SOURCE: "The Elegies," in Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry, University of California Press, 1934, pp. 153-82.

[In the essay below, Wheeler demonstrates that Catullus was a pioneer and signal influence in the genre of the classical elegy.]

In elegy the Romans achieved one of their greatest literary successes. Three quarters of a century after the death of Ovid, the last of the great Augustan elegists, Quintilian, a sober critic, comparing the Roman achievement with the Greek, briefly expresses his verdict in the words, elegia … Graecos provocamus, "in elegy we challenge the Greeks." It is a verdict from which the modern critic, after studying all the remains of Greek and Roman elegy—and the material is abundant—is not likely to dissent. Undoubtedly the Romans possessed a remarkable gift for this kind of poetry, and even if we had before us today the entire product of all the Greeks and Romans, it is probable that we should still regard the elegy of the Augustan Age, with its four great names—Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid—as on the whole the acme of the genre.

Like all other kinds of Roman poetry, Augustan elegy is compounded of both Greek and Roman elements. Among the Greeks the genre had a very long development and they had brought it to the highest degree of perfection of which they were capable some two centuries before the Romans began to practice it. The first Roman elegies appear in Catullus only a generation earlier than the most perfect example of the genre in the Augustan Age. Clearly if we would understand how it came about that the Romans achieved such perfection, it is necessary to study the elegies of Catullus, the pioneer.

But what was the general character of elegy in antiquity? We of modern times have inherited the term, but we have greatly restricted its meaning. Elegy is now defined as "a short poem of lamentation or regret, called forth by the decease of a beloved or revered person, or by a general sense of the pathos of mortality," or as "a song of grief … it can look forward to death as well as back."

These definitions fit only one type of ancient elegy—an important type because, in accordance with the predominant ancient view, elegy was originally a lament; the word ὲ́λεροῐ (Latin elegi), "couplets" or "an elegy," and the adjective έλερει̂ος from which came the noun ὲλερεια (Latin elegeia or elegia), "an elegy" or "elegy" (the genre), were connected, perhaps rightly, with the noun ὲ́λεος, a "lament." But if elegy was ever exclusively restricted to a content of mourning, sorrow, and consolation, it must have been at a period antedating the earliest extant examples of the genre, which occur in Archilochus and Callinus sometime between 700 and 650 B.C. The actual (and abundant) remains of elegy reveal no such restriction. On the contrary from the seventh century to the end of the Augustan Age the lament was at some periods rare and was never the most important type of elegy. In fact so; far as content and tone are concerned ancient elegy had an extremely wide range. But to an ancient nothing was elegy unless it was written in the elegiac couplet, which consisted, in the words of Diomedes, of a (dactylic) hexameter and a pentameter placed alternately. In English the movement of this meter is fairly well represented by Coleridge's translation of Schiller's couplet:

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery
  column,
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

This meter was used by the ancients for such a wide range of themes that we may almost agree with Mackail that it was a meter "which would refuse nothing." But we cannot fully agree, for the couplet was regarded as a weaker, less dignified, metrical vehicle than the hexameter alone. The Greeks and Romans often called the pentameter "soft," "tender" …, peculiarly adapted to the theme of love. Ovid wittily illustrates this conception in the second poem of his Amores. He had begun a lofty epic, he says, and the second verse was equal in length to the first, for he was using the regulation epic meter, the hexameter. But Cupid, who was resolved that Ovid should be a love poet, stole a foot from the second verse, thus changing it into a pentameter, whereupon the poet in his tirade against the thief exclaims, "My fresh page began with a splendid first line, but that second line removed all my vigor!" And so perforce he had to sing of love in a meter better adapted to the subject.

Efforts to reproduce classical meters in English are rarely successful, although with the employment of extreme care in the choice of words and syllables some fairly good results can be attained. In English the pentameter is bound to be monotonous and tends 'to degenerate into a mere jingle. Tennyson, who was in the best sense an imitator of the classics, greatly admired the hexameter and the Alcaics of Horace, but he did not like the Sapphic stanza with the little Adonic at the end "like a pig with its tail tightly curled," as he expressed it, and for the pentameter he suggested the outrageous parody:

All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel.

The metrical form of ancient elegy was fixed; in modern elegy it is free. The themes of ancient elegy had a very wide range; in modern elegy they are rather closely limited. The ancient elegists put some curious subjects into elegiac form. For example, Nicander wrote on snakes, Archelaus on plants, Xenothemis on travel, and Ovid during the long years of his exile wrote nine books of elegiac verse, mostly letters to his friends in Rome. All these things were, from the ancient point of view, elegy, but they were bypaths, not the main highway. Anybody who will follow the course of elegy for more than six hundred and fifty years from Archilochus and Callinus to Ovid will be impressed by the great variety of its content and its purpose. He will be still more impressed by the fact that love, for the first three hundred years an infrequent theme, became important in the fourth and third centuries and dominant in the Augustan Age. From early Greek elegy—ending about 400 B.C. or somewhat later—we have remains of over thirty elegists, but only two, Mimnermus (ca. 600 B.C.) and Antimachus (ca. 400 and later) are really important as erotic elegists. During most of the fourth century the history of elegy cannot be followed; the remains are too meager. Toward 300 B.C., however, fragments become more numerous, so that we can form some conception, imperfect though it is, of the so-called Alexandrian elegy from Philetas and Callimachus, its acknowledged leaders, to Parthenius, sometimes called the last of the Alexandrians. Toward the end of this period Rome became the literary center of the world. Parthenius lived at Rome and his long life made him a contemporary of both Catullus and the Augustan poets. He was intimately associated with Gallus and Vergil, and he dedicated to the former a collection of mythological love stories in prose to be used, as he says, in the composition of epic and elegy. This little book is still extant, but the poetical work of Parthenius is in tatters.

This association in Rome of Greek writers composing in Greek with Romans composing in Latin is, I think, one of the most striking proofs of the continuity of Greek and Roman literature. Parthenius was only one of many. For nearly two hundred years there had been Greek men of letters residing in Rome. A long list of these Greeks is known, including in the second century B.C. such prominent names as Panaetius, the philosopher, and Polybius, the historian, who were members of the literary circle of the younger Scipio, the conqueror of Carthage, and in the first century besides Parthenius the epigrammatists Philodemus and Crinagoras. Cicero knew and befriended a number of Greek literary men, among whom the name of Archias is known (or used to be known!) to every schoolboy. The surviving work of Archias, however, does not measure up to the estimate which Cicero gives of his ability as a poet.

From these Greeks the Romans learned much and they learned to such good effect that by the Augustan Age they had wrested from them the supremacy in most departments of poetry which were being practiced at that time. They were freed at last from Greek leading strings although they did not wish to be freed from Greek influence.

Elegy was one of the greatest Roman successes, and although other themes were by no means excluded, it was to a very large extent erotic. In the Tibullus collection, for example, there are, excluding the little erotic epigrams, twenty-eight elegies of which twenty-two belong to the thorough-going erotic type, while in four others love is an important theme, and the non-erotic themes, such as love of country life, hatred of war, are often intimately connected with the erotic. In Propertius and Ovid there is greater variety, but love continues to be by far the most important theme. Gallus wrote four books of elegies of which only one line survives, but there is not the slightest doubt that they too were predominantly erotic.

It is not surprising then that when the ancient critics of this and later periods spoke of elegy they thought first of erotic elegy. Fine elegies were written on other themes, for example; the seventh of Tibullus' first book celebrating at once the Aquitanian triumph and the birthday of the great Messalla, or Propertius, 111. 18, mourning the untimely death of young Marcellus; but such elegies were outside the main current. And so we find that when in the first century of the Empire Quintilian alludes to elegy he has in mind primarily erotic elegy. In his famous canon of the elegists he characterizes Ovid as lascivior, "more wanton," a word which applies only to the erotic elegies of that poet. Elsewhere he remarks that elegy is not suitable reading for schoolboys.

At the outset we must distinguish two main groups of erotic elegies: (1) those in which the poet deals with his own love; (2) those in which he deals with the love of others—friends, mythological characters, etc. The first variety is often called by the clumsy but expressive name subjective-erotic elegy, and it is by far the more important because here the Romans are probably most original, certainly at their best. If we are to determine what contributions Catullus made to elegy it will be well to bear in mind what were the salient characteristics of this type in the period of its highest development. And so it is worth while to attempt a definition or concise description of the Augustan erotic elegy. In the sphere of poetry, definitions are never very satisfactory, but the attempt to define may serve to clarify our ideas.

A subjective-erotic elegy was a poem of considerable length, usually addressed to an individual or to readers, in which the poet communicates the thoughts and feelings which are suggested by some experience or aspect of his own love. It is usually serious or sad, but on occasion it may be joyous or even gay. Humor and wit are not excluded. It may be gracefully familiar, but it is rarely comic or vulgar, for it possesses a certain dignity of tone and style. Some comments will make this definition clearer. The length of such an elegy may vary between some sixteen lines (Propertius, 11.31) and one hundred and sixty (Catullus, "LXVIII"). The average is between fifty and sixty lines. Longer pieces are found among Ovid's Heroides or Tristia and of course in the three books of his Ars amatoria, but these are not of the subjective-erotic type and I have excluded them. When a composition is very short it tends to pass into the field of the epigram, as, for example, Propertius, 1.21 or 22 (10 lines) or Tibullus, IV. 14 (4 lines). This point will be considered later. Ordinarily, however, there is no difficulty in distinguishing an elegy from an epigram.

The address, which had been a common feature of elegy from the earliest times, is ordinarily to the loved one or to friends (sodales, amici) of the poet, less often to patrons—Messalla, Maecenas, etc. Sometimes no name is used and we have a mere amici or vos or an address to readers generally. This feature is not confined to elegy; it occurs in many other forms—lyric, satire, etc., but it is a noteworthy characteristic of elegy—part of its intimate nature.

The course of true love never did run smooth—it would not be very interesting if it did—and so the tone of elegy is usually serious or sad. Exultation there is, but gloom and despair are far more common. Sometimes there are flashes of humor, as in Tibullus, or of wit, as in Ovid. But Ovid's excessive display of gaiety and wit show that in him the elegy is already beginning to decline.

The general dignity of this type of Augustan elegy is striking. The poet-lover maintains in general a gallant, romantic, almost a chivalrous attitude which lifts this love poetry far above most of the stuff which the Greeks, so far as we know, produced. In the last analysis this tone is due to the general attitude of the Roman toward the Roman woman, whose position was superior to that held by woman among the Greeks. With this attitude the style of elegy conforms; there is a general decency, not to say nobility of language.

Elegy, says Reitzenstein, speaking of the earlier Greek period, is "talk." Solon, for example, talks to his audience. This is much more true of Roman elegy. It is sermo, often very much like the sermones, the "talks," of Horace, except that its style is more dignified, and it deals for the most part with different themes. The elegist like the satirist often thinks or reflects out loud. This produces a loose quasi-extemporaneous structure, and logic often goes by the board. It is as if the reader received only those impressions of the poet's mood which happen to become oral.

There is an endless variety in human love affairs and the novelists of our day have by no means exhausted them. If you survey the whole range of Roman elegy you will find that these ancient poets made a very fair beginning and many a passage in the modern novel, particularly if the story happens to be told in the first person, need only be translated into Latin elegiacs to become a good Roman elegy. I have noted such passages all the way from Henry Fielding to Arnold Bennett. But of course there is an enormous difference in the impression of sincerity produced by a Roman elegist pouring forth his own sentiments about his own passion and the impression produced by a modern novelist presenting the sentiments of a character—the same difference which exists between Tibullus' subjective-erotic elegies and those pretty pieces in the fourth book in which he deals with the love affair of Sulpicia and Cerinthus, or between these same pretty pieces and their sources, the startlingly sincere little elegiac letters of Sulpicia herself.

The best Roman elegies create the impression of reality and sincerity. The heroine is real flesh and blood and the poet's moods and sentiments have a real basis. At times he displays a bit of humor but for the most part he is in dead earnest. We must not forget this when we read one of those humorous summaries of the elegiac love story which it is easy for the observant bystander to compose. The scoffing bystander is indeed a character in Roman elegy, for the elegists, especially Propertius, were quite aware that their preoccupation with love was in the eyes of the average Roman folly and worthlessness (nequitia). This confession renders the picture of their slavery all the more convincing. The true elegist is the slave of love and he cannot help it, and it is precisely because Ovid was in reality a witty bystander that he is not so good an elegist as Tibullus and Propertius.

If you will bear in mind the importance of love to the elegist himself, it will do no harm to read the outline of a typical affair composed by one who saw at once its pathos and its humor—the late Kirby Smith.

The bacillus amatorius generally penetrates the poet by way of his eyes, and the period of incubation is ridiculously short. Among the first symptoms one of the most notable is an utter inability to sleep. It is useless to struggle. The arrows of Dan Cupid are unerring and burn to the bone. His victim is an ox at the plow, and the worst is yet to come; he is a soldier detailed for special service, always leading the forlorn hope. To overcome the girl's disdain is only one of his troubles. Frequently there is a selfish and tactless "husband" in the way. Then follow all the varieties, moods, and motives of an intrigue.

The emotional temperature is far above the danger point. Clothes torn, hair forcibly removed, faces scratched, black and blue spots—these are all marks of affection. As the observant Parmeno remarks—

in amore haec omnia insunt vitia: iniuriae,
suspiciones, inimicitiae, indutiae,
bellum, pax rursum, etc.

"A bitter-sweet passion at best," says Burton, after consulting all the books in and about Oxford—"dolentia delectabilis, hilare tormentum—fair, foul, and full of variation."

Jove's book for recording lovers' oaths is running water. And "la donna e mobile"—her promises are sport for the winds and seas. The poet is always poor. His mistress however is not only a pearl, but a pearl of price. He promises her immortality in his verses; she is more concerned about her immediate future in this life. He learns as did the Abbe Voisenon that—

    Sans depenser
C'est en vain qu'on espere
    De s'avancer
Au pays de Cythere.

He is therefore the natural enemy of wealth, greed, and present-day luxury. His ideal is the Golden Age, when men were so happy and so poor. He takes no part in politics, is not ambitious to get on in affairs; war is as unpopular with him as seafaring and similar short cuts to death. He observes omens, frequently consults witch-wives and Thessalian moon specialists, and generally makes them responsible for the sins of his mistress. She herself has a decided leaning for ritualism. She is devoted to Isis and sows dissension by her periodical attacks of going into retreat.

She is earnestly advised not to mar her great natural beauty by artificial means. In the course of the affair she never fails to have an illness. The poet nurses her and afterwards writes a poem about it. He too falls ill. Maybe he is going to die. If so, will she see to it that the following directions with regard to his funeral are carried out?

Like Anakreon he must love, and is made to sing of love alone. To expect him to write epic is quite out of the question. Indeed the gods themselves sometimes serve notice on him to that effect.

Such then in outline was the most important type of elegy at the height of its development in the Augustan Age. Its chief basis was life and experience, but the poets were trained artists and they drew freely on all kinds of literature, Greek and Roman, which could help them in the artistic presentation of their love. They did not limit themselves to elegy but made use of epic, lyric, epigram, Greek New Comedy, bucolic poetry, and even prose—remember, for example, the little prose book of love stories which Parthenius dedicated to Gallus "for use in epic and in elegy." Whatever useful material they found they poured into the form of elegy, each poet of course modifying it to suit his own purpose.

Now the most important feature of this elegy is the fact that the poet employs all his material, whether he drew it from life or from literature, in the presentation of his own love. He depicts the varying aspects of his love at length; he dwells on them. He causes the reader to grasp the elements which enter into his varying moods. Often he is highly lyric, often he narrates, describes or illustrates, still more often he reflects, as it were, out loud. Many details of this elegy have been traced to ultimate sources in Greek literature, but the whole—the developed treatment by a poet of his own love—has no counterpart there, even in elegy. If any Greek elegist wrote poems of this kind, they have not survived.

From the point of view of literary history we have here a question which has divided scholars into two camps. The Alexandrian elegists, Philetas and Callimachus, were greatly admired by Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid, and the last two often acknowledge a debt to them. Although Tibullus names no Greek poet, his obligation to the Greeks is none the less clear. Philetas is said to have written some kind of poetry concerning a sweetheart Bittis, but the few fragments of his work allow us to form no conception of it. Callimachus is called by Quintilian the leader of elegy (princeps elegiac). He wrote many elegies of which we have fairly numerous fragments—one of eighty-odd lines—together with the Latin translation of a complete elegy by Catullus, but no sweetheart's name is mentioned in connection with him, and all his elegies seem to have been of the etiological variety, narrative poems in which it would have been very difficult to insert passages about his own love. In fact neither the fragments of Alexandrian elegy nor the numerous statements by Greek and Roman writers about it prove that any of these Greek poets composed elegies of the Roman type. And yet many scholars have believed that subjective-erotic elegies were composed by the Alexandrian poets and that the Romans found in them direct models which they adapted to their own situations. These scholars believe that the Greek elegists utilized the new comedy, lyric, epic, epigram, etc., and that the presence in Roman elegy of motive traceable to these genres is best explained on their assumption. When, for example, Propertius and Ovid pose as experts in the art of love, it has been asserted that they did not get the idea directly from the New Comedy where it was first developed, but from some Greek elegist who had used the New Comedy.

The work of Catullus throws considerable light, in my opinion, on this central problem of elegy and I shall keep it in mind throughout the following discussion. Catullus was not generally thought of as an elegist, for he wrote few poems of this kind. Moreover, his fame as a writer of the very short types of poetry was so great that men were prone to forget the rest of his work. In the Augustan Age Propertius alone connects him with elegy, placing him with Varro of Atax at the head of his fist of Roman elegists. Varro was a contemporary of Catullus but he did not turn to elegy until he had completed a long epic on the Argonauts and so it is probable that Catullus is to be regarded as actually the first Roman elegist. Certainly as a poet he ranked far above Varro.

We have from Catullus only five elegies (including the translation from Callimachus): "LXV-LXVIII," and "LXXVI"—a total of 402 lines. Two of these ("LXV," "LXVIII") can be dated ca. 59 B.C. In 59 B.C. Gallus was a boy of nine or ten, and Tibullus and Propertius began to write nearly thirty years later, about 31-30 B.C. Ovid began to make public his Amores about 25 B.C. In round numbers a period of about seventy-five years—from the earliest datable work of Catullus to the death of Ovid, 17 A.D.—will include the beginning, the perfection, and the decline of the best Roman elegy.

When we compare the work of Catullus with Augustan elegy, we see at once that the Augustans developed the genre in many ways. What part Gallus took in this development it is impossible to say since his four books of elegies are lost, but his contribution was certainly important and, since he died 26 B.C. and had for some time been actively engaged in affairs, his work was probably completed before Tibullus and Propertius began to write. At any rate even the earliest elegies of the last two poets are finished products. It is with their work and that of Ovid that we must compare the elegies of Catullus. To what extent did he anticipate them in content and in form? What was his conception of elegy and how did it influence the Augustans? And, finally, what elements of Greek elegy did Catullus make his own? These are some of the questions which I shall try to answer and the result will enable us to define the position in this department of Catullus himself. He is a much more important figure, I am convinced, than most scholars have believed him to be, and even the few who have recognized in him the founder of Roman elegy have not given an adequate account of his contributions to the development of the genre.

Meter is too technical a subject to be fully discussed here, but perhaps I can make one or two points clear. The first Roman to employ the elegiac couplet was, so far as we know, Ennius, over one hundred years earlier than Catullus. He did not write elegy, but, as we have had occasion to note again and again, the couplet was the favorite meter of epigram and in tracing the history of the meter all occurrences of it must be included. The hexameter and pentameter were adapted from the Greek and they were difficult for the Romans because their movement is dactylic (- / /) and for this the Latin language was not by nature well suited; it had too many long vowels and syllables, not enough words and combinations of two short syllables. Moreover the Latin accent had a strong element of stress which had to be reckoned with in working out a verse agreeable to the ear. From the metrical point of view Roman poetry is a curious phenomenon. Almost every one of the meters was taken over from the Greek, which had a so-called musical accent, into a language whose accent was to a large extent one of stress. It was a transfer from one medium into another in which the original elements were not present in the same degree or the same proportions. Necessarily the results were different in kind. The Roman poets strove to compose verses which to their ears reproduced the movement of the Greek originals. The results could only be approximate since the media were different.

And so generation after generation of Roman poets contributed to the development of this meter. As we follow the history of the meters from the third century B.C. to the Augustan Age, they become more and more perfect in form. In fact the Romans rather overdid the thing and developed ideals of perfection unknown to the Greeks or at least unpracticed except as tours de force. To my taste the meters of Horace's odes are too perfect. They sacrifice freedom for a perfection of form which incurs the risk of artificiality.

The history of the elegiac couplet follows the usual course, and it is to a large extent a struggle to secure a dactylic movement. In this Ovid was the first Roman to succeed. The verses of Catullus are heavy with spondees. In other respects also the Augustan poets produced lighter, smoother, more flexible verses. They have fewer and less harsh elisions and they were far more successful in adapting the word order, the syntax, and the sense to the meter.

Yet we must remember that all the poets who wrote elegiac couplets were trying to perfect the meter and that the Augustans could not have succeeded in their achievement without the work of a long line of predecessors among whom Catullus was foremost. We may, I think, go a step farther. Catullus, with all his metrical skill, was unable to perfect the couplet. He came too early. But if we compare his work with that of the earlier centuries (Greek and Roman) on the one hand, and with that of the Augustan Age on the other, we see that if he could have carried out his ideas with the requisite technical skill, his couplets would have reached a perfection different from that of Tibullus and especially of Ovid whose couplets are usually regarded as the norm. His successors followed a number of the principles which he had laid down, others they rejected, and they developed some new things, notably the "Law of the Distich," in accordance with which each distich or couplet became more or less a unit of thought. Neither the Greeks nor Catullus observed this last principle and I doubt whether it was a real improvement. The same may be said of the strong Augustan tendency to end the pentameter with a word of two syllables. Both these principles tend to make the verse schematic, monotonous. Catullus held more closely to the Greeks and as a result he strove to produce a freer couplet. The Augustans, although they had greater technical skill, restricted its freedom. It is all a matter of taste, but I agree with the greatest commentator on Catullus, Robinson Ellis, that a Vergil might have molded a better couplet than that of Ovid by following along the lines marked out by Catullus. Propertius indeed started to do this but later he went over to the camp of Ovid.

Thus Catullus helped to develop the metrical technique of elegy; but his chief contributions are of a different character. The first of these is his development of the epigram into an elegy. We have already noted that elegy and epigram run closely parallel courses in Greek and Latin. The favorite meter of epigram was the elegiac couplet and the themes were often the same as the themes of elegy. Almost all the extant collections of Roman elegies—Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid's Amores—include epigrams, sometimes imbedded in an elegy. Many an elegy was in a sense an expanded epigram or, if you prefer, the same theme was worked up in both epigram and elegy. The difference was one of length and especially of treatment.

Ordinarily if we wish to study the difference between an elegy and an epigram on the same subject it is necessary to compare the work of two different poets. Excellent examples of this may be found in the fourth book of the Tibullus collection where some of the little epigrams of Sulpicia are worked up by a real poet presumably Tibullus himself, into elegies. In each case the elegy is three or four times the length of the epigram on which it is based. In Catullus however we have the unique opportunity of comparing an elegy with epigrams on the same situation all written by one and the same poet. Moreover these poems all concern the poet's own love, and so they throw a great light on one way at least in which the most important type of elegy originated and developed.

The eighty fifth poem ["Poem 85"] consists of only two lines, but it is one of the unforgettable things of poetry:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Hate and love—torture that I do not understand—a whole human life in a couplet, as Moritz Haupt said. But soon the poet begins to understand. In the seventy-fifth poem ["Poem 75"] the same situation is treated still epigrammatically, but a little more fully: "My heart has been brought to such a pass through your fault, Lesbia, and has suffered such ruin through its own devotion that I could no longer wish you well, should you become the best of women, nor cease to love you, no matter what you do." Here the hate—(in the tempered form of "not wishing her well") and the love persist, but there is more; there is the inability to cast the feelings aside, and above all there is some explanation: Lesbia's faithlessness (culpa) and the poet's devotion have caused his conflicting passions. The poet has begun to reflect. He has taken the first step toward that extended presentation of a situation and a mood which characterizes subjective-erotic elegy in its purest form. And in the seventy-sixth poem ["Poem 76"] we have the elegy. The situation is the same—the poet-lover convinced of the girl's faithlessness but unable to break the fetters of his love. The brief suggestions of the epigrams appear in expanded form: his devoted loyalty, her faithlessness, his persistent love and torture; the recognition that his own strength is so slight that he must appeal to the gods for pity and aid. There are many more finished poems in Latin and in Catullus, but none can approach this elegy in the gripping power and sincerity with which the torture of a human heart is laid bare. Propertius and Ovid have dealt with the same theme but their elegies are very inferior to that of Catullus.

Thus Catullus had begun to work into subjective-erotic elegy by way of epigram. In this he anticipates an important method of Augustan elegy. Before Catullus no Greek or Roman poet, so far as we know, had attempted it, but it would be rash to assume that the method as a method originated with Catullus.

The only other subjective-erotic elegy is the long sixty-eighth poem ["Poem 68"]. In this elegy Catullus combines three themes: his friendship for Allius, his grief for his brother's death, and his love for Lesbia. He had gone home to Verona crushed by his grief when his friend Allius, who was suffering from some misfortune in love, wrote to him requesting consolatory poetry. Catullus at first declares that his grief makes it impossible for him to write, and then suddenly he launches forth into a long poem of more than one hundred lines in which he mourns his brother and praises Allius for aid in his own love affair with Lesbia. As a whole the poem is a curious composition. Its structure, for example, is unique. The poet has three main themes: friendship, love, sorrow. He works through the friendship to the love and so to the sorrow and then back again in reverse order: sorrow, love, friendship. The structure may be represented by the letters A BCBA, and the parts also of each main theme are arranged with equal symmetry. As we read from the beginning to the central lines we may compare the poem to one of those nests of boxes cunningly wrought by some Chinese workman, the sorrow representing the core of the whole. Whether this highly artificial structure was suggested to Catullus by some lost Greek poem, or by the Pindaric ode, or whether he invented it himself, we do not know. To me it appears to be an extreme development of the old Homeric digression or the tale within the tale, but since it was never imitated it throws no light on the development of elegy and I need not discuss it here.

The three themes—grief, friendship, love—taken in the broadest sense all appear both in Greek and in Augustan elegy. Catullus' lament for his brother continues one of the oldest themes of elegy—perhaps, as we have seen, the original theme. But the other two themes stand on a different basis. They are closely connected with each other, and the friend (Allius) is thanked and praised for services connected with the poet's own love. Praise (encomium) as such is not uncommon in Greek elegy, but nowhere is it rendered for services in love. Catullus connects the encomiastic element with the subjective-erotic and in this also he anticipated Augustan elegy. Like Tibullus and Propertius he had begun to reflect in elegy the love affairs of himself and his friends, and the services for which he thanks Allius are of the same type as the services which Propertius, for example, promises to Gallus.

In the use to which he puts the story of Laodamia Catullus anticipates an important feature of Augustan elegy. He makes of the myth an illustration of his own love: Laodamia came to Protesilaus as Lesbia came to Catullus and her motive also was love. The Greeks—Theognis and Antimachus, for example—had begun this use of myth, but they had not developed it in the same way. In Augustan elegy however and especially in Propertius the phenomenon is so common as to require no illustration, but it is worth while to note that Propertius employed the same myth.

Another mythological parallel occurs in vv. 138-140 and suggests an interesting point. In this passage the poet compares his own forbearance toward Lesbia's flirtations with the attitude—enforced, to be sure—of Juno toward Jupiter. Both the attitude and the manner in which it is expressed became common in Augustan elegy, but the Augustans developed them into the principle of complaisance (obsequium) and made it part of their didactic system. Catullus knows nothing of such a system.

I have referred above to the generally elevated tone and style of Augustan erotic elegy—one of its most striking characteristics. In this also Catullus led the way. He felt his love for Lesbia to be of the purest type like that of a father for his children. When he came to a full realization of her perfidy his epigrams and lyrics express hate and loathing in the most violent terms. Not so the elegies. In his elegies he preserves a certain decency and dignity. Lesbia possessed for him much more than physical charm. She was dearer to him than his life and he regarded their relation as bound by a compact like that of wedlock. Nothing is more significant of his conception of elegy than the style in which the erotic details are expressed. The sixty-eighth poem ["LXVIII"] contains many such details but they are clothed in language which does not endanger the dignity of the whole composition. Clearly Catullus felt that elegy should maintain a certain dignified level, and this is all the more striking because in the rest of his subjective-erotic work he follows no such principle. In addition to the principle itself every one of the details which I have mentioned can be paralleled in Augustan elegy. But I must pass on to other things.

The remaining elegies ("LXV"-"LXVII") do not represent the most important type, but they contribute a number of interesting points to our knowledge of Catullian elegy as a whole.

The sixty-seventh poem ["LXVII"], the tale of a bit of Veronese scandal, lies so far outside the general course of ancient elegy that I need not dwell long upon it. It has, however, two details of form which are interesting because they appear again in Augustan elegy. The story is told in dramatic dialogue between the poet and a house door. Speaking tombstones, statues, chaplets—even, as we shall see in a moment, locks of hair—are common enough in ancient poetry, but this is the first appearance of the device in elegy. Propertius continued it in the sixteenth elegy of his first book and he employs the dramatic dialogue also in the first poem of his fourth book. But the form was exceptional. When a character was made to speak, the instinct of the elegists was correct in choosing the informal method which allowed the poet also to speak and to comment at will. The dramatic dialogue was too rigid to suit the general character of elegy.

The sixty-sixth poem, the "Tress of Berenice" ["LXVI"], is a translation of Callimachus' [poem of the same name], a complimentary elegy of the etiological type. The Greek poet told how the queen vowed one of her tresses to the gods if her husband Ptolemy should return safely from war, and how the tress, as the astronomer Conon had professed to discover, became a constellation. This is the only complete elegy of Callimachus that has survived and in spite of the Latin form it throws a great deal of light upon the Greek poet's art as an elegist, for Catullus' translation is on the whole so faithful that we may rely on the Latin poem as representing the structure, the run of the thought, and the general character of the Greek, though not always the verbal details.

In the history of elegy the sixty-sixth poem contributes chiefly to our knowledge of Callimachus, not Catullus. But Catullus admired Callimachus; he must have seen something to admire in this elegy or else he would not have translated it. Since Callimachus was regarded by both Catullus and Propertius as the leader among Alexandrian elegists it is worth while to examine the sixty-sixth poem in order to determine what qualities appealed to Catullus. The answer is in short this: Catullus was interested chiefly in the poetic art with which Callimachus told a love story, the same art—the "modern" art—which is displayed in the long papyrus fragment of the great Alexandrian's Cydippe, his most famous elegy. Let us glance at some of the details.

The "Tress of Berenice" is a narrative elegy. The ostensible theme is the dedication and the deification or, if I may use such a term, the "starification" of the tress. But the erotic element, which is logically subordinate, becomes in the actual telling of the storymuch more important then the mere narrative theme. It is the love of Berenice for Ptolemy which prompts her to make and to carry out her vow, and it is love for Berenice which is the chief feeling of the Tress as she tells the story—for Callimachus makes of the tress a person and puts the whole tale into her mouth. This device is of the same kind as that employed by Catullus and Propertius when they personify the house door. Callimachus found in it a convenient means of complimenting the royal pair. The elegy is court poetry, but it has other aspects which are of much greater interest.

The elegy is full of learning, especially in the astronomical passages. Some of the allusions are so obscure that in spite of the labors of scholars they are not yet fully understood. Callimachus knew and his cultured readers understood him, but we do not wonder that in later times his elegies proved to be so difficult that they were called the "exercising ground of the grammarians." Catullus and the other doctipoetae were attracted by this idea of inserting bits of learning into poetry. More important is the manner in which it was done. Often there was just an allusion; the reader was expected to know the rest, as when Callimachus just alludes (5-6) to the tale of Endymion. If such a tale did not happen to be well known, obscurity might result, but the poets were at no pains to be clear. It was a method widely practiced by the well trained Roman poets and they learned it from Callimachus and other later Greeks.

Still more important is the way in which the erotic element is managed. Berenice's feelings as she parts weeping from her husband are analyzed—in fact the feelings of brides in general are analyzed—by a series of insinuating questions and answers (15-32) which prove that her acts are due to love. The passage is worthy of Ovid. Berenice becomes one of those heroines who, like the Arethusa of Propertius, are forced to part from their lovers. All the details are familiar to readers of Augustan elegy—the tears, the vow, the longing for the lover's return, the parting words, although Callimachus spares us the actual speech.

Similarly the feelings of the Tress are emphasized—her unwillingness to leave Berenice, her yearnings to be once more with the queen, her despair. These reflections of feeling are skilfully connected with the narrative, and the manner in which Callimachus passes from one to the other, dwelling rather on the feeling, is a marked characteristic of Roman elegy. It is part of the modern Greek method of telling a love story which is better illustrated in the Cydippe of Callimachus than anywhere else because there the poet is himself telling the tale, not, as in the "Tress of Berenice," putting it into the mouth of a character. In the Cydippe also the narrative advances, as it were, by fits and starts. The poet breaks off to address himself and to reflect, he apostrophizes Acontius, gives his source for the story (Xenomedes), and expresses his own resolve. In a word, the personality of the poet is constantly felt—we might almost say intruded—in this modern fashion of telling a story. Many details of this technique appear also, as I have shown, in the short epic, the hexameter narrative. But in elegy the poets made of it something more natural, and as regards style more colloquial. What a world of difference there is between this intimate, modern way of telling a story and the old-fashioned style and how quickly it developed can best be seen by comparing the long fragment of Alexander of Aetolia (ca. 300 B.C.), in which the story of Antheus and Cleobeia is told, with the Cydippe, which must have been written hardly fifty years later.

Here then in the art of Callimachus we have the secret of his influence on Roman elegy. This alone is sufficient to explain why Catullus liked the "Tress of Berenice," why Callimachus is mentioned much more often by Propertius and Ovid than any other Greek elegist. The Romans undoubtedly utilized the material they found in Callimachus, but their chief obligation was one of poetic craftsmanship. Callimachus wrote no subjective erotic elegies—he confined this content to his epigrams—but many details of the art which he employed in narrative elegy were easily transferred by the Romans to elegies and other forms in which they presented love. In this Catullus made a good beginning.

In a brief lecture it is impossible to present all the details or even all the classes of details which contribute to our estimate of Catullus as an elegist. I have omitted much—for example, all comment on the sixty-fifth poem ["LXV"]. But enough has been said, I think, to prove that Catullus in the department of elegy was a real pioneer laying the foundations and in many ways clearly indicating the lines which his successors were to follow. In elegy as in his other work he owed much to the Greeks, but his indebtedness, stated in general terms was an indebtedness of form, not content. The entire content of the sixty-seventh ["LXVII"] and seventy-sixth ["LXVI"] poems and the major parts of the sixty-fifth ["LXV"] and sixty-eighth ["LXVIII"] were derived from his own observation and experience. He learned from the Greeks not so much what to say as how to say it.

His own elegies are few—only four, if we exclude the translation of Callimachus—and yet they anticipate Augustan elegy in a surprising number of characteristics. By far the most important of these is the expression of the poet's own love, for this became the striking feature of Augustan elegy. It is quite possible that his services here were even more important than the meager extant evidence indicates that he was not only the first Roman poet, but the first poet, Greek or Roman, to enter this field. As one scans the long centuries of elegiac writing from Archilochus to Catullus, searching for the beginning or at least the elements of that modern, extended treatment by a poet of his own love which is the great achievement of the Augustan elegists, several tendencies seem to converge on Catullus. From the earliest times certain elements persist to the very end, for example the address to friend, or patron, or reader—a form not peculiar to elegy but nevertheless very characteristic of it—or the mythological parallel. Such elements may be called permanent traits of the genre; they pass from the early to the later Greeks, to Catullus, and so to the Augustans. I have amused myself by making a collection of these permanent traits. Among the themes of elegy the lament is such a trait; love for woman is another. But the mere mention of these reminds one that during the course of six hundred years such elements were subject to modification and development. Love of woman first appears as a theme of elegy in Mimnermus ca. 600 B.C., then in Antimachus ca. 400 B.C. or later, then in a number of elegists at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the third—Philetas, Hermesianax, Alexander Aetolus—and finally in Callimachus and his successors who lead us on to Catullus and the Augustans in the first century. "Mimnermus burned with love for Nanno," says Hermesianax, a somewhat dubious authority, "inventing amid his woes the breath of the soft pentameter." Subjective-erotic, then, in elegy.

But how did Mimnermus deal with love; In almost eighty lines of fragments he touches on love: life is nothing without love; love is the tender flower of youth; let me die when love is no longer possible for me. Love and youth are the great blessings of humanity, old age and death are its evils. He generalizes; his attitude is that of the philosopher surveying human life and finding love an important element. There is nothing of that intimate personal treatment which characterizes the Roman elegy.

Antimachus also dealt with his own love. The nine broken lines which have survived from his poetry give no hint of his treatment, but we know something about It from the statements of other writers, especially Plutarch. He consoled himself (says Plutarch) for the loss of his wife Lyde by enumerating, in an elegy named after her, the unfortunate affairs of mythology. The Lyde, then, was a long composition in at least two books, chiefly narrative, not subjective; the myths, not the poet's love, were the main theme. It was a catalogue poem. Of its method we can form a good idea by reading the long fragments of Hermesianax and Phanocdes who continued this form. All is objective narrative-story tacked on to the story by means of the old formulae "such as", "or as," etc. It is certain, I think, that these earlier elegists did not work out in detail the vicissitudes and moods of their own love, and I have already noted that in objective narrative the earlier manner persisted into the third century, when Philetas and Callimachus revolted against it Callimachus (and Catullus too) condemned Antimachus, and Callimachus at least knew how to tell the tale of another's love in modern fashion. His own love he restricts to epigram, in which probably Asclepiades had preceded him. And this brings me to the second point. When we search extant Greek poetry for traces of subjective-erotic we find it not in elegy, but in lyric and especially in epigram, forms which did not afford opportunity for the extended treatment which is characteristic of elegy. The epigram and the lyric have something more than the mere germs of it; there the situations, the moods, the sentiments are often the same as in elegy. But the Greeks did not develop the epigram into a true elegy. Just before and during the period of Catullus certainly they were still confining their subjective-erotic poetry to the short forms, witness Meleager, Philodemus, and others.

It is significant that the first attempts of the Romans in this kind of erotic—the attempts of Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, end: Lutatius Catulus, which I described in the third lecture—are also in epigram, and still more significant that Catullus continued the same type of epigram. But as we have just seen, he was the first, so far as we know, to develop such epigrams into elegies. We see him feeling his way from one genre into another, a genre that is richer in every way—a better medium for the expression of a poet's own erotic feeling. It seems to me that in Catullus we may discern the chief-type of elegy coming into existence. If, as many scholars have believed, the Greeks had written elegies of this type, it is difficult to understand why Catullus did not write more of them. They were an excellent form, as his two examples show, in which to express his love for Lesbia.

But Catullus did not choose to persist in elegy, and if such a course would have curtailed his other work, we may on the whole congratulate ourselves that he did not persist. The briefer and more, varied forms were better suited to his genius and he used them with a much more perfect technique than he displays in elegy. Nevertheless we must not allow the brilliance of these little jewels to obscure their author's importance in the field of elegy.

The Augustan specialists developed elegy in every way. They perfected its form and they greatly extended its scope. Elegiac erotic became a system in which countless situations, countless moods were reflected in whole cycles of poems and the poet lover posed as an erotic expert able to aid other lovers although he admits on occasion that he cannot aid himself. This system does not exist in Catullian elegy but many of its elements and much of the art with which it was presented are there. Like Catullus the Augustan elegists were expressing for the most part their own experiences and sentiments. Like him they utilized any suitable material which they found in any kind of Greek literature. They greatly extended the field in which such material could be found, turning, for example to Greek New Comedy and bucolic poetry which (in elegy) Catullus had not used. All these suggestions they poured into the elegiac mold. But, so far as the sources of elegy were bookish, the Augustans had an advantage over Catullus; in addition to the Greek writers they had at their disposal a group of artistic Roman poets among whom Catullus himself was foremost, whereas Catullus had found no stimulus in the art of his own Roman predecessors. In fact the Augustan elegists, not Horace or Vergil, were the real heirs of Catullus. They were stimulated not only by his elegies but by all parts of his work. But if we consider the influence of his elegy alone, it is fair to say that the Augustans achieved their success in this field by following the lead of Catullus.