Concatenatio Catulliana: A New Reading of the Carmina (review)
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Recounting scholarly views of Catullan arrangement that run from Chaos to Cosmos, Claes propounds "an objective foundation, viz. the recurrence of motifs and phrases in consecutive poems," arguing that "the generality of the phenomenon proves that the poet conceived of the volume as a coherent collection, in which the poems fit like links in a chain"—a discovery that "suggests a new reading of the Carmina" (3).
Claes scrupulously and fruitfully reviews modern scholarship, including the aesthetics of poikilia and "mesodic" ordering around a centerpiece. He challenges scholarly arbitria that have truncated arguably whole poems (2, 14) and finds "no need to suppose that Catullus did not compose and edit the Carmina himself" (14), albeit with division into three books (citing Ullman 1973). Noting that "ancient poetry has never produced a volume chronologically composed" (18), Claes excludes crude autobiography, weighing, however, metrical arrangement (Skutsch, Skinner) and cyclical, annular (anular-, i.e., ring like), and thematic structures.
Claes then describes what he calls concatenation, both thematic (28–30) and lexical (30–55), the latter a "repetition of identical or similar words or phrases in poems that are close to each other" (30). Similar repetitions abound in other Latin poetry, he shows.
The final, longest, chapter presents a "linear" reading of each of the posited three books, offering "many new interpretations of single poems" (57). Claes summarizes thematic links between contiguous poems and proceeds to identify varieties of variation. Charts illustrate concentric composition, first in cc. 76–92, then 92–107, but also 1–36, although Claes leaves open [End Page 86] questions about other sequences and about reader response, with the rhetorical and cognitive functions of such structures.
Finally Claes employs the described structures "to support or to correct the reading of the received text" (131), e.g., 1.9, favoring qualecumque quod <est>, patrona uirgo and ruling out patroni ut ergo (Bergk, Fordyce, Goodwin), which Gould once favored in a talk at Yale, causing Clausen to mutter, "My learned colleague has a penchant for readings that are hispid and uncouth"; 2.13, "V's negatam . . . confirmed" over ligatam (edd.); 12.9, differtus (Passerat) not dissertus (O); 14.16, salse (G) over false (O); 22.13, tritius (Pontanus, Putnam) over tristius (mss.); 32.1, ipsicilla (Friedrich) over ipsi illa (O) and ipsi thila (G); 64.324, tutamen, Opis (Housman), over tutum opus (V) and tu tamen opis (R2); 65.12, tegam (O) over canam (deteriores); and 68a, 68b, two poems, confirmed by annular composition (Barwick, Courtney).
Claes' broad structural hypotheses and wealth of particular readings constitute a benchmark and challenge for further studies, not only of Catullus, but of Latin, indeed European, verse, starting in my case with structure in the Bucolics of Virgil and the Carminum liber of Giovanni della Casa (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/jvsickle).
As metapoetics for structure, concatenation seems alien, not metonymic from the text, unlike Virgil's disparibus compacta cicutis fistula or fiscellam texit. Yet the crafted coverlet of Peleus' couch—sedibus in mediis . . . priscis . . . uariata figuris . . . mira uirtutes indicat arte—is the centerpiece of the centerpiece of a book remarkable at every level for centering and concordia discors in passionately spectacular craft.
Graduate School, City University of New York
