A Companion to Catullus (review)

Topics and authors attract, promising expert and timely ways to approach or reconnect with the poet and trace readers' shifting fashions. Good reading starts with the editor—judicious, attentive to scholarly history's turns and to advances by her notable crew. Given the editorial constraints customary here, however, my remarks will focus on a few of the many intersections with scholarly concerns of mine. Text history fascinates in the hands of the late James Butrica—redeeming Pontano, prizing Billanovich (praised now too by a Latin inscription at his Milanese university). Competing perceptions of a Catullan book get historicized by the editor as conditioned by evolving preconceptions about structure: other poetic books could use such reckoning.

Already central to the editor's account of order, Peter Wiseman vindicates his standing (with her) as a dean of Catullan studies, bringing again to life hints of "Transpadane upbringing" and providing an exemplary reconstruction of social history for the Valerii Catulli and their Sirmionian villa through lapidary hints from ruins, inscriptions, satire, and epigram. Also reconstructing socio-political circles, Konstan revives and amplifies possible allegory encoded in the manneristic rendering of marriage between Peleus and Thetis, e.g., indicat not merely colorless "reveal" (Guy Lee) but "expose" (cf. "indict"). Despite a textual lapse (legitur, an unmetrical gloss displacing fertur, c. 114.2), Konstan recalls that Callimachus' Lock of Berenice was court poetry and he intuits that the metonym and slight catachresis of caesaries ("head of hair") to translate "lock" might flatter Julia, daughter of Julius Caesar. Catullus' use of Hellenistic learning to negotiate social status, closely argued by Andrew Feldherr, may even prompt rueful reflection about the relative status of learning in our times.

The "court poetry" of Catullus' forebears at Alexandria has morphed in recent scholarship into ideological engagement: e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter (Tradition and Innovation, 2005) decrying notions of "art for art's sake" to restore Hellenistic poetry to "its own intellectual and cultural context" (cf. more emphatically Stephens, Seeing Double. Intercultural Poetics, Berkeley 2003). But if Alexandrian poets looked beyond the library, to honor the hand that fed and to collaborate on ideological instruments for Ptolemaic rule, their role anticipates that of the poets (Livius, Naevius, Ennius) engaged by Rome's elite to corroborate imperial expansion (cf. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature, 1998). They codified the mythic frame and epic style for the confident republican order. That order's last master was Cicero, portrayed with empathy and wit by W. R. Johnson as an old school poet, dutifully Roman, perplexed by the rather fresh (neoteroi) "Euphorionic troupe" (cantores) with their "poetics of style for style's sake"—the "peeled" ("slight," lepton)—to which Catullus and his ilk turned, Johnson writes, "away from civic failure and public catastrophe—inward to a private world of immense, exciting emotions and of extraordinary pleasures (and pains)."

Rome's political chaos allowed them not a neo-Alexandrian ideology but a mirror of broken ties: fragments of the shattered frame for Catullus' private construct, cobbled together from amicitia, amor, Troy as manifold sign of tragic loss, even one bit of the old foundational mythology reduced to a satiric barb—glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes ("she peels back the descendants of heroic Remus")—ultimate variant of lepton. Construing the "neoteric" emphasis on private amor as retreat from the public engagement of Alexandrian and republican Roman poetics, suggests review of takes on Virgil and Catullus by both W. R. Johnson and Christopher Nappa. Virgil, perhaps little more than a decade on into the agony of the republic, begins to move beyond neoteric retreat to reclaim an Alexandrian role for his poetics, envisioning public order beyond chaos. In the first half of the Bucolics, Virgil makes ROMA the causative power for new order and new epos, starting to restore but stretch the republican mythic frame—ille mihi semper deus (ecl. 1), nova progenies, Iovis incrementum (Ecl. 4), deus, deus ille (Ecl. 5); cf. Dionaei Caesaris astrum (ecl...