occasions.69 The men to whom he dedicates the four books of the Siluae have a role well beyond that of Catullus’ Cornelius Nepos. Nepos authorises the value of Catullus’ work by receiving the gift of the poetry book, but Catullus, if we accept the vulgate text, looks to his patron Muse for the prospect of enduring fame (qualecumque, quod, o patrona uirgo, | plus uno maneat perenne saeclo, Catullus 1.9–10).70 Statius’ patrons, on the other hand, support Statius in multiple ways. They provide a physical refuge to write, they provide friendly feedback, they defend the work against critics, and above all they provide their seal of approval for publication.71 Through the enhanced role of the patron, and of the poet’s friendship with him, the literary and cultural status of the short poem in the imperial age is also augmented. So too Statius’ patrons gained cultural capital from their support of Statius.72 Statius takes from Catullus the affective language of the poetry book.73 In the first preface to the Siluae, in which Statius dedicates his poetry to Stella – Martial’s Stella of 1.7 – Statius describes his Siluae as libelli (2, 16; Catullus 1.1, libellum), and their composition as ‘play in a more relaxed style’ (stilo remissiore praeluserit, 9; Catullus 50.2, multum lusimus in meis tabellis). One key Catullan term is missing from Statius’ programmatic terminology, however, namely lepidus, ‘witty and charming’. This adjective appears prominently in the first line of Catullus’ first poem (lepidum nouum libellum, 1.1), thereby acknowledging a close debt to Callimachean poetics.74 But lepidus occurs nowhere in Statius’ Siluae, with the exception of one use of the noun lepos in Silv. 4.9.54, Statius’ most Catullan poem.75 Instead, in Statius’ first preface he introduces a new programmatic, aesthetic term as regards the short poem, namely celeritas (‘speed’, 1 praef. 13), a term that is an inversion of the Callimachean aesthetic of carefully crafted composition.76 Statius shares with Martial an ambiguous relationship with Hellenistic poetics. Certainly, as Woodman has pointed out, ‘speed’ is a well-attested feature of many types of literature, including historiography; for instance, 69 71 74 75

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70 Hardie (1983) 58–72. Fordyce (1961) ad loc. 72 See especially the prefaces to Books 3 and 4. Zeiner (2005). 73 Roman (2001) 120–4. Pliny also identifies lepos as a key feature of neoteric poetics; see Ep. 1.16.5. On this key term of neoteric poetics see Krostenko (2001a) 94–9; 248–57. Cf. Silv. 4.9.54–5, tantum ne mihi, quo soles lepore, | et nunc hendecasyllabos remittas (‘only don’t now do the same thing and send me back hendecasyllables, with your customary charm’, 54–5). See Damon (1992). Reitz (2013) 150–4. (References to the preface of Siluae 1 are to lines and are taken from the OCT of E. Courtney.)

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festinatio is programmatic for the aesthetics of the Tiberian historiographer Velleius Paterculus. As Merli comments, ‘the festinatio of the poets is a necessary qualification’ in relation to the prose tradition.77 But whereas Velleius associates festinatio with brevity and selectivity, in Statius’ Siluae speed is associated with the poetics of improvisation; haste represents effusion rather than concision.78 Statius describes his father, an important poetic model for him, as laudum festinus et audax | ingenii (5.3.135–6); the two adjectives, as Gibson notes, resonate with Statius’ programmatic language in his first preface to the Siluae, uniting speed with boldness.79 The reference to the celeritas of Statius senior confirms, as Merli observes, ‘that it was a merit and ability of professionals’.80 For an occasional poet, writing quickly was often necessary – and displayed an accomplished poet’s virtuosity. ‘None of my poems were written in more than two days, and some in only one day’, Statius boasts to Stella in his first preface (13–15). Statius cultivates the idea of improvisation. As Rosati points out, he deviates in this regard from the Callimachean – and Catullan – principle of the well-polished poem. Yet Statius boldly suggests that hasty composition is not something to be ashamed of but rather is a pleasure, festinandi uoluptas (1 praef. 3).81 Statius’ Flavian aesthetic thus mediates between neoteric and epideictic tendencies. Lepidus perhaps was too firmly associated with Callimachean poetics; Statius in the Siluae never lets his readers forget that he is also an epic poet who gives epic weight to the ‘short’ poem.82 The importance of Catullus to Statius in the Siluae can perhaps be summed up by exploring an allusion in Siluae 3.2 to Poem 4 of Catullus, which celebrates the phaselus, a small, swift ship that has retired from service after many years plying the route between Asia Minor and Italy. Siluae 3.2, an expanded propemptikon, is addressed to Maecius Celer, a military tribune who is travelling by sea to Egypt and Syria for a spell of military duty. Although Statius’ poem owes an obvious debt to Augustan propemptika, as well as to Catullus’ contemporary Cinna, towards its start it also acknowledges the importance of Catullus.83 Statius’ densely intertextual poem plays on the common metaphor of the 77 79 80 82 83

Merli (2017) 139. 78 Woodman (2012a) 208–20; cf. Woodman (1977) on Vell. 108.2. Gibson (2006) ad loc.; cf. 1 praef. 3–4; 13; 19 (if Sandström’s conjecture ausus sum is correct). Merli (2017) 147. 81 Rosati (2015) 54–65. In the first prologue to the Siluae Statius compares himself to Homer and Virgil, who also ‘played’ in light verse (1 praef. 7–9). On the propemptikon see Cairns (1972) 7–16; 231–5; Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 41–5. On Statius’ debt to the Augustan propemptika see Hardie (1983) 156–64; Putnam (2017). On Cinna see Silv. 3.29–11 with Hollis (2007) 12–14, 21–9; also Courtney (2003) 212–18.

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ship as poetry; moreover, like Martial in Poem 1.7 on the sparrow and dove, aesthetic value is expressed in the first instance through size.84 Whereas Catullus’ phaselus is a lightweight ship and very fast, phaselus . . . celerrimus (‘a very speedy little ship’, 4.1–2), the ship of Silv. 3.2 is an imperial bark, celsa ratis (‘lofty ship’, 19). Wittily, however, it transports a man called Celer (Mr. Swift), who embodies a key feature of Statius’ new poetics, swift yet grand composition. The rare word phaselos occurs only twice in Statius’ poetry.85 Here in Silv. 3.2 it describes a lifeboat tied behind the lofty merchant ship in which Celer travels (3.2.31), quaeque secuturam religent post terga phaselon (‘and some must tie a phaselos to follow along behind’).86 But the expression secuturam . . . post terga phaselon possibly has metapoetic significance. Statius ends Silv. 3.2 with the proud claim that he has recently concluded his Thebaid (Silv. 3.2.142–3), ast ego . . . quaeue laboratas claudat mihi pagina Thebas (‘but I will tell of the page that concludes the labour of my Thebes’). Whereas Vergil’s Aeneid epic ends abruptly, Statius seals his Thebaid with a sphragis.87 The verb sequi occurs prominently in Statius’ sphragis as a programmatic word that describes literary succession (Theb. 12.816–17), uiue, precor, nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta, | sed longe sequere. But whereas in the sphragis Statius describes himself as following at a distance behind Virgil, in Silv. 3.2 he suggests that the Catullan phaselus follows behind Statius’ ship; that is, he reverses the relationship he expresses at the end of his epic between himself and Virgil. His poetry is the grand ship of a poet who is proving himself in both epic and short poetry, bringing grandeur and decorum, and also playfulness, to this new poetic form; as Bessone points out, Statius ‘awards equal nobility to poetic forms of different rank’.88 While the binding of the phaselos to Statius’ ship suggests a clear line of literary succession in the short poem emanating from Catullus, the stately, imperial bark now takes the lead and is going forwards, a symbol of poetic innovation. Catullus’ phaselus poem reflects the complex relationships between Greece and Rome in the late Republic.89 Bithynia, the point of origin for the phaselus, transported to Italy slaves and also books and poets, including the influential Parthenius. Brought by the poet Cinna (or his father) to 84 86 87 89

85 Catullus 4 is written in iambic senarii; Silv. 3.2 in hexameters. Cf. Silv. 5.1.242–6. The text of the previous line is difficult and hence the referent of quaeque is unclear. See Laguna (1992) on 3.2.30, a locus desperatus, and on 3.2.31. See Putnam (2016). 88 Bessone (2014) 216. E.g. Wiseman (1974) 46–50; Fitzgerald (1995) 104–110; Young (2015) 89–101.

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Rome and there freed, Parthenius helped revolutionise the literary landscape of Catullus’ Rome, becoming a major envoy of cultural translation for neoteric and elegiac poets.90 The phaselus, a Greek word for a lightweight ship that Catullus transliterates into Latin, is a symbol of Catullan poetics, with its Greek origins and freight, its Roman destination, its poetic lightness, shifting uncertainties of poetic voice, and its confrontation with epic, for, like the Argo, the phaselus is a talking ship. Statius’ imperial bark, which sails from Naples, then a major Roman port,91 reflects the polyvalence of his poetics. Rosati has written that Statius is ‘a poet of three hearts’, Greek, Roman and Neapolitan.92 Raised and educated in Naples, that quasi Graecam urbem (‘a virtually Greek city’, Tac. Ann. 15.33.2), Statius had no need to travel in order to have close contact with Greek culture. He follows to some degree in the footsteps of Virgil, who wrote his Eclogues and Georgics in Naples while studying with Hellenistic philosophers and poets (G. 4.563–6).93 Here too Statius wrote many of his Siluae, developing a new Romanised style of Greek epideictic poetics; here too he completed his epic poem the Thebaid. Statius thus extended the literary culture of Naples well beyond the neoteric. In Silv. 3.2 his imperial ship bears the richly allusive freight of ‘a transnational poet’ firmly located, however, in southern Italy, represented as now being the centre of imperial literary activity.94 Statius offers perhaps the most varied response to Catullus of any of the Flavian poets. I shall conclude by looking at a surprising citation of Catullus not in the Siluae, but in the Thebaid. At the start of Book 9 of the Thebaid, news that Tydeus is dead reaches the ears of Polynices. His emotional reaction is extreme. He faints, then drags himself to the body, strips off his armour and falls upon the corpse, where he delivers a despairing lament (9.46–53): Tandem ille abiectis, uix quae portauerat, armis nudus in egregii uacuum iam corpus amici procidit et tali lacrimas cum uoce profudit: ‘hasne tibi, armorum spes o suprema meorum, Oenide, grates, haec praemia digna rependi, funus ut inuisa Cadmi tellure iaceres sospite me? nunc exsul ego aeternumque fugatus, 90 91 93 94

On the life of Parthenius see Lightfoot (1999) 9–16. On Cinna and Parthenius see Woodman in this volume. 92 Casson (1971) 236–7. Rosati (2011); Bessone (2014) 223. See Janko (2000) 3–10 on the late-Republican cultural environment of Naples. Bessone (2014) 221–3.

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quando alius misero ac melior mihi frater ademptus. At last he threw aside the weapons that he had struggled to carry and, stripped bare, he fell upon the lifeless corpse of his peerless friend and gushed forth tears with words such as these: ‘Are these the thanks that I paid you, are these the worthy rewards, o supreme hope of my army, son of Oeneus, that you lie on Cadmus’ hated land, while I am unharmed? Now I am indeed an exile and banished for eternity, since another and better brother has been taken from wretched me.’

In that last line Polynices repeats, with only slight variation, one of the most famous and moving lines in Roman literature, Catullus’ lament for his brother. This line acts as a memorialising refrain in the second half of Catullus’ collected poems, for it occurs three times in the elegiac pentameter with only slight alterations: O misero frater adempte mihi (68a.20) O brother taken from wretched me. ei misero frater adempte mihi (68b.92) Alas brother, taken from wretched me. heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi (101.6) Alas, wretched brother, unworthily taken from me.

In Poem 101, Catullus addresses his brother at his brother’s grave in the Troad. Polynices, however, quotes Catullus’ verse as he lies upon the bloodied, brain-spattered corpse of Tydeus, who presumably still clasps the head of Melanippus in his mouth. The shock of hearing Catullus’ moving fraternal invocation repeated in its essence by Polynices in such ghoulish circumstances is palpable. Dewar and others therefore speculate that the line is spurious, especially since it appears in only a handful of manuscripts.95 Yet the shock serves a purpose for our understanding of Statius’ epic. The language of mourning is here infected with spite and hate, as Polynices calls Tydeus his ‘better brother’, even though Tydeus has committed a vile impious act. Polynices’ echoing of Catullus’ famous words highlights the distorted bonds of kinship in the Thebaid whereby a brother-in-law ranks higher in affections than his twin, Eteocles. The moving simplicity and elegance of Catullus’ line becomes twisted in the Thebaid to reflect a world where natural ties are poisoned. Yet Statius also makes a claim here to Catullus’ anti-heroic ethos. Catullus’ brother died at Troy (68b.89), Troia 95

Dewar (1991) ad loc.

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(nefas!) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque (Troy (oh horror!) the common grave of Asia and Europe). For Catullus, Troy has claimed yet another undeserving victim (68b.89–92). His opposition here to the epic tradition is expressed through the theme of eternal mourning for the premature death of a brother, a theme that is a rejoinder to Homer and to Homeric kleos (glory).96 The echo of Catullus in Statius’ epic underscores the moral bankruptcy of war and of the heroic world. The Thebaid shares with Catullus’ lament the questioning of the conventions of epic tradition, which here in Statius’ epic are pushed to an extreme. Polynices’ speech is a striking instance of male lament in a poem that is dominated by female lament.97 Statius’ allusion to Catullus’ lament not only increases the pathos and horror of this battlefield scene; it also serves a literary-historical purpose. It acknowledges Catullus as a foundational figure for male lamentation in Roman poetry.98 Catullus is thus a key predecessor for Statius in the Siluae also, which are distinctive for the high number of personal male laments: Silv. 2.1, 2.6, 3.3, 5.1, 5.3, 5.5.99 Beginning with Poem 65, Catullus authorised the right for men to lament, to break conventional Roman strictures on open, physical expressions of grief as unmanly. Seneca’s Ep. 63, for instance, opens by counselling a bereaved friend not to grieve more than is reasonable (plus tamen aequo dolere te nolo).100 In his grief for his brother, Catullus takes lament out of mythical time and puts it in the personal voice of the contemporary male poet. In Poem 65 lament is boldly inserted, moreover, into a text of diverse genre, epistolary in its framework, Callimachean in its conclusion;101 personal lament thus is freed from specific generic as well as gendered restraints. In the laments of the Siluae Statius demonstrates some of the poetic freedom that is so characteristic of Catullus, in that he endorses openness and extravagance of expression. Polynices drags himself to Tydeus’ body weak-kneed, fainting and awash in tears, deeming all his heroic endeavours to be worthless (Theb. 9.39–45). Likewise in the first poem of lament and consolation in the Siluae, Silv. 2.1, the bereaved, Atedius Melior, tears his clothes and skin and falls upon the ground, grieving like a woman for his young foster son (169–73). Statius takes from Catullus key tropes of 96 97 98 99 101

Bleisch (1999). Dominik (1994) 134–7. Polynices’ lament is followed two books later by Oedipus’ lament for his sons (11.605–26; 630–1). Calvus wrote a lament for a girlfriend Quintilia, possibly based on the lengthy (3-book) epicedion, Arete, by Parthenius for his wife. See Hollis (2007) 68–71. 100 See Gibson (2006) xxxi-l; Newlands (2011) 9–11. Newlands (2011) 10–11. Du Quesnay (1976) 23; Woodman (2012b); Fernandelli (2015) 55–6.

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lament, in particular the feminisation of grief,102 the difficulty of finding adequate poetic expression for bereavement, and the fear of loss of memory, thus developing the emotional range of male lament.103 For Statius, then, Catullus was important as a radical rethinker of generic and gendered social and literary norms, despite the hierarchy of genres codified by his contemporary Quintilian. But all the Flavian authors I have examined here used their relationship to Catullus to rewrite literary history and emphasise their contributions to the short poem. Overall, the nouus poeta offered the Flavians strategies for overcoming ‘lateness’ through their own creative forms of innovation. An excerpt from Polynices’ lament (Theb. 9.49–62) circulated in the Middle Ages between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries along with five other highly dramatic excerpts from Statius’ epic, namely laments by Argia, Hypsipyle, Jocasta, and part of Tydeus’ dying demand for Melanippus’ head.104 These laments were meant to be sung, and were selected for their expressive possibilities and their rhetorical intricacy. The principle of selection, moreover, suggests recognition of the relative rarity of male lament and its potential for cross-gendered poetics. Today we often conceive of Catullus as a love poet. In the Middle Ages, when Catullus’ poetry was lost to the world, it was his famous words of lament for his brother, misero ac melior mihi frater ademptus, that continued to be sung and remembered, embedded in the text of Statius.

Further Reading Until recently, scholarly attention focused on the Augustan influence upon the Flavian poets. Several articles in Bessone and Fucecchi (2017), in particular those by Canobbio and Morelli, explore the complex relationship between the Flavians and Catullus. Roman (2015) argues for the importance of the idea of Catullan playfulness and informality in an age that required deference before powerful and wealthy patrons. Bessone (2014), building upon Hardie’s (1983) foundational study, provides an important discussion of Statius’ self-construction as an imperial poet. Morgan (2010), Chapter 2, offers insightful discussion of Statius’ hendecasyllabic poems. 102 103 104

On this feature of Catullus’ poetry see Wray (2001) 196–200; Woodman (2012b); Woodman (2012a) 50; Fernandelli (2015) 74–97. See Fernandelli (2015) 48–55; Gibson (2006) xxxviii-l. Ziolkowski (2004) 121–3 lists the occurrence and provenance of the laments; see also Newlands (2013b).

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Marchesi (2008) focuses upon Pliny’s interest in poetry, especially Catullus’ poetry, as a major factor in his style of composition in the Epistles; Gibson and Morello (2012) provide valuable historical and social context for Pliny along with close readings of many of his Epistles and an argument for a grand design for the entire collection along the lines of a poetry book. The influence of Catullus’ dedicatory poem upon the rhetoric of the Flavian preface has been astutely discussed by Roche (2016) with attention to Pliny the Elder in particular. The sexual interpretation of Catullus’ passer poems from Martial onward is explored in Gaisser (2007a) 305–340. Watson and Watson (2015) provide a lively, up-to-date introduction to Martial.

chapter 11

The Manuscripts and Transmission of the Text S. P. Oakley

Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg began to change the literary culture of Europe by using movable type to print books. In 1465 Cicero’s De officiis became the first classical text to be so printed. In 1472 Catullus was printed for the first time by Vindelinus de Spira in Venice. Before the invention of printing, books could circulate only if they were manu scripti (‘copied by hand’). Catullus lived at a time when for the vast majority of literary works these copies were made on rolls of papyrus, to which and to other materials for writing he refers quite often.1 For a work of classical literature to be read in modern times, at least one manuscript copy had to survive until printing brought about more widespread dissemination. This survival depended, so to speak, on the text’s being able to leap over several hurdles. First, it had to be interesting enough for people to wish to acquire copies of it: Volusius and Suffenus are now known only from the poems of Catullus (22, 36, 95). Second, at least one copy had to be transcribed from papyrus into a codex made of parchment, which was more durable and slowly replaced papyrus during the centuries of the Roman Empire:2 several codices written in antiquity itself still survive after being kept in medieval and modern libraries; papyrus survives only rarely, for instance when disgorged from the arid sands of Egypt. Third, at least one codex had to avoid destruction in the so-called Dark Ages, to be copied in the revival of classical learning in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian epoch of the late eighth and ninth centuries, or even later: Sallust’s Histories, for example, could be read in the fourth and fifth centuries but only excerpts of speeches and letters from them survived to the Carolingians.3 And, fourth, a copy of a text made in, or surviving into, the Carolingian epoch still needed itself either to survive unscathed or to be copied for the text to be available I thank Dr D. Kiss and Professor M. D. Reeve for improvements to an earlier version of this chapter. 1 2 E.g. 1.1–2, 1.6, 22.5–8, 36, 42, 68.33–40, 95.7–8. See conveniently Roberts and Skeat (1983). 3 On the transmission of Sallust’s Histories see L. D. Reynolds, in Reynolds (1983) 347–9.

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today: texts that leapt this last hurdle imperfectly include Cicero’s defective In Pisonem and Pro Flacco, both of which we could read complete today if the ninth-century Vatican MS Arch. S. Pietro H 25 had been copied before it was damaged, and Livy, Books 41–5, which survive in just the fifth-century Vienna, ÖNB 15, a MS that – astonishingly – lay unread and uncopied until the sixteenth century but which by then had lost segments of text. Thomson (1997: 72–91) has a list of 145 MSS of Catullus, but, if one discounts duplicates, excerpts written in the fifteenth century, and any manuscript written after about 1510 (by which date the printed book had changed habits of writing and reading), the number reduces to about 118: see the Appendix at the end of this chapter. Compared to Livy, Books 41–5, Catullus may seem fortunate, but the relatively high number of manuscripts masks a precarious survival. Of these 118 MSS, only one was written before c. 1350, and of Catullus’ poetry it contains only Poem 62; only three more were certainly written before 1400, and a fourth c. 1400. All the remaining MSS were written after 1400, virtually all before 1500. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 8071, is an anthology written almost certainly in northern France in the middle of the ninth century that contains Poem 62 on ff. 51 r and v.4 Now damaged, it contains also inter alia many of Juvenal’s Satires, a collection of Martial’s epigrams, the Pervigilium Veneris, and Grattius’ Cynegetica. Like several other important MSS, it was owned by Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553–1617); hence editors call it the Codex Thuaneus and give it the siglum T.5 The other four early MSS all contain exclusively the poems of Catullus as we know them. The second earliest is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. class. lat. 30, written on 37 folios of parchment probably around the middle of the fourteenth century; editors call it the Codex Oxoniensis or O.6 O’s script, a late version of the gothic minuscule common in Italy throughout the Middle Ages, illustrates some of the less satisfactory features of the handwriting of this time, above all the extensive use of abbreviations: even the scribe of O may have found it difficult accurately 4 5

6

In this volume Kiss withdraws his suggestion (in Kiss (2015d)) that this MS once also contained Poem 11. A microfilm of the whole manuscript has been digitised and may be found at https://gallica.bnf.fr /ark:/12148/btv1b9078246d.r=8071?rk=21459;2. For the folios containing Catullus see http://www .catullusonline.org/CatullusOnline/?dir=list_of_manuscripts&type=t . On the probable derivation from T of marginalia in Aberdeen, University Library, Inc. 165 and some other incunables, see Kiss (2015a) xiii–xiv and Reeve (2016). On O see e.g. Mynors (1966) (the unpaginated preface) and Thomson (1997) 28–30. For full digital reproductions see https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/2fe1d52b-f87b-4468-b6e1-2108cf74b3de or www.catullusonline.org/CatullusOnline/?dir=list_of_manuscripts&type=o ; these supersede the facsimile in Mynors (1966).

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to read aloud all that he had copied.7 Around 1425–45 an illuminated opening initial was added in the style of contemporary Lombard illustration.8 O has a few variants and marginalia.9 The third earliest MS is Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 14137, written at Verona on 36 folios of parchment in 1375 by a scribe who has been identified as Antonio da Legnago.10 Editors call this MS the Codex Sangermanensis (because it found its way to the monastery of SaintGermain-des-Prés before being moved to the Bibliothèque Nationale) or Codex Parisinus or G (for Germanensis).11 After the Explicit to Catullus that occupies the first line of the recto of the thirty-sixth folio, the scribe of G offers information, both valuable and enigmatic, about the circumstances in which he wrote the manuscript. First comes: Versus domini Beneuenuti de Campexanis de Vice | ncia de resurrectione Catulli poet(a)e Veronensis Ad patriam uenio longis a finibus exul: causa mei reditus compatriota fuit, scilicet a calamis tribuit cui francia nomen quique notat turb(a)e pretereuntis iter. quo licet ingenio uestrum celebrate Catullum cuius sub modio clausa papirus erat. The lines of Master Benvenuto de Campesanis of Vicenza on the reemergence of Catullus, the poet from Verona An exile, I return to my fatherland from distant borders: a fellow countryman is the reason for my return, namely the person to whom France gave a name from his pens and who describes (notat; notarius = ‘a scribe’) the travel of the passing crowd. With such wit as you are able, sing the praises of your Catullus, whose paper (or ‘wick’) had been shut away under a measuring-vessel (modius).

Since Benvenuto Campesani was dead by 1324, this epigram must have been written before that year.12 Its subject must be either Catullus himself 7

On the unsatisfactory nature of much late gothic, see Ullman (1960b) 11–19. See Pächt and Alexander (1966–73) 2.73, Thomson (1997) 29–30. 9 For the (not certainly right) view that these are in the hand of the original scribe, see Thomson (1997) 81, citing personal communication from A. C. de la Mare. 10 For the identification (generally accepted) see Billanovich (1959) 159–67; it has excellent historical plausibility, but the palaeographical evidence adduced is inconclusive. 11 For G see e.g. Thomson (1997) 30–2. A full digital reproduction may found at either https://gallica .bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52000994w.r=14137?rk=21459;2 or www.catullusonline.org/CatullusOnline/ ?dir=list_of_manuscripts&type=g. The ‘facsimile’ of Clédat (1890) should not be used: it renders many readings of G1 and G2 invisible. 12 For varied discussion of this epigram see e.g. Levy (1968), Billanovich (1988) 48–50, Butrica (2007) 26–8, Kiss (2015c) 2–9. 8

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or Catullus’ book of poetry. Vv. 3–4 a calamis tribuit cui . . . nomen quique notat seems to imply that the man who brought Catullus home was a scribe or notarius, and v. 3 francia that he was called ‘Francesco’; the rest of v. 4 is obscure. V. 1 patriam and v. 2 compatriota refer probably to Verona (note Catulli poetae Veronensis earlier) but conceivably to northern Italy more generally. Billanovich pointed out that papirus also means wick and that Benvenuto alludes to the New Testament idea of hiding one’s light under a bushel. Then, in smaller script, comes the colophon of the scribe himself: Tu lector quicumque ad cuius manus hic libellus obuenerit Scriptori da ueniam si tibi coruptus uidebitur. Quoniam a corruptissimo exemplari transcripsit. non enim quodpiam aliud extabat unde posset libelli huius habere copiam exemplandi, et ut ex ipso salebroso aliquid tantum suggeret decreuit pocius tamen coruptum habere quam omnino carere. Sperans adhuc ab alliquo alio fortuite emergente hunc posse corigere. Valebis si ei imprecatus non fueris. 1375 mensis octobris 19° quando cansignorius laborabat in extremis, etc.13 Lesbia damnose bibens interpretatur Whoever you are, reader, into whose hands this book has chanced, please excuse the scribe if it seems corrupt, since he copied it from a very corrupt exemplar: nothing else was to hand from which he might take the opportunity of copying this book; and so that he would be able to assemble at least something from this bumpy text, he decided rather to have it corrupt than altogether to do without it, hoping all the time that he could correct it from some other appearing by chance. You will fare well if you do not curse him.14 19th October 1375, when Cansignorio was in his death throes, etc. Lesbia means (?) ‘drinking ruinously’15

Cansignorio dalla Scala (5.3.1340–18.10.1375) was ruler of Verona. In carrying a date, G is relatively rare among fourteenth-century MSS; the practice was to 13 14 15

Ullman (1960a) 1047–8 adduces other examples of etc. in colophons and concludes ‘it perhaps merely implies that other details could be given by the scribe’. On the problems of text and translation see recently Grazzini (2005) 163–8; for my ‘assemble’ he prefers ‘suck’, perhaps rightly. Ullman (1960a) 1049 first saw that this comment is taken unchanged from the eleventh-century Vocabularium of Papias. The lexicon is ordered alphabetically, and the entry is found under ‘Lesbia’. It has not been edited since 1496, but may now be consulted swiftly via digitised incunables. At the time of writing http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0005/bsb00058582/images/index.html? id=00058582&groesser=&fip=eayaewqeayaeayaeayaeayaeayaqrswxsewq&no=5&seite=207 leads to the relevant page of Munich, BSB, Ink P-11 (the Venice 1486 edn.). A passive sense seems best for interpretatur; in classical Latin the verb is deponent, but ‘explains’ gives poor sense. McKie (1976) argues that Papias was deriving Lesbia from l(a)esus and bibere (i.e. ‘damaged by drinking’); Grazzini (2005) 169–70, perhaps more cogently, explains it by referring to the temulenta (‘drunk’) Lesbia at Terence, Andria 228–9 and to Donatus’ comment on that passage.

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become more common as the fifteenth century progressed and standard in early printed editions, which have passed it on to our own times.16 In addition to its main text, G has numerous marginal and interlinear variants. These fall into two principal series: one, taken from G’s exemplar, was written by the scribe himself and is cited by Thomson as G1; its range is restricted largely to the beginning of the text. Another, Thomson’s G2, is taken from M, an extant MS on which see below.17 There are a few later corrections. The fourth earliest MS is Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Ottob. lat. 1829, called R (or Codex Romanus) by editors;18 it was written on 37 folios of parchment in a late gothic rotunda. Before the text of the poems the scribe wrote out the epigram of Benvenuto. R was owned by Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406).19 About his efforts to secure a manuscript of Catullus, we can read in his letters; the last reference comes on 16.11.1375, when he thought that he was closing in on his quarry.20 The MS has a few corrections by the original scribe (R1) but very many more by Salutati himself (R2), perhaps made over a period of time. These interventions of R2 include various glosses and the addition (on f. 37 r, after the text of Catullus) of lesbia damnose bibens interpretatur, the same comment as is found in the colophon to G. There are a smaller number of corrections by later scribes, among which the cursive hand of R3 is the most prominent. The fifth earliest MS of Catullus is Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS lat. XII 80 (4167), known to editors as the Codex Marcianus or M,21 consisting of 42 folios but of paper not parchment. It 16

17

18

19

20 21

For example, of 896 plates in Watson (1979) illustrating dated MSS in the British Library, nos. 1–181 predate 1300, nos. 182–300 cover 1300–1399, nos. 301–896 cover 1400–1499. The figures are striking, even when allowance is made for the fact that many more MSS were written in, and survive from, the fifteenth century than earlier. Many of the earlier MSS are datable rather than dated. High-quality modern digital photography has made distinguishing between G1 and G2 easier. The best account remains Bonnet (1877) 59–62, written before R and M had been brought to scholarly attention and therefore the more valuable for not being influenced by the debates caused by their emergence. Thomson’s apparatus is unreliable on this matter. On R see e.g. Thomson (1970) (a full collation) and (1997) 33–5, De Robertis and Fiesoli, in De Robertis, Tanturli, and Zamponi (2008) 238–43 (with full bibliography). The attempt of Thomson (1973) and (1997) 37–8 to distinguish different phases of Salutati’s work on R by means of the readings of its apograph M is refuted by McKie (1986). The MS and its importance were discovered by Hale (it had been faultily catalogued in the Vatican Library): see Hale (1896), (1897) 33–9, (1898), (1899), (1906). A low-quality digital reproduction from microfilm may be found at https://digi.vatlib .it/view/MSS_Ott.lat.1829. On f. 1r R has ’71. Carte 39’, a mark of cataloguing typical of Salutati’s MSS. De Robertis and Fiesoli state (plausibly) that the same scribe wrote Florence, Laur. 36.47 (Plautus), also for Salutati; this would make it virtually certain that R was written in Florence (Billanovich (1988) 51 implies that it is Veronese). On Salutati see conveniently Ullman (1963), de la Mare (1973) 30–43, and De Robertis, Tanturli, and Zamponi (2008). See Novati (1891–1911) 1.170, 207, and 221–2. Thus Hale in his publications; Mynors and Thomson use the lower-case siglum m.

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is of considerable palaeographical interest, since it is one of the earliest MSS to be written in something approaching humanist script, here seen emerging out of the gothic style; it also has an initial vine-stem decoration that is placed on a background of gold, red, and blue, a style that was to become characteristic of Florentine MSS in the period c. 1400–1430.22 The genealogy of manuscripts is revealed by significant errors that they share. If a manuscript shares just some of another’s significant uncorrected errors, the two very often derive from a common source in which the errors appeared. If a MS shares all the significant uncorrected errors of another MS and adds others of its own, it must derive from that other MS. If a MS shares all the significant uncorrected errors of another MS and further errors added to that other MS by a corrector, the proof of derivation is even stronger. Establishing what is ‘significant’ requires judgement: the term is generally used for errors that a scribe could not have corrected easily by conjecture, but in the fifteenth century several men with a fine talent for conjectural emendation wrote out or worked on the text of Catullus, and therefore in classifying the younger MSS care is needed in application of the criterion.23 The common origin of all five MSS is shown by errors that they share in Poem 62. These include the omission of lines (certainly after 32, probably around 42) and also corruptions for which editors print conjectures, such as: 62.7 ignes Palladius: imbres T: imber OGRM 62.9 uincere B. Guarinus: uisere TOGRM 62.35 Eous Schrader: eospem T: eosdem OGRM Although in vv. 7 and 35 T and OGRM have different readings, the difference is slight and caused by progressive corruption (probably in OGR at v. 7, in T at v. 35). In addition to their errors in vv. 7 and 35, other errors prove that OGRM derive from a common source;24 a good example from Poem 62 is their omission of v. 14, which is found in T. The lost common source of OGRM is usually called V by scholars, sometimes A. O has a very large number of uncorrected errors absent from GRM, which prove that GRM cannot derive from it. Here are some of the first to be met in the apparatus of Thomson 1997: 22

23 24

de la Mare’s view, of which she later became doubtful, that this was the earliest MS of Poggio, the first great exponent of humanist script (see de la Mare (1973) 79 and de la Mare and Thomson (1973), has not been generally accepted; see e.g. McKie (1986), De Robertis (2016) 70, and Zamponi (2016) 110–11. On significant errors see below on avoidance of R’s errors at 35.11 and 42.15. For the errors shared by T and OGRM and their significance, see Kiss (2015c) 15–23.

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1.10 perenne]25 perire 4.9 sinum] siniam 4.10 ubi iste] ubuste 5.3 aestimemus (extimemus GRM)] estinemus 6.5 hoc] hic GRM share various errors not found in O that prove that they derive from a common source from which O could not also derive, for example: 4.17 tuo] tuas 11.5 -ue] que 17.25 derelinquere] delinquere 64.139 blanda] nobis 92.2–4 amat . . . dispeream] omitted Scholars now usually give the siglum X to the lost ancestor from which GRM derive. Among these three descendants of X, G has uncorrected errors that are not found in ORM, such as: 64.394 Mauors] mauros 66.24 tibi] ibi 66.32 abesse] adesse 67.31 omission of hoc And RM share errors that are not found in OG, such as: 35.11 si mihi] mihi si 42.15 hoc satis] satis hoc However, M shares all the uncorrected errors of R and adds others of its own, such as the omission of tu at 8.14 and of ego at 86.2. It must derive from R. The corrections and variants that are found in OGRM (many introduced by ał = alias or aliter ‘elsewhere’, ‘otherwise’) add more colour to this picture but do not fundamentally alter it. The few in O (designated O1) include: 2.6 libet (lubet printed in some editions) OGR: ał iubet O1 2.9 tecum OGR: ał secum O1 3.9 circumsiliens] circum silens OGR: ał siliens O1 3.12 illud OGR] ał illuc O1 In the first two passages O1’s variant is wrong, and the scribe of O almost certainly took it from his exemplar, which must have included both an 25

Hereafter the true reading stands before ], the error after it.

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error and the correction of it (otherwise, why should O bother to record manifestly wrong readings?). In the last two the marginal variant is correct, but since O’s scribe shows little evidence elsewhere of a good knowledge of Latin, it is more likely that he took these readings from his exemplar than that he himself conjectured the truth. That both G1 and R2 had access to variants which must have stood in X is shown by such sets of readings as: 2.3 appetenti] at petenti OGR: ał patenti G1R2 4.27 Castor] castrum OGR: ał castorum G1R2 12.15 muneri] numeri OGR: ał muneri G1R2 Variants such as that at 12.15 prove little, since both G1 and R2 could have conjectured the truth independently, but in 2.3 and 4.27 both G1 and R2 share the same error. The obvious conclusion is that these variants stood in X.26 In a few passages such as 2.9 ludere OGR: ał luderem G1 G1 includes a variant that is not found in R or R2. In very many passages such as 16.12 uos quod] hosque O: uosque GR: ał hos ał quod R2 66.56 collocat OR2: aduolat GR 73.6 habuit OR2: habet GR R2 has a variant not recorded by G or G1. These variants almost certainly come from X.27 M takes over from R not only readings from its text but also many of its variants. Usually the variant in R is kept by M as a variant, but occasionally M puts the reading of R2 in its text and has that of R merely as a variant. The variants on G in the hand of G1 are few in number. Far more are in the hand of G2, and Hale demonstrated that they were taken from M.28 This may be illustrated by these sets of readings: 53.3 crimina OGR: carmina MG2 61.61 nil MG2: nichil OGR: ał nihil M2 64.123 immemori] in memori OGRM2: in nemori M: ał nemori G2 26 27

28

On the same principle the lesbia damnose comment must have stood in X. The variants may have included some self-corrections by the scribe of X. The appearance of true readings in R2 that are found also in O but not in G, G1, or R may suggest that Salutati had access to another source for the text independent of X, but the facts that G1 and R2 sometimes concur in a variant and that G1 added few variants after the beginning of the text make this unlikely. See Hale (1908) 249–56.

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64.307 his OGR: hic M2: ał hic G2 64.360 flumina OR: lumina G: flumine M: ał lumina ł [= uel] flumina M2: ał flumine G2 Hale also demonstrated, what is sometimes forgotten in recent scholarship, that M2 occasionally added a reading of G to M, as is shown by its lumina at 64.360. Since M derives from R it is of no value to editors; it has been discussed here because its evidence is needed to understand G2. The interrelationships of TOGRM may therefore be depicted in diagrammatic form on a stemma (see p. 272). A stemma of the manuscripts of a classical author should not be regarded merely as a lifeless palaeographical equivalent to a mathematical equation but appreciated as an abstraction of the historical process of copying. For Catullus, as for most other Latin classics, the historical evidence that it provides can usually be supplemented and turned into some kind of story about the transmission of the text. Imitations, allusions, and quotations by later writers illustrate Catullus’ popularity in the 150 years after his death, and numerous references to him in grammarians and writers of commentaries suggest that he was still readily available in late antiquity.29 But for 800 years between 500 and 1300 he seems hardly to have been known: as we have seen, only one MS survives from this period (and it contains just one poem), and literary allusions that suggest knowledge of him are scarce:30 in Merovingian times Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 6.10.6 per hiulcatos . . . agros (‘through cracked open fields’) seems to recall 68.62 hiulcat agros (‘cracks open the fields’); in the ninth century, Heiric of Auxerre seems to echo him, appropriately enough in phalaecian hendacasyllables; the echoes claimed for the poetry of Agius of Corvey (again ninth century), not wholly compelling in either quantity or quality, perhaps just suffice to show his knowledge;31 William of Malmesbury (twelfth century) has an echo; and for reasons that are obscure a twelfthcentury reader of William of Doncaster wrote the name of Catullus beside a moralising comment.32 When Rather, Bishop of Verona, says that he has read Catullus numquam antea lectum ‘never read before’, he reveals the rarity of the text in the tenth century. The broader study of the transmission of Latin 29 30 31 32

For quotations see Kiss (2016) 128–31. For what follows I abbreviate the survey of Kiss (2016) 135–7, which should be consulted for the precise evidence and further bibliography. See Nisbet (1995) 93–4 and Trappes-Lomax (2007) 18. Perhaps one should add the use by Cologne, Dombibliothek MS 202 (10th century) of the correct adjective cuniculosae in Priscian’s citation of 37.18 at Institutiones Grammaticae 7.22, where other MSS used by editors have the corruption Celtiberosae and correction from a text of Catullus may be postulated.

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T

[V]

[A?]

[X]

O

G1

G

R

R1

G2 M +M2

Stemma of the older manuscripts of Catullus. The sigla for manuscripts that are no longer extant have been placed in square brackets.

R2

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texts shows that this circumstance is not extraordinary: there are other authors whose transmission was extremely slender through the Middle Ages but expanded dramatically in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Tibullus provides one obvious parallel: the earliest complete MS, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS R 26 sup., like R of Catullus, was written in the second half of the fourteenth century and owned by Salutati. Statius’ Siluae provides another: one poem, like Catullus 62, survives in a medieval anthology but the rest only in fifteenth-century MSS.33 Like the whitening of the sky that precedes dawn, the activities of the socalled pre-humanists in Padua, Verona, and elsewhere in northern Italy in the early fourteenth century were the harbingers of the explosion of interest in classical texts that was to accompany and follow the career of Petrarch. Catullus was certainly known to four learned men who lived in this period: Geremia (Hieremias) da Montagnano (d. c. 1320), Benzo of Alessandria (c. 1250–c. 1329),34 Guglielmo da Pastrengo (c. 1290–1362), and Petrarch himself (1304–74),35 all of whom cite him. Some scholars believe that he was known also to Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). Some verses of Catullus were quoted in the compendium of short excerpts known as the Flores Veronenses,36 written not earlier than 1329, a priceless guide to authors available in Verona in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Among our evidence for knowledge of Catullus after 1300 the centrality of Verona stands out: Geremia and Benzo both worked in the chapter library of Verona; Guglielmo da Pastrengo lived and died in Verona; Petrarch was a friend of Guglielmo and visited him in Verona; the Flores and G were written there;37 and the epigram (above, p. 265) probably refers to the return there of Catullus. Almost certainly, therefore, it was from Verona that in the years after 1300 knowledge of Catullus spread out, and in Verona that there emerged a MS from which all later MSS derive. It must be the ultimate source of MSS O and X, and therefore scholars have given the name Veronensis and the siglum V to their lost ancestor. How 33 34 35

36 37

For Tibullus and the Siluae see, respectively, Rouse and Reeve and Reeve alone, in Reynolds (1983) 420–5 and 397–9. On Benzo and Catullus, see Hale (1910). On Petrarch and Catullus see e.g. Ullman (1973) 191–6, Billanovich (1988) 35–47, and Petoletti (2004) 102–3. Our uncertainty about the position on the stemma of the MS that he used is a great frustration, not least because we should like to know whether it influenced the later tradition. Ullman (1960a) 1043–5 thought that he owned X (but see e.g. McKie (1977) 170–2 and 180–6, who points out that Salutati seems to dissociate the MS that he hoped to acquire (probably X) from Petrarch’s collection); both Billanovich and Thomson (1997) 27–8 argued that Petrarch owned or used a now lost MS higher up the stemma, either A or a sibling of O and X. Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CLXVIII [155]. That Guglielmo da Pastrengo created the Flores is argued strongly by Bottari (2010) 45–102.

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many early copies of it were made is uncertain. It was once generally held that the pre-humanists all read and quoted from V itself and that O and X were copied from it, but the current orthodoxy is that, although Hieremias copied from V and Benzo may have done, all our extant MSS derive from an apograph of V that scholars call A.38 If this argument is right, then A was the archetype of all Catullus except for Poem 62.39 But, because the argument for the existence of A is perhaps not quite certain,40 I shall often refer to V/A. It is argued that A had to be made because of the fragile state of V, and it is assumed that (as is certain for the Flores and G) the lost A, the lost X, and O were all written in Verona and that, before R was written for Salutati, Catullus was not to be read outside Verona.41 Whether the dearth of copies to which the scribe of G refers reflects Verona in 1375 or is a tralatician comment inherited from X or A has been disputed. It has been argued, reasonably, that the lack of conscientiousness exhibited by G’s scribe in copying variants makes it an unsuitable comment for him to have made and that the reference must therefore be inherited; but, if in 1375 only X was to hand and O is either not Veronese or had been taken elsewhere, it could perhaps refer to the copying of G. No one has yet propounded a wholly cogent explanation of how the evidence for knowledge of Catullus in northern Europe is to be integrated with T’s and V/A’s sharing a common ancestor, with Rather’s knowledge of Catullus in Verona in the tenth century, with the re-emergence of Catullus at Verona c. 1300, and with Benvenuto’s epigram. It is particularly difficult to interpret the epigram in the light of Rather’s comment. One possibility is that a late antique copy of Catullus began to circulate in northern Europe in the eighth or ninth centuries, and from copies of it derive T, the echoes of Catullus in Carolingian and post-Carolingian literature, and a MS taken to Verona by Rather’s day, which either survived as V or was lost, with Catullus being brought back to Verona in the late Middle Ages. This last suggestion is uneconomical with the evidence but would find a parallel in other textual traditions that moved c. 1300–1350 38 39 40

41

See e.g. Thomson (1997) 25–8, Kiss (2015b) xviii. Like many (but not all) others I use ‘archetype’ to mean the latest manuscript in the chain of copying from which all extant MSS derive. It depends on the fact that OGR have a different system of headings from that which Hieremias used, and hence it is argued that A changed the system that it inherited from V (which Hieremias had used); but it cannot be shown that Hieremias did not use a MS that had itself made changes to the headings. However, there is as yet no palaeographical proof that O was written in Verona, let alone that it was a direct copy of V/A, as scholars confidently assert; it is conceivable that it was copied in Pavia or Milan (hence its later Lombard decoration) from a lost copy of V/A. And Petrarch may have had a copy that was not to be found in Verona.

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from northern Europe to northern Italy. Alternatively, and more economically with most of the evidence, the late antique exemplar emerged in Verona, and T and the north European echoes of Catullus derive from copies taken from Verona to northern Europe. Such an argument would allow Benvenuto to refer to a MS of Catullus that has made only a local journey (to Padua, Billanovich suggested); yet Benvenuto seems to be recording something more momentous.42 What of the quality of the text to which the north Italian pre-humanists had gained access? According to Goold, Mynors accepted over 800 conjectures in the 104 pages of his fairly conservative Oxford Classical Text.43 Some corrections were easy to make, and, by Goold’s calculation, the majority of the conjectures which were needed to restore sense had been made by 1500. For example, at 1.8 we now read quare habe tibi quicquid hoc libelli ‘therefore keep for yourself whatever this is of a book’, but OGR have the unmetrical quare tibi habe quicquid hoc libelli; and Catullus began Poem 51 with the famous words Ille mi par esse deo uidetur ‘That man seems to me to be the equal of a god’, but OGR offered the unmetrical Ille michi (a medieval spelling of mihi) impar esse deo uidetur ‘That man seems to me to be unequal to a god’; in both cases correction had been made by the middle of the fifteenth century. In many places, e.g. 2–3 and 40–7 (the more remarkable because 44 is in choliambics), OGR have no gaps between poems; the right divisions were generally made in the fifteenth century. In these cases the corruption is not deep. Elsewhere our surviving evidence does not allow it to be healed: for example, 14.24–6 (otherwise known as 14b) floats as an incomplete sentence between what we call Poems 14 and 15; 25.5 has baffled all; and after 62.32 a section of text of uncertain length is missing from both T and OGR. Although competent scholars agree that the texts of Mynors and Thomson are too conservative, their failure to agree on which conjectures should be printed suggests that corruption may be deeper than is sometimes claimed.44 We come now to the remaining 114 MSS listed in the Appendix to this chapter.45 In what follows I shall refer to these MSS by the number that 42

43 44 45

Whether Benvenuto’s epigram goes back in the tradition beyond X (which most scholars believe but which cannot be proved, since it is not found in O) hardly matters: even if it was found first in X it could still refer to a journey that Benvenuto knew had been made by an ancestor of X. Goold (1958) 98–9. Diverse views: Goold (1958) 111: ‘the corruption is of a superficial rather than a profound nature’; Kiss (2015c) 21 ‘the corruptions . . . are not superficial’. I have seen almost all either in situ or in reproduction, but not 11 and 126 (for which I rely on collations kindly provided by, respectively, Dániel Kiss and Gabriele Rota); and my knowledge of the readings of 53 is restricted.

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they bear in the Appendix. Almost all these MSS are Italian and they illustrate many of the scribal practices that are found in Italy in this period. The new age brought forth a new script, the so-called ‘humanistic script’, pioneered in Florence by the likes of Niccoli and Poggio to replace the rather degenerate forms of gothic script then in use;46 it is the ancestor of modern ‘Roman’ typefaces. M, as we have seen, was produced in an early version of this style; 8, perhaps the next earliest extant MS, displays the script in a slightly less primitive form. More developed humanistic script is used in many MSS (e.g. 12, 15, 19, 35, 38, 48, 49, 50, 52, 79, 83, 84, 86, 93, 105, 106, 118, 127, 129a); some manuscripts that exhibit it are signed by wellknown scribes (e.g. 21 and 83 by Gherardo del Ciriagio, 63 by Antonio Sinibaldi). Cursive and semi-cursive forms of humanistic script, from the latter of which modern italic fonts were to evolve, were employed by the middle of the fifteenth century, and many MSS are written in them (e.g. 4, 6, 7, 9, 17, 19a, 37, 75, 79, 82, 108, 112, 117). To modern researchers, the most famous exponent of such script was Bartolomeo Sanvito of Padua, who wrote two MSS of Catullus (122 and 128) in semi-cursive;47 another skilled practitioner was Lodovico Regio of Imola, who wrote 12 and 17.48 However, humanistic styles of writing established themselves more slowly in northern Italy than in Tuscany, and throughout the fifteenth century many MSS of Catullus are written in gothic or gothicising script (e.g. 77, 78, 103, 109). MSS of Catullus were produced in all the great Italian centres of copying. Some reveal their place of production in a colophon written by the scribe himself (e.g. 21, 63, and 83 at Florence; 26 at Naples; 10a, 37, and 88 at Pavia; 8 at Venice, 44 at Verona, 52 at Perugia). Others may be localised with confidence on the basis of their scribe or illumination (e.g. 20 and 123 to Florence; 15, 57, 84 to Milan and Pavia; 118, 122, and 128 to Padua, 76 to Venice, 50 to Ferrara, 35 to Bologna, 108 and 116 to Rome, 48 to Naples). From the late 1430s the rudimentary use of vine-stems in the illumination of early fifteenth-century MSS was replaced in Florence by illumination in which vine-stems covered a more substantial part of the borders of the first page; good examples of this practice are provided by e.g. 11, 21, 83, and 123. And from Florence the practice of using vine-stems spread over Italy and is found in many MSS produced in other cities; among those of Catullus note e.g. 19a and 38 (both perhaps Ferrarese), 35 (Bolognese), 118 and 122 (Paduan). 46 48

See Ullman (1960b). 47 On Sanvito see de la Mare and Nuvoloni (2009). On 12 see Cunningham (1983).

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Many of these MSS were written on paper (57 out of 118),49 an indication that the readership of Catullus and the love-poets in general required less grand copies than, for example, the fifteenth-century readership of Cicero’s speeches.50 At the other extreme are the lavish productions made specially for great patrons which illustrate the high standards of book illumination found in the cities of Renaissance Italy. Federico da Montefeltro, successively Count and Duke of Urbino, commissioned perhaps the most splendid manuscript collection of his time; like many other MSS in his collection, the Catullus, no. 105, was furnished for him from Florence by Vespasiano da Bisticci, the most famous book-seller of the age.51 The Medicis of Florence, too, owned many exquisite MSS: 21, written for Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici, is a good example. 63, though written in Florence, comes from the library of the Aragon royal family of Naples, and has the decoration characteristic of deluxe Neapolitan MSS of its time. 123 was produced for King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, an important figure in the promotion of humanism in central Europe who assembled a famous collection of manuscripts from various Italian sources.52 As for humanists, there is no extant MS known to have been owned by Petrarch, by Niccoli, Bruni, Poggio, Filelfo, Guarino, Valla, or Panormita; but Salutati owned R, and the scribe of 59 has been identified as Niccolò Perotti, that of 20 as Bartolomeo Fonzio, that of 31 as Cristoforo Landino, that of 91 as Giulio Pomponio Leto, and that of 124 as Giorgio Antonio Vespucci.53 Although many MSS contain just the text of Catullus, Renaissance readers liked collected volumes, and the relatively short length of Catullus encouraged coupling his poetry with that of others. Naturally, the love-elegists were favoured partners, and in many MSS Catullus is coupled with Tibullus (1, 11, 13, 21, 27, 29, 31, 34, 40, 45, 59, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 84, 92, 93, 96, 107, 112, 114, 116, 118, 124, 128) or both Tibullus and Propertius (2, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 35, 37, 38, 39, 42, 49, 52, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64, 69, 49

50 51

52 53

On the use of paper in manuscript production, significant first in the fourteenth century and becoming common in the fifteenth but always less prestigious than parchment, see e.g. Clemens and Graham (2007) 6–9. 44 out of about 165 MSS of Pro Cluentio known to Rizzo in her book of 1983 were written on paper. On Vespasiano see de la Mare (1996) (192–200 on his involvement with Federico). Digitisation (see e.g. www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link1.jsp?fond=Urb.lat.) has made the splendour of the Urbino collection accessible to all; but see also e.g. Peruzzi (2008). Much has been written about this collection; Csapodi and Csapodi-Gárdonyi (1969) remains the easiest introduction. See Grossi Turchetti (2004) 17–18 (reporting the view of de la Mare) (for Perotti), de la Mare (1985) 487 (for Fonzio), (1976) 230 (for Vespucci), V. Sanzotta in Bausi et al. (2013) 226 (for Landino), and Muzzioli (1959) 340–6 (for Leto).

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78, 79, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 98, 103, 104, 105, 111, 121, 122, 123, 126, 129a) or, more rarely, with just Propertius (16, 44,54 50, 65, 76, 99).55 Do all these later MSS derive from one of O, G, and R? Or, by a fusion of textual traditions (the process that textual scholars call contamination), from more than one of these? Or are there descendants of V/A or X entirely independent of O, G, and R? Answers to these questions are a matter of concern for editors because any MS regularly independent of O, G, and R should be cited in their critical apparatuses, in which the small number of older MSS leaves ample space for additions. They matter for those interested in the transmission of texts, because they will allow the shape of the later tradition to be charted. W. G. Hale, who first brought R to the attention of scholars, stated but never proved that all later MSS derive from O, G, and R, and most from R.56 Mynors produced a formulation that was as evasive as it was elegant: omnes a codicibus OGR originem aut duxerunt aut, quod nobis idem ualet, duxisse possunt ‘all either have derived from MSS OGR or, what for our purposes amounts to the same, could have so derived’.57 Many individual manuscripts have been investigated more or less thoroughly, but a coherent account of the status quaestionis is lacking.58 We shall see that, although contamination and cross-fertilisation between families of MSS becomes increasingly prevalent in the middle and later fifteenth century, the shape of the tradition can, broadly speaking, be defined. An obvious first move is to ask how many MSS share errors of X that are avoided by O. From 61.102, for which O has lenta sed (which is generally accepted), G lenta que, and R lenta qu(a)e, Dániel Kiss has adduced striking evidence: all other MSS except 86 have either the reading of G or R or 54 55 56 57 58

The Propertius is now BL Add. 10387. The substantial overlap with the tradition of Propertius makes much of Butrica (1984) relevant for the textual transmission of Catullus. See e.g. Hale (1908) 234, (1922) 112 (where he admitted to considerable contamination and that ‘the task that I have set myself is not only perplexing in the highest degree but enormous in extent’). Mynors (1958) viii. Zicàri (1978) 43–122 is the most extensive and thorough body of work but flawed by failure to appreciate the primary position of R. Thomson (1997) 72–89 has many remarks on the genealogy of individual MSS, often summarising earlier scholars, sometimes adding fresh observations. What he says about e.g. 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 18, 20, 24, 27, 31, 39, 44, 56, 61, 65, 68, 71, 76, 83, 92, 95, 99, 100, 105, 109, 117, 123, 127 is true or broadly true; but his remarks on 14, 21, 23, 29, 46, 50, 54, 60, 74, 77, 79, 88, 93, 96, 97, 106, 122, and 129a are in various ways misleading, he offers no synthetic overview, and his stemma on p. 93 is faulty. A difficulty has been caused by Mynors’s grouping (1958, ix–xi), taken over by Thomson, of various manuscripts under Greek sigla with reference to waves of emendation and not to shared errors. Most in fact constitute families that can be genealogically defined (but not ζ, and his α and β refer to just one MS each). Lack of space prevents my citing the evidence for most of what I say about the classification of these MSS; I hope soon to publish it elsewhere.

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a progressive corruption of it.59 If lenta sed is indeed right, this would seem to imply that here at least all MSS except 86 derive from X and that there is no trace of any descendant of V/A other than O and X. But caution is required: a stemma should not be established on the basis of one set of readings (especially when the archetype may have had variants); the reading of X makes sense and could conceivably be right; and O may read lenta sed by a happy accident. A passage that offers a shibboleth more characteristic of the way in which the MSS tend to divide is to be found at 64.139–40, where editors rightly print at non haec quondam blanda promissa dedisti | uoce mihi ‘but once upon a time you did not give such promises to me in your coaxing voice’. O reads blanda, for which GR have nobis. That Catullus could have written nobis, which would be redundant alongside mihi and leave uoce suspended without an epithet, passes belief: either the scribe of X (or an ancestor of X) omitted blanda and nobis was a later stop-gap, or he lost concentration and paraphrased. The MSS divide as follows:60 64.139 blanda O, 3c, 4c, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 24, 29, 37, 42, 44c, 49, 54, 57, 59, 75, 85c, 88, 94, 96, 98c, 106, 107, 108, 116, 118ac, 118c2, 122, 128: nobis G, R, M, 2, 3ac, 4ac, 5, 7c, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 16a, 18, 19, 19a, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44ac, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85ac, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98ac, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118c1, 121, 123, 124, 127ac: me 127c.61

Every witness that has nobis must at this point derive, directly or indirectly, from either X or a putative lost brother of X; for most this derivation is easily confirmed by their elsewhere sharing other errors of X. The next question that should be asked is how many of these MSS share the individual errors of G and R (which would rule out descent from a putative brother of X) or can be derived from G and R. The doctrine that a manuscript will derive from another MS if it shares all its uncorrected errors and adds more of its own is not easily applied to G: at the beginning of the text heavy correction from M has removed all its individual errors. Nevertheless, repetition of errors at the end of the text shows that 93, 18, and 65 derive from a lost copy of G after it had been corrected from M, with 65 in turn deriving from 18. These MSS are north Italian: presumably this lost copy was made while G was still in Verona or thereabouts. 31 (of which 4 and 68 are independent descendants) derives from another copy of 59 60 61

See Kiss (2015c) 11. In this and the following lists, a superscript c indicates a correction, c1 the first correction, c2 the second correction, ac (= ante correctionem) a reading before correction. 1, 51, 67, 102, and 125 are not extant for this passage.

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G after correction.62 On its first page 68 offers a classic proof of derivation: for verse 8 the false variant ał mei, which is cued to libelli but placed opposite laboriosis at the end of verse 7, was inherited by 31 from X via G + G1; 68 reads laboriosis mei. But for the second earliest complete MS of Catullus, a family of six MSS is a small haul. R, by contrast, was in the right place for bearing progeny, and at the right time. In Florence c. 1400 the great movement of humanism, for which Salutati acted like an honorary godfather, was just beginning to gather pace, and in the fifteenth century more MSS of classical texts were produced there than in any other city in Europe. R’s production provides a splendid illustration of an important phenomenon in the transmission of texts in the Renaissance: the arrival in Florence of a new text (often at Salutati’s behest, and often from northern Italy), and its subsequent circulation in Florence and further abroad.63 I have subjected all the MSS to two tests of derivation from R, using the passages cited above (p. 269) where R has unmetrical transpositions found in neither O nor G. This is how they divide:64 35.11 nunc si mihi uera O, G, 4, 5, 7, 8c, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19a, 20, 24, 28, 31, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 79, 82, 85, 86, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 121, 122, 128: nunc (tunc 1, 38) mihi si (sui or su 102ac) uera R, M, 1, 2, 3, 8ac, 9, 11, 12, 16a, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84c (mihi nunc si uera 84ac), 88, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 117, 123, 124, 132: nunc mihi si nunc 100, 127: nunc si uera mihi 68, 125. 42.15 est tamen (tam 49: iam 112) hoc satis O, G, 4, 5, 7, 10c, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19a, 20, 24, 26, 31, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 57, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78c, 79, 82, 85, 86, 90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 118, 121, 122, 125, 128: est tamen satis hoc R, M, 1, 2, 8ac, 9, 11, 12, 16a, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 54, 56, 61, 64, 71, 73, 76, 78ac, 77, 83, 84, 92, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 109, 114, 117, 123, 124, 127, 132: est tamen satis hec 46: est satis tamen hoc 3, 58, 88, 94: est hoc tamen satis 10ac: hoc satis est tamen 19: est satis hoc tamen 8c2, 60.

Both tests are passed by M, 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16a, 19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 29, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78ac, 83, 84, 88, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 109, 114, 117, 123, 124, 127, 132. That is, 47 out of the 108 MSS. 62 63 64

That is, before 64.278; thereafter they probably derive from R. On 4 and 31 see Ullman (1960a) 1048–9. Two north Italian MSS of Cicero, Laur. 49.9 (Ad familiares) and Laur. 49.18 (Ad Atticum and other letters), which were brought to Florence by Salutati, are prime illustrations of the phenomenon. 51, 67, and 91 are defective for both passages.

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Unsurprisingly, almost all also read nobis at 64.139.65 If, as has become the standard view, R was a direct copy of X, one need look no further for proof of derivation from R. If R was not a direct copy, then in theory these MSS could derive from a lost MS intermediate between R and X. In practice this seems extremely unlikely, and any scholar who felt the labour of collation worth while would almost certainly find that many of these MSS would pass the ultimate test of sharing all R’s significant uncorrected errors and adding more of their own. 26, 28, 46, 47, 104, and 114 each have just one of these errors; the explanation for this is almost certainly that they derive from R but have contamination from outside the tradition of R in their ancestry. R emerges as an extremely productive MS. In addition to O, G, and its descendants both tests are failed by 5, 7, 10, 10a, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19a, 20, 24, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 57, 59, 66, 69, 70, 74, 75, 79, 82, 85, 86, 96, 98, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116, 118, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129a – that is, 49 MSS. Their evidence is perhaps not fatal for Hale’s theory that most MSS derive ultimately from R: we shall see that many of these MSS could so derive, but with these two transpositions corrected by either contamination from a MS independent of R or conjecture. Many MSS (2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 16a, 22, 27, 35, 39, 41, 43, 47, 50, 52, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 77, 82, 83, 90, 92, 95, 100, 102, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 117, 121, 127) are marked out from others by having a portion of text transposed. None of these MSS can be the parent of the family, here called α, since each has uncorrected errors avoided by some or all the others. Although there are some variations at the edges of the transposition, the original order of α itself, or at least its order when copied, seems to have been Poems 1–23, 24.1–2, 44.21–62, 25–44.20, 63–116.66 The more primitive members of the family, of which 8, written by Girolamo Donato in Venice in 1412, is perhaps the oldest and 22, 95, and 109 the next oldest, are also marked out by sharing a large number of errors. Since 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16a, 22, 27, 35, 39, 41, 47, 64, 71, 76, 77, 83, 95, 100, 102, 105, 109, 117 have all passed the test of derivation from R, it follows that α itself must derive from R. The transposition was almost certainly caused by the misplacing of a quire of text, but, since the transposed passages do not correspond to quires in R itself, the oldest members of the family must have at least the lost α and perhaps (a) further lost MS(S) intermediate between themselves and R. 65 66

88 does not because especially in Poems 63–5 it has been contaminated heavily from outside the family of X. For these transpositions see e.g. Pighi (1950) 15.

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α’s vast size, with members written all over central and north-eastern Italy, makes it dominant in the fifteenth-century tradition. If α itself was not a direct copy of R, it need not have been written in Tuscany, although 95, one of its earliest descendants (from one copy of which derives 117, from another 11, 83, and 105),67 is perhaps of Tuscan origin (it is now in Siena, and 83, 105, and 117 are Florentine). 22 (which has no descendants) and 109 (from a copy of which or from a very similar lost MS derive 27 and 92) have not been localised. More interestingly, 8 shows the text of R and α in the Veneto very early in the fifteenth century. It produced its own family. 2 and 77 (siblings); 9, 12 and 39 (among which 9 is cousin to the siblings 12 and 39); 41 and its descendant 71; 35 and 76 were all probably produced in the Veneto or thereabouts, and all derive fundamentally from 8 via a lost copy (with some contamination from other sources, especially in 9, 12, and 39). This strain of text spread outside the Veneto: 48, 52, 66, and 90 (Mynors’s θ group) have much contamination in their ancestry but appear to have a common descent; they share some of 8’s errors and may also derive from it by a complicated route that now defies precise reconstruction. 129a has lost the transposition but shares several errors with these four MSS and probably derives from their source. 10, 49, and 59 (Mynors’s ε group, discussed again below) do not have the transposition but share so many errors of α and 8 that they are almost certainly contaminated descendants of 8. And the errors of 8’s family are found also in other manuscripts which do not have the α-transposition: 19a, 54 (which has the fewest of these errors), and the latter half of 97; in the case of 19a it seems likely that the transposition was removed in an ancestor by contamination. 46, which has one of the errors of R noted above, has rather fewer errors of α. Other members of α less easily connected with 8 are 46, 64 and 102 (the latter probably deriving from the former), 16a, 100, and the latter portion of 127 (the third deriving from the second). 78, the famous Codex Traguriensis which in another part contains the Cena Trimalchionis, likewise does not have the transposition but shares errors with R and α, especially at the beginning of the text. Among MSS with α’s transposition, 16, 43, 50, 67, 69, 70, 74, 82, 91, 92, 104, 111, 112, 121, and 127 (first portion), fifteen of the forty-seven MSS that have not been shown to derive from R, remain to be discussed. They are not entirely easy to classify: not only do they not share the errors of R for which I have tested but they also avoid many errors found in the older α-MSS. That scribes or scholars were so taken with the transpositions that they had found in α that they decided to reorder the poems is just conceivable, but it is much more likely that the transpositions (which in most of these MSS take the form 67

On the genealogy of these MSS see Kiss (2012b) 261–9.

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Poems 1–23, 24, 44.21, 45–62, 25–44.20, 63–116) are a relic of descent from α (and hence from R) and that more minor errors have been eliminated by contamination. Among these fourteen MSS, 16, 50, 69, 70, 82, 91 (at the beginning of the text), 111, 121 share errors with each other (70 and the first part of 69 deriving from 121) that prove that they descend from a common lost ancestor. A clue that the broad argument about derivation from R is right is perhaps offered by 47: it has R’s error at 35.11 but otherwise is closely related to this group, and especially to 50. Another fact now becomes relevant: the editio princeps (Venice 1472) does not have α’s transpositions, but it does share many errors with 16, 47, 50, 69, 70, 82, 111, and 121.68 It is much more likely that it derives from a lost member of α than that these MSS derive from a lost ancestor of the editio princeps on which the transpositions were bizarrely imposed. In addition to the shared errors, this probability is supported by the editio princeps’s starting Poem 45 not with its first verse (Acmen Septimius . . .) but with the last verse of the preceding poem (44.21): when the α-transposition occurred, 44.21 was left marooned between Poems 24 and 45. Not only can all subsequent editions before at least 1503 be shown to derive immediately or ultimately from the editio princeps but many MSS derive from one of these editions and therefore immediately or ultimately from the editio princeps:69 20, 24 (a copy of 44), 44, 63, 98 (from the editio princeps itself); 13 (from the Parma edn. of 1473); 53 and 79 (from the Milan edn. of 1475);70 7 and 96 (from the Reggio edn. of 1481); 126 (from the Brescia edn. of 1485–6); 14 and 17 (from the Venice edn. of 1487); 125 (from the Venice edn. of 1493); and 106 (from the Florence edn. of 1503);71 and 26 has so many of the errors of the editio princeps (including the early start to Poem 45) that it must derive from it or an ancestor of it. A further twenty-nine MSS, therefore, are likely to derive ultimately from R. That MSS should derive from printed editions sometimes surprises, but the wide circulation achieved by many printed editions greatly increased the probability of their being copied. Some of these MSS were commissioned by snobbish patrons who disliked the new technology and wanted their books to be grand examples of calligraphy (e.g. 20, 63, 79);72 others were copied by scholars too impecunious to afford a printed book (98 may be an example).73 68 69 71 72 73

On the editio princeps and its successors see Kiss in this volume (pp. 291–317). On this subject see Kiss (2018). 70 On 53 see Kiss (2012c) 616. But perhaps this last merely shares several readings found first in the 1503 edn. On Federico da Montefeltro’s disdain for printed books see e.g. de la Mare (1985) 413. Studies of most manuscript traditions reveal MSS copied from printed books. On the phenomenon see Reeve (2011) 175–83.

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The genealogical method of investigation cannot win every battle against contamination, the main impediment to its successful deployment: 74 and 85 share some errors but are so heavily contaminated that classification should be tentative; since 74 has transpositions akin to those in α, both perhaps derive from α. Besides M and α, other lines of descent may be traced from R, most (unsurprisingly, given R’s home in Florence) Tuscan. A third line leads just to 21, already mentioned as exhibiting grand Florentine calligraphy. A fourth leads to 23, owned by Mattia Lupi at nearby San Gimignano, and its descendant 99. A fifth leads to another nearby Tuscan town, Pistoia, where 29 was written. A sixth, which produced more MSS, leads to 124, written by the Florentine humanist, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci: 123 and 61 are descendants of it, both Florentine. In the investigation of MSS, it is always gratifying when textual evidence can be confirmed by geographical proximity; but, if MSS had not been transported over longer distances, there would have been no transmission of Latin texts, and, as we have seen already with the progeny of R’s descendant α, R’s reach was not bounded by the borders of Tuscany. Another branch of this sixth line reached Lombardy, where a lost descendant of R spawned Mynors’s δ-family: 34 (just conceivably the parent of the extant members), 84, and the closely related 3, 58, and (for much of its text) 88. A seventh line leads to 1, 38, 40, 56,74 73, and 103, Mynors’s γ family, all independent of each other, and all or most written in Ferrara. 5, 19, 28, 45, 67, and 114 show little or no sign of having taken readings from outside X, but only 19 and 114 have one of the errors of R cited above. They share some errors with each other. If they all have a shared descent (which is far from certain), the parent of the family was probably a descendant of R, but there must have been contamination in lost MSS between this parent and most of those now extant. 19 is the most primitive member of the family, and 5, perhaps written by the same scribe, derives from it, via a corrected intermediary. We have seen that at 61.102 every MS except 86 may derive from X. 86 is another sophisticated MS that is difficult to classify; elsewhere it reveals signs of descent from X. 110 is equally sophisticated and difficult; it too shows some signs of descent from X. No MS shares all O’s significant errors and therefore no MS can derive entirely from O; for example, I have not met the five errors of O, cited above (pp. 268–9), in any other MS. Nevertheless, a substantial number of the MSS that avoid errors of X either themselves share errors with O or are 74

This MS is contaminated at the beginning of its text and there less obviously belongs to this family.

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closely related to MSS that share errors with O. This makes it very likely that most of their non-X readings derive ultimately from the same copying of V/A as does O; and that the errors in question came from O itself is a more economical hypothesis than postulating an otherwise unknown brother of O. A nice illustration is provided by 51 and 97: at 10.7, where O has Iarbithinia for iam Bithynia, 51, which contains only Poems 2–17.14 and 61–2, has Iam ał ar bithyna (-nia 51c). 97 does not have this error but shares so many errors with 51 at the beginning of its text that there at least it must derive fundamentally from the same source, which fused readings of X and non-X. The group comprising 10a, 15, 37, and 57, to which 88 belongs in some of the later reaches of its text, shares most errors with O and has a geographical connection with it: its members all derive from a lost MS that was in Pavia in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and we have seen that O had Lombard decoration added to it c. 1425–50. Both the group 10, 49, 59 and 78 (from which last 60 probably derives after even more contamination)75 exhibit texts in which readings of R and α readings are fused with non-X readings: Kiss has pointed out that 10, 49, and 78 share O’s striking uel neque nec for neque at 22.15.76 Another family (Mynors’s η) that avoids readings of X is formed by 42, 75, 107, 108, 116, 118, and 128; from a member of it, Puteolanus corrected the editio princeps in order to produce the 1473 Parma edition, from which most of 13 derives. Most of these MSS are very handsome; several were written in Padua. The analogy of the MSS discussed in the preceding paragraph makes it likely that they take their non-X readings from O or a MS very like O, but I have not yet found a significant error shared with O which would prove this point. As observed above, corrections to a MS can help in proving descent from it, and the case for the derivation of many MSS from R is strengthened by the reappearance in them of faulty conjectures imposed on R by Salutati (R2) which have a certain plausibility because they remove an error (usually found also in O and G). Because they generally made sense, such conjectures were less prone to being removed in later attempts at correction. A good example is to be found at 5.8, where for OGR’s unmetrical deinde mille altera, deinde secunda centum, most editors have followed the Aldine edn. of 1502 in reading dein mille altera, dein secunda centum. However, Salutati entirely obliterated R’s original reading, so that it now reads deinde 75 76

Such is the conventional story (see e.g. Zicàri (1978) 93–4, Thomson (1997) 79), but 60 avoids very many of 78’s distinctive errors. Kiss (2015c) 13.

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mi altera, da secunda centum, and he had done so by 1394, since he quotes the line as it stands in R after correction in a letter dated to 1392–4.77 Here is how the second part of the verse is found in the MSS: 5.8 2dein secunda centum (106)] deinde secunda centum O, Gac, Rac?, 3c, 19a, 51, 97, 103: da secunda centum R2 in ras., G2, M, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 16a, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 34, 37c, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48ac, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61 (in ras.?), 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76c, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112c, 116, 117, 118, 121c, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127ac, 128, 129 (also the editio princeps): da s(a)ecundo 18, 65, 93: dain (?) secuda centum 48c: mille deinde centum 56: de secunda centum 76ac: da secula centum 35: milli dein centum 121ac: deinde centum 5, 94, 103: secunda deinde centum 15, 37ac, 57. Line omitted in 3ac, 29, 40, 44, 58, 88, 111, 112ac, 114.

These readings confirm much of what has been said above: of the MSS that have passed the test of derivation from R, most (M, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16a, 19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 29, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 54, 58, 60?, 61, 64, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78ac, 83, 84, 95, 99, 100, 102, 105, 109, 114, 117, 123, 124, 127) pass once again. The failure of the others is easily explained by either their (or an ancestor’s) having omitted the verse through homoeoteleuton (3, 29, 40, 58, 88) or progressive corruption (56, 103). But MSS that failed to share the uncorrected errors of R at 35.11 and 42.15 share this error: 7, 10, 10a, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 24, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 59, 66, 69, 70, 74, 75, 82, 85, 86, 96, 98, 104, 107, 108, 110, 116, 118, 121, 122, 125, 128. For many of these, evidence of this kind reinforces the case made above for fundamental derivation from R. We may see also how the reading of R2 was transmitted to G2 via M and then into 4, 31, 19, 65, 68, 93, all descendants of G. Among those that avoid Salutati’s conjecture are two groups that share errors with O (51, 97; 10a, 15, 37, and 57), and 106 has the reading of the 1502 edition. The manuscript tradition of Catullus provides evidence for several phenomena that should feature in any general history of the transmission of the Latin Classics: the slender thread by which many texts survived; the rediscovery of texts by the so-called pre-humanists; the dismal quality of some late gothic script and the creation of the new humanistic script; the importance of Salutati and Florence in the dissemination of texts all over Italy in the fifteenth century; the appearance of differing strains of text in different centres of production; the commissioning of new copies for the libraries of the rich and famous; the ability of many humanists in conjectural emendation; and the copying of MSS from printed editions. As for methods of investigation, it is universally admitted that the genealogical 77

See Novati (1891–1911) 3.36.

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method works extremely well for assessment of the five oldest MSS of Catullus (TOGRM) and their readings, but we have seen that it can be used to reveal the ancestry of many of the younger MSS, for the derivation of some of which the evidence is very clear, for others weaker but probably satisfactory. There remain, as in most traditions, some MSS that do not readily betray their ancestry, but they are a minority. Conclusive proof may never be found that Hale was right to hold that all MSS apart from T derive from OGR, but no one has yet adduced a compelling reason to think that he was wrong. For future editors, therefore, T, O, O1, G, G1, R, R1, and R2 remain the only witnesses that derive independently from the archetype and deserve full and regular citation in a critical apparatus.

Further Reading The subject of this chapter is covered by e.g. Mynors (1958) v–xiii, Ullman (1960a) (both now rather dated), R. J. Tarrant, in Reynolds (1983) 43–5, Billanovich (1988) (controversial), Gaisser (1992) 198–211, Thomson (1997) 22–43 and 72–93, Butrica (2007), and Kiss (2015b). McKie (1977), regrettably unpublished, is by far the most profound study of the interrelationships of the MSS that matter for editors. The best introductions to the transmission of Latin texts are Reynolds (1983: xiii–xliii) and Reynolds and Wilson (2013). For the theory of stemmatics, used in the classification of MSS, see further e.g. Maas (1958), Timpanaro (2005), many of the essays in Reeve (2011), and Reynolds and Wilson (2013) 212–17.

Appendix Listed here are MSS of Catullus written before c. 1510, with enumeration after Thomson 1997: 72–89 and Kiss 2015a: 173–7. The removal of later MSS and excerpts accounts for the gaps in the enumeration. An asterisk (*) denotes that a digital reproduction of a MS has been made available online by the library that houses it. BAV = BL = BML = BN = BNF = BNM = HAB =

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana British Library (for London) or Bodleian Library (for Oxford) Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Biblioteca Nazionale Bibliothèque Nationale de France Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Herzog August Bibliothek

288 *1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9. 10. 10a. 11. 12. *13. *14. *15. 16. 16a. 17. 18. 19. 19a. *20. *21. *22. *23. 24. 26. 27. 28. 29. 31. 34. 35. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

s. p. oakley Austin (Tx.), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center 32 Bergamo, Biblioteca Civica MA 408 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Diez. B Sant. 36 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Diez. B Sant. 37 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Diez. B Sant. 40 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Diez. B Sant. 56 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 2621 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 2744 Brescia, Biblioteca Queriniana A VII 7 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale IV.711 Budapest, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Cod. lat. medii aevi 137 Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine 361 Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana 29 sin. 19 Cologny-Geneva, Biblioteca Bodmeriana, MS Bodmer 47 Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dc 133 Dublin, Trinity College Library 929 Dublin, Trinity College Library 1759 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv. 18.5.2 El Escorial, MS Ç. IV. 22 (part a) El Escorial, MS Ç. IV. 22 (part b) Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea Cl. II. 156 Florence, BML Plut. 33.11 Florence, BML Plut. 33.12 Florence, BML Plut. 33.13 Florence, BML Plut. 36.23 Florence, BML Ashburnham 260 Florence, BN Magl. VII 948 Florence, BN Magl. VII 1054 Florence, BN Magl. VII 1158 Florence, BN Panciatichi 146 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 606 Genoa, Biblioteca Civica Berio Cf. arm. 6 Göttingen, Universitätsbibliothek Philol. 111b Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale 549 Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek scrin. 139.4 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Voss. lat. O 13 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Voss. lat. O 59 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Voss. lat. O 76 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Voss. lat. O 81 St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia cl. lat. Q 6

The Manuscripts and Transmission of the Text 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. *68. 69. 70. 71. *72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. *78. *79. *80. *82. *83. *84. *85. *86.

London, BL Add. 10386 London, BL Add. 11674 London, BL Add. 11915 London, BL Add. 12005 London, BL Burney 133 London, BL Harley 2574 London, BL Harley 2778 London, BL Harley 4094 London, BL Egerton 3027 Oslo area, Schøyen Collection 586 Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana D 24 sup. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana H 34 sup. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana I 67 sup. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana M 38 sup. Milan, BN di Brera AD xii 37. 1 Mons, Bibliothèque locale Ville de Mons; C.C.J. 218.109 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 473 Naples, Biblioteca Oratoriana dei Girolamini M. C. F. 3–15 Naples, BN IV. F. 19 Naples, BN IV. F. 21 Naples, BN IV. F. 61 Naples, BN IV. F. 63 New Haven (Ct.), Beinecke Library 186 Oxford, BL Lat. class. e. 3 Oxford, BL Lat. class. e. 15 Oxford, BL Lat. class. e. 17 Oxford, BL Canon. class. lat. 30 = O Oxford, BL Canon. class. lat. 33 Oxford, BL Canon. class. lat. 34 Oxford, BL Laud. lat. 78 Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare C 77 Palermo, Biblioteca Comunale 2. Q. q. E. 10 Paris, BNF lat. 7989 Paris, BNF lat. 7990 Paris, BNF lat. 8071 = T Paris, BNF lat. 8232 Paris, BNF lat. 8233 Paris, BNF lat. 8234 Paris, BNF lat. 8236 Paris, BNF lat. 8458

289

290 *87. 88. 90. 91. 92. 93. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. *101 *102. *103. *104. *105. *106. *107. *108. *109. *110. *111. *112. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 121. 122. *123. 124. 125. 126. *127. 128. 129a.

s. p. oakley Paris, BNF lat. 14137 = G Parma, Biblioteca Palatina HH 5.47 (716) Pesaro, Biblioteca Oliveriana 1167 Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 15 Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana 43. D. 20 San Daniele del Friuli, Biblioteca Guarneriana 56 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati H. V. 41 Tübingen, Universitätsbibliothek Mc 104 Turin, Biblioteca Reale, varia 54 Vatican City, BAV Barb. lat. 34 Vatican City, BAV Ottob. lat. 1550 Vatican City, BAV Ottob. lat. 1799 Vatican City, BAV Ottob. lat. 1829 = R Vatican City, BAV Ottob. lat. 1982 Vatican City, BAV Pal. lat. 910 Vatican City, BAV Pal. lat. 1652 Vatican City, BAV Urb. lat. 641 Vatican City, BAV Urb. lat. 812 Vatican City, BAV Chigi H. IV. 121 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 1608 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 1630 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 3269 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 3272 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 3291 Vatican City, BAV Vat. lat. 11425 Venice, BNM lat. XII.80 (4167) = M Venice, BNM lat. XII.81 (4649) Venice, BNM lat. XII.86 (4170) Venice, BNM lat. XII.153 (4453) Venice, Museo Correr, MS Cicogna 549 Vicenza, Biblioteca Civica Bertoliana G 2.8.12 (216) Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 224 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 3198 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 3243 Wolfenbüttel, HAB 65.2 Aug. 8° Wolfenbüttel, HAB 283 Gud. lat. 8° Wolfenbüttel, HAB 332 Gud. lat. 8° The ‘Codex Tomacellianus’, privately owned

chapter 12

Editions and Commentaries Dániel Kiss

For Julia Haig Gaisser, distinguished pioneer of this field

Introduction Quot editores, tot Propertii, ‘as many Propertiuses as editors’: Phillimore’s quip aptly describes the current situation in the textual criticism of Propertius, where a conservative editor such as Fedeli and a radical one such as Heyworth present strongly different texts, and arguably different authors with distinct styles.1 The principal manuscripts of Catullus are far more corrupt, and yet his modern editors have not produced a similar variety of reconstructions. Apart from a few outliers, editions of Catullus from the same period tend to differ only in the treatment of individual textual problems, but the style of the text they present tends to be the same.2 The editorial vulgate of his poems has evolved markedly during the five centuries since they were first printed, but its development has been linear, although it can be broken down into several fairly distinct phases. Why should we care about how the text was printed centuries ago, given that the best editions available today are far superior to anything that was published before 1950? Reconstructing an ancient text is not a one-off task but a process, and looking back on the progress we have made so far may well help us to see how we can advance yet further. Nor has the This chapter has been written with the help of a Beatriu de Pinós Fellowship (reference: 2014 BP-B 00071) held within the research group LITTERA (2014SGR63, 2017SGR241) at the Universitat de Barcelona, and an OTKA Postdoctoral Fellowship (NKFIH no. 116524) held at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. I would like to thank Alejandra Guzmán Almagro and Víctor Sabaté Vidal for enabling me to consult several pieces of recondite bibliography. 1 Phillimore (1901), cf. Tarrant (2006) 45–8. 2 The outliers include heavily bowdlerised editions such as that of Ramler (1793) and Herrmann’s Les deux livres de Catulle (1957), in which he rearranged the poems into two original books, without adducing substantial evidence.

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methodology of textual criticism changed so radically since the Renaissance as to render the work of past scholars useless: conjectures are made in much the same way as before, and the fertility of a Scaliger or a Baehrens in this regard can still teach us a thing or two. Broader lessons can be drawn from the history of editing: the shift from print to digital media that is taking place in front of our eyes is reminiscent of the change from manuscripts to printed books half a millennium ago. One can only hope that digital editions will soon escape some of the errors that plagued the earliest printed books, such as a messy and uncoordinated production process and a focus on quantity rather than quality. The following pages offer a brief historical account of editing and commenting on Catullus from the editio princeps to the present. They will concentrate on major milestones; it is not possible to mention every scholarly edition or commentary, let alone the hundreds of derivative publications such as reprints, school commentaries and bilingual editions.

Breaking Ground: the Fifteenth Century The poems of Catullus first appeared in print in 1472 in a volume that also contained the poems of Tibullus (together with the rest of the Corpus Tibullianum), the elegies of Propertius and Statius’ Siluae.3 It was printed in Venice by an immigrant from Germany, Wendelin of Speyer (Vindelinus de Spira), whose brother Johannes had been the first person to print books in the city in 1469 and had passed away soon afterwards. He had left the printing house to Wendelin, who tried to profit from the enthusiasm for humanistic learning in Renaissance Italy. His editions of authors such as Cicero, Pliny and Terence contributed to the ‘the overproduction of Latin classics’ that led to the collapse of the Venetian book trade in 1473, as a result of which Wendelin lost hold of his business.4 Like other contemporary editions of Latin authors, the editio princeps (the first printed edition) of Catullus is a large folio volume suited to a scholar, who could study it on his lectern and add notes in its broad margins. The printer used an attractive Roman type in a layout that still resembles that of a manuscript, most conspicuously through the spaces left empty for illuminated initials. Wealthy buyers could hire a craftsman to decorate their copy, but most readers faced a text full of gaping holes. 3 4

BMC vol. 5.161–2, GW M47056, ISTC it00366400. Scholderer (1924) 133 = (1966) 78; on the brothers see also V. Scholderer in BMC vol. 5. ix–x, Franck (1881) and Geldner (1974).

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The poems of Catullus are introduced by a brief biography of the poet ‘culled . . . from two authors whose works must have served as general references in many printing shops, Jerome and the fifteenth-century biographer Sicco Polenton’.5 The volume does not indicate who wrote this biography, but there is reason to believe that it was written, and the poems of Catullus were prepared for the press, by Girolamo Squarzafico (Hieronymus Squarzaficus) from Alessandria in the Piedmont, a minor humanist with a drinking habit and an unsettled lifestyle who collaborated with Wendelin several times during the years 1471–72.6 This edition has received a considerable amount of criticism. Its text is ‘riddled with corrupt readings and impossible scansions, with historical anachronisms and unknown names and allusions, and . . . with incomprehensible or even unidentifiable poems’.7 But all manuscripts of Catullus from the fifteenth century display similar errors, and the editio princeps clearly inherited most of its shortcomings from whatever highly corrupt manuscript Squarzafico had been using.8 We might imagine that he was pressed for time, though perhaps less so than in the case of Cicero’s De oratore: he later claimed that he had been asked to edit that text in a day.9 And he may not have done such a bad job, as is shown by the number of conjectures that are first attested in his edition. Whatever the merits of the editio princeps, its defects were pointed out very soon. One year later a new edition of Catullus and of Statius’ Siluae was published in Parma by Francesco Dal Pozzo, known as Puteolano (Puteolanus, d. 1490), a lecturer at the university of Bologna.10 The colophon to the Siluae proudly states that he has corrected over three thousand passages in the two texts that had not made sense in the previous edition.11 Puteolano emended the text both ope ingenii, by using his wits (i.e. making conjectures), and ope codicis, by consulting a manuscript. He used a codex 5 6

7 8

9 10 11

Gaisser (1993) 26, cf. 290 for the text of the biography. On Squarzafico see Allenspach and Frasso (1980), esp. 236–7. He claims authorship of the biography of Catullus at the end of the life of Propertius in the Milan 1475 reprint of the editio princeps (BMC vol. 6.702–3, GW 6387, ISTC ic00322000), in which he also had a hand: ‘uale, gratissime lector, et memor Hieronymi Alexandrini mi [= mei] qui tibi tris uitas clarissimorum poetarum in lucem dedit, Catulli Tibulli et Properti’ (cf. Allenspach and Frasso (1980) 266–7). Gaisser (1993) 31. According to Zicàri (1957) 157 = (1978) 106, this manuscript was not too different from London, British Library, Additional MS 11915. However, the omission of certain passages (e.g. 8.4–8 and 42.21–4) in the London manuscript but not in the editio princeps shows that the manuscript cannot have served as the model for the edition (Kiss (2018) 2158–9). Allenspach and Frasso (1980) 286. BMC vol. 7.939, GW 6386, ISTC ic00321000. On Puteolano see Gaisser (1993) 31–4 and Contarino (1986). Fol. 96v; see BMC vol. 7.939 and Gaisser (1993) 291 n. 29.

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that happened to contain readings close to the Oxoniensis,12 which permitted him on occasion to improve significantly on the text. But where he lacked this external support, he was far less successful: out of those readings that are first attested in his edition and could thus be his conjectures, a handful are good, but many are misguided and several are unmetrical, which makes one wonder what he taught his students. A more satisfactory text was printed in Vicenza in 1481.13 Its editor was a respected scholar from Bergamo called Giovanni Planza de’ Ruffinoni and known as Calfurnio (Calphurnius, c. 1443–1503).14 In his preface he recounted how he ‘began to look over the work printed at Venice that contains . . . Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and [Statius’] Siluae, and discovered that it was so filled with mistakes that far more was faulty and corrupt than had been corrected’ and he went on to state that ‘I can thus boast that I have not emended, but have rewritten almost the entire’ text.15 He improved the text significantly, both by collating printed editions and possibly the odd manuscript, and by making conjectures of his own.16 One problem that he encountered is characteristic of this era. He wrote in his preface that ‘I have decided not to have any more dealings with printers because they habitually change and turn upside down the corrected works they have received.’17 He went on to note one passage where they had printed both the transmitted reading and his correction for it, and two others in which they had omitted a word from the text. Early printers worked in a constant hurry to turn a profit, and the time available for proofreading was limited by the fact that most of them will only have had enough type to set one gathering (one set of pages, typically sixteen for a folio volume) at a time. As a result, the incunable (fifteenth-century) editions of the classics tend to be full of mistakes not only by the standards of modern scholarship, but also compared to contemporary high-grade manuscripts. Where Calfurnio decided not to publish anything else in print, other scholars were all too happy to take their chance. Four or five years later, Antonio Partenio (1456–1506), a minor humanist from Lazise on Lake 12 13 14 15

16

Zicàri (1958) 95–6 = (1978) 99 and Gaisser (1993) 33–4, though her statement that ‘Puteolano used a descendant of . . . O’ is a slip. BMC vol. 7.1041, GW 6389, ISTC ic00323000. The volume also contained the poems of Tibullus and Propertius. On Calfurnio and his edition see Albertini (1953), Zicàri (1957) and Gaisser (1993) 35–42. Gaisser (1993) 37 (I have slightly modified her translation) with 294–5 n. 54. Calfurnio seems to have used not the editio princeps, but the 1475 edition (see n. 6 above), printed in Milan for a pair of Venetian booksellers. 17 Zicàri (1957) 158–9; Gaisser (1993) 42. Translation by Gaisser (1993) 37.

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Garda, published the first edition of Catullus with a commentary.18 Like all commentaries on Catullus until the nineteenth century, it is in Latin. As was usual at the time, it surrounds the printed text in three margins, a layout that is less convenient than one might expect, as the notes often do not refer to the section of text beside them, and the absence of line numbers makes it hard to navigate between the text and the commentary. Partenio’s commentary was a pioneer work of heroic proportions. He aimed ‘to give an intelligible account of every poem and to explain every separate point of difficulty in a corrupt and diverse corpus as long as three books of the Aeneid – all without the benefit of either a critical tradition or any of the lexica, concordances, encyclopaedias, or onomastica that later classicists would take for granted’.19 Painfully aware of his own limitations, Partenio produced a volume that can only be described as a mixed success. ‘Since the text and its meaning were so poorly understood, it is not surprising that Partenio generally attempts interpretation only of the most basic kind and that he makes only sporadic and limited forays into anything that might be styled literary criticism.’20 At times he hits the nail on its head: he may have been the first commentator to identify the addressee of Poem 1 with the historian Cornelius Nepos (an identification already made in Ausonius, Praef. 4.3), and he made several convincing corrections to the text.21 But many of his comments are mistaken, or downright erratic; he has a penchant for introducing irrelevant information and in ‘trying to explain whole poems he sometimes produces detailed scenarios, which are most elaborate when he is standing on the shakiest ground’.22 With admirable courage and diligence, Partenio tries to explain all of Catullus; but all too often he fails. Partenio wrote his commentary in a race with a more renowned scholar, Battista Guarini (1434?–1503), a lecturer in Ferrara and the son of the great Guarino.23 But Battista does not appear to have completed his commentary on Catullus. Instead, in 1496 there appeared a commentary by Palladio Fosco or Negri (Palladius Fuscus or Niger, c. 1450/60–1520), a scholar from Padua who was teaching in the Dalmatian city of Zara at the time.24 Julia Gaisser has shown that Palladio patched together his commentary from a range of published 18

19 22 24

BMC vol. 7.968–9, GW 6391, ISTC ic00324000. The volume was printed in Brescia; the colophons of the surviving copies give four different dates in 1485 and 1486. On Partenio and his commentary see Gaisser (1993) 78–96. 20 21 Gaisser (1993) 87. Gaisser (1993) 93. Gaisser (1993) 88; Goold (1958) 99. 23 Gaisser (1993) 90. Gaisser (1993) 78–85; Pistilli (2003). BMC vol. 5.530, GW 6390, ISTC ic00325000; on Palladio see Gaisser (1993) 97 and Cavazza (2013).

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and unpublished sources.25 While his original contributions to Catullan scholarship were limited, he seems to have had the knack of knowing which ideas were worth pinching.

The Aldine Revolution Despite the intense rivalry between Catullus’ first editors, the incunable editions of his poems resembled each other in several ways. Their text was not radically different: the editio princeps established a vulgate that was copied, corrected, altered or debased in the subsequent incunables, but it was not revised radically, let alone rejected in favour of a text based in its entirety on better sources than the manuscript that had been used by Squarzafico. All incunables were peppered with typographical errors, the result of the hasty production process of the first printing houses. And they even resembled each other physically as bulky folio volumes with broad margins, suited to the scholar rather than the casual reader. This came to an end thanks to a remarkable man. Aldo Manuzio (Aldus Manutius, c. 1450–1515) was a minor humanist from southern Lazio who spent his formative years in Rome and Ferrara.26 About his fortieth year he moved to Venice, where he set up a new kind of printing house. Its business model, indeed its mission, appears to have been to provide humanistic readers with quality editions of classical and modern texts. It made particular headway in publishing Greek texts, which had been largely neglected by previous printers, but in Latin too Aldo’s contribution was inestimable. He shook up printing practices, introducing a graceful italic (cursive) type and printing texts in the handy octavo format, pocket-sized and highly portable. He was equally careful about the contents of his books: he searched for manuscripts to publish, employed capable scholars to edit the texts, and oversaw the publishing process with a dogged determination and a perfectionism all his own. His printing-house produced a stream of Aldine editions that have been collectors’ items ever since. Aldo published Catullus in 1502 in a neat octavo volume that also included the poems of Tibullus and Propertius.27 It was printed in Aldo’s 25 26 27

Gaisser (1993) 97–9; see Kiss (2013b) 65–8 for further evidence. On Aldo see Lowry (1979), Davies (1995) and Infelise (2007). Avanzi and Manuzio (1502); on the volume see Fletcher (1988) 100–6 and now Bertone (2018), who also takes in the second edition of 1515. Most earlier scholars such as Gaisser (1993) 64, Thomson (1997) 48 and Biondi (2015) 34 have regarded Avanzi as the sole editor of this volume. In fact Aldo states explicitly in the preface that he was assisted in editing it by Avanzi (see below), we know from other sources that Aldo went to great lengths to correct the texts that he published, and the text of Catullus in this volume is far less conservative than what one would expect from Avanzi. Thus it

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elegant italic type, with a carefully designed layout, including clearly distinguished titles and only small spaces left for the initial letter of each poem. This is the first edition of Catullus that will look familiar to today’s reader. In the preface Aldo states that the volume had a print run of 3,000 copies, which may have been unprecedented.28 He was assisted in editing the text by Girolamo Avanzi, a scholar from Verona who became ‘a professor of moral philosophy at Padua, and a doctor of arts and medicine’.29 Avanzi was already an authority on Catullus thanks to his Emendationes in Catullum et Priapea, printed in 1495 and in a revised version in 1500 alongside the poems of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.30 The first work of secondary literature ever to be published on Catullus, the Emendationes had already established Avanzi’s position as ‘a more careful text critic’ than any of the previous editors of Catullus.31 For that work he had ‘consulted most, if not all, of the earlier editions’ as well as two manuscripts of Catullus.32 In his preface Aldo treats Catullus as the most important of the three authors in the volume and reflects on how his text has been edited, noting that the poet ‘will appear very different from what he has been so far because of the great number of emendations and the verses that have either been added or restored to their original position’.33 A closer look at the text shows how this programme of radical revision has been carried through. The misprints that were the plague of the incunable editions have been largely banished, as has an awkward error such as the inversion of lines 62.11–12. It is indicative of Avanzi’s astuteness that there have been adopted in the text not only many of the readings he had proposed in his Emendationes, but also a number of attractive conjectures that can be ascribed to other scholars, such as 10.27 minime (Gioviano Pontano) and 36.14 Golgos (Ermolao Barbaro). When it comes to the large pool of readings that first appear in this edition and may have been conjectured by Aldo or Avanzi, the picture becomes more mixed. A handful of them

28 29 30 31 32 33

seems best to regard Avanzi and Aldo as co-editors, as has been done recently by Grant at Manuzio (2017) 328 n. 43. Aldo Manuzio in Avanzi and Manuzio (1502) aIv, now reprinted with a translation in Manuzio (2017) 22–5, at 24–5; Lowry (1979) 174 n. 96; Fletcher (1988) 100–2; Gaisser (1992) 211. Gaisser (1993) 302 n. 104. 1495: BMC vol. 5.530, GW 3098, ISTC ia01407000. 1500: BMC vol. 5.535, GW M47037, ISTC it00374000. Gaisser (1993) 52, who rightly considers Politian (Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano, 1454–1494) a superior critic; but Politian did not edit Catullus. Gaisser (1993) 59–60 (quoted at 60) and 409. Aldo Manuzio in Avanzi and Manuzio (1502) aIv, cf. Manuzio (2017) 24–5.

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(including 5.8 dein for da, 64.13 incanuit for incanduit, and 69.3 non si illam rarae for nos illa mare following Calfurnio’s non illam rarae) are convincing, but most of them can hardly be called radical or brilliant; one possible exception is 114.1 Firmano saltu, where OGR read Firmanus saluis and earlier printed editions had salius. An eye for metre may have helped the two scholars to emend the refrain of the initial stanzas of Poem 61, where an innovative layout helps the reader to understand the strophic structure of the poem. However, most of the changes made to the text are unconvincing. Some are trivial, but many cause serious damage (thus 54.5 Tito for tibi and 61.129 sordebam for –bant). We know from his Emendationes that Avanzi was a fairly cautious critic, but the production process of this volume was evidently overseen by Aldo, who had a commercial interest in producing a readable volume and who may have believed that the text of Catullus was so corrupt that it had to be refashioned radically. Earlier editors of Catullus had often printed patently corrupt words and phrases, and their editions were pockmarked by typographical errors; Aldo and Avanzi produced an edition that is fairly smooth and readable, but owes a great deal to the untrammelled fantasy of its editors, and very likely to that of Aldo in particular. The first Aldine edition of 1502 must have sold out, or it would be hard to explain why Avanzi prepared a thoroughly revised second edition that appeared in 1515, the year of Aldo’s death. Due to the quality of their text as well as their attractive appearance, prestigious publisher and enormous print runs, the two Aldines laid the foundation of the text of Catullus for the following three centuries. Pirated editions that copied their form and contents were produced in Florence and Lyons, outside the reach of the rudimentary copyright laws of the Venetian Republic, from as early as 1502. Avanzi’s final thoughts on the text of Catullus do not appear in the second Aldine of 1515, but in a mysterious edition that was printed in 1535, not by the doctor and humanist Giovanni Francesco Trincavelli, to whom it was attributed until recently, but by Bartolomeo Zanetti of Casterzago, who had just entered business as a printer in Venice.34 The frontispiece of this edition promises the poems of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and ‘Gallus’ (i.e. Maximian, whose elegies were known under this name at the time), but the volume only contains Catullus and has no colophon; it must have been decided to omit the three other poets at some stage during the production process. This edition contains many fresh conjectures in Catullus, some of them of a very high quality. 34

On this edition see Kiss (2011) 269–71 and (2012a).

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The High Tide of Humanistic Scholarship The collaboration of Aldo and Avanzi inaugurated one of the most fruitful periods in the editorial history of Catullus. Its first milestone was an oddity. While Partenio’s rival Battista Guarini had never realised his intention of publishing a commentary on Catullus, his son Alessandro (1486–1556), a professor at the university of Ferrara, brought out in 1521 an edition with a commentary that drew heavily on the work of his father.35 It is introduced by a warm letter of support from no other than Pope Leo X, who issued a five-year ban on reprints; the papal missive is followed by a dedicatory epistle from Alessandro addressed to his patron Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. The commentary occupies most of 237 densely printed quarto pages, on which it surrounds the text on four sides or displaces it altogether. It offers erudite exegesis and has a strong textual focus. Alessandro’s pious objective was to publish the ideas of his father; when he offers a new conjecture, he often ascribes it explicitly to Battista, but on occasion he claims it as his own, and most frequently he does not comment on its source, leaving it unclear to whom these conjectures should be ascribed.36 In any case, Alessandro’s commentary is disappointing. While Gaisser may go a little too far in comparing him to Partenio, her characterisation of him as ‘diligent rather than gifted’ is certainly correct.37 This cannot be said of Catullus’ next commentator. Born in central France, Marc-Antoine Muret (1526–85) became a minor intellectual celebrity as a young man, lecturing in a number of French cities including Paris, where his public included the King and Queen.38 An accomplished NeoLatin poet, he was the literary theorist behind the circle of vernacular French poets known as the Brigade, including Joachim du Bellay and Pierre Ronsard, whose Amours appeared with a learned commentary by Muret. Yet the career of the young scholar nearly collapsed in 1553, when he had to leave Paris and then flee for his life from Toulouse due to accusations of atheism and sodomy. He went to Italy and reached Venice, where, ‘befriended by [Aldo’s son] Paolo Manuzio, he set to work on 35 36

37 38

Guarini (1521); on its editor see Cerroni (2003). A conjecture for which Alessandro humbly claims authorship is 55.4 tigillis. In Kiss (2013a) I also attributed to him all the conjectures that lack an explicit attribution. The conjectures that Alessandro ascribes to his father raise further questions; in particular, conjectures by others could have found their way into Battista’s notes and have been attributed to him by his son. It complicates matters further that some of these conjectures also appear in the first Aldine edition, perhaps thanks to Aldo’s strong contacts with Ferrara. Gaisser (1993) 97. On Muret see Gaisser (1993) 147–51, Leroux (2009) 13–24 and Girot (2012) 9–47.

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a commentary on Catullus, which was printed by the Aldine press in October of 1554’.39 Later he would pursue a distinguished academic career, lecturing and writing in Italy. He ended his days in Rome, after having taken up holy orders as a Catholic priest. Muret’s commentary on Catullus is a brilliant feat of scholarship.40 It draws heavily but judiciously on the work of his predecessors, including not only the earlier commentaries on Catullus, but also the work of more recent scholars such as Piero Vettori (1499–1585). Most of all, it reflects the erudition, originality and literary sensitivity of its author. Muret pays special attention to the style of the poet and (in the introductory epistle) to his place in literary history. His contribution to the interpretation of the poems includes identifying Poem 51 as a translation of a poem of Sappho’s and exploring the Alexandrian roots of Poems 64 and 66. While his main interest is not textual criticism, he makes major advances in reconstructing the text, especially by separating many poems that had been transmitted together. In contrast to Italian humanists such as Avanzi and the Guarinis, Muret is fairly conservative as an editor and abstains from wild conjecturing. Rather than printing Gioviano Pontano’s supplement at 1.9 and that of Partenio at 95.4, he prefers to leave empty spaces. His own conjectures tend to be fairly cautious, but often they are not far off the mark; his best one may be 116.4 tela infesta for telis infesta or –um.41 Muret was also the first editor to print line 62.14, which was absent from the principal manuscripts OGR and was solely transmitted by T, a descendant of which appears to have reached Italy in the early sixteenth century.42 Muret’s volume used a new layout, in which the text of each poem is followed by a lemmatised commentary. He was followed in this by Achilles Statius (Aquiles Estaço, 1524–1581), who published an edition of Catullus with a commentary in 1566. The son of a companion-in-arms of the explorer Vasco da Gama who took him to Brazil as a child, Statius was educated in his native Portugal, in Louvain and Paris, before finding a home in the humanistic circles of Rome.43 His edition of Catullus, 39 41

42 43

40 Gaisser (1993) 147. On the commentary see further Gaisser (1993) 155–68. Gaisser (1993) 158 writes that Muret (1554) 134v ‘claims to have read the verse in veteribus libris’. I believe that his somewhat opaque note on this line (‘Hunc autem [i.e. versum] quem nos reposuimus, in libris veteribus legi, ipsi quoque, qui eum reiecerunt, confitentur’, ‘Even those who have rejected the line that we have restored acknowledge that it is read in old manuscripts’) means something else: it seems to imply that some old manuscripts must contain this reading, even though Muret may not have found any that actually do. It is the mark of a conservative scholar to talk of evidence even where there is none. On this descendant of T see now Reeve (2016). On Statius see Fernandes Pereira (1991) 11–33.

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which is his main claim to fame, reflects this environment: he explains in the preface that he has been studying Catullus in preparation to translate the poetry of the Bible into Latin verse, and his commentary is full of references to other Roman humanists.44 He states that he has aimed ‘to improve at least a little, if I could not restore completely, a fine poet much corrupted by the neglect of the ages,’45 and indeed his commentary has a strongly textual focus. He puts forward a number of excellent conjectures, some of them his own, others the creations of his friend Gabriele Faerno (1510–1561) and other contemporaries. He also quotes readings from seven manuscripts, five of which have been identified by Berthold L. Ullman, who has pointed out that the ‘Maffei liber’ used by Statius must have been the important fourteenth-century manuscript we know as R.46 The humanist did not realise the value of what he saw, but his careful study of several different manuscripts was a valuable innovation in the study of Catullus. No less impressive is the thoughtfulness with which he considered the merits of alternative readings. At a time when scholars often replaced arguments with invective, Statius’ courteousness comes as a relief.47 Mildness was no virtue of the next important scholar to edit Catullus. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) received an excellent grounding in Latin from his father Julius Caesar Scaliger, an Italian scholar who had settled in southern France and claimed descent from the great Veronese family of the Scaligeri (della Scala). He honed his skills at the University of Paris and developed a mastery of Greek as well as a good command of Hebrew and Arabic. Having converted to Calvinism as a young man, after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 he fled France for Geneva. It was here that he tried to get the better of Muret, for a literary trick of whose he had fallen, by preparing an edition of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius and a textual-interpretative commentary bearing the proud title Castigationes. The pair of volumes appeared in Paris in 1577.48 Scaliger’s commentary offers a rich display of his exceptional skills at reconstructing and interpreting difficult passages. Another innovation lies in his use of the sources. From Benvenuto dei Campesani’s epigram on the ‘resurrection’ of Catullus, which had already appeared in the editio princeps and had been read by hundreds of humanists before him, Scaliger drew the brilliant inference that all the Italian manuscripts of Catullus had to 44 45 47 48

Statius (1566) [3–4]; Gaisser (1993) 170–2. 46 Statius (1566) [6], translated following Gaisser (1993) 172–3. Ullman (1908), esp. 10–17. On Statius’ commentary see also Grafton (1983) 95–6 and Gaisser (1993) 168–78. Scaliger (1577a–b), on which see Grafton (1983) 161–79 and Gaisser (1993) 178–91.

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descend from a lost copy that had been taken to Verona from France some time during the later Middle Ages.49 He argued that this ‘Gallicanum exemplar’, which we would now call the archetype of the surviving manuscripts of Catullus, must have been written ‘Langobardicis litteris’, ‘in Longobardic characters’, a difficult script that lay at the root of many of the corruptions in the text.50 He presumably had in mind something close to a script he had seen, that of ‘the ninth-century Visigothic manuscript V of Ausonius’.51 His palaeographical skills may have been limited, but his insight into the overall shape of the manuscript tradition of Catullus was not equalled until the early nineteenth century, and it is still regarded as fundamentally correct. Writing in Rome, Statius had been able to consult seven manuscripts for his edition; Scaliger made do with just one, a codex belonging to his friend Jacques Cujas that has been identified with London, British Library, MS Egerton 3027.52 Scaliger observed that ‘to me this one . . . seems to be far better than all other manuscripts of this poet’.53 In fact it was a late and innovative manuscript that contained many conjectures; it had been copied in 1467 by the minor humanist and erotic poet Pacifico Massimi (Pacificus Irenaeus Maximus). Even so, it enabled Scaliger to banish quite a few corruptions and unnecessary conjectures that had been printed by his predecessors. Somewhat less felicitously, a handful of Republican Latin forms in the manuscript, and what seemed to be traces of others, triggered Scaliger’s liking for archaic Latin and led him to argue that the lost ‘Gallicanum exemplar’ had contained forms such as quor (for cur), quom (for the conjunction cum) and ludei (for the genitive singular ludi), m’ Alius (for me Allius) and ili’ et (for ilia et). In fact Catullus certainly wrote quom and he may still have used the early forms quor and ludei; but neither contemporary usage nor the evidence of his manuscripts suggests that he could have omitted elided vowels in phrases such as ili’ et.54

49 50 52 53 54

The epigram is printed e.g. by Mynors (1958) 105, Thomson (1997) 194 and Kiss (2015b) 2. On its interpretation see Kiss (2015b) 2–9 and Oakley on pages 265–6 above. 51 Scaliger (1577b) 4. Grafton (1983) 173. Thus already Palmer and Ellis (1875), at a time when the manuscript was still owned by Samuel Allen. Scaliger (1577b) 3. At this time the Romans still wrote quom rather than the conjunction cum (Quint. Inst. 1.7.5, Marius Victorinus GL 6.13.3–4 Keil); they may have preferred quor to cur (TLL 4.1438.67–83); and the genitive singular of the second declension could be written both as –ei and as –i, so the genitive form underlying ludere in OGR at Catullus 61.203 might be ludei rather than ludi. On Catullus’ spelling see further Cremona (1958) and Bonvicini (2012) with Kiss (2014).

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Scaliger presented his proposals with an imperious self-confidence, treating rivals real and imaginary with what has been described as ‘egotistical and spiteful polemic’.55 But his pretensions to infallibility did not prevent him from publishing in 1600 a revised text of the three poets and an edition of the Castigationes with additions. Back in 1593 he had been made Professor of Latin in Leiden at the newly founded flagship university of the Republic of the Netherlands, which had already made several important contributions to the study of Catullus. It had been set up in 1575, the year after the city successfully withstood a siege by the forces of the Spanish King Philip II. One of the founding curators of the university was Janus Dousa (Jan van der Does) the Elder (1545–1604), a nobleman from Holland who had commanded the city’s forces during the siege. No mean Latinist himself, Dousa published in 1581 a textual commentary on select passages of Catullus entitled Praecidanea or ‘Preliminaries’. Eleven years later there followed a full-scale edition with a textual commentary by Dousa’s son Janus Dousa the Younger (1571–1596), who was only twentyone at the time. Dousa filius quoted unpublished conjectures of his father’s, and both of them quoted conjectures of and manuscript readings known to the great Netherlandish scholar Justus Lipsius (Joost Lips, 1547–1606), who taught in Leiden from 1579 until 1590. Lipsius and the Dousas lack the brilliance of Scaliger and most of their conjectures fail to convince, but they mark the establishment of a Dutch tradition of textual criticism.

Towards a Science of Editing During the seventeenth century the intense editorial activity of the humanists came to a halt. The only major contribution came from the eccentric Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689). The son of the celebrated humanist Gerardus Johannes Vossius, Isaac travelled across Europe searching for manuscripts, was appointed the official historian of Holland, acted as the librarian of Queen Christina of Sweden and later moved to England, where he became a canon at Windsor, despite a reputation for libertinism: King Charles II is said to have observed that ‘This man believes everything as long as it is not in the Bible.’56 His edition of Catullus with a commentary was published in 1684. Its strengths lie in erudite exegesis and in textual criticism. Parallels drawn from obscure authors flaunt the erudition of the 55 56

Gaisser (1993) 182. On Vossius see De Vries (1911) and Jorink and Van Miert (2012), quoted at 4.

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commentator, who also reports readings of manuscripts that he collated during his travels in the 1640s, including the venerable Codex Thuaneus (T, now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8071), a ninth-century anthology that contains Catullus’ Poem 62. Vossius also quotes part of Poem 11 as coming from the Thuaneus, as I discovered a couple of years ago; but I now believe that Vossius did not find this text in the manuscript, but merely confused his notes.57 Vossius’ commentary was soon surpassed in quantity, if not in quality, by Giovannantonio Volpi (Ioannes Antonius Vulpius, 1686–1766), who was from 1724 till 1736 Professor of Philosophy and then until 1760 of Greek and Latin humanities at the university of his native Padua, where he also owned a printing house.58 In 1710 he published Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius with fairly brief notes, which may be the first edition in which the lines of the poems are numbered, an innovation that has made it far easier to refer to individual passages.59 Twenty-seven years later he printed an edition of Catullus with a detailed commentary that filled a large quarto volume of over six hundred pages. Volpi repeated ‘conscientiously . . . the material of previous commentaries’; in Thomson’s apt description, ‘[s]ober, pedantic, and clerically decorous, [his commentary] relied on multiple quotations of parallel passages, rather than helping the reader who sought an understanding of Catullus’.60 The following year there appeared an edition with a very different kind of commentary by a young Venetian cleric, Giovanni Francesco Corradino dall’Aglio (Corradinus de Allio, 1708–1743).61 In the grandiose preface, dedicated to no less a person than Charles Albert, the Elector of Bavaria, he declared that ‘domi cuiusdam figuli’, ‘in the house of a certain potter’ in Rome, he had stumbled on a priceless manuscript of Catullus that had enabled him to purge the text not only of the corruptions that had deformed it, but also of the unnecessary alterations imposed by previous editors. Unsurprisingly, other scholars came to regard Corradino dall’Aglio 57

58 59 60 61

See Kiss (2015c). Since then, Michael Reeve has helped me to track down Vossius’ collation of the Thuaneus and some other manuscripts in a copy of the first Aldine of 1502 (now Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek 758 E 30). A number of readings in Catullus 62 that clearly stem from the Thuaneus are accompanied by the sigla Th or Thu; but the reading fractus at 11.24, of which he writes in his commentary that he found it in the Thuaneus, is accompanied by the siglum G, which he uses elsewhere for another manuscript. So he probably found fractus in another codex (perhaps Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8458: see Kiss (2015c) 349 n. 20) and attributed it by mistake to the Thuaneus. On Volpi see Fiesoli (2006), esp. 109–10. The poems had already been numbered in Passerat’s edition of 1608. Thomson (1997) 55. Fiesoli (2006) 118–26 takes a more positive view of the same features. On him see Harless (1764).

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as a troublemaker and later as a fraud who had invented a manuscript that did not exist. In his commentary, he advocated some readings of this manuscript and used others to offer conjectures of his own, many of them patently impossible, just a few plausible. In fact his ‘Codex Romanus’ is not a product of his fantasy: the readings he quotes from it are identical with or close to those of Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinas lat. 812.62 This manuscript had been on the shelves of the Vatican Library since the middle of the seventeenth century; Corradino dall’Aglio’s statement that he had found his manuscript in the squalid dwelling of a potter is almost certainly a theatrical fib. Far from being an unsullied source, the codex contained a text that was full of humanistic conjectures and corruptions, which explains in part why it has been seen as an invention. A more substantial edition was published in 1788–92 by Friedrich Wilhelm Doering (1756–1837), the director of the Gymnasium in Gotha.63 His pair of volumes contained a text of Catullus below which there stood a ‘Varietas Lectionis’ and a commentary proper. The former discussed variant readings and conjectures; the latter had a strong focus on interpretation, but it also took in literary criticism, stylistic analysis and occasionally textual conjectures that had not made it into the ‘Varietas’. Although very different in its focus, Doering’s commentary resembles that of Volpi in its massive accumulation of knowledge, which is bound to impress, but is not easy to digest (possibly not even for its author, whose erudition was not always matched by his judgements). Revised versions were published by the French scholar Joseph Naudet in 1826 and by Doering himself in 1834. A slender volume that appeared in the same year as the first volume of Doering’s commentary was arguably more innovative. This edition of Poem 68 was the work of Laurens or Louw van Santen (Laurentius Santenius, 1746–98), a Dutch scholar educated in his native Amsterdam and in Leiden, where he struggled to obtain a permanent academic position, until the French invasion of 1795 lifted him to the chairmanship of the municipal council.64 Well before that, he had enlisted scholars in other parts of Europe (and even the Dutch ambassador to Austria) to collate manuscripts of Catullus, as he recounts in the preface of his volume. His 62 63 64

Troublemaker: Harless (1764). Fraud: Ginguené (1813), Dibdin (1827) vol. 1. 380, Gaisser (1992) 217, Fiesoli (2006) 125–6, etc. On his manuscript see Kiss (forthcoming). On Doering see Eckstein (1877). On Van Santen see Anon. (1874); on his edition of Catullus 68 cf. Ellis (1889) xvi–xvii and Thomson (1997) 56.

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innovative text of Catullus 68 is accompanied by a commentary, almost entirely textual, in which he reports the readings he knows of. He is certainly guilty of counting manuscripts (of which he knows over thirty) rather than weighing them, a practice later deplored by Housman; but at the time even this constituted a major advancement, as his predecessors had used manuscript evidence only sparingly, if at all. Van Santen’s edition of Poem 68 was introduced as ‘futurae editionis specimen’, ‘a sample of a future edition’. The fact that no such edition appeared may have had to do not only with the turmoil after the French Revolution and with Van Santen’s illness and early death, but also with the inherent difficulty of preparing a variorum edition of a longer text that would quote the wildly divergent readings of several dozen manuscripts. A comparable but far less ambitious approach was applied by the Dresden Latinist Carl Julius Sillig (1801–55) in his edition of 1823, which reported the readings of several early printed editions as well as the manuscript that is still conserved in Dresden and whatever codices other scholars had already quoted. These preliminaries paved the way for a slender but revolutionary edition that was published in 1829 by a young German scholar. Born in Braunschweig as the son of a Protestant pastor and educationalist, Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) studied classical and German philology and became a professor in Königsberg before his thirtieth birthday.65 Later he took up a position in Berlin, where he produced a series of ground-breaking editions of classical Latin and medieval German texts, and of the New Testament. After his death he came to be regarded, not entirely deservedly, as the founder of the stemmatic method of the study of manuscript traditions, also known as the ‘method of Lachmann’.66 Lachmann’s edition of Catullus is innovative in two important ways. Its most conspicuous innovation has to do with the numbers running along the margin of the text. He does not explain what these stand for, but an astute reader may well infer that they indicate the pages and the lines of an important lost manuscript of the poems that was reconstructed by the editor. The complex rationale behind this reconstruction was set out later by Lachmann’s student Moriz Haupt, but it did not find wide acceptance and Giovanni Fiesoli has explained recently why it is entirely implausible, unlike the one Lachmann went on to propose for Lucretius in his famous edition of 1850.67 65 66 67

Kühnel (1982). See Timpanaro (2005) with Fiesoli (2000), who revise the older view still represented by Kühnel (1982) 372. Haupt (1837) 37–49; Fiesoli (2000) 62–78.

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Another innovation of Lachmann’s was less eye-catching, but more profound and of incomparably greater value. While earlier editors such as Statius, Doering and Van Santen had understood the importance of collating manuscripts, they had only used them piecemeal, in order to solve individual problems within an editorial vulgate that was based on the Aldine editions and, ultimately, on the editio princeps of 1472. It was obvious to every scholar that the printed editions were derived from manuscripts, which was why the latter could be used to correct the former; but nobody before Lachmann had the daring or the good sense to break with tradition, throw out the editorial vulgate and base a reconstruction of the text only on manuscript sources.68 Lachmann was helped by his easy access to the Royal Library (now the Staatsbibliothek) in Berlin, which had acquired several manuscripts of Catullus in 1817 as part of the library of Heinrich Friedrich von Diez. Lachmann decided to base his edition on two of these on the basis that ‘the other non-interpolated (manuscripts) agree with one or other of these in every passage’, a claim that he should have known to be false.69 He called these manuscripts Datanus or D (Diez. B. Sant. 37) and Laurentianus or L (Diez. B. Sant. 36). His favourite was the Datanus, which found favour with some later scholars as well, but it is late and heavily contaminated (or, as Lachmann would have put it, ‘interpolated’) and has no particular value as a source. The Laurentianus is equally undistinguished. But while Lachmann had picked the wrong manuscripts, his method of basing an edition of Catullus entirely on manuscript sources was absolutely right, and his mistakes in applying it could be corrected by later editors who had access to better codices (and were able to identify them as such). In any case, his rejection of the editorial vulgate led him to avoid hundreds of unnecessary alterations to the transmitted text; and his systematic reliance on actual manuscripts made him less prone to alter the text than many of his predecessors, which made his edition distinctly conservative. But where the text was corrupt, Lachmann was not reluctant to intervene and he proposed several dozen elegant conjectures, many of which involve only a minimal change to the transmitted text, but still respect Latin usage.70 The austere format of his critical apparatus also proved 68 69 70

On this problem see Kenney (1974), esp. 18–20, and Timpanaro (2005) 45–6 and 58–67. Lachmann (1829) 1 ‘cum . . . alterutro ceteri non interpolati ubique consentiunt’, on which see Fiesoli (2000) 86–8. Cf. Fiesoli (2000) 89.

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influential; most subsequent critical editions have followed this model, rather than the chatty erudition of Lachmann’s predecessors.

Hunting for Manuscripts, Banishing Corruption Lachmann’s edition of Catullus appeared at a time when classical philology was growing fast in the German-speaking lands. Textual criticism was one of the main areas of research, cultivated during the second half of the nineteenth century not only at the universities, but also by teachers at secondary schools (Gymnasien). Significant advances were made both in the study of manuscripts and in correcting the text. It must have been easy to perceive that Lachmann’s preference for the two Berlin manuscripts was arbitrary, and that it would be worthwhile to search for better manuscripts of Catullus throughout Europe. Lachmann mentioned several others, including a codex he called the ‘Thuaneus antiquissimus inter Parisinos regios 8071’,71 the Thuaneus or T, a ninth-century anthology that had already been seen by Vossius. Its age will have been given away by its aging parchment and its Carolingian minuscule script. The Thuaneus only contained Poem 62; good witnesses of the entire collection were harder to identify, as they were not much older than the large group of manuscripts copied in the fifteenth century. The Sangermanensis or G (now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14137), copied in 1375, was already quoted by Sillig in a review article in 1830; the first edition to make extensive use of this valuable source was published in 1866 by the German Latinist Ludwig Schwabe (1835–1908). Possibly a little earlier and thus the oldest complete manuscript of Catullus to survive, the Oxoniensis or O (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonicianus Class. Lat. 30) was discovered by Robinson Ellis (1834–1913), then a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, who published some of its readings in his edition of 1867. Good editions relying on O, G and T were published in 1876 by Emil Baehrens (1848–88), a prolific German scholar who became Professor Extraordinarius in Groningen, and in 1886 by Schwabe. The last principal manuscript of Catullus to be discovered was the late-fourteenth-century Romanus or R (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottobonianus lat. 1829), identified in 1896 by William Gardner Hale (1849–1928), an excellent US Latinist who had been trained in Germany, while he was the first director of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome.72 71 72

Lachmann (1829) 36 For a brief account of Hale’s work on Catullus see Thomson (1978) 6–9.

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These scholars, and some others, studied the codices recentiores or the more recent manuscripts of Catullus as well as they could. Theodor Heyse (1803–84), a German scholar who settled in Italy, studied twenty-five manuscripts himself and obtained the readings of twenty others before publishing his elegant bilingual edition of 1855.73 Ellis documented manuscripts in Oxford and London. Baehrens established the value of O and G and analysed their relationship to the codices recentiores cogently in his Analecta Catulliana of 1874.74 A project to study all surviving manuscripts of Catullus and to draw up a stemma codicum was conceived of by Hale soon after he had discovered R. The difficulty of the task and perhaps his own excessive perfectionism prevented him from publishing even a partial stemma, but the collations and transcriptions drawn up by his assistants offered a valuable starting point for future editors.75 Similar progress was made in correcting the transmitted text. Heyse and Schwabe proposed some excellent conjectures in their editions, and several other scholars made valuable contributions. In 1854 August Rossbach (1823–1898) published an edition of Catullus that contained a few mediocre conjectures by himself and several excellent ones by the classical scholar and liberal politician Theodor Bergk (1812–81). More fertile but less judicious was Baehrens, who published a rich harvest of conjectures in his Analecta (1874), in his edition of Catullus (1876), in his commentary (1885) and in a series of articles. Ellis published a stock of conjectures of his own, and a few by other British scholars, in the two imprints of his edition (1867, 21878) and in those of his commentary on Catullus (1876, 21889), which was the first one to be published in a language other than Latin. Towards the end of the century there started to appear innovative editions by other Anglophone scholars. One of them was the small edition of 1889 by the English scholar John Percival Postgate (1853–1926), which contained some new conjectures by his brilliant countryman Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936). A bilingual edition published in 1893 by the Englishman Sidney George Owen (1858–1940) was followed three years later by an attractive pocketsized text edited by Arthur Palmer (1841–97), a scholar born in Canada who pursued a distinguished career at Trinity College Dublin. For commentaries too, this was a fertile period. Mention has already been made of Baehrens’ lengthy textual-interpretative commentary, still written in Latin, and the more innovative commentary in English by Ellis. 73 75

Heyse (1855) 278. 74 On Baehrens and his work on Catullus see Butterfield (2015a) 108–17. They are now conserved among the papers of Hale’s distinguished student Berthold L. Ullman at the Department of Classics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The scope of the latter was less narrowly textual and it also took in matters of literary criticism. Its conspicuous defects were a lack of incisiveness, a diffuse chattiness and an inability to distinguish what is relevant from what is not. Less important were a more basic German commentary published in 1884 by a scholar from Frankfurt, Alexander Riese (1840– 1924), and a French publication in three volumes, the first one (1879) containing the Latin text of the poems edited by the distinguished French Latinist Eugène Benoist (1831–87) alongside a verse translation by the learned lawyer and banker Eugène Rostand (1843–1915), the second (1882) offering an erudite commentary on Poems 1–63 by Benoist, and the third (1890) a commentary on Poems 64–116 by Emile Thomas (1843– 1923), a junior scholar who completed the project after the death of Benoist. It is ironical that Thomas arguably surpassed his distinguished predecessor; his achievements include several competent, though not outstanding, conjectures.

The Age of Consolidation While the nineteenth century made spectacular advances in editing Catullus, the twentieth century saw far less progress. Editions continued to appear with some regularity, but they did not produce a rich harvest of conjectures comparable to that of their predecessors, and for several decades they did not even make satisfactory use of the manuscript evidence. Most of them were fairly conservative. The best critical editions from this period, those of Mynors (1958) and Thomson (1978 and 1997), consolidated the achievements of earlier scholarship by documenting the readings of OGR and using them to reconstruct the text. Their conservatism can be justified as a consequence of their focus on the manuscripts, but the same excuse cannot be made for their less distinguished contemporaries. The commentary tradition made greater advances, as Kroll and Fordyce eclipsed the learning of the previous century, and Quinn pursued a new path with a more literary commentary. Three publications from the early 1900s reach back into the previous century. Ellis, who had become Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford in the meantime, brought out a slender Oxford Classical Text of Catullus in 1904. He made use of R, expressing broad agreement with Hale’s assessment of it, but his failing eyesight prevented him from reporting correctly the readings of that manuscript. Here too he proposed some new conjectures. Four years later there appeared a voluminous but

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uneven commentary by Gustav Friedrich (1853–after 1917); as Thomson put it, ‘the author annotated only those passages and those questions that engaged his keen interest’.76 A far more important contribution was made by Wilhelm Kroll (1869–1939), an accomplished Latinist from Silesia who became Professor of Latin in Breslau and was editor-in-chief of the Pauly– Wissowa Realenzyklopädie for thirty-three years until his death. His text of Catullus with a commentary appeared in 1923. Although intended as a school edition and running only to 290 pages, it is unparalleled as a storehouse of useful references. Kroll draws not only on his own impressive erudition, but also on the German scholarship of the preceding century. His judgement is not infallible, nor is he particularly distinguished as a textual critic; but almost a century after its publication, his commentary still offers the best guidance to the place of Catullus within classical literature, and to many of the modern scholarly controversies about his poems. Kroll, like Baehrens before him, had based his text on O and G but disregarded R, even though the latter was the most useful primary manuscript, as both others had been left incomplete by their scribe. Lafaye chose not to give R any prominence in his bilingual edition of 1922 in the Collection Universités de France. Cazzaniga made only limited use of R in his Paravia edition of 1944. Schuster’s Teubner text of 1949 was equally undistinguished. A major advancement was made by the slender Oxford Classical Text of Catullus published in 1958 by the distinguished English Latinist R. A. B. Mynors (1903–1989), a successor of Ellis as Corpus Christi Professor of Latin. Mynors’ main innovation was to base his text on OGR and (where available) T, the relationships of which he clarified in an elegant Latin preface. ‘As for the other surviving manuscripts’, he remarked, ‘they all stem or, what is the same for my purposes, they could stem from the codices OGR’, a statement that ‘leaves many questions unasked’, as Michael Reeve pointed out.77 Mynors used these manuscripts as sources of conjecture, assigning them to chronological layers which he quoted using Greek letters, in a system that is elegant for its simplicity, but does not always convince.78 In the constitution of the text Mynors displays admirable judgement, ‘sound and impartial’ according to so demanding 76 77

78

Thomson (1997) 59. Mynors (1958) viii ‘Quod ad ceteros codices attinet, . . . omnes a codicibus OGR originem aut duxerunt aut, quod nobis idem ualet, duxisse possunt.’ Mynors’ approach was accepted by Goold (1958) 95, but not by Reeve (1980) 179–80. Mynors (1958) ix–xi; for some objections see Kiss (2013a), ‘About the repertory’.

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a critic as G. P. Goold, but his overall approach can be characterised as conservative.79 When in doubt about the transmitted reading, he usually lets it stand, adding in his apparatus several dozen times the comment ‘vix recte’ (on the transmitted reading) or ‘fortasse recte’ (on a conjecture). Six decades after it appeared, this may still be the edition that is used the most widely, a success that is by no means undeserved. Its potential rivals published in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana series on either side of the Iron Curtain, the editions of Schuster and Eisenhut (1958), Bardon (1973) and Eisenhut (1983), were distinctly inferior. Mynors’ edition was followed by a commentary on Catullus by the Scottish Latinist Christian J. Fordyce (1901–74) in the ‘Oxford Reds’ series, aimed at advanced secondary-school students and undergraduates in the English-speaking world.80 Ostensibly aiming to accompany Mynors’ edition, in fact the commentary had been in preparation since 1947.81 Its most conspicuous feature was the omission of ‘a few poems which do not lend themselves to comment in English’ in the words of the commentator; in fact the missing poems numbered no fewer than 32.82 For this prudish act of censorship Fordyce was duly taken to task by his reviewers, who also pointed out his numerous mistakes and omissions.83 And yet his commentary has notable strengths – erudition, elegance, a focus on the language and an ability to present scholarly controversies without distracting from the fun of the poems.84 Twelve years later there appeared a revised edition with extensive corrections and minor additions.85 A commentary on all of the poems of Catullus was published in English in 1970 by Kenneth Quinn (1920–2013), Professor of Latin at University College Toronto at the time. Aimed at a similar public as Fordyce’s commentary, his volume consisted of a basic introduction, a fairly conservative text of Quinn’s own making without an apparatus, and a commentary that takes in not only matters of interpretation and (occasionally) textual criticism, but also the literary qualities of each poem. Writing under the influence of the New Criticism, Quinn is one of the most modern commentators Catullus has had to date. The downsides of his commentary are an excessive confidence in his own judgement and

79 80 81 83 84 85

‘Sound and impartial’: Goold (1958) 106. Conservative: ibid. 98. See Henderson (2006) 70–110 on the commentary and 1–5 on the series. Henderson (2006) 82–3. 82 Fordyce (11961) [v]. Fraenkel (1962), Elder (1963) and Putnam (1963). Henderson (2006) 97–109 offers a balanced assessment. Fordyce (21973), cf. Henderson (2006) 110.

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a rich scattering of mistakes.86 This is a useful student’s edition, but it should be used with care. A new strain in editing Catullus emerged in an unexpected place. The English Latinist George P. Goold (1922–2001) had already published a thoughtful review of Mynors’ edition in 1958. In 1973 a student at Groton School in Massachusetts printed a handsome edition of Catullus, for which Goold supplied the text, admitting conjectures by himself and others with a freedom reminiscent of the nineteenth century. Goold made further changes to the text in the bilingual edition he brought out in 1983 with Duckworth. As an editor Goold is radical, but never reckless or superficial; his approach is different from that of Mynors, but his text is of a comparable quality. Goold had not provided a critical edition of Catullus to supersede that of Mynors, a task that awaited D. F. S. Thomson (1919–2009), a Scottish scholar who spent most of his working life at the University of Toronto. In 1978 Thomson published a Critical Edition of the poems of Catullus with a fairly conservative text that represented a slight improvement on that of Mynors, and a thoroughly revised critical apparatus that was markedly superior. Thomson offered a better assessment of the different hands in G and R, which he had studied in depth, and of the readings of the fifteenth-century manuscripts, for which he could use the collations made for Hale that were now conserved among the papers of Berthold L. Ullman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A revised version of Thomson’s critical edition came out in 1997, accompanied by a detailed commentary that concentrates on how the text should be reconstructed and interpreted. This is no easy matter in the case of Catullus; but readers interested in literary commentary must look elsewhere. This is the first edition to take into account, in its preface, the insight of David S. McKie that OGR descend not from the lost Codex Veronensis (V), but from a lost copy of it, which Thomson terms A.87 Somewhat inconsistently, Thomson continues to use the siglum V for the agreement of OGR in his critical apparatus. The distinguished Andalusian Latinist Antonio Ramírez de Verger prepared the Latin text and the critical apparatus of the rare bilingual edition that appeared in 2005 in Huelva with a Spanish translation by Ana Pérez Vega and a literary and interpretative commentary by both scholars, but mostly by the latter. The rich textual apparatus reports more 86

Mistakes: see Kenney (1973).

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McKie (1977) 38–95; Thomson (1997) 24–5.

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conjectures than any edition from the twentieth century, and it reflects a thorough revision of the text, which is almost as radical as that of Goold. Three young Italian scholars doing research on Catullus under Giuseppe Gilberto Biondi in Parma have each published an edition of a longer poem of Catullus with a detailed commentary: Alex Agnesini of Poem 62 (2007), Giovanni Maggiali of 68 (2008) and Orazio Portuese of 67 (2013). They offer a new reconstruction of each poem with a critical apparatus which is even richer than that of Ramírez de Verger; they excel at reporting the readings of the codices recentiores, which they have studied in detail. Their extensive commentaries embrace literary as well as textual problems and reflect a broad knowledge of earlier scholarship. A harbinger of new times or an academic curiosity, an online edition of Catullus was published in 2013 by the author of these pages. The text of Catullus Online is fairly conservative and serves as a support for the repertory of conjectures in Catullus, containing thousands of manuscript readings and conjectures, which appears as an exceptionally rich critical apparatus. The editor aims to update the contents of the repertory regularly and hopes to adapt the website to the browser technologies of the future. The site also contains images of the principal manuscripts O, G and T (though currently not of R), and a critical edition of all the ancient quotations from Catullus.88

The Future: Prospects and Possibilities At the turn of the millennium, the Oxford Latinist Stephen Harrison pointed out the need for a new edition of Catullus.89 He envisaged a text that would admit more conjectures than Mynors (1958) or Thomson (1997), with an up-to-date, selective critical apparatus, a format reminiscent of the Oxford Classical Texts series. Seven years later, Harrison’s former teacher John M. Trappes-Lomax published over five hundred proposals to improve on the text printed by Mynors. Most reviewers have regarded the majority of his proposals as too radical, but it is widely agreed that there is ample space for new work on the text of Catullus. We clearly need a new edition of Catullus, but would we be served best by just one? As the preceding pages have shown, editing such a poorly transmitted text is not an isolated act but a process, in which competent editors often improve on the work of their predecessors. And in fact the 88 89

For a more detailed discussion of Catullus Online (Kiss (2013a)) see now Kiss (2020). Harrison (2000).

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periods that made the greatest contributions to restoring the text of Catullus, namely the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, were characterised by the coexistence of many different editions, which improved on the text more than any individual scholar could have done. We would be well served by such creative rivalry in our time. It is another question what a new edition should look like. Over half a millennium after Catullus’ editio princeps, the printed critical edition is a mature medium of publishing, but the Internet has made it possible to create digital editions as well. The burgeoning, rich and rather bewildering growth of online texts has come with large advantages as well as significant drawbacks. It is now possible for any person with a computer and an Internet connection to read most of classical Latin literature, including the poems of Catullus. A resource such as PHI Latin Texts enables one to conduct complex lexical searches in the blink of an eye. Yet the quality of today’s online texts is wildly inconsistent: while the best are comparable to good printed editions, many suffer from poor presentation and editing, and some are downright unreliable. Digital critical editions such as Mastandrea et al. (2007) and Kiss (2013a) are still few and far in between. As of 2019, the status quo in editing is upheld by a set of interlocking factors.90 Only a limited number of scholars have the necessary skills to edit classical Latin texts, and several factors push them to publish in print rather than digitally. Funding bodies and other academic institutions still tend to attach more value to printed editions than to digital publications, regardless of their content or quality. The best traditional publishing houses offer excellent support for academics who would like to publish, while a good infrastructure for publishing online is lacking. Conservation poses a special challenge, as today’s digital editions risk being rendered unusable by tomorrow’s changes in technology. These factors continue to limit the growth of online scholarly editing. However, it is likely that at some point in the future the digital revolution will reach even this ancient branch of scholarship. One can only hope that at that stage the upheaval of media change will not lead to a radical fall in the quality of editing. When it comes to commentaries on Catullus, it is even harder to be completely satisfied with what we have. Kroll (1923) is erudite and Fordyce (1961) is sensible, but both have their drawbacks and neither is as deep and detailed as one might wish. In addition there have been enormous advances 90

This chapter could not take into account the important new bilingual edition with commentary by Fo (2018).

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of scholarship during the past fifty years, and the lexical research tools that are available today make it possible to study the style in far greater detail. That would also contribute to the stage of editing known as examinatio, of checking whether the transmitted text is genuine or corrupt.91 A more compact and user-friendly commentary to replace Fordyce (1961) and Quinn (1970) would also be welcome. The commentary on Catullus that Monica Gale is preparing for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series may well fulfil this objective. And alongside such scholarly commentaries, we also need good study editions in English and in other languages. Here too digital publishing offers new possibilities, already explored for other authors by Dickinson College Commentaries. The digital medium would make it possible to expand the genre of the commentary by including further material such as images and maps, adding links to other resources such as texts and dictionaries, and developing tests and translation aids that could yield a revolution in our practice of reading a Latin text.

Further Reading For an earlier account of the editions and commentaries of Catullus, and the scholarship on his text, see Thomson (1997) 43–60. Gaisser (1992) lists, discusses and documents all early commentaries, including minor ones and those that only survive in manuscript form, up to the early seventeenth century. Gaisser (1993) 24–192 discusses in detail the main editions and commentaries, even those that were not published in print, and the most important developments in Catullan scholarship, up to and including Scaliger (1577a–b). A shorter and more selective account of the earliest commentaries on Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius is offered by Gaisser (2015). A stemmatic study of the incunabula is now available in Kiss (2018). Until a decade ago, it was a major logistical challenge to study the editorial history of Catullus, as hardly any library possessed even half of the editions and commentaries discussed here. Almost all of them up to Friedrich (1908) are now available online, for the most part thanks to Google and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The digital study of books not covered by copyright is making further headway. Many of the earliest printed books have no clear title, or none at all. Hence the incunable editions of Catullus mentioned in this chapter are not 91

On examinatio see Maas (1958) 10–20.

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normally listed in the bibliography, but they are keyed to the standard catalogues (BMC, GW and ISTC ) in a footnote. The first edition to be listed in the bibliography is Avanzi and Manuzio (1502). It is not possible to discuss in a chapter of this length the hundreds of textual problems with which the editors of Catullus have had to struggle over the centuries. The conjectures made by individual editors can be studied online at Kiss (2013a), which has a searchable critical apparatus.

chapter 13

Catullus in the Renaissance Alex Wong

The poems of Catullus were rediscovered around 1300. Manuscript copies were made throughout the fourteenth century, but circulated little, though it appears that Petrarch had access to the text around the middle of the century, and it has sometimes been supposed that he owned a copy of it. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati had transcribed for him a new complete manuscript, descended at third hand from the original (V), and itself now known as R; and back to this copy most of the proliferating manuscripts of the fifteenth century can be traced.1 The rebirth of Catullus, therefore, coincides with the ‘Renaissance’ itself: a point to which the looming presence, in traditional accounts, of Petrarch near the beginning of both processes – the assimilation of Catullus and the larger ‘revival of antiquity’ – lends emphasis. The elevation of Catullus to a canonical status began slowly, and was not achieved until the mid-fifteenth century. Judging from the evidence of poetic imitation, most humanists thought of Catullus as a writer of erotic and invective verse primarily, and associated him therefore with short, somewhat colloquial poems, often playful and often obscene. This is not to say that the longer poems were neglected. The nuptial elements of Poem 64, combined with Poems 61 and 62, helped determine the character of much Renaissance wedding poetry. The difficult galliambic metre of Poem 63, too, attracted a number of ambitious humanists, including the celebrated Michael Marullus (c. 1453–1500), whose ‘Hymn to Bacchus’ imperfectly imitates the prosody of the ‘Attis’ and sometimes echoes its content and style.2 But throughout the period, though the longer poems gained increasing attention from commentators, the short lyrics and epigrams were the most widely influential on the writing of poetry. 1 2

On the MSS see Oakley in this volume. Michael Marullus, Poems, ed. Charles Fantazzi (Cambridge, Mass., 2012) 212–17. On Renaissance galliambics see Campbell (1960).

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Perceptions of the rediscovered Catullus were largely determined by the way in which Martial had responded to his great acknowledged predecessor, since Martial was, in the early Renaissance, much the better-known poet of the two.3 The early modern imitators of Catullus tended towards many of the same poems and themes that Martial had found appealing (see Chapter 10). Indeed, in the realm of prickly lampooning epigram the impress of Catullus is often difficult to extricate from the more prevalent Martialian influence. But the legacy of Catullus the love poet is more distinct, and the bulk of early modern poetry that is most frankly and obviously ‘Catullan’ is, therefore, amatory. The place of Catullus in Renaissance literature is in some fundamental ways different in kind from that of most other Roman authors. Certainly, like all the available classical poets, Catullus was searched for quotable sententiae, to be transferred into commonplace books and plucked out as occasion demanded. And Renaissance poets echoed lines, phrases and images from Catullus just as they would from, say, Horace. But Catullan imitation took an early and decisive turn toward manneristic exaggeration. Catullan inspiration often elicited poetry that was ostentatiously idiomatic and stylistically playful to an unusual degree.4 This may be partly to do with the habitual themes of Catullan verse, given that the humanist imitators responded most readily to Catullus’ shorter, sprightlier poems. But it is more than that. For Renaissance schoolboys, reared on Virgil, Ovid, Horace (not on the unsuitable Catullus), the styles derived from these authors naturally came to be in each case a kind of ‘house style’ for the particular forms of verse composition into which a continuing humanist training would encourage them. The style inspired by Catullus – sufficiently definite and prevalent in the Renaissance for modern scholars, especially I. D. McFarlane and Philip Ford, to have dubbed it ‘NeoCatullanism’ – seems to have been a self-consciously ‘alternative’ style, even after its parameters and basic features had long become conventional.

*

Until the mid-fifteenth century, the text of Catullus – not to be printed until a Venetian edition of 1472 set him alongside Tibullus, Propertius and Statius – was better known about than known.5 But the name of Catullus meant something particular, even to those humanists whose access to the manuscripts was, at best, severely limited. What it meant can perhaps be 3 4 5

This has been most forcefully argued by Gaisser (1993), 193–254, esp. 199. On the basic characteristics of the style, see Ludwig (1990), esp. 183–4, and Ford (2013) 58. On early editions see Kiss in this volume, and cf. Gaisser (1993) xii-xiii, 24–65, etc.

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seen from the Hermaphroditus, two books of erotic and obscene Neo-Latin verse by Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471), dating to 1425–6. In Poem 2.23, the poet writes to his friend: Ardeo, mi Galeaz, mollem reperire Catullum, ut possim dominae moriger esse meae. Lectitat illa libens teneros, lasciua, poetas, et praefert numeros, docte Catulle, tuos. (1–4)6 I burn, my Galeazzo, to find soft [mollis] Catullus, so I may indulge my mistress. She often likes (the wanton girl!) to read the ‘tender’ poets; and she prefers your verses, O learned Catullus.

Catullus here is a mysterious aphrodisiac. Moreover, he is mollis (‘soft’) and doctus (‘learned’), adjectives that would adhere closely to him throughout the early modern period. The range of associations implied by mollis cannot easily be captured in a single English word: wantonness and naughtiness; effeminacy or perversion; the lover’s life of amorous otium as opposed by the later Augustan love-elegists to public or military life; jovial triviality. Mollitia (softness) and the diminutive adjective molliculus (‘softy’ is Richard Burton’s expressive English solution)7 would become important terms in later NeoCatullanism, defining its characteristic aesthetic. As for the doctrina (learning) of Catullus, this notion was inherited from the Roman writers whom the early humanists knew better, initially, than they knew Catullus, and who in turn knew Catullus better than the humanists did. Catullus is called doctus by Ovid, by Lygdamus (supposed author of the spurious third book of Tibullus), and on five separate occasions by Martial. It has been shown that the epithet was also used by the same writers, and others, for poets who do not exhibit the recherché Callimachean aesthetics we associate with Catullus;8 but during the early modern period the doctrina of Catullus came to be widely understood as representing a particular quality of learnedness proper to him pre-eminently. The enduring sense that this label refers to his neoteric Alexandrianism, however, could not become established until after scholars had worked intensively on both Catullus and his Greek predecessors. Such work was thin in the fifteenth century. It would quickly gather pace in the sixteenth.9 Beccadelli’s mistress apparently knows something about Catullus, but neither she nor he has ready access to the text. The Hermaphroditus 6 7 8

Antonio Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. Holt Parker (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) 88. Catullus, Carmina, trans. Richard Burton and Leonard Smithers (London, 1894) 31. See Allen (1915). 9 See Gaisser (1993), chs. 2–5 (66–192).

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contains only one plausible allusion to an actual poem of Catullus: Poem 1.14 begins: Cur qui paedicat semel, aut semel irrimat, | [. . .] nunquam dedidicisse potest?’ (‘Why, when a man has once started buggering and mouth-fucking, can he never stop doing it?’), reminiscent of the opening of Catullus 16.10 Alone, this is hardly conclusive; but there is another reason to suppose that Poem 16 may have been within Beccadelli’s reach when he wrote the poems. For it was in Beccadelli’s day that Catullus 16 began to be regularly cited by humanist writers as an authority for the acceptability of salacious verse: Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis, quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum. nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est; qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt . . . (1–9)11 I’ll roger your arse and roger your face, you cock-muncher Aurelius, and Furius you catamite – who think me immodest on account of my little verses, because they’re a bit naughty [molliculi]. For it befits the sacred poet to be chaste himself, though his poems need not be so. And they only have wit and charm if they are rather naughty, and impudent, and can arouse lascivious agitations . . .

Martial had extracted from this a poetic ‘law’ (1.35.10–11): lex haec carminibus data est iocosis, | ne possint, nisi pruriat, iuuare (‘This is the law established for witty songs: they can’t serve their purpose unless they titillate’).12 Pliny the Younger and Apuleius had also cited Catullus 16 in their own defence, quoting lines 5–8 and 5–6 respectively (Epist. 4.14; Apologia 11). Beccadelli makes similar arguments in several of the poems (1.1, 1.23, 2.11), not alluding specifically to Catullus; but in a letter prefixed to the Hermaphroditus, scorning ‘the ignorant rabble’ who forget that ‘things should be judged one way in life, and another way in literature’, his friend Guarino da Verona followed in the footsteps of Pliny and Apuleius by producing Catullus 16 as a buttress. Poggio Bracciolini soon wrote a second supporting letter, and Beccadelli’s grateful reply, taking a cue from Guarino, then also quoted Catullus 16 (alongside Martial 1.35). 10 12

Beccadelli, ed. Parker, 18–20. 11 Text OCT. Text OCT. Cf. also Mart. 1.4 and Ovid, Trist. 2.354.

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Two later epistles by Beccadelli show him citing this ‘law’ again in a similar way.13 Its reasoning was taken for granted in much subsequent NeoCatullan poetry, and explicit invocations of it were also made by several sixteenth-century poets, as we will see.14 The earliest known example of sustained Catullan imitation in the Renaissance is by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), later known as an eminent historian. He knew personally both Colluccio Salutati, who owned MS R, and Poggio Bracciolini, who copied MS M from Salutati’s text. Bruni’s single Catullan poem (c. 1405–15) begins with an echo of Catullus 3, reproducing its Veneres Cupidinesque verbatim but turning the invocation into a dismissal, since the rest of the poem, 48 hendecasyllables in total, is devoted to invective against his former beloved: Sed nil uerba facit neque his mouetur, he complains; heret mentula nanque fixa cordi | auresque obstruit (‘But she speaks not a word, and remains unmoved by my words: cock is lodged immovably in her heart and stuffs up her ears’; 36–8).15 Bruni shows more knowledge of Catullus than Beccadelli does, but both associate Catullus with obscenity. The Florentine Cristoforo Landino (1424–98) shows a subtler and more extensive Catullan influence in his Xandra. A first version was dedicated to Leon Battista Alberti in 1443–4, and the final three-book text was finished by 1460.16 Landino is particularly drawn to Catullus 8 (Miser Catulle), recalling it especially in Poems 6 and 35 of the early Xandra, which became Poems 1.6 and 1.17 in the later version.17 These poems ruefully and bitterly renouncing his mistress have something of the emotional conflict of Catullus and it is primarily the psychological and moral situation that Landino is attracted by, rather than idiosyncrasies of diction or form. The scazons of the original are replaced by elegiacs, his more usual metre, and probably much easier to handle after a humanist training which privileged verse composition in the major forms, hexameters and elegiacs. But Landino does adopt some of the formal tricks of the Catullan style, including the use of repetition as a structuring device (see Poem 35/1.17). Julia Gaisser also notes that Landino’s Poem 50/1.30 bears some resemblance to Catullus 11, including its adoption of the sapphic stanza;18 and 13

14 16 17 18

The first three of these letters are included as part of the text (F) on which modern editions have been based, the others are appended to Parker’s edition. Beccadelli, ed. Parker, 2–5, 56–9,112–25, 138–43, 154–63. 15 See Ford (2011). The whole poem is quoted in Gaisser (1993) 212–14. Both versions in Cristoforo Landino, Poems, ed. Mary P. Chatfield (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). Further references give the number of each poem as it appears in both the early and later versions. Cf. Gaisser (1993) 215–20.

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this is one of several poems by Landino written in sapphics, so it may be that he especially associated that form with Catullus (who uses it in Poems 11 and 51), even though it would also have been familiar to him, without doubt, from Horace. Landino’s most obvious metrical Catullanism, however, is his use of hendecasyllables. One of these is what was initially the dedicatory poem to Alberti (1.13 in the later text), which blends a memory of Catullus 1 with sharper echoes of Martial’s dedication poems, especially those, such as 1.70 and 3.2, that address the personified book and send it on a mission to the dedicatee. Landino tells his libellus (little book) not to be frightened of Alberti, who ‘reads learned poets gladly, and praises light, witty verses’ (legit poetas | doctos ille libens salesque laudat | leues).19 But neither does Alberti disdain poets who are ‘bad and hoarse-toned’ (raucidulos malosque uates), and ‘soft’ or ‘naughty’ (molliculi).20 The notion of a ‘learned’ poet who nevertheless indulges in naughty, witty trifles is one that fits well the humanist image of Catullus. Molliculus takes us back to Catullus 16, while raucidulus, though it also appears as a doubtful reading in St Jerome (letter 40.2) and possibly other places in which Landino could have encountered it, may also recall the memorable word raucisonus in Catullus 64.263. If so, the true Catullan word has been turned into a diminutive after the manner of Catullus. In any case, these diminutives show Landino attempting to recapture a particular element of his model’s style, an element which in the hands of younger poets would be greatly exaggerated. The Neo-Catullanism of the next generation was more closely anticipated in Landino’s Poem 46/1.26. Its juxtaposition of erotic compliment with angry verbal abuse invites comparison with the ‘Lesbia cycle’, and there are some definite echoes, probably amounting to deliberate allusions: the addressee, for instance, is likened to a Libyan lioness, as in Catullus 60. But the use of extravagantly prolix, diminutive-sprinkled hendecasyllables for sensuously titillating material such as Catullus himself never lingers over – si semel auream papillam | et pectus niveum simul gulamque | pulchram tangere (‘just once to touch your golden nipple, and also your snowy bosom, and your fair throat’) – all this is a sign of things to come.21 It was the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429– 1503), together with others of his circle, including Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530) and Michael Marullus, who established the popularity of the 19

20

Leues here might also be translated ‘smooth’, thereby yielding the preferred long syllable at the start of the hendecasyllabic line; but since exceptions to that rule are precedented in Catullus and common in Neo-Latin, on the whole I think ‘light’ the more likely meaning in this context. 21 Landino, ed. Chatfield, 24–7; 24. Landino, ed. Chatfield, 54–7; 54.

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dominant Catullan style in Neo-Latin poetry, replete with specialised vocabulary and using the metres of Catullus, especially hendecasyllabics, in a much more insistently stylised way than hitherto.22 Pontano’s version of the Catullan style, which includes or influences virtually all NeoCatullanism from his own heyday onward, is largely concerned with amatory topics, sometimes but not always obscene. As Walter Ludwig says, Catullus and the lex (‘law’) of Poem 16 ‘made possible and legitimized for Pontano a poetry of Epicureanism, which he separated from his Christian beliefs’.23 Pontano’s early Catullan poetry belonged to his Pruritus (1449), which was partly decanted into his Parthenopaeus or Amores of the following decade; but in his Baiae or Hendecasyllabi, written in old age (up to 1503), he was still refining the style. Baiae 1.16 is typical: Et cum lacteolo sinu quiescens fessus languidulum capis soporem, carpis dulciculum beate somnum, non fallor, tibi, credo, dormienti occurrit Charitum nitens figura, occurrit Veneris decora imago. (30–5)24 And when, settling down, tired, in that milk-white bosom of hers, you take a languorous little snooze; when you snatch, lucky man, that sweet little slumber, I think it won’t be amiss to say that a gleaming vision of the Graces appears to you; that the fair image of Venus appears to you.

Note the deliberately excessive use of diminutives. Languidulus appears once in Catullus, describing the languorous slumbers awaiting the newlywed couple in 64.331, and it was enthusiastically taken up by Neo-Latin poets. We also have dulciculus, not in Catullus, but just the sort of thing Neo-Catullanism enjoys; and, perhaps less strikingly playful, lacteolus (cf. Catull. 55.17). Even the name of the mistress is ‘Drusula’, another diminutive. But diminutives are not the only playful word-forms favoured by these writers, who are also attracted by coinages along the lines of Catullus’s basiatio or osculatio (‘kissification’ is Quinn’s rendering).25 All the better if the words are long, placed at the end of the hendecasyllabic line, and can be made to terminate in –ue or –que.26 Other elements of the Neo-Catullan style evident here – and which were especially obvious in hendecasyllabics, although easily transferable to the anacreontic metres that Neo-Catullan poets after the early sixteenth 22 24 25

23 On Pontano see Kidwell (1991) and Gaisser (1993) 220–54. Ludwig (1990) 195. Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Carmina, ed. Johannes Oeschger (Bari, 1948) 294–5. 26 Quinn (1970) 112. Cf. Gaisser (1993) 195.

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century often employed (cf. Catull. 34, 61) – are repetition and redundancy. Lines such as these go awkwardly into prose translation because the metrical line is treated as so definite a unit; and successive lines, each comprising an alternative, parallel unit of sense, often with parallel syntax, are allowed to accumulate in ways that prose syntax cannot neatly handle. The total effect is of quasi-spontaneous but curiously artificial verbosity. Baiae 1.16.31–3, for example, offers two versions of essentially the same point, with small similarities and differences meant to be appreciated: capis becomes carpis; soporem becomes somnum; the polysyllabic diminutives are subject to conspicuous variation but retain the same position within the unit of the line. The manner is otiose, languidly fussy, and of a piece with the Neo-Catullan mood of leisurely amorousness. Baiae 1.23, De fulgentissimis Lucillae papillis (‘On the dazzlingest nipples of Lucilla’), illustrates again how repetition and syntactical redundancy were drawn upon for the characteristic tone: Cum mollis digitos acumque miror, miror artifices manus opusque, inter fasciolam papillulasque obliquis oculis repente uidi: quid uidi, uideo an uidere credo? Sed certe uideo, en uidetis ipsi . . . (1–6)27 While I was marvelling at her tender fingers, and the needle; while I was marvelling at her dextrous hands and their work, between the little band of the hem and the little breasts, out of the corner of my eye, suddenly I saw it . . . What did I see? I see it, but can I believe my eyes? But surely I see it: look, you can see it too!

As in the previous extract, there is repetition both of particular words (mirari and uidere) and of syntactical patterns. The redundancy of manus opusque after digitos acumque is typical. So is the juxtaposition of two diminutives, one more playful than the other (fasciolam papillulasque), while the –que suffix at the end of the hendecasyllabic line (like Cupidinesque in Catullus 3) exemplifies a frequent habit. The mixture of off-hand colloquialism with lyrical artifice is something the humanists particularly responded to in Catullus. Yet Pontano’s elaborate titillation is indebted much more to Ovid’s calculated eroticism – shapely female legs revealed beneath dresses, and the like – than to anything authentically Catullan. 27

Pontano, ed. Oeschger, 300.

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Now, however, consider the following couplet from Pontano’s De Amore Coniugali (‘On Married Love’): En pectus, formose, tuum; mihi dulcia iunge | oscula et in solito molle quiesce sinu (‘Come, handsome one, here is the bosom that is yours; give me sweet kisses, and softly rest in my familiar lap’).28 Drusula, whom we met in Baiae 1.16, might have spoken to the lover reclining in her lap in such terms as these. Some of the vocabulary is shared between both examples (quiescere, dulcis and sinus), the style is plainly comparable, and kisses are very much at home in Neo-Catullan eroticism, thanks to the popularity of Poems 5 and 7. But this couplet actually belongs to a poem called the ‘Second Lullaby’ (Naenia), supposed to be sung by a nurse to an infant. We might, therefore, have a right to translate mihi dulcia iunge | oscula as an instruction to suck the nurse’s breast (‘latch your sweet little mouth onto me’), since osculum, ‘kiss’, means literally a ‘little mouth’. The diminutive-laden erotic babytalk of NeoCatullan amatory verse, full of nonce-words, pet names, petulant repetitions and calculated silliness, here virtually elides with the genuinely childish – the change of function bringing home more forcefully the peculiarity of its erotic idiom. In the ‘Fourth Lullaby’ we read: en mammas, en lacteolas, formose, papillas, | en cape delicias tinnula plectra tuas (‘Come, handsome one, seize my bosom! Come take hold of my milky breasts, and your delightful plaything, the tinkling rattle’).29 Does lacteolus mean ‘milkwhite’, as in the poem on Lucilla’s breasts (Baiae, 1.23), or in this case ‘milkbearing’? The Neo-Catullanism developed by Pontano became a popular NeoLatin style across Europe for the next two centuries. Philip Ford suggests that we might think of it as falling into ‘hard’, ‘medium’ and ‘soft’ categories.30 The obscenity of Beccadelli, Bruni or (at times) Pontano represents the ‘hard’ end. Marullus, Pontano’s younger friend, may be the most eminent representative of ‘soft’ Catullanism, using some of the same mannerisms as Pontano – diminutives, lovers’ epithets, repetitions of various kinds – but in much less voluptuous poetry, closer to broadly Petrarchan models: in one poem he explicitly defends his ‘chaste poems’ (carmina casta, Ep. 1.62).31 It was the ‘medium’ version, however, which was most fertile in the sixteenth century: sensual, often self-consciously naughty, but generally not as obscene as Beccadelli or Pontano could be.

* 28 31

Ibid., 164; Am. Con. 2.9.19–20. Marullus, ed. Fantazzi, 48–51; 48.

29

Ibid., 166; Am. Con. 2.11.11–12.

30

Ford (2013) 58–65.

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Pontano’s Parthenopaeus 1.5 combines two popular Catullan themes: kissing (to which we will return) and Lesbia’s sparrow, here transformed into a dove – perhaps recalling Catullus 68.125–8, in which doves (125: niueo . . . columbo) are said to snatch billing kisses ‘more wantonly than any woman’. Pontano’s opening, furthermore, is a clear allusion to Catullus 1 (Cui dono lepidum nouum libellum), with Martial 3.2 intervening. So the dedication poem, one of the genres of short poem to which Catullan imitators often returned (we have seen an example from Landino already), and more particularly the models of that genre offered by Catullus and Martial jointly, provide the generic template for what here becomes a sustained sexual conceit: Cui uestrum niueam meam columbam donabo, o pueri? Tibine, Iuli, num, Coeli, tibi, num tibi, Nearche? Non uobis dabimus, mali cinaedi; non uos munere tam elegante digni. ... Sed cuinam cupis, o columba, munus deferri? Scio; nam meam puellam amas plus oculis tuis, nec ulla uiuit mundior elegantiorue. ... Huius tu in gremio beata ludes, et circumsiliens manus sinumque interdum aureolas petes papillas. Verum tunc caueas, proterua ne sis; ... Impune hoc facies, uolente diua, ut, cum te roseo ore suauiatur, rostrum purpureis premens labellis, mellitam rapias iocosa linguam, et tot basia totque basiabis, donec nectarei fluant liquores. (1–5, 10–13, 17–20, 26–31)32 Hey, boys! To which of you shall I give my snow-white dove? To you, Julius? Not, Coelius, to you? Nor to you, Nearchus? No, I won’t give it to you, you wicked catamites! You are not worthy of such a fine favour. . . . But to whom, then, O dove, do you wish to be given over as a favour? I know! For you love my girlfriend more than your own eyes, nor is there anyone else 32

Pontano, ed. Oeschger, 70–1.

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alex wong alive more refined or more elegant. . . . You shall play happily in her lap, and, while leaping about her hands and breast, sometimes you’ll be seeking out her golden nipples. But then may you beware, lest you be wanton! . . . [Yet] you’ll do this unpunished, with the goddess willing: to wit, when she kisses you with her rosy mouth, pressing your beak with her bright lips, you will snatch, playfully, her honey-sweet tongue; and then so many, so many kisses you’ll kiss—until the nectareal liquids flow.

The repudiation of the boys as cinaedi recalls Catullus 16, which is significantly connected, as we have seen, with the theme of kissing; and meanwhile Pontano’s kisses at the end of the poem recall Catullus 5 and 7, the Lesbia kiss-poems. The warning of a severe penalty may also bring to mind Catullus’ stolen kiss in Poem 99 and the angry response of Juventius, though in this case ‘kissing’ is allowed. In keeping with the bird motif, too, circumsiliens in line 18 is evidently taken from Catullus 3.9, where it describes Lesbia’s sparrow. But there is also a more general habit of borrowing from Catullus, in ways not specifically yoked to the theme in hand. Verum . . . impune hoc, for example, is reminiscent of the turn of phrase in 78b.3 (uerum id . . . impune), and Pontano’s caueas . . . sis may owe something to the caue sis of Catullus 50.18. The formulation ‘more than your own eyes’, too, echoes Catullus 3.5, 14.1 and 104.2. Pontano’s transformation of literary dedication to lewd joke is aided by the fact that Martial had referred to the poems of Catullus, collectively, as his Passer (‘sparrow’, 4.14), and had alluded to a poem or set of poems by his own patron, Stella, as his Columba (‘dove’, 1.7). Pliny, moreover, had referred to his own poems as columbuli (‘little doves’) and passerculi (‘little sparrows’, Epist. 9.25.3). But the more basic elision here – of bird and penis – is inspired by Martial 11.6:33 Da nunc basia, sed Catulliana: quae si tot fuerint quot ille dixit, donabo tibi Passerem Catulli. (14–16) Now give me kisses, but Catullan ones! If they are as many as he said, then I’ll give you Catullus’ sparrow.

Although, as Gaisser points out, Parthenopaeus 1.5 antedates the main controversy by some four decades, the validity of this lewd reading of Lesbia’s sparrow was much debated in the late fifteenth century.34 The Florentine scholar-poet Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) wrote in favour of it in 33 34

Martial 7.14 and 1.109 also could be taken to support this double entendre. Gaisser (1993) 243.

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1489, citing Martial as authority and drawing a witheringly sarcastic rebuttal in verse by Pontano’s disciple Sannazaro (Ep. 1.61). In siding with his friend Marullus in an ongoing literary feud, was Sannazaro just waging a dishonest war with a rival humanist, as Gaisser contends – since he elsewhere seems to endorse Pontano’s phallic dove?35 Or did he think that turning an inherited motif into an innuendo poetically was a different thing (as it surely is) from arguing critically that the original author intended such a meaning? Probably both. But innuendo haunts many a poetic sparrow of the period. And more generally, Renaissance poetry offers countless examples of non-avian pet poems that owe something to Catullus 2 and 3. Puppies were notably popular, in part owing to Martial’s comparison of Catullus’ sparrow with a puppy called ‘Issa’ in 1.109, and encouraged by the fact that the Latin word for puppy, catellus, allows for wordplay with Catullus.36 A yet more powerful current of thematic imitation was originated by Catullus’ kissing-poems, especially those to Lesbia (5, 7), but also those concerning Juventius (48, 99), which in early modern re-imaginings tended to be made heterosexual. The repetitiousness and extravagant copiousness that Neo-Catullan writers loved are eminently conspicuous in 5 and 7. The kiss motif, together with the tropes associated with it, even led to the institution of a new humanist genre, the basium (‘kiss’). Individual poems in this vein had already been partly conventionalised by Pontano and others in the late fifteenth century, but the genre was formalised in the 1530s by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus (1511–36), whose book of nineteen Basia, printed in 1541, initiated the tradition of gathering together such poems into discrete collections in varied metres and calling them Basia.37 Here the notionally ‘Catullan’ style was more obviously merged, in the elegiac poems especially, with the legacies of Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus, and also fitted to some of the metres of Horace’s Odes and Epodes. The range of metres is impressive: not only elegiacs and hendecasyllabics, but also alcaics, glyconics, iambic dimeter and trimeter catalectic, the third asclepiadic stanza, and pythiambics. Variety, both prosodic and tropological, is an avowed principle: Secundus likes many different kinds of kiss, many different kinds of kisspoem (see Basium 10 especially). An accomplished Latin poet of a later age, Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), declared that the final two lines of Secundus’ third Basium ‘would have been quoted, even from Catullus himself, as among his best’: 35 37

36 Gaisser (1993) 245–6. See Wong (2017) 58–9, 222–3. On Secundus see Schoolfield (1980), Guépin (1991), Price (1996).

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Non hoc suauiolum dare, Lux mea, sed dare tantum | est desiderium flebile suauioli (‘This is not giving a little kiss, my Light, but only giving the doleful desire for a little kiss’).38 As in many good basia, there is a deliberate sensuousness here in the mouthing of the syllables. Suauiolum, a particularly useful word in this regard – getting the kissing-muscles in motion – takes us back to Catullus 99.2, which, like this poem, is in elegiacs. Meanwhile Lux mea, a typical Neo-Catullan lovers’ epithet, is precedented in Catullus 68.132 and 68.160. Basium 4 (in hendecasyllables) was also one of Secundus’ most celebrated, and provoked much imitation: Non dat basia, dat Neaera nectar, dat rores animae suaueolentes, dat nardumque, thymumque, cynnamumque, et mel . . . Quae si multa mihi uoranda dentur, immortalis in iis repente fiam, magnorumque epulis fruar Deorum. Sed tu munere parce, parce tali, aut mecum dea fac, Neaera, fias: non mensas sine te uolo deorum. (1–4, 8–13)39 Neaera doesn’t give kisses: she gives nectar! She gives the sweet-smelling dew of her soul! She gives nard, and thyme, and cinnamon, and honey . . . If all these many things were given me to devour, I should at once become immortal in their midst, and enjoy the banquets of the great gods. But, Neaera, be sparing, sparing with such a gift—or else be sure to make yourself a goddess with me: for I don’t want the tables of the gods, without you!

But the Bolognese humanist Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505) had anticipated the opening imagery in his elegiac poem Osculum Panthiae (‘Panthia’s Kiss’),40 and in the closing lines Secundus may have been inspired by two Neo-Catullan kiss-poems by Sannazaro which also end with the expression of a preference for the earthly delights offered by the beloved over the pleasures of the gods. Should he receive the kisses he asks for, Sannazaro would be content to turn down the blessed nocturnal doings of Aurora and Venus, nor would he even prefer the bed of Hebe: ‘not even if she deserted her husband; not even if she asked me over and over; not even if she promised me eternal youth’ (1.6). And again, his beloved’s kisses are worth 38 39 40

Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. T. Earle Welby and Stephen Wheeler, vol. 11 (London, 1930) 177–225; 183. Jean Second, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Roland Guillot, vol. 1 (Paris, 2005) 130. Secundus, ed. Guillot, 134. Orationes et Carmina Baroaldi [sic] (Bologna, 1502) sigs O2r-O3v.

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more than ‘the banquets of the gods, and cups taken from Ganymede’s hand’ (1.57).41 Sannazaro in 1.6 is likely to have been thinking of Catullus 70.2: non si se Iuppiter ipse petat (‘not even if Jupiter himself were to court her’), and Secundus, in remembering Sannazaro, may well have been remembering this too. Still, the apotheosis conceit in Secundus, who fears he will suddenly be raised to godhead against his will if Neaera is not more parsimonious with her intoxicating kisses, is a thrilling addition. The whole poem, it may be noted, is built around a conventional comparison of sweet kisses with nectar, for which Catullus had offered a nearprecedent in the ambrosial kiss of Juventius in Poem 99. One of the Hendecasyllabi of the Scottish humanist George Buchanan (1506–82), whose grand reputation in early modern Europe is hard to overstate,42 shows the influence of Secundus’ imagery: Cum das basia, nectaris Neaera das mi pocula, das dapes deorum. Vt factus uidear mihi repente unus e numero Deum, Deisue siquid altius est, beatiusue. Sed nectar mihi dulce basiorum sic fallacibus imbues uenenis. Vt qui nunc fueram Deus, deisue si quid altius est beatiusue, praeceps in Stygium datus barathrum degam Erinnyas inter, aut barathrum si quid sit Stygium infra Erinnyasue. Sic statim mihi cor, iecur, medullas et uenas tacite malum pererrat: sic corpus mihi tabe colliquescit, ardet ignibus, aestuat uenenis: sic mentem mala pestis occupauit, ut sit nectare suauius uenenum, uita mors potior, labor quiete, sanitate furor, salute morbus.43 When you give kisses, Neaera, you give me goblets of nectar; you give me the banquet of the gods, so that it seems I am suddenly made one of the number of the gods, or whatever is higher than the gods, or more blessed. 41 42 43

See in Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry, ed. Michael C. J. Putnam (Cambridge, Mass., 2009) 258–60, 294. On Buchanan see McFarlane (1981) and Ford (1978, 1980, 1982). Georgii Buchanani Scoti Poemata quae extant (Leiden, 1628) 350. I retain the full stops in lines 2 and 7, unusual as they are by modern standards.

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alex wong But you will so imbue the sweet nectar of your kisses with deceitful venom that I, who just now have been a god or whatever is higher or more blessed than a god, shall be sent headlong into the Stygian abyss, and shall pass my time among the Furies, or whatever is below the Stygian abyss or the Furies. Thus all at once, imperceptibly, the poison penetrates to my heart, my liver, my marrow and my veins: my body so melts away with a wasting sickness, burns with fires, boils with venom, and the evil disease has so occupied my mind, that the poison is sweeter than nectar, death stronger than life, labour stronger than rest, frenzy stronger than sanity, and illness stronger than health.

Buchanan’s beloved, like those of Secundus (in the Basia) and Marullus, is named ‘Neaera’. The characteristic piling-up of diminutives is absent here, but other typical habits of Neo-Catullan vocabulary, syntax and structure – especially repetition – are emphatically present. For his rhetorical framework Buchanan exaggerates the authentically Catullan use of hyperbolic comparatives: think of Catullus 13 (seu quid suauius elegantiusue est, ‘or whatever is even sweeter and more delightful’), Catullus 23 (corpora sicciora cornu | aut siquid magis aridum est, ‘bodies drier than horn, or whatever is drier than that’), and Catullus 82 (aut aliud si quid carius est oculis, ‘or whatever else there is that is dearer than one’s eyes’). If Buchanan, placed beside most other Neo-Catullan writers, seems unusually serious-minded about the deleterious effects of erotic passion, it can be argued that it was precisely in this that he came closest to the real Catullus – who speaks of the ‘insane flame burning [his] vitals’ (cum uesana meas torreret flamma medullas, 100.7), the ‘revolting sickness’ (taetrum . . . morbum, 76.25) of his wretched love, and the deadly disease (pestem perniciemque) which, he says, ‘creeping over me, like a numbness, deep into my innermost parts, has driven away happiness from all my breast’ (quae mihi subrepens imos ut torpor in artus | expulit ex omni pectore laetitias, 76.21–2). Buchanan’s uenenum might also recall 77.5–6, where a faithless friend, Rufus, is decried as ‘the cruel venom of my life’ (crudele uenenum | uitae). Consciously in the Secundan tradition, Buchanan goes back to Catullus to inspire a change in the traditional tone.44 Neo-Catullan kissing-poems, especially as modified by Secundus, could be stuffed with innuendo; but they could also provide erotic subject matter that was decorously chaste, considered comparatively. Secundus insists several times on the chastity of his Basia: somewhat ironically, given how sexual certain of them are (his ‘stiff upturned prick’ in Basium 14 echoes the 44

See Wong (2017) 49–50, 227–8.

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protruding member of Catull. 32),45 though of others the claim does hold true. Already in Marullus in the late fifteenth century, and notably in Secundus and others in the sixteenth, such as the French Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557) or the German Paulus Melissus Schedius (1539–1602), Neo-Catullanism combined in lively ways with the conventions of Petrarchanism, a tradition with which it might seem to stand in sharp contrast.46 The incorporation of Petrarchan tropes and motifs (including paradoxes and antitheses involving, for example, burning and freezing) were easy to transfer into the poetry of achieved and relished sexual contact associated with Pontanian Neo-Catullanism, while conversely the NeoCatullan styles and forms could be employed in poems of yearning mistress-veneration, closer to the Petrarchan situation and tone. The kiss theme also formed an association with putatively ‘Neo-Platonic’ tropes of soul-exchange, used by Pontano and others in the late fifteenth century, but most famously elaborated in the Basia of Secundus (2 and 13 especially). In these, the souls of lovers are woozily mingled through lingering kisses, or the vital spirits of one lover enter through the mouth to nourish and sustain the other, shown fainting through the peregrination of their own soul to an exile in the beloved’s breast.47 Secundus’ kisses were widely imitated.48 In the Netherlands several poets, including Janus Dousa the Elder (1545–1609), Janus Lernutius (1545–1619) and Albertus Eufrenius (1581–1626), wrote books of Basia or Sauia. In France, the Pancharis of Jean Bonnefons (1554–1614) was so clearly in the Secundan kissing genre too that it became commonly known as his Basia. Vernacular poets also wrote such collections: the Italian Gaspare Murtola (c. 1570–1624) has his book of Baci, and Rémy Belleau (1528–77) his French Baisers, while plenty of other French and Italian poets (especially the Pléiadistes and the Marinists) produced numbers of kiss-poems intermixed with other kinds of verse. The Catullan heredity of such poems was frequently stressed. Bonnefons, for instance, pays tribute to Catullus pater osculationum (‘Catullus, the father of osculations’), echoing the opening line of Catullus 21, Aureli, pater esuritionum (‘O Aurelius, father of starvations’), but transforming its insult into a compliment.49 The wedding poetry of Catullus also had a lasting influence on subsequent writers, in antiquity as well as in the Renaissance. In this influence 45 47 48 49

Secundus, ed. Guillot, 182. 46 See Forster (1969). See Wong (2017) 136–200, esp. 171–93. See Wong (2017) passim. See also Balsamo and Galand–Hally, eds. (2000). Johannis Bonefonii Arverni Carmina (London, 1720) 7 (bas. 3).

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the relevant parts of Poem 64, describing the marriage of Peleus and Thetis and including the song of the Parcae, effectively joined forces with Poems 61 and 62. Pontano in his De Amore Coniugali wrote a number of wedding poems with his usual Neo-Catullan traits, including two epithalamia for his daughters (3.3, 3.4).50 For all these he used elegiacs. Many aspects of them are taken from Catullus: chanted addresses to Hymen (cf. 61), the rising of Vesper (cf. 62), and so on. The flower imagery of Catullus 62.39–47 is the inspiration for some extended floral conceits in both epithalamia, and the flammeum (bridal veil) of Catullus 61 becomes the diminutive flammeolum in Pontano 3.4.71, out-Catullusing Catullus. Later, Jean Salmon Macrin, an early synthesiser of Latin Catullanism and Petrarchan conventions in France,51 begins his 1531 Epithalamiorum Liber (‘Book of Epithalamia’), with an invocation of the ‘Catullan law’ of Poem 16: Nam legem tulit hanc Catullus olim, princeps Hendecasyllabon Catullus, ut castus foret integerque uates, uatis carmina non item, lepore quae tum praecipue suo placerent si essent mollicula et parum seuera. Nos legem sequimur Catullianam Fescenninaque ludimus, Camoenae praefati ueniam licentiori.52 Catullus once established this law – Catullus the prince of the hendecasyllable – to wit, that the poet should be chaste and upright, but the same doesn’t go for the poet’s songs, which can only be specially pleasing with their particular charm if they are a touch naughty [mollicula] and not too severe. We follow this law of Catullus, and in play we compose fescennine verses, asking, in advance, your pardon for our more licentious Muse.

Macrin’s muse is not in fact as licentious as this apology promises: the apology, with its Catullan pose, is partly an end in itself. Indeed, the showy appeal to Catullus in a book of poems centred on the poet’s wedding would seem to indicate that a Catullan heritage for wedding poetry (for which there were also other important precedents in Statius, Claudian, etc.) seemed obvious to Macrin, and worth emphasising. Yet the actual influence of Catullus 61, 62 and 64 is very general, and the poems describing 50 51 52

Epithalamia: Pontano, ed. Oeschger, 176–85. On Macrin see Morrison (1955) and Ford (1997). Jean Salmon Macrin, Le Livre des Épithalames; Les Odes de 1530, ed. Georges Soubeille (Toulouse, 1978) 138.

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Macrin’s wedding night – Poems 8 and 10 – are less strikingly Catullan than others on non-nuptial themes, like the intervening Poem 9 with its hendecasyllables and kisses.53 Secundus also wrote a famous Epithalamium in a style markedly similar to that of his Basia. It is not, like Catullus, concerned with the nature of the marriage ceremony or the institution of marriage, but purely with the depiction of sexual consummation, nodding towards procreation. In Bonnefons, later, the link between the epithalamial and the basial was made more than a matter of stylistic similarity, because his Pancharis (1587), dominated by Neo-Catullan kisses, was followed directly by his long Pervigilium Veneris, not explicitly about a marital night, but so clearly influenced by the Epithalamium of Secundus that it is hard not to think of it as belonging to the same generic kind (both authors use lavishly NeoCatullan hendecasyllables). In the next century we find the young Dutch poet Petrus Stratenus (1616–40) combining the Secundan and Bonefonian models by writing a set of nineteen Basia – the same number as those of Secundus – ending with a sequence of wedding poems addressed to various people. Again Neo-Catullanism seemed an appropriate style for epithalamial themes, which are treated as though naturally germane (perhaps through common Catullan descent) to kissing tropes. But again the Catullanism is very generalised. In fact, the motif from Catullus’ wedding poems most widely adopted by Renaissance humanists was the imagery of ivy (61.34–5) and vine (61.102–5, 62.49–55), representing the closeness of the lovers’ embrace; and this sort of image was used in Neo-Catullan amatory verse of all kinds, not only in epithalamia. It became associated especially with the poetry of kissing.54 Another theme is worth mentioning briefly: Sirmione and Lake Garda (Benacus), known to be the site of Catullus’ home and celebrated by him in Poem 31. There is a good deal of Renaissance poetry inspired by this region, and since its most famous local poet was Catullus, much was made of the connection. The anonymous early-sixteenth-century epyllion called Sarca – the name of the river that flows into Garda – is, as Martin Korenjak has argued, ‘unmistakably modelled’ on the form and manner of Catullus’ own miniature epic, Poem 64, even while its basic theme more immediately remembers Poem 31.55 The Veronese poet Girolamo Fracastoro (1476/8–1553), too, known to posterity chiefly for his long 53 54 55

Macrin, ed. Soubeille, 170–9. For this motif’s post-Catullan association with kissing and nuptial themes see Wong (2017) 173–4, n. 64. Korenjak (2012) 530–1.

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hexameter poem Syphilis, often mentions Catullus. One long eclogue in praise of his friend and fellow poet Gian Matteo Giberti, for example, repeats at intervals, with slight modification, these lines: Syrmio, frondentes per ripas insere lauros: ille colit Musas, et uates educat, et iam magna iterum docti nascetur Musa Catulli, magnanimum heroa tua quae cantet in acta. (53–6)56 Sirmio, bring forth leafy laurels along your banks: for he [Giberti] cultivates the Muses, and fosters poets; and now the great Muse of learned Catullus will be born again, and with the power to sing, by your shore, the praise of this great-spirited hero!

The style is not Neo-Catullan. Rather, the eclogue form is apt to recall Virgil, and in these few lines we even find a phrase taken out of the Aeneid – the magnanimi heroes of 6.649. But Catullus remains the undisputed tutelary poet of the region; and therefore, to bless and define the relationship between these two of its eminent Renaissance inhabitants, Fracastoro and Giberti, both poets themselves, it is Catullus who must be evoked.

*

Neo-Catullan style required a language in which Catullan wordplay – abundant diminutives, polysyllabic nonce-forms – could be easily accommodated. French vernacular poets in particular rose to the challenge. In the 1530–40s, Clément Marot (1496–1544) imitated Catullus thematically, with kisses and sparrows scattered among the examples, but, as Ford points out, does not appear to have tried seriously to find a French equivalent for the Neo-Catullan style. Neither did his contemporaries such as Maurice Scève or Mellin de Saint-Gelais.57 It was left to the Pléiade poets, particularly Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–89), to develop a vernacular idiom in which to clothe the Neo-Catullan matter their elders had already been incorporating. This development occurred rapidly, around the early 1550s, almost instantly reaching a high level of sophistication. The influence of Marc-Antoine de Muret’s current lectures and scholarship (he published a commentary on Catullus in 1554, and was also enthusiastic about lesser-known Greek poets) played an important part in the cultivation of the sensibility that produced this French style mignard, as it came to be known: a ‘soft’ or ‘delicate’ style, though the term 56 57

Girolamo Fracastoro, Latin Poetry, ed. James Gardner (Cambridge, Mass., 2013) 318. Ford (2013) 74–81.

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also connotes friskiness. Mignard and molliculus have much common ground.58 Ronsard’s Livret de folastries (‘Little Book of Frisky Trifles’), anonymously published in 1553, bore on its title-page the two lines from Catullus 16 in which the lex Catulliana is expressed, while in the poems themselves, many of them obscene or scatological, Catullan influence mingles with that of the Greek Anthology, Martial and the Priapea. But in Ronsard’s Odes and Amours there are many more examples of Neo-Catullan style and substance, which, though often risqué, do not stray so far into indecency. Ronsard’s style mignard does most of the things that Pontanian NeoCatullanism could do in Latin: Petite Nymphe folâtre, Nymphette que j’idolatre, Ma mignonne, dont les yeux Logent mon pis et mon mieux: Ma doucette, ma sucrée, Ma Grace, ma Cytherée, Tu me dois pour m’appaiser Mille fois le jour baiser . . .59 O little frolicsome Nymph! O Nymphet whom I idolise! My little cutie, in your eyes rest both my happiness and my bane! My little sweetie, my sugared one, my Grace, my Cytherean [Venus]; you must, to appease me, give me a thousand kisses a day . . .

Pet names, Catullan kisses, diminutives, repetition and redundancy – all in a lively new vernacular idiom. Elements of the style, especially diminutives, spread into much of Ronsard’s less obviously ‘Catullan’ work too, in many an odelette and amourette (‘odelet’, ‘little love poem’). Ronsard’s friend Jean-Antoine de Baïf can be even more stylistically extreme. His Amours, mostly of the early 1550s, offer many pieces in the mignard fashion. Baïf imitates a number of Neo-Latin poets associated with Neo-Catullanism, including Secundus and Marullus, and shows a familiarity – partly owed to Muret – with Greek lyric as well as with Catullus and the Roman elegists. His most clearly Neo-Catullan poems tend to be written in short lines, sometimes in stanzas with complex rhyme-schemes, and are full of choice, playful vocabulary: the poems are chansonettes (little songs, cf. poematia), collected into livrelets (little books, 58 59

On Muret see Gaisser (1993) 146–68; and above, Chapter 12. Oeuvres Complètes de Ronsard, ed. Hugues Vaganay, vol. 2 (Paris, [1923]) 293–5; 293. Poem originally from the 1552 Amours.

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cf. libelli); they are addressed to femmelettes (little ladies), who may be friandelettes (little epicures) like his Francinelette (little Francine).60 These delicate rhyming lyrics successfully reproduce the ornate patternings, playful lightness, repetitions and super-refined diction of Latin NeoCatullanism – including its erotic babytalk – in fresh, elegant ways. France was also the focus of the sixteenth-century Anacreontic revival. Because of its prior popularity, and what seemed a comparable lightness and naughtiness of tone and matter, Neo-Catullanism provided some of the stylistic elements for the Latin version of the Anacreontic style. Henri Estienne’s editio princeps of Anacreon was published in Paris in 1554 with facing Latin paraphrases, and a year later a second set of Latin versions was published by Elie André. Both Latin translators, as John O’Brien has argued, gravitate towards Neo-Catullan mannerisms (among other tendencies), and many Neo-Latin poets followed suit.61 The French vernacular style mignard, with its Catullan heritage, also proved hospitable to the Anacreontic themes.62 In French poets such as Ronsard and Belleau, therefore, as well as in Neo-Latin verse, Catullanism and Anacreontism were often mixed.63 English is much less well adapted to the linguistic mannerisms required for the Neo-Catullan idiom. Catullan influence in English, therefore, is more a matter of theme and tone than of style. Thus, though Giles Fletcher the Elder (c. 1548–1611) imitates many of the same Neo-Latin poets in his Licia (1593) as Baïf had done a little earlier, including Marullus and Secundus, Fletcher’s English sonnets give no impression of deliberate Catullanism in manner. In the next century Richard Lovelace (1616–57) translated a dozen epigrams from Catullus, but there is nothing distinctive about their style as compared with the other translations among which they sit.64 The diminutives go unregistered in his English versions. Lovelace has apparently been attracted by wit, which is easily accommodated in the usual English epigram style in rhyming couplets, and by the emotional complexity of the Lesbia poems, more than by the commoner detachable motifs, or by the idiosyncratic traits of diction for which he has no English equivalent. Elsewhere, the favourite topoi of the continental 60 61 63 64

For sources of this sample vocabulary, see Baïf, Euvres en rime, ed. Charles Marty-Laveaux, vol. 1 (Paris, 1881), 229–31, 388–9. O’Brien (1995) 2, 80–1, 134–6, 168, 242. 62 Ibid., 155–99, esp. 190. See also Wong (2017) 243–51, 305. Appended (with other translations) to his Lucasta: Posthume Poems (1659). Lovelace translates 70, 72, 75, 82, 85, 86 and 87 (Lesbia); 13, 69, 103 and 106 (witty epigrammatic badinage); and 48 (kissing Juventius, not the more widely imitated 5 or 7).

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Neo-Catullanists were also favoured in the British Isles: kisses, sparrows, weddings. The main thematic difference is that the lack of an English Neo-Catullan style meant that Catullan trappings did not license and incite the more generalised kinds of sensualism that had come to be regarded as ‘Catullan’ in French and Latin. Catullan kissing, more or less diluted, is extremely common in English poetry from around the 1580s through to the Restoration.65 It is present, for example, in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591); in various lyrics by Elizabethan and Jacobean poets including Walter Ralegh, Thomas Campion and the ostentatiously Latinate Ben Jonson; in the Italianinspired sonnets and madrigals of William Drummond; and in the work of mid-seventeenth-century royalist poets, especially Robert Herrick. Often these kisses come via the Secundan tradition, as in the case of Thomas Stanley (1625–78), who also translated most of Secundus’ Basia.66 The English songbooks of the period are full of kissing-poems, often anonymous. Catullan sparrows in English are descended from John Skelton’s lament for ‘Philip Sparrow’, written around the first decade of the sixteenth century. Skelton recalls the details of Catullus 2 and 3 in making the sparrow perch in the female speaker’s bosom (‘Between my breastės soft’), as had the passer in Lesbia’s sinus.67 Later, George Gascoigne in the 1570s has a poem in ‘Praise of Philip Sparrow’; Drummond, some time before 1614, writes a poem to ‘Phyllis, on the death of her Sparrow’, which – like Skelton’s – has been ‘slain’ by a cat; and Herrick has an elegy ‘Upon the death of his Sparrow’ in the Hesperides (1648). The examples could be multiplied. Sonnet 83 of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, in which Astrophil expresses his envy for Stella’s beloved sparrow ‘Sir Phip’, is one of the most interesting, because the fact that the sparrow shares the poet’s Christian name helps to encourage a lewd reading, while the sonnet’s position at the end of a series of meditations on Astrophil’s stolen kiss emphasises Sir Phip’s Catullan heritage.68 The most famous wedding poem of the English Renaissance is Spenser’s Epithalamion (1594/5), in which the Catullan influence is of a very general kind; but one wonders whether the refrain in his Prothalamion (1596) is directly or indirectly influenced by the refrain of the Fates’ nuptial song in 65 66 67 68

See Wong (2017) 40–53, 201–312. ‘Kisses by Secundus’, from Stanley’s Poems ([privately printed], 1651) 121–31. See Wong (2017) 306–12. Complete Poems of John Skelton, ed. Philip Henderson, 2nd edn (London, 1948) 60–100; 63. See Wong (2017) 57–8.

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Catullus 64. Catullus has: currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi (‘run on, drawing the yarn, you spindles, run’); Spenser has: ‘Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song’,69 and we know that Catullus 64 appealed to Spenser, because he alludes to it in The Faerie Queene (vii 7.12). Among the many seventeenth-century epithalamia that draw on Catullus, the third of Henry Peacham’s Nuptiall Hymnes, composed for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613, is noteworthy inasmuch as its stanza form mimics that of Catullus 61: the glyconics and pherecrateans all become English octosyllables, the last, representing the pherecratean, being indented so as to set it apart. Peacham’s first two stanzas follow the Latin closely, and his refrain, ‘Io Hymen Hymenaeus’, reproduces Catullus’ io Hymen Hymenaee almost letter for letter.70 Pontano’s NeoCatullan epithalamia for his daughters (see above) were both imitated by George Chapman in his ‘Hymne to Hymen’, also written for the royal marriage in 1613;71 but in Hero and Leander (1598) the erudite Chapman had returned to Catullus’ originals: his epithalamial song in the ‘Fifth Sestiad’ echoes Catullus 62, evoking its antiphonal bands of youths and maidens (472–3), and sometimes paraphrasing details. Chapman closely renders lines 62–4 of the Latin, on the tripartite ownership of maidenheads (5.474–8), but with a curious difference. In Catullus each parent owns a third, and the parents’ two-thirds share, passed on to the chosen betrothed, outweighs the bride’s part, invalidating her objections; whereas in Chapman the parents have a third jointly, and the bride ‘saves’ a third for the lover, keeping the last part for herself. For this is not an arranged Roman marriage, but a love match to please Elizabethan readers.72

*

‘Catullan’ writing in the Renaissance tends to represent itself with halfsincere, half-defiant modesty, as a kind of sophisticated but unserious pastime: elegant, learned, but also frolicsome and trivial. To apologise for itself in such terms is one of its typical habits. Humanists who employ the Catullan style often refer to their productions as ‘trifles’, calling their collections, either in passing or on title-pages, nugae (‘nonsenses’), ioci (‘jests’), lusus (‘games’), and so on. There is some precedent in Catullus, who memorably – whether ironically or not – speaks of his own poems as nugae (1.4) and uersiculi (‘little verses’, 16.3, 50.4), and who seems to be 69 70 71 72

Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London, 1912), 601–2. Henry Peacham, The Period of Mourning [etc.] (London, 1613), sigs f1v-f2v. See Schoell (1915) 232. Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1941, repr. 1962), 162.

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talking about his poetry when he recalls former years in which he ‘disported’ (multa satis lusi, 68.17, and cf. 50.2). Also Pliny, with Catullus in mind, had used a number of these trivialising terms to describe the sort of poetry he was writing: not only, as we have seen, passerculi and columbuli (‘little sparrows’, ‘little doves’), but also poematia (‘little poems’), uersiculi and ineptiae (‘sillinesses’). Like Pliny, the humanists often prefer libellus (‘little book’) to liber (‘book’). Erotopaegnia or Erotopaignia (‘erotic playthings’) – the title ascribed by Ausonius and Aulus Gellius to a lost multi-book collection of poems by Laevius, an immediate forerunner of Catullus – was also, oddly, adopted as a book-title by poets in the Neo-Catullan vein, including Girolamo Angeriano (d. 1535), Janus Dousa the Younger (1571–96) and Caspar von Barth (1587–1658). Collections of Renaissance poems which appear under such self-deprecating titles are not always predominantly Catullan, but Neo-Catullanism is usually a significant part of their repertoires. These pseudo-bashful terms signal not only a lack of serious moral or didactic intent, but also a sophisticated, self-conscious flippancy, and they coyly signal erotic subject matter. Naturally such writing, with its extreme stylistic mannerisms, unrepentant apologies and narrow range of ludic and erotic themes, invited attack from the more severely minded. The English poet Phineas Fletcher (1582– 1650) chooses Neo-Catullan hendecasyllabics as both parodic vehicle and target when he wishes to launch an assault on the stupid poets who waste their time on ephemeral inanities: Quid, o quid Veneres, Cupidinesque, Turturesque, jocosque, passeresque Lasciui canitis greges, poetae? Et jam languidulos amantum ocellos, Et mox turgidulas sinu papillas; Jam fletus teneros, cachinnulosque, Mox suspiria, morsiunculasque, Mille basia, mille, mille nugas? (1–8)73 Why, oh why, you wanton droves – you poets! – why do you sing of Venuses and Cupids, and turtle-doves, and lovers’ japes, and sparrows? Now the languidulous eyes of lovers, and then the swelling little nipples on the breast? – now, tender lamentations, and little giggles; then sighs, and little nibblements, a thousand kisses, a thousand thousand trifles? 73

Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick S. Boas, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1909, repr. 1970) 293. Originally prefacing Giles Fletcher’s Christ’s Victorie (1610/32).

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But sarcastic pastiche can hardly exaggerate the qualities of so selfconsciously excessive a style, whose self-mocking tone anticipated, courted and deflected censure.

Further Reading The fullest study of Catullus in the Renaissance is by Gaisser (1993), who elsewhere provides chapter-length overviews (2007a, 2009 166–93). Ludwig (1990) is an important earlier essay on Catullan imitation in the period. I am indebted to both Gaisser and Ludwig, and also to Philip Ford, whose chapter on Neo-Catullanism in France (2013) is the best place to start on that topic (see also Morrison (1955), (1963)). Catullus’ influence on early modern English poetry has attracted less work: McPeek (1939) remains the fullest consideration, while Gaisser (2009) covers the period briefly; for the primary texts see Gaisser (2001) or Duckett (1925). On Catullan kisses in early modern poetry see Wong (2017) and the literature cited there. For more on Neo-Latin literature see Knight and Tilg (2015), Moul (2017), or Ford, Bloemendal and Fantazzi (2014). Many Neo-Latin poets of the Italian Renaissance, including the Greek-born Marullus, have been edited and translated for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press).

chapter 14

Catullus and Poetry in English since 1750 Stephen Harrison

Introduction This chapter will concentrate on the English-language literary reception of Catullus since 1750, particularly in poetry;1 there is stimulating work elsewhere on the reception of Catullus in other European literatures in this period.2 It will largely focus on Britain, with occasional excursions into other English-speaking environments. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain had seen much interest in translating and adapting Catullus into English,3 but the Augustan world of Pope and Dryden preferred the more obviously polished Virgil, Horace and Ovid amongst the Latin poets,4 a taste continued in the age of Dr Johnson (d.1784),5 and it was in the Romantic period from the later eighteenth century that Catullus began to regain in Britain the literary popularity he had enjoyed in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts.6

1

2

3 4 5 6

For other material on this topic see Harrington (1923) 192–215, Wiseman (1985) 211–45, Fitzgerald (1995) 212–34, Vance (1997) 112–32, Gaisser (2001) xxvii-xli, Ziolkowski (2007), Arkins (2007), Gaisser (2009) 194–221. For Catullus in prose fiction see nn. 34 and 35 below. My thanks to Karl (C. K.) Stead, Josephine Balmer, Anna Jackson and James Methven for kind permission to quote from their work in this chapter. For material on Germany see Seidensticker (1994) and von Albrecht (2003) 3–50, on France David-de Palacio (2005) and Aranjo (2005), on Italy Della Corte (1989) and Fo (2002); for further bibliography on Catullan reception in these and other countries see Holoka (1985) 291–6 and Frenz and Stelte (2012). See the wide range of work anthologised in Gaisser (2001) and the surveys in Harrington (1923) and McPeek (1939). Though the catasterism at the end of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) clearly looks to that of the lock of Berenice in Catullus 66 – see Martindale (1992) 204. Johnson translated Horace and Virgil, William Cowper (d.1800) Horace, Virgil, Ovid and the great Welsh neo-Latin poet John Owen, neither of them Catullus. See especially Stead (2016) 34–40. Catullus is mentioned only twice in the standard survey of classical reception in English literature from 1660–1790, Hopkins and Martindale (2012), but much more often in the volumes covering 1558–1660 and 1790–1880, Cheney and Hardie (2015) and Vance and Wallace (2015).

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Georgian and Victorian It was only in 1795 that the first more or less complete translation7 of Catullus into English was published by John Nott, physician and scholar, followed a generation later by that of the Hon. George Lamb (1821), Whig politician, likely natural son of George IV and half-brother of the second Viscount Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister.8 Both these were liberal figures choosing to translate a Latin poet who was seen as relatively unconventional and subversive, especially given his tendency to obscenity in invective.9 Nott indeed apologises in his preface for presenting the less polite parts of the text: ‘I have given the whole of Catullus without reserve. The chaste reader might think them [indecencies] best omitted; but the inquisitive scholar might wish to be acquainted even with the ribaldry and broad lampoon of Roman times.’10 The translation itself is unexceptional, as a quotation of the opening of poem 2 shows: Dear sparrow! the pride of my maid, With whom in sport she often plays, Whom oft, on her snowy breast laid, She toys with a thousand fond ways;

Lamb is a little more elegant and closer to the original: Dear Sparrow, long my fair’s delight Which in her breast to lay, To give her finger to whose bite, Whose puny anger to excite She oft is wont in play.

In his preface he is concerned to present Catullus as a respectable Roman and a heartfelt poet of love, while recognising his occasional crude language: ‘when he celebrates Lesbia, the heart speaks in every line; sensuality is refined into a higher tone, and only twice in his works, when driven into exile by extravagances of which she was the cause [i.e. Poem 11], and venting to Caelius his rage and grief at her voluntary debasement [i.e. 7 8 9

10

Nott (1795) presents the whole of Catullus’ Latin text, but often tones down the translations of obscene passages. For biographies of both translators see The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 online version www.oxforddnb.com. See the full account of both versions and authors in Stead (2016) 33–98, who notes that selected poems of Catullus translated by the radical politician John Wilkes were posthumously published in 1798. Nott (1795) 1.xi.

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Poem 58], does he, concerning her, indulge in the least grossness of expression’.11 Some sense of Catullus as an ‘alternative’ Latin poet can be seen in Robert Burns’ appropriation of the famous simile of the flower cut down by the plough at the end of Catullus 11 in the last stanza of his ‘To a Mountain-Daisy: On Turning One Down with the Plow’, in April, 1786: Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate, That fate is thine – no distant date; Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight Shall be thy doom.12

Here Burns literalises Catullus’ simile, recounting an incident from his real-life lowly occupation as a ploughman, and the flower (probably a poppy in Catullus) is the humble daisy. Both these elements can be seen as claiming Catullus for a broader social class, though the poem is in decorous English rather than Burns’s more demotic Scots mode. At the same time Catullus’ politer poems began to be more prominent in school education: the juvenilia of Wordsworth and Coleridge from the 1780s include versions of Poem 3 (the death of the sparrow, here metamorphosed into a starling) and Poem 5 (Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus). Wordsworth’s starling is not without pathos: Pity mourns in plaintive tone The lovely Starling dead and gone. Weep, ye Loves, and Venus, weep The lovely Starling fall’n asleep.

In the case of Byron, Harrow School’s encouragement of translation of classical poetry into English led to several versions of similar Catullan poems, published in Fugitive Pieces (1806) when the poet was eighteen; these were also influenced by the versions of the Irish poet and musician Thomas Moore published by him at the age of twenty-one in his 1801 The Poetical Works of Thomas Little.13 Byron’s homoerotic love-life at Cambridge was reflected here in his choice to translate the kiss-poem to the boy Juventius (48): 11 12 13

Lamb (1821) xxxiii; at lxix Lamb admits to excising problematic poems in his version, more genteel than that of Nott. Burns and Catullus were linked in the Victorian period as poets of genuine passion: see Vance (1997) 123. For all this material see Stead (2016) 152–99.

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stephen harrison Oh! might I kiss those eyes of fire, A million scarce would quench desire; Still would I steep my lips in bliss, And dwell an age on every kiss; Nor then my soul should sated be, Still would I kiss and cling to thee: Nought should my kiss from thine dissever, Still would we kiss and kiss for ever; E’en though the numbers did exceed The yellow harvest’s countless seed; To part would be a vain endeavour: Could I desist? – ah! never – never.

Leigh Hunt, radical friend of Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, enlisted Catullus as a poet of protest and polemic, employing a version of the poem narrating the story of the ecstatically self-castrating Attis (63) to attack the religious excesses of Primitive Methodism (1811), and pathetic elements from the same to enlist sympathy for the castrato singer Velluti (1825). In more conformist mode, he also translated Poem 61 to celebrate the marriage of George IV’s daughter and heir apparent Princess Charlotte (1816) to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the future king of the Belgians.14 But in general, Catullus’ position as the Latin poet favoured by the liberal and the young in the Romantic period seems clear. One Romantic who engaged with Catullus throughout his long life was Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864),15 who at the age of twenty included much Catullan material in his first collection of poems (1795), including versions of Poems 3 and 5,16 and nearly half a century later (1842) produced an extensive interpretative essay ‘The Poems of Catullus’ incorporating more of his own versions and paraphrases.17 Here he comments on most of the poems while omitting the indecent ones, confirms his age’s particular taste (see above) for Poems 3 and 63, and rounds off with the judgement that ‘he [Catullus] always is shrewd and brilliant; he often is pathetic; and he sometimes is sublime’.18 Of the versions in the essay, those of the lighter poems are more successful, for example the first half of Poem 39 (Landor does not render the poem’s more pungent second half on Egnatius’ dental hygiene): Egnatius has fine teeth, and those Eternally Egnatius shows. Some criminal is being tried 14 16

15 On Hunt and Catullus see in detail Stead (2016) 222–68. See Super (1976). 17 See Stead (2016) 153–65. Best found in Welby (1930) 177–225. 18 Welby (1930) 223.

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For murder; and they open wide; A widow wails her only son; Widow and him they open on. ‘Tis a disease, I’m very sure, And wish ’twere such as you could cure, My good Egnatius! for what’s half So silly as a silly laugh?19

Landor’s later ‘On Catullus’ of 1853 seems to be about to face the issue of Catullus’ obscenity20 but then turns to pure praise of his natural qualities: Tell me not what too well I know About the bard of Sirmio . . . Yes, in Thalia’s son Such stains there are . . . as when a Grace Sprinkles another’s laughing face With nectar, and runs on.

In the Victorian period into which Landor survived, Catullus was more widely read and studied:21 the learned if dry editions and commentaries of the Oxford scholar Robinson Ellis22 were supplemented by a volume of his translations which bravely tried to render each poem into an English approximation of the original Latin metre,23 while the Edinburgh professor W. Y. Sellar contributed a sympathetic account of Catullus to his pioneering critical work on the poets of the Roman Republic.24 The obscenity of many of Catullus’ invective poems was an issue both for educationalists and for Victorian society as a whole: selection and expurgation of Catullus, who according to Byron in Don Juan (10.111) ‘scarcely had a decent poem’, was the rule for school texts,25 while a translation intended for the general reader by Theodore Martin, the future biographer of Prince Albert, as well as excising a number of poems for their crudity, pleads in its introduction that the poems ‘most deeply stamped with licentiousness’ were a product of the poet’s youth and the decadence of his age in the late Roman Republic.26 However, the more unconventional aspects of Catullus clearly appealed to the equally unconventional tastes of Algernon Swinburne, who in his 19 20 21 22 24

25

Welby (1930) 206. Admitted by Landor not only implicitly in the omissions in his 1842 essay, but also in an earlier poem ‘Written in a Catullus’, which talks of the poet’s ‘uncleanly wit’ and ‘rank putridity’. For the Victorian reception of Catullus see especially Vance (1997) 112–32. See Ellis (1867) and (1876), both followed by a number of further editions. 23 Ellis (1871). Sellar (1889) 408–74 (in the third edition of a work first published in 1863), concluding: ‘If to love warmly, constantly and unselfishly be the best title to the love of others, few poets, in any age or country, deserve a kindlier place in the hearts of men than the young Catullus’ (474). 26 See Trimble (2012). See Martin (1861) xi-xii.

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mesmeric sado-masochistic poem ‘Dolores’ (1866) incorporated elements of Catullus 63 and the Priapean poems previously known as Catullus 18 and 19, thought Catullan by Swinburne.27 More conventional is Swinburne’s use of Poem 101, the lament for the poet’s brother, which he imitates in his lengthy elegy for Baudelaire which has the last words of Catullus’ poem as its title (‘Ave Atque Vale’, 1878): here in the eighteenth and final stanza Swinburne’s poetic brother is addressed in a version of the Roman poet’s words to his actual brother: For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, Take at my hands this garland, and farewell. Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, With sadder than the Niobean womb . . .

For Swinburne, Catullus like Baudelaire was a brother poet (in ‘To Catullus’ (1883) the Roman is addressed as ‘My brother, my Valerius’); for him Catullus was ‘the first if not the only Latin poet I loved’,28 and he imitated his characteristic metres in English equivalents in ‘Hendecasyllabics’(1866) and in twenty-one Latin pure iambic trimeters (no mean feat) in ‘Ad Catullum’ (1878), another poem of praise. Catullus 101 was also picked up more than once by another prominent Victorian poet. In In Memoriam (1850) Tennyson invokes the poem in lamenting his dead more-than-brother Arthur Hallam (57): I hear it now, and o’er and o’er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave’ said, ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore.

Likewise ‘Frater ave atque vale’ (1880) records Tennyson’s visit to Catullus’ home of Sirmione, citing and echoing Catullus’ own praise of the peninsula in Poem 31, but also recording through its quotations from the last line of Poem 101 (101.10 atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale) Tennyson’s grief for his own brother, who had died the previous year.29 Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row! So they row’d, and there we landed – ‘O venusta Sirmio!’ There to me through all the groves of olive in the summer glow, 27 28 29

See Boulet (2009). In an 1894 letter to the Cambridge literary scholar F. W. H. Myers: Meyers (2004) 72. For Swinburne’s imitations of Catullus see further Ridenour (1988). See Pavlock (1979).

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There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow, Came that ‘Ave atque Vale’ of the Poet’s hopeless woe, Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago, ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ – as we wandered to and fro Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!30

Tennyson also imitated Catullan metre in ‘Hendecasyllabics’ (1863), a likely model for Swinburne’s homonymous poem (see above), which was also Catullan in its invective content: O you chorus of indolent reviewers, Irresponsible, indolent reviewers, Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem All composed in a metre of Catullus, All in quantity, careful of my motion, Like a skater on ice that hardly bears him, Lest I fall unawares before the people, Waking laughter in indolent reviewers. Should I flounder awhile without a tumble Through this metrification of Catullus, They should speak to me not without a welcome, All that chorus of indolent reviewers.

The Twentieth Century W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Scholars’ (1919) famously contrasts Catullus’ putative romantic life with the supposedly desiccated existence of the scholars who study him, perhaps thinking of the volumes of Robinson Ellis: Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? 30

For this and several other Tennysonian poems imitating Catullan metres see Markley (2004) 114–19.

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Catullan scholarship of the inter-war period was in fact developing ideas about the two contrasting aspects of Catullus as learned Alexandrian poet and passionate child of nature, expressed for example in the important German edition of Kroll (1923)31 or the stimulating monograph of the then Toronto-based Havelock (1939). This was something of a counter to the Yeats-style romantic and biographising interpretations of Catullus’ poetry then generally prevalent,32 and on the Alexandrian side incorporated important German work by Wilamowitz on Catullus’ use of Hellenistic poetry.33 The 1930s and 1940s saw a series of biographical novels on the affair of Catullus and Lesbia, with the best known of them Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948);34 this established a literary tradition that still continues in British and US romantic/historical fiction.35 This romantic tendency was wittily subverted by Dorothy Parker in ‘From a Letter from Lesbia’ (1928), suggesting a dysfunctional relationship and satirising the often-imitated pathos of the dead sparrow of Poem 3: That thing he wrote, the time the sparrow died – (Oh, most unpleasant – gloomy, tedious words!) I called it sweet, and made believe I cried; The stupid fool! I’ve always hated birds . . .

As always, Catullus’ aggressive side could be invoked as well as his pathetic capacity. In ‘To Catullus’ (1921) the aged Poet Laureate Robert Bridges wished for the Latin poet’s invective firepower to attack an unnamed enemy, following Swinburne and Tennyson’s ‘Hendecasyllabics’ (above) in using a rhythmical version of Catullus’ own hendecasyllable: Would that you were alive today, Catullus! Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us, A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk, Of no least sorry use on earth, but only Fit in fancy to justify the outlay Of your most horrible vocabulary.

More in the spirit of the times, Catullus was taken up by some major figures in the modernist movement: Ezra Pound’s translations include versions of three short Catullan poems (26, 43 and 85),36 while Basil 31 33 34 35 36

32 Kroll (1923) vii. See Havelock (1939) 73–86. See Wilamowitz (1924) 2.277–310, taken up in English by e.g. Wheeler (1934). For these see Wiseman (1985) 233–41 For such novels of the pre-1975 period see Wiseman (1975), and for more recent examples see n.45 below and Theodorakopoulos (2013). Pound (1970) 408. The earliest of these (43) was written in 1916.

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Bunting produced a loose version (1931) of Poem 63 (Attis) and gave up in irritation a closer version (1933) of Poem 64 (Peleus and Thetis), though he later completed one of Poem 51 (1965).37 The most striking Catullan product of the modernist aesthetic was the homophonic translation by Louis and Celia Zukofsky, influenced by Pound and composed over a decade before its publication in 1969.38 I cite the opening of Poem 8 followed by the Latin whose sounds it imitates: Miss her, Catullus? don’t be so inept to rail at what you see perish when perished is the case. Full, sure once, candid the sunny days glowed, solace, when you went about it as your girl would have it, you loved her as no one else shall ever be loved. Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, et quod vides perisse perditum ducas. fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles, cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.

Catullus was a natural classical focus for the youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Already in 1942 Louis MacNeice, in his ‘Epitaph for Liberal Poets’, depicts Catullus as an unsuccessful youthful rebel: The Individual has died before; Catullus Went down young, gave place to those who were born old And more adaptable and were not even jealous Of his wild life and lyrics.

Similarly, the American scholar Frank Copley’s lively versions from 1957 present Catullus as a kind of James Dean figure (‘a rebel, a radical, an experimenter, an innovator, a pioneer’),39 and are at their most successful in the lighter poems where they convey an attractive contemporary flavour, for example at the start of Poem 13, where uneven lineation and non-use of capitals and punctuation recall the work of E. E. Cummings: say Fabullus you’ll get a swell dinner at my house a couple three days from now (if your luck holds out) all you gotta do is bring the dinner 37 38 39

Bunting (2000) 30–1, 153, 141 respectively. Zukofsky and Zukofsky 1969; for an excellent brief account and bibliography see www.z-site.net/ notes-to-poetry/catullus-1969-with-celia-zukofsky. Copley (1957) xi.

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stephen harrison and make it good and be sure there’s plenty Oh yes don’t forget a girl (I like blondes) and a bottle of wine maybe . . . .

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that increasing general toleration of obscenity, as we have seen a consistent issue for earlier readers of Catullus, led to translations where his colourful obscene language could be accurately rendered: effective English translations of this kind include those by Peter Whigham (1966), C. H. Sisson (1967) and Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1978). Amongst poetic adaptations in this period, perhaps the most stimulating are the work of the New Zealand poet James Baxter (1926–72).40 In 1966–8 Baxter was a creative writing fellow at his alma mater the University of Otago, where he attended the classes of Kenneth Quinn, who was then working on the second edition (1969) of his influential The Catullan Revolution (1959) and his commentary on Catullus (1970) and seems to have encouraged Baxter in what Quinn regarded as ‘creative translations’. These versions were published a few years later in Baxter’s posthumous collection Runes (1973) as a fourteen-poem sequence ‘Words to Lay a Strong Ghost’. The third poem in the sequence, ‘The Budgie’, provides a neat version of Catullus 3: Pyrrha’s bright budgie who would say, ‘Pretty fellow! Pretty fellow!’ For bits of cake from her hand is now Silent in the underworld.

Here the more European sparrow (though in fact found in New Zealand) is changed for the typically Antipodean budgerigar, and other telling transformations of detail neatly relocate the poem to Baxter’s own time and space. It is notable that Baxter (here and elsewhere) uses the name ‘Pyrrha’ for the beloved, not Catullus’ ‘Lesbia’, drawing the name from Horace (Odes 1.5).41 Baxter, like a number of poets already treated, is also interested in Poem 101; he translated it as a rather conventional sonnet aged 19,42 but provides a more rewarding version in the 1973 sequence under the title ‘At the Grave of a War Hero’, appropriately imagining the brother as a modern ANZAC 40 41

42

For more on Baxter’s Catullus see Harrison (2009). The origin is clearly in Horace Odes 1.5, where the same name occurs for an ex-lover, and the surprise of Baxter’s sequence is its sixth poem, ‘The Change-Over’, where that famous ode of Horace is clearly appropriated in the middle of a group otherwise dedicated to Catullus. See Harrison (2009).

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war casualty to whose grave the speaker brings a modern offering matching that of Catullus:43 One fat nut from the macrocarpa tree That grows above the garage Where you kept your bike and rabbit traps – I plant it at the edge of your military Slab . . .

This expanded version moves away from the original in the middle, but returns to it at the end in echoing Catullus’ final aue atque uale: . . . Well, brother, The War Graves Commission Has put you in your place Right where you started from, Perfectly adjusted, normalised, In your concrete cabin – till the last flag drops, Good luck, mate; goodbye!

Another New Zealand poet with a close relationship to Catullus is C. K. Stead, who in a series of poems from 1982 has produced many versions,44 one of the most attractive of which is ‘From The Clodian Songbook 7’ (1982), a condensed rendering of Catullus 11: Air New Zealand old friend of Catullus you offer a quick hike to Disneyland the South Pole Hong Kong’s hotspots to ease a jealous ache. Thanks brother but I’d rather you flew downcountry a message to Clodia. Tell her she’s known to her 300 loveless lovers as the scrum machine. 43

44

This is fitting given that Catullus’ brother died and was buried at the famous war site of Troy (Catullus 65.7–8); Baxter may have in mind the site of Gallipoli, opposite the site of Troy on the other side of the Dardanelles, where many ANZACs died in 1915, though the formal setting of the poem seems to be a World War II cemetery. It is worth recalling that New Zealand troops served in Vietnam in the period 1963–1975 and that a number of them were killed – see Lyles (2004). See Harrison (2009).

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stephen harrison Tell her Catullus loves her as the lone lawn daisy loves the Masport mower.

Catullus in the Twenty-first Century One key feature of the Anglophone literary reception of Catullus in the twenty-first century has been the prominence of female poets and writers. Others have written on female-authored biographical novels on the Catullus/Clodia affair,45 and I will focus on female poetic translations and adaptations. One of the most attractive contributions has been that of the classical scholar, poet, translator and critic Josephine Balmer.46 In Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (Balmer 2004a) she provides a lively modern translation of all the poems except the longest (omitting 61–6 and 68), reordering them by theme to make them more accessible to a modern audience; here she is clearly aware of the hotly debated issue of whether or not the poems in the Catullan collection we have follows the intended order of the poet.47 Here I cite the first part of her translation of Poem 51, renumbered by her as Poem 5 (‘On Seeing Lesbia: A Translation of Sappho’): That man to me seems the equal of a god; that man – dare I say? – surpasses the divine, the one who sits by you, who time after time looks on you, who hears you as you laugh so sweetly, while I’m in hell, senses shredded, torn apart; for when I see you there, Lesbia, there’s nothing left of me [no voice to speak of ]

Balmer here chooses an English metre identical in shape and syllable-count to Catullus’ Sapphic stanza (three identical lines of eleven syllables followed by one of five), and preserves much of the Latin word order, e.g. in the opening ‘That man to me’ = Ille mi; she also shows her scholarly awareness by presenting her eighth line in brackets since it fills in a one-line lacuna in 45 46 47

See Theodorakopoulos (2013), treating The Key, by Benita Kane Jaro (1988), The Floating Book, by Michelle Lovric (2003), and Counting the Stars, by Helen Dunmore (2008). See her own full discussion of her classical work in Balmer (2013). For a good summary of the problem see Skinner (2007a), and for Balmer’s own view Balmer (2013) 165–7.

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the original. As she points out in her own discussion, in her version this poem voices a female version of a male poet’s heterosexual version of a female homosexual poem of desire,48 a gender complexity fully at home in the twenty-first century.49 She can also produce sharp versions of the more colourful poems, for example 33, renumbered by her as 64, ‘A Father and Son team’: Our most renowned pair of bath-house thieves – father Vibennius, rent-boy son (the former’s hand is the stickier, the latter’s arse-hole the greedier) – should both leave town for nether regions or for hell; father’s many bath-thefts are well-known, and son’s hairy buttocks a no-go, won’t fetch a penny piece.

Simultaneously with her translation, Balmer published Chasing Catullus (Balmer 2004b), using poems stimulated by Catullus and other classical sources to deal with some poignant events in her own life.50 The title poem from this collection explores her method there of appropriating classical poets to make her own personal statements, using a series of witty puns which link metaphorical grammatical and scholarly terms with their more human literal senses: It’s the rule of attraction, the corruption of texts, the way his corpus tastes of skin and sweat, that taint of decay, scent of cheated death. But then, I’ve always liked them old – parsed hearts, lost minds, redundant souls; just enough to get me fleshing ghosts, giving them tongue, jumping their bones. Yet sleep with the dead and you’ll wake with the worms – stripped down, compressed, a little accusative, slightly stressed – to find the code you crack, the clause that breaks, is no longer subordinate, it’s now your own.

Another female poet-translator is the Canadian classical scholar Anne Carson. In her 2000 collection Men in the Off Hours she includes a series of loose versions of short Catullan poems (2, 3, 31, 43, 46, 50, 58, 70, 75, 76, 85, 48 50

49 Balmer (2013) 150–3 . See e.g. Butler (2004). See her own discussion in Balmer (2013) 171–99.

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86, 96, 97, 101 and 109), but her most notable Catullan enterprise is her 2010 Nox, based on Catullus 101, the poem of lament for the poet’s brother, which she had already rendered in her 2000 series and which, as we have seen, is particularly popular in his modern reception. Nox is an extraordinary work on one very long concertina-folded sheet of paper, presented within a book-size box, which combines expanded lexicographical considerations of every word in this short poem and literary comments on it with many other meditational fragments, as well as a poetic rendering of it: Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed – I arrive at these poor, brother, burials so I could give you the last gift owed to death and talk (why?) with mute ash. Now that Fortune tore you from me, you oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me, now still anyway this – what a distant mood of parents handed down as the sad gift for burials – accept! soaked with tears of a brother and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.

Here she translates line-for-line, differently from her looser 2000 versions, and sticks notably close to the Latin and its word order (e.g. line 1, matching Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus, ‘accept’ for accipe as the first word of line 9, ‘and into forever’ for atque in perpetuum in the last line). The key narrative strand in Nox is Carson’s account of her troubled and estranged brother Michael who died in 2000 and whose funeral she attended in distant Copenhagen after little contact over two decades: the story of Michael’s sad life and dysfunctional relations with his family is gradually pieced together over the volume. This close connection of the situation of the Catullan poem with Carson’s own family circumstances lends this remarkable volume particular pathos, as do the many old photographs of the author, subject and other items such as letters and their stamps which give it some of the character of a family album. A different kind of application of Catullus to a family situation is found in another brilliantly innovative take in the New Zealand poet and scholar Anna Jackson’s catullus for children (2003).51 Here Catullus’ 51

For Jackson’s own discussion of her work see Jackson (2009). There and elsewhere she acknowledges the influence of the excellent series of earlier New Zealand poetic versions of Catullus by C. K. (Karl) Stead, which I have discussed in detail in Harrison (2009).

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poems are recontextualised in the world of contemporary New Zealand children. The closest engagement with a Catullan original is perhaps in the opening of ‘Party’, a version of 13, the poet’s dinner invitation to Fabullus: You’re rounding up all the children in the cul-de-sac for a party in your treehouse – you promise them more food than there is sand in Iraq! So long as they can cajole it out of their parents – unless they want to eat the spider webs that is all you have got on your shelves.

Here we find a fusion of the original invitation poem with a detail from Catullus 7, where the poet suggests that only the number of sand-grains in the North African desert can match the number of kisses which is sufficient for him and Lesbia (7.1–6); this is accompanied by a neat topical allusion to Iraq, reflecting the international coalition’s invasion of that country in March 2003. In her more recent volume, I, Clodia and Other Portraits (2014), Jackson presents a second-wave feminist approach: her title echoes that of the two scholarly volumes entitled I, Claudia (Kleiner and Matheson 1996 and 2000), which sought to stress the value of the often-occluded roles and achievements of women in the Roman world. Here for example she presents a version of Poem 3, the ever-popular death of the sparrow, in ‘Pipiabat [used to chirp . . .]’: Look at me, my tear-stained face, my red eyes – is this what you came for? It’s not what you think. So there are verses about me circulating about the city – how could you possibly imagine I, Clodia would care? I might cry over your verses – tears of laughter – but these are real tears, I’m grieving. Look at what was my little bird, yesterday – this was somebody, closer to me than . . . you had better be leaving.

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Jackson begins from the end of Catullus’ poem which suggests that the bird’s death is the reason for Lesbia’s tears (3.16–18), and as in ‘Party’ fuses two Catullan ideas in one poem, adding the notion that the poet has been attacking her in his work (cf. Poem 36). Not only Jackson’s overall female framework but also her choice of the sparrow-poem here surely look back to Dorothy Parker’s trope of seeing the sparrow’s death from Clodia/ Lesbia’s point of view (see above). Another female perspective is to be found in Tiffany Atkinson’s Catulla et al. (2011), presenting a modern female persona in loose adaptations of the male Roman poet. So ‘Basia Mille’, her version of Poem 5, Viuamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, is addressed to Rufus, perhaps evoking Lesbia’s likely alternative lover Caelius Rufus (cf. poem 58): Then live with me, Rufus. We’ll have four fine rooms And an excellent kitchen . . . . . . Meanwhile kiss me in the checkout queue and let the tight mouths clatter . . .

And Catullus’ homosexual love poems to Iuventius become heterosexual in ‘99’ (turning Catullus 99 on kissing the boy): Iuventius, your corona of red hair makes my fingers itch. I’ve wondered what this means. You sat behind me; I was cross-legged on the carpet like a girl . . . . . . I have no answer for your cool, soft mouth . . .

This gender-bending is a natural next feminist step and appeals to the twenty-first century interest in fluid gender identity (see above); but it also reflects a strong strand in contemporary Catullan criticism, which has often noted the ‘feminine’ position taken up by the poet in passages such as the poppy simile at the end of Poem 11.52 The Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn has also produced some sharp and witty versions of Catullus in her collections Profit and Loss (2011) and The Radio (2017). Particularly pointed is her adaptation of Poem 28, an ironic expression of sympathy with Catullus’ friends on provincial service with an exploitative governor, in ‘Government Servants’ (in Flynn 2017): 52

See especially Skinner (1993). Suitably, Atkinson includes an allusion to the gender-bending Attis poem (63) in ‘Ave atque vale’.

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Government servants with your dinky backpacks, cohorts of bullshit, at its beck and call: friend-of-my-youth, and you, my bosom buddy, how is it going? Have you had your fill of corporate wine and state-subsidized feeding, fiddled expenses, claim forms and books cooked to show some profit?

Here we find truly Catullan vivacity and edge, both picking up lexical items from the original (‘cohorts of bullshit’ renders 28.1 cohors inanis) and applying a satirical voice to a modern political issue with telling and amusing contemporary detail (‘dinky backpacks’). The latest female translator of Catullus in the UK is Daisy Dunn, whose The Poems of Catullus came out in 2016 (Dunn 2016a). She is another scholar-poet, whose versions are natural and close to the originals, for example the opening of Poem 3: Mourn, Venuses and Cupids And who have tasted love. My girl’s sparrow is dead, Sparrow, apple of my girl’s eye Whom she loved more than her own eyes . . .53

Simultaneously with this translation, Dunn published a vivid and mildly fictionalised biography of Catullus, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet (Dunn 2016b), which returns to the early twentieth-century tradition of reconstructing Catullus’ life and loves from his poems; it is generally well contextualised in contemporary Roman history and culture, and uses her own translations throughout. As in the case of recent novels about Catullus (see n. 45 above), the apparent immediacy and realism of the poems continues to stimulate imaginative biographical reconstruction. Not all Catullan work of the last two decades has been by women.54 I finish with two examples, the much praised complete 2005 translation by the veteran UK/US classicist Peter Green, from which I quote the parallel lines to those of Dunn cited above, the opening of Poem 3: 53

54

The publication of this version was followed by a correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement about how to translate Catullus 32.8 nouem continuas fututiones, rendered ‘nine continuous fucks’ by Dunn – see www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/so-how-do-you-translate-fututiones. I mention in passing the splendid Ulster-Scots versions by the distinguished Ulster poet Michael Longley (one printed in Longley 2008), which I discuss in Harrison (forthcoming).

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stephen harrison Mourn, Cupids all, every Venus, and whatever company still exists of caring people. Sparrow lies dead, my own true sweetheart’s sparrow, Sparrow, the pet and darling of my sweetheart, loved by her more than she valued her own eyesight.

Here there is effective close replication of the rhetorical and insistent repetitions of the original, passer . . . passer (3–4), meae puellae . . . meae puellae (3–4), but also a clear attempt to present Catullus in modern diction (‘caring people’, ‘eyesight’). Especially enjoyable for me are the brilliantly witty versions in James Methven’s Precious Asses (2009), which transpose Catullus’ poems to a modern student environment and sometimes in good twenty-first century mode swap their genders. For example, the poem to Catullus’ friend Furius about his villa open to the cold draughts of debt (26) becomes with neat topicality one addressed to Cherie Booth (wife of Tony Blair) about her hair (her expensive travelling stylist in the 2005 UK general election campaign had been the subject of media comment)55 in ‘So what?’: Cherie dear, your cute bob is lovely, Mind, at that price it should be, Tho’ I must say it leaves your neck Looking a little draughty. Blown to the East, tugged to the West, Nuzzled to the South, Northwards floating: Cherie’s immaculate hair Wins our hearts and votes.

This nicely recreates some of the satirical tone of Catullan poems about contemporary Roman politicians (Caesar and Pompey in 29, Caesar in 57 and 93). More graphic is ‘All you can eat for £5.99’, which well conveys the shocking idea of Poem 58 (addressed to Catullus’ likely erotic rival, Caelius) that Lesbia is servicing the males of Rome as a street prostitute: Rhodz, I thought you should know: Your Phoebe, my Phoebe, that Phoebe Whom – uniquely – Your Jimmy loved more than All the boys and girls he’s ever loved – Was last seen in the door of that greasy 55

See e.g. www.telegraph.co.uspk/news/uknews/1516373/Cherie-Blair-spent-7700-on-electioncampaign-hairdos.-Sandra-Howard-spent-65.-Which-gets-your-vote.html

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Chinese ‘Eat as Much as You Like’ caff, Chowing down on the ’skins of High-minded hoodied chavs.

Lesbia’s erotic antics in the alleyways of Rome are here memorably updated to a modern urban environment; the last line is a splendid rendering of magnanimi Remi nepotes.56

Conclusion The foregoing shows (I hope) that the literary reception of Catullus in English since 1750 is rich indeed. Some trends and common elements have emerged: Catullus has consistently been favoured by the youthful and progressive, and has been particularly appealing to women in recent years. His more obscene poems have been more freely translated and imitated as social attitudes to such material in literature have liberalised, especially over the last half-century. Certain poems have had a continuing popularity over the whole period: the poems on Lesbia’s sparrow (2 and 3) and the lament for the poet’s brother (101), perhaps because they appeal to the universal situations of the passing of pets and close relatives. Catullus has been appropriated for different types of Zeitgeist: liberal politics in the nineteenth century, modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, feminism and gender fluidity in more recent years. Literary receptions have also often showed the influence of the Catullan scholarship of their own time, not least because they have been produced by poets who are themselves scholars or from a scholarly environment. Consistent interest has been shown in the apparent emotional realism of the poems, leading to a tendency to read them biographically and to treat them as the basis for fiction. The passionate immediacy of the poet’s first-person voice remains just as important as his literary learning and sophistication for his modern receivers.

Further Reading Gaisser (2001) is a rich anthology of Catullan translations and imitations which covers our period as well as earlier ones; Wiseman (1985) has a stimulating chapter on the modern literary reception of the Clodia story. On Catullus in the Romantic period Stead (2016) is now indispensable, while the Catullus 56

For non-UK English speakers, ‘chav’ is a colloquial term for a low-status young male, while ‘caff ’ is an abbreviation for ‘café’.

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chapter in Vance (1997) is the key item for the Victorian era, and Ziolkowski (2007) is a rich resource for Anglo-American material since 1945. Other useful material on Catullan reception in our period can be found in Harrington (1923, old but still serviceable), Fitzgerald (1995, suggestive material on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), and Arkins (2007, a good survey of the twentieth century).

Abbreviations and Bibliography

Abbreviations ADB BMC BNP DBI FRH GL GW ISTC LTUR NDB PMG TLL

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Index Locorum

CATULLUS (1–60) 144–53, 178 (1) 62–3, 73–5, 168, 186, (1.3–4) 243, (1.9) 186 (2–14) 179–81, 217 (2) 63, 169, 344 (2b) 79 (3) 63, 350, 352, 357, 359 (4) 256 (5) 358 (6) 122 (7) 97 (8) 64–6, 77, 94–6, 351 (9) 98 (10) 122 (11) 1, 101, 150–1, 345, 353, (11.21–4) 78–9, 234 (13) 351, 357 (14.1–2) 98 (14b-26) 181–4, 217 (16) 76, 112, 182, 321 (17) 12–13, 152, 183 (22) 183 (25) 118 (26) 360 (27–60) 184–201 (27–48) 185–94, 217 (27) 187 (28) 187, 358 (29) 188, (29.6–7) 230 (30) 110, 151, 188 (31) 189 (33) 355 (34) 152, 189 (35) 189 (36) 190 (37) 90–1, 190 (38) 126, 191 (39) 190, 346 (40) 170 (42) 191 (44) 9, 42–4, 191, (44.7–9) 127 (45) 77, 192

(46) 193 (47) 193 (48) 182, 193, 345 (49–60) 194–201, 217 (49) 100, 197 (50) 26–7, 77, 195 (51) 52–7, 75, 96, 198, 226–9, 354 (52) 2, 196 (53) 195 (54) 197 (57) 200 (58) 107, 360 (61-68b) 171–8 (61–4) 153–8 (61) 59–62, 153, 172, (61.102) 278 (62) 59–62, 154, 172, 264, 268, 314, (62.43) 234 (63) 82, 156–8, 173 (64) 66–9, 104–5, 154–6, 174, (64.43–6) 40, (64.139–48) 222 (65–116) 158–65 (65) 50–2, 99, 175, (65.19–24) 80 (66) 50–2, 175, (66.47–50) 50 (67) 175, 314 (68) 81, 102–4, 305, 314 (68a) 176 (68b) 177 (69–116) 201–8 (69–92) 202–8, 217 (70) 57–9, (70.3–4) 222 (72) 98 (76) 107, 204 (77) 204 (79) 205 (80.6) 127 (81) 11–12 (83) 206 (84) 208 (85) 96 (86) 97 (92) 206

399

400

Index Locorum

(93–115) 208–17 (95) 211 (96) 28, 212 (97) 212 (98) 213 (99) 213, 358 (100) 213 (101) 19, 63, 214, 259, 348, 352, 356, (101.1–2) 235 (102) 214 (103) 215 (104) 215 (112) 216 (113) 210 OTHER Apuleius (Apologia 10) 93 Ausonius (Praef. 4.3) 295 Callimachus (Aetia fr. 110) 50–2, (110.47–50) 50, (Epigram 25) 57–9, (27) 51, (Hecale 291.3) 60 Calvus (2C/35H) 29, (13C/24H) 30, (15C/25H) 35, (16C/28H) 28, (17C/38H) 29, (18C/39H) 30 Cicero (Att. 7.2.1) 31, (Orator 161) 31, (Tusc. Disp. 3.45) 37

Cinna (1C/6H) 42, 210, (7C/9H) 35, (11C/13H) 35–6, 51, (14C/H) 42 Ennius (Ann. 206–7) 28, (620) 124, 210, (Medea Exul 1–2/208-9J) 67 Euripides (Medea 1–4) 67 Horace (Carm. 1.13) 226, (1.22) 228, (Epode 4.5) 230, (Sat. 1.10.17–19) 229 Isidore (Etym. 19.33.3) 36 Laevius (28C) 44 Lucretius (1.926–8) 39, (2.27, 37–8) 40 Martial (1.7) 248, (11.6.14–16) 328, (11.62.1–2) 250, (11.99) 250 Meleager (Anth. Pal. 4.1.1–2) 62 Menander (Samia 326–56) 65–6 Mucius Scaevola (1C/91H) 42 Philodemus (Epigrams ed. Sider) (19.1) 37, (29.7) 37 Pliny the Elder (HN 1 praef. 1) 186, 243 Pliny the Younger (Ep. 1.16.5) 186, 244, (4.14.1) 245, (4.27.4) 246 Sappho (31) 53–7, 75 Statius, (Siluae 3.2) 256, (Thebaid 9.46–53) 258 Virgil, (Aen. 6.692–3) 235, (9.433–7) 234, (9. 435–7) 61, (11.67–71) 234, (11.68–71) 61

General Index

address, direct 133–9 Aemilius Scaurus, M. (praetor 56 bc) 211 aemulatio 54 Agius of Corvey 271 Agnesini, Alex 314 ‘Alexandrian footnote’ 66 Alfenus Varus, P. (cos. suff. 39 bc) 3, 29n, 188 anecdote 105–7 Aratus 35, 38, 41, 49, 51, 52, 154 archaism 127–30 Atkinson, Tiffany 358 atque 120 Aurelius 180–3 Avantius or Avancius (Girolamo Avanzi) 297, 298 Baehrens, Emil 308 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de 337 Balmer, Josephine 354–5 Bartolomeo Fonzio 277 Baxter, James 352 Beccadelli, Antonio (Panormita) 320–2 Benoist, Eugène 310 Benzo of Alexandria 273 Bergk, Theodor 309 Bithynia 2, 4, 18, 180 book, concepts of 254 Bridges, Robert 350 Bruni, Leonardo 322 Buchanan, George 331 Bunting, Basil 350 Burns, Robert 345 Byron, Lord 345 Caecilius 34, 99 Caesius Bassus 185 Callimachus 30, 36, 37, 38–9, 46, 50, 51, 56, 68, 74, 75, 82, 99, 109, 119, 122, 126, 129, 147, 154, 156, 160, 168, 173, 175, 176, 186, 201, 203, 212, 232, 241, 248, 255, 260, 320

Calphurnius (Giovanni Planza de’ Ruffinoni) 294 Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, L. (cos. 58 BC) 4, 37, 193 Campesani, Benvenuto (dei Campesani, Benvenuto, Benvenutus de Campesanis) 265, 274, 301 cantores Euphorionis 37 Carson, Anne 355–6 Catullus: brother 2, 3, 100, 102, 177, 214; date of birth 1; date of death 1–2; fragments 167; named contemporaries 7; political engagement 8; self-naming 94; testimonia 167; title 168 Catullus Online 6, 314 celeritas 255 Chapman, George 340 Cicero 8, 29, 31–3, 38, 43, 45 Clodia, identity of: ?wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus (cos. 60 bc) 3, 93; ?wife of L. Licinius Lucullus (cos. 74 bc) 3; ?daughter of Ap. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 54 bc) 3 Clodius Pulcher, P. (trib. pleb. 58 bc) 205, 206 codex 169, 263 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 345 colloquial features 120, 126 Coluccio Salutati 267, 277, 280, 285, 286 Copley, Frank 351 Cornelius Gallus, C. 37, 219 Cornelius Nepos 1, 10, 29, 42, 73, 89, 168, 186, 188, 194, 215, 217, 254, 295 Cornificius, Q. (praetor ?45 bc) 34 Corradinus de Allio (Giovanni Francesco Corradino dall’Aglio) 304 correction 55 Cosimo de’ Medici, Giovanni di 277 dedication 254 doctrina, doctus poeta 5, 23, 28, 39, 126, 141, 188, 219, 220, 230, 233, 237, 241, 254, 320

401

402

General Index

Doering, Friedrich Wilhelm 305 Donato, Girolamo 281 Dousa, Janus (Jan van der Does) the Elder 303 Dousa, Janus (Jan van der Does) the Younger 303 Dunn, Daisy 359 ecphrasis 254 editio princeps 263, 283, 292, 307 elegy, elegiacs 119, 219–26; elegiac puella 220 Eliot, T. S. 52 Ellis, Robinson 308, 310, 347 enmity 107–11; see also invective Ennius 38, 127 epanalepsis 118 epigrams 120, 143 erus 125 Euphorion 19, 37, 154 Faernus (Gabriele Faerno) 301 Federico da Montefeltro 277 flagitatio 183 Fletcher, Phineas 341 Florence 276, 280, 284, 286 Flores Veronenses 273 Flynn, Leontia 358 Fonzio, Bartolomeo 277 Fordyce, C. J. 312, 315 Fosco or Negri, Palladio (Palladius Fuscus or Niger) 295 Friedrich, Gustav 310 friendship 98–101, 180 Furius 182–3; see also Furius Bibaculus, M. Furius Bibaculus, M. 33, 42, 181 Gellius (? L. Gellius Publicola, cos. 36 bc) 108, 165, 201, 204, 205 gemination 118 gender 70–87; gender positioning 73–8; genderroles 221, 222, 223; grammatical 129 Geremia (Hieremias) da Montagnano 273 Gherardo del Ciriagio 276 Goold, G. P. 311, 313 graffiti, verse 123 Greek Anthology 62–4 Green, Peter 359 Guarini, Alessandro 299 Guarini, Battista 295 Guglielmo da Pastrengo 273 Hale, William Gardner 308 Heiric of Auxerre 271 Helvius Cinna, C. 3, 24, 34–6, 42, 52, 144, 168, 210, 211 Heyse, Theodor 308 Horace 226–33; Epodes 230–3

Hortensius Hortalus, Q. (cos. 69 bc) 51, 99, 175 Housman, A. E. 309 humanistic script 276 hyperbaton 126–7 illic, deictic pronoun 129 illocution 136–9 innovation, linguistic 121 intertextuality 47–69 intratextuality 47 invective 83–7, 224; see also enmity Italy, Italian 10–14 Jackson, Anna 356–8 Julius Caesar 1, 8, 13, 15–18, 41, 45, 181, 200, 208 Juventius 92, 182, 213 Keats, John 26 kenning 67 Kiss, Dániel 314 Kroll, Wilhelm 311, 315 Lachmann, Karl 306–7 Laevius 44, 144 Lamb, George 344 Landino, Cristoforo 277, 322–3 Landor, Walter Savage 329–33, 346 language: coarse 123; comic 124–5; sexual 123 Leigh Hunt, James Henry 346 lepidus, lepos 39, 112–13, 114, 123, 138n, 141, 247, 255, 256 Lesbia 89–98, 179, 203, 206, 207, 220, 249–53; identity of 3, 93 Leto, Giulio Pomponio 277 library, public at Rome 171 Licinius Calvus, C. 2, 26–31, 92, 168, 173, 195, 212, 217, 219 Lipsius, Justus 303 Lodovico Regio 276 love 91–8 Lovelace, Richard 338 Lucilius 139 Lucretius 4, 39–41 Lupi, Mattia 284 lusus, ludere 27, 242, 245 MacNeice, Louis 351 Macrin, Jean Salmon 334 Maggiali, Giovanni 314 magis (adversative) 119 Mamurra 10, 11, 14, 18, 20, 30, 84, 111, 149, 188, 191, 199, 200, 209, 230 Manlius Torquatus, L. (praetor 49 BC) 4, 172, 176

General Index manuscripts 263–87; α 281; A (≈ V/A) 274, 313; Codex Datanus (D) 307; Codex Sangermanensis (G) 265–7, 278, 308, 313; Codex Laurentianus (L) 307; Codex Marcianus (M) 267; Codex Oxoniensis (O) 264, 268, 278, 294, 308; Codex Romanus (R) 267, 278, 280, 301, 305, 308, 310, 313; Codex Thuaneus (T) 264, 300, 303, 308; V 268, 273, 313; X 269; contamination 278, 284; cross-fertilisation 278; stemma 272 Manutius, Aldus (Aldo Manuzio) 296–8 Marot, Clément 336 marriage 81–3, 92 Martial 247–53, 319 Marullus, Michael 318, 326 Matthias Corvinus 277 Mattia Lupi 284 Meleager 57, 62, 63 Memmius, C. (praetor 58 bc) 3, 4, 35, 180 Mentula 20, 84, 111, 209–10, 211 Methven, James 360 metre 116–21, 143–65; anaclasis 157; diastole 165n; elegiac couplet 158–60; elegies ~ epigrams 160–3; elision 161–4; of final –s 31, 128, 165; galliambic 156–8, 173; Hermann’s Bridge 159; hexameter: fifth-foot spondee 154, 160; holospondaic 160; hiatus 164; iambic 147–50; phalaecian hendecasyllables 117, 144, 145–7, 179, 184, 194, 243; polymetrics 117, 143; sapphic 150–1; synaphea 151, 152, 153 militia amoris 223 miser 140 Montefeltro, Federico da 277 mollis, mollitia 43, 72, 76, 76n, 140, 182, 186, 192, 223, 230, 231, 243, 244, 320, 323, 337 moralising 107–12 Mucia, third wife of Pompey 211 Mucius Scaevola, Q. (trib. pleb. 54 BC) 209 Muretus (Marc-Antoine Muret) 299 Mussato, Albertino 273 Mynors, R. A. B. 310, 311 Myth of Ages 238 mythology 102–5, 237

403

names, personal 133–6 Neoterics, neotericism, νεώτεροι 4, 31–3, 34, 58, 73, 87, 122, 140, 144, 153, 154, 160, 186, 212, 230, 241, 256, 258, 320; see also nouus New Comedy 65, 225 New Poets see nouus Nott, John 344 nouus, noui poetae, New Poets 31–3, 34, 165, 168, 242, 246, 261; see also Neoterics Ovid 221 Owen, Sidney George 309 Palmer, Arthur 309 Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli) 320–2 Parker, Dorothy 350 Partenio, Antonio 294 Parthenius 4, 37, 87, 177, 212, 257 participial constructions 118 Perotti, Niccolò 277 Petrarch 273, 318 Philodemus 4, 37 Pliny the Elder 242–4 Pliny the Younger 28, 169, 244–7 poeticisms, elevated 128 Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano 323–9, 334 Portuese, Orazio 314 Postgate, John Percival 309 Pound, Ezra 350 Propertius 220 publication 41, 170 Puteolanus (Francesco Dal Pozzo) 285, 293 Quinn, Kenneth 312, 352 Quintilius Varus 3, 183, 212, 217 Ramírez de Verger, Antonio 313 Rather, Bishop of Verona 271, 274 reception 48 reference 49 Regio, Lodovico 276 Riese, Alexander 310 Roman empire 15–18 Rome 21–3 Ronsard, Pierre 299, 336 Rossbach, August 309 Rufus (?M. Caelius, praetor 48 bc) 108 sal 114 Salutati, Coluccio 267, 277, 280, 285, 286 Sannazaro, Jacopo 323, 329, 330 Sanvito, Bartolomeo 276 Sappho 59–61 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 301–2 Schwabe, Ludwig 308

404 scroll 169, 263 Secundus, Janus 329 Sellar, W. Y. 347 seruitium amoris 125, 223 Sestius, P. (?praetor before 54 bc) 43 Sillig, Carl Julius 306 similes, ‘reverse-sex’ 78–81 Sinibaldi, Antonio 276 Sirmio 1 Social Wars 4 Spenser, Edmund 339 sphragis 94 Squarzafico, Girolamo (Hieronymus Squarzaficus) 293 Statius 117, 253–61 Statius, Achilles (Aquiles Estaço) 300 Stead, C. K. 353 Stratenus, Petrus 335 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 347 syncopated verb forms 119 Tennyson, Alfred 348 Terentianus Maurus 169 Terentius Varro, M. (praetor ?68 bc) 45 Thomas, Emile 310 Thomson, D. F. S. 310, 313 de Thou, Jacques Auguste 264 Tibullus 221 translation 38, 41, 47, 49–57, 75, 99, 140, 175, 199 Troy 19–20, 239

General Index Valerius Cato, P. 33, 42, 200 van Santen, Laurens or Louw (Laurentius Santenius) 305 Vatinius, P. (cos. 47 bc) 2, 29, 181, 195–7 Venantius Fortunatus 271 Venice 296 Verona 1, 178, 266, 273, 302 Vespasiano da Bisticci 277 Vespucci, Giorgio Antonio 277, 284 Vettori, Piero 300 Vindelinus de Spira (Wendelin of Speyer) 263, 292 Virgil 233–41 Vossius, Isaac 303 Vulpius, Ioannes Antonius (Giovannantonio Volpi) 304 Wilder, Thornton 350 William of Doncaster 271 William of Malmesbury 271 words: comparative forms 131; diminutives 131–3; length 130; nouns in –tio 130; nouns/ adjectives in –arius 131; register 122–5, 158; shape 130–3 Wordsworth, William 345 Yeats, W. B. 349 Zanetti, Bartolomeo 298 zetema 68 Zukofsky, Louis and Celia 351