SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of Catullus, edited and translated by Guy Lee, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. ix-xxvi.

[In the excerpt below, Lee examines Catullus's epigrams, citing the epigrammatist Martial for clarification and comparison.]

Catullus the Epigrammatist

Because he writes short and intense poems about his own feelings, modern readers tend to think of Catullus as a lyric poet, and indeed Jerome in his Chronica (late fourth century A.D.) actually describes him as 'the lyric writer' (scriptor Iyricus). But Jerome's reason for this label is likely to have been the purely formal one that Catullus used lyric metres (hendecasyllables, sapphics, asclepiads, glyconics, etc.) in Poems 'I-LX', 'LXI', and 'LXIII'. Earlier in antiquity, however, he was classed not as a lyric poet but as an epigrammatist.

Martial, epigrammatist par excellence, regards him as the originator of the genre in Latin (see the prose preface prefixed to Book I of his Epigrams) despite the fact that Ennius and Lucilius had written epigrams in the second century B.C., and that Calvus and Cinna are known from their Fragments to have written epigrams in the same metres as Catullus. Martial also regards him as the greatest Latin exponent of the genre and his own highest ambition is to be placed second on the list of epigrammatists after Catullus. It should be noted that he counts as epigrams not only the elegiac couplets of 'LXIX-CXVI' but also the hendecasyllables and iambics of 'I-LX', because he refers to Catullus' Passer as his model, meaning by that word the whole libellus whose first word it is, and because he himself includes hendecasyllables and iambics among his elegiacs. Theocritus had done the same in the third century B.C., and Martial's contemporary the younger Pliny states that his own collection of hendecasyllables could just as well be called epigrams. Like Catullus, Martial refers to his verse as nugae and to his books as libelli.

Martial counts epigram as lowest in the hierarchy of literary genres and specifically states that its subject matter is everyday life: agnoscat mores Vita legatque suos, 'Let Life (here) recognize and read about her own behaviour'. According to him epigram as a genre exhibits two features which are likely to repel the squeamish: first, personal abuse; secondly, coarse language (lasciua uerborum ueritas, id est epigrammaton lingua, … I, praefatio). As regards the first of these Martial emphasizes that he himself never attacks real people, even the humblest, in this differing from his predecessors, who did not hesitate to name real names and even great ones (nomina magna sed et uera). But as regards the second characteristic, obscenity, he writes: 'I would apologize for it if I were the first to use it, but Catullus, Marsus, Pedo, Gaetulicus, all write like that—so does any epigrammatist worth reading.'

In fact what Martial says about epigram helps us a great deal in understanding Catullus. Admittedly Catullus never mentions the word, but no one would wish to deny that 'LXIX-CXVI' in elegiacs are epigrams; as Ross has shown they carry on a tradition started in Latin by Ennius. As regards 'I-LX' the word iambi, 'iambics', crops up three times: at 'XXXVI'. 5 and 'LIV'. 6 in hendecasyllables, and at 'XL'. 2 in scazons or limping iambics. Now iambi ever since the Greek poet Archilochus' first use of the metre, was a technical term for invective verse, and invective verse, as Martial, tells us, is characteristic of epigram.

Even the reader who reckons that he knows Catullus' work well will be surprised, when he actually counts up its total of obscene and/or abusive poems, to find out how very many of them there are. It is in fact much quicker to list those that contain no element of obscenity or abuse. Among the Polymetra they total a mere twenty, viz. 'I-V', 'VII-IX', 'XIII', 'XXXI', 'XXXIV-V', 'XIV-VI', 'XLVIII-LI', 'LV', 'LVIII B'—that is, about one third. Among the elegiac epigrams the proportion is even smaller—ten out of forty-nine, viz. 'LXXXV-VII', 'XCII', 'XCVI', 'C-CII', 'CVII', 'CIX', and that includes one ('LXXXVI') which could reasonably be counted out on the ground that it is insulting to Quintia. It must therefore be admitted that at least two-thirds of Catullus' epigrams are such as either 'do not lend themselves to comment in English' (as Fordyce archly observes)or exemplify personal abuse or are at the same time obscene and abusive.

We do not know whether Catullus was the first to lace his collection of epigrams with so much invective or whether this element was already present in similar proportion in contemporary Greek collections. On the one hand, ribald Fescennine verses were a characteristic Latin thing, and Rome was notorious as maledicaciuitas, 'a slanderous community'; on the other hand, Catullus is well known as a doctus poeta or scholar-poet (Martial calls him doctus on several occasions) and was well acquainted with Greek literature, as is shown by his translations from Sappho and Callimachus, his knowledge of Greek epigram, and his not unlikely connection with the Hellenistic poet Parthenius, a connection emphasized by Clausen. It is perhaps unlikely then that as first of the Latin epigrammatists (if we can trust Martial) naturalizing a fresh Greek genre in Latin he would have departed far from contemporary Greek precedent. This of course is not to deny that his individual epigrams are different from their Greek counterparts, as may clearly be seen by a comparison of Philodemus' invitation to Piso with Catullus' invitation to Fabullus ('XIII'), or Meleager's grave-epigram for Heliodora with Catullus' for his brother ('CI'). The Latin epigrams have an immediacy and a closeness to the spoken language that is lacking in the more ornate and 'poetical' Greek.

Moreover Catullus attacks real people, his contemporaries, including the great and powerful among them. As Martial implies, this is the cardinal difference between the two poets, and it reflects first of all their different social standing, and secondly the different political state of their times. Both poets were provincials, but Catullus came from a rich and influential family in the neighbourhood of Verona. He had the entree to high society in Rome and like the satirist Lucilius in the previous century could afford to throw his weight about. Besides, he wrote in the turbulent times of the First Triumvirate of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, times marked by political in-fighting, electoral corruption, and public disorder, when he and his friends could safely play the part of a Roman Republican Private Eye. Martial, on the other hand, an impoverished citizen from Bilbilis in Spain, lived under the tyranny of the Emperor Domitian, when political freedom was minimal and one had to watch out for informers. Private need and the temper of the times demanded that he attack lay figures. He could count himself lucky to get away with obscenity under an emperor so insistent on public propriety that he buried alive a Chief Vestal Virgin found guilty of immorality.

Catullus' Life and Poetry

A recent book on Catullus begins with this statement: 'We do not know very much about the life of Catullus'. It is true that we have very few hard facts about his life. External information is limited to a mere three or four items. Jerome in his Chronica tells us that Catullus was born at Verona in 87 B.C. and died in his thirtieth year in 57 B.C. Unfortunately the second date must be wrong, because there are poems of Catullus which allude to events after 57 B.C.; thus 'CXIII' refers to Pompey's second consulship, which fell in 55 B.C., and 'XI' refers to Caesar's invasion of Britain, which took place in the autumn of that same year. It is customary to suppose that Jerome is right about Catullus' age and to choose 54 B.C. as the date of his death and therefore 84 B.C. for his birth.

The one reasonably certain date in his life is that of his service in the province of Bithynia on the staff of the governor Memmius from 57 to the spring of 56 B.C. This date depends on a letter of Cicero to his brother Quintus from which we gather that Memmius is praetor designate for 58 B.C. It was normal for a praetor to remain in Rome during his year of office and in the following year to proceed to a provincial governorship. If Memmius did the regular thing, then the earliest datable poem of Catullus is 'XLVI', written in the spring of 56 B.C. when he was on the point of returning from Bithynia to Italy via some of the famous cities of Asia Minor.

Suetonius in his Life of Julius Caesar tells us that Catullus' father was accustomed to entertain Caesar, which means that he must have been one of the local aristocrats of Cisalpine Gaul, certainly a land-owner, with a villa on the peninsula of Sirmione on Lake Garda ('XXXI'), and Wiseman further suggests that he was a businessman with interests in Spain and Asia Minor. In the same place Suetonius records that Catullus' verses about Mamurra (presumably 'XXIX' and 'LVII') were recognized by Caesar as having brought an indelible stigma on himself, but that when the poet 'made amends' he invited him to dinner.

Apuleius tells us in his Apologia, some two hundred years after Catullus' death, the real name of the woman Catullus calls Lesbia, and incidentally provides us with Catullus' own praenomen or first name, thus: 'Gaius Catullus used the name Lesbia for Clodia'. Apuleius will have got this information from Suetonius' De Poetis, who in his turn, according to Wiseman, will have had it from Julius Hyginus, librarian of the Palatine Library in the time of Augustus, interested in modern poetry and author of De Vita Rebusque Illustrium Virorum.

Apart from these few items of information from other writers we are dependent on Catullus' own poems for knowledge of his life. And in fact they tell us a great deal about the man and the sort of life he led. Indeed it would be true to say that we know more about Catullus from his poetry than about any other classical poet, with the exception of Horace and Ovid. This is because two thirds of his work are concerned with actual moments, incidents, and personalities in his life. Virtually all his epigrams ('I-LX' as well as 'LXIX-CXVI') are concerned with his emotional reactions to other people, his contemporaries. Even those epigrams concerned with places ('XXXI' Sirmio, and 'XLIV' his farm), things ('IV' his yacht, and 'XLII' his hendecasyllables), or animals ('II-III' Lesbia's sparrow) personify their subjects and treat them as human beings. His reactions to other people usually arise from some event in his daily life: he welcomes a friend back from military service in Spain, records an incident that happened to him in the Forum to his disadvantage, taxes an acquaintance with the theft of some table-napkins, invites a friend to a rather special dinner, complains about being given an anthology of bad poetry at the Saturnalia, advises a friend on a poem, consoles Calvus on the death of his beloved Quintilia, celebrates the publication of Cinna's long-meditated miniature epic. After reading some hundred epigrams about the poet's friends and enemies and about things that happened to him, one feels one knows a good deal about him and the sort of life he led.

Of course this is not to say that one can take everything he tells us as gospel truth. In literary studies, as in most other departments of life, fashion swings from one grotesque extreme to the other. In the nineteenth century many scholars took poetic statements as too literally related to real life; in the twentieth many have believed that poetry has no relation at all to life but exists in a self-referential vacuum or a self-contained world of literary allusion. One even meets sceptics who do not believe that Catullus' Lesbia really existed; and if they mean that the picture of Lesbia one gets from Catullus' poems about her is not a faithful representation of the historical character to whom the pseudonym refers, then they may well be right. But if they mean that the pseudonym is purely fictitious and refers to no historical character at all, then on the evidence of Apuleius they are wrong.

Unfortunately Latin has no definite or indefinite article, so we cannot know whether Apuleius meant 'a Clodia' or 'the Clodia'. For us 'the Clodia' is the Clodia attacked by Cicero in his speech Pro Caelio, the Clodia married to Metellus Celer, who held the praetorship in 63 B.C. and the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul (Catullus' homeland) the year after that, the Clodia notorious for her sexual licence, who was even rumoured to have murdered her husband Metellus by poison. But this Clodia had two sisters, who also spelt their patrician name of Claudia in the plebeian way as Clodia, following the example of their brother Publius Clodius Pulcher, Cicero's enemy. Which of these three Clodias was Catullus' Lesbia?

Since the Renaissance most scholars have favoured Metellus' Clodia: she was married, which fits with Catullus' admission that the affair was adulterous ('LX-VIII'. 143-6); she also had an affair with Marcus Caelius Rufus, which fits with Catullus' reference to 'our Lesbia' in 'Poem LVIII' addresses to a Caelius, and with his hitter complaint in 'Poem LXXVII' that a Rufus has betrayed him; she would have known Catullus from at least 60 B.C. until 55 when he finally breaks with her in 'Poem XI', a space of time which can reasonably allow the affair to be described in 'Poem LXXVI' as a long love.

The opponents of this identification, however, point out that the first datable poem of Catullus is 'XLVI', written just before his return from Bithynia in 56 B.C., and that all the other datable poems ('IV', 'XXXI', 'XI', 'XXIX', 'XLV', 'LII', 'LV', 'LXXXIV', and 'CXIII') are later than that. Besides, Catullus' Caelius, according to 'Poem C', is a native of Verona, whereas Cicero's Caelius Rufus came from the Ancona area; moreover Catullus' Rufus apparently suffers from gout and halitosis ('LXIX' and 'LXXI'), whereas Cicero's Caelius Rufus was an elegant young man about town.

There is also an important metrical argument to be taken into account. It has been pointed out that Catullus' treatment of the first two syllables, or base, of the hendecasyllabic line varies according to an odd pattern. In the 263 hendecasyllables of Poems 'II-XXVI' there are only four exceptions to spondaic base (two long syllables), viz. 'II'.4, 'III'.12 and 17, 'VII'.2. On the other hand, in the 279 hendecasyllables of Poems 'XXVIII-LX' there are sixty-three exceptions—thirty-three with iambic base (short, long) and thirty with trochaic (long, short). Now 'Poem I', the dedication to Cornelius Nepos, which we can reasonably suppose to have been written last of all the poems 'I-LX', has one iambic and three trochaic bases in its ten lines. Professor Otto Skutsch has therefore inferred that Catullus began by sticking strictly to the rule that a hendecasyllable should begin with a spondee, but as time went on gradually relaxed this restriction.

His argument provides a possible means of the relative dating of the hendecasyllabic poems, which Wiseman develops. The earliest datable poem, 'XLVI', has spondaic bases only. So too 'Poem X' (a long one of 34 lines), 'Poem V (clearly an early Lesbia poem), and Poems 'VI', 'IX', 'XII-XV', 'XVI' (clearly later than 'V', to which it refers), 'XXI', 'XXIII-XXIV', 'XXVI', 'XXVIII', 'XLIII' (again a Lesbia poem), 'XLVIII', 'LVI-LVII'. In short, according to Wiseman, we have no reason to suppose that any Lesbia poem is earlier than 56 B.C., and therefore Catullus' Lesbia cannot have been Metellus' Clodia, because she was a widow at that time, whereas Catullus states that he was committing adultery.

Fascinating as it may be, the question of Lesbia's identity is not of great importance to Catullus' readers. Its answer leaves his poetry unaffected. He has not wished his readers to identify Lesbia and that is why he has given her a pseudonym. Why did he choose that particular pseudonym? It means literally 'the woman from Lesbos', as Andria, the title of Terence's play, means 'the woman from Andros'. Curiously enough a Lesbia occurs in the cast of Terence's Andria—as a midwife.

This is not an allusion likely to have occurred to Catullus! Professor Wendell Clausen, who made these points in conversation, believes that Catullus' original readers would have taken Lesbia as the name of a Greek courtesan from Lesbos and that that was what Catullus meant them to do. After all, if we can believe Apuleius, Catullus was committing adultery with an aristocratic Roman lady. He would not wish her to be publicly dishonoured, and moreover he himself disapproved of adultery ('LXI'. 97-9). Presumably he first used the pseudonym in 'Poem LI', his adaptation of Sappho's famous poem, where it would have most point (for Sappho was a native of Lesbos); so the knowledgeable reader of that poem would naturally associate the name with Sappho. But while this is probably so, Catullus has deliberately concealed the connection from the reader by placing 'Poem LI' late in his libellus and introducing the name without any Sapphic associations in 'Poem V'. From its appearance in this poem, in which love is implicitly contrasted with money as the thing worth living for, the reader would guess that Lesbia was a Greek courtesan and Catullus not wholly serious. But, on reading on in the collection, he would be amazed by the number, the content, and the quality of the Lesbia poems; for as Lyne has pointed out 'Catullus is the first ancient poet to treat a love-affair … in depth, in a related collection of mutally deepening poems', and this treatment was an inspiration to many later poets.

The importance of Lesbia in the life of Catullus, however, must not incline us to underestimate the importance to him of his poet-friends, in particular of Gaius Licinius Calvus ('XIV', 'L', 'LIII', 'XCVI') and Gaius Helvius Cinna ('X', 'XCV', 'CXIII'). In 'XCV' Catullus greets the publication of Cinna's brief epic narrative poem, or epyllion, the Zmyrna, just as the Alexandrian Greek poet Callimachus had greeted the publication of Aratus' Phaenomena, and by the epigram's balanced structure and allusive content, by its attack on the verbosity of Hortensius and the Annals of Volusius, and by its praise of the small-scale and its scorn for the popular taste for the orotund, indicates, indeed exemplifies, the sort of poetry approved by Cinna and himself. That was the poetry Callimachus had championed, concentrated, subtle, erudite, and allusive, the result of much thought and revision. What Cinna had produced was an epyllion in the contemporary Greek manner, re-telling an out-of-the-way legend about a daughter who fell in love with her own father, deceived him into intercourse, was changed into a myrrhtree, and in due time split open to bear a son, Adonis. Cinna's bizarre Zmyrna (this spelling represents the Greek pronunciation of Smyrna) is lost, save for two hexameters, but we have Catullus' own epyllion, 'LXIV', as first surviving representative of this new genre in Latin poetry.

No less revealing in its different way than 'XCV' is Catullus' epigram 'L' to Calvus, recording how they spent an evening together drinking and improvising versiculi in various metres. Key words here are ludere, delicati, lepor, and facetiae, pointing to light verse, sophistication and impropriety, elegance, wit, and humour. In fact the poem is intended to be an object-lesson in precisely these qualities, its impropriety being the barefaced declaration of love for Calvus in a poem designed to be read by the general public (Calvus himself would not need to be given the information provided in lines 1-6). The word versiculi (for which Quinn in his commentary proposes the translation 'epigrams') has already appeared in 'XVI', another indecent mock-serious piece, indeed a poetic manifesto intended to justify the sort of poetry that Poems 'I-LX' represent—and one would not need to justify an already existing type of verse.

Catullus' work mirrors himself, and in it we can clearly see that Lesbia, his brother, his friends, and poetry were the four loves of his life. If he has a message, it can be summed up (surprisingly enough) in that untranslatable word pietas, with its overtones of duty, devotion, respect, and even pity. He claims to have shown this quality in his love for Lesbia ('LXXVI'.2), in his relationship with an unnamed friend ('LXXI-II'.2), and in his vocation as a poet ('XVI'.5). Although the word does not occur in the famous farewell to his brother ('CI'), that grave-epigram is unmistakably an embodiment of pietas. But his pietas goes unrewarded. Lesbia spurns him; his friend betrays him; he loses his brother. His ideal lives on, however, in the mind of Virgil, whose own observation of life may well have combined with his reading of Catullus to extend its scope into the domain of public life and to make it the key to the character of his epic hero Aeneas.