Narrativising Catullus: a Never-ending Story

Classical Review, 2016

2001

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1985

Dbenef ited from an extraordinary amount of professional and personal generosity. I cannot possibly express my gratitude to everyone who aided me during the course of my academic career, but let me at least thank the people and institutions who assisted the progress of the book you're now holding. Without their help, it would not be in your hands. First, I deeply appreciate the enthusiasm with which Eugene O'Connor, Managing Editor of the Ohio State University Press, greeted my proposal and the time he subsequently spent with me discussing how the project might suit his own prospective new list in classical studies. The two referees chosen to review the manuscript brought to the task an impressive expertise in the field. Furthermore, they readily applied the insights gained through their own prior critical engagements with Catullus to refining and strengthening what may have seemed a highly unorthodox argument. My indebtedness to them is manifest throughout. Let me express my special thanks to the Press copy editor, who gave the manuscript scrupulous attention, and to the production staff for its contributions to the physical appearance of the volume. Once more Jeffrey S. Carnes performed a superior job of indexing; I'm only sorry that it couldn't be done on site. I am grateful, too, to Matthew S. Santirocco, editor of Classical World, for permission to reprint material from my article "Transactions with Catullus," originally published in CW 95.4 (2002): 435-38; to David Higham Associates for permission to reprint Elizabeth Jennings' poem "Ghosts" from New Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1986); and to the Art Renewal Center and its chairman, Fred Ross, for permission to reproduce the cover image of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting "The Discourse." The Provost's Author Support Fund of the University of Arizona supplied funds to offset fees for use of copyrighted material. I warmly appreciate the assistance tendered by my institution in this and other ways. I began working on this book during a sabbatical from the University of Arizona from 1995 to 1996 and completed the manuscript in the fall of xv xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lastly, a very special thank-you to Madeleine Henry of Iowa State University, though she may not remember why. In an e-mail back in 1995, just when I was first realizing the hopeless magnitude of the project I'd undertaken, she wrote, "I can't wait for Catullus in Verona!" That endorsement kept me going through the first and second chapters. Mady, you've waited a long time: here it is. xvii Preface Starting from that last piece of evidence, T. P. Wiseman has filled in certain other essential details. Until it acquired full Roman citizenship in 49 B.C.E., Transpadane Gaul possessed only the ius Latii. Service on the staff of a provincial governor like Memmius, however, required both citizenship and equestrian status. It is likely that Catullus' father had been an elected magistrate of the colony of Verona, thereby acquiring Roman citizenship ex officio for his wife and children (1987: 331). Tenure of Sirmio-and Catullus speaks, in poem 31, as though his family owned the entire peninsula-implies substantial assets. The wealth of the equestrian Valerii Catulli may have been derived from business dealings in Asia and Spain. 11 After Catullus' death they continued to prosper, politically as well as financially: two generations afterward, a L. Valerius Catullus was triumvir monetalis under Augustus and attained the consulship in Tiberius' reign (31 C.E., CIL XIV 2095, 2466). His son was an intimate of Caligula in more than one sense (Suet. Cal. 36). When the blind L. Valerius Catullus Messallinus, twice consul, became confidential advisor to the emperor Domitian, the family reached the peak of its fortunes. At some time during the first century C.E., the huge luxury villa at Sirmio familiarly known today as the "Grotte di Catullo" was erected. 12 On the grounds that the edifice was obviously constructed "by someone very high in imperial favour" (349) and that there is no reason to believe Sirmio had fallen into other hands, Wiseman contends that "[w]hether it was himself, his father, or his grandfather who built the villa, Messallinus surely lived in it," and Domitian himself may have stayed there when in northern Italy (359). In succeeding generations, the Valerii Catulli apparently continued to be leading figures at Verona and neighboring Brixia; the last Valerius Catullus is attested in the early third century C.E. (CIL V 4484). Given the early extinction of so many aristocratic Roman lines, the tenacious survival of Catullus' family over three centuries is remarkable. Catullan Editorship At first glance this project of criticism may seem doggedly conventional in scope and methods, insofar as it takes its point of departure from a long-standing philological uncertainty. Whether Catullus himself arranged his collection of poems in the order in which they have been transmitted to us has been argued back and forth for well over a hundred years. 13 The existence of poem 1, dedicating a libellus to Cornelius Nepos, is prima facie evidence that the poet compiled at least some of his verses and presented them in a gift volume. Although the length of the entire corpus, approximately 2400 lines, was long thought to militate against its xxii INTRODUCTION being contained on a single roll, fresh papyrus finds have reopened practical consideration of that possibility. 14 Still, the extreme heterogeneity of the collection and its frequent logical displacements create persistent stumbling blocks. For example, chronology is scandalously disrupted when poem 11, bidding Lesbia an irrevocable farewell, is succeeded at length by its companion piece 51, generally ascribed to the earliest stage of the relationship. 15 Other instances of temporal discontinuity occur among the poems in elegiac meter that constitute the third section of the corpus. The great suite of epigrams in which the speaker struggles, more and more desperately, to deal with his mistress' infidelity and his own degrading attachment to her ends on a jarringly upbeat note, first with 107, in which we hear of Lesbia's unexpected return, and then with 109, where her promise of amor perpetuus, "everlasting love," is capped by the hopeful proclamation of an aeternum. .. sanctae foedus amicitiae, "eternal pact of sacred friendship." Finally, our manuscripts of Catullus terminate with poem 116, whose anomalous status is well described by C. W. Macleod: "[S]ince it seems to explain why Catullus has taken up the pen against Gellius, it has all the air of being a prelude to the other poems directed at him (74, 80, 88-91), and yet it follows them at some distance" (1973: 308). To categorize the piece as an "inverted dedication," Macleod's solution to the puzzle, begs the question of effective placement. Their programmatic overtones notwithstanding, predictions of literary retaliation in 116 are nullified by its very position as last poem, which allows them to fade into silence. The weight of such aberrations was sufficient to convince Eduardus a Brunér and several generations of readers who followed his lead that a posthumous editor was largely responsible for the present shape of the Catullan collection. 16 That is, if there was any shape at all: a few, like Bernhard Schmidt, went so far as to brand all internal order illusory, proclaiming the liber Catulli "ein wüstes Chaos" (278). Most scholars writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, took the less radical position that one or more rolls issued by the author had been grievously disarranged, probably when the contents were transferred to codex form. Arthur Leslie Wheeler adopted that stance in his initial Sather Classical Lecture, whose publication in 1934 produced a virtual consensus that the effective absence of coherent authorial design in the extant corpus was a proven fact needing no additional demonstration. 17 As an expression of the communis opinio, Wheeler's pronouncements met with little opposition for decades. However, that orthodox theory of posthumous arrangement has lately been subjected to rigorous scrutiny. As a result, more and more specialists in the field now subscribe to the opinion that extensive patterns of authorial organization are still to be dis-xxiii Introduction other methodological premises, Miller draws similar conclusions: Catullus' collection is a "garden of forking paths" of meaning that "exist and interact with one another in a virtual time which allows multiple levels of consciousness, multiple temporalities to operate simultaneously" (1994: 75). 27 To some extent, these assertions are correct, for paradox and self-contradiction are elements organic to Catullan signification. Neither xxv Introduction This is not to claim, however, that every reader tamely follows intertextual traces planted by an author, real or conjectured, to arrive at only one predetermined meaning. No two readers interpret one set of textual cues in precisely the same way, nor can any one reader, including the text's composer, interpret the same set of cues in exactly the same way twice (Hinds 46-47). Thus a distinction between the inherent meaning of a textual allusion and the specific construction placed upon it by a reader also collapses in practice. Instead, shifting between those two totalizing perspectives is a structural peculiarity of the reading process (Culler 73). In any critical venture, though, such a conceptual distinction is routinely made "so that acts of interpretation can continue to be produced." 46 Lest that last procedural observation promptly trigger an accusation of professional cynicism-meanings are assumed to "be there," planted by an author, so that articles can be written and assistant professors get tenure-I should add that volumes of both aesthetic and critical theory in English studies are now devoting renewed attention to traces of decision-making...

Catullus excelled at his ability to change his style throughout his body of work. Since ars longa, vita brevis, Catullus was moved to create a legacy that would withstand the test of time. This sophisticated poet realized he had the capability to playliterally luderewith his genre and especially with gender. However, there were many definitions of what it meant to be a man according to Roman traditions. This paper will define Roman traditional masculinity with primary sources -Livy, Priapus, and "performative" masculinityand use secondary sources to support the definition of masculinity as a ferox and virilis man. This is then contrasted with the more feminine -Sappho and Livy's Lucretia. Through careful examination of the Catullan narrator, the gender of this persona appears to be a diverse spectrum rather than a simple traditional category. His narrator portrays different gendersmasculine (virilis), feminine (effeminatus), and womanly (muliebris)with each gender corresponding to a poemrespectively 16, 63, and 51. Through manipulation of diction and thematic approach to gender, Catullusthrough his narrator's gender spectrumspurns the traditional Roman values and revolutionized how the Roman world would define masculinity forever.

Syllecta Classica, 2011

and 84, Catullus ridicules his characters for a variety of annoying habits (writing bad poetry, stealing others' belongings, inappropriate smiling, and chronic mispronunciations). The poems have been interpreted as attacks upon their subjects' provincial or low-class origins, but these habits do not result from accidental circumstances. Catullus' characters have purposefully cultivated their habits in order to show off their beauty, wit or talent. Unfortunately, their attempts at self-promotion have the opposite effect; their actions demonstrate that they are far less talented, handsome or witty than they believe themselves to be.* In poem 41 Catullus attacks a woman named Ameana, whom he calls ugly (turpiculo naso, 41.3) and well worn (defututa, 41.1), because she has demanded ten thousand sesterces from him. 1 In this poem, Catullus criticizes Ameana, not so much for her lack of beauty and questionable reputation per se, but because, considering her unattractive face and dubious reputation, she has priced herself so highly. Ten thousand sesterces was a large sum of money; as we can see from pro Caelio 17, it amounted to one year's rent for a small apartment on the Palatine. 2 * I gratefully acknowledge the valuable help I have received from Craig Gibson and Peter Green, co-editors of Syllecta Classica, and from the two anonymous readers for the journal. The text used is Mynors, with exceptions as noted. All translations are my own.

Gaius Valerius Catullus’ polymetric and elegiac poems make up two thirds of a body of work which expresses the poetic and psychological imagination of the finest poetae novi to emerge from that school. His stylistically refined and genre-defying verse, which Cicero famously found distasteful to his own restrained and traditional tastes, yet belies a psychological tension between the old and the new. Simultaneously both eschewing and honouring the conventions of Roman values and literary propriety, Catullus’ oeuvre is metrically diverse, linguistically adventurous, and rich in allusion. His polymetric poems and his elegiac verse both speak of the conflicts within himself, and his attempts to redefine and re-purpose the role of poet in the society in which he lived.

Alexandrian Studies II in Honour of Mostafa El Abbadi, Société D`Archéologie D’Alexandrie, Bulletin 46 (2001) 249-277.

2009

The poetry of the famous Roman poet Catullus (first century BC) has come down to us through a single manuscript. The question as to whether the order of the poems in this collection shows original composition of the poet has vexed scholars for over a hundred years. This paper will show that modern conceptions of publishing have anachronistically influenced the proposed solutions to this problem. After examination of the reactions of ancient readers to Catullus’ poetry, it will become clear that no ancient reader of Catullus’ poems has read the same “book”. This urges us to reconsider our frame of reference in discussing ancient publishing.