M. Skinner – A Companion To Catullus

Автор: M. Skinner
Название книги: A Companion To Catullus
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 603
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

In this companion, international scholars provide a comprehensive overview that reflects the most recent trends in Catullan studies.
Explores the work of Catullus, one of the best Roman ‘lyric poets’
Provides discussions about production, genre, style, and reception, as well as interpretive essays on key poems and groups of poems
Grounds Catullus in the socio-historical world around him
Chapters challenge received wisdom, present original readings, and suggest new interpretations of biographical evidence

Catullus, as William Fitzgerald acutely observes, is a poet whom ‘‘we have taken
rather too much to our hearts’’ (1995: 235). For a considerable part of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, both lay and academic audiences reacted to the lyric
voice in the Catullan collection as that of a friend and contemporary, whose grief over
a brother’s death and anger at betrayals of trust struck us as candid, universally human
responses to circumstance. Yet treating Catullus sympathetically as one of ourselves
greatly impeded efforts to appreciate his literary achievement as a whole and to locate
his poetry within its particular cultural and historical milieu. New Criticism finally
taught readers to value the longer works of the learned ‘‘Alexandrian’’ Catullus and
even to relish displays of erudition in the love poetry, but only at the price of
dismissing his barbed invective and his coarsely funny occasional pieces as material
supposedly displaying a ‘‘lower level of intent’’ (Quinn 1959: 27–43). Appreciation
of the Catullan corpus, obscenity and all, in its entirety and within its proper context
had to wait for the rise of New Historicism in the 1980s and the subsequent impact of
the cultural studies movement on the humanities.1
It is just since the 1980s, then, that wide-ranging research has succeeded in
grounding Catullus firmly in the socio-historical world around him – by investigating
his provincial North Italian background, his family connections, and his dealings with
the Roman elite; by observing his interactions with fellow provincials seeking
advancement; by teasing out references to matters of everyday life in his poems; by
studying, lastly, the circumstances under which his works were produced and disseminated
and what they might have conveyed to the audiences at which they were
aimed. This historicizing approach has proved unusually fruitful; since Wiseman’s
Catullus and His World (1985), influential articles and entire monographs on
Catullus have appeared with increasing frequency. Such recent critical studies have
employed a variety of incisive tools, including those of anthropology, cultural studies,
gender theory, Lacanian psychology, performance theory, reader-response theory,
and sociolinguistics, to delineate the basic cultural and rhetorical frameworks within
which the poetry operates. They have given us a more nuanced grasp of Catullus’
language and poetics and his standing among his contemporaries.
Unfortunately, this ferment in present critical discourse seldom trickles down to
high-school or even undergraduate college classrooms, although on both levels of
Latin instruction Catullus is now one of the three ancient authors most commonly
encountered. As Ancona and Hallett demonstrate in this volume, his current pedagogical
popularity is likewise a nascent phenomenon. Within the living memory of
many North American teachers, Catullus was a text assigned only on the college level,
and then with some trepidation: despite their relatively easy syntax and their immediate
emotive appeal, the poems were deemed simply too racy for the young.
Incorporation into the Advanced Placement syllabus (for examinations usually
taken in the senior year of high school, approximately age 17) gradually furthered
Catullus’ secondary-school canonicity, though he was not finally accepted as a core
AP author until 1994. Consequently, although annotated teaching texts and materials
on the poet have proliferated over the past few years, and good general introductions,
such as those of Martin (1992) and Hurley (2004), are available, students and
teachers looking for more detailed summaries of current scholarly opinion find
nothing really suitable in English. Hence the Blackwell Companion to Catullus
appears to be a timely project. Containing essays on a range of topics by recognized
and emerging authorities and drawing together two decades’ worth of research into a
collection adaptable for classroom use, this volume is intended to present C. Valerius
Catullus to a wider public as a writer who was very much a man of his time and a
perceptive eyewitness to the last troubled decade of the Roman Republic.
Unlike most studies of literary figures that attempt to reach out to non-specialist
readers, the Blackwell Companion to Catullus does not begin with a chapter on the
author’s life, for the very good reason that we know almost nothing about it. Texts,
translations, surveys, and entries in reference works dating from earlier periods do
contain short biographies of Catullus. Most have been based, directly or indirectly,
upon Ludwig Schwabe’s 1862 reconstruction of his career, known to those of us in
the field as the Catullroman (‘‘Catullus novel’’). As that term of art hints, Schwabe’s
account is quite speculative, and prior biographies that leaned on it wove the scant
data into highly imaginative scenarios. They focused on Catullus’ affair with the
pseudonymous ‘‘Lesbia,’’ generally assumed to be Clodia, wife of Metellus Celer
(cos. 60 BC) and sister of the radical demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher (tr. pop. 58).
Drawing heavily on the first-person statements in the poetry, and treating artistic
utterances as confessional pronouncements, they represented their subject as the
disillusioned lover of a corrupt and degenerate noblewoman and attributed his
purported early death to the suffering caused by that experience (or, alternatively,
to tuberculosis, on no evidence whatsoever).
Here, too, the new socio-historical approach results in a changed emphasis. We can
still start with the few external facts. Following earlier authorities, the late-antique
chronicler Jerome reports Catullus’ birth at Verona in 87 BC (Chron. 150 H.) and
assigns to 58–57 BC his death at Rome during his thirtieth year (XXX aetatis anno,
Chron. 154 H.). The latter date is demonstrably incorrect: all the poems in the
collection to which dates can be ascribed were written during the period 56–54 BC,
though we find no unambiguous reference to events subsequent to 54. Most
scholars, accordingly, have treated Catullus’ life-span of 29 years as fixed and
moved the date of birth down to 84; there has been a recent tendency to shift the
death-date as well, down to 52 or even 51 (Granarolo 1982: 19–30; Wiseman 1985:
191; Thomson 1977: 3–4). But there is a possibility that the number XXX could be a
scribal error; might Catullus have instead lived almost to the age of forty (XXXX)
and thus seen the outbreak of civil war? Cornelius Nepos, to whom he dedicated his
libellus, confirms that by 32 BC he was dead (Att. 12.4), but we have no idea how long
before that he died, or what, if anything, he might have been doing after 54 BC.2
In his Life of the Deified Julius (73), the biographer Suetonius records: Valerium
Catullum, a quo sibi uersiculis de Mamurra perpetua stigmata imposita non dissimulauerat,
satis facientem eadem die adhibuit cenae hospitioque patris eius, sicut consuerat,
uti perseuerauit (‘‘[Caesar] had not denied that Valerius Catullus had put a
lasting mark of shame against his name by his lampoons concerning Mamurra, but,
on the same day Catullus apologized, Caesar invited him to dinner and continued to
accept the hospitality of Catullus’ father, just as he had been accustomed to do’’). In
this volume, T. P. Wiseman unpacks what this sentence tells us about the social
standing of Catullus’ family, and David Konstan explores its implications for Catullus’
view of politics. I have elsewhere noted (Skinner 2003: xxi) that, with a father still
alive, Catullus would have been a filiusfamilias, or son subject to paternal authority
(potestas), legally unable to own property and dependent upon others for his living
expenses in Rome. That would make his vitriolic personal attacks upon his father’s
guest, no less a personage than the military governor of Cisalpine Gaul, all the harder
to explain. In the absence of extenuating circumstances, about which we know
nothing, one wonders how on earth Catullus thought he could get away with
embarrassing the family so blatantly.
The last bit of information contained in other sources is Apuleius’ testimony (Apol.
10) that ‘‘Lesbia’’ was a cover name for a woman named Clodia. That statement is
corroborated by internal evidence, for in poem 79 Catullus informs us that ‘‘Lesbius’’
(who, in accordance with Roman nomenclature, must be some paternal relation of
‘‘Lesbia’’) is ‘‘Pulcher,’’ a broad hint at the notorious Clodius Pulcher. As Dyson
explains (below, pp. 254–5), the identification of Clodia Metelli as Catullus’ mistress
is not wholly certain, but there is a reasonable probability that it is correct, given her
own social and political visibility. These days, though, historians are less interested in
the details of the affair (if it was real) and more concerned with their implications for
Catullus’ contemporary Roman audience. In the poems, a married woman associated
with a powerful aristocratic clan is not only adulterously involved with the speaker, a
young Transpadane, but accused of indiscriminate relations with named and
unnamed others and figuratively branded in cc. 37 and 58 a common prostitute.
Few today would accept this as a realistic picture of a noblewoman’s life. The cruel
beloved is a standard generic component of ancient erotic verse (Dixon 2001:
137–40), and libelous charges of sexual immorality were part of the orator’s and
the politician’s rhetorical gear, unscrupulously deployed against female as well as male
opponents. Is the construction of ‘‘Lesbia’’ in the corpus just an assemblage of
literary topoi, though, or does it also pass a harsh judgment upon the social scene in
which she moved? There would be little point to the poet’s dramatic revelation that
‘‘Lesbia’’ was the aristocratic Clodia if the world of Roman politics were not somehow
relevant to her literary and symbolic function. W. Jeffrey Tatum in this volume
consequently finds a telling parallel between her lack of personal integrity and the
high-handed way in which the nobility, in Catullus’ eyes, was exploiting the municipal
equestrian class, and Konstan provocatively analyzes her insatiable promiscuity in
c. 11 as a trope for Rome’s wars of imperial expansion and plunder.
From the poems themselves we learn a few additional facts: that Catullus served for
a year in Bithynia on the personal staff of the propraetor C. Memmius, probably in
57–56 BC (cc. 10, 28, 46); that the loss of an elder brother, who died and was buried
in the Troad, was a devastating blow (cc. 65, 68a–b, 101); that his family owned
property on the peninsula of Sirmio, near Verona (c. 31), and also an estate (most
likely a working farm) somewhere between upscale Tibur and the rustic Sabine
district (c. 44); that he formed close ties at Rome with numerous other poets and
intellectuals (Cinna, Cornificius, his great friend Licinius Calvus, the brothers Asinii,
Nepos, probably Valerius Cato) and was acquainted with several distinguished
Roman senators, members of the nobility, and key players, including Cicero, Gellius
Publicola, Hortensius Hortalus, Manlius Torquatus, and Cicero’s influential ally
P. Sestius. For a young unknown provincial, Catullus must have climbed the social
ladder in Rome very quickly. Did he simply make the most of good connections, or
were other talents brought to bear?
More and more Catullan scholarship is embracing a theory of performativity: that
many of Catullus’ poems were originally scripts for live recital by their author, most
likely at banquets to which he had been invited, and that in those scripts the speaker
fashions a self-image that will further his goals and ambitions. Critics emphasize
various and sundry elements implicated in Catullan performance: Selden (1992)
considers it a form of rhetorical, and Krostenko (2001a) a mode of linguistic, critique;
Fitzgerald (1995) studies it as a tool for controlling and manipulating audience
response; Wray (2001) analyzes it as a display of competitive masculinity; more
pragmatically, I have suggested (1993a, 2001) that live performance was a tactic
allowing a talented outsider to curry favor with those able to help him advance
socially, economically, and perhaps politically.3 Several chapters in this volume
acknowledge the likelihood of convivial recitation, but it is Elena Theodorakopoulos’
reading of poem 68 in light of that assumption that reveals how postulating a ‘‘back
story’’ of performance on private occasions may clarify old Catullan questions.
Consequently, imagining the presence of the poet as a guest, a well-known artist
and entertainer, in the dining rooms of leading Roman personages allows us to view
him as someone not only having access to privileged information about the workings
of power but also very much concerned about its concrete use and abuse.
Contributors to this volume examine current developments in traditional, as well as
new, areas of Catullan research. In part I, ‘‘The Text and the Collection,’’ J. L.
Butrica reviews the transmission of the Catullan text from antiquity to the present
day, while I myself offer an account of the debate over the vexed question of authorial
arrangement (a chore I hesitated to impose on any colleague). Part II, ‘‘Contexts of
Production,’’ then introduces us to the numerous ways in which Catullus’ poetry can
be regarded as reflective of its times. T. P. Wiseman, who pioneered investigation of
the poet’s family and its later fortunes (Wiseman 1987), provides a history of the
Valerii Catulli and their presence in Northern Italy. David Konstan examines the
contemporary political scene in Rome, offers an explanation for Catullus’ direct
attacks on Caesar and Mamurra, and, most interestingly, finds political reverberations
in other ostensibly non-political poems. Andrew Feldherr locates Catullus’ studied
appeal to a learned coterie in the context of larger intellectual debates over Hellenization
and shows how he and his fellow provincials employed learning to their
advantage as they jockeyed for status within the circles of the Roman nobility.
Elizabeth Manwell provides an overview of research on gender and masculinity and
then analyzes contradictory paradigms of masculinity in Catullus, a matter that has
received considerable attention in recent years.
Later generations habitually characterized Catullus as doctus, ‘‘learned,’’ in tribute
to his impressive acquaintance with the earlier poetic tradition. Although numerous
predecessors exercised influence on his work, he himself recognizes Sappho and
Callimachus as his primary poetic models. In part III, ‘‘Influences,’’ Ellen Greene
shows how Catullus’ appropriation of the ‘‘Sapphic voice’’ enables him to express his
private erotic subjectivity – yet, by disrupting conventional gender polarities, likewise
destabilizes his own sense of male identity. Peter E. Knox provides a concise introduction
to Callimachus, including a review of his most important works and an
explanation of the innovative features of Callimachean poetics; Knox then surveys
the far-reaching effects of ‘‘Callimacheanism’’ on the Roman poetic tradition, from
Ennius through Catullus and his fellow neoterics, down to the Augustan Age.
Catullan language and style are distinctive. In part IV, ‘‘Stylistics,’’ three authorities
investigate those formal aspects of the poetry. We still speak of the ‘‘Catullan revolution’’
as an abrupt break with previous artistic techniques. W. R. Johnson wittily
elucidates Cicero’s grumpy reactions toward the poets he christened the ‘‘neoterics’’
and considers possible reasons why Catullus and his colleagues might have developed
their innovative poetics. George A. Sheets analyzes the elements of Catullan style—
diction, rhythm and meter, pragmatics—that endow it with its characteristic flavor,
while Brian A. Krostenko shows that Catullus’ deployment of the vocabulary that
connotes ‘‘elegance’’ (or the reverse) plays upon ambivalent cultural attitudes toward
displays of aestheticism in the political arena.
The Catullan corpus is by no means homogeneous – indeed, no other Latin poetic
collection manifests such diversity in genre, meter, tone, and subject matter. Critics
therefore frequently treat thematically related groups like the ‘‘Lesbia poems’’ as
coherent elements of the collection and approach some of the ‘‘longer’’ poems,
cc. 64 and 68 in particular, as independent compositions worthy of monographs.
In part V, ‘‘Poems and Groups of Poems,’’ we find studies of thematic categories, as
well as in-depth readings of those two major works. WilliamW. Batstone considers a set
of poems commonly labeled ‘‘programmatic pieces’’ and boldly inquires what the label
means and whether it can justifiably be applied: whatmakes verses programmatic, and is
the program in the author’s eye or the eye of the reader? Julia T. Dyson examines the
large body of poems thought to relate to the poet’s affair with ‘‘Lesbia,’’ finding,
intriguingly enough, not one but three distinct ‘‘Lesbias,’’ with contrasting poetic
functions. Vassiliki Panoussi rereads the wedding compositions, 61 and 62, from an
anthropological perspective. As re-enactments of ritual activity, each examines weighty
cultural issues: tensions between male and female, conflict of personal desires and
societal demands, continuation of the family line, sexual fidelity – all topics privately
meaningful to the Catullan speaker as well.