Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Throughout this volume, the translations are my own.
2. The pattern is set at the start of Book 1 with C. 1.9, 1.14, and 1.18.
3. Cf. Epi. 1.19.23.
4. Institutio oratoria 10.1.96. At 10.1.94, Horace is selected as the outstanding practitioner of satire for the concision and clarity of his language. Compare also the famous judgment that Petronius puts into the mouth of Eumolpus when he speaks of Horace’s curiosa felicitas, his painstaking appropriateness of expression (Satyrica 118.5).
5. For general evaluations of lyric and lyricism, see in particular W. R. Johnson 1982; the chapters on ancient lyric by Jonathan Culler in his yet-unpublished essay on lyric theory will be of great value to all students of Catullus and Horace as well as of lyric poetry in general.
6. Horace’s failure to name Catullus may not at first seem unusual. In the two books of his Satires, for instance, Lucretius is never mentioned, though he is clearly a major influence. My point rests on the question of genre. As far as his first publications are concerned, Horace is writing satiric poetry, Lucretius didactic. But in the Carmina, where Alcaeus is invoked by name twice and Sappho once (and where each is alluded to obliquely on several other occasions), we might expect at least a direct, if passing, reference to the “lyric” Catullus.
7. For a more detailed discussion of the parallels, see Putnam 1986, 40–41.
CHAPTER 1: TIME AND PLACE
1. We should note Horace’s only mention of Remus at Epodes 7.19, where it is also juxtaposed to nepotibus (20). Horace gives Remus the adjective immerentis, but the Horatian context likewise deals with moral decline that for the Augustan poet stems from a fratricide that anticipates the continuity of civil war in late Republican Rome.
2. As commentary on this and other parallel situations, we should remember the observation of Commager (1962, 145): “Catullus . . . often adjures himself by name in order to see himself, psychologically as well as grammatically, as a third person.”
3. For the meaning and sexual connotations of glubo, see Penella 1976; Arkins 1979; Jocelyn 1979; as well as Adams 1982, 74 and 169.
4. For 1.25, see in particular Lee 1975, 36.
5. At line 20 I follow the universal reading of the manuscripts, Hebro. Here, and elsewhere on occasional matters of orthography and punctuation, I differ from the text I follow throughout the book (F. Klingner, ed., Q. Horati Flacci Opera [Leipzig, 1959]). At line 20, Klingner, following the 1501 Aldine edition of Horace’s works, emends Hebro to Euro.
6. Cf. the uses of domus at 68.68 and 156, and the discussion by Elder (1951). The text of Catullus followed is the Oxford Classical Text of R. Mynors (Oxford, 1959).
7. De rerum natura 4.1177.
8. Lydia is also levis because she will become dry and therefore light as a leaf in winter. She can afford to take no love seriously because none will then come her way.
9. Horace’s only use of the word moechus in his lyric corpus is at C. 1.25.9. It occurs, used of male adventurers, in Catullus also at 11.17 and 37.16, the latter a poem that has much in common with 58. The setting is outdoors, in the center of Rome, at a taberna in the Forum. We are nine columns from the temple of Castor and Pollux, watching Lesbia sitting there, once “beloved as much as no one will be loved” (amata tantum quantum amabitur nulla, 12). Her affections are now bestowed ubiquitously, on men “of rank and fortune” (boni beatique, 14), as well as on “all petty sorts and back-street adulterers” (omnes pusilli et semitarii moechi, 16). The nonce word semitarii has some of the same resonance as angiportis in 58, defining those who, whether male or female, ply their trade in the by-ways.
10. Horace’s gerundives in C. 2.14 all appear at the beginnings of lines; dormienda concludes its line in Catullus (6).
11. For the etymology of Faunus from faveo, see ServiusD on Virgil Georgics 1.10, and Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, ed. A. Ernout and A. Meillet (Paris, 1959), s.v. Faunus.
12. At line 8 I read urit instead of the equally strong visit.
13. We find nunc at lines 9, 11, and 20, iam at 3, 5, and 16, with all except the first serving as the initial word of a verse. For further discussion of Catullus 5, see also Chapter 4.
14. Besides the several mentions of Catullus 46 in the present chapter, see discussion in Chapter 4.
15. Horace may have drawn his mention of Favonius from Catullus 64.282, which tells of the flowers that the “fertile breeze of warm Favonius begets” (aura parit . . . tepidi fecunda Favoni).
16. Cf. Catullus 3.12, of the underworld “whence they say no one returns” (unde negant redire quemquam).
17. The noun campi is also repeated at line endings at 46.4 and C. 4.7.1. Poem 46.5 concludes with aestuosae, C. 4.7.9 with aestas.
18. The repetition of sollicitam (16) in sollicitus (26) connects the troubled brow of the rich, who could and should find useful a stay in a poor man’s dwelling, with Maecenas himself, for whom the substitution of country for city, poor for rich, a poet’s appropriate philosophizing for troubles of state, is in order, according to the speaker’s suggestion.
19. I differ from the text of Klingner by extending the quotation from vixi through to the end of line 48.
20. The adjective impotentia (18), which I translated as “wild,” can also mean something like “powerless.” However raging the waters might be, they offer no danger to the phaselus and its passenger.
21. The powerful personification of the boat is abetted by the denomination of its passenger as erus (19). The boat is slave, its passenger, master. Much the same distinction holds true of the relation between Sirmio and its erus (31.12) in a poem, as we will see, closely linked to 4.
22. Bithunos campos (31.5–6) and Phrygii campi (46.4) are self-reflective; lacum (4.24) is further explained by Lydiae lacus undae (31.13).
23. For this suggestion, see Putnam 1962.
24. For a different approach to Catullus 4, which views it as a study in stylistics, see Davis 2002.
25. See Chapter 4.
26. See, e.g., J. Pucci 1992. See also Chapter 4.
27. On the punctuation of both text and translation here, see Quinn 1980, 152 (on C. 1.14.9–15).
28. On the echoes of Catullus here, see Mendell 1938, 148.
29. Quintilian Institutio oratoria 8.6.44.
30. Fr. 208 Campbell. Some scholars, among them Kiessling and Heinze (1955, 71), find little in common between Horace’s words and the Alcaeus fragment. Fraenkel (1957, 155) resorts to litotes, seeing Horace here as “not independent of the Lesbian poet.”
31. See Mendell 1935, 298–99; Lee 1975, 36; and, in particular, Zumwalt 1977.
32. We should note also that the form cave (C. 1.14.16) appears only once elsewhere in the Carmina (C. 3.7.24). Two of Catullus’s three uses occur at 50.18 and 19 (the other is to be found at 61.145) in a warning to Calvus not to scorn the speaker’s affection.
33. Before we leave the influence of Catullus 4 on Horace, it is worth noting that the only use of phaselus (-os) in Horace is at C. 3.2.29, where the subject is again an allegorical journey. In his moral progress through life, “Horace” will not “unmoor his barque” (solvat phaselon) with anyone who makes public the rites of Ceres.
In the previous lines he states that he will not allow the same person “under his roof ” (sub isdem / . . . trabibus, 27–28). The metonymy is striking. The same figuration is used by Catullus for the phaselus (4.3) and has already been adopted by Horace at C. 1.1.13 for a boat.
34. On C. 1.22, see Commager 1995, 131–36; Zumwalt 1975; Olstein 1984; G. Davis 1987, 1991, 67–69; Lowrie 1997, 189–94; Hubbard 2000, passim. For detailed treatments of Sappho and Catullus in the background of Horace’s ode, see McCormick 1973; Ancona 2002.
35. At Epi. 1.10.1, Fuscus is styled urbis amatorem. Horace therefore may be wittily asking him, in his mind, to leave Rome and to follow the speaker in his own spiritual journey from the Sabine territory to points remote. Horace is also playing with the name Fuscus, he of the dark skin (see Lee 1975, 39). The reader is helped by the name of the slave fuscus Hydaspes at Sat. 2.8.14. Even though Fuscus is attached to Rome, Horace separates his name by only four lines from the Hydaspes, at C. 1.22.4–8. Perhaps the poem’s addressee should think of himself, as well as his poet friend, as having a connection with India. On Fuscus, see further Harrison 1992, as well as R. Nisbet 1959.
36. On poem 51, see further discussion in Chapters 2 and 3.
37. The whole poem is no. 31 in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. E. Lobel and D. Page (Oxford, 1955). See also D. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1965), 19–33.
38. The influence of Catullus 11 on other odes of Horace deserves separate treatment. Foremost among them are C. 2.6 (and through it C. 2.7), C. 2.17, and, perhaps most richly, C. 3.4, where the poet’s invulnerability also features prominently among his credentials for lecturing Caesar. See note 40 below.
39. The striking use of integer as the poem’s opening word may also be meant to remind the reader of the preceding ode, as the speaker prepares a chorus to hymn Diana and Apollo. The tenerae virgines and pueri who fulfill this duty (C. 1.21.1–2) are in turn a reminder of the puellae et pueri integri (34.2) who actually sing Catullus’s hymn to Diana.
40. Horace makes several other bows to Catullus 11, especially when the theme of travel is paramount. Aestuat unda at C. 2.6.4, for instance, is a clear allusion to the phrase tunditur unda in the same verse of Catullus 11 (see Mendell 1935, 297 n. 3). But perhaps the most interesting, extensive reference back on Horace’s part comes in his longest ode, C. 3.4. There the speaker begins by displaying the credentials that allow him license to offer counsel to Caesar—the core of the poem. He was miraculously free from harm even as a child. Since then the Muses have guaranteed his sacrosanctity, saving him, among other hazards, from death at sea (here Sicula Palinurus unda, 28, are the words that recall tunditur unda). Whatever treacherous journey he might undertake, the Muses will see him safely through (29–36):
utcumque mecum vos eritis, libens
insanientem navita Bosphorum 30
temptabo et urentis harenas
litoris Assyrii viator,
visam Britannos hospitibus feros
et laetum equino sanguine Concanum,
visam pharetratos Gelonos 35
et Scythicum inviolatus amnem.
Whenever you will be with me, as a sailor I will gladly make trial of the raging Bosphorus (30) and, as a traveler by land, the burning sands of the Assyrian shore, scatheless I will view the Britons, fierce to their guests, and the Concanus who delights in the blood of horses, I will view the quivered Geloni (35) and Scythia’s river.
Here the parallels are particularly intense. Catullus’s temptare (14) is altered to temptabo (31), his visens (10) to visam (33, 35); the Britanni are a common presence, while Catullus’s sagittiferos Parthos (the adjective is apparently his coinage) become pharetratos Gelonos. The earlier poet’s quintuple use of sive or seu to begin lines from 2 to 9 is mimicked by Horace’s anaphora of visam and et at the start of lines 33–36. Finally, one Caesar, in Catullus’s line 10, leads to another at the start of Horace’s subsequent stanza.
In the symbolic world with which Horace replaces Catullus’s palpable geography, the literal journey that “Catullus” contemplates in the company of Furius and Aurelius mutates into the imagined itinerary that Horace envisions in the company of the Muses, a journey that proves his invulnerability through prowess of mind. And the vivid words that Catullus’s speaker commands his comrades to convey to Lesbia become Horace’s own discreet moralizing to Octa-vianus Caesar on the restrained uses of power. As so often, Catullan immediacy suffers metamorphosis into Horatian spirituality but serves as its impetus as well.
41. Among the lexical parallels here between the two poems (and poets) is the verb vagor. It is used by Catullus but once (46.7) and by Horace only twice in the Carmina, at C. 1.22.11 and C. 3.14.19.
42. Alcaeus 338 Campbell.
43. Note also that puellae appears in the first line, and digitum in the third, of Catullus’s poem, while the same space separates puellae from digito in C. 1.9.22–24. Horace’s use of repetantur (20) may find its source in Catullus’s appetenti (3). Likewise, Catullus’s malum is at least sonically echoed in male, Horace’s penultimate word.
44. The manuscripts show no division in the thirteen lines, but there has been no uniformity among critics about the final three lines, with some opting for the manuscripts’ continuum, others positing them as part of poem 2 but with the omission of one or more lines, and a third group seeing them as a fragment of a different poem. Reasons for and against unity are given by virtually all commentators. See especially Fordyce 1961; Quinn 1970; and Thomson 1997, ad loc.
45. Catullus’s spectat has no counterpart in Sappho’s original.
46. For the connection between the two poems, see, among others, Quinn 1970 (on Catullus 9.9); Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, on C. 1.36.6; West 1995, 176–79; and the more extended comparison of Syndikus 1972, 325–28.
47. Horace deftly compresses Catullus’s os oculosque (9.9) into oscula (C. 1.36.6).
48. The aloof tone and lack of apostrophe stand out, especially in a poem nominally welcoming back a friend from abroad. Excitement on the part of the speaker and apostrophe to the poem’s addressee are both present in a parallel ode, C. 2.7, on “Horace’s” pleasure at the return of (an unknown) Pompeius, but there the influence of Catullus is more adumbrated than direct.
49. The connection is pointed out, among others, by Fordyce (1961, on 61.34) and West (1995, 180–81). We should also compare the parallel simile at 61.102–6.
50. It is noteworthy that Horace may have gained inspiration for his phrase Cressa . . . pulcra dies nota (10) from Catullus’s description of a day on which Lesbia favors him (lapide illa dies candidiore notat, 68.148), apparently the first appearance of the image. The context happens also to concern an adulterous union where marriage is apparently out of the question.
51. For alloquerer (4) and the importance of dialogue to Catullus, see poem 38 and its double use of allocutio (5, 7).
52. Cf. Horace’s use of the same language in a similar context at C. 4.2.20.
CHAPTER 2: SPEECH AND SILENCE
1. In Chapter 3 I examine in detail how Catullus’s anaphora of the word otium here is drawn upon by Horace at the opening of C. 2.16, by way of seeking the difference between each poet’s treatment of the noun’s meaning. The interconnection will prove to be one of the most visible examples of Horace’s emulation of the earlier poet and of how we read Catullus through him.
2. On the idea of mortality implicit in the phrase lumina nocte, cf. Virgil’s imitation at Aeneid 10.746.
3. We should note, however, the use of vacuam at C. 1.5.10, where the adjective implies a freedom from emotional involvement that also suggests sexual availability.
4. At line 13 I read gaudete, with G and R, instead of gaudente, the emendation of Bergk adopted by Mynors.
5. Horace’s only use of the form salve occurs at C. 1.32.15.
6. For further discussion of Catullus 31, see Chapter 1.
7. This same section of Catullus 68 was also a prime influence on Horace as he wrote C. 3.13. Forms of lympha (68.54, 3.13.16), of rivus (68.58, 3.13.7) and of dulcis (68.61, 3.13.2, each at the beginning of a line) appear in each poem. Prosilit (68.58) becomes desiliunt (3.13.16). Perlucens (68.57) finds its counterpart in splendidior vitro (3.13.1) and viatori lasso in sudore (68.61) in fessis vomere tauris (3.13.11), while the phrase cum gravi . . . agros is reflected in atrox hora Caniculae (3.13.9). For a detailed discussion of the ode, see Chapter 5.
8. Horace may also glean the phrase Musas Veneremque from Catullus 68.10 (muneraque et Musarum hinc petis et Veneris, “and you seek from me the gifts of the Muses and of Venus”), where the conjunction probably serves as a hendiadys for love poetry.
Horace mentions Alcaeus by name on four other occasions in his poetry (C. 2.13.27 and 4.9.7, Epi. 1.19.29 and 2.2.99), and alludes pointedly to him on several other occasions, usually when the poetry of Lesbos is mentioned.
9. In this context, Horace’s use of laborum (14) looks, among other possibilities, ambiguously at the efforts of poetry-making and the trials of love. Cf. the use of labore at Catullus 50.14 (as well as at 31.9 and 11, mentioned above). Certainly the last stanza, while dealing with an abstraction, also abstracts us, but never completely, from the physical exactitude of the previous stanza’s rhetorical journey from Bacchus to Lycus’s hair and eyes. Apostrophe to the lyre draws us away from a concentration on passion, but Horace’s mention of labores leaves us wondering whether the lyre’s lenimen effects the same outcome for him.
10. See discussion in Chapter 1.
11. It is not happenstance that the subsequent ode in the Horatian corpus, C. 1.33, is a spiritual dialogue between poets, in this case between Horace and his addressee, probably the elegist Albius Tibullus. Horace pits lyric, at least his version of lyric, which here offers the detached view of Horatius vacuus on amatory affairs and their innate inconstancy, against the obduracy of Albius’s mournful song.
12. LP/Campbell fr. 342.
13. For details, see Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 227–28 (introduction to commentary on C. 1.18).
14. See Martin 2002, passim.
15. On the erotic connotations of the noun labor, see R. Pichon, Index Verborum Amatorium (Hildesheim, 1966), 180.
16. We think, for instance, of the famous bore of Sat. 1.9 who shares Horace’s walk along the Via Sacra and of whom we learn much, but never his name.
17. See Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, on C. 1.27.17, for the connection, as well as the elaboration of Wray 2001, 153–56. Fitzgerald (1995, 54) notes how the theme of revealing and hiding connects Catullus 6 with its more famous neighbors, 5 and 7.
18. The elimination of any announcement on Horace’s part of the power of his poetry to immortalize is also complementary to its understatement or non-statement.
19. On the complex structure of this jewel of a poem, see Putnam 1969b.
20. See also discussion of poem 76 in Chapter 1.
21. Historia naturalis 14.63.
22. See Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 312–13 (on C. 1.27.5).
23. For Catullus’s last line (hic merus est Thyonianus), see Isidore’s definition of merus (Origines 20.3.3): dicimus cum vinum purum significamus; nam merum dicimus quidquid purum atque sincerum est (“We speak of merus when we refer to unmixed wine, for we call merus whatever is pure and unadulterated”). See also Chapter 4, note 5.
Thyonianus is a nonce word. The closest that Horace comes to it is the rare metronymic Thyoneus (C. 1.17.23), of Bacchus the “Seether,” son of Semele, blasted by Zeus’s fire. This suggests a moment when wine-drinking might get out of hand, something that will not happen when Tyndaris visits the speaker.
24. Cf. the use of deduci at C. 1.37.31, of Caesar’s (failed) attempt to lead Cleopatra in his triumphal procession after the battle of Actium and the fall of Alexandria.
25. Catullus’s use of perenne in juxtaposition to plus uno saeclo may pose a paradox that in fact also allies him with Horace. At De rerum natura 1.118,Catullus’s contemporary, Lucretius, applies the adjective to the foliage that forms Ennius’s poetic crown. Catullus’s humorous self-deprecation and self-limitation in fact harbor hints of the eternal survival that Lucretius bestows on Ennius, and Horace on himself.
26. For this interpretation of Catullus 1, see Rauk 1996–97, especially 324–25. The same tonal ambiguity permeates Catullus’s poem to Cicero, 49.
27. On Epi. 1.19, see also Chapter 3, as well as Dilke 1973; Macleod 1977; Reckford 2002.
28. In an epistle dealing with the tempering of Archilochean diatribe, it is appropriate that the allusion to Catullus 69 center on a poem that combines both epigram and invective. Though 69 is not the first of Catullus’s poems written in elegiac couplets, it initiates the segment of his corpus devoted primarily to short epigram.
The satiric tone of the same poem had already been mitigated by Horace at Epi. 1.6.1, where the opening nil admirari, with its counsel of philosophical restraint, echoes Catullus’s initial noli admirari, part of a more pragmatic admonition.
29. See Oliensis 1995, for an excellent analysis of Epi. 1.20.
CHAPTER 3: HELEN
1. See especially Santirocco 1986, 49–52, for a discussion of salient points of unity among these odes.
2. See Lowrie 1997, 128–35, for a detailed discussion of C. 1.15 in its poetic setting.
3. Phaedrus 243a.
4. For an examination of Horace’s use of the palinode, see Cairns 1978. The testimonia for Stesichorus’s Helen palinodes are collected in Campbell 1991, 92–97. See also Davies 1982.
5. The representation of heat and rain at C. 1.16.11–12 anticipates C. 1.17.3–4, and the mention of Liber at C. 1.16.7, in a context that stresses Bacchus’s negative force, looks ahead to the appearance of Semeleius Thyoneus, which can best be translated as “wild son of Semele who makes people wild,” at C. 1.17.22–23. There are also connections between poems 15 and 17. For example, the form vitabis appears at the beginning of line 18 of each poem.
6. The punning relation between Pan’s Mt. Lycaeus (C. 1.17.2) and the lupos (9) that cannot threaten Horace’s animals may suggest a further link with C. 1.15. There, at 29–30, Paris, pursued by Diomedes, is compared to a deer who has sighted a wolf (lupum), which stands out in its context for replacing the lion in Horace’s Homeric model (Iliad 3.23). Adulterers are menaced in C. 1.15; in C. 1.17, lovers are danger-free. If C. 1.16 is, secondarily, a recusatio of the preceding poem, which associates Helen with the Trojan War, C. 1.17 makes more direct amends by lyricizing Helen and making her song complementary to the odic singer’s own.
7. Cf. Quintilian’s judgment (Institutio oratoria 10.1.62): Stesichorus “sings of the greatest wars and the most famous leaders and on the lyre shoulders the burdens of epic song” (maxima bella et clarissimos canentem duces et epici carminis onera lyra sustinentem).
8. For the repetition, see Wills 1996, 232–33 and n. 24.
9. The first line of C. 1.16 may serve as a link between pastor Paris of C. 1.15 and “Horace” as implicit goatherd in C. 1.17. The rare use of an adjective in both positive and comparative forms in a single line may remind us of the conclusion of Daphnis’s epitaph at Virgil Eclogues 5.44: formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse (“[I], guardian of a beautiful flock, more beautiful myself ”). A possible allusion to Virgilian pastoral not only forges a bond between present and preceding poems, it also adds a touch of humor, which lightens the tone of C. 1.16 and connects it with the several aspects of wit in C. 1.17.
The line is also remarkably close to Plautus Asinaria 614 (quoted by Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, ad loc.): oh melle dulci dulcior tu es (“Oh you are sweeter than sweet honey”). Not only are the rhythms similar, but there is the parallelism between oh and o, melle and matre, dulci and pulcra. If Plautus was on Horace’s mind, then a comic element is also mixed in with iambic become lyric, to further lighten the tone.
10. Ars poetica 79.
11. On Epi. 1.19, see also discussion in Chapter 2.
12. For a detailed examination of poem 36 as a whole, see Wray 2001, 75–80. The connection between poem 36 and C. 1.16 is noted by Santirocco (1986, 195 n. 26).
13. The anthropomorphism by which the iambi are described makes them palpable, quasi-comic self-extensions of this speaker of iambs. I follow the manuscript tradition in reading vestra at line 4.
14. There is also a form of facio in the middle line of each final triad (proficere, 42.23; fias, C. 1.16.27).
15. The words pudica and proba appear together, in reversed order, in a fragment of Afranius (116R) quoted by commentators: proba et pudica quod sum consulo et parco mihi (“Because I am upright and chaste, I take care of and watch out for myself ”). But the order of the adjectives and the second-person apostrophe that they have in common make it clear that direct reference from epode 17 to Catullus 42 is meant (though cf. the demurral of Mankin [1995, ad loc.]).
For further discussion of the connection between the two poems, see Hahn 1939; Fraenkel 1957, 64–65; Lindo 1969; Oliensis 1991; Porter 1995.
16. On the interpretation of the phrase, see Barchiesi 2001, 158.
This is the only occasion where Horace uses a form of perambulo in the future. Catullus’s unique usage in the future opens line 9 of poem 29, written, as is epode 17, in pure iambic trimeters. The poet is lampooning Caesar’s notorious henchman Mamurra: perambulabit omnium cubilia (“He will make his way through the couches of all”). Horace may write astra sidus aureum in a pretense of complimenting Canidia, but the Roman reader would expect, and hear, om-nium cubilia, with all its implications.
17. For a detailed discussion of the possible meanings of the name, see Mankin 1995, on Epodes 17.42–44, and app. 2, 299–301. The connection between Canidia and canis is made, among others, by Oliensis (1991) and Gowers (1993, 188–89).
18. Shame is a major component of Helen’s story. See Austin 1894, passim, and for further details, commentators on Iliad 3.180; Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1988 on Odyssey 4.145 (quoting J. Redfield on the dog as symbol of adultery); West 1978 on Hesiod Works and Days 67. For a general study, see Lilja 1976, esp. 21–22. On pudor, see Kaster 1997.
19. On the conclusion of Catullus 51, see also Chapter 2.
20. The fact that Catullus’s own relationship with Lesbia—a relationship that poem 68 develops in some detail—was adulterous is worth noting in this context.
21. Catullus 63 has also entered Horace’s thoughts when dealing with the feminization of Paris. The only occasion in which Catullus uses a form of the root anhel- is in connection with the emasculated Attis at 63.31 (anhelans). Horace’s unique usage is at the same line number in C. 1.15 where the noun anheli-tus describes the breathing of “soft” (mollis) Paris. As the poem’s first line reminds us, Paris is shepherding on Mt. Ida when he makes his famous judgment, and Ida is the location for Attis’s adventure (63.30, 52, and 70). For mollis and mollitia in Horace, see commentators on Epodes 14.1, e.g., Mankin (1995) and Watson (2003).
22. See Chapter 2.
23. On the name Grosphus, see Nisbet and Hubbard 1978, on C. 2.16.17 (iaculamur).
24. We are reminded of the javelins and arrows of which the sacrosanct poet-lover has no need in C. 1.22.2–3. See above, Chapter 1.
25. Grosphus is addressed in the final lines of C. 2.16 as tibi, te, tibi, te; the speaker as mihi, mihi.
26. Cf. 63.13 (Dindymenae dominae) and 91 (domina Dindymi).
27. Cf. 63.19, where we hear of Attis’s teneris digitis, and 88, where he is directly called tenerum. (I accept the masculine adjective of the manuscript tradition rather than Lachmann’s emendation to teneram. This is the last moment where Attis can be conceived of as both tener and masculine before being herded back into Cybele’s service forever.) Horace’s only mention of Dindymene is at C. 1.16.5.
CHAPTER 4: VIRGIL
1. Cf. Catullus 61.164, of a new husband waiting for his bride. On C. 2.11, see also Chapter 2.
2. See Lewis and Short, A New Latin Dictionary (New York, 1879), s.v. IA.
3. For the connection between C. 4.12 and Catullus 13, see, among others, Rutgers van der Loeff 1936, 112–13; Ferguson 1956, 11–12; Syndikus 1973, 402; Quinn 1980, 320; Clay 2002, 135–36.
4. See Maltby 1991, s.v. mereo.
5. See Maltby 1991, s.v. merum, quoting Isidore (Origines 20.3.3). For the full quotation, see Chapter 2, note 23.
6. See above, Chapter 1, note 8.
7. The origin of the simile lies with Homer (Odyssey 19.518–23), where the nightingale is the mother of Itylus. Since Catullus describes the singer as Daulias, he is most likely referring to Procne, wife of Tereus, who came from Daulis in Phocis. In Ovid’s telling of the tale (Metamorphoses 6.424–674), Procne, mother of Itys, becomes a swallow, her sister, Philomela, the nightingale. I am presuming that Catullus is referring to Procne as a nightingale because of the intensity of her song, with perhaps a nod to Sappho 136LP: “The messenger of spring, the lovely-voiced nightingale.” Horace, however, seems to equate Procne with the swallow, a bird much more associated with spring than the nightingale (see Thompson 1936, 319, and, for C. 4.12 in particular, Putnam 1986, 201 and 204). Virgil Georgics 4.511–15 is also in Horace’s mind.
8. On this point and on C. 4.12 as a whole, see Clay 2002.
9. The most recent critique of C. 1.24 is by Thibodeau (2003).
10. For a study, in a numismatic context, of the language of economics at C. 1.3.5–8, where the vocabulary expands on C. 1.24.11, see Buttrey 1972, 47–48.
11. For other examples of Horace’s dependence on Catullus 68, see above, this chapter, as well as Chapters 2 and 3.
12. See also Chapter 1.
13. Epistles 5.3.6.
14. C. 1.3.16, e.g., looks back at lines 18–21 of Catullus 4, and the use of in-columem at C. 1.3.7 may allude to Catullus’s only use of the adjective, at 9.6, in a poem that tells of receiving back a beloved friend from a journey abroad.
Here and in the discussion that follows, I take Horace’s tone as fully serious. But perhaps its very vigor, largely foreign to the sympathetic “Horace” that attracts readers, is meant to suggest that humor lies not far beneath the surface of the speaker’s seemingly dark stance. It is not hard to imagine Virgil chuckling over, rather than shuddering at, his friend’s apparent gloom.
15. See Chapter 1.
16. Both phrases occur at line endings. These are the only uses in each poet of fines as bounds standing for the territory they embrace. Several of the parallels noted here are listed by Mendell (1935).
17. The use of the same verb (imbuo) at 64.11 not only brings the poem full circle but also implicitly connects the voyage of the Argo with humanity’s moral decline.
18. I follow Horace’s apparent spelling of his heroine’s name.
19. Horace’s only two uses of the noun macies are at C. 1.3.30 and 3.27.53.
20. Poem 64: querellis (130), conquerar (164), questibus (170); C . 3.27.66:querenti. See Mendell 1935.
21. Poem 64.132–33, and cf. 117 and 180; C. 3.27.34–35, 49, 57.
22. Praeda: 64.153; C. 3.27.55. Catullus’s use of dilaceranda at 64.152 is unique (he never uses lacero); two out of Horace’s three uses of lacero are at 3.27.46 and 71.
23. See Lowrie 1997, 310. The description of Europe takes up a full line; Ariadne’s ends 64.197. See also 64.54, 94, 405, and cf. 124 (furentem) and 254 (furebant).
24. For instance, the perfidy that Horace allots to Venus at C. 3.27.66 is a constant theme for Ariadne (see 64.132–33, 174, and cf. 322).
25. We might note the following further parallels: Catullus’s only use of a form of invictus is at 64.204, and Horace’s, in his lyric corpus, is at C. 3.27.73. Catullus employs expallesco (in the phrase expalluit auri) only at 64.100, and never pallesco; Horace has a form of pallesco (in the phrase palluit audax) in his lyric work only here, and never uses expallesco. Forms of the verb carpo appear at 64.310 (of the Fates working their wool) and at C. 3.27.64, where Europe imagines the possibility of woolworking in a servile future.
26. On ancient etymologies of oscen connecting it with bird song and cano, see Maltby 1991, s.v. oscen.
27. C. 1.3.5 and C. 3.27.26 (and cf. C. 1.24.11). The phrase niveum latus (25–26) is a witty reference to Eclogues 6.53, where Virgil uses the words to describe the bull of whom Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and therefore daughter-in-law of Europe, became enamored. Ovid adopts the same language in his telling of the story at Metamorphoses 2.865.
28. Williams (1969, 139, on C. 3.27.53–56) speaks of the poet as “gently mocking his heroine.” Horace may also be burlesquing Attis’s address, in his final moment of sobriety, to his fatherland at Catullus 63.50–73. Its initial verses—patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix, / ego quam miser relinquens (“O fatherland my creator, o fatherland by begetter, whom I now leave in my misery”)—may also lie behind Europe’s opening words: pater—o relictum filiae nomen (“Father—o name of daughter I left behind”).
29. The emphasis on flowers at C. 3.27.29 and 43–44 is standard in epithalamia. Both passages may look back to Catullus. The phrase in pratis studiosa florum draws on Catullus’s complex symbolism at 11.22–23, and recentis carpere flores resembles carptus defloruit (62.43), by which, in Catullus’s second epithalamium, the chorus of virgins describes the bride as an unloved, plucked flower.
CHAPTER 5: GENRES AND A DIALOGUE
1. We note, as did ancient etymologists, the association of Lucina and Luna, names that frame the fourth stanza, with words for light.
The meter of the poem is also closely parallel to that of Catullus’s first epithalamium, 61, with a number of glyconic lines followed by a pherecratean. It, too, starts as a hymn, to the god of marriage.
2. For a detailed examination of the Carmen saeculare, see Putnam 2000, 51–95.
3. Romulus is mentioned at 34.22 and C.s. 47. It is not a coincidence that both lines are also hypermetric.
4. We have mention of the Carmen at C. 4.6.29–44 (directly) and at Epi. 2.1.132–38 (indirectly).
5. Silvarum is repeated in silvis, and virentium finds its associate in viridis; amnium becomes fluviis, and nemorum is also paralleled in silvarum.
6. See Pliny Historia naturalis 36.24.
7. On the relationship of C. 3.22 and Catullus 34, see Henderson 1995, 106–13.
8. With descende, cf. the use of the same imperative to begin C. 3.4, a prayer to the muse Calliope to sing the poet’s song, which also happens to be Horace’s longest ode.
9. Has Horace over time become akin to the languidiora vina (“mellower wine,” 8) that the jug is harboring?
10. See Santirocco 1986, 136–38, for connections between C. 3.21 and 3.22.
11. With exactos, compare the use of exigo at C. 3.30.1; for ictum, see C. 4.6.36, where Diana is the subject.
12. For a more detailed discussion of C. 3.23, see Putnam 2002.
13. Horace’s only use of the adjective pestilens is at C. 3.23.5, and Catullus’s at 26.5. On both occasions, wind, or a wind, is involved. Catullus mentions a villa only in poems 26 and 44. Here, then, a second Catullus poem may be among Horace’s poetic antecedents as well.
14. For further details, see above, Chapter 2, note 7.
15. For C. 1.36, see Chapter 1, and for C. 3.27, Chapter 4.
16. See Nisbet and Hubbard 1978 ad loc., referring to Ensor 1902–3, 108–9.
17. On C. 1.5, see also Chapter 1.
18. The phrase appears first at 91 and is repeated at 92, 96, 106, and 113. Note also that Catullus’s bride is called pulchrior at 61.84 as is Barine at C. 2.8.7.
19. On thieves protected by the darkness of night, cf. Catullus 62.34: nocte latent fures (“thieves lie hidden at night”).
20. For this reading of the poem, see Jones 1971.
21. See also [Tibullus] 3.4.66.
22. Horace may in fact be wishing the fate of Catullus’s unwedded vine upon Chloe, whereby the only eroticism allowed her is self-generated.
23. I have dealt in detail with Catullus 45 and C. 3.9 in Putnam 1977, several paragraphs of which are revised and incorporated here. See also Nielsen 1977.
24. Does she in fact now love him even more than he loves her? See Kroll 1929, 84 (on 45.13).
25. Such a reading, typical of Horatian levitas, is abetted by the poem’s comic elements. The picture of Chloe, literally and figuratively thrown out of the house, has its counterpart in the vision of Septimius face-to-face with a grey-eyed lion.