SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of Catullus, translated by Peter Whigham, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 9-46.

[In the following essay originally published in 1966, Whigham surveys what he deems the highlights of Catullus's poetic canon.]

The date of Catullus's introduction into Roman society is of interest in helping to assess how much of his younger, formative life was spent in what he refers to as 'the province'. It is, unfortunately, likely to remain an unsolved query. If Metellus Celer was responsible, Catullus would not be likely to have left home before the spring of 62. On the other hand, his father, who must have been a wealthy man, was probably just as capable of arranging the matter for himself. In which case, there is no knowing when he left. There is a third alternative—of no help from the point of view of dates, but worth considering for other reasons. It is not impossible that he was provided with introductions to Roman literary circles by Publius Valerius Cato, the Veronese teacher, poet and critic, known not only to Catullus but to at least three other of the 'new poets', Ticidas, Gaius Cinna and Furius Bibaculus, all Cisalpines and all, at one time or another, pupils of his. It is likely, but unprovable, that Catullus was another. Cato was the author of a work on grammar, now lost, and probably of a poem called Dirae, which is still extant. A line of Cinna's refers to a poem called Diana, and a line of Ticidas', although not quite so certainly, to one called Lydia. Bibaculus speaks of him as though he were not only a master but an exemplar. He calls him 'the sole maker of poets', and laments the poverty of so discerning an individual. The warmth and personal element in Bibaculus's tributes, together with Catullus's poem ('56'), give us a hint of the mingled feelings of equality and respect which these men seem to have felt for him. If, as most scholars believe, Cato was the moving force behind the 'new poets', it would help to explain the number of Cisalpines among them. It would also explain, perhaps, something of the urgency and iconoclasm—although that word may be too strong—that they brought to their work. It would be misleading to suggest that, because they came from across the Po, an area which had not yet acquired full Roman status, they were what we should call 'provincials'. But there would be a freshness about them, and this—as in the case of Catullus—would give a bite to their Roman manners. Cato himself outlived all his pupils, dying as late as 25 B.C. only eight or nine years before Propertius, whose work, if he read it, he must certainly have approved of.

When we speak of the 'new poets' and the inspiration they derived from Cato, it should be remembered that we are in effect speaking of the work of Catullus and a tradition about Cato. The surviving fragments of the works of Calvus, Cinna, Cornificius, Bibaculus and Ticidas occupy barely three pages of print. Fortunately, in at least ten of his poems Catullus gives some very direct indications of what he and his friends felt about poetry, what their prejudices were and what they expected from it. Most of these poems are written to fellow poets and cast in the form of imaginary letters. (Catullus was fond of this convention: the opening lines of poem '13' follow the actual wording of a formal invitation to dinner.) Some of these 'letters' promise, or enclose, or make excuses for not enclosing translations of Greek models. Others are humorously abusive of poets of whom Catullus disapproves. Others are tributes to friends. We gather that the followers of the old-fashioned tradition of Roman epic were not popular with the 'new poets', that long-windedness was to be avoided, and anything pompous, stilted or affected. We are told, or it is implied, that gaiety should be a concomitant of the arts, that the psychological and personal approach was to be preferred to the formal or public one, and that elegance (venustas), taste and learning (doctrina), were among a poet's most precious jewels. Perhaps the most illuminating poem of this genre is 'No. 50', where we see Calvus and Catullus, like any two poets who are also friends, playing at poetry together. We are aware that their poetry was a very close part of their lives. This was something new in Roman letters.

There is always the danger that the literary historian will invest the past with a more or less spurious unity. Life, we feel, is more haphazard than most biographers or historians would like it to appear. The documentary evidence for the idea that there was a new movement at all rests on three brief passages of Cicero, in one of which appears the term 'new poets'—and, as an ironic allusion to their literary ancestry, 'new poets' is written in Greek. To some people this has seemed insufficient proof of the existence of a literary movement, and they have consequently denied that the so-called, new poets' worked together or formed a school. And yet one of the strongest impressions left from a reading of the dozen or so poems mentioned above is that Catullus, and the other writers with whom he mixed, felt themselves united, in an almost arrogant manner, for certain things in poetry, and against others, and this seems to me stronger evidence than Cicero's. When Catullus started writing in 69 or 68 B.C. he had three traditions to draw on: Roman epic and tragedy Roman comedy and satire; and the Roman love epigram which was an importation from Alexandrian Greek. This third element was comparatively new, with a history of not more than fifty years. The examples we have are elegant but brittle; slight in accomplishment and small in quantity. The weightier traditions of tragedy and epic were not with out Greek influence; but beside them the love epigram is like an exotic that had not taken root. By setting out these trends, in this way, I do not wish to imply that they were of equal importance, either in themselves or to Catullus. They were not. The exact nature of his debt to each is a matter of dispute. In general terms, however, it is safe to say that he drew his ability to convey grandeur (the Aegeus passage in 'Poem 64') from the language of epic and tragedy, that he guessed at the uses to which colloquialism and realism might be put from the comico-satiric tradition, and that it was in the last, the somewhat precious form of the love epigram, that he saw the opportunity for original development. But a poet's greatness rests largely on the extent to which he is able to effect a synthesis of preceding traditions while producing something that has not been achieved before. This provides the fourth element: the constant and individual interplay between the three traditions. Fused in the oeuvre, it is what gives Catullus's poetry its immediacy and, as far as Latin literature is concerned, its originality. Before Catullus, colloquialism had been confined to comedy; the elevated manner to epic or tragedy. In his poetry, for the first time, grandeur is heightened by unexpected realism. Colloquial diminutives express tenderness, which rubs shoulders with an equally colloquial grossness. The subject matter of the Roman epigram is broadened and shifted to the entirely new field of the personal lyric with a wide variety of metres, many of which are used for the first time. As for his own epigrams, he confined these, for the most part, to elegiacs and, in so doing, made the brittleness of the epigrammatic technique, once a limitation of the poetic sensibility, an end in itself, so that his most vitriolic fantasies become disembodied and intellectualised: imagery and metaphor are discarded and a startling directness of language takes their place. But the most important thing Catullus does for the Alexandrian Greek epigram is to make it personal.

The Greek stimulus sought by the 'new poets' came mainly from Alexandria. The reason for this was natural enough. Ever since its foundation by Alexander in 332 B. C., and the subsequent building of the great library by Ptolemy I (323-283), it had been the principal centre of Greek culture and learning. It represented what Greece meant to a contemporary. It would be unrealistic to expect writers to have gone behind Alexandria to Greece itself. Her judgements (in literary matters) were regarded judgements of Greece, or the Greek cities. Added to this, Alexandria had in the second century B.C., come under Rome's sphere of influence, and as recently as the year 80 had actually, been bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy X in his will. The focal point for the scholars and poets of Alexandria was, of course, the magnificent library, the greatest in the world carefully nursed, for their own political ends, by the Ptolemies. Callimachus himself, whom the 'new poets' seem to have held in especial regard, worked and taught there from c. 260 B.C. to his death in 250. Apollonius Rhodius (c. 295-c. 230), whose Argonautica, so sympathetic to modern tastes, was clearly known to Catullus, was a pupil of his. This was where the 'new poets' derived their ideal of the scholar-poet. It was here that they learnt to attach as much importance to the complexity of a poet's attitudes as to their consistency; it was here that they learnt their love of allusion and the oblique manner, and to cultivate an almost eighteenth-century type of artistic sensibility. It was here they learnt their respect for craftsmanship and their devotion to form and structure. But the 'new poets' applied these Alexandrian principles and techniques to a very un-Alexandrian situation. The Alexandrian school had been engaged in resuscitating, and to some degree had succeeded in embalming, an old tradition; the 'new poets' were endeavouring to found a new one. When considering the Alexandrian school as a whole, it is permissible to regret the lack of (apparent) spontaneity which characterised the earlier age of the Greek lyric. But spontaneity, or its appearance, is by no means the sine qua non of a successful poem. We regret its absence only in certain moods. To compare a poem of T. S. Eliot's to 'Go Lovely Rose' and find Eliot wanting, is to indulge in an extra-literary judgement. Only a prejudice against Alexandrianism, as such, could lead us to deplore its deep and widespread influence over Catullus and his circle. They or Catullus—had plenty of 'spontaneity', and if his more substantial works, such as poems 64 and 68, do at times read a little like The Waste Land, they seem none the worse for that.

The longer works ('61-8') stand in the middle of the volume of his poems as it has come down to us, and deserve special mention. But first there is the volume itself, which is curiously arranged. It is in three parts: mixed lyrics, long poems and epigrams. The epigrams are nearly all quite short. 'Poem 76', the longest, runs to no more than twenty-six lines, and may more properly be called a love elegy. With '68', it represents the first example of its kind in Latin This section is introduced, metrically, by the second half of the long poems, '65-8', which are all in elegiacs. The lyrics ('1-60') are in various metres, sapphics, choliambics, iambic trimeters, and the metre which Catullus made peculiarly his own, the Phalaecian hendecasyllable, which appears to be calculatedly inserted between the others. 'Poem 34', the hymn to Diana, is the only one in this group to be written in glyconics, and, as with the elegiacs and poems '65-8', so here we find that the first of the long poems is also written in glyconics. It is clear that whoever arranged the poems did so on an almost exclusively metrical basis. This would suggest that the arrangement was at least post-Augustan. But the decisive factor is the length of the whole book—approximately 2,300 lines. This was enough to fill nearly three rolls; and the roll did not give place to our book form until the third or fourth century A.D. A likely theory is that poems '1-60' were originally a collection on their own, perhaps arranged by Catullus and preceded by the dedication to Cornelius Nepos. Various of the long poems, notably '64,' would have been published as individual items, while the poems at the end may only have been passed round privately among intimates. There is no means of knowing whether they are complete, or whether they are a selection. While they contain some of Catullus's best and most characteristic work, they are of varying worth, and are certainly more scrappily arranged than the lyrics.

Turning to the long poems, we see that '61' is in the form of a personal epithalamium. Its recipient was Lucius Manlius Torquatus, a close friend of Catullus; about the wife we know nothing. 'Poem 62' is another epithalamium, but generalised. Taken with poem '34', it is one of the only two non-personal or public poems that he ever wrote. It is written in hexameters. 'Poem 63' is the celebrated Attis. The subject is again the relationship between male and female but it is treated psychologically, in terms of Catullus's own experience, which he projects into the world of myth. It is written in the galliambic metre, so-called from the priests of Cybele, the galli, from whose ritual cries and dance movements it was said to be derived. It is the only poem to have survived in this metre either in Latin or Greek. Poem 64 blends each of the foregoing elements: it is mythological; love is a public, official affair (the marriage of Peleus and Thetis), and a private one (Ariadne's elopement, desertion and consolation). Like '62' it is in hexameters; they are the only two poems he wrote in this metre, and it will be seen that they neatly sandwich the unique galliambics. 'Poem 65' introduces three new subjects: poetry itself friendship and the loss of his brother. It is a dedicatory epistle to '66' and is addressed to Q. Hortensius Hortalus. It initiates the series written in elegiacs. 'Poem 66' itself is a direct translation from a poem of Callimachus', an elegant piece of court poetry verging on persiflage. Nothing—or little—is accidental in Catullus, least of all the subject matter of a translated poem. ('Poem 51', his other direct translation, is further proof of this.) In 'No. 66' he chose a poem in which the protagonist—a woman's lock of hair—laments the fact that it was severed from its mistress's head on her wedding night, before she had had time to experience the pleasures of married love. The lock recounts the occasion and its circumstances, concluding with a request for votive offerings of the scents used by married women, since it never experienced these in life. If wives preface the 'chaste dalliance of the marriage bed' with libations such as these, they will be blest with arts which will keep their husbands faithful to them. I believe that Catullus has exaggerated the element of persiflage that he found in the original and used his subject matter as an opportunity to turn the poem he is translating inside out and thus make a personal poem out of a quasi official one. (Callimachus wrote the piece very soon after the events which it describes.) 'Poem 67', set in 'the province', consists of a dialogue between Catullus and the door of an unnamed woman. The Caecilius who is spoken of as having right of access to the house may be the fellow poet of 'No. 35', who had written a poem, presumably not unlike the Peleus and Thetis, on Cybele. Unfortunately, the local allusions are lost on us. We are confronted with (at the least) incest and adultery, and an attempt to swindle an inheritance out of someone under the Lex Voconia, whereby a daughter was unable to inherit a substantial sum unless she produced a male child, in which case she could hold the money in trust. (The same reference is found in 'Poem 68'.) The poem is amusing, coarse, realistic, and presents us with the obverse of '61' and '62'. 'Poem 68' is addressed to Manlius Torquatus. I accept the theory that Manlius's wife, Aurunculeia, has died, and that the poem is principally one of consolation. But Manilus's love and loss is intricately interwoven with Catullus's own loss (of his brother) and love (of Lesbia). The themes of friendship and poetry make their reappearance. If '67'was local and realistic, '68' is local and romantic. Mythology is used again, but not now as a framework, as in '64'. In '64' the mythological landscape was touched with realistic detail. Here, the world of reality is irradiated by myth. The poem has a trancelike quality.

Enough should have been said to show that this middle section contains poems that are essential to an understanding of Catullus and that cannot be regarded separately from the rest of his work. If this seems a curious statement to the reader who has read my translations but is no Catullan scholar, then one of the purposes of my version will have been achieved. Not only do these poems form a unity in themselves but in their unreal and, in the Attis, violent and catastrophic, handling of the sexual relationship, they cast backwards to the extremes of tenderness, in the lyrics, and forwards to the obscenities of the Gellius sequence. (There are 'obscene' poems in section '1-60', and warm and tender poems in section 69-116; but as a generalization the distinction may be allowed to stand.) Catullus is, of course, a lyric poet. But, as far as the middle section is concerned '61' is nothing if not lyric; '65' and '68' both have very great lyrical beauty of a grave and meditative kind: while no man should imagine he can fully apprehend the spirit which informs the sparrow or the kissing poems, unless he has the Attis in his other hand. The objection to the longer poems would seem to resolve itself into an objection to '64'. Since '64', together with '68', were doubtless the poems which he himself regarded most highly, another look at both of them would seem to be indicated.

'Poem 64' is the centrepiece of the Carmina. It is a window on the world of the gods. If to-day we look back over our shoulders a thousand years or so we do not, even if we are G. K. Chesterton Distributists, feel that we have missed-out on Eden. But a similar idea does appear to have haunted both Greeks and Romans round about the beginning of the Christian era. It was no mere accident of literary fancy that insisted that all genealogies, whether of city, state or hero, should be traced back to the time when the gods still walked the earth. This feeling was the inspiration of the Evander passages in the Aeneid, of the whole of Ovid's sprawling Metamorphoses and, of course, of the Peleus and Thetis. Although the part played by Crete in the early history of the Aegean basin was then unknown, it is plain from both myth and legend that the Minoan age was in some obscure way recognised as the time when this desirable state obtained. In the Peleus and Thetis Catullus employs all the resources of a highly eclectic and allusive use of myth to depict its passing. In a sense, his method allows him to have things both ways. He can pin-point details which serve his purpose, but even while he is doing this the body of the material he does not use still exerts its influence over the reader's mind. Taking the Argonautic expedition as a whole, the fact that Peleus leant over the side of the ship and saw and fell in love with the sea-nymph Thetis, is of such slight importance that it might well pass unmentioned; while Ariadne, deserted on Naxos, and Aegeus, committing suicide because of the wrong coloured sail, are traditionally, and rightly, regarded as postscripts to the Minotaur myth. Yet it is from the interlocking of details such as these, taken from quite separate mythological cycles, that Catullus conjures his orderly, consistent and convincing narrative. His points of departure are pre-Homeric Crete, the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and Troy. The connection between them is effected (backwards to Crete) by the wedding quilt, and (forwards to Troy) by the ill-omened epithalamium. We are shown how the fall of Minoan Crete marked a process which, via the birth of Achilles, found its conclusion in the fall of Troy. As though this were not enough, Catullus also manages to tell us what the golden age once meant in terms of human happiness and what the future held in terms of human distress. He describes how a goddess marries a man, and a woman marries a god. A life of heroic action is rewarded in the first instance, and love is eased of its passion in the second. (Ariadne, as a victim of faithlessness and unrequited love, is a mouthpiece for Catullus's own feelings.) He also shows Nemesis overtaking evil (Aegeus's suicide), a foretaste of the state into which the world is about to lapse. The way in which the whole poem folds inwards on itself to the seventy lines of Ariadne's lament, which represents the 'personal' centre of the poem, is perhaps best shown in tabulated form.

ll. 1-49: The Argonautic expedition on which Peleus first sees Thetis; the wedding day; the Palace; the coverlet on the marriage bed.

ll. 50-264: Description of the scenes woven on the coverlet. This section is divisible as follows:

ll. 50-75: Ariadne on the beach at Naxos; the intrusion of evil in the shape of human faithlessness;

ll. 76-123: flashback of Theseus' expedition to Crete, the slaying of the Minotaur and Theseus' subsequent elopement with Ariadne;

ll. 124-31: return to Ariadne on Naxos;

ll. 132-201: Ariadne's lament and curse;

ll. 202-14: the Gods, as Theseus nears Greece, hear Ariadne's curse;

ll. 215-37: flashback of Aegeus's instructions to Theseus before he set sail for Crete, and Aegeus's feelings on that occasion;

ll. 238-48: return to the present; Theseus forgets his instructions; Aegeus commits suicide; Theseus' state of mind is compared to

ll. 249-50: that of Ariadne as she stands gazing out to sea after him;

ll. 251-64: the scene passes forward to the advent of Bacchus which ends the description of the coverlet.

ll. 265-77: Departure of the mortal guests.

ll. 278-304: Advent of the immortals—the Olympians, Jupiter and Juno, attended by the three demi-gods particularly associated with the bride and bridegroom. First: Chiron, the local deity of the chief mountain of Thessaly, Pelion, and the future tutor of Achilles;secondly, Peneus, spirit of the principal river and related to Thetis; and thirdly, Prometheus, who foreseeing the glory that will accrue from the marriage has persuaded Jupiter to sanction it. Apollo, who is to be the author of Achilles' death is mentioned as staying behind on Olympus.

ll. 305-22: Description of the Parcae.

ll. 323-81: Hymn of the Parcae, constituting the epithalamium; the scene moves forward as the Fates foretell the birth of Achilles and the subsequent fall of Troy.

ll. 382-408: Final peroration on the fallen state of man and the vanished golden age with which the poem has opened.

The total effect is cinematic. We have glimpses of paradisal landscapes emerging from the clear, primal world of sea and sky. But the clarity is deceptive and the landscapes and figures dissolve into one another and are never fully revealed. All is a little mysterious; which is as it should be for without mystery there is no paradise.

The second of Catullus's Alexandrian pieces ('68') is even more complex. Unfortunately, the text is very corrupt. We do not even know for certain whether it is one poem or two. (In the original codex, now lost, there was no indication where one poem ended and another began, and the copyist, after a break in his work, was quite capable of taking up his pen again at the wrong place.) It is unlikely that the string of queries which the poem prompts will ever be satisfactorily resolved. If it is one poem, is it addressed to 'Allius', or 'Mallius', and is this person identifiable with L. Manlius Torquatus of poem '61'? Is the domina of the house which has been lent to Catullus for his meetings with Lesbia(?) its châtelaine, or Torquatus's mistress or both? And is his wife, Aurunculeia, dead? And is her death really the main subject of the poem or, more accurately, the core around which the poem is built? As elsewhere, I have taken different readings from different texts, and different suggestions from different scholars—usually I have found that it has been the more traditional interpretation that has attracted me—and having selected my material on the basis of what I found most stimulating poetically, I have then tried to rewrite the poem as I imagined Catullus might have written it had he been alive to-day and writing in English. As a poem is more than the sum of its constituent parts, a certain ruthlessness over details is often necessary. It is the whole poem which has to be captured and rewritten. One is, of course, grateful for whatever donne's fall into one's lap, passim. But the details of a poem are to be digested so that they become a part of the living grain of the new poem, not embalmed like flies in ointment. Since '68' is not a narrative poem, a table setting out the various strands of which it is composed will need to be a little more explanatory than was the case with '64'.

ll. 1-40: Preface. Manlius has written to Catullus asking him for 'gifts of Love and the Muses' to console him in his sorrow. Catullus replies by saying that his own sorrows match Manlius's, and that he cannot comfort him as he would wish. Manlius's sorrow consists of the loss of his young wife, Aurunculeai; Catullus's of the loss of his brother.

ll. 41-74: Catullus nevertheless decides to record the debt that he owes to Manlius, weho once provided him with a house in which he could meet Lesbia and in which they could make love. She comes to him as a 'bright-shining goddess'.

ll. 74-86: His own love for Lesbia, and the dead Aurunculeia's for Manlius are fused in the image of Laodamia, the symbol of wifely passion.

ll. 87-90: Troy, where Laodamia lost her husband, Protcsilaus, is apostrophised in the first of two bridge pasages as a source of widespread sorrow. (There may be a connection here with the 'historical' view of Troy expressed in 64, where its fall marks the end of the golden age.) Through Troy, Laodamia's loss is linked to Catullus's and so to Manlius's. In the intensity of her love she represents Aurunculeia, and of her grief, Manlius.

ll. 91-100: Catullus's brother was buried near Troy. The theme of his dead brother was broached in the first section of the poem; it is taken up again and expanded. Catullus repeats the original lines (20-4) nearly word for word.

ll. 101-4: The second of the bridge passages about the Trojan War. It is worth noting that Helen is mentioned by name in the first, and Paris in the second. In themselves the two passages constitute a laconic reflection from outside the body of the poem—on the inherently calamitous nature of mortal love.

ll. 105-30: Catullus passes from the cause of Leodamia's grief to an analysis of her love. He does this by means of three sustained similes, each to do with a different sort of bird: the Stymphalian birds of Hercules's Sixth Labour, the vulture, and mating doves. The poetic significance of the passage has puzzled commentators. Catullus's technique is similar to that of our seventeenth-century Metaphysicals. In lines 74-86, Laodamia's love is evoked in such a way that we are intended to participate in it, here the intention is that we should understand it. The passages complement each other.

To take the similes in order: I read the caverns under Mount Cyllene as a reference to the consummation of the marriage. Hercules can stand only for Manlius. We cannot know what his Sixth Labour suggested to a man of Catullus's day: but there can be no doubt that in the context of the poem the derivation of the word 'Stymphalus' (… the male and female members) is of peculiar significance. The reference to Hebe, goddess of eternal youth, whom Hercules marries on his apotheosis, indicates that Aurunculeia, still young, will be reunited with Manlius in the next world. In the second simile, the vulture symbolises death. The woman's gifts that the bride (Laodamia) brings will keep even death at bay. In the third simile, Isis's vulture gives place to Venus's doves which symbolise the enjoyment of sexual love. In brief, we have (a) ritualistic loss of virginity; (b) the expectations and the transforming power of love; (c) sexual pleasure.

ll. 131-48: Reintroduction of the theme of Catullus and Lesbia's love for each other. Their illicit relationship is compared with that of married love.

ll. 149-60: Epilogue. Catullus has, after all, written a poem to Manlius. Not a formal piece, such as he sent to Hortalus in '66', but an account of their relations with each other. The poem ends with a final evocation of Lesbia as 'she who endows Catullus with the quality of vision'.

I have often felt that the poem reads like an expansion of '65'. Both poems consist of a similar, elaborate interweaving of the themes on which Catullus felt most deeply. Both have the same slow-trailing movement of successive clauses loosely drawn out. But what made the poem new in Latin, and remains its outstanding virtue, is the calculated and delicate of use to delineate specific psychological states. It is a reminder what we may well have lost in the works of Calvus, Cinna and the other 'new poets'.

There remains the Attis. Walter Savage Landor's comment with which he concludes his long survey of Doering's second edition of the Carmina (published nearly fifty years after his first, Leipzig, 1788) provides a fitting and amusing prelude to any discussion of the poem.

They who have listened, patiently and supinely, to the catarrhal songsters of goose-grazed commons, will be loth and ill-fitted to mount up with Catullus to the highest steeps in the forests of Ida and will shudder at the music of the Corybantes in the temple of the Great Mother of the Gods.

The poem is a strange one, both violent and barbaric, full of odd coinings and archaisms, and written in the breakneck metre known as 'galliambic'. The youth Attis is described as crossing the sea to Asia Minor and there castrating himself in the frenzy of his devotion to the Mother Goddess. The act is accompanied in the original Latin by a change of gender. Attis calls to the other initiates of Cybele's cult to join him at her shrine on Mount Ida. There he falls into a coma. On waking, his immediate reaction is to regret what he has done. He returns to the beach and looks back over the sea. There follows a twenty-three-line lament for the civilised patrimony which he has abandoned. This patrimony is described in Greek terms not Roman, a fact which has led some scholars to presume a Greek model, even a Greek original, and to read the whole as an expression of conflict between civilised and barbaric values. Even if such an interpretation is correct, it still leaves the core of the poem untouched. Following Attis's lament, Cybele unyokes one of her lions and instructs it to drive Attis back into the thickets on the slopes of Ida, where he is to remain for the rest of his life, a helpless devotee. In the last three lines, Catullus prays to Cybele to protect him from such desires; 'goad others to rabid madness keep your fury from my house'. The lines are spoken as though he has woken from a nightmare (the preceding ninety lines) and recognized, with horror, himself in the figure of the unfortunate Attis. To emphasise this reading I have placed the last four lines of my version in direct quotes.

When considering the significance of this poem, I have always found it suggestive that the Temple of Cybele stood not far from Clodia's house, on the Palatine. The clashing cymbals, the drums and the peculiar ululating cries of the worshippers must on occasion have been audible to the members of Metellus Celer's household. Whether the initial stimulus that Catullus found in the myth lay simply in an accident of locality such as this, or whether it weas the result of his trip to Asia Minor, it is impossible to say. The worship of Cybele had been introduced into Rome in the year 204 B.C., during the Second Punic War. A black stone representing the Goddess had been brought up the Tiber and placed, temporarily, in the Temple of Victoria, since the new temple which was designed to house it had not yet been completed. The cult was of Anatolian origin and was ecstatic like that of Dionysus, some of the terms being interchangeable. The general effect of both has been described as not unlike a latter-day Dervish dance. The worshippers inflicted wounds on themselves, were liable to despatch anyone who stumbled on their devotions, and, in the rites of the Mother Goddess, actually underwent voluntary castration. The fundamentally grave Romans viewed the cult with suspicion, and it was not allowed to spread.

On many occasions, in moments of intense emotion Catullus expresses his feelings in the guise of a woman. The fact that homosexuality was not then considered either as a vice, an aberration or a disease, as it is now, is attendant but not cardinal to the point that I wish to make, which is that there was in Catullus a strain of femininity which went deeper than 'normal' adherence to the bisexual conventions of his class and time. His luventius poems strike exactly the same note as the heterosexual poems such as '32', that were not written to Clodia. The absence of 'guilt' is matched by a similar absence of 'spirituality'—of anything that is not a straightforward satisfaction of desire. With Clodia, lust is at a discount. It is she, to speak from the evidence of the poems, who displays the animality, not him. In 'No. 72' he even compares his feelings for her with those of a fisher for his daughter: an attitude unique in Roman poetry. 'Poem 51' is a translation from Sappho. It is the poem in which he gives Clodia the name of 'Lesbia'. In it, not only does he speak to her in the person of Sappho but the poem he has chosen to translate is one in which Sappho describes the physical sensations she experiences from the close presence of her beloved, in her case, if we accept the tradition, another woman. In the beautiful, tentacular '65', the startling, bright little vignette at the end (which is in itself a brilliant switch from the inclusive to the elliptical) represents an identification of himself with a young girl who is caught harbouring a guilty secret, the secret being her awareness of her own sexuality, symbolised by an apple. In poem '2', he wishes he were able to play with Lesbia's sparrow, as Lesbia does, and imagines that if he were, he would feel like Atalanta, when she stooped to pick up the apple and so lost the foot-race and, with it, her virginity. In 'No. 66', we have observed how he assumes the persona of a woman's lock of hair; while in 'No. 68' we noted a similar switch of sexes in the passages where he describes Manlius's and his own grief in terms of Laodamia's. But there is an obverse to this side of Catullus's nature. It is to he found in his obsession with the more repulsive aspects of sexuality. ('Poem 97' and the Gellius sequence.) His male drives found their outlet here, and the more disagreeable the news they could report, the more justification they provided for his invert fantasies. In poem 11 he refers to Lesbia as 'dragging the guts' out of him in the love act; and elsewhere there are references to the way in which a woman 'drains' a man of virility. It is as though Catullus felt that at the moment of orgasm a man became like Cybele's priests behind Metellus Celer's house. This I believe to have been the significance of the Attis myth for Catullus. Woman has, as it were, a lien on man's sex, an attitude expressed in the priests' castration and in the dramatic change of gender in the poem. It is the reason why Catullus was both repelled and attracted by the myth. The hate which Attis proclaims for Venus in line 17 is identical with that which Catullus in poem '85' expresses for Clodia. It has nothing to do with the antipathy of discordant elements, but arises from the repulsion from which attraction draws its strength, each succeeding the other in the love-hate see-saw. The experience is, of course, that of the manic depressive. And the Attis, as is now generally accepted, is a document of that state.

As a footnote to the poem, it is worth recalling the story of how an ancestress of Clodia's vindicated her chastity by using her zona or girdle, to secure the image of the Holy Mother when the ship bringing it up the Tiber ran aground in shoal water. It is unclear exactly how she did this, but the garment in question was evidently used to bring the image (it was probably a meteorite) safely to dry land. Clodia must have known the tradition. And Catullus too. Did he perceive and, if so, relish, the irony it contained for him?

The hills around Lake Garda can have altered little since Catullus's day, and the waters of the lake not at all. Garda is subject to very swift changes of weather. The wind off the Dolomites blows down over Trento to Riva at the head of the lake. The hills which stand close in to the northern shore conduct the wind from one end of Garda to the other. Suddenly the water will be curled into steep, crested waves, so that the lake looks like the open sea. A very slight shift of wind and the waters will be smooth again. The pleasure boats which in the tourist season ply north and south between Riva, Malcesine and Desenzano wisely hug the coast. The violent and abrupt changes of mood which characterise the lake are also characteristic of Catullus's poetry. They are each as unpredictable as the other. But the lake could be called—is invariably and justly called 'beautiful', and that is not the aptest word to apply to Catullus's poetry. There is immediacy and vitality and pathos and nobility. He riddles away with words, juggling them about, a dozen times in half as many lines: eyes, apples, stars, numbers and then more numbers. The primitive is sometimes surprisingly near the surface. He has made his own mirror, not of life but of himself, and in this of course he is a Romantic. The tributes to him in English poetry are innumerable. They start with Ben Jonson, and go through Lovelace to Landor and Tennyson, Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Yeats and Ezra Pound. And when I think how I shall conclude this tribute of mine, I turn again to Walter Savage Landor whom I have just quoted and whose paraphrases and adaptations stand second only to those of Ben Jonson. The lines touch on the problem of Catullus's 'obscenity'. Landor, whom no one could accuse of laxity in this respect, saw that the question was of little or no importance in itself, and existed only in an incidental relationship to the whole work. The picture is a charming one, and not without relevance in these days of hasty and intemperate opinions on the subject of what should and should not be printed.

Tell me not what too well I know
About the bard of Sirmio—
  Yes, in Thalia's son
Such stains there are—as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
  With nectar, and runs on.