The poetry of Catullus

A consideration of the text of Catullus’ poems and of its arrangement is of unusual interest. Its survival has been as precarious as his biography is brief. Not being part of the school syllabus, from roughly the end of the 2nd century to the end of the 12th century, it passed out of circulation. Knowledge of it depends on a single manuscript discovered c. 1300, copied twice, and then lost. Of the two copies, one in turn was copied twice, and then it was lost. From the three survivors—in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican Library in Rome—scholars have been able to reconstruct the lost “archetype.” Incorrect transcription in the preceding centuries (some 14 instances are beyond repair), however, has invited frequent and often uncertain emendation. Depending on whether one poem is divided or not, 113 or 114 poems survive. In the printed total of 116, numbers XVIII to XX were inserted by early editors without proof that they were written by Catullus. In 14 instances gaps are visible (eight of these of one or more lines), and in possibly six poems fragments of lost poems have been left attached to existing ones. Ancient citations indicate the existence of at least five more poems. The surviving body of work is therefore mutilated and incomplete and (in contrast to the Odes of Horace) cannot in its present published form represent the intentions of either author or executors, despite the elegant dedication to the historian Cornelius Nepos that heads it. With these qualifications, it permits the reconstruction of a poetic personality and art unique in Latin letters.

The collection is headed by 57 “short poems,” ranging in length between 5 and 25 lines (number X, an exception, has 34) in assorted metres, of which, however, 51 are either hendecasyllabic—that is, having a verse line of 11 syllables (40 such)—or iambic—basically of alternate short and long syllables (11). These rhythms, though tightly structured, can be characterized as occasional or conversational. There follow eight “longer poems,” ranging from 48 lines to 408 (number LXV, of 24 lines, is prefatory to number LXVI) in four different metres. The collection is completed by 48 “epigrams” written in the elegiac distich, or pair of verse lines, and extending between 2 and 12 lines, a limit exceeded only by two poems, one of 26 lines and the other of 16.

This mechanical arrangement, by indirectly recognizing the poet’s metrical virtuosity and proposing three kinds of composition, justly calls attention to a versatility disproportionate to the slim size of the extant work. The occasional-verse metres and the elegiac distich had been introduced into Latin before his day. Traditionally both forms, as practiced by Greek writers after the 4th century bce and their Roman imitators, had served for inscriptions and dedications and as verse of light occasions, satirical comment, and elegant sentiment. Catullus and his contemporaries continued this tradition; but in some 37 instances the poet uniquely converts these verse forms to serve as vehicles of feelings and observations expressed with such beauty and wit, on the one hand, or such passion, on the other, as to rank him, in modern terms, among the masters of the European lyric—the peer of Sappho and Shelley, of Burns and Heine—but exhibiting a degree of complexity and contradiction that the centuries-later Romantic temperament would scarcely have understood. The conversational rhythms in particular, as he managed them for lyric purposes, achieved an immediacy that no other classic poet can rival.

In his longer poems Catullus produced studies that deeply influenced the writers and poets of the Augustan Age: two charming marriage hymns; one frenzied cult hymn of emasculation; one romantic narrative in hexameters (lines of six feet) on the marriage of Peleus with the sea goddess Thetis; and four elegiac pieces, consisting of an epistle introducing a translation of an elegant conceit by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, followed by a pasquinade, or scurrilous conversation, between the poet and a door (of poor quality, perhaps a youthful effort), and lastly a soliloquy (unless indeed this be two poems) addressed to a friend and cast in the form of an encomium, or poem of praise. The Augustan poet Virgil is content to imitate Catullus without naming him, even going so far, in the Aeneid, as thrice to borrow whole lines from him. Horace both imitated Catullus and criticized him. Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and later Martial both imitate and affectionately commemorate him.

Legacy

In his lifetime, Catullus was a poet’s poet, addressing himself to fellow craftsmen (docti, or scholarly poets), especially to his friend Licinius Calvus, who is often posthumously commemorated along with him. It is now fashionable to identify this coterie as the poetae novi, or “Neoterics” (the modern term for these new poets), who preferred the learned allusiveness and mannered and meticulous art of the Alexandrian poets to the grander but archaic fashion of Ennius, the father of Roman poetry. The school was criticized by Cicero and by Horace, who names Calvus and Catullus. To the degree that Catullus shared such conceptions of what might be called poetic scholarship, he is to be numbered in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound rather than with the Romantics.

For the general reader, the 25 Lesbia poems are likely to remain the most memorable, recording as they do a love that could register ecstasy and despair and all the divided emotions that intervene. Two of them with unusual metre recall Sappho, the poetess of the Aegean island of Lesbos, as also does his use of the pseudonym Lesbia. As read today, these two seem to evoke the first moment of adoring love (number LI, a poem that actually paraphrases its Sapphic model) and the last bitterness of disillusionment (number XI). On the other hand, the poems of invective, which spare neither Julius Caesar nor otherwise unknown personalities, male and female, may not have received the critical attention some of them deserve. Their quality is uneven, ranging from the high-spirited to the tedious, from the lapidary to the laboured, but their satiric humour is often effective, and their obscenity reflects a serious literary convention that the poet himself defends. Between these two poles of private feeling lie a handful of transcendent and unforgettable compositions: the lament at his brother’s grave; the salute to Sirmio his beloved retreat; the exchange of vows between Acme and Septimius; his elegy for the wife of Calvus; and even that vivid mime of a moment’s conversation in a leisured day, in which the gay insouciance of a few young persons of fashion, the poet included, going about their affairs in the last days of the Roman Republic, is caught and preserved for posterity.