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Catullus Poems

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CATULLUS

Catullus 3

"But curse on you, evil shadows of hell,
who devour all beautiful things."

Catullus Poems

Biography

Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC) was one of the most influential Roman poets of the 1st century BC. His work is still widely studied, and his perennial influence continues to be seen in poetry and other forms of art.

Little about Catullus's life is known for sure. Most ancient sources, including Suetonius and the poet Ovid (Amores III.XV), agree that he was born in or near Verona. His was part of a leading equestrian family from Verona, but he lived in Rome most of his life.

Catullus's well-to-do family owned a villa at Sirmio, and his father entertained Caesar, then governor of Gaul. Catullus's friends included the poets C. Licinius Macer Calvus, Furius Bibaculus, and C. Helvius Cinna; the orator Q. Hortensius (a rival of Cicero in the law courts) and the biographer Cornelius Nepos, to whom Catullus' book of poems is dedicated.

In 61 BC, Catullus went to Rome where, he met and fell in love with Clodia, the "Lesbia" of the poems. This sophisticated woman, 10 years older than Catullus, was the wife of Metellus Celer and a member of the Claudian family, an old aristocratic line. The poet and the aristocrat had a brief affair which ended when Clodia replaced him with Caelius Rufus, part of Catullus' social set and an associate of Cicero.

In 57 BC, he accompanied his friend Memmius to Bithynia, where Memmius had received a propraetor's post. This position on the staff of the governor of Bithynia was Catullus' only political office. While in the East, Catullus traveled to the Troad to perform rites at his brother's tomb, an event recorded in a moving poem.

After his year in Bithynia, Catullus returned to Italy, probably settling in Rome and spending the last few years of his life there. Although his poems contain complaints of poverty, he was well-off enough to have owned a villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli).

It is uncertain when Catullus died. Some ancient sources tell he died from exhaustion at the age of thirty. St. Jerome gives his birth year as 87 B.C. and wrote that the poet lived 30 years, but some of the poems refer to events in 55 B.C., and no poem can be dated any later than 54, so scholars have traditionally accepted the dates 84 BC – 54 BC.

Subsequently, his poems were appreciated by other poets and intellectuals, but politicians like Cicero despised them for their supposed amorality. Catullus was never considered one of the canonical school authors. Nevertheless, he greatly influenced later poets, including Ovid, Horace, and even Virgil; after his rediscovery in the Middle Ages, Catullus again found admirers. Still, his writing style, which is frequently explicit, was shocking to many readers, both ancient and modern, and until recently it was not easy to find an equally explicit translation of some of his poems. Jacob Rabinowitz has since remedied this.

Catullus's poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one (of two) copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300. These three surviving copies are stored at the National Library in Paris, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican Library in Rome. These manuscripts recorded Catullus's work in an anthology of 116 carmina (three of which are now considered spurious — 18, 19 and 20 — although the numbering has been retained), which can be divided into three formal parts: sixty short poems in varying metres, called polymetra, eight longer poems, and forty-eight epigrams.

There is no scholarly consensus on whether or not Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems, and although some scholars have argued he is responsible for the arrangement no definitive answer to the question of arrangement has ever been offered. The longer poems differ from the polymetra and the epigrams not only in length but also in their subjects: There are seven hymns and one mini-epic, or epillion, the most highly-prized form for the "new poets".

The polymetra and the epigrams can be divided into four major thematic groups (ignoring a rather large number of poems eluding such categorization):

-- poems to and about his friends (e.g., an invitation like poem 13).

-- erotic poems: some of them indicate homosexual penchants (50 and 98), but most are about women, especially about one he calls "Lesbia" (in honour of the poetess Sappho of Lesbos, source and inspiration of many of his poems); philologists have taken considerable efforts to discover her real identity, and many concluded that Lesbia was Clodia, sister of the infamous Publius Clodius Pulcher and a woman known for her generous sexuality, but this identification rests on some rather fragile assumptions. In the 116 poems found of Catullus, the poet displays a wide range of highly emotional and seemingly contradictory responses to Lesbia, ranging from tender love poems, to sadness and disappointment, and bitter sarcasm.

-- invectives: some of these often rude and sometimes downright obscene poems are targeted at friends-turned-traitors (e.g., poem 30) and other lovers of Lesbia, but many well known poets, politicians (e.g., Julius Caesar) and rhetors, including Cicero, are thrashed as well. However, many of these poems are humorous and craftily veil the sting of the attack. For example, Catullus writes a poem mocking a pretentious descendant of a freedman who emphasizes the letter "h" in his speech because it makes him sound more like a learned Greek by adding unnecessary Hs to words like insidias (ambush).

-- condolences: some poems of Catullus are, in fact, serious in nature. One poem, 96, comforts a friend in the death of a loved one (presumably his wife or mistress), while several others, most famously 101, lament the death of his dear brother.

All these poems describe the Epicurean lifestyle of Catullus and his friends, who, despite Catullus's temporary political post in Bithynia, lived withdrawn from politics. They were interested mainly in poetry and love. Above all other qualities, Catullus seems to have sought venustas, or charm, in his acquaintances, a theme which he explores in a number of his poems. The ancient Roman concept of virtus (i.e. of virtue that had to be proved by a political or military career), which Cicero suggested as the solution to the societal problems of the late Republic, meant little to them.

But it is not the traditional notions Catullus rejects, merely their monopolized application to the vita activa of politics and war. Indeed, he tries to reinvent these notions from a personal point of view and to introduce them into human relationships. For example, he applies the word fides, which traditionally meant faithfulness towards one's political allies, to his relationship with Lesbia and reinterprets it as unconditional faithfulness in love. So, despite seeming frivolity of his lifestyle, Catullus measured himself and his friends by quite ambitious standards.

Catullus's poetry was greatly influenced by the Greek neoteroi, or "new poets". Callimachus influenced Catullus especially, having propagated a new style of poetry which deliberately turned away from the classical epic poetry in the tradition of Homer. Catullus and Callimachus did not describe the feats of ancient heroes and gods (except perhaps in re-evaluating and predominantly artistic circumstances, e.g. poems 63 and 64), focusing instead on small-scale personal themes. Although these poems sometimes seem quite superficial and their subjects often are mere everyday concerns, they are accomplished works of art. Catullus described his work as expolitum, or polished, to show that the language he used was very carefully and artistically composed.

Catullus was also an admirer of Sappho, a poetess of the 7th century BC, and is the source for much of what we know or infer about her. Catullus 51 is a translation of Sappho 31, and 61 and 62 are certainly inspired by and perhaps translated directly from lost works of Sappho. Both of the latter are epithalamia, a form of laudatory or erotic wedding-poetry that Sappho had been famous for but that had gone out of fashion in the intervening centuries. Catullus sometimes used a meter that Sappho developed, called the Sapphic strophe. In fact, Catullus may have brought about a substantial revival of that form in Rome.

The epistolatory novel Ides of March by Thornton Wilder features Catullus, his poetry, his relationship (and correspondence) with Clodia, correspondence from his family and a description of his death. Catullus' poems and the closing section by Suetonius are the only documents in the novel which are not imagined.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia