A Companion to Catullus E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1489

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In this companion, international scholars provide a comprehensive overview that reflects the most recent trends in Catullan studies.

• Explores the work of Catullus, one of the best Roman ‘lyric poets’
• Provides discussions about production, genre, style, and reception, as well as interpretive essays on key poems and groups of poems
• Grounds Catullus in the socio-historical world around him
• Chapters challenge received wisdom, present original readings, and suggest new interpretations of biographical evidence

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes on Contributors

1 IntroductionMarilyn B. Skinner

Part I The Text and the Collection

2 History and Transmission of the TextJ. L. Butrica

3 Authorial Arrangement of the Collection: Debate Past and PresentMarilyn B. Skinner

Part II Contexts of Production

4 The Valerii Catulli of VeronaT. P. Wiseman

5 The Contemporary Political ContextDavid Konstan

6 The Intellectual ClimateAndrew Feldherr

7 Gender and MasculinityElizabeth Manwell

Part III Influences

8 Catullus and Sappho Ellen Greene

9 Catullus and Callimachus Peter E. Knox

Part IV Stylistics

10 Neoteric Poetics W. R. Johnson

11 Elements of Style in Catullus George A. Sheets

12 Catullus and Elite Republican Social Discourse Brian A. Krostenko

Part V Poems and Groups of Poems

13 Catullus and the Programmatic Poem: The Origins, Scope, and Utility of a Concept William W. Batstone

14 The Lesbia Poems Julia T. Dyson Hejduk

15 Sexuality and Ritual: Catullus’ Wedding Poems Vassiliki Panoussi

16 Catullan Intertextuality: Apollonius and the Allusive Plot of Catullus Jeri Blair DeBrohun

17 Poem 68: Love and Death, and the Gifts of Venus and the Muses Elena Theodorakopoulos

18 Social Commentary and Political Invective W. Jeffrey Tatum

Part VI Reception

19 Catullus and Horace Randall L. B. McNeill

20 Catullus and Vergil Christopher Nappa

21 Catullus and Roman Love Elegy Paul Allen Miller

22 Catullus and Martial Sven Lorenz

23 Catullus in the Renaissance Julia Haig Gaisser

24 The Modern Reception of Catullus Brian Arkins

Part VII Pedagogy

25 Catullus in the Secondary School Curriculum Ronnie Ancona and Judith P. Hallett

26 Catullus in the College Classroom Daniel H. Garrison

Part VIII Translation

27 Translating Catullus Elizabeth Vandiver

Consolidated Bibliography

General Index

Index Locorum

Praise for A Companion to Catullus

“This volume is strongly recommended to scholars and teachers for its sound exposition of a given Catullan problem and as a point of departure for any student starting out to explore the Catullan oeuvre.”

Sjarlene Thom

“This Companion will be the best of companions to young Catullus scholars, as a strong starting point for work on the most important questions in Catullan studies.”

New England Classical Journal

“The volume's 27 essays are the work of a team of internationally renowned scholars. It deserves a place in both the libraries of academic institutions as well as the well-stocked public library.”

Reference Reviews

“Abounds with scholarship of a high order, state-of-the-art literary history and criticism, and, not least, solid practical advice for readers and instructors.”

Choice

“This reviewer recommends the book without reservation not only to the Catullus specialist, but also and especially to all classicists and teachers.”

Scholia Reviews

“Offers modern youth a direct hotline with an ancient author.”

Journal of Classics Teaching

“It is a strong volume, to which the student meeting Catullus for the first time and the highly experienced reader can be sent with confidence.”

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD

This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises between twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

ANCIENT HISTORY

Published

A Companion to the Roman ArmyEdited by Paul Erdkamp

A Companion to the Roman RepublicEdited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx

A Companion to the Roman EmpireEdited by David S. Potter

A Companion to the Classical Greek WorldEdited by Konrad H. Kinzl

A Companion to the Ancient Near EastEdited by Daniel C. Snell

A Companion to the Hellenistic WorldEdited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Late AntiquityEdited by Philip Rousseau

A Companion to Archaic GreeceEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to Julius CaesarEdited by Miriam Griffin

A Companion to Ancient HistoryEdited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to ByzantiumEdited by Liz James

A Companion to Ancient EgyptEdited by Alan B. Lloyd

A Companion to Ancient MacedoniaEdited by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington

In preparation

A Companion to the Punic WarsEdited by Dexter Hoyos

A Companion to SpartaEdited by Anton Powell

LITERATURE AND CULTURE

PublishedA Companion to Classical Receptions

Edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray

A Companion to Greek and Roman HistoriographyEdited by John Marincola

A Companion to CatullusEdited by Marilyn B. Skinner

A Companion to Roman ReligionEdited by Jörg Rüpke

A Companion to Greek ReligionEdited by Daniel Ogden

A Companion to the Classical TraditionEdited by Craig W. Kallendorf

A Companion to Roman RhetoricEdited by William Dominik and Jon Hall

A Companion to Greek RhetoricEdited by Ian Worthington

A Companion to Ancient EpicEdited by John Miles Foley

A Companion to Greek TragedyEdited by Justina Gregory

A Companion to Latin LiteratureEdited by Stephen Harrison

A Companion to OvidEdited by Peter E. Knox

A Companion to Greek and Roman Political ThoughtEdited by Ryan K. Balot

A Companion to the Ancient Greek LanguageEdited by Egbert Bakker

A Companion to Hellenistic LiteratureEdited by Martine Cuypers and James J. Clauss

A Companion to Vergil's Aeneid and its TraditionEdited by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam

A Companion to HoraceEdited by Gregson Davis

In preparation

A Companion to the Latin LanguageEdited by James Clackson

A Companion to Greek MythologyEdited by Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone

A Companion to SophoclesEdited by Kirk Ormand

A Companion to AeschylusEdited by Peter Burian

A Companion to Greek ArtEdited by Tyler Jo Smith and Dimitris Plantzos

A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman WorldEdited by Beryl Rawson

A Companion to TacitusEdited by Victoria Pagán

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near EastEdited by Daniel Potts

This paperback edition first published 2011

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2007)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to Catullus/edited by Marilyn B. Skinner.

p. cm. — (Blackwell companions to the ancient world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-4051-3533-7 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-4443-3925-3 (paperback: alk. paper)

1. Catullus, Gaius Valerius—Criticism and interpretation. I. Skinner, Marilyn B.

PA6276.C66 2007

874’.01—dc22

2006025011

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

In memory of

James L. P. Butrica

attigit quoque poeticen, credimus, ne eius expers esset suauitatis

Cornelius Nepos, Life of Atticus 18.5

Illustrations

4.1 Transpadane Italy

4.2 North end of the Sirmione peninsula

4.3 Schematic reconstruction of a lost inscription from Lanuvium (CIL 14.2095)

4.4 Hypothetical reconstruction of the Sirmio villa

4.5 Fragment of wall-painting from the villa at Sirmione

Acknowledgments

The editor of this volume, the contributors, and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Authorities of the Italian Air Force (Aeronautica militare) for fig. 4.2, photograph of the north end of the Sirmione peninsula (CODIC, SMA N. 356 – 12 August 1981). Thanks to the British Embassy in Rome for assistance in obtaining the photograph.

A. P. Watt Ltd for non-US English rights to reprint excerpts from W. B. Yeats’ “The Scholars” and The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats. Permission granted by A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

Carcanet Press Ltd for world rights to reprint Robert Graves’ “The Thieves,” from Robert Graves: The Complete Poems in One Volume, edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (2000). ©1995 by the Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust.

The University of Chicago Press, for permission to publish a synopsis of Brian A. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (© 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.).

Elisabetta Roffia, Soprintendenza per i beni archeologici della Lombardia, for photographs of fragment of fresco (Archivio Fotografico D 756) reproduced as fig.4.5.

David Higham Associates for world rights to reprint an excerpt from “Epitaph for Liberal Poets,” by Louis MacNeice, included in E. R. Dodds, ed., The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Copyright ©1966 by The Estate of Louis MacNeice.

Faber & Faber Ltd for UK and British Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to reprint excerpts from the following works by Ezra Pound:

“The Flame” and “To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound.

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound.

Selected Prose of Ezra Pound 1909–1965, copyright ©1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound.

“Canto IV” and “Canto V” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound.

The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1935 by Ezra Pound.

“Catullus: XXVI and LXXXV” by Ezra Pound, from The Translations of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1963 by Ezra Pound.

Faber & Faber Ltd for British Commonwealth and European rights to reprint an excerpt from The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard. Copyright ©1997 by Tom Stoppard.

New Directions Publishing Corporation for United States and Canadian rights to quote from the following works and authors:

“The Flame” and “To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Selected Prose of Ezra Pound 1909–1965, copyright ©1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

“Canto IV” and “Canto V” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1935 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

“Catullus: XXVI and LXXXV” by Ezra Pound, from The Translations of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1963 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

“Dear Little Sirmio: Catullus Recollected,” by Stevie Smith, from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, copyright ©1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Pickering & Chatto Publishers Ltd for permission to quote an excerpt from Terry L. Meyers, ed., The Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Vol. 3, 1890–1909 (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2004). Reproduced courtesy of Pickering & Chatto Publishers.

Brian Read and the literary estate of Arthur Symons for permission to reprint Arthur Symons’ translation of Poem 8, originally contained in From Catullus – Chiefly Concerning Lesbia, ©1924 by Arthur Symons.

Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, for US rights to reprint excerpts from W. B. Yeats’ “The Scholars” and The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations of the names of ancient authors and their works follow, whenever possible, the practice of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (1996), referred to as OCD3. Otherwise Greek authors and titles are abbreviated as in Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition, revised by H. Stuart Jones and supplemented by various scholars (1968), referred to as LSJ. Latin authors and titles are abbreviated as in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982), commonly cited as OLD. Names of authors or works in square brackets [—] indicate spurious or questionable attributions. Numbers in superscript following a title indicate the number of an edition (e.g., OCD3). Abbreviations and descriptions of works of secondary scholarship are also usually taken from OCD3.

General Abbreviations

ad; ad loc.

ad locum,

at the line being discussed in the commentary

ap.

apud

, within, indicating a quotation contained in another author

c, cc.

carmen,

poem;

carmina,

poems

ca.

circa,

about or approximately

cf

compare

ch.

chapter

cos

.

consul (date follows)

des.

designatus,

appointed but not yet installed

suff

suffectus,

appointed to fill out a term

d.

died

def

definition

esp.

especially

f.

filius, filia,

son or daughter

ff.

and the following (lines, pages)

flg., figs.

figure, figures

fr., frr.

fragment, fragments

G

Sanjjermanensis

(Paris codex of Catullus)

ibid.

ibidem,

in the same work cited above

1.

libertus, liberta,

freedman or -woman

m.

married

MS, MSS

manuscript, manuscripts

n., nn.

note, notes

no., nos.

number, numbers

O

Oxoniensis

(Oxford codex of Catullus)

p., pp.

page, pages

passim

passim,

throughout

pr

praetor (date follows)

pref

preface

pron.

pronepos,

great-grandson

R

Romanus

(Vatican codex of Catullus)

sc.

scilicet,

namely

s.v.

sub verbo,

under the word

test.

testimonia,

mentions in later antiquity

tr. pop.

tribune of the people (date follows)

trans.

translated (by)

V

Veronensis

(Verona codex of Catullus)

v, vv.

verse, verses

vel sim.

vel simile,

or something similar

Roman Pmenomina

First names of male Roman citizens, relatively few and handed down in families, are abbreviated on inscriptions and conventionally in modern works of scholarship. The following occur in this volume:

Ap.

Appius

C.

Gaius

Cn.

Gnaeus

D.

Decimus

L.

Lucius

M.

Marcus

P.

Publius

Q.

Quintus

Ser.

Servius

Sex.

Sextus

T

Titus

Ti.

Tiberius

Greek Authors and Works

Aesch.

Aeschylus

Anth. Pal.

Palatine Anthology

App.

B Civ.

Appian,

Bellum Civile

Ap. Rhod.

Argon.

Apollonius Pdiodius,

Argonautica

Arist.

Rhet.

Aristotle,

Rhetorie

Callim.

Callimachus

Act.

Aetia

Epigr.

Epigrams

Democr.

Democritus

Dio Cass.

Dio Cassius

Hes.

Theog.

Hesiod,

Theogony

Horn.

Homer

II.

Iliad

Od.

Odyssey

Joseph.

BJ

Josephus,

Bellum Judaicum

Pind.

Isthm.

Pindar,

Isthmian Odes

PI.

Plato

Resp.

Republic

Plut.

Plutarch

Caes.

Life of Julius Caesar

Cat. Mi.

Life ofCato the Younger

Cic.

Life of Cicero

Galb.

Life of Galba

Nie.

Life ofNicias

Pomp.

Life of Pompey

Polyb.

Polybius

Strab.

Strabo

Theoc.

Id.

Theocritus,

Idylls

Roman Authors and Works

Apul.

Apol.

Apuleius,

Apologia

Asc.... C

Asconius, ed. A. C. Clark (OCT, 1907)

Aur. Viet.

Caes.

Aurelius Victor,

Caesares

Babr.

Babrius

Caes.

Caesar

B Civ.

Bellum Civile

B Gall.

Bellum Gallicum

Catull.

Catullus

Cic.

Cicero

Amie.

De amicitia

Att.

Letters to Atticus

Brut.

Brutus

Caecin.

Pro Caecina

Cael.

Pro Caelio

Cat.

In Catilinam

De or.

De oratore

Div.

De divinatione

Fam.

Letters to Acquaintances (Ad familiäres)

Fin.

De finibus

Flac.

Pro Fiacco

Font.

Pro Fonteio

Har. resp.

De haruspicum response

Inv. rhet.

De inventione rhetorica

Leg. Man.

Pro lege Manilia

Off-

De officiis

Or at.

Orator

Phil.

Philippics

Pis.

In Pisonem

Quinct.

Pro Quinctio

Sest.

Pro Sestio

Tusc.

Tusculanae Disputationes

Verr.

In Verrem

[Cic]

Sail.

[Cicero],

In Sallustium

Dig.

Paulus,

Justinian's Digest

Enn.

Ann.

Ennius,

Annales

(ed. Skutsch)

Fest.

Festus

Gell.

NA

Aulus Gellius,

Attic Nights

Hirt.

B Gall.

Hirtius,

Bellum Gallicum

Hor.

Horace

Ars P.

Ars Poetica

Carni.

Odes

Carni. Saec.

Carmen Saeculare

Ep.

Epistles

Epod.

Epodes

Sat.

Satires

Isid.

Etym.

Isidore,

Etymologiae

Jer.

Chron.

Jerome,

Chronica

Just.

Epit.

Justin,

Epitome

(of Trogus)

Juv

Juvenal

Liv.

Livy

Luc.

Lucan

Macrob.

Sat.

Macrobius,

Saturnalia

Mart.

Martial

Men. Rhet.

Menander Rhetor

Nep.

Att.

Cornelius Nepos,

Life of Atticus

Ov

Ovid

Am.

Amores

Met.

Metamorphoses

Tr.

Tristia

Paul.

Dig.

Iulius Paulus,

Digesta lustiniani

Phaedr.

Phaedrus

Plaut.

Plautus

Bacch.

Bacchides

Men.

Menaechmi

Mil.

Miles gloriosus

Per.

Persa

Rud.

Rudens

Plin.

Ep.

Pliny (the Younger),

Letters

Plin.

HN

Pliny (the Elder),

Natural History

Prise.

Inst.

Priscian,

Institutes of the Art of Grammar

Prop.

Propertius

Q. Cic.

Comment, pet.

Quintus Cicero,

Commentariolum petitionis

Quint.

Inst.

Quintilian,

Institutes of Oratory

Rhet. Her.

Rhetorica ad Herennium

Sail.

Sallust

Cat.

Catiline

Hist.

B. Maurenbrecher, ed.,

C. Sallusti Crispi Historiarum reliquiae

(1893)

Jug.

Jugurtha

Sen.

Controv.

Seneca (the Elder),

Controversiae

Sen.

Ep.

Seneca (the Younger),

Epistulae

Serv.

Servius

Stat.

Silv.

Statius,

Silvae

Suet.

Suetonius

Calig.

Life of Caligula

Claud.

Life of the Deified Claudius

Gram.

De grammaticis

lui.

Life of the Deified Julius

Ner

Life of Nero

Vita Hor.

Life of Horace

Tac.

Tacitus

Agr

Agricola

Ann.

Annales

Dial.

Dialogus de oratoribus

Hist.

Historiae

Ter. Maur.

Terentianus Maurus

Val. Max.

Valerius Maximus

Var.

Men.

Varrò,

Menippeae

Veil. Pat.

Velleius Paterculus

Verg.

Vergil

Aen.

Aeneid

Ed.

Eclogues

G.

Georgics

Works of Secondary Scholarship

AÉ

L'Année Épigraphique,

published in

Revue Archéologique

and separately (1888–)

Blänsdorf

J. Blänsdorf, ed.,

Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum epicorum et lyricorum praeter Ennium et Lucilium,

3rd edn. (1995)

Bücheier

F. Bücheier, ed.,

Petronii Saturae,

8th edn. (1963)

Cèbe

J.-P. Cèbe, ed.,

Varron, satiresMénippées

(1972–99)

CIG

A. Boeckh, ed.,

Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum

(1828–77)

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

(1863–)

CLE

F. Bücheier and E. Lommatzsch, eds.,

Carmina

Latina Epigraphica

(1825–1926)

Courtney

E. Courtney, ed.,

The Fragmentary Latin Poets

(1993)

Diehl

E. Diehl, ed.,

Anthologica Lyrica Graeca

(1925; 2nd edn. 1942; 3rd edn. 1949–52)

D-K

H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds.,

Fragmente der

Vorsokratiker,

6th edn. (Berlin, 1952)

GLK

H. Keil, ed.,

Grammatici Latini,

8 vols. (1855–1923; rpt. 1961)

H.

R. Helm, ed.,

Die Chronik desHieronymus,

2nd edn. (1956)

IG

Inscriptiones Graecae

(1873–)

Inschrif. Eph.

H. Wankel, ed.,

Die Inschriften von Ephesos,

8 vols. in 10 (1979–84)

Inscr. Ital.

Inscriptiones Italiae

(1931/2–)

LGS

D. L. Page, ed.,

Lyrica Graeca Selecta

(1968)

Lindsay

W. M. Lindsay, ed.

DCD

Nonii Marcelli De compendiosa doctrina,

3 vols. (1903)

DVS

Sexti Pompei Pesti De verborum significatu quae

supersunt cum Pauli epitome

(1913)

L-P

E. Lobel and D. L. Page, eds.,

Poetarum Lesbiorum

Fragmenta

(1955)

OCT

Oxford Classical Text

OLD

P G. W. Glare, ed.,

Oxford Latin Dictionary

(1968–82)

ORF

H. Malcovati,

Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta

(2nd edn. 1955; 4th edn. 1967)

Pf.

R. Pfeiffer, ed.,

Callimachus,

2 vols. (1949)

P. Mil. Vogl. VIII

309

G. Bastianini and C. Gallazzi with C. Austin, eds.,

Posidippo di Petto,: Epigrammi,

Papiri dell' Universita degli Studi di Milano 8 (2001)

Radt

B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt, eds.,

Tragicorum Graecorum Frammenta (TrGF),

5 vols. (1971–85)

Sk.

O. Skutsch, ed.,

The Annals ofQ. Ennius

(1985)

S-M

B. Snell and H. Maehler, eds.,

Pindari carmina cum fragmentis

(198 7–8 )

Supp. Hell.

H. Lloyd-Jones and R Parsons, eds.,

Supplementum Hellenisticum,

Texte und Kommentare no. 11 (1983)

TLL

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

(1900–)

Notes on Contributors

Ronnie Ancona is professor of classics at Hunter College, CUNY, and in the PhD program of the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her PhD in classics from the Ohio State University in 1983. Her publications include Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes (1994); Horace: Selected Odes and Satire 1.9, student text with accompanying teacher’s guide (1999, 2nd edition 2005); Writing Passion: A Catullus Reader with accompanying teacher’s guide (2004); Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry, co-edited with Ellen Greene (2005); and A Concise Guide to Teaching Latin Literature, forthcoming. She is the series editor for the Bolchazy-Carducci college-level Latin Readers and, with Sarah B. Pomeroy, the co-editor of a series on women in antiquity for Routledge. Current projects include a monograph, Contextualizing Catullus: Literary Interpretation and Cultural Setting.

Brian Arkins is professor of classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and at University College Dublin, where he obtained an MA in classics and a PhD in Latin. His main research interests are in Latin poetry and in reception studies, with special reference to modern Irish literature. His books include Sexuality in Catullus (1982); An Interpretation of the Poems of Propertius (2005); Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (1990); Greek and Roman Themes in Joyce (1999); and Hellenising Ireland: Greek and Roman Themes in Modern Irish Literature (2005). He has also published over a hundred journal articles.

William W. Batstone is professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. His research interests include literary theory and philosophical hermeneutics as well as both the prose and poetry of the Roman Republic and early Empire. He is the author with Cynthia Damon of Caesar’s Civil War (2006) and has written on reception theory, Bakhtin, rhetoric, and metatheatre as well as on Plautus, Catullus, Cicero, Sallust, and Vergil. He is currently working on articles for companions to Roman history and Roman rhetoric and a book on comedy, ancient and modern, and the vicissitudes of Hegel’s concrete universal.

J. L. Butrica, who passed away while this book was in press, received his BA from Amherst College in 1972, and his MA and PhD from the University of Toronto in 1973 and 1978 respectively. Besides a few articles on Greek drama, most of his work was concerned with the textual criticism of Latin poetry (most notably The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius [1984]). More recently he began to publish reviews and articles on Roman sexuality. He also translated Erasmus’ “Ecclesiastes” for the “Collected Works of Erasmus” series (due to appear in 2006–7). Currently he has two substantial articles awaiting publication in Phoenix and Rheinisches Museum arguing that Epigrammata Bobiensia 37 and 36 respectively are works of the Domitianic poet Sulpicia (a traditional attribution, now generally rejected, in the first case, a new attribution in the second).

Jeri Blair DeBrohun is associate professor of classics at Brown University. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 1992 and taught in the Classics Department at Florida State University for three years before joining the Brown faculty in 1995. Her research specializations are Hellenistic and Roman poetry, with particular emphasis on Republican and Augustan poetry at Rome. Her publications include Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy (2003) plus articles on Propertius, Catullus, Ovid, and Lucretius. She also has an interest in cultural studies, and she is currently writing a book on Greco-Roman Dress as an Expressive Medium.

Julia T. Dyson Hejduk is associate professor of classics at Baylor University. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Before taking up her present post in 2003, she worked for ten years at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include Latin poetry, Roman religion, and women of ancient Rome. She has written one monograph, King of the Wood: The Sacrificial Victor in Virgil’s Aeneid (2001), a sourcebook in translation with commentary, Clodia: Readings in Roman Passion, Politics, and Poetry (forthcoming), and several articles on Vergil and Ovid. She is currently at work on a monograph involving religion and intertextuality in Ovid, Ovid and His Gods: The Epic Struggles of an Elegiac Hero.

Andrew Feldherr is professor of classics at Princeton University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. His research concentrates on Latin literature in several genres with a special emphasis on historiography (Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History [1998]) and epic. He is currently completing a monograph on the Metamorphoses entitled Playing Gods: The Politics of Fiction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as editing the Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians.

Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Bryn Mawr College, where she taught from 1975 to 2006. She received her PhD in Greek from the University of Edinburgh in 1967. Her research interests lie in three principal areas: Republican and Augustan poetry, the transmission and reception of Roman literature, and Renaissance humanism. She is the author of Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993) and Pierio Valeriano On the Ill Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and His World (1999) and the editor of Catullus in English (2001), an anthology of Catullus translations. Forthcoming are Oxford Readings in Catullus and The Fortunes of Apuleius: A Study in Transmission and Reception.

Daniel H. Garrison is professor of classics at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. His dissertation work was rewritten as a monograph, Mild Frenzy: A Reading of the Hellenistic Love Epigram (1978). His editions of Horace’s lyrics, Horace Epodes and Odes: A New Annotated Latin Edition (1991), and Catullus, The Student’s Catullus (3rd edition, 2004), grew out of his classroom work with these poets at Northwestern. He has also written on Greek and Roman sexual culture in Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece (2000). He is now completing an annotated translation of the first comprehensive anatomy book in Europe, Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543, 1555), and is editing a volume on constructions of the human body in the ancient world.

Ellen Greene is the Joseph Paxton Presidential Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. Her research specialization is Greek and Roman lyric poetry, with an emphasis on issues in gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Poetry (1999), and has edited or co-edited four collections of essays: Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (1996), Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission (1996), Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome (2005), and Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry (with Ronnie Ancona, 2005). She has also published numerous articles on Greek and Latin love lyric, and is currently working on a book-length study of Sappho for Blackwell.

Judith P. Hallett is professor of classics at the University of Maryland at College Park. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1971, and has been a Mellon Fellow at Brandeis University and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women as well as the Blegen Visiting Scholar at Vassar College. Her major research specializations are Latin language and literature; gender, sexuality, and the family in ancient Greek and Roman society; and the history of classical studies in the United States. Author of Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family (1984), she has also co-edited a special double issue of Classical World on Six North American Women Classicists (1996–7), a special issue of Arethusa on The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship (2001), and a special issue of Helios on Roman Mothers (2007). Her co-edited volumes include Roman Sexualities (1997); Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship (1997); and Rome and Her Monuments: Essays on the City and Literature of Rome in Honor of Katherine Geffcken (2000). In addition, she has published over sixty articles, chapters in books, and translations, as well as speeches (ovationes) and songs in classical Latin. Finally, she contributed the essays on Cornelia, Sulpicia the elegist, Martial’s Sulpicia, and the women of the Vindolanda tablets to Women Writing Latin, Volume I (2002).

W. R. Johnson is John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. He has taught at Berkeley and Cornell and at the University of Chicago and has been visiting professor at the University of Michigan and UCLA. He gave the Martin Lectures at Oberlin in 1984, the Townsend Lectures at Cornell in 1989, and the Biggs Lectures at Washington University in 2004. In 1984 his monograph The Idea of Lyric won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism. He has written several books and numerous articles on Latin poetry, most recently Lucretius and the Modern World (2000) and the introduction to Stanley Lombardo’s translation of The Aeneid (2005).

Peter E. Knox is professor of classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He received his PhD in 1982 from Harvard University, where he also taught briefly before moving to faculty positions at Columbia University and his present post. His research interests focus on Roman literature of the late Republic and early Empire, as well as Greek poetry of the Hellenistic period. He is the author of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry (1986) and Ovid, Heroides: Select Epistles (1986), and has published widely in scholarly journals on topics in Greek and Latin literature, ranging from Sappho to Nonnus. In addition he is known as co-editor of Style and Tradition: Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen (1998) and as editor of Oxford Readings in Ovid (2006) and a Companion to Ovid, forthcoming in this series.

David Konstan is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition, and Professor of Comparative Literature, at Brown University. He holds a BA in mathematics, and a PhD in classics, from Columbia University. Prior to coming to Brown in 1987, he taught for 20 years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the University of Edinburgh, the Universidade de São Paulo, the University of La Plata in Argentina, the University of Natal in Durban, the University of Sydney, Monash University in Melbourne, the American University in Cairo, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His books include Roman Comedy (1983); Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (1994); Greek Comedy and Ideology (1995); Friendship in the Classical World (1997); Pity Transformed (2001); and The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006). He was president of the American Philological Association in 1999.

Brian A. Krostenko is associate professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1993 and has held faculty positions at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His research interests are the culture of the late Roman Republic, Cicero, rhetoric, and Latin linguistics. He is the author of Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (2001), which explores the problem of aestheticism in Roman culture by means of historical semantics.

Sven Lorenz received his PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich in 2001. His doctoral dissertation on Martial’s depiction of the emperors (Erotik und Panegyrik: Martials epigrammatische Kaiser) was published in 2002. Since then, he has published articles on Martial, Juvenal, and the Appendix Vergiliana. Recently he has completed a full annotated bibliography on Martial scholarship from 1970 to 2003 (part 1: Lustrum 45, 2003, 167–277; part 2: forthcoming). He teaches Latin and English at a secondary school near Munich.

Elizabeth Manwell is the Sally Appleton Kirkpatrick Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests encompass the literature and culture of the Roman Republic, theories of gender, and classical reception.

Randall L. B. McNeill is associate professor of classics at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. He received his AB summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1992 and his PhD from Yale University in 1998. His research focuses on techniques of self-presentation and the depiction of social relationships in Latin poetry of the late Republican and Augustan periods. He is the author of Horace: Image, Identity, and Audience (2001) and articles on Horace, Catullus, and classical Greek art.

Paul Allen Miller received his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Texas at Austin (1989). He is currently Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, and the editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (1994); Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (2002); Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (2004); and Latin Verse Satire: An Anthology and Critical Reader (2005). He has edited or co-edited 11 volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in classics, including Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (1998). He has published articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature as well as theory. He is currently finishing work on Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Plato and the Construction of the Subject in Postmodern France.

Christopher Nappa is associate professor of classics and chair of classical and Near Eastern studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Reading after Actium: Vergil’s Georgics, Octavian, and Rome (2005) and Aspects of Catullus’ Social Fiction (2001) as well as a number of articles on Latin poetry. His interests include Republican and Augustan Latin literature, satire, and intertextuality.

Vassiliki Panoussi is assistant professor of classical studies at the College of William and Mary. She received her PhD from Brown University in 1998. Previously she held a visiting position at the University of Virginia and a faculty post at Williams College. Her research focuses on Roman literature of the late Republic, the age of Augustus, and the early Empire as informed through the study of intertextuality, cultural anthropology, and sexuality and gender. She has published articles on Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius. She is currently completing a book-length study of Vergil’s Aeneid and its intertextual and ideological relationship to Greek tragedy. She is also at work on another book project on Women’s Rituals in Roman Literature.

George A. Sheets is associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and associate professor of law in the University of Minnesota Law School. He received his PhD from Duke University in 1974, and his JD from the William Mitchell College of Law in 1990. His research and teaching interests include comparative Indo-European linguistics, the application of linguistic pragmatics to literary texts, the history of the Greek and Latin languages, and comparative law. Currently he is working on a study of jurisprudential issues associated with tombs, corpses, and deceased persons as legal subjects and objects in Roman law.

Marilyn B. Skinner is professor of classics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 1977. Before taking up her present post in 1991, she held faculty positions at Reed College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Northern Illinois University, and visiting appointments at the University of Texas in Austin and Colgate University. Her research specialization is Roman literature of the Republican and Augustan eras. She has authored two monographs, Catullus’ Passer: The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems (1981) and Catullus in Verona (2003), and has co-edited a collection of scholarly essays, Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (2004). She is well known for her work on sexuality and gender in antiquity, as both co-editor of Roman Sexualities (1997) and author of Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (2005). Finally, she has published numerous articles on the Greek female poetic tradition, including Sappho and her successors Korinna, Erinna, Anyte, Moero, and Nossis.

W. Jeffrey Tatum is Olivia Nelson Dorman Professor of Classics at Florida State University. In 2005 he was De Carle Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities at Otago University. His research concentrates on the Roman Republic. He is the author of The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher (1999) and numerous articles on Roman history and Latin poetry.

Elena Theodorakopoulos has been a lecturer in classics at the University of Birmingham since 1994. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol in 1996 and her research specialization is Roman literature of the Republican and Augustan ages. She has written on Vergil, Ovid, and Catullus, as well as Apollonius of Rhodes. She has also edited Attitudes to Theatre from Plato to Milton (2004) and co-edited Advice and its Rhetoric in Greece and Rome (2006). In addition she has an interest in filmic representations of Rome, on which she has just completed a book, Story and Spectacle (forthcoming). Currently, she is at work on a book on Catullus and performance.

Elizabeth Vandiver is the Clement Biddle Penrose Associate Professor of Latin and Classics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. Before coming to Whitman in 2004, she held several visiting appointments, including positions at Rhodes College, the University of Maryland, and Northwestern University. Her research specializations include historiography, Latin lyric, translation studies, and the classical tradition. She has published a monograph, Heroes in Herodotus: The Interaction of Myth and History (1991), and the first English translation of Johannes Cochlaeus’ biography of Martin Luther in Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther (2002). She is currently at work on a third book, which examines the importance of the classical tradition in British poetry of World War I. She has published articles on a variety of topics, including Catullus, Livy, the classical tradition, and translation.

T. P. Wiseman is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter; he was lecturer and then reader at the University of Leicester before going to Exeter in 1977. His Oxford DPhil thesis was published as New Men in the Roman Senate 139 BC–AD 14 (1971); his other books include Catullan Questions (1969), Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays (1974), Clio’s Cosmetics (1979), Catullus and His World (1985), Roman Studies Literary and Historical (1987), Historiography and Imagination (1994), Remus: A Roman Myth (1995), Roman Drama and Roman History (1998), and The Myths of Rome (2004), which won the American Philological Association’s Goodwin Award of Merit for 2005. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary DLitt of the University of Durham. In 1996 he received the silver griffin award of the Comune di Sirmione for his work on Catullus.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Marilyn B. Skinner

Catullus, as William Fitzgerald acutely observes, is a poet whom “we have taken rather too much to our hearts” (1995: 235). For a considerable part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both lay and academic audiences reacted to the lyric voice in the Catullan collection as that of a friend and contemporary, whose grief over a brother’s death and anger at betrayals of trust struck us as candid, universally human responses to circumstance. Yet treating Catullus sympathetically as one of ourselves greatly impeded efforts to appreciate his literary achievement as a whole and to locate his poetry within its particular cultural and historical milieu. New Criticism finally taught readers to value the longer works of the learned “Alexandrian” Catullus and even to relish displays of erudition in the love poetry, but only at the price of dismissing his barbed invective and his coarsely funny occasional pieces as material supposedly displaying a “lower level of intent” (Quinn 1959: 27–43). Appreciation of the Catullan corpus, obscenity and all, in its entirety and within its proper context had to wait for the rise of New Historicism in the 1980s and the subsequent impact of the cultural studies movement on the humanities.1

It is just since the 1980s, then, that wide-ranging research has succeeded in grounding Catullus firmly in the socio-historical world around him – by investigating his provincial North Italian background, his family connections, and his dealings with the Roman elite; by observing his interactions with fellow provincials seeking advancement; by teasing out references to matters of everyday life in his poems; by studying, lastly, the circumstances under which his works were produced and disseminated and what they might have conveyed to the audiences at which they were aimed. This historicizing approach has proved unusually fruitful; since Wiseman’s Catullus and His World (1985), influential articles and entire monographs on Catullus have appeared with increasing frequency. Such recent critical studies have employed a variety of incisive tools, including those of anthropology, cultural studies, gender theory, Lacanian psychology, performance theory, reader-response theory, and sociolinguistics, to delineate the basic cultural and rhetorical frameworks within which the poetry operates. They have given us a more nuanced grasp of Catullus’ language and poetics and his standing among his contemporaries.

Unfortunately, this ferment in present critical discourse seldom trickles down to high-school or even undergraduate college classrooms, although on both levels of Latin instruction Catullus is now one of the three ancient authors most commonly encountered. As Ancona and Hallett demonstrate in this volume, his current pedagogical popularity is likewise a nascent phenomenon. Within the living memory of many North American teachers, Catullus was a text assigned only on the college level, and then with some trepidation: despite their relatively easy syntax and their immediate emotive appeal, the poems were deemed simply too racy for the young. Incorporation into the Advanced Placement syllabus (for examinations usually taken in the senior year of high school, approximately age 17) gradually furthered Catullus’ secondary-school canonicity, though he was not finally accepted as a core AP author until 1994. Consequently, although annotated teaching texts and materials on the poet have proliferated over the past few years, and good general introductions, such as those of Martin (1992) and Hurley (2004), are available, students and teachers looking for more detailed summaries of current scholarly opinion find nothing really suitable in English. Hence the Blackwell Companion to Catullus appears to be a timely project. Containing essays on a range of topics by recognized and emerging authorities and drawing together two decades’ worth of research into a collection adaptable for classroom use, this volume is intended to present C. Valerius Catullus to a wider public as a writer who was very much a man of his time and a perceptive eyewitness to the last troubled decade of the Roman Republic.

Unlike most studies of literary figures that attempt to reach out to non-specialist readers, the Blackwell Companion to Catullus does not begin with a chapter on the author’s life, for the very good reason that we know almost nothing about it. Texts, translations, surveys, and entries in reference works dating from earlier periods do contain short biographies of Catullus. Most have been based, directly or indirectly, upon Ludwig Schwabe’s 1862 reconstruction of his career, known to those of us in the field as the Catullroman (“Catullus novel”). As that term of art hints, Schwabe’s account is quite speculative, and prior biographies that leaned on it wove the scant data into highly imaginative scenarios. They focused on Catullus’ affair with the pseudonymous “Lesbia,” generally assumed to be Clodia, wife of Metellus Celer (cos. 60 BC) and sister of the radical demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher (tr. pop. 58). Drawing heavily on the first-person statements in the poetry, and treating artistic utterances as confessional pronouncements, they represented their subject as the disillusioned lover of a corrupt and degenerate noblewoman and attributed his purported early death to the suffering caused by that experience (or, alternatively, to tuberculosis, on no evidence whatsoever).

Here, too, the new socio-historical approach results in a changed emphasis. We can still start with the few external facts. Following earlier authorities, the late-antique chronicler Jerome reports Catullus’ birth at Verona in 87 BC (Chron. 150 H.) and assigns to 58–57 BC his death at Rome during his thirtieth year (XXX aetatis anno, Chron. 154 H.). The latter date is demonstrably incorrect: all the poems in the collection to which dates can be ascribed were written during the period 56–54 BC, though we find no unambiguous reference to events subsequent to 54. Most scholars, accordingly, have treated Catullus’ life-span of 29 years as fixed and moved the date of birth down to 84; there has been a recent tendency to shift the death-date as well, down to 52 or even 51 (Granarolo 1982: 19–30; Wiseman 1985: 191; Thomson 1977: 3–4). But there is a possibility that the number XXX could be a scribal error; might Catullus have instead lived almost to the age of forty (XXXX) and thus seen the outbreak of civil war? Cornelius Nepos, to whom he dedicated his libellus, confirms that by 32 BC he was dead (Att. 12.4), but we have no idea how long before that he died, or what, if anything, he might have been doing after 54 BC.2

In his Life of the Deified Julius (73), the biographer Suetonius records: Valerium Catullum, a quo sibi uersiculis de Mamurra perpetua stigmata imposita non dissimulauerat, satis facientem eadem die adhibuit cenae hospitioque patris eius, sicut consuerat, uti perseuerauit (“[Caesar] had not denied that Valerius Catullus had put a lasting mark of shame against his name by his lampoons concerning Mamurra, but, on the same day Catullus apologized, Caesar invited him to dinner and continued to accept the hospitality of Catullus’ father, just as he had been accustomed to do”). In this volume, T. P. Wiseman unpacks what this sentence tells us about the social standing of Catullus’ family, and David Konstan explores its implications for Catullus’ view of politics. I have elsewhere noted (Skinner 2003: xxi) that, with a father still alive, Catullus would have been a filiusfamilias, or son subject to paternal authority (potestas), legally unable to own property and dependent upon others for his living expenses in Rome. That would make his vitriolic personal attacks upon his father’s guest, no less a personage than the military governor of Cisalpine Gaul, all the harder to explain. In the absence of extenuating circumstances, about which we know nothing, one wonders how on earth Catullus thought he could get away with embarrassing the family so blatantly.

The last bit of information contained in other sources is Apuleius’ testimony (Apol. 10) that “Lesbia” was a cover name for a woman named Clodia. That statement is corroborated by internal evidence, for in poem 79 Catullus informs us that “Lesbius” (who, in accordance with Roman nomenclature, must be some paternal relation of “Lesbia”) is “Pulcher,” a broad hint at the notorious Clodius Pulcher. As Dyson Hejduk explains (below, pp. 254–5), the identification of Clodia Metelli as Catullus’ mistress is not wholly certain, but there is a reasonable probability that it is correct, given her own social and political visibility. These days, though, historians are less interested in the details of the affair (if it was real) and more concerned with their implications for Catullus’ contemporary Roman audience. In the poems, a married woman associated with a powerful aristocratic clan is not only adulterously involved with the speaker, a young Transpadane, but accused of indiscriminate relations with named and unnamed others and figuratively branded in cc. 37 and 58 a common prostitute. Few today would accept this as a realistic picture of a noblewoman’s life. The cruel beloved is a standard generic component of ancient erotic verse (Dixon 2001: 137–40), and libelous charges of sexual immorality were part of the orator’s and the politician’s rhetorical gear, unscrupulously deployed against female as well as male opponents. Is the construction of “Lesbia” in the corpus just an assemblage of literary topoi, though, or does it also pass a harsh judgment upon the social scene in which she moved? There would be little point to the poet’s dramatic revelation that “Lesbia” was the aristocratic Clodia if the world of Roman politics were not somehow relevant to her literary and symbolic function. W. Jeffrey Tatum in this volume consequently finds a telling parallel between her lack of personal integrity and the high-handed way in which the nobility, in Catullus’ eyes, was exploiting the municipal equestrian class, and Konstan provocatively analyzes her insatiable promiscuity in c. 11 as a trope for Rome’s wars of imperial expansion and plunder.

From the poems themselves we learn a few additional facts: that Catullus served for a year in Bithynia on the personal staff of the propraetor C. Memmius, probably in 57–56 BC (cc. 10, 28, 46); that the loss of an elder brother, who died and was buried in the Troad, was a devastating blow (cc. 65, 68a–b, 101); that his family owned property on the peninsula of Sirmio, near Verona (c. 31), and also an estate (most likely a working farm) somewhere between upscale Tibur and the rustic Sabine district (c. 44); that he formed close ties at Rome with numerous other poets and intellectuals (Cinna, Cornificius, his great friend Licinius Calvus, the brothers Asinii, Nepos, probably Valerius Cato) and was acquainted with several distinguished Roman senators, members of the nobility, and key players, including Cicero, Gellius Publicola, Hortensius Hortalus, Manlius Torquatus, and Cicero’s influential ally P. Sestius. For a young unknown provincial, Catullus must have climbed the social ladder in Rome very quickly. Did he simply make the most of good connections, or were other talents brought to bear?

More and more Catullan scholarship is embracing a theory of performativity: that many of Catullus’ poems were originally scripts for live recital by their author, most likely at banquets to which he had been invited, and that in those scripts the speaker fashions a self-image that will further his goals and ambitions. Critics emphasize various and sundry elements implicated in Catullan performance: Selden (1992) considers it a form of rhetorical, and Krostenko (2001a) a mode of linguistic, critique; Fitzgerald (1995) studies it as a tool for controlling and manipulating audience response; Wray (2001) analyzes it as a display of competitive masculinity; more pragmatically, I have suggested (1993a, 2001) that live performance was a tactic allowing a talented outsider to curry favor with those able to help him advance socially, economically, and perhaps politically.3 Several chapters in this volume acknowledge the likelihood of convivial recitation, but it is Elena Theodorakopoulos’ reading of poem 68 in light of that assumption that reveals how postulating a “back story” of performance on private occasions may clarify old Catullan questions. Consequently, imagining the presence of the poet as a guest, a well-known artist and entertainer, in the dining rooms of leading Roman personages allows us to view him as someone not only having access to privileged information about the workings of power but also very much concerned about its concrete use and abuse.

Contributors to this volume examine current developments in traditional, as well as new, areas of Catullan research. In part I, “The Text and the Collection,” J. L. Butrica reviews the transmission of the Catullan text from antiquity to the present day, while I myself offer an account of the debate over the vexed question of authorial arrangement (a chore I hesitated to impose on any colleague). Part II, “Contexts of Production,” then introduces us to the numerous ways in which Catullus’ poetry can be regarded as reflective of its times. T. P. Wiseman, who pioneered investigation of the poet’s family and its later fortunes (Wiseman 1987), provides a history of the Valerii Catulli and their presence in Northern Italy. David Konstan examines the contemporary political scene in Rome, offers an explanation for Catullus’ direct attacks on Caesar and Mamurra, and, most interestingly, finds political reverberations in other ostensibly non-political poems. Andrew Feldherr locates Catullus’ studied appeal to a learned coterie in the context of larger intellectual debates over Hellenization and shows how he and his fellow provincials employed learning to their advantage as they jockeyed for status within the circles of the Roman nobility. Elizabeth Manwell provides an overview of research on gender and masculinity and then analyzes contradictory paradigms of masculinity in Catullus, a matter that has received considerable attention in recent years.

Later generations habitually characterized Catullus as doctus, “learned,” in tribute to his impressive acquaintance with the earlier poetic tradition. Although numerous predecessors exercised influence on his work, he himself recognizes Sappho and Callimachus as his primary poetic models. In part III, “Influences,” Ellen Greene shows how Catullus’ appropriation of the “Sapphic voice” enables him to express his private erotic subjectivity – yet, by disrupting conventional gender polarities, likewise destabilizes his own sense of male identity. Peter E. Knox provides a concise introduction to Callimachus, including a review of his most important works and an explanation of the innovative features of Callimachean poetics; Knox then surveys the far-reaching effects of “Callimacheanism” on the Roman poetic tradition, from Ennius through Catullus and his fellow neoterics, down to the Augustan Age.

Catullan language and style are distinctive. In part IV, “Stylistics,” three authorities investigate those formal aspects of the poetry. We still speak of the “Catullan revolution” as an abrupt break with previous artistic techniques. W. R. Johnson wittily elucidates Cicero’s grumpy reactions toward the poets he christened the “neoterics” and considers possible reasons why Catullus and his colleagues might have developed their innovative poetics. George A. Sheets analyzes the elements of Catullan style—diction, rhythm and meter, pragmatics—that endow it with its characteristic flavor, while Brian A. Krostenko shows that Catullus’ deployment of the vocabulary that connotes “elegance” (or the reverse) plays upon ambivalent cultural attitudes toward displays of aestheticism in the political arena.

The Catullan corpus is by no means homogeneous – indeed, no other Latin poetic collection manifests such diversity in genre, meter, tone, and subject matter. Critics therefore frequently treat thematically related groups like the “Lesbia poems” as coherent elements of the collection and approach some of the “longer” poems, cc. 64 and 68 in particular, as independent compositions worthy of monographs. In part V, “Poems and Groups of Poems,” we find studies of thematic categories, as well as in-depth readings of those two major works. William W. Batstone considers a set of poems commonly labeled “programmatic pieces” and boldly inquires what the label means and whether it can justifiably be applied: what makes verses programmatic, and is the program in the author’s eye or the eye of the reader? Julia T. Dyson Hejduk examines the large body of poems thought to relate to the poet’s affair with “Lesbia,” finding, intriguingly enough, not one but three distinct “Lesbias,” with contrasting poetic functions. Vassiliki Panoussi rereads the wedding compositions, 61 and 62, from an anthropological perspective. As re-enactments of ritual activity, each examines weighty cultural issues: tensions between male and female, conflict of personal desires and societal demands, continuation of the family line, sexual fidelity – all topics privately meaningful to the Catullan speaker as well.

Current work on Catullus 64, the short epic known today as “The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis,” concentrates upon its intertextual relations with predecessors and uncovers the implications of allusions to earlier Greek and Latin masterpieces. Jeri Blair DeBrohun’s chapter on this epyllion specifically analyzes its use of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. This Hellenistic poem, she concludes, underlies Catullus’ text in unsuspected ways: it determines the essential structure of the narrative and, through ominous reflections of the suppressed tale of Jason and Medea, tropes the poet’s indebtedness to the past as intergenerational conflict. Elena Theodorakopoulos carefully walks the novice through the massive array of textual and interpretive problems associated with Catullus 68, which, for her, becomes an exceptional attempt to achieve permanence by overcoming the limitations of time and mortality. Finally, W. Jeffrey Tatum considers the function of Catullan invective: beginning with a consideration of the role of polemic in Roman political debate, he examines the conventions of political abuse as they are reflected in Catullus’ poetry and analyzes the hidden messages in Catullan obscenity, showing that the concerns expressed are of a piece with the ethical stance of the speaker throughout the corpus. Despite the apparent diversity of the collection, then, certain leitmotifs emerge that provide an overall impression of engaged social commentary.

How did Catullus’ subsequent readers view his poems, and how have their reactions to the author shaped the ways in which we read him? Reception theory – which studies how later perceptions, products of their own time, are mapped onto the original poem and become part of the text we confront – is represented in this volume by the series of chapters grouped under the rubric of part VI, “Reception.” Four of these essays deal with responses to Catullus in antiquity. For Randall L. B. McNeill, the great problem is Horace’s apparent dismissal of Catullus as a precursor and model: was the later lyric poet really as ungenerous as he seems? Vergil, on the other hand, makes sophisticated and often poignant reference to certain poems; going beyond a mere listing of passages, Christopher Nappa’s chapter seeks to envision “Catullus” as Vergil might have perceived him. In Paul Allen Miller’s view, Catullus, not Gallus, is the real inventor of Latin love elegy and poem 68 the single text that gave birth to it; Miller’s reading of 68b complements and complicates Theodorakopoulos’s in taking it as the expression of a polarized subjectivity. Martial, according to Sven Lorenz, redefines Catullus as primarily a composer of iambics and invokes his practices to justify the use of aggressive obscenity, meanwhile insisting that his own joking verses do no harm. This section concludes with two studies of Catullus’ reception in later periods. Julia Haig Gaisser tells of the rediscovery of the text at the beginning of the Renaissance and the slow process of purging its most egregious errors; her account spells out the debt Catullus owes to his earliest editors and commentators. Brian Arkins surveys his assimilation by Romantic, Victorian, and twentieth-century poets and critics, who together created a sentimental image of Catullus still lingering as a ghostly presence in our classrooms.