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Catullus
Modern bronze bust of Catullus, Sirmione
Catullus’ Life
• Warning! -total absence of reliable biographical
data!
• Gaius Valerius Catullus born 85 or 84 BC
• Jerome who relies on Suetonius, puts it in 87
• Father wealthy and prominent citizen of Verona,
then part of Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul
• Part of Gaul located in Italy between the Alpine
foothills and the river Po
• Inhabitants called Transpadanes
• Father had friendly relations with Julius Caesar
• Villa at Sirmione at Lake Garda - half-excavated
ruins
Le Grotte di Catullo
Catullus’ Life
• Catullus moved to Rome in 60’s returned to
Verona perhaps more than once
• Love affair with Lesbia, thought to be a
pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, from 62-57 BC
• emancipated and profligate sister of Cicero’s
enemy Publius Clodius and the wife of Metellus
Celer, consul in 60 BC, died in 59
• Catullus’ brother died in 58 BC, buried near Troy
Map of Italy
Catullus’ Life
• Catullus spent year on staff of Memmius,
governor of Bithynia, (Roman province on NW
coast of Asia Minor) in 57-56 (the one precise date
we have!)
• Lucretius dedicated De Rerum Natura to
Memmius
• may have gone to leave Clodia and visit brother’s
tomb (see poem 101 “A Final Offering at a Distant
Grave”), also to acquire money
• Caesar’s conquests on Rhine in 55 and plans to
invade Britain events mentioned in poems 11 and
45
• no poem can be dated later than 54 BC, may be
year of death
Traditions of Poetry before Catullus
• Epic
• Homer, Ennius
• Long-winded epic
• Dactylic hexameter meter
• Patriotic, heroic,
impersonal
• Public audience
• Rough-hewn narrative
• Poetry should teach about
world
• Alexandrian/Hellenistic
-Callimachus, Theocritus
-small scale: lyric, elegy,
epyllion (mini epic)
-lyric or elegiac meters
-private, romantic, personal
-coterie poetry, written for set
-display of wit, polish,
erudition
-art for art’s sake; wit; poetry
should exist in its own
world
Catullus and the New Poets “novi poetae”
• Social and political upheaval may have
influenced circle
• Poetae novae and in Greek hoi neoteroi
“the modernists”
• Followed in footsteps of Greek Alexandrian
poets of third century BC, Callimachus and
Theocritus
• his poetic circle included Calvus, Cinna,
and Cornelius Nepos
Catullus’ oeuvre
• We have just 116 poems of Catullus, varying in
length from two to 480 lines, and a few fragments;
this probably represents the whole of his published
work.
• Poems 1-60 are shorter pieces, for the most part,
written in a variety of meters, on a variety of
topics (love poems, attacks against enemies, witty
observations on contemporary mores, short
hymns), and in a variety of tones.
• Are known as the polymetric poems
Oeuvre continued
• 25 Lesbia poems convey happiness and disallusion
• wrote lyric poems, besides amatory, some satiric,
occasional poems, epigrams
• cameos of friends and enemies, and of chance
meetings and sexual encounters
• Coarse and amusing
• Poems 61-68 are longer pieces, again in a variety
of meters and on a variety of topics (from wedding
poems to a particularly elaborate example of an
epyllion or "mini-epic“)
• Known as carmina docta
Oeuvre continued
• Others, including his longest (Poem 64), an
account in hexameters of the wedding of Peleus
and Thetis, have mythological themes, but still
show depth of poetic emotion.
• Poems 69ff. are shorter pieces of varying length
composed in elegiac couplets — a weightier, more
reflective meter than those of poems 1-60. The
subject matter of these poems parallels that of
poems 1-60 for the most part, but often in a more
somber or brooding tone. This is particularly true
of the Lesbia poems in this part of the collection
• These poems referred to as the epigrams
Textual Tradition
• Poems of Catullus might have suffered
same fate as those of Archilochus and
Sappho but for a single manuscript which
made its way to Verona early in 14th
century
• Text we use today based on copies of copies
of copies of that text which no longer
survives
Textual Tradition continued
• Rude and obscene poetry routinely left
untranslated or left out of collections all together
in many editions so not to offend
Catullus at Lesbia's by Sir Laurence Alma Tadema , 18361912
Lesbia Weeping Over a Sparrow, by Sir Laurence AlmaTadema