Poetry of Catullus

The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic. It describes the lifestyle of the poet and his friends, as well as, most famously, his love for the woman he calls Lesbia.

Sources and organization

Catullus's poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one of two copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300. These three surviving manuscript copies are stored at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican Library in Rome. These manuscripts contained approximately 116 of Catullus's carmina. However, a few fragments quoted by later Roman editors but not found in the manuscripts indicate that there are some additional poems that have been lost. There is no scholarly consensus on whether Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems.

While the numbering of the poems up to 116 have been retained, three of these poems—18, 19 and 20—are excluded from most modern editions because they are now considered not to have been written by Catullus, having been added by Muretus in his 1554 edition^[1] (which identified 113 poems existing in the Catullan manuscripts). Some modern editors (and commentators),^[2] however, retain Poem 18 as genuine Catullan.^[1] Furthermore, some editors have considered that, in some cases, two poems have been brought together by previous editors, and, by dividing these, add 2B, 14B, 58B, 68B and 78B as separate poems. (Not all editors agree with these divisions, especially with regard to Poem 68.)^{[citation needed]} Conversely, poem 58B is considered by many editors to be a fragment accidentally detached from 55, which is in the same rare metre; it has been suggested that it should be placed between lines 14 and 15 of that poem.^[3][4]

Catullus's carmina can be divided into three formal parts: short poems in varying metres, called polymetra (1–60); nine longer poems (61–68b), of which the last five are in elegiac couplets; and forty-eight epigrams (69–116) all in elegiac couplets. The longer poems differ from the polymetra and the epigrams not only in length but also in their subjects: there are seven hymns and one mini-epic, or epyllion, the most highly prized form for the "new poets".^[5] Each of these three parts – 860, 798, 656 lines respectively – would fit onto a single scroll.^[6]

The polymetra and the epigrams can be divided into four major thematic groups (ignoring a rather large number of poems eluding such categorization):

• poems to and about his friends (e.g., an invitation such as Poem 13).
• erotic poems: some of them indicate homosexual penchants (48, 50, and 99),^[7][8][9] but most are about women, especially about one he calls "Lesbia" (in honour of the poet Sappho of Lesbos, source and inspiration of many of his poems); philologists have gone to considerable efforts to discover her real identity, and many have concluded that Lesbia was Clodia, sister of the infamous Publius Clodius Pulcher and a woman known for her generous sexuality, but this identification rests on some rather fragile assumptions. Catullus displays a wide range of highly emotional and seemingly contradictory responses to Lesbia, ranging from tender love poems to sadness, disappointment, and bitter sarcasm.
• invectives: some of these often rude and sometimes downright obscene poems are targeted at friends-turned-traitors (e.g., Poem 16) and other lovers of Lesbia, but many well-known poets, politicians (e.g. Julius Caesar) and orators, including Cicero, are thrashed as well. However, many of these poems are humorous and craftily veil the sting of the attack. For example, Catullus writes a poem mocking a pretentious descendant of a freedman who emphasizes the letter "h" in his speech because it makes him sound more like a learned Greek by adding unnecessary Hs to words like insidias (ambush).
• condolences: some poems of Catullus are, in fact, serious in nature. One poem, 96, comforts a friend for the death of his wife, while several others, most famously 101, lament the death of his brother.

All these poems describe the lifestyle of Catullus and his friends, who, despite Catullus's temporary political post in Bithynia, appear to have lived withdrawn from politics. They were interested mainly in poetry and love. Above all other qualities, Catullus seems to have sought venustas (attractiveness, beauty) and lepos (charm).

Catullus is the predecessor in Roman elegy of poets like Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Catullus came at the beginning of the genre of love poetry, so his work is different than his predecessors'. Ovid is heavily influenced by Catullus; however, the focus of Ovid's writing is on the concept of love, rather than on himself or the male lover.^[10]

Lesbia

The major love of Catullus's poems is a woman he calls "Lesbia". Lesbia is mentioned by name in 12 poems (5, 7, 51 and 58 in the polymetra, and 72, 75, 79, 83, 86, 87, 92, and 107 in the elegiac epigrams); but it is usually assumed that she is referred to in several others, for example as meae puellae 'of my girl' in 2, 3, 11, 13; puella 'girl' in 8 and 36; mulier mea 'my woman' in 70; mea vita 'my life' in 109; omnia nostra bona 'all our good things' in 77; and others. Fordyce puts the total number of Lesbia poems at 25.^[11]

Early in the collection, Catullus expresses his passionate love for Lesbia, famously demanding thousands of kisses from her in poems 5 and 6; but already in poem 8 he had grown bitter and disillusioned by Lesbia's infidelity, and in poem 11 he accuses her of sleeping with 300 other men, and in poem 58 of being no better than a common prostitute.^[12] But at the end of the collection, in poems 107 and 109, it appears that the two have become reconciled again, even though Catullus is sceptical about Lesbia's promises.^[13]

It is likely that "Lesbia" is a pseudonym; Apuleius tells her that her real name was Clodia.^[14] Already in 1553 the Renaissance scholar Victorius had suggested that this Clodia is to be identified with the aristocratic Clodia, wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer (consul 60 BC) and daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul 79 BC), a woman whom Cicero attacks mercilessly in his speech Pro Caelio. This identification, though not certain, is thought probable by modern scholars. Clodia's two sisters also used the spelling Clodia; but in poem 68 Clodia's husband is spoken of as being still alive (he died in 59 BC); Catullus's Lesbia is therefore less likely to be the eldest sister, Clodia Marcii, whose husband was dead by 61 BC, or the youngest, Clodia Luculli, who had been divorced in 66 BC.^[15] If the identification is correct, Fordyce suggests that Catullus may have met Clodia in 62 BC when her husband served as governor of Cisalpine Gaul, the province from which Catullus came.^[16] Clodia would have been possibly as much as ten years older than Catullus.^[17] The scandalous behaviour of Clodia pilloried by Cicero certainly fits the depiction of Lesbia in Catullus's poems.

After her husband's death in 59 BC (Cicero insinuates that she poisoned him) it seems that Clodia took up with the young man Marcus Caelius Rufus, who had rented a house near hers on the Palatine Hill. It is thought possible that poem 77, in which Catullus bitterly attacks a certain former friend called "Rufus" for stealing his love, reflects this change. Later Caelius broke off the relationship, and in 56 BC he was taken to court on a charge (among other things) of trying to poison Clodia.^[18]

Iuventius

Also included among the poems are four (24, 48, 81, 99) mentioning a certain boy Iuventius, with whom it seems that Catullus also had an affair. It is conjectured that other poems too, such as 15, 21, 38, and 40 may also refer to Iuventius, although he is not named.^[19] It appears that Iuventius was not faithful to Catullus. Catullus's friend Aurelius tried to seduce him (poem 21), as did a certain Ravidus (poem 40); and from poems 23, 24, 81 it seems that Iuventius preferred the handsome but impecunious Furius to Catullus.^[20] Iuventius is last heard of in poem 99, where Catullus says he tried to steal a kiss from the boy, causing Iuventius to reproach him angrily. Catullus says that as a result the kiss turned for him from ambrosia to hellebore (a bitter herb used to cure madness), curing him of his passion.^[21]

Inspirations

Catullus deeply admired Sappho and Callimachus. Poem 66 is a quite faithful translation of Callimachus' poem Βερενίκης Πλόκαμος ("Berenice's Braid", Aetia fr. 110 Pfeiffer) and he adapted one of his epigrams, on the lover Callignotus who broke his promise to Ionis in favor of a boy (Ep. 11 Gow-Page) into poem 70. Poem 51, on the other hand, is an adaptation and re-imagining of Sappho 31. Poems 51 and 11 are the only poems of Catullus written in the meter of Sapphic strophe, and may be respectively his first and last poems to Lesbia.^[22] He was also inspired by the corruption of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and the other aristocrats of his time.

Influence

Catullus was a popular poet in the Renaissance and a central model for the neo-Latin love elegy. By 1347 Petrarch was an admirer and imitator who read the ancient poet in the Verona codex (the "V" manuscript). Catullus also influenced other humanist poets, including Panormita, Pontano, and Marullus.^[23]

Catullus influenced many English poets, including Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick. Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe wrote imitations of his shorter poems, particularly Catullus 5, and John Milton wrote of the poet's "Satyirical sharpness, or naked plainness."^[24]

He has been praised as a lyricist and translated by writers including Thomas Campion, William Wordsworth, James Methven, and Louis Zukofsky.^[24]

Poems 5, 8, 32, 41, 51, 58, 70, 73, 75, 85, 87 and 109 were set to music by Carl Orff as part of his Catulli Carmina.^[25]

Style

Catullus wrote in many different meters including hendecasyllabic and elegiac couplets (common in love poetry). A portion of his poetry (roughly a fourth) shows strong and occasionally wild emotions especially in regard to Lesbia. He also demonstrates a great sense of humour such as in Catullus 13 and 42.

Many of the literary techniques he used are still common today, including hyperbole: plenus sacculus est aranearum (Catullus 13), which translates as ‘[my] purse is all full – of cobwebs.’ He also uses anaphora e.g. Salve, nec minimo puella naso nec bello pede nec…(Catullus 43) as well as tricolon and alliteration.

History of the texts of Catullus's poems

Far more than for major Classical poets such as Virgil and Horace, the texts of Catullus's poems are in a corrupted condition, with omissions and disputable word choices present in many of the poems, making textual analysis and even conjectural changes important in the study of his poems.^[26]

A single book of poems by Catullus barely survived the millennia, and the texts of a great many of the poems are considered corrupted to one extent or another from hand transmission of manuscript to manuscript. Even an early scribe, of the manuscript G, lamented the poor condition of the source and announced to readers that he was not to blame:^[26]

You, reader, whoever you are to whose hands this book may find its way, grant pardon to the scribe if you think it corrupt. For he transcribed it from an exemplar which was itself very corrupt. Indeed, there was nothing else available, from which he could have the opportunity of copying this book; and in order to assemble something from this rough and ready source, he decided that it was better to have it in a corrupt state than not to have it at all, while hoping still to be able to correct it from another copy which might happen to emerge. Fare you well, if you do not curse him.

Even in the twentieth century, not all major manuscripts were known to all major scholars (or at least the importance of all of the major manuscripts was not recognized), and some important scholarly works on Catullus don't refer to them.^[26]

Before the fourteenth century

In the Middle Ages, Catullus appears to have been barely known. In one of the few references to his poetry, Isidore of Seville quotes from the poet in the seventh century. In 966 Bishop Rather of Verona, the poet's hometown, discovered a manuscript of his poems "and reproached himself for spending day and night with Catullus's poetry." No more information on any Catullus manuscript is known again until about 1300.^[23]

Major source manuscripts up to the fourteenth century

A small number of manuscripts were the main vehicles for preserving Catullus's poems, known by these capital-letter names. Other, minor source manuscripts are designated with lower-case letters.

In summary, these are the relationships of major Catullus manuscripts:

• The V manuscript spawned A, which spawned O and X. The X manuscript then spawned G and R, and T is some kind of distant relative.
• O, G, R, and T are known exactly, but V is lost, and we have no direct knowledge of A and X, which are deduced by scholars.

Descriptions and history of the major source manuscripts

• T – ninth-century – contains only Poem 62.
• V – nothing is known about its creation date, except that it was certainly written in a minuscule script; it became known in the late 13th or early 14th century^[26] – a manuscript preserved in the Chapter Library of Verona and also known as the Verona Codex, is said to have been "clearly available to various Paduan and Veronese humanists in the period 1290 – 1310".^[26] Benvenuto de Campesanis "celebrated the discovery as the poet's resurrection from the dead".^[23] This manuscript is now lost. V was the sole source of nearly all of the poet's surviving work. It was a "late and corrupt copy which was already the despair of its earliest scribes." Many scholars think this manuscript spawned manuscripts O, X, G, and R.
• A – a scholar-deduced intermediate source of the O and X manuscripts.^[26] If it existed, it could date from the late 13th to sometime in the 14th century – created from V soon after V was discovered in Verona. Its (disputable) existence is deduced from the titles and divisions of the poems of the O, X, G, and R manuscripts.^[26]
• O – last third of the fourteenth century. It is most probably the oldest of all known MSS. containing the entire Catullan corpus (T is five hundred years older, but it contains only one poem). Its importance was not presented to the public until R. Ellis brought out Catulli Veronensis Liber in 1867 (Oxford).^[26]
• X – last quarter of the fourteenth century. This manuscript is lost; scholars deduced its existence as a direct source of the later G and R manuscripts. Contrary to the disputable existence of A, the existence of X is not doubted.^[26]
• G – last quarter of the fourteenth century. G and R are two manuscripts with close textual "proximity" that "make it clear that these two descend together" from a common source (X). G bears a date of 19 October 1375 in its subscription, but there is a prevailing opinion of scholars that this date (and the entire subscription) has been copied from X.^[26]
• R – in about 1391, the X manuscript was copied for the humanist Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence. This copy is the R manuscript. Coluccio added some important marginal readings, now called "R²". Some of this material comes from the X manuscript because it is also present in G. The R manuscript, lost through an error in cataloguing, was dramatically rediscovered in a dusty corner of the Vatican Library by the American scholar William Gardner Hale in 1896. It helped form the basis of Ellis's Oxford Classical Text of Catullus in 1904, but didn't receive wide recognition until 1970, when it was printed in a facsimile edition by D.F.S. Thompson: The Codex Romanus of Catullus: A Collation of the Text (RhM 113: 97–110).^[26]

In print

The text was first printed in Venice by printer Wendelin von Speyer in 1472. There were many manuscripts in circulation by this time. A second printed edition appeared the following year in Parma by Francesco Puteolano, who stated that he had made extensive corrections to the previous edition.^[26]

Over the next hundred years, Poliziano, Scaliger and other humanists worked on the text and "dramatically improved" it, according to Stephen J. Harrison: "the apparatus criticus of any modern edition bears eloquent witness to the activities of these fifteenth and sixteenth-century scholars."^[26]

The divisions of poems gradually approached something very close to the modern divisions, especially with the 1577 edition of Joseph J. Scaliger, Catulli Properti Tibulli nova editio (Paris).^[26]

"Sixteenth-century Paris was an especially lively center of Catullan scholarship," one Catullus scholar has written. Scaliger's edition took a "novel approach to textual criticism. Scaliger argued that all Catullus manuscripts descended from a single, lost archetype. ... His attempt to reconstruct the characteristics of the lost archetype was also highly original. [...] [I]n the tradition of classical philology, there was no precedent for so detailed an effort at reconstruction of a lost witness."^[23]

In 1876, Emil Baehrens brought out the first version of his edition, Catulli Veronensis Liber (two volumes; Leipzig), which contained the text from G and O alone, with a number of emendations.^[26]

In the twentieth century

The 1949 Oxford Classical Text by R.A.B. Mynors, partly because of its wide availability, has become the standard text, at least in the English-speaking world.^[26]

One very influential article in Catullus scholarship, R.G.M. Nisbet's "Notes on the text and interpretation of Catullus" (available in Nisbet's Collected Papers on Latin Literature, Oxford, 1995), gave Nisbet's own conjectural solutions to more than 20 problematic passages of the poems. He also revived a number of older conjectures, going as far back as Renaissance scholarship, which editors had ignored.^[26]

Another influential text of Catullus poems is that of George P. Goold, Catullus (London, 1983).^[26]

Readings

• Catullus 1 in Latin and English
• Catullus 2 in Latin and English
• Catullus 3 in Latin and English
• Catullus 4 in Latin and English
• Catullus 5 in Latin and English
• Catullus 6 in Latin and English
• Catullus 7 in Latin and English
• Catullus 8 in Latin and English
• Catullus 9 in Latin and English
• Catullus 10 in Latin and English
• Catullus 11 in Latin and English
• Catullus 12 in Latin and English
• Catullus 14 in Latin and English
• Catullus 15 in Latin and English
• Catullus 16 in Latin and English
• Catullus 17 in Latin and English
• Catullus 21 in Latin and English
• Catullus 22 in Latin and English
• Catullus 23 in Latin and English
• Catullus 24 in Latin and English
• Catullus 25 in Latin and English
• Catullus 26 in Latin and English
• Catullus 27 in Latin and English
• Catullus 28 in Latin and English
• Catullus 29 in Latin and English
• Catullus 30 in Latin and English
• Catullus 31 in Latin and English
• Catullus 32 in Latin and English
• Catullus 33 Latin and English
• Catullus 34 Latin and English
• Catullus 35 Latin and English
• Catullus 36 Latin and English
• Catullus 37 Latin and English
• Catullus 38 in Latin and English
• Catullus 39 in Latin and English
• Catullus 40 Latin and English
• Catullus 41 Latin and English
• Catullus 42 Latin and English
• Catullus 43 Latin and English
• Catullus 44 Latin and English
• Catullus 45 in Latin English
• Catullus 46 in Latin English
• Catullus 47 in Latin English
• Catullus 48 Latine Anglice Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi
• Catullus 49 in Latin & English- Disertissime Romuli nepotum
• Catullus 50 in Latin & English- Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi, Vocabulary notes
• Catullus 51 Latin and English
• Catullus 52 in Latin & English- Quid est, Catulle- Quid moraris emori
• Catullus 53 in Latin & English- Risi nescio quem modo e corona
• Catullus 55 in Latin & English- Oramus, si forte non molestum est
• Catullus 57 in Latin & English- Pulcre convenit improbis cinaedis
• Catullus 58 in Latin & English
• Catullus 60 in Latin & English
• Catullus 101

See also

• Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829

Notes

References

• Oxford Latin Reader, by Maurice Balme and James Morwood (1997)

Collections and commentaries

• Ancona, R (2004). Writing Passion: A Catullus Reader. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. ISBN 978-0-86516-482-6.
• Garrison, DH (2004). The Student's Catullus (3rd ed.). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3635-6.
• Arnold, B; Aronson A; Kawall G (2000). Love and Betrayal: A Catullus Reader. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-043345-9.
• Bender, HV; Forsyth PY (2005). Catullus: Expanded Edition. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. ISBN 978-0-86516-603-5.
• Forsyth, PY (2002). The Poems of Catullus: A Teaching Text. Lanham MD: University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-8191-5151-3.
• Fordyce, CJ (1990). Catullus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-872147-5.
• Thomson, DFS (2003). Catullus: Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary (revised ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-8592-4.

External links

• The Poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus at Wikibooks
• Works related to Author:Gaius Valerius Catullus at Wikisource
• Poems of Catullus at Project Gutenberg
• Catullus's work in Latin and over 25 other languages at Catullus Translations
• Find other Catullus-minded people and discuss his works with them at the Catullus Forum
• The complete poems of Catullus at The Latin Library
• Summer Lyrics Short essay on Catullus by Morgan Meis of 3 Quarks Daily
• Poems of Catullus in Latin/English Archived 2007-02-12 at the Wayback Machine
• CATULLUS PURIFIED: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CARMEN 16
• Catullus: text, concordances, and frequency list

This page was last edited on 23 April 2024, at 13:46