The Galliambics of Catullus 63: "That Intoxicating Meter"

J.T. Kirby: Galliambics of Catullus 6363 The Galliambics of Catullus 63: "That Intoxicating Meter" for AKlM John T. Kirby "Perhaps the most remarkable poem in Latin."1 Superlatives are dangerous, and yet, in the case of Catullus 63, a respectable defense could be made for such an assertion. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the meter of this poem should have attracted so little attention.2 Initially it presents a complex profile, and perhaps this has deterred the study of it in an age where Metrik has become the purview of the few. But in fact its myriad permutations are governed by an overriding rhythmic regularity, the knowledge of which should bring to life its power. My intent here is to discuss the origin and nature of this meter, and how Catullus exploits it in the Attis poem. I Hemiola The galliambic is a meter of poetry which is used, as the Greeks said, ?at? st????—line by line—rather than as part of a stanza. It falls naturally into two halves. At the end of the last century there was a flurry of argument over whence came this meter: was it from the Ionic a minore, or not?3 The latter meter follows the pattern: 1 K. Quinn, Catullus: The Poems (New York 1970, 2nd edition 1973) 282. 2 J.P. Elder ("Catullus' Attis," AJP 68 [1947] 394-403), and C. Rubino ("Myth and Mediation in the Attis Poem of Catullus," Ramus 3 [1974] 152-75) have rightly lamented the lack of attention given the poem as a whole. The latter's notes are a good catalogue of the general bibliography up to that time. H. Dettmer, in note 12 of "Design in the Catullan Corpus: A Preliminary Study" (CW 81.5 [1988] 371-81), points out the central position of the Attis in the corpus, and the attention drawn to the poem by its unique meter. 3 See G. Allen, The Attis ofCatullus (London 1892); R.Y. Tyrrell, "Grant Allen on the Attis of Catullus," CR 7 (1893) 44-45; and G. Dunn, "The Galliambic Metre," CR 7 (1893) 145-48. 64Syllecta Classica 1 (1989) and may be catalectic, that is, with a "rest" or silent interval in place of its final longum. We find the Ionic a minore very early in Greek poetry—there are some in Aeschylus' Persians, now held to be our earliest extant tragedy.4 But they look very different from the galliambic, and the question is, if the galliambic arose from the Ionic a minore, how did it do so? For a galliambic line, in its most basic form, follows this pattern: UU — U — U — — luu — UUUU — Metricians are now agreed that the galliambic did indeed evolve from the Ionic a minore.5 Their explanation for the phenomenon is "anaclasis," that is, that the fourth and fifth syllables of the first hemistich have been reversed, yielding uu-u-u — instead of uu ----- uu —. I find this to be a good description of the hemistich, but at the same time a very poor explanation of how the hemistich assumed that shape. The problem is that poets and metricians work in radically different ways. Poets do not sit, pencil in hand, arranging longs and shorts in different combinations and seeing how they look on the page. Rather they work with words as musicians work with notes: they hear sounds, rhythms, patterns. So the concept of anaclasis, while a simple and tidy description of the way the scansion looks on paper, is a very inadequate explanation of how the galliambic came to have the shape it now has. Scholars have noted a similarity of function between the galliambic and the dactylic hexameter.6 That is significant for us, because, while metricians today resist mapping out most metrical units in terms of a constant, quasi-musical rhythm, the dactylic hexameter is one that can be treated in just this way.7 The hexameter is composed ?at? st????, and each line has a fixed number ofrepeated identical units. These are equivalent in music to regular measures of time. The same is true of the Ionic, and—most important for us—of the galliambic line. If...