A Companion to Catullus

Marilyn B. Skinner, Marilyn B. Skinner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444393781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this companion, international scholars provide a comprehensive overview that reflects the most recent trends in Catullan studies.

• Explores the work of Catullus, one of the best Roman 'lyric poets'
• Provides discussions about production, genre, style, and reception, as well as interpretive essays on key poems and groups of poems
• Grounds Catullus in the socio-historical world around him
• Chapters challenge received wisdom, present original readings, and suggest new interpretations of biographical evidence

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Marilyn B. Skinner

Catullus, as William Fitzgerald acutely observes, is a poet whom “we have taken rather too much to our hearts” (1995: 235). For a considerable part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both lay and academic audiences reacted to the lyric voice in the Catullan collection as that of a friend and contemporary, whose grief over a brother’s death and anger at betrayals of trust struck us as candid, universally human responses to circumstance. Yet treating Catullus sympathetically as one of ourselves greatly impeded efforts to appreciate his literary achievement as a whole and to locate his poetry within its particular cultural and historical milieu. New Criticism finally taught readers to value the longer works of the learned “Alexandrian” Catullus and even to relish displays of erudition in the love poetry, but only at the price of dismissing his barbed invective and his coarsely funny occasional pieces as material supposedly displaying a “lower level of intent” (Quinn 1959: 27–43). Appreciation of the Catullan corpus, obscenity and all, in its entirety and within its proper context had to wait for the rise of New Historicism in the 1980s and the subsequent impact of the cultural studies movement on the humanities.¹

It is just since the 1980s, then, that wide-ranging research has succeeded in grounding Catullus firmly in the socio-historical world around him – by investigating his provincial North Italian background, his family connections, and his dealings with the Roman elite; by observing his interactions with fellow provincials seeking advancement; by teasing out references to matters of everyday life in his poems; by studying, lastly, the circumstances under which his works were produced and disseminated and what they might have conveyed to the audiences at which they were aimed. This historicizing approach has proved unusually fruitful; since Wiseman’s Catullus and His World (1985), influential articles and entire monographs on Catullus have appeared with increasing frequency. Such recent critical studies have employed a variety of incisive tools, including those of anthropology, cultural studies, gender theory, Lacanian psychology, performance theory, reader-response theory, and sociolinguistics, to delineate the basic cultural and rhetorical frameworks within which the poetry operates. They have given us a more nuanced grasp of Catullus’ language and poetics and his standing among his contemporaries.

Unfortunately, this ferment in present critical discourse seldom trickles down to high-school or even undergraduate college classrooms, although on both levels of Latin instruction Catullus is now one of the three ancient authors most commonly encountered. As Ancona and Hallett demonstrate in this volume, his current pedagogical popularity is likewise a nascent phenomenon. Within the living memory of many North American teachers, Catullus was a text assigned only on the college level, and then with some trepidation: despite their relatively easy syntax and their immediate emotive appeal, the poems were deemed simply too racy for the young. Incorporation into the Advanced Placement syllabus (for examinations usually taken in the senior year of high school, approximately age 17) gradually furthered Catullus’ secondary-school canonicity, though he was not finally accepted as a core AP author until 1994. Consequently, although annotated teaching texts and materials on the poet have proliferated over the past few years, and good general introductions, such as those of Martin (1992) and Hurley (2004), are available, students and teachers looking for more detailed summaries of current scholarly opinion find nothing really suitable in English. Hence the Blackwell Companion to Catullus appears to be a timely project. Containing essays on a range of topics by recognized and emerging authorities and drawing together two decades’ worth of research into a collection adaptable for classroom use, this volume is intended to present C. Valerius Catullus to a wider public as a writer who was very much a man of his time and a perceptive eyewitness to the last troubled decade of the Roman Republic.

Unlike most studies of literary figures that attempt to reach out to non-specialist readers, the Blackwell Companion to Catullus does not begin with a chapter on the author’s life, for the very good reason that we know almost nothing about it. Texts, translations, surveys, and entries in reference works dating from earlier periods do contain short biographies of Catullus. Most have been based, directly or indirectly, upon Ludwig Schwabe’s 1862 reconstruction of his career, known to those of us in the field as the Catullroman (“Catullus novel”). As that term of art hints, Schwabe’s account is quite speculative, and prior biographies that leaned on it wove the scant data into highly imaginative scenarios. They focused on Catullus’ affair with the pseudonymous “Lesbia,” generally assumed to be Clodia, wife of Metellus Celer (cos. 60 BC) and sister of the radical demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher (tr. pop. 58). Drawing heavily on the first-person statements in the poetry, and treating artistic utterances as confessional pronouncements, they represented their subject as the disillusioned lover of a corrupt and degenerate noblewoman and attributed his purported early death to the suffering caused by that experience (or, alternatively, to tuberculosis, on no evidence whatsoever).

Here, too, the new socio-historical approach results in a changed emphasis. We can still start with the few external facts. Following earlier authorities, the late-antique chronicler Jerome reports Catullus’ birth at Verona in 87 BC (Chron. 150 H.) and assigns to 58–57 BC his death at Rome during his thirtieth year (XXX aetatis anno, Chron. 154 H.). The latter date is demonstrably incorrect: all the poems in the collection to which dates can be ascribed were written during the period 56–54 BC, though we find no unambiguous reference to events subsequent to 54. Most scholars, accordingly, have treated Catullus’ life-span of 29 years as fixed and moved the date of birth down to 84; there has been a recent tendency to shift the death-date as well, down to 52 or even 51 (Granarolo 1982: 19–30; Wiseman 1985: 191; Thomson 1977: 3–4). But there is a possibility that the number XXX could be a scribal error; might Catullus have instead lived almost to the age of forty (XXXX) and thus seen the outbreak of civil war? Cornelius Nepos, to whom he dedicated his libellus, confirms that by 32 BC he was dead (Att. 12.4), but we have no idea how long before that he died, or what, if anything, he might have been doing after 54 BC.²

In his Life of the Deified Julius (73), the biographer Suetonius records: Valerium Catullum, a quo sibi uersiculis de Mamurra perpetua stigmata imposita non dissimulauerat, satis facientem eadem die adhibuit cenae hospitioque patris eius, sicut consuerat, uti perseuerauit (“[Caesar] had not denied that Valerius Catullus had put a lasting mark of shame against his name by his lampoons concerning Mamurra, but, on the same day Catullus apologized, Caesar invited him to dinner and continued to accept the hospitality of Catullus’ father, just as he had been accustomed to do”). In this volume, T. P. Wiseman unpacks what this sentence tells us about the social standing of Catullus’ family, and David Konstan explores its implications for Catullus’ view of politics. I have elsewhere noted (Skinner 2003: xxi) that, with a father still alive, Catullus would have been a filiusfamilias, or son subject to paternal authority (potestas), legally unable to own property and dependent upon others for his living expenses in Rome. That would make his vitriolic personal attacks upon his father’s guest, no less a personage than the military governor of Cisalpine Gaul, all the harder to explain. In the absence of extenuating circumstances, about which we know nothing, one wonders how on earth Catullus thought he could get away with embarrassing the family so blatantly.

The last bit of information contained in other sources is Apuleius’ testimony (Apol. 10) that “Lesbia” was a cover name for a woman named Clodia. That statement is corroborated by internal evidence, for in poem 79 Catullus informs us that “Lesbius” (who, in accordance with Roman nomenclature, must be some paternal relation of “Lesbia”) is “Pulcher,” a broad hint at the notorious Clodius Pulcher. As Dyson Hejduk explains (below, pp. 254–5), the identification of Clodia Metelli as Catullus’ mistress is not wholly certain, but there is a reasonable probability that it is correct, given her own social and political visibility. These days, though, historians are less interested in the details of the affair (if it was real) and more concerned with their implications for Catullus’ contemporary Roman audience. In the poems, a married woman associated with a powerful aristocratic clan is not only adulterously involved with the speaker, a young Transpadane, but accused of indiscriminate relations with named and unnamed others and figuratively branded in cc. 37 and 58 a common prostitute. Few today would accept this as a realistic picture of a noblewoman’s life. The cruel beloved is a standard generic component of ancient erotic verse (Dixon 2001: 137–40), and libelous charges of sexual immorality were part of the orator’s and the politician’s rhetorical gear, unscrupulously deployed against female as well as male opponents. Is the construction of “Lesbia” in the corpus just an assemblage of literary topoi, though, or does it also pass a harsh judgment upon the social scene in which she moved? There would be little point to the poet’s dramatic revelation that “Lesbia” was the aristocratic Clodia if the world of Roman politics were not somehow relevant to her literary and symbolic function. W. Jeffrey Tatum in this volume consequently finds a telling parallel between her lack of personal integrity and the high-handed way in which the nobility, in Catullus’ eyes, was exploiting the municipal equestrian class, and Konstan provocatively analyzes her insatiable promiscuity in c. 11 as a trope for Rome’s wars of imperial expansion and plunder.

From the poems themselves we learn a few additional facts: that Catullus served for a year in Bithynia on the personal staff of the propraetor C. Memmius, probably in 57–56 BC (cc. 10, 28, 46); that the loss of an elder brother, who died and was buried in the Troad, was a devastating blow (cc. 65, 68a–b, 101); that his family owned property on the peninsula of Sirmio, near Verona (c. 31), and also an estate (most likely a working farm) somewhere between upscale Tibur and the rustic Sabine district (c. 44); that he formed close ties at Rome with numerous other poets and intellectuals (Cinna, Cornificius, his great friend Licinius Calvus, the brothers Asinii, Nepos, probably Valerius Cato) and was acquainted with several distinguished Roman senators, members of the nobility, and key players, including Cicero, Gellius Publicola, Hortensius Hortalus, Manlius Torquatus, and Cicero’s influential ally P. Sestius. For a young unknown provincial, Catullus must have climbed the social ladder in Rome very quickly. Did he simply make the most of good connections, or were other talents brought to bear?

More and more Catullan scholarship is embracing a theory of performativity: that many of Catullus’ poems were originally scripts for live recital by their author, most likely at banquets to which he had been invited, and that in those scripts the speaker fashions a self-image that will further his goals and ambitions. Critics emphasize various and sundry elements implicated in Catullan performance: Selden (1992) considers it a form of rhetorical, and Krostenko (2001a) a mode of linguistic, critique; Fitzgerald (1995) studies it as a tool for controlling and manipulating audience response; Wray (2001) analyzes it as a display of competitive masculinity; more pragmatically, I have suggested (1993a, 2001) that live performance was a tactic allowing a talented outsider to curry favor with those able to help him advance socially, economically, and perhaps politically.³ Several chapters in this volume acknowledge the likelihood of convivial recitation, but it is Elena Theodorakopoulos’ reading of poem 68 in light of that assumption that reveals how postulating a “back story” of performance on private occasions may clarify old Catullan questions. Consequently, imagining the presence of the poet as a guest, a well-known artist and entertainer, in the dining rooms of leading Roman personages allows us to view him as someone not only having access to privileged information about the workings of power but also very much concerned about its concrete use and abuse.

Contributors to this volume examine current developments in traditional, as well as new, areas of Catullan research. In part I, “The Text and the Collection,” J. L. Butrica reviews the transmission of the Catullan text from antiquity to the present day, while I myself offer an account of the debate over the vexed question of authorial arrangement (a chore I hesitated to impose on any colleague). Part II, “Contexts of Production,” then introduces us to the numerous ways in which Catullus’ poetry can be regarded as reflective of its times. T. P. Wiseman, who pioneered investigation of the poet’s family and its later fortunes (Wiseman 1987), provides a history of the Valerii Catulli and their presence in Northern Italy. David Konstan examines the contemporary political scene in Rome, offers an explanation for Catullus’ direct attacks on Caesar and Mamurra, and, most interestingly, finds political reverberations in other ostensibly non-political poems. Andrew Feldherr locates Catullus’ studied appeal to a learned coterie in the context of larger intellectual debates over Hellenization and shows how he and his fellow provincials employed learning to their advantage as they jockeyed for status within the circles of the Roman nobility. Elizabeth Manwell provides an overview of research on gender and masculinity and then analyzes contradictory paradigms of masculinity in Catullus, a matter that has received considerable attention in recent years.

Later generations habitually characterized Catullus as doctus, “learned,” in tribute to his impressive acquaintance with the earlier poetic tradition. Although numerous predecessors exercised influence on his work, he himself recognizes Sappho and Callimachus as his primary poetic models. In part III, “Influences,” Ellen Greene shows how Catullus’ appropriation of the “Sapphic voice” enables him to express his private erotic subjectivity – yet, by disrupting conventional gender polarities, likewise destabilizes his own sense of male identity. Peter E. Knox provides a concise introduction to Callimachus, including a review of his most important works and an explanation of the innovative features of Callimachean poetics; Knox then surveys the far-reaching effects of “Callimacheanism” on the Roman poetic tradition, from Ennius through Catullus and his fellow neoterics, down to the Augustan Age.

Catullan language and style are distinctive. In part IV, “Stylistics,” three authorities investigate those formal aspects of the poetry. We still speak of the “Catullan revolution” as an abrupt break with previous artistic techniques. W. R. Johnson wittily elucidates Cicero’s grumpy reactions toward the poets he christened the “neoterics” and considers possible reasons why Catullus and his colleagues might have developed their innovative poetics. George A. Sheets analyzes the elements of Catullan style—diction, rhythm and meter, pragmatics—that endow it with its characteristic flavor, while Brian A. Krostenko shows that Catullus’ deployment of the vocabulary that connotes “elegance” (or the reverse) plays upon ambivalent cultural attitudes toward displays of aestheticism in the political arena.

The Catullan corpus is by no means homogeneous – indeed, no other Latin poetic collection manifests such diversity in genre, meter, tone, and subject matter. Critics therefore frequently treat thematically related groups like the “Lesbia poems” as coherent elements of the collection and approach some of the “longer” poems, cc. 64 and 68 in particular, as independent compositions worthy of monographs. In part V, “Poems and Groups of Poems,” we find studies of thematic categories, as well as in-depth readings of those two major works. William W. Batstone considers a set of poems commonly labeled “programmatic pieces” and boldly inquires what the label means and whether it can justifiably be applied: what makes verses programmatic, and is the program in the author’s eye or the eye of the reader? Julia T. Dyson Hejduk examines the large body of poems thought to relate to the poet’s affair with “Lesbia,” finding, intriguingly enough, not one but three distinct “Lesbias,” with contrasting poetic functions. Vassiliki Panoussi rereads the wedding compositions, 61 and 62, from an anthropological perspective. As re-enactments of ritual activity, each examines weighty cultural issues: tensions between male and female, conflict of personal desires and societal demands, continuation of the family line, sexual fidelity – all topics privately meaningful to the Catullan speaker as well.

Current work on Catullus 64, the short epic known today as “The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis,” concentrates upon its intertextual relations with predecessors and uncovers the implications of allusions to earlier Greek and Latin masterpieces. Jeri Blair DeBrohun’s chapter on this epyllion specifically analyzes its use of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. This Hellenistic poem, she concludes, underlies Catullus’ text in unsuspected ways: it determines the essential structure of the narrative and, through ominous reflections of the suppressed tale of Jason and Medea, tropes the poet’s indebtedness to the past as intergenerational conflict. Elena Theodorakopoulos carefully walks the novice through the massive array of textual and interpretive problems associated with Catullus 68, which, for her, becomes an exceptional attempt to achieve permanence by overcoming the limitations of time and mortality. Finally, W. Jeffrey Tatum considers the function of Catullan invective: beginning with a consideration of the role of polemic in Roman political debate, he examines the conventions of political abuse a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Half title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I The Text and the Collection
• Part II Contexts of Production
• Part III Influences
• Part IV Stylistics
• Part V Poems and Groups of Poems
• Part VI Reception
• Part VII Pedagogy
• Part VIII Translation
• Consolidated Bibliography
• General Index
• Index Locorum