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Dedications and Status: Catullus 1 and Horace Epodes 1
- Classical World
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 107, Number 2, Winter 2014
- pp. 199-215
- 10.1353/clw.2013.0119
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Catullus’ first poem foregrounds gift-giving as a poetic problem not only for his own work but also for subsequent lyric collections. Reading Catullus 1 as participating in the larger context of elite gift-exchange and obligation casts light on Catullus’ choice of dedicatee and the reading of the second-to-last line. This focus on the problems of gift-giving contextualizes Horace’s use of Catullus’ poetry, notably in Epodes 1. Horace’s deployment of the nexus of relations between poet, patron, and readers to mitigate the problem of status builds on Catullus’ inversion of conventional Roman ideals of liberalitas.