Reading Guide: Catullus
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Reading Guide: Catullus
History of Rome
Gaius Valerius Catullus (?84 - ?54) was born at Verona, now in Northern Italy, then in Cisalpine Gaul. He came of good family (his father hosted Julius Caesar), went to Rome at an early age, and moved with the jet set. There he fell in love with a woman some years older than himself, to whom he refers using the pseudonym “Lesbia”. “Lesbia” has traditionally been identified as Clodia Metelli (or one of her sisters). Her brother was the notorious P. Clodius Pulcher, one of Cicero’s enemies and the man who got Cicero exiled. Catullus’ poems, passionately intense and startlingly original, juxtapose lyrical anguish with gross violence and obscenity: they have been taken to exemplify an increasingly powerful ethos of individualism in Roman society of the late Republic:
“Personal relations between men and women were also affected by the growth in individualism ..... Some of the best evidence for this change in personal relations comes from Roman poetry. In the last century B.C., for the first time, Latin poets wrote personal love poems, and a whole series of poems about their love affairs ..... This art form was the particular invention of Catullus [derived from] Hellenistic models..... We are [therefore] interested in Catullus’ experiment with language to express unaccustomed feelings, and with the social implications of his message ..... That passionate love for a particular woman outside marriage could be quasi-legitimate, a properly improper social obligation, was itself revolutionary.”
----- Keith Hopkins, Death and Renewal (1983), 84-85
*Be prepared to refer to specific poems in discussing the following. Please bring your texts to class!*:
1.What are the main subjects of Catullus’ poems and how does he present his poetic mission (esp. in Poem 1)? What in his life and in his writings does he care about deeply, and why?
2.Several of the poems are savagely obscene (esp. Poem 16). Is there a point to our reading of these poems? How do they comment on or reflect the nature of Roman society?
3.The 50s BC, a time of political turmoil, saw four of Rome’s very greatest writers at the height of their powers, Cicero and Julius Caesar in prose, and Catullus and Lucretius in poetry. Why do some particular times and places in history (e.g. England under Elizabeth I) produce great and exciting literature, while others do not? Could Catullus have lived at any other time in Roman history?
4.On a related note—why is Catullus’ poetry considered so great? Do you enjoy reading it? Does it surprise you in any way?
5.What can we learn from Catullus’ poetry as historians?
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The following is extracted from the article on Catullus by H.P. Syndikus in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd. edn, edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Oxford, 1996 (available online):
Catullus, Gaius Valerius, came from a distinguished propertied family of Verona but spent most of his life in Rome. The dates of his life are incorrectly transmitted in the Chronicle of Jerome but can be approximately reconstructed. He was probably born in 84 BC or a little earlier, and probably died in 54 BC: at any rate, there is no trace in his work of events subsequent to 55 BC. Since he was sent to Rome as a young man, his family were probably thinking of a political career, but he seems to have had no great ambitions in this area. His only public activity, so far as we know, was service on the staff of the propraetor C. Memmius who was governor of Bithynia in 57–6 BC. In general, the political events of the turbulent decade he passed in Rome are little mentioned in his work. On one occasion his politically active friend C. Licinius Calvus involved him in a literary campaign against the triumvirs, especially Caesar (with his minion, Mamurra), but this outburst of ill-humour did not last and when Caesar magnanimously offered him his hand in reconciliation, he did not refuse it (Suet. Iul. 73).
If Catullus was only marginally involved in politics, he was at the centre of the radical social change that marked the end of the republic. He lived in the circles of the jeunesse dorée [golden youth] (the delicata iuventus as Cicero called them) who had turned away from the ideals of early Rome and embraced Hellenistic Greek culture. This environment affected not only Catullus’ outlook and views but also his language, which acquired a facility previously unknown in Roman literature. In a literary sense also Catullus was surrounded by like-minded individuals. A whole group of young poets, the so-called ‘neoterics’, shared the same rejection of traditional norms and the same search for new forms and content, and, as in their lifestyle, Hellenistic culture provided the most important model. In these same aristocratic circles Catullus met the married woman whom he called ‘Lesbia’. He depicts her as self-assured, beautiful, and cultured, and regards her becoming his lover as the peak of felicity. But when he realizes that she has been false to him with a succession of partners, his happiness turns to despair. The ups and downs of this affair provide Catullus with the central theme of his poetry. His love poetry is completely different from the light-hearted frivolity of Hellenistic literature, as presented in the epigrams of the Greek Anthology; he sought in love not sexual transport but a deep human union which would last a whole lifetime. Apuleius (Apol. 10) tells us that behind the name Lesbia was a Clodia, and this seems to offer a secure historical context, since we know of a Clodia with similar characteristics living in Rome at this time, the sister of P. Clodius Pulcher and wife to the consul of 60 BC, Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer. Cicero gives a picture of her in his Pro Caelio which for all its bias must have had some basis in life. The identity of Lesbia and Clodia was for a long time thought secure, but has often been questioned in the 20th cent. Nevertheless, even if the identification cannot be proved, Cicero’s picture of the historical Clodia is instructive for the social background to Catullus’ poetry.
Catullus died young, and left behind only a slim corpus of work amounting to 114 poems of extremely varied length and form. The book is primarily ordered on metrical grounds. Sixty short poems in lyric or iambic metres are followed by poems 61–8, which are long poems in a variety of metres: the remainder of the book consists of epigrams. Another structural principle groups the elegies and epigrams together--that is, all the poems in elegiacs (65–116). Within these major sections, the ordering is again not random. In the short poems, as far as possible, a succession of poems in the same metre is avoided: the only exceptions are the many poems in phalaecean hendecasyllables, which often of necessity must be placed together, and the two short closural poems, 59 and 60. In the long poems, the first and last are metrically related to the neighbouring shorter poems: poem 61 is in lyric metre, 65–8 in elegiacs. A series of cycles may also be noticed in the content; the most important of these is the Lesbia cycle at the beginning of the book (2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11), telling the story of Catullus’ love affair from their first courtship through the height of passion to estrangement and the final break up of the affair. It is then up to the reader to place the rest of the Lesbia poems, which are not ordered chronologically, within this framework. There is another Lesbia cycle in the epigrams (70–87), though it is more loosely constructed and not completely chronological. Further cycles of related poems include those dealing with the dubious pair of friends Furius and Aurelius (15–26) and with Gellius (74–91, and then 116). Other motives, such as the trip to Bithynia, the Iuventius poems, and the invectives against Caesar, are distributed throughout the book. This apparently careless arrangement has led some to believe that Catullus did not order the book himself, but that it is the result of posthumous publication. The principles of ordering mentioned above, however, seem more likely to go back to the poet himself, and a similar variety may be discerned in various reconstructions of Hellenistic books, such as the Garland of Meleager.
The three major groupings of poems within the corpus differ considerably in their approach. The short poems (1–60) contain much that one might term ‘social poetry’ from a thematic point of view, though they also include expressions of stronger emotions. These poems are certainly not, as has sometimes been thought, artless productions of a moment’s reflection: Catullus models himself in them on the elegance and facility of the shorter Hellenistic forms. The group of longer poems in more elevated style begins with two wedding poems (61–2): poem 63 describes the fate of a young man who has become a devotee of Cybele, the ‘epyllion‘ 64 contrasts happy and unhappy love in the stories of Peleus and Ariadne, and 65–8 are a series of elegiac poems on various themes. Poem 66 (with the introductory poem 65) contains a translation of the Lock of Berenice which concludes Callimachus’ Aetia: 68 (possibly two connected poems), is often seen as a precursor of the love elegies of Propertius and Tibullus. The epigrams (69–116) differ radically from the other poems. Even when they deal with the painful circumstances of the poet’s own life, they are never simply representations of a momentary emotion, but rather reflective analyses of a situation or the poet’s own experience.