Catullus (review)

Amanda Kolson Hurley (hereafter = H.) has produced an engaging introduction to the poetry of Catullus, in the series Ancients in Action, described by its publisher as “short incisive books introducing major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader.” (Other subjects in the series include Horace, Lucretius, Ovid, Cleopatra, and Spartacus.) Altogether H. provides a nice balance of analysis of the poems, occasional discussion of secondary literature and modern translations and imitations, and relevant information about the ancient world.

The first chapter surveys the evidence for Catullus’ life, based on testimonia and references to his contemporaries in the poems. H. works in quite a bit of useful literary-historical and cultural material as well, beginning with the urban-rural dichotomy as it applied to Catullus’ origins, and how the dichotomy entered into the Roman idealization of primitive virtue and condemnation of urban mores. She discusses Catullus’ education and describes the Roman poetic milieu of his day, mentioning his relations with poets and other prominent men, and outlining the ideals of the neoteric poets and the influence upon them of Hellenistic poetry and the Alexandrian aesthetic. A discussion of Lesbia’s identity follows. H. also describes briefly the history of the text, including the detail of Scaliger’s emendation of 61.213, which strikes me as a happy illustration of textual problems for those readers unfamiliar with textual criticism. She turns to competing views or versions of Catullus (“Romantic,” “Modern,” and “Roman Catullus”) and closes with a description of the poems’ arrangement.

Chapter 2, “Defining Catullan poetics: the opening sequence,” is an effective introduction to the first three poems. Discussing poem 1, H. introduces the reader to the importance of lepidus, Catullus’ use of diminutives, and the poem’s programmatic nature. H. brings out the ambiguity in Catullus’ professed modesty about his little book and the trifles it contains.

The sparrow poems are also treated as emblematic of important aspects of Catullus’ style and concerns; H. concludes that “Poem 2...by uniting playfulness and eroticism (deliciae), signals that both will be important features of Catullus’ style” (36). In poem 3, “...we see Catullan charm emerge as a quality combining daintiness and wit, and tinged with sex appeal...”. “Catullus is challenging us to enjoy his pretty miniatures, and to adopt his pose of amused detachment when confronted with excessive emotion...”. “Most of us will want to enter into the spirit of Catullus’ literary game” (37–38).

The following section deals with poems 5, 7, and 48; H. uses this combination of poems to introduce her own program of choosing representative poems from the collection. “The strategy I employ below is to identify ‘clusters’ of related poems from different parts of the corpus, while broadly following numerical order. Though no doubt somewhat arbitrary, these clusters are intended to illustrate key aspects of Catullus’ work. Within each cluster the individual poems shed light on one another—as do poems 5, 7 and 48, the ‘kiss poems’.” H. provides a close reading of poem 5, mentioning its many later imitations, and citing an article of John Henderson on the poem’s enacting of a game.¹ In her analysis of 7 she emphasizes the role of geographical allusions and homage to Callimachus. She does not actually discuss poem 48 except as an example of Catullus’ homoerotic poems, and she uses this to segue into Chapter 3, “Male Friendship in Catullus,” where poems 11, 15, and 16 make up her first triad.

In her discussion of male friendship H. relies heavily for the first time on secondary literature in her interpretation of the poems. Connecting the catalogue of the Roman world’s margins in poem 11 with the poet’s self-marginalization and vulnerability, she cites David Konstan on Catullus’ removal of himself from the hierarchical ordering of sexual relationships in the Roman world.² Then she turns to Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men to borrow a paradigm she will use in interpreting a number of poems: that of the “erotic triangle” in literary works...