1. Catullus and the AugustansFootnote ⁴

Unsurprisingly, the love elegists of the next generation, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, take Catullus the lover of Lesbia as their shared archetype. Name-checked as a predecessor by both Propertius and OvidFootnote ⁵ – the latter of whom links him with the recently dead Tibullus – Catullus is also echoed more or less closely in a number of places by all three elegists.Footnote ⁶ But arguably more important than specific intertextual connections is Catullus’ role as ‘code model’Footnote ⁷ for elegiac poetry: a turbulent relationship between a dominant, magnetic but unfaithful woman and her hopelessly devoted lover constitutes the governing paradigm of the genre, taking its point of departure from Catullus’ Lesbia cycle. More specifically, the lover’s intermittent willingness to surrender his own masculinity and take the subordinate role in the affair – to ‘follow wherever the girl leads’, as Catullus puts it (8.4) – is central to elegy’s ambivalent gender discourse.

The oscillation considered in Chapter 2 between this self-abasing pose and the macho, ‘Priapic’ stance has its counterpart in elegy’s alternation between self-deprecating acceptance of the labels mollis (‘soft’, ‘effeminate’) and iners (‘idle’, ‘inactive’) as descriptors both of the genre and of the poet-lover himself, and provocative assertion of its own superiority to conventionally valorized lifestyles and literary forms. Typically slippery is the emblematic figure of militia amoris – ‘the warfare of love’ – which serves simultaneously to diminish the lover (as too feeble for real warfare or martial poetry) and to aggrandize him (as a quasi-epic warrior on the figurative battlefield of love).Footnote ⁸

Importantly, too, the elegists follow Catullus in adopting the comic adulescens as role model; and other comic archetypes and scenarios are if anything more fully exploited in elegy.Footnote ⁹ The wealthy rival, for example, something of an elegiac stock-type, is clearly calqued on the comic miles gloriosus or ‘braggart soldier’, and the lena or brothel-keeper (a character who barely registers in the Catullan corpusFootnote ¹⁰) is another standard figure in elegy’s cast of characters. But, while the use of these stereotypes has its distinctive differences from Catullus’ less systematic appeal to comic models, the intertextual relationship between elegy and comedy is mediated in important ways by Catullan precedents. The fuzzy status of the elegiac beloved, whose role (especially in Propertius) seems to slide between that of meretrix (prostitute or courtesan) and that of matrona (married woman),Footnote ¹¹ is in part a function of this dual heritage: like her comic counterpart, she is financially demanding and reluctant (or unable) to commit herself exclusively to her lover; but the intermittent appearance of a uir (‘man’, ‘husband’) constraining her movements points to the possibility that she should be thought of, like Lesbia, as married to another, lending the poems a frisson of the illicit. Elegy, too, confronts its reader with questions of role-playing and ‘sincerity’ (what does it mean for a first-person writer to take on the role of comic adulescens?) similar to those posed by Catullus, but differently framed and perhaps inviting different answers.

In contrast to the elegists’ overt appeal to Catullus as an important precursor, Horace’s only explicit reference, at Satires 1.10.17–19, is distinctly hostile, though his acrimony is aimed more directly at Catullus’ admirers and imitators than at the poet himself. In practice, as Michael Putnam’s important study of Catullan intertextuality in the Odes thoroughly demonstrates, Horace invokes Catullan precedents relatively frequently, but most often as a foil for his own self-presentation, particularly in the erotic sphere.Footnote ¹² Here, Catullus figures again as the poet of passion, the uesanus Catullus (‘crazy Catullus’) of poem 7, representing a mode of behaviour rejected by the Epicurean-influenced Horace. Odes 1.22, for example, recalls and inverts elements of both Catullus 11 and 51: the poem is closed out with a declaration of love for Lalage, who, with her sweet laughter and sweet speech (dulce ridentem…dulce loquentem), recalls both the Lesbia of poem 51 and her Sapphic model.Footnote ¹³ But, whereas Catullus’ love has perished like a flower ‘touched/grazed by the plough’ (tactus aratro; 11.24), Horace claims that he will maintain his integrity (integer, literally ‘untouched’; 1.22.1) and his love for Lalage, wherever in the world he may find himself (1.22.5–8, 17–22, with echoes of Catullus 11.2–12).Footnote ¹⁴ Horace’s love odes in general can usefully be read as an ‘anti-romantic reaction’ to Catullan love poetry,Footnote ¹⁵ and the Augustan poet’s unruffled persona is thrown into relief by his engagement with both the contemporary elegists and their predecessor.

In the earlier Epodes, however, the reader experiences both a different Horace and (accordingly) a different kind of relation to Catullan models. Here, Catullan echoes typically surface in the more truculent and aggressive invectives: Archilochean iambus is mediated through Catullus, much as the elegists’ comic models are viewed through a Catullan filter. This is perhaps clearest in Epode 6, where the speaker pictures himself as a watchdog, who will ‘bite back’ if attacked, and invokes Archilochus and Hipponax as precedents (Epode 6.13–14): the indignant rhetorical questions with which the poem opens are reminiscent of Catullus at his most Archilochean, in the opening lines of poem 40.Footnote ¹⁶ So, too, the whip-scarred social climber attacked in Epode 4 has traits of both Catullus’ Mamurra (poem 29) and his Thallus (poem 25).Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, as recent criticism has emphasized, Horace’s invective manner fluctuates between virulent aggression and the pose of weak and powerless underdog – and here, too, we can see Catullan precedents, as Horace rolls together the ‘Priapic’ and ‘anti-Priapic’ postures characteristic of Catullus’ poetry. If at times Horace poses as the fierce watchdog of the community, elsewhere in the collection he characterizes himself as ‘unwarlike and unmanly’ (imbellis ac firmus parum; 1.16), and appears both sexually and politically impotent; oscillation between these two poles seems as characteristic of Horace’s self-representation in this collection as of Catullus’.Footnote ¹⁸

In contrast, for Virgil, and for the Ovid of the Metamorphoses, it is the carmina maiora that offer the greatest scope for intertextual engagement.Footnote ¹⁹ Traces can be found in both poets of careful reading of Catullus 64, in the context of the poems that surround it in our modern collection. Virgil’s Dido and Ovid’s Scylla (Met. 8.6–151), for example, are each modelled in part on the abandoned Ariadne, but both poets also echo Catullus 66 in this connection, in a way that tends to confirm the thematic links between the two Catullan poems discussed in the previous chapter. In the much-discussed encounter between Aeneas and Dido in the Underworld of Book 6, the hero appropriates the words of the Catullan Lock, inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi (‘unwillingly, o queen, did I depart from your head’; Catull. 66.39) – pointing perhaps to a reading of poem 66 as more serious and more evocative of profound emotion than modern criticism has generally been willing to allow.Footnote ²⁰ Ovid’s juxtaposition in Metamorphoses 8 of Scylla’s cutting of her father’s lock with the catasterism of Ariadne’s crown indicates a similar perception of thematic interconnection between poems 64 and 66. The two Augustan poets, too, are much concerned in different ways with temporality: the chronological complexity and ambiguity of Catullus 64 (discussed in Chapter 5) has arguably left its mark on the Aeneid and Metamorphoses. Virgil’s ‘history in the future tense’ and problematic juxtaposition of linear and cyclical models of cultural development, and Ovid’s apparently deliberate chronological inconsistencies, are suggestive of a broader concern with temporal patterns and problems inaugurated – or at least given new impetus – by Catullus’ epyllion.Footnote ²¹

While both Ovid and Virgil can be seen to read the carmina maiora as modelling sophisticated inter- and intratextual play, in combination with narrative and chronological complexity, Virgil’s Catullus is above all a poet of grief and lamentation. Poem 101, together with 65 and the references to the brother’s death in 68, is crucial here; but so too is the theme of loss and separation that emerges in various ways throughout the carmina maiora. As Philip Hardie shows, the anxieties of the girls’ chorus of poem 62 are transposed by Virgil to mark the end of a marriage, with the loss of Creusa in the flight from Troy; the cut flower image of 62.39–47 (and its counterpart at the end of poem 11), on the other hand, assimilates the ephebic youths Euryalus and Pallas – who, like Catullus’ Attis, will never achieve full manhood – to the virginal brides of the epithalamia.Footnote ²² Again, too, Aeneas’ final separation from his father Anchises in the Underworld is marked by Catullan echoes, of which the most striking is Anchises’ near-quotation of the opening line of poem 101, quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora uectum / accipio (‘after how long a journey over land and sea do I greet you!’, Aen. 6.692–3; cf. Catullus 101.1–2: multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus / aduenio, ‘after journeying through many peoples and over many seas I have come…’). While Aeneas’ situation here in some ways inverts its model (unlike Catullus at his brother’s grave, Aeneas is granted one final chance to converse with his father, and Anchises’ role here is, of course, as much that of the spokesman of public, Roman values as the voice of personal grief and loss), the pathos of the impending separation is nevertheless foregrounded by invocation of the Catullan intertext.Footnote ²³

2. Pliny and Martial: Catullus in Flavian Rome

It is perhaps a little startling to find so prosaic – and so emphatically establishment – a figure as Pliny the Younger expressing a sense of affinity with Catullus meus (‘my Catullus’, as the poet is denoted both by Pliny himself [Ep. 1.16.5] and in a passage quoted in Letter 4.27 from a poem by a younger friend, Sentius Augurinus).Footnote ²⁴ It is telling, however, that these two letters, as well as the third in which Catullus is mentioned by name (Ep. 4.14), are either devoted to the expression of admiration for a friend’s compositions or aim to solicit comment on Pliny’s own: here, we can see a notable similarity to the poetics of literary exchange that characterizes Catullus’ collection.Footnote ²⁵ The circulation of praise for literary endeavours between Pliny and his friends and correspondents is perhaps best compared with Catullus’ dedication to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1, where both the mock-modest tone and the symmetry between poet and dedicatee bear similarities to Pliny’s – rather less subtle – self-promotion; but more generally we might think of poems such as 14, 22, 35, and 95, where Catullus passes (not always positive) comment on fellow-writers.

In these and other letters where Pliny comments on his own poetry, what is most striking is the connection with otium or leisure: poetic composition for Pliny is not only a leisure activity but one to be fitted into the odd moments when more serious pursuits are impossible – when travelling, or suffering from insomnia, or otherwise at an unavoidably loose end (see esp. Ep. 4.14.2, 7.4.3–5). The apologetic note struck, for example, in Letter 7.4 is no doubt partly disingenuous (notably, it offers Pliny the opportunity to compare himself with his favoured role model, Cicero, allegedly the author of an epigram addressed to Tiro), but it also reflects a perception, apparently common to Pliny and his circle of acquaintance, that the writing of uersiculi (‘little verses’, a somewhat dismissive term he applies to his own compositions as well as to those of friends) is an activity that ranks low on the scale of priorities proper for a member of the senatorial elite. The productive use of otium is a recurrent theme in Pliny’s letters: in this context, the writing and recitation of poetry offers a vehicle for display of one’s mastery of and versatility in a broad literary culture; at the same time, however, Pliny is insistent that his verses cost him no great effort – they are playful amusements, tossed off at high speedFootnote ²⁶ – although this does not preclude the hope that they will win the approval of posterity, as of his equally cultivated contemporaries (Ep. 7.4.10, 7.9.10, 9.25.2).

The version of Catullus that Pliny offers us is tailored to suit this model of cultivated aristocratic leisure. The terminology of neoteric poetics – uersiculi, lusus, ioci – and the ideal of polished wit – urbanitas, lepos, facetiae – is readily assimilated to this new context, as is the connection between poetry and otium most clearly suggested in poem 50 (hesterno, Licini, die otiosi, ‘Yesterday, Licinius, at our leisure…’).Footnote ²⁷ But Catullus’ provocative privileging of otium, and the dedication to poetic labor epitomized in Cinna’s nine years’ work on the Smyrna (celebrated in poem 95), are in strong contrast to Pliny’s self-conscious dilettantism. By the same token, there is no hint here of the anguished lover of the Lesbia poems (we can surmise that the amores or ‘loves’ of which Pliny claims to have written at Ep. 7.4.6 [cf. 4.14.3, 4.27.4, 7.9.13] were sufficiently playful and generic in character not to compromise the characterization of his poetry as ‘light’ verse), or of the aggression and obscenity of the invectives – despite references to ‘anger’ (Ep. 4.14.3, 7.9.13) and ‘bile’ (Ep. 4.27.2; cf. 1.16.5, 3.21.1), and the celebration of variatio in poetic output, both his own and that of others. Pliny’s Catullus is a poet of the stylish, witty epigram: perhaps a little risqué and sometimes rather ‘too harsh’ (Ep. 1.16.5: duriusculus Footnote ²⁸) for good taste, but nevertheless an apt model for the playful vers de société appropriate for a man of Pliny’s rank and public profile.

The toning down of Catullus’ invective virulence which we have observed in Pliny is also characteristic of his contemporary and beneficiary, Martial.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, as has often been pointed out, it is symptomatic of the shift from the aristocratic libertas dicendi (‘freedom of speech’) of the Late Republic to the more regulated and guarded discourse of the Imperial period that many of Martial’s targets are (apparently) fictive, or at least otherwise unknown, in contrast to the prominent contemporaries (Julius Caesar, Mamurra) attacked by Catullus.Footnote ³⁰ It is important, too, that Martial writes from a different perspective from either Catullus or Pliny, both of whom were members of the social elite, making no secret of his dependence on patronage and his status as a ‘professional’ poet. As the poet of the streets and hoi polloi who frequent them, Martial self-consciously distances himself from the rarefied codes of literary and social performance that are so central to Catullus’ poetry. Epigram 11.52, for example, begins with a quotation from Catullus 13, cenabis belle, Iuli Cerialis, apud me (‘you’ll get a good dinner at my place, Julius Cerialis’; cf. Catullus 13.1: cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me), but substitutes a full menu for the mysterious perfume that is all Catullus can offer his guest. Whereas Catullus promises Fabullus meros amores (love, or love poetry, as we saw in Chapter 1), Martial promises not to recite – or, rather, to leave this privilege for his guest: the poem ends with a graceful compliment to its addressee (16–18). The unguentum or perfume crops up in a different guise in 3.12, where Martial signals his Catullan intertext by calling his dinner host Fabullus. Here, the guest talks back: what good is it to smell nice and go hungry (res salsa est bene olere et esurire)? One might as well be dead (qui non cenat et unguitur, Fabulle, / hic uere mihi mortuus uidetur, ‘one who is perfumed and eats nothing is – I’d say – a corpse’; 3.12.4–5).

These two poems exemplify what Fitzgerald has called the ‘banalization’ of Catullus in Martial’s hands:Footnote ³¹ the intangible subtleties of Catullan poetics and erotics are replaced by concrete objects of desire and distaste in all their physicality – in this respect, Martial seems closer to Juvenal than to Catullus, though without the former’s aggressive moralizing. At the same time, Martial’s Catullus (like Pliny’s) is above all the poet of nugae, lusus, and ioci – playful, witty, risqué, but stripped of the provocativeness and venom that typify the polymetrics and epigrams (the carmina maiora, again, barely figure in Martial’s reception of Catullus).Footnote ³² Here, too, Catullan models – along with those of his fellow-epigrammatists Domitius Marsus, Albinovanus Pedo, and Gaetulicus – license the use of obscene language and content:Footnote ³³ the preface to Book 1 draws attention to its lasciua uerborum ueritas (‘risqué plain-speaking’) even while purporting to apologize for it, and the theme of obscenity recurs elsewhere.

Catullus is consistently represented by Martial – often by nameFootnote ³⁴ – as an important forerunner in the epigrammatic tradition, sometimes implicitly as an object of rivalry. Twice, for example, Martial echoes the kiss poems, 5, 7, and 48, in a way that suggests a certain one-upmanship:

In the oft-quoted 11.6, the basia Catulliana recur, this time neatly combined with a knowingly suggestive reference to the passer of poems 2 and 3: typically, Martial makes much more obvious play of the double meaning only hinted at by Catullus.Footnote ³⁶

Lesbia, too, is a recurrent character in Martial’s epigrams, sometimes appearing explicitly as the Lesbia of Catullus, sometimes apparently as a contemporary. In the former instances, she figures as a generic elegiac puella, the ‘girlfriend’ (amica) of Catullus, listed alongside Propertius’ Cynthia, Ovid’s Corinna, and others.Footnote ³⁸ More striking are the poems on the contemporary Lesbia, who may be seen as a kind of deformation or travesty of Catullus’ idealized beloved: hypersexual, grossly physical, even ugly, and – in particular – a fellatrix (‘cocksucker’; 2.50), she owes something to the monstrously insatiable Lesbia of Catullus 11, but also makes explicit the submerged associations of the name.Footnote ³⁹

In general, critics have rightly seen Martial as ‘turning down the emotional heat’ in his handling of Catullan intertexts: for all his repeated citation of poem 16, the epigrammatist aims to amuse and entertain rather than excite his reader or rouse our emotions or indignation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Symptomatic is his rejection of the invective poem as weapon at 7.12.5–8: here, Martial contrasts his own, inoffensive verse – which the emperor may read with ‘serene brow’, and which causes no one to blush (1–4) – with the violence of Archilochean invective (‘weapons that drip with the blood of Lycambes’; 6).Footnote ⁴¹ Martial’s epigrammatic Catullus, then, is not only a forebear to be emulated and even surpassed (by, as Gaisser nicely puts it, ‘taking Catullus’ poems apart, putting a witty spin on their ideas, and reassembling them in new and surprising combinations’Footnote ⁴²) but also one to be self-consciously toned down, to suit the more circumspect sensibility of Domitianic Rome.

3. Catullan renaissance

It is something of a cliché to say that Catullus almost did not survive antiquity. From the early fifth century ad, references become increasingly sporadic and finally disappear altogether: we can assume that manuscripts of the poems ceased to circulate, and that medieval authors before the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century had no access to Catullus’ text and knew of him only through references and quotations in other ancient authors.Footnote ⁴³

At some time around the year 1300, however, a manuscript of the poems was discovered in (or brought to?) Verona and copied at least once. This momentous event was celebrated in a riddling Latin epigram by Benvenuto Campesani (d. 1323), transmitted in two of the earliest surviving manuscripts, where it precedes or follows Catullus’ text. The epigram is entitled ‘Verses of Master Benvenuto Campesani of Vincenza on the resurrection of the poet Catullus of Verona’ and describes Catullus’ text as having returned home from distant exile, and as having been ‘hidden under a bushel’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This concluding phrase has generated romantic fantasies of the discovery of the manuscript literally in a storeroom or wine cellar; more probably, it alludes to the biblical phrase ‘hiding one’s light under a bushel’, with a pun on the word papirus (which in medieval usage could refer either to paper or to the wick of a lamp).

The rediscovered, though subsequently lost, manuscript celebrated in Benvenuto’s epigram is generally identified with the archetype from which all our surviving manuscripts – with the exception of the Codex Thuaneus (T) – descend;Footnote ⁴⁵ it is known as the Veronensis (V). The oldest of the descendants, designated O, G, and R, are probably not direct copies of V: a further lost manuscript (usually designated A) is now thought to have intervened between V and O, while, on the basis of shared errors present in G and R but absent in O, it can be deduced that the former were copied from a common source (X, no longer extant); this will have been a second, independently made copy of A, and thus a ‘sibling’ of O. A copy of R, the Codex Marcianus or M, was made some time around 1400 for the proto-humanist Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406).Footnote ⁴⁶ Together, these four manuscripts, O, G, R, and M, can be used to reconstruct the readings of V, as well as representing the earliest phase of scholarly work on the text of the poems: Salutati made numerous corrections in R (designated R²), both by comparing the manuscript with its exemplar and by proposing emendations of his own, and there are some indications that Petrarch may already have added marginal notes in the lost manuscript A.Footnote ⁴⁷

Such emendations were sorely needed: it is clear that the archetype, V, and indeed the more distant ancestor (Ω) from which both V and T ultimately descend, was marred by very extensive textual corruption. The scribe of G appends an apology for his text’s poor quality, perhaps copied from X or even A; and, as Oakley notes, Roger Mynors’ Oxford Classical Text, though relatively conservative, accepts over 800 conjectural readings into the approximately 2,300 lines of the corpus, without which much of the Latin would be nonsensical, unmetrical, or both.Footnote ⁴⁸ The great majority of these are due to the humanist scholars of the Renaissance, to whom we owe the fundamental basis of our modern editions. Many cruces and disputed readings remain, and textual critics continue to propose new conjectures. However, though modern editors may differ widely on matters of detail, the texts that we read nowadays are at least legible, in a way that was scarcely true of the fourteenth-century manuscripts, or even the editio princeps (first printed edition) of 1472.Footnote ⁴⁹

A major advance came with the Aldine editions of 1502 and 1515, printed in Venice by the renowned publisher Aldo Manuzio in collaboration with the Veronese scholar Girolamo Avanzi (Avantius).Footnote ⁵⁰ With its greatly improved text and large print run, the Aldine edition made Catullus much more accessible, and – importantly – comprehensible to a more general readership.

As readable texts became more widely available through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the poems began to have an impact on literary as well as scholarly production. A central figure in this regard is the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1426–1503), whose three collections of Latin poetry (the Pruritus or ‘titillation’, the Parthenopaeus or Amores, and the Hendecasyllabi or Baiae) helped to establish a type of Neo-Catullan verse that would dominate the poet’s Renaissance reception. As Gaisser persuasively argues, Pontano and his contemporaries approached Catullus through Martial, reading him as a poet of the senses rather than the emotions, and focusing selectively on a small number of the polymetrics, to the virtual exclusion of the carmina maiora and (to a lesser extent) the epigrams.Footnote ⁵¹ Pontano – like Pliny and Martial – advances the lex Catulliana of poem 16 in mitigation of the frank sensuality and (particularly in the first collection) sexual explicitness of his verse. From Martial, too, he presumably derives the ‘obscene’ reading of the passer poems, 2 and 3, which is conflated in Parthenopaeus 1.5 with the dedication of poem 1 and the kiss poems, 5 and 7 (as well as more circumscribed echoes of several other poems).Footnote ⁵² Pontano initially considers offering his ‘dove’ to the mali cinaedi (‘wicked catamites’), before settling on his girlfriend, in whose lap it ‘happily plays’. The poem concludes:

While the sexual suggestiveness of Pontano’s poetry is often toned down by his successors, the kiss poems and the passer continue to be a focus in Neo-Latin poetry throughout the Renaissance, ultimately spawning an entire (sub-)genre, the basium. At the same time, Pontano developed a characteristically Neo-Catullan style, which was to prove equally influential: typified by verbal patterning (especially repetition and rhetorical parallelism), diminutives, and what Alex Wong refers to as ‘erotic babytalk’, this self-consciously voluptuous manner is both reminiscent of its Catullan models and yet distinctively different from that of either Martial or Catullus himself.Footnote ⁵³

4. Catullus and the moderns

Catullan reception in the English vernacular arguably begins with Skelton’s ‘Philip Sparrow’ (c. 1505), an extended lament for a pet bird put in the mouth of a young woman, Jane Scrope, and very loosely based on Catullus 3.Footnote ⁵⁴ Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the first half of the eighteenth, the sparrow and kiss poems remained predictably popular, as did the epithalamia, 61 and 62;Footnote ⁵⁵ but, alongside the appearance of the first complete – if often euphemistic – translations, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw something of a shift away from the perception of Catullus primarily as a poet of love and marriage. Henry Stead argues that the ‘Cockney School’ around the liberal poet and essayist Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) co-opted Catullus as a voice of social protest, while Catullan parody might serve equally as a stick with which to beat the radicals.Footnote ⁵⁶ More generally, the epigrams and non-amatory polymetrics receive much more attention in this period than previously; and poem 64 inspired both translations and engagement of a more allusive kind.Footnote ⁵⁷

Another, perhaps surprising, favourite of the Romantics and post-Romantics is poem 63.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hunt framed his translation as an attack on ‘religious enthusiasm’: it was first published in 1811 under the title ‘Atys, the Enthusiast’ – a heading which would readily have pointed contemporary readers to the ‘ranting’ and ‘enthusiasm’ associated by its detractors with Primitive Methodism.Footnote ⁵⁹ But he also drew on Attis a second time in an 1825 poem, ‘From Velluti to his Revilers’. Here, Hunt takes on the persona of the celebrated castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti, whose recent performance in London had attracted critical hostility: ‘Velluti’, in turn, identifies with the mourning Attis as he laments his irrevocable alienation from home and recognized social roles:

Whereas Hunt exploits Catullus in a bid to win sympathy for the alien figure of the castrato, the exoticism of the poem’s themes and its unusual, hypnotic metre exerted their own fascination. Both Tennyson and Meredith imitated the galliambic metre in ‘Boadicea’ (described by Tennyson as ‘a far-off echo of the Attis of Catullus’) and ‘Phaethon’ respectively. Landor closes his 1842 essay ‘The Writings of Catullus’ with a remarkable peroration contrasting Catullus’ sublimity with ‘the catarrhal songsters of goose-grazed commons’, whose devotees will be ‘loth and ill-fitted to mount up with Catullus to the highest steeps in the forests of Ida, and will shudder at the music of the Corybantes in the temple of the Great Mother of the Gods’.Footnote ⁶¹ More remarkable still is Swinburne’s scandalous sadomasochistic fantasy ‘Dolores’, in which the vampiric anti-Madonna Dolores personifies the abandoned sexuality and ‘violent delights’ associated by Swinburne with the lost classical past.Footnote ⁶² Represented by Swinburne as the daughter of Priapus and the Roman funerary goddess Libitina, Dolores is opposed both to the Virgin Mary and to (Catullus’) Cybele, whose cold purity is portrayed as a castrating force pitted against the perverse sexuality of ‘Our Lady of Pain’:

At the opposite extreme from Swinburne’s mocking Catullus is the ‘tender Catullus’ of Tennyson’s ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ (1880), which combines direct quotation of the homecoming poem, 31 (another nineteenth-century favourite), with the ‘hopeless woe’ of 101. Tennyson identifies with Catullus, as a fellow-poet but more specifically as a poet of mourning and lament (Tennyson had lost his own brother, Charles, just a few months before his visit to Sirmione):

As ‘Frater Ave atque Vale’ suggests, the tenderness that Tennyson and his contemporaries find in Catullus is manifested not so much in the love poems as in the elegiac laments, 65, 96 (a poem of consolation to his fellow-poet Calvus), and especially 101.Footnote ⁶⁴ Translations and echoes of these poems often point to a sense of community with Catullus as a poet of loss and longing: picking up on the homosocial aspect of Catullus’ poetry discussed in Chapter 3, the nineteenth-century writers insert themselves into the network of amici whose literary and personal friendships the collection both constructs and celebrates.Footnote ⁶⁵ The symbolic brotherhood of poets implicit in Tennyson is similarly invoked by Swinburne, both in ‘Ave atque Vale: In Memory of Charles Baudelaire’ and in ‘To Catullus’, where the Roman poet is directly invoked as ‘My brother, my Valerius’. More teasingly, Aubrey Beardsley suggests a direct identification with Catullus through the illustration accompanying his translation of poem 101 for The Savoy magazine of 1896: the imaginary portrait of Catullus is at the same time a portrait of Beardsley himself, whose striking profile, with its beak-like nose, can be discerned in the outline of the black drapery framing the figure’s torso.

Nineteenth-century Catullus is a poet of extremes, both exotic and domesticable, distant yet intimate, whose ‘uncleanly wit’ is to be deplored (where not passed over in silence), yet who can be claimed as a literary ‘brother’, as much by the laureate Tennyson as by the self-consciously counter-cultural Swinburne and Beardsley.Footnote ⁶⁶ Though rather differently framed, this dichotomy can usefully be compared with the opposition between ‘Priapic’ and ‘anti-Priapic’ personae discussed in Chapter 2: late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarship, while somewhat more suspicious in its reading of Catullan self-representation, offers an analogue for Tennyson’s ‘tender’ poet in the feminized, self-abasing aspect that complements and contrasts with the assertive and hyper-masculine speaker of the invectives.

A different kind of dichotomy is suggested in what is perhaps the best-known modern response to Catullus and Catullan scholarship, Yeats’s ‘The Scholars’ (1929):

Yeats’s satirical antithesis between the ‘old, learned, respectable bald heads’ of Catullus’ modern editors and the despairing young lover who ‘rhymed out’ the poems ‘to flatter beauty’s ignorant ear’ is commonly supposed to be directed primarily at the commentary of Robinson Ellis, first published in 1876.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ironically enough, however, Yeats’ romanticized image of Catullus tossing on his bedFootnote ⁶⁹ is equally in tune with an increasingly prominent strand in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catullan scholarship, inaugurated by Schwabe’s Quaestiones Catullianae, which had appeared more than a decade before Ellis’ commentary, in 1862. As we saw in Chapter 2, Schwabe’s methodology – the novelistic reconstruction of Catullus’ biography on the basis of the poems – was to exert a crucial influence in the academic sphere for the next several decades; at the same time, and perhaps not coincidentally, biographical approaches, particularly narrativization of the Lesbia affair, become popular in both poetic and prose receptions of Catullus in the twentieth century.

As Gaisser points out, novelization of Catullus’ life and poetry was not new, and can be traced back to the late seventeenth century, when Jean de la Chapelle published his Les Amours de Catulle.Footnote ⁷⁰ Twentieth-century writers, however, adopted the novelistic approach to a much greater extent than their predecessors. Fitzgerald shows how a series of male poets (James Baxter, John Cotton, and others) take the ups and downs of the affair with Lesbia, and particularly her ‘victimization’ of the poet, as models for their own sexual relationships: the brotherhood of poetry and loss fantasized by the Victorian poets mutates into a distinctly misogynistic sense of male–male solidarity in the face of the castrating female.Footnote ⁷¹ A feeling of intimacy – of kinship with ‘the person imagined behind the poetry’, as Theodore Ziolkowski puts itFootnote ⁷² – persists as a connecting thread through modern receptions of the poems, considerably outlasting the biographical fashion in Catullan criticism, in tandem with which it originated.

Both poets and prose writers generally took (and continue to take) the identification of Lesbia with Clodia Metelli for granted: the novelists – like Schwabe himself – draw freely on the ancient sources for the lives of Clodia and her contemporaries to fill out the exiguous biographical detail supplied by the poems themselves and the sparse ancient testimonia.Footnote ⁷³ Something of an exception, however, is the most highly regarded and certainly the most imaginative of the Catullus novels, Thornton’s Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948). Wilder’s existentialist-influenced ‘fantasia’ on the last days of Caesar’s dictatorship is explicitly ahistorical in its willingness to play fast and loose with chronology and the relationships between characters, for all the effet de réel created by its documentary format (a variation on the epistolary novel, it consists entirely of a series of mostly fictive ‘documents’, with accompanying ‘editorial’ glossing).Footnote ⁷⁴ Catullus plays a secondary role in the novel, serving primarily as a kind of foil to Caesar, who greatly admires Catullus’ poetry but is perplexed, as are others, by his obsessive devotion to Clodia. What is particularly striking in Wilder’s portrayal of Catullus – in the context of contemporary scholarship – is his depiction as, at bottom, oddly innocent and strait-laced: Cornelius Nepos characterizes him as being ‘as severe [to his peers] as their fathers, and, although extremely licentious in conversation,…little short of austere in his life and attempts to inculcate “the Old Roman Way” in them also’ (49–50; see also 55–6). Clodia, while sympathetically treated by Wilder, destroys her lover out of a generalized hatred of ‘everything and everyone about her’ (60, a letter from Asinius Pollio to Caesar), motivated by a kind of existential angst and (it transpires) by the childhood trauma of having been raped by her uncle at the age of twelve.Footnote ⁷⁵

If Wilder’s Catullus is strikingly different from our modern image of the urbane and often aggressively masculine poet, his characterization is very much of a piece with that of Schwabe and late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century scholarship in general. Schwabe, as noted in Chapter 2, represents Catullus as the innocent victim of Lesbia’s perfidy: his ‘candid and open heart’ was naturally vulnerable to her ‘meretricious arts’, and, while unduly prone to both love and hatred, he can be forgiven the ‘madness’ of passion on account of his fundamental purity of mind, pious worship of the gods, and devotion to his brother.Footnote ⁷⁶ Wilder has discarded Schwabe’s sententious moralizing; but we can nevertheless trace the outlines of the ‘pure’ Catullus, found elsewhere in both the scholarship and the literary receptions of the period, and presumably derived ultimately from an over-literal reading of the assertions of pietas in poems 16 and 76 and the prayer for salvation at the end of the latter, along with a pervasive tendency to gloss over or entirely ignore the invectives.Footnote ⁷⁷

Alongside this penchant for the novelization of Catullus’ life, twentieth-century poets admired him for his perceived counter-cultural individualism and for the combination of technical brilliance with emotive power. For Louis MacNeice, he represents ‘the Individual’, who ‘went down young, gave place to those who were born old / …and were not even jealous / of his wild life and lyrics’ (‘Epitaph for Liberal Poets’ [1942]). Pound had a high regard for the metrical range and precision of his verse, as well as his lyrical intensity, and Frost, somewhat similarly, adopts him as a model for the interdependence of ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Perhaps the most marked tendency in poetic receptions of recent decades has been the appropriation of a Catullan voice by women poets, a trend which can (again) be aligned with feminist-influenced scholarship and increased interest in constructions of gender in academic criticism of the poet.Footnote ⁷⁹ As early as 1928, Dorothy Parker sought to imagine Lesbia’s perspective on the affair, in a characteristically acerbic response to poems 2 and 3 (‘From a Letter from Lesbia’):

Almost a century later, the New Zealand poet Anna Jackson, who has engaged extensively with Catullus’ poetry, adopted a similar strategy in her collection I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (2014), ‘writing back’ from Clodia’s perspective as a sexually liberated woman with demands and desires of her own to match those of her lover.

Other women poets have adopted a more ambiguously Catullan voice, appropriating and re-gendering the subject position of the poet himself. In her 2011 collection Catulla et Al, for instance, Tiffany Atkinson presents herself as a kind of updated female counterpart of the Roman poet, in a series of more or less direct responses to specific Catullan models. In Chasing Catullus (2004), Josephine Balmer tropes the role of translator as that of lover, rejecting the ‘subordinate’ role that has traditionally been assigned to the former, in (perhaps) self-consciously gendered terms:

The series of loose translations incorporated in Anne Carson’s collection Men in the Off Hours (2000) again relocates Catullus to a modern setting: albeit less explicitly so than in Atkinson’s poems, this tactic tends to create a kind of palimpsest, in which Carson’s voice is overlaid on that of her source-text. Although each poem is preceded by a descriptive heading explicitly identifying the speaker as Catullus (‘Catullus observes his love and her pet at play’, ‘Catullus sings a dirge’, etc.), it is difficult to resist the sense that the translator is appropriating the Latin text as a vehicle for her own voice, particularly in the case of poem 50, self-reflexively concerned as it is with poetic composition and the response of one poet to another.

This palimpsestic voice is still more clearly present in Carson’s Nox (2010), certainly the most strikingly original instantiation of Catullan reception in recent decades. The work – ‘poem’ does not seem quite the mot juste – is a fusion of translation, scholarly commentary on and reimagining of Catullus 101, and at the same time a kind of family album, memorializing Carson’s estranged and subsequently deceased brother. It seems appropriate to close this brief survey of modern receptions with this indefinable work, which transcends the Yeatsian opposition between emotion and scholarship: for Carson, the commentary itself appears to provide a means to express and work through the grief of separation and loss. Still more than Carson’s translations, Nox offers the reader a complex layering of voices, in which the interplay of her own, present grief with that of the ancient poet doubles the interplay between Catullus’ own sense of displacement and that of the Homeric Odysseus (as briefly discussed in Chapter 3 above). At the same time, the fragmentation of Catullus’ poem, on which Carson provides a painstaking philological commentary in the form of lexical entries documenting the range of possible meanings of each word, and the open-endedness of the translation that she eventually offers – ‘I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101’, she writes; ‘I guess it [the process of translation] never ends’ – hint at an analogy between the ancient poem, or its poet, and the brother she mourns. Like Carson’s estranged brother, the past can never be known completely, however intimate and personal our connections to it: but the work of philology parallels the work of memory, in its (never fully completed) attempt to assemble the fragments into a coherent whole.Footnote ⁸⁰