Analysis
Of the poems attributed to Catullus, 116 have been preserved; 3 are now judged to have been written by someone else. It was only by chance that any of his work survived through the Middle Ages. One poem, number 62, was included in a ninth century anthology of Latin works. In the fourteenth century, a single manuscript containing the 116 poems was discovered in the poet’s native Verona. That manuscript disappeared in the following century, but two copies had been made, and one of these survives to the present day, housed at Oxford University in England.
The entire collection constituted a slender but potent volume. The Greek Callimachus is credited with the saying mega biblion mega kakon (“big book, big evil”), and his admirer Catullus seems to have taken this to heart. None of the Roman poet’s surviving works exceeds 408 lines; most are between 10 and 30 lines long. As Callimachus’s poetry showed great learning and polish, so did the work of Catullus, whose followers called him doctus poeta (learned craftsman). However, while Callimachus’s style was criticized as labored and artificial, Catullus’s poems earned praise for their easy grace and polish, belying the effort that produced this technical excellence.
Although Alexandrian thought and style directly influenced Catullus, much of that tradition had already been assimilated by his Roman predecessors or contemporaries, including the epic poet Quintus Ennius and the philosophical poet Titus Lucretius Carus. However, Catullus’s uses and expressions of the literary conventions are distinctly his own. His skilled use of Roman vocabulary and rhythms of speech are set against the classical Greek meters to produce a markedly original, Roman literature.
A few of his poems are based not only on Greek meter but on actual Greek poems; for example, Poem 66, about the lock of Berenice, is a translation from Callimachus, and his Poem 51 is thought to be an adaptation of a lost poem by Sappho. Catullus, like Sappho and Callimachus, avoided the traditional epic treatment of war and military conquest, heroes and gods. Instead, his poems are about personal matters: love’s rapture and lovers’ quarrels, his grief at losing a brother, his love of the family estate in the provinces. Indeed, Catullus was among the first Roman poets to adapt Roman poetic subjects to Greek meters.
In the short poems especially, Catullus’s original use of the Alexandrian conventions—meter, learned allusions, and rhetorical figures—contribute to his reputation for directness, simplicity, and emotional sincerity. For example, Catullus’s Poem 3—the famous lament for his female friend’s dead sparrow—is written in a familiar Alexandrian meter, the Phalaecian hendecasyllabic. In Catullus’s hands, however, it becomes an instrument for the simple, poignant expression of sympathy, such as one might hear anywhere in Rome. His poems contain slang, made-up words, and occasional vulgarity not encountered in his Alexandrian models.
Despite the brevity of his life and the slenderness of his surviving output, Catullus had a strong influence on his immediate Roman successors. The most prominent among them adopted different aspects of Catullus’s model. Quintus Horatius Flaccus showed the Catullan influence in his lyric poems, while Publius Vergilius Maro manifested it in his use of the elegiac meters. In the following century, Marcus Valerius Martialis, a master of the poetic epigram, acknowledged his debt to Catullus’s achievement in that genre.
The discovery of his surviving poems in the fourteenth century marked the beginning of his popularity in modern times. By the mid-1300’s, the Italian poet Petrarch had read Catullus and begun to imitate his work. Catullus’s influence can be seen during the Renaissance and beyond through the work of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William...
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Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Lord Byron. Translators of Catullus have included the poets Thomas Campion, William Wordsworth, and Louis Zukofsky.
Catullus’s proficiency in expressing emotion has led scholars to debate whether his poems reflect the author’s state of mind or simply the artistic skill that he brought to composition. Given the array of feeling his poems express, either he felt a wide range of intense emotions, or he had a broad range of skill in artistic evocation, or both. However, the question also implies a moral evaluation of the writer’s intent, which probably cannot be resolved concerning an author as far removed in time as Catullus. What can be said with certainty is that much of the value in his poems lies in the authenticity with which they portray emotions. Both the effect of his poems on the reader and his influence on the exceptional poets who came after him are testimony to that artistic authenticity.
Poem 5 (“Let Us Live, My Lesbia”)
Written: First century b.c.e. (collected in The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, 2005)
Type of work: Poem
This poem, which begins, “Let us live and love, my Lesbia,” is among Catullus’s best known and most influential works.
Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe wrote imitations of Poem 5, and Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), though directly inspired by Horace’s carpe diem (seize the day), is also strongly reminiscent of this work. Evidently written early on in the poet’s relationship with Lesbia, Poem 5 opens by exhorting the beloved to enjoy sensual love in the present and to ignore moral reproaches from envious older people. What is their disapproval compared with the brevity of life?; because, “. . . when our brief light has set,/ night is one long everlasting sleep.”
At first glance the poem seems very similar in spirit to carpe diem, but it goes on to evoke other levels of meaning. The poet demands numberless kisses of Lesbia: “Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,/ another thousand, and another hundred . . .” In this breathless enumeration, some scholars have perceived an innocent, delighted, and amorous confusion. Others inferred a more serious intent: Envious witnesses would somehow be able to harm the young couple by knowing the exact number of kisses exchanged; in Roman belief this knowledge could enable a practitioner of witchcraft to curse the lovers with the evil eye. The lovers should prevent this by concealing the account from their detractors, and even from themselves.
To explain the repeated alternation “a thousand” with “a hundred,” one scholar envisions the lovers tallying kisses with a Roman abacus, which had separate columns for pebbles representing tens, hundreds, and thousands. When the accounting is completed, according to this vivid interpretation, the abacus is shaken vigorously, scattering all the pebbles and wiping out the score, to the confusion of those who would give the evil eye. The poem itself makes no mention of an abacus or of counting pebbles (calculi), but the Latin verb used here, conturbabimus, does denote a throwing into disorder.
Poem 5 is written in hendecasyllabic verse (meaning literally, eleven-syllable line), a form favored by Sappho and the Alexandrians and revived during the Renaissance. Among Renaissance poets striving to re-create or surpass the literary forms of classical literature, a vogue arose for using quantitative meter (hendecasyllabic and others from classical Greek and Latin) in stress-based vernacular languages, especially English. As late as the nineteenth century, poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were attempting this form, with varied success.
Poem 7 (“You Ask Me How Many Kisses”)
Written: First century b.c.e. (collected in The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, 2005)
Type of work: Poem
With its recurring theme of counting kisses, Poem 7 is closely associated with Poem 5.
You ask how many kissings of you,Lesbia, are enough for me and more than enough.As great as the number of the Libyan sandthat lies on silphium-bearing Cyrene . . .
Catallus is again mindful of “evil tongues” that might “bewitch” the couple if the number of kisses were known. This time, instead of confusing the number, the poet seems to envision stealing away with Lesbia to a foreign land where they will not be observed except by “ . . . the stars, when night is silent,/ that see the stolen loves of men . . .,” and the poet wants as many kisses as there are stars.
Poem 7 is an example of the poet’s flair for blending traditional Greek meters (again, the hendecasyllabic) with his own creative use of colloquial Latin. In Latin, line 1 ends with the word basiationes. Some consider this a “made-up” word and assign it the playful meaning “kissifications.” The orthography is legitimate, though Poem 7 is the only poem in which the poet uses basiationes, and the next Roman poet to use it was the epigrammist Martial in the following century. In the fourth line, Catullus does use a made-up word, lasarpiciferis, or “silphium-bearing,” to describe Cyrene, an ancient city in Libya.
In the context of this passionate love poem it is significant that Cyrene, after whom the Libyan city is named, was beloved of Apollo, who carried her off to Africa and there built her a city.
Poem 61 (“O, Haunter of the Heliconian Mount”)
Written: First century b.c.e. (collected in The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, 2005)
Type of work: Poem
The contrast between this poem and the shorter lyrics underscores the poet’s artistic range.
At 230 lines, this is, for Catullus, a long poem. In composing it, Catullus made certain modifications to the glyconic meter, giving it a lightness well suited to this joyful epithalamium, or wedding poem. Most epithalamia were meant to be sung, not spoken, and the meter lent itself to a stately but energetic processional dance. Catullus could have intended this poem to be sung, or he could have presented it privately as a gift to the wedding couple, Junia Aurunculeia and Manlius Torquatus.
By turns serious and ribald, Poem 61 provides readers with insight into the Roman moral view of marriage. Early on, he acknowledges the weeping bride’s reluctance to leave her mother’s side, but he reminds her that the dictates of Venus (goddess of love) cannot be fulfilled without her willing participation, and, moreover, “No house without thee can/ give children, no parent rest/ on his offspring; but all is well/ if thou art willing . . . ” Then, lest Aurunculeia fear that she will not please her new husband, Catullus reassures her that there is no fairer woman around, and he later reassures the groom that he is handsome.
Thus the poet addresses the significance not only of the wedding night but also of the entire institution of marriage. He goes on to describe the roles that both wife and husband are expected to play throughout married life. The chief expectation in a marriage was the birth of children. Catullus notes that marital fidelity is required to ensure honor and the continuation of the family line. Lest the reader conclude that all of that responsibility is imposed on the wife, Catullus exhorts the husband at length to give up any former liaisons—including homosexual relations, which were evidently common among unmarried men of the upper classes—and cleave only to his bride.
Poem 85 (“I Hate and I Love”)
Written: First century b.c.e. (collected in The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, 2005)
Type of work: Poem
An elegiac couplet just two lines in length, Poem 85 exemplifies the poet’s ability to depict a situation concisely.
“Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris./ Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.” has been translated as “I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask./ I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.” The final word, excrucior, has also been translated literally as “I am crucified.”
Poem 85 is popularly associated with a famous poem by the seventeenth century English satirist Tom Brown: “I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,/ The reason why I cannot tell;/ But this I know, and know full well,/ I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.” More likely, Brown’s poem was actually an imitation of an epigram by Martial.
Many scholars have observed that Poem 85 embodies a particular kind of symmetry achieved by balancing opposites. There is opposition between the negative odi (hate) and the positive amo (love); there also is opposition between sentio (feel) and excrucior (am crucified). Another set of opposites consists of the active faciam (I do) and the passive fieri (it happens). A final pair includes requiris (you ask) and nescio (I do not know). In every aspect, this brief poem is tightly balanced. Some scholars have even diagrammed what is known as chiastic form in the poem, with lines connecting the opposites, producing something akin to a cross. At any rate, a distinctive feature of Poem 85 is that it comprises a full gamut of emotions, whereas each of the poems that explicitly mentions Lesbia is emotionally exclusive, expressing passionate love, pathetic sorrow, moral condemnation, or furious hatred.
