In this brief epilogue, I outline what seem to me to be the main trends in Catullan criticism over the thirty-five years since the publication of the first ‘New Survey’ on Catullus.Footnote ¹ Ferguson’s volume appeared when formalist, New Critical approaches to the poet were at their height; even a brief comparison between the emphases of the 1988 volume and the present survey will make it clear how far the critical centre of gravity has shifted in the intervening period.

Some continuities are, nevertheless, perceptible: in particular, prosopographical studies and attempts to situate the historical Catullus within the social and political context of the mid-first century bc continue to appear.Footnote ² But in general we can trace something of a shift from a historicist focus on concrete details of situation and personality to a greater emphasis on the cultural and ideological matrix of the poems, particularly their relation to contemporary Roman constructions of gender and sexuality. Important work published during the 1980s and ’90s on Roman sexual and gender categories (in the wake, ultimately, of Foucault, whose History of Sexuality alerted Classicists to the interrelationship between sex and power in Graeco-Roman cultureFootnote ³) facilitated more sophisticated and informed readings of the Lesbia poems and – to an even greater extent – of the invectives and the Juventius cycle. Particularly notable here was the landmark chapter on Catullus in Amy Richlin’s The Garden of Priapus (first edition 1983); this was followed by influential articles and monographs by Skinner, Wray, and others.Footnote ⁴ The enhanced understanding of Catullus’ poetry consequent on scholarly engagement with cultural-historical studies has in turn contributed significantly to our current conceptualization of gender norms and sex roles in Roman society. What impact the very recent shift away from binary constructions of gender and sexuality to more dynamic and fluid models in our own society will have on our understanding of Catullus remains to be seen.

In a somewhat similar vein, readings of Catullus in the latter part of the twentieth century tended, more or less explicitly, to reject the earlier supposition that the poems offer a transparent window onto the poet’s life and loves, invoking instead the concept of literary persona. A clear-cut separation is still drawn by some scholars between the ‘I’ of the text and the historical figure of the author, a strategy that has been used, for example, to support ironic readings of poem 10, in which ‘Catullus’ is understood as a self-discrediting speaker.Footnote ⁵ Increasingly, however, persona has come to seem too uncomplicated – and too strongly intentionalist – a term to describe the relation between author and speaking ‘I’.Footnote ⁶ We can detect a distinct tendency in current Catullan criticism – perhaps owing something to the dominance in recent work on ancient epistolography of the concept of ‘self-fashioning’ – to conceptualize the first-person poem as a performance of self, in which the speaking voice of the text is neither an unmediated reflection of the historical author nor entirely separable from him.Footnote ⁷

Increasingly, too, the poems’ performative aspect has been understood as enmeshed in the competitive and hierarchical structures of Late Republican elite society. On the one hand, the poems themselves have been read as vehicles for the negotiation of relations between individuals, through a culture of mutual compliment and literary exchange; on the other, competitive rivalry between peers is often detected in the poems of amicitia as well as the invectives.Footnote ⁸ The centrality of urbanitas to Catullus’ social, erotic, and poetic code – long recognized as characteristic of the poet – has been helpfully located within the context of elite practices of display and social performance.Footnote ⁹ From a slightly different perspective, the concept of homosociality has been productively brought to bear on poems addressed to Catullus’ male friends, and on the characterization of the female either as an object of exchange between men or as a disruptive force tending to impede the smooth functioning of male–male relationships.

A further aspect of the collection that has much preoccupied Catullan scholars since at least the early 1980s is intertextuality. Here, too (as discussed in Chapter 1), there has been a clear – though by no means universal – move away from an author-centred model of ‘allusive artistry’Footnote ¹⁰ towards an understanding of intertextual relations as a process, realized at the point of reception, as opposed to a stable and demonstrable set of connections between source and target texts, which the reader has only to recognize and decode. It is perhaps fair to say, too, that increased attention is being paid to intertextuality at the generic level – that is, to Greek epigrammatic and iambic poetry and Graeco-Roman New Comedy as matrices for the poet’s self-representation, as well as his construction of other characters and scenarios – alongside continuing attempts to detect and interpret specific intertexts. Intertextuality has, indeed, been closely connected in this sense with the poet’s ambiguously gendered self-representation: to adopt the voice of Sappho, Archilochus, or Callimachus is to take on a specific stance in relation to masculine aggression and dominance (or, conversely, feminine/effeminate disempowerment and vulnerability), as well as to display the cultural mastery which is itself central to the Catullan ideal of urbanitas.Footnote ¹¹

Related to intertextuality is the practice of translation, most evident in poems 51 and 66, which has been another focus of recent interest. Particularly notable here is linkage between translation and cultural appropriation explored most extensively by Young (see Chapter 5); this can be connected in turn to the wider impact of postcolonial theory and critical practice on Catullan criticism, perhaps most evident in the case of poem 11.Footnote ¹² The projected ‘world tour’ of this poem’s opening stanzas is predicated in fairly obvious ways on an imperialist ideology, though the poet’s self-positioning in relation to imperial conquest is not without its complexities. As in the case of gender roles, Catullus can be seen to align himself both with the weak and disempowered (the female, the conquered subject) and with the dominant and aggressive: this two-sidedness in his self-presentation is perhaps the single most striking aspect of the collection in current interpretations.

A final, and very welcome, trend in recent scholarship has been the closer attention given to the invective poems. Willingness to confront obscenity head on has been crucially important in this connection, as has the location of Catullus’ invective topoi and strategies within the context both of contemporary political discourse and of popular invective and the tropes of ancient graffiti (though here much more work remains to be done).Footnote ¹³ The poet’s self-positioning in relation to Greek iambic code models, noted above, as well as specific intertexts, is also crucial in this connection: Wray and others have productively explored this aspect of the collection’s intertextual nexus, and further studies in this area will no doubt follow.

Naturally, important new work also continues to be produced in more traditional areas of study. In particular, work on the text continues unabated, with a steady flow of articles proposing new conjectures or re-evaluating existing ones.Footnote ¹⁴ Given the heavily corrupted state of the manuscripts, it is highly unlikely that scholarly consensus will ever be reached on many points; but, as Kiss observes, ‘editing such a poorly transmitted text is not an isolated act but a process’, and we may confidently expect continued advances in this area.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather less promising, in my view, is ongoing discussion of the perennial questions of authorial arrangement of the collection and the ‘original’ format of publication. Despite recent contributions from Schafer, Du Quesnay, and Wiseman, the interpretative gains are less than obvious, and more fundamental questions (What do we mean by ‘publication’ in the ancient context? What is stake here? and Why – ultimately – does the arrangement of the poems matter?) still tend to be ignored or elided.Footnote ¹⁶

The ‘influence’ of Catullus’ poetry, too, has long been a focus of at least intermittent attention, but the explosion in Classical reception studies since the 1990s offers fertile ground for further, and more methodologically sophisticated, work in this area. We now have important systematic studies of Catullan reception in the Renaissance and the Romantic period by Gaisser and Stead respectively, as well as a number of useful brief surveys for other periods.Footnote ¹⁷ More detailed discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement with Catullus remains a desideratum, however. A keynote of recent work (as surveyed in Chapter 6) has been the tendency of receiving authors to reinvent Catullus in ways congenial to the sensibility of their own period, and this is undoubtedly as true of scholarly as of literary reception. The current focus on gender, masculinity, and performative self-fashioning outlined in this epilogue will certainly, by the same token, give way in due course to other focuses and preoccupations. The last thirty-five years have, nevertheless, been a peculiarly rich period in Catullan studies, during which we have begun to see the collection whole, in a way which has scarcely been the case since its rediscovery at the dawn of the Renaissance.