[In the following excerpt, Goold emphasizes Catullus's role as a pioneer in the crafting of effective poetic diction in classical poetry.]

[Poets] from Ennius onwards had successfully clothed Greek literary forms in a Latin dress but had conspicuously failed to match their originals in elegance and beauty of language. This failure the neoterics sought to redeem, taking as their models the poetry of Ptolemaic Alexandria and of Callimachus in particular. l hey imitated not only formal features like artistic word-order and prosodical precision but also the poetic ideology of their models, who discarded the major genres of drama and epic in favour of compositions on a smaller and even miniature scale, for in these every line and every word could be carefully crafted and the proportions of the whole meticulously calculated. No less did the neoterics cultivate the recondite learning characteristic of the Hellenistic poets and especially the subjective and personal manner in which they recounted abstruse and often novel versions of mythological stories.

Catullus' technical skill is especially noticeable in his handling of the native Roman artifice of matching sound to sense: this abounds in his work and is the more effective for being mostly unobtrusive, like the mono-syllables of 'III' 11 with their voiceless consonants mimicking the pathetic hopping of the sparrow along the road of death or the alliteration, variety of vowels, and spondaic ending of 'LXV' 23 which arrestingly reproduce the tumbling down of the apple that reveals all. How endearingly in 'XLV' does Septimius alliterate to Acme with p and she to him with s, though the latter letter spits out savageness at 'XLIV' 155f and the former pours forth poison from the first to the last line of 'XXIX'! Some of his rhetorical figures are possibly overdone, anaphora, for instance, of which he was inordinately fond, though in 'LXIII' (21ff ubi, 63f and 68ff ego) we should make allowances for the constraints of the metre.

Two features of Catullus' diction call for comment. Diminutives constituted a rich source of expression in colloquial Latin no less than in modern Italian—how rich we can surmise from the vast yield from our exiguous means of access to it: Plautus and Terence, Cicero's Letters, and Petronius. On one occasion ('XXV') Catullus used these forms to great effect, exploiting the notion of effeminacy which lurks in their nature; and elsewhere we find in isolation over seventy different diminutives, a greater proportion than any other classical Latin poet has put in his work. Munro deeply regretted the Augustans' banishment of this word-type, which 'made the lyric of the heart impossible'. Yet a little investigation shows that in Catullus the diminutive is often hardly more than a substitute (or the natural word, which we discover to be excluded by the metre (e.g. 'LXI' 174 bracchiolum for -chium; 'LXIII' 35 lassulae for lassae; 'LXVI' 16 lacrimulis for -mis; 'LXVIII' 2 epistolium for -tulam): 'V' and 'VII' and 'VIII' and 'XI' and 'XIV' and 'XXXI' and 'XXXIV' and 'LI'—to give a representative selection—scarcely support Munro's contention.

Compound words, which contributed so much to the richness of Greek, were coldly regarded in classical Latin. Early republican poets had freely imitated Greek formations, but how incompatible these were with the very nature of Latin is sharply revealed by an instance like Pacuvius' Nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum pecus (of dolphins). If this sounds grotesque to us, we should reflect that compounds like Ennius' altivolans and Lucretius' lauricomus (which may appeal to us as highly poetical) probably struck the Romans as being unattractive only in a lesser degree. In fact the only compounds to become thoroughly at home in Latin were noun-object/verb combinations like signifer. In his lyrics Catullus has only buxifer, laserpicifer, pinnipes, and plumipes (the last two in the experimental 'LV'), and they are seen no more; of the other dozen examples erifuga, hederiger, nemorivagus, properipes, and silvicultrix all occur in 'LXIII' and, since they can never enter dactylic verse, probably owe their existence in some measure to metrical exigencies.

The most impressive feature of Catullus' diction, however, is—and here one can do no better than quote from the old school edition (1879) of Francis P. Simpson—'the simplicity and naturalness of his language, which are in great contrast to the later artificial Latin style.… However difficult the metre in which he writes, however subtle the thought he would convey, he is never intricate and never obscure. His words seem to have fallen of themselves into metre without leaving their natural order, and would make good prose—if they were not poetry. His language, in the epigrams, lyrics, and elegiacs, is little removed from ordinary speech. He is full of familiar phrases … He uses the tongue of the wits of the town, the lips of the lover of real life.'

His humanity needs no comment, but he stands out above most poets of antiquity for his imaginative sympathy with nature and inanimate things. Though his zest for society took him to Rome he never lost his appreciation of the north Italian scenery which we may fancy we detect in such passages as the third stanza of 'XXXIV' and the first major simile of 'LXVIII' (57ff). In particular the sea, indeed water generally, which for Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and the other poets was an element to be feared and shunned, represents for Catullus laughter and gaiety ('XXXI' 14; 'LXIV' 269ff). For him the lopping of a wild-flower was as tragic as the destruction of his own love ('XI' 22ff), a sensitivity he displays again in 'LXII' (39ff).

The verse of Catullus so often implies a situation in which individual poems were sent on tablets ('XLII') or in feuilleton ('XXXV') that it must have been in this way that the poet's productions were first disseminated and that he himself acquired some celebrity or, it may be, notoriety 'XVI' 12, referring to 'V 10). We also read of reactions experienced on receipt or in the circulation of his poems whether by intimates like Lesbia ('XXXVI') or Cornelius Nepos ('I') or by prominent public figures like Cicero ('XLIX') or Caesar ('LIV'). 'Children of the moment' was the happy phrase that Wilamowitz applied to such poems, and it accurately conveys how little at the time of creation the poet was concerned with publication in book-form. That could come later. The tantalizing thing is we do not know how far Catullus was able, to use the modern term, to see his work through the press. He cannot have done more than assemble a collection of his lyrics and prefix a dedication to Cornelius Nepos when death overtook him (and of this he may have had no warning). Improbable even that this lyric collection was published as such: antiquity has no knowledge of a title, and it may be wondered whether, if 'publication' (that is the establishment of a definitive edition) had already taken place, the person responsible for the collected edition which we inherit today would have ventured to insert other poems into it, as he seems to have done. The last year of Catullus' life was prolific, but he died with his work unfinished: his epyllion lacks a title and may lack the author's imprimatur as well; nor do the long elegiacs either form a whole or amount to sufficient bulk to constitute a libellus on their own. In short, Catullus' poems were published posthumously.