Catullus

Roman poet

• Born: c. 85 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Verona, Cisalpine Gaul (now in Italy)
• Died: c. 54 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Probably Rome (now in Italy)

Catullus was the leader of a group of poets who created a native idiom for Roman poetry. Intensely personal, epigrammatic, and more colloquial than epic or dramatic, this style of poetry set the standards for the literary achievements of the Augustan Age.

Early Life

Like most figures of Greek and Roman antiquity, Catullus (ka-TUH-luhs) provides little information about his early life, and the ancient sources add few facts. His family was prominent in Verona, which was then a part of the province of Cisalpine Gaul. They also owned a villa on the peninsula of Sirmio (modern Sermione) in the Lago di Garda, about twenty miles east of Verona. Catullus’s later references to this country home reveal his deep attachment to the family seat. Suetonius’s biography of Julius Caesar records that Catullus’s father was prominent enough to entertain Caesar during the latter’s governorship of that province in the early 50’s b.c.e.

Although his views about family ties were firmly traditional, Catullus makes no reference to either of his parents. An emotional tribute to his brother, who died near Troy, is the only mention of a relative, but it strengthens the inference that Catullus’s family was closely knit.

The usual education of a wealthy and talented provincial is likely to have included study in Athens, and although there is no record of an educational sojourn in Greece, Catullus’s poetry is that of a young man thoroughly imbued with Greek poetry from Homer to Callimachus. His many attachments to friends from northern Italy, however, including several of the novi poetae, suggest that unlike the Augustans Vergil and Horace, Catullus did not completely detach himself from his provincial origins to become a Hellenized Roman. The demotic, vernacular coloring of his poetry is symptomatic of a mind that resisted imitation of the accepted Greco-Roman literary canons.

Life’s Work

Catullus’s reputation as one of the greatest poets of all Roman literature is even more remarkable because it is based on a collection of poems smaller than a fourth of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553) and because this collection survived antiquity in only a single copy. The 113 poems range in length from epigrams of two lines to a miniature epic of 408 lines. The near extinction of this great poet is attributable to the audacious and racy subject matter of some of his poems, which made them unsuitable for use in the schools.

It is impossible to reconstruct a dependable chronology of Catullus’s poetic career on the basis of the poems themselves, and, as previously noted, the ancient sources provide little additional information. Clearly, the shortness of his life means that his oeuvre represents the work of a young poet, but nothing in it could be described as juvenilia. The poems appear to have been selected by him for publication. Poem 1 of the collection now extant refers to a “slim volume” (libellus) which he is dedicating to his friend the historian Cornelius Nepos, but there is no evidence that this slim volume is the same as the extant collection. There exists a scrap of another dedication also, apparently part of another collection.

The existing collection is divided into three parts on purely formal grounds. The first group, poems 1 through 60, are in a variety of meters; hence, they are called the polymetric poems. The favorite meter of this group is the hendecasyllabic, or Phalaecian, an eleven-syllable line of Greek origin that lends itself well to the colloquial tone of his work. The second group consists of eight long poems in various meters, two of them the dactylic hexameter familiar to epic poetry. The third group is written in elegiac couplets, a meter that had become popular in Hellenistic epigrams but was on its way to becoming the medium of the Latin love elegy. Yet not all Catullus’s elegiac poems are on love. He wrote a poem to his dead brother as well as a number of purely satirical pieces.

Judging from what has survived, scholars agree that the elegiac couplet was Catullus’s favorite medium. Within the three sections of the now-canonical collection, there is evidence of design in the ordering of the poems. The collection is not organized chronologically or by subject matter, but it betrays a subtly designed miscellany of moods and subjects, each poem contrasting with or corresponding to its neighbors in ways that sustain the reader’s interest.

Because there is no known chronology, one good way to perceive the work of Catullus is through the people about whom and to whom he wrote his poems. The social character of his poetry, much of which is addressed to somebody specific, is also well served by this approach. The most visible and intense of the poet’s personal relationships is with a woman he calls Lesbia, mentioned in some twenty-five of Catullus’s love poems. Lucius Apuleius wrote that her real name was Clodia, and it is generally believed that she was a married woman ten years older than the poet. If Apuleius’s testimony is correct, Clodia was the sister of Cicero’s enemy P. Clodius Pulcher and wife (later the widow) of Q. Metellus Celer, who governed Cisalpine Gaul between 64 and 62 b.c.e. For her, the affair she had with Catullus was casual, one of many. For Catullus, it was the cause of both euphoria and anguish, with little middle ground. This stormy relationship lasted about six years, from perhaps 58 or 59 to 55 or 54 b.c.e. The Lesbia poems are the best known of Catullus’s work.

A second episode in Catullus’s life, one whose dates are known more definitely, was his year of public service on the staff of C. Memmius, the Roman governor of Bithynia. Such tours of duty were a normal part of the life of young Romans of rank, and although Catullus complains loudly in his poems about Memmius’s tightfisted policies and writes eloquently of the pleasure of returning home, this year of furlough from the stresses of his affair with Lesbia/Clodia and the high life of Rome (from 57 to 56 b.c.e.) may have contributed much to Catullus’s achievement as a poet. It is a reasonable inference that the job itself was not demanding and that in his enforced isolation on the southern shore of the Black Sea Catullus had ample opportunity to study, write, and revise.

A significant part of Catullus’s poetry may be described as occasional verse, that which commemorates an event of no great objective importance in such a way as to bring out its humor, irony, or emotional significance. The Greek tradition in which he chose to write was satirical, and a large number of the poems of the collection expand on the foibles of people whom the poet wished to embarrass. Some of these were amatory rivals, some were social climbers or nuisances (such as Asinius Marrucinus, the napkin thief of poem 12). Others, including the orator Cicero, the politician Julius Caesar, and Caesar’s protégé Mamurra, were public figures. In spite of attacks of varying intensity (in poems 29, 57, and 93), Caesar remained an admirer of Catullus; according to Suetonius, Catullus eventually apologized for his attacks (in one of which he accuses Caesar of sexually molesting little girls) and was invited to dine with Caesar the same day.

Traditional serious poetry also exerted its attraction for Catullus. In the course of what might be viewed as a licentious life of pleasure and scandal, Catullus composed three long wedding hymns (poems 61, 62, and 63) that show every sign of a deep belief in the institution of marriage. In addition, there is an impressive long poem about the religious frenzy of a legendary young Greek named Attis, who emasculates himself in order to serve the Asiatic goddess Cybele. Notwithstanding the emphasis of the Neoterics on short poetry in a native poetic idiom, epic remained the medium of choice for the highest achievement. Catullus’s effort in this genre, the miniature epic or epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with its digression on Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne (poem 64), ranks with his best work. Parts of it, such as Ariadne’s lament, are unsurpassed in Latin literature.

Significance

Although it remains the slimmest volume on a bookshelf of classical works, the poetry of Catullus is a unique testament to the power of a young poet working in a still-raw language. As Cicero, writing a decade later, found Latin a poor vehicle for philosophy, poets of Catullus’s generation had none of the vocabulary and native traditions that Greek had developed over the course of seven centuries. Instead of borrowing Greek vocabulary, themes, and genres wholesale to produce feeble imitations, Catullus set out to create a genuinely Latin poetry. The only Roman model of significant use to him was the comedian Plautus, the Umbrian stagehand-turned-playwright who transformed Greek comedies into lively shows for untutored audiences. Though inevitably indebted to Greek inspiration for most of what he wrote, Catullus put Latin poetry on a more independent course and set the agenda for Augustan poetry: to write what Horace was to call a Latinum carmen, or Latin song.

Specifically, this agenda meant adapting Greek poetic rhetoric to the more subjective taste of a Roman audience, reducing the dependence on words borrowed from the Greek, modifying the rigid syntactic structure of formal Latin to gain the flexibility that Greek had long enjoyed, and broadening the range of subjects that were acceptable for poets to essay. By succeeding as conspicuously as he did in these tasks, Catullus opened the way for Latin poetry to become a worthy successor to Greek rather than a mere imitator.

Ultimately more interesting to the average reader than his place in the history of Roman poetry is the vibrant and colorful picture Catullus gives of private life in the Rome of Cicero and Caesar. As it happens, Catullus wrote for all time, but his poetry is an intimate portrait of life in his own time, written with an art that few successors dared imitate.

Bibliography

Fordyce, C. J. Catullus: A Commentary. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965. An extensive and illuminating commentary in English on the Latin text, flawed by the author’s refusal to print or discuss some thirty-two poems “which do not lend themselves to comment in English.”

Garrison, Daniel H. Student’s Catullus. New York: Routledge, 1996. Provides notes on vocabulary, grammar, and mythology along with translations of the poems.

Quinn, Kenneth, ed. Catullus: The Poems. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. This scholarly commentary is somewhat idiosyncratic but suitable for college-level readers. The Latin text of all poems is presented with introduction and commentary in English. A short bibliographical guide for further study of each of the poems is included.

Small, Stuart G. P. Catullus: A Reader’s Guide to the Poems. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983. A running narrative, not of the poet’s life but of his poetic achievement. Divided by topic, with sane judgments on matters of literary and scholarly controversy. Small supplements a reading of the poems by giving topical overviews. Includes bibliography.

Wilder, Thornton. The Ides of March. New York: S. French, 1971. The classic historical novel on the Rome of Cicero, Catullus, Clodius, and his sister—and Julius Caesar, the emperor whose life ended on the title day in 44 b.c.e.

Wiseman, Timothy Peter. Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. A highly readable reconstruction of the social and political context, informative not only about Catullus but also about late republican Rome and its personalities. Richly documented, with eight pages of bibliography.