Catullus

• 1. Introduction

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  Gaius Valerius Catullus wrote two lines that translators have spent two thousand years trying to equal: "I hate and I love. You ask how this is possible. I do not know, but I feel it, and I am in agony." That couplet, poem 85, captures something so immediate that a Finnish jazz singer has performed it over standard jazz tunes, an Icelandic composer set it through a vocoder backed by a string quartet, and it still turns up in undergraduate anthologies today. Catullus was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic, born around 84 BC into a prominent family in Verona. He died young, probably around 54 BC, leaving behind 116 poems that ranged from tender love lyrics to obscene lampoons aimed at Julius Caesar himself. How did a man from a provincial town in Cisalpine Gaul come to write poems that Julius Caesar admitted left an indelible stain on his reputation? What was the love affair that gave the world some of the most psychologically acute relationship poetry of antiquity? And why did those poems nearly vanish entirely, only to surface in a single manuscript in Verona more than a thousand years after his death?

• 2. The Verona Family

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  Verona in the late Republic was not a backwater. Catullus came from a leading equestrian family there, a social rank that carried enough weight for his father to host Julius Caesar when Caesar served as promagistrate of the two Gallic provinces. That connection to power is one of the biographical facts the poems themselves confirm. In poem 31, Catullus describes arriving home at the family villa on the peninsula of Sirmio, jutting into Lake Garda near Verona, in a mood of uncomplicated joy. The family also held a villa near the resort of Tibur, the modern Tivoli. These are the coordinates of a comfortable, well-connected life. He spent most of his young adult years in Rome, where his circle included the poets Licinius Calvus and Helvius Cinna, the biographer Cornelius Nepos, and Quintus Hortensius, the son of the great orator who had been Cicero's rival. Catullus dedicated a collection of poems, a libellus, to Cornelius Nepos; scholars still debate how that dedication relates to the 116-poem collection that survives. His acquaintances also extended to Marcus Furius Bibaculus and to the most prominent Romans of the age: Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey all appear, sometimes admiringly, more often as targets, in his verse. One year, from summer 57 to summer 56 BC, he left Rome to serve on the staff of Gaius Memmius in Bithynia, on the southern shore of the Black Sea. While traveling in the region he made a detour to the Troad, the area around ancient Troy, to perform ritual rites at the tomb of his dead brother. The grief recorded in poem 101 from that visit is among the most translated passages in Latin literature.

• 3. Lesbia

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  The Roman writer Apuleius identified the woman Catullus called "Lesbia" as a certain Clodia, and most scholars since have accepted that she was Clodia Metelli, sister of the notorious Publius Clodius Pulcher and wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, who held the consulship in 60 BC. She was educated, sophisticated, and from one of the great patrician houses of Rome. The pseudonym "Lesbia" was itself a gesture, evoking the lyric poet Sappho, who came from the island of Lesbos. Catullus traced the full arc of the affair in his poems: initial euphoria, doubt, estrangement, and a wrenching sense of loss that never entirely resolved. His own verse attests to at least five other partners of hers: Egnatius in poem 37, Gellius in poem 91, Quintius in poem 82, Rufus in poem 77, and Lesbius in poem 79. The relationship between Clodia and her husband was itself shadowed. Her husband Metellus died in 59 BC under circumstances Cicero, in his speech Pro Caelio, hinted darkly might involve poison. Catullus seems to have been unable to turn away from Clodia despite the evidence of her indifference, and poems 11 and 58 in particular swing between devoted love and bitter contempt. The back-and-forth was not literary posturing. The poems display a psychological depth that later readers across very different centuries recognized as genuine. It is unclear when the affair ended or whether it ended cleanly at all.

• 4. Neoteric Ambitions

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  Cicero coined a term for the group Catullus belonged to: he called them neoteroi, Greek for "moderns", or in Latin poetae novi, the new poets. He meant it as a slight. These writers had turned their backs on the grand tradition of Roman epic, the tradition handed down from the poet Ennius, in favor of short, meticulous, personal poems modeled on the Hellenistic innovations of Callimachus and the Alexandrian school. Catullus described his own work as expolitum, polished, a word that signals deliberate craft over epic grandeur. His debt to Callimachus was substantial, but his debt to Sappho was personal. Catullus 51, one of the Lesbia poems, is part translation and part transformation of Sappho 31. He used the Sapphic stanza, the meter Sappho was associated with, in exactly two of his poems, 11 and 51, and that choice may have encouraged his successor Horace to take up the form. The influence of Greek and Roman mythology ran through his longer poems: 63, 64, 65, 66, and 68 all engage mythological material. Poem 64, his longest work at 408 lines, is a miniature epic set in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer and Virgil, and it folds two myths together, the abandonment of Ariadne and the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with one story embedded inside the other. The poem declares that the wedding of Peleus and Thetis was the last occasion on which the gods visited mortals directly. That use of nested narrative and deliberate chronological dislocation, letting compositional balance take precedence over plot sequence, is what scholars identify as one of the defining traits of Neoteric poetry.

• 5. The 116 Poems

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  The surviving collection runs to 116 poems, though the exact number varies slightly across different editions. They fall into three formal groups: roughly sixty short poems in varying meters, called polymetra, nine longer poems, and forty-eight epigrams in elegiac couplets. Each group, approximately 860 lines, 1136 lines, and 330 lines respectively, is compact enough to fit on a single ancient scroll. Within those groups, the polymetra and epigrams sort loosely into four thematic territories: poems to and about friends, including the lighthearted dinner-invitation poem 13; erotic poems, among them a cluster addressed to a boy named Juventius alongside the Lesbia cycle; invectives, some of them obscene, targeting former friends, rival poets, and politicians; and poems of grief and condolence, including poem 96, which comforts a friend, and the famous poem 101, the elegy for his brother. Whether Catullus himself arranged the order is debated. The case for intentional ordering rests on details like thematic clusters and pairings of poems with contrasting content. Martial, the later Roman epigrammatist, mentions a collection of light verse known as Passer, which means sparrow, suggesting a book named after its opening poem. Poem 2 of the surviving collection begins with that word, passer, yet the collection opens instead with a dedication poem, and the question of which poem was intended first has not been settled.

• 6. Survival and Rediscovery

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  After the late second century CE, Catullus's poetry effectively dropped out of circulation. Saint Jerome and Boethius left scattered references showing some knowledge of his work, but there was no continuous tradition of reading or teaching him. Then, in 1305, a manuscript turned up in Verona, the city where Catullus had been born roughly fourteen hundred years earlier. Scholars call it the V manuscript, for Verona. It disappeared again shortly after being found, but not before two copies were made. One of those copies now rests in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The other, thought to have belonged to the poet Petrarch, was in turn copied and then also disappeared. Every modern edition of Catullus descends ultimately from those two copies of the lost Verona manuscript. Jerome had placed the poet's birth at 87 BC and his death in Rome in his thirtieth year. But the poems themselves refer to events as late as 55 BC, which made Jerome's dates problematic. Because the Roman consular lists can create confusion between 87-57 BC and 84-54 BC, most scholars now accept 84-54 BC as the likeliest span of his life. Some scholars push the death date forward to 52 or 51 BC. Catullus lamented in his poems that his brother's death had buried the whole family, yet the Valerii Catulli continued to appear as a notable family in later centuries, leading the scholar T. P. Wiseman to argue that Catullus may have married after his brother's death and that later members of the family could have been his descendants.

• 7. Afterlives in Art and Music

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  The rediscovery of the Verona manuscript eventually spread Catullus's poems into the hands of Renaissance readers, and from there into an unusually wide range of later creative work. Robert Frost named Catullus his favorite Roman poet, and Frost's 1920 poem "For Once, Then, Something" was composed in hendecasyllables, the meter central to much of Catullus. Tennyson also admired Catullus and used hendecasyllables in two of his own poems. Ezra Pound, who saw his own era as one of artistic collapse, turned to Catullus as a touchstone for reconstruction, believing that poetry could only advance by returning to and reexamining classical work. John Milton, Robert Herrick, Petrarch, William Butler Yeats, and Thornton Wilder all engaged with the poems in different ways; Wilder made both Catullus and Clodia major characters in his 1948 epistolary novel The Ides of March. In music, the Hungarian-born British composer Matyás Seiber set poem 31, the Sirmio homecoming poem, for unaccompanied mixed chorus in 1956. The American composer Dominick Argento, who won the Pulitzer Prize, set roughly fifty lines of Catullus for mixed chorus and percussion in 1981, using his own English translation, in a work premiered by the Dale Warland Singers. Carl Orff's cantata Catulli Carmina dates to 1943. Thomas Campion wrote a lute-song, "My Sweetest Lesbia," in 1601 drawing on the first six lines of poem 5; and Alfonso Ferrabosco the Younger set the same poem 5, in a translation by Ben Jonson, as a lute-accompanied song in 1606. The composer Michael Linton's Carmina Catulli, drawing on seventeen of Catullus's poems, had its premiere at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in March 2014, performed by French baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer and pianist Jason Paul Peterson.