Always read the subtitle. This ambitious, enjoyable and largely persuasive book ranges far wider than the main title suggests. P. does identify and discuss numerous specific intertextual and generic links between the Catullan corpus and the comedies of Plautus and Terence. However, his emphasis is far more on the pervasiveness and complexity of theatrical modes of conceptualising experience in the Late Republic. Indeed, the rich analysis yields almost as many insights into Cicero and Lucretius as it does into Catullus. Not all P.'s analyses are persuasive. Sometimes the connection to comedy is tenuous, sometimes the relevance to the wider theme under discussion dubious. Nevertheless, every page includes something suggestive, provocative or insightful, and when all the elements come together, P. sheds much light on all three of Catullus, comedy and the Late Republic.
The introduction establishes the three strands that P. claims will run through the book, though they are perhaps less prominent in the later chapters than the reader is led to expect. Each strand is illustrated by examples of Catullus’ direct engagement with comic motifs and specific Plautine or Terentian intertexts. P.'s discussion of ‘nugatory poetics’ does an excellent job of situating this familiar aspect of Catullan aesthetics within an established comic discourse, providing telling parallels for buzzwords such as sal, nugae and lepos. The discussion of Catullan props and costumes as signifiers, not merely of comedy as a genre, but of self-conscious theatricality, is particularly successful. I especially liked the notion that the pallium that Thallus has stolen in Carm. 25 constitutes a theft from the comic genre. The second strand is a little more diffuse, looking at how both Catullus and comedy range between the domestic, the urban and the local. The depiction of the speaker's persona in Carm. 10 as playing the roles of both parasitus and alazon works well, though P. rather loses sight of the parasitus side of the equation. Even more successful is the connection of the Sirmio poem with the comic nostos in Trinummus. The final strand is Graeco-Roman hybridity, a promising area of common ground between Catullus and Roman comedy. As happens not infrequently in the book, P. produces a wonderful intertextual analysis – in this case relating Carm. 70 to Casina – but is less successful in linking it to the wider argument, here about the elationship between Greece and Rome.
The first chapter proper is also markedly introductory, and curiously – though self-confessedly – it contains almost no reference to Catullus. P. offers a good and, for his argument, important survey of the Romans’ theatricalised world view, offering much familiar but well-handled material from Cicero's Pro Roscio Amerino and Pro Caelio as well as Plautus’ Pseudolus and, more tangentially to the book's focus, historiographical depictions of Nero. These are in turn related to a range of overlapping concepts from recent scholarship, such as exemplarity (citing M. Roller), characterisation (M. Seo), persona and social life as performance (M. Bloomer). The topic is clearly central to P.'s thesis and needs to be established, but much of the material is familiar and, while the chapter could serve as a useful primer for students, its uncontroversial material could perhaps have been established more concisely in the introduction proper.
The discussion of love as a disease and the use of comedy, in particular the figure of the adulescens amator, as a means of exploring its cure is also successful. Again, there is much non-Catullan material, here an extended discussion of Cicero's treatment of the subject in the Tusculans and of the famous diatribe at the end of Lucretius 4. The latter is particularly successful, showing how Lucretius treats the comic adulescens as a sort of meta-exemplum, and invites readers to look at comedy from the outside rather than playing the role inside the drama. P. puts particular emphasis on the centrality of Terence's Eunuchus to Late Republican erotic discourse (‘the textbook definition of the lover's experience’, p. 117) and applies this to his discussion of a range of poems across which Catullus distributes allusions to that play. The analyses of these poems are generally persuasive in themselves, but the overall connection to the therapeutic discourse in Cicero and Lucretius is less convincing. The figure of Menander is also problematic here and elsewhere in the book. P. rather overstates the element of divine intervention in the famously realistic Greek playwright to privilege Terence's psychological approach to love, ignoring concepts of double determination. It is also notable that, among the numerous Roman comic precedents P. cites for Carm. 8, there is no mention of R.F. Thomas's connection of it with Demeas’ monologue in Samia, making Catullus not an adulescens but a senex amator (RhM 127 [1984], 308–16).
P.'s application of W. Anderson's notion of Plautine malitia as ‘heroic badness’ to Catullus sets up the persona as a seruus callidus. The identification of a common verbal motif shared by Carm. 21, 24 and 49 as well as speeches by cunning slaves in Plautus’ Bacchides, Persa and elsewhere is a wonderful insight, linking the poems to each other as well as to their comic antecedents. The depiction of Catullus as seruus callidus works well when he is entrapping the predatory Aurelius qua parasite/pimp/senex and when he is negotiating status anxiety vis-à-vis Cicero, but is less convincing in his relationship with Juventius. This important engagement with issues of status extends into the next chapter on ‘naughty girls’. Again, there is a little too much familiar material on Roman attitudes to gender, but the discussion of slaves, wives and sex-labourers (as P. unflinchingly renders meretrices) in comedy is excellent. The subsequent discussion of Carm. 55 and 58b offers many nice insights, though the connection to the wild goose chase speech in Amphitruo is worked rather too hard. Most problematically for a chapter on ‘naughty girls’ is the over-emphasis put on the brief speech of the pessima puella in Carm. 55. She is undoubtedly a sex-labourer like Plautine meretrices, but a humble streetwalker is a poor parallel for the high-class call girls of comedy. The discussion of Carm. 37 works well, though it does not go far beyond D. Wray's identification of Catullus as a miles gloriosus in that poem, while the link to comedy in Carm. 36 is tenuous. An epilogue looks forward to Augustan elegy's reception of comedy through the lens of Catullus and ends with a fine discussion of Carm. 110 and Plautus’ Asinaria.
P. has a very engaging style that never tips into excessive informality, and a nice line in modern parallels, which, though markedly American (Leave it to Beaver tested my cultural literacy), are generally comprehensible. The book is admirably free of typos and errors. Occasionally, P. forces and even distorts the evidence slightly to support his argument. In striving to fix the entry of love into non-comic Roman poetry as late as possible (an argument that is already perilously dependent on the silence produced by the loss of almost all of it), P. describes the ‘pre-neoterics’ Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinius and Lutatius Catulus as ‘the same age as Cicero, give or take a decade’. Since the last-named was elected consul in 102 bce at the fourth attempt, he is hardly coeval with a man born in 106 bce. The overall argument is a good one, though some of the analyses work better in their own right than as parts of the whole. The emphasis on how comedy reflects and articulates underlying aspects of Roman life and thought also poses a potential problem, in that it is often unclear whether Catullus is engaging with comic dramatisations of such aspects, or the two genres are independently responding to the same societal structures. This is far from a fatal problem, but it is one that P. might have usefully addressed. In the end, this is a book of many virtues and some flaws, but one that makes an important contribution to far more than the study of Catullus and Roman comedy.
