Catullus

Julia Haig Gaisser

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118293430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Literaturkritik

Catullus is one of the liveliest and most appealing Roman poets. His emotion, charm, and apparent spontaneity resonate with readers as strongly today as in antiquity. This sophisticated literary and historical introduction brings Catullus to life for the modern reader and presents his poetry in all its variety of emotions, subjects, and styles.

• Places Catullus in a social, historical, and literary context
• Examines Catallus's style and subjects, and provides a literary introduction to his major themes of love, social life, and politics
• Discusses the reception of the poems by translators and interpreters

1

Introduction: The Young Poet in Rome

Romae vivimus: illa domus,

illa mihi sedes, illic mea carpitur aetas.

(Poem 68.34–5)

Catullus is the most accessible of the ancient poets. His poems (even the very long ones) convey an emotional immediacy and urgency that claim the reader’s sympathy. The emotions themselves—love, sorrow, pleasure, hatred, contempt—are clear, direct, passionate, very much like our own, we are tempted to imagine. They are set out for us not in the abstract but in the real, historical world of late republican Rome. This Rome, evoked for us with a few light, sharp strokes, is a virtual character in the poetry, with its politicians, playboys (and girls), low-lifes, and fellow poets. Catullus’ language seems for the most part as clear and direct as his feelings. His characteristic meter, the phalaecean hendecasyllabic, is relaxed, conversational, and memorable. He is learned (formidably so), but a first reader does not have to be equally learned in order to respond to him. Many of his poems are short—of fewer than 20 lines—so that even a novice Latinist can take them in at a sitting.

But Catullus’ accessibility is deceiving. He draws us into his world and its emotional landscape so artfully that we think we know him much better than we do, rather like a seemingly open and guileless acquaintance we have known for a time and then realized we did not know at all. The emotional immediacy and factual details in Catullus’ poems can make us forget that his poetry, like all poetry, is a fiction. The Catullus we see in the poems is a character or persona created by Catullus the poet, and we can never be sure where the one leaves off and the other begins. We will look more closely at the Catullan persona in chapter 3. In this chapter, however, we will consider what we can know about Catullus the poet, the maker (not the subject) of the poetry, and about the world in which he created his poems.

Fragments of a Biography

A few details of Catullus’ life are recorded by ancient sources. The fourth-century writer Jerome mentions Catullus twice in his Chronica (a chronological list of historical dates). For 87 B.C. he says: “Gaius Valerius Catullus the lyric writer is born in Verona” (Chronica 150H); for 58 B.C.: “Catullus dies at Rome in the thirtieth year of his life” (Chronica 154H). But Jerome’s dates cannot be right. Catullus mentions events of both 55 and 54, and he was still alive as late as August 54 (the date of his friend Calvus’ prosecution of Vatinius, mentioned in poem 53).¹ Scholars generally accept the idea that Catullus died when he was twenty-nine or thirty. (Perhaps he did, even if dying young is a very “poetic” thing to do.) They adjust Jerome’s chronology accordingly, dating Catullus’ life to something like 84–54 or (more often) 82–52. But Jerome’s testimony is important even though his chronology is inaccurate. He gives us at least approximate dates, identifies Catullus as a lyric poet (a point that is often disputed, as we will see), and places him in Verona and Rome, sites that resonate powerfully (and in different keys) in his poetry.

Jerome probably took his information on Catullus from a much earlier work on the lives of literary men called De viris illustribus, written by the biographer Suetonius around the beginning of the second century. This work is now lost, but Suetonius preserves another important biographical snippet in his Life of Julius Caesar. He uses the following anecdote about Catullus to demonstrate Caesar’s eagerness to lay aside even legitimate grievances.

Caesar did not hide the fact that Valerius Catullus had placed a permanent mark of infamy on him with his verses about Mamurra. But when Catullus apologized, he invited him to dinner on the same day, and continued to enjoy the hospitality of his father as he had been in the habit of doing. (Life of Julius Caesar 73)

Catullus wrote two poems attacking Caesar and his henchman Mamurra (29 and 57).² Suetonius (and Caesar) could have had both poems in mind, but 57 is especially virulent. It begins:

Pulcre convenit improbis cinaedis,

Mamurrae pathicoque Caesarique. (57.1–2)

(The shameless faggots are well matched,

Both queer Mamurra and Caesar too.)

The story in Suetonius is valuable evidence for the circulation of Catullus’ poetry, for the verses on Mamurra must have been very widely known for Caesar to believe that he had received “a permanent mark of infamy.” The story is also surprisingly informative about Catullus’ family and social position. The essential point is that the Valerii of Verona had enough status and wealth and a sufficiently grand establishment to qualify as frequent hosts to a great man like Caesar. Italian tradition since the time of the Renaissance has located their property at Sirmione (ancient Sirmio) on a beautiful peninsula of Lake Garda near Verona. The tradition was inspired by archeological evidence (ruins of a great Roman villa of the first century A.D. are found on the site), but still more by Catullus’ poem 31, in which he salutes Sirmio as his home and refers to himself as its master (erus). Modern scholars have agreed with the identification, and it has been suggested that the site was still in the family a century after Catullus’ time when the villa was built.³ Suetonius does not say when Catullus’ apology and dinner with Caesar took place, but it would have been in the middle 50s during the Gallic wars when Caesar generally wintered in Cisalpine Gaul (“Gaul on this side of the Alps,” i.e., northern Italy).⁴ In any case, Catullus’ father (whom the poet never mentions) was still alive at the time.

The most famous piece of ancient biographical information comes from Apuleius in the Apology (mid-second century). In response to the charge of using pseudonyms for the boys he addresses in his erotic poetry he says: “By the same token they should accuse Gaius Catullus because he used the name Lesbia for Clodia” (Apology 10). Apuleius’ identification of Lesbia places Catullus’ most famous subject and the poems about her in a particular social context, for Clodia was a member of one of the greatest and most ancient patrician families in Rome, the Claudii. The spelling of her name (Clodia, not Claudia) tells us that she was a sister of the infamous demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher, who used the “popular” spelling. But it is not clear which sister she was.⁵ Clodius had three sisters, all named Clodia, the feminine form of their nomen. Like most aristocratic women, they were differentiated either by the genitive form of their husband’s name or by an ordinal number corresponding to their place in the birth order of female children (Prima, Secunda, Tertia, etc.). Thus, the three were Clodia Metelli (Clodia the wife of Metellus), Clodia Luculli (Clodia the wife of Lucullus), and Clodia Tertia, who was the third daughter born, but not the youngest of the surviving group (Clodia Luculli was the youngest). Clodia Metelli is generally identified as Lesbia, largely on the basis of Cicero’s racy and slanderous portrait of her in his oration Pro Caelio. But she is not the only possible candidate. Little is known of Clodia Tertia, but Clodia Luculli lived at least as fast and loose as Clodia Metelli. All three sisters, but especially Clodia Metelli and Clodia Luculli, were rumored to have committed incest with their brother Clodius. The charge is reflected in Catullus’ invective on “Lesbius pulcer” in poem 79, which begins:

Lesbius est pulcer; quid ni? Quem Lesbia malit

quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua. (79.1–2)

(Lesbius is pretty. Why not? For Lesbia would prefer him

to you with your whole family, Catullus.)

From the details provided by Jerome, Suetonius, and Apuleius we can begin to piece together the outlines of the poet’s life. He was born in the 80s and died about thirty years later. He was of a wealthy and important provincial family in an area that had come fairly recently under Roman control. (The settlements in northern Italy between the Alps and the river Po were designated Latin colonies in 89 and their inhabitants, called Transpadani, “people on the other side of the Po,” received a general grant of Roman citizenship only in 49.) He lived for some time in Rome and wrote poems to a patrician woman (Clodia) calling her by the pseudonym Lesbia. He died in Rome.

A few more pieces of the poet’s biography can be gleaned from the poems themselves. Catullus tells us that he served in the cohors or entourage of Memmius in Bithynia (poems 10 and 28). He also says he didn’t like it. Since Memmius is known to have been governor of Bithynia in 57–56, Catullus’ complaints provide one secure date in his biography and poetry: poems 10 and 28 and the others referring to Bithynia (31 and 46) were written in 57–56 or later. His presence in Memmius’ cohors helps to flesh out the picture of his social status we saw in Suetonius, for such positions were held by young men with excellent connections and political prospects. Being in a governor’s cohors was not uncommon in Catullus’ circle, nor was coming home disenchanted with it. Catullus’ friends Veranius and Fabullus served in Piso’s coho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BLACKWELL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE CLASSICAL WORLD
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Young Poet in Rome
• 2 Poetry Books
• 3 The Catullan Persona
• 4 What Makes It Poetry
• 5 Poetic Architecture
• 6 Songs for Mixed Voices: Allusions, Intertexts, and Translations
• 7 Receiving Catullus 1: From Antiquity through the Sixteenth Century
• 8 Receiving Catullus 2: England and America
• Appendix 1 Catullus’ Meters
• Appendix 2 Glossary of Metrical and Rhetorical Terms
• Bibliography
• Index