CHAPTER NINE
Catullus and Callimachus
We do not know for certain the contents of the book that Catullus introduces with a short, dedicatory poem, describing it as “pretty” and “new”:
cui dono lepidum nouum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi.
To whom do I give my pretty new book, freshly polished with dry pumice? To you, Cornelius.
On the face of it, this dedication does not pose many stumbling blocks to interpretation, but with reflection the questions grow. Who is the Cornelius to whom Catullus presents his little book, and why is he a particularly appropriate recipient? What is there about this book that is new and pretty, and does Catullus merely refer to the physical appearance of a brand new papyrus roll? The answers to these other questions, which would surely have occurred to an ancient reader as well, are not immediately deducible from the context. Some answers, such as the identity of the addressee, require a bit of familiarity with the literary culture of the mid-first century bc, for instance the fact that a certain Cornelius Nepos, who hailed from Catullus’ native Cisalpine Gaul, composed a historical work known as the Chronica. Other answers can only emerge more gradually, from the perspective of a profound engagement with Catullus’ writings, which will inevitably draw in other figures from among his literary antecedents and contemporaries.
The book that Catullus offers to Nepos is a libellus, not a full-fledged book, that is, but the diminutive form. The circumstances of the transmission of Catullus’ text do not allow us to know what poems were included in it, but the reader will inevitably notice the emergence of patterns of arrangement, and most modern critics are persuaded that the short poems (1–60), known as the “polymetrics,” formed a single collection, whether as a separate book or one part of a larger collection (Wiseman 1969: 1–31). This grouping of poems on diverse themes, like the collection of epigrams (69–116), recalls the practice of Greek poets of the Hellenistic period, and is particularly associated with the name of Callimachus of Cyrene, active in Alexandria in the third century bc. The diminutive form of libellus will also come to be familiar to readers, as this linguistic usage is characteristic of Catullus’ verbal style (Ross 1969: 22–6), but the associations that it evokes, both in its colloquial tone and in its depreciative effect in calling this a “little book,” emerge upon closer engagement with Catullus’ contemporaries. And again, the name of Callimachus comes into play. That the book is new will not surprise in this setting, but again as the reader moves further into the Catullan corpus the idea of “novelty” in a poetic context will take on other associations. And finally, while lepidus and related terms will be found to have prominence in what one might call Catullan ethics, they will also be found to carry an aesthetic charge. In each instance the reader will be challenged to look beyond the text of Catullus to intertexts among contemporary Roman and Greek poets, but more particularly to the works of the Greek poets of the Hellenistic period who transformed the world of letters two centuries earlier.
Callimachus
Callimachus was not only the most influential poet in the Greek world of the third century bc, he was one of the age’s most compelling intellects. His writings can be dated roughly from 285 to 245 bc, although these dates are only approximate and his literary career may well have begun earlier than this. What little we know, or think we know, of his life is derived primarily from inferences drawn from his poetry and the biography contained in the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (Test. 1 Pf.). Although his family originated in Cyrene, he spent much of his life in Egypt at Alexandria, where he worked in the great Museum and its Library. He never headed the Library, but he was intimately connected with it and was known at the court of the Ptolemies, where he may have served in his youth as a royal page (Cameron 1995: 1–11). Much of his most influential poetry celebrates members of the dynasty.
According to the Suda Callimachus authored more than 800 books (i.e., papyrus rolls) in poetry and prose, of which the following is a partial list (Test. 1 Pf.):
The Coming of Io; Semele; Founding of Argos; Arcadia; Glaukos; Hopes; satyric dramas; tragedies; comedies; lyric poems; Ibis…; Museum; Pinakes of the Illustrious in Every Branch of Literature and of What they Wrote, in 120 books; Pinax and Register of the Dramatic Poets Arranged Chronologically from the Beginning; Pinax of the Glosses and Compositions of Democrates; Names of Months According to Tribe and Cities; Foundations of Islands and Cities and their Changes of Name; On the Rivers of Europe; On Marvels and Curiosities in the Peloponnesos and Italy; On Changes of Names of Fish; On Winds; On Birds; On the Rivers of the Inhabited World; Collection of Wonders of the Entire World According to their Locations.
What emerges from the bare essentials of his biography is a portrait of a polymathic scholar with an extraordinary range of interests. These scholarly interests inform his poetry as much as – some would say more than – the divine inspiration of the Muse, and it is one of the features of his poetry that modern readers find most difficult to appreciate. As W. Clausen once observed (1982: 182), “it is impossible to read much of Callimachus…without being impressed, or depressed, by his multifarious learning.”
Callimachus’ most famous work of poetry was the Aetia, which more than any of his other works, more so indeed than any other single work of Greek literature after Homer, impressed itself upon the minds of the Roman poets of the first century bc. The work no longer survives intact and until the twentieth century it had to be reconstructed from scattered quotations in other ancient authors. Papyrus finds in the last century have significantly increased our understanding of the poem’s composition, narrative content, and style. There is general agreement about the basic outlines of the Aetia, which was composed in two parts. At the beginning of the poem (fr. 2 Pf.), Callimachus imagined himself transported in a dream from Alexandria to Mount Helicon in Greece, the place where Hesiod famously encountered the Muses while herding his sheep (Theog. 22–34). There Callimachus engages in a lively question-and-answer session with the Muses as he asks about the origins of rituals and numerous other topics. The answers that he receives from them form the etiology that gives the work its title. This structure was not carried over to Books 3 and 4, which were probably composed later and added to the original two-book version. In these last two books etiological stories are straightforwardly juxtaposed and we do not know how Callimachus endowed this part of his point with narrative unity, or if he did so at all.
Beyond this general outline, there is considerable controversy over many of the details of the Aetia, particularly concerning the Prologue to the work (fr. 1 Pf.), in which Callimachus addresses his critics, whom he refers to as “Telchines,” a mythical race of troglodytes dwelling on the island of Rhodes. This important programmatic statement is open to conflicting interpretations both because of the fragmentary state of the text and because of the cryptic terms in which Callimachus states the fundamental premises of his approach to poetry (fr. 1.1–6 Pf.):
[Often] the Telchines mutter at my song, ignorant as they are and no friends of the Muse, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem on [the deeds] of kings or heroes [of old] in many thousands of lines, but instead like a child [steer] my poetry into a small compass, though the decades of my years are not few.
This opposition between two types of poetry, the long and turgid versus the short and refined, is a consistent theme throughout the Prologue. The device of contrasting one with the other is reproduced with concrete examples in an important passage, where Callimachus refers to two predecessors in the genre of elegy, one the much earlier Mimnermus, the other his near-contemporary Philetas. Unfortunately, the papyrus that preserves this text is damaged at key points; addressing his critics, the Telchines, Callimachus asserts (fr. 1.9–12): “[…] of a few lines; but bountiful Demeter by far outweighs the big [lady?]. And [of his] two [works], not the big woman, but the small-scale [verses] teach us that Mimnermus is sweet.” The interpretation of these lines is much disputed and the brackets indicate how speculative is the reconstruction of text, but an ancient commentary on these lines that is also preserved on papyrus probably points in the right direction in explaining that a long poem by Philetas is being compared unfavorably with a shorter work known as the “Demeter.” Likewise, a longer poem by Mimnermus, identified as “the big woman,” is being unfavorably contrasted with his shorter poems (Cameron 1995: 307–9).
Sixty-three epigrams attributed to Callimachus are preserved in the Palatine Anthology, and surviving fragments (frr. 393–402 Pf.) suggest that he wrote many more. The selection preserved in the Anthology covers a wide range of topics, including erotic, sympotic, funerary, and dedicatory. In many epigrams literary themes are intertwined with the personal, most notably in a poem that makes a connection between the poet’s erotic interest in a handsome youth and his tastes in literature (Epigr. 28 Pf.):
I loathe the Cyclic poem, nor do I like
the road that carries many to and fro;
I also hate a gadabout lover, nor do I drink
from the fountain: I detest all common things.
Lysanias, you are so, so handsome – but before I get
the words out clearly, Echo says “he’s another’s.”
The first four lines of the poem have often been read as a separate statement of Callimachus’ poetic creed, but it is important to consider his programmatic pronouncements in their entire context: that is how Catullus and the Roman poets read them, however they may have adapted their readings to their own purposes. This is an erotic poem, in which Callimachus first lists four things he does not like, while in the last couplet he describes what he does like, the boy Lysanias. The final twist comes in the last line when it turns out that he cannot have what he likes after all (Cameron 1995: 387–402). The Cyclic poems that he does not like and the imagery of the crowded road echo themes raised in the Aetia Prologue, but they are adapted here to the amatory purposes of the epigram. For his association of his personal affairs and Lesbia with literary values, Catullus found an influential precedent in Callimachus.
Callimachus’ antipathy to long poetry on heroic themes has sometimes been considered at odds with his other major narrative work, a hexameter poem of more than a thousand lines known as the Hecale. It is usually classed by scholars as an “epyllion,” a modern critical term used to describe a wide range of poems from the Hellenistic period to Roman times containing narrative of less than epic proportions. Although the term is not ancient (W. Allen 1940), it serves a practical utility in discussing the common characteristics of a number of Hellenistic works, some largely lost, such as Callimachus’ Hecale or the Hermes of Eratosthenes, others such as Theocritus’ Idylls 13 (“Hylas”) or 24 (“Heracliscus”) surviving but differing considerably in scale (Hollis 1990: 23–6). Although the Hecale survived the wreck of ancient literature only in papyrus scraps and later quotations, from the reputation it enjoyed in antiquity it is clear that, for most later Greek and Roman writers, this poem provided the prototype for the short narrative poem. It recounts the story of Theseus’ defeat of the great bull that was ravaging the countryside around Marathon. But the most prominent feature of Callimachus’ narrative was not the actual heroic feat: most of the poem told of his visit with an old peasant woman from whom the poem takes its title. Theseus rests overnight in her hut when he seeks shelter from a sudden rainstorm. Much of the poem seems to have been taken up with their conversation and her hospitality to the hero, and although most of this part of the Hecale has been lost, some appreciation of its characteristics may be gleaned from Ovid’s imitation in his description of the visit by Jupiter and Mercury to the peasant home of Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.624–724). A key trait that this poem shares with Catullus, as we shall see, is a narrative focus that deviates from the ostensible theme of the poem.
Papyrus discoveries have also restored some portions of a collection of 13 poems in iambic meters apparently designed as a coherent collection (Kerkhecker 1999: 271–95). The first of the Iambi represents the figure of Hipponax, the sixth-century poet who, together with Archilochus, was most closely identified with the origins of the genre. Hipponax returns from the dead to lecture the philologists of the Museum in Alexandria, warning them against envy. The collection is a miscellany, with invective playing a reduced role and including poems on a variety of topics, among them fable, epinician, and ecphrasis. In the framing poem (13), Callimachus again invokes Hipponax in defending himself against criticisms for writing in a variety of forms (polyeideia). In a central passage, he denies that there is a “one poet, one genre rule” (fr. 203.30–4 Pf.): “who said…you compose pentameters, you the heroic, it is your lot from the gods to compose tragedy? In my opinion, no one.…” Callimachus has softened the invective tone of iambic poetry to include a wider range of admonitory discourse, and adapted it to literary programmatic purposes in defense of a more sophisticated approach to literary genre (Acosta-Hughes 2002: 82–9).
Six hymns survive in a medieval manuscript tradition, reviving the traditional form of the Homeric hymns. It is a matter of dispute whether these hymns actually formed part of a ritual performance (Cameron 1995: 63–7) or, as most critics believe, were entirely literary creations designed to create the illusion of a performance. The Hymn to Apollo (2) concludes with another important programmatic statement that strikes many of the same notes already heard in the Aetia, the Epigrams, and the Iambi (105–13):
Envy spoke secretly in Apollo’s ear: “I do not admire the poet who does not sing like the sea.” Apollo gave Envy a kick and said: “Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but it carries much filth and refuse in its water. The bees do not bring water from everywhere to Demeter, but only the pure and undefiled stream that rises up from a holy spring, the supremely best.” Hail, lord; but let Blame go where Envy dwells.
Many critics have seen in this passage a further statement of Callimachus’ antipathy to narrative epic, including even Homeric epic (F. Williams 1978: 85–9). The passage closely parallels the Aetia Prologue in its denunciation of the big and crude, but it also serves a function within the hymn in cutting short what the poet had promised would be a performance of the god’s virtues that would last for days. Callimachus’ pronouncements on literary values were enormously influential, both among his contemporaries and eventually at Rome; but they are never cut-and-dried statements to be taken as prescriptive. Catullus and Callimachus’ other readers at Rome for the most part knew how to read his works in context and adapted his aesthetics to their own.
Callimachus in Rome
From its beginnings in the third century bc, Roman literature was, in the strictest sense of the term, derivative: the earliest poets writing in Latin took their bearings from the dramatic and narrative poetic traditions of Greece. Indeed, the most important of these poets, Livius Andronicus and Ennius, were themselves Greek, and the Latin literary culture that they initiated was, in many respects, an extension of the Greek (Mayer 1995). Roman writers in every genre, with the exception only of satire, saw themselves as carrying on a live tradition extending back to the authors of the Greek canon. The earliest works of Latin poetry were translations and adaptations of Greek masterpieces, like Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey and Plautus’ adaptations of Greek New Comedy. Indeed, Ennius portrayed himself, and in turn was viewed by later generations, as another Homer (Ann. 3–11 Sk. Skutsch 1985: 147–67). And Terence was seen by later critics as a “knock-off ” (dimidiate, Caes. fr. 1 Blänsdorf ) of Menander. But the role of Callimachus in Latin poetry was somewhat different from these classic models, and it was Catullus who was largely responsible for his disproportionate influence on succeeding generations of Roman poets.
To be sure, Callimachus was not unknown in Rome before the 50s bc. Ennius certainly knew enough of his Aetia to allude to the famous dream at the beginning of his Annals (Skutsch 1985: 147–50), although the extent to which it influenced his approach to poetry is difficult to gauge because of its fragmentary state. We know even less about the composition of Ennius’ Saturae and so it is impossible to evaluate how much the origins of the quintessentially Roman genre of satire might owe to Callimachus’ reconfiguration of iambic poetry. The same observations apply to the Satires of Lucilius later in the second century bc (Puelma-Piwonka 1949). An adaptation of one of Callimachus’ epigrams (41 Pf.; Courtney 1993: 75–6) by Lutatius Catulus (cos. 102 bc) is an indication of the reading interests of the cultured Roman elite of this period, rather than of a literary movement taking its inspiration from Callimachus. Catulus was a learned man, a respected orator, and the friend of Greek poets such as Archias and Antipater of Sidon. When the next generation adapted Callimachean poetics, there was now a readership capable of recognizing it. The intense engagement with Callimachus that begins in the generation of Catullus has often been attributed to an external stimulus associated with the contemporary Greek poet Parthenius of Nicaea. Parthenius was brought to Rome in the late 70s or early 60s bc, probably by the poet Cinna or a close relation (Lightfoot 1999: 9–16). Almost every aspect of Parthenius’ relations with Cinna, Catullus, Gallus, and the “neoterics” is disputed, but the cumulative weight of the abundant circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that, while he may not have played the dramatic role sometimes ascribed to him (Clausen 1964), Parthenius was clearly heavily implicated in the increasingly sophisticated engagement of Catullus and his contemporaries with the poetry of the Hellenistic world (Lightfoot 1999: 50–76). Callimachus was “the chief classic of an unclassical art,” as one of the greatest critics of Hellenistic poetry referred to him (Wilamowitz 1924: I.170), and it was inevitable that as the Romans came to know the works of Parthenius, now present in Rome, and the corpus of Hellenistic epigrams recently assembled by Meleager of Gadara (Gow and Page 1965), they would also want to know more about the inspirational source of this poetry in his works.
Callimachus in the Polymetrics and Epigrams: Callimachean Poetics
The dedication poem at the head of Catullus’ surviving works evokes a literary and social background, establishing the tone in which the following poems might be read:
cui dono lepidum nouum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas
iam tum, cum ausus es unus Italorum
omne aeuum tribus explicare cartis
doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis.
quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
qualecumque; quod, <o> patrona uirgo,
plus uno maneat perenne saeclo.
To whom do I give my pretty new book, freshly polished with dry pumice? To you, Cornelius, for you already thought my that my trifles were of some value when you, the only one among the Italians, dared to unfold the whole of history in three rolls, learned ones, by Jupiter, and laborious. So have for yours, this trifle of a book, such as it is; and may it, o patron Muse, last more than one age.
The poem is addressed to the polymath Cornelius Nepos, some fifteen to twenty years Catullus’ senior, with a question and response in the same manner as the opening poem of the nearly contemporary collection of Greek epigrams prepared by Meleager of Gadara (Anth. Pal. 4.1.1– 4; Gow and Page 1965: II.593–7). The physical description of the book, which some commentators have taken to refer only literally to its outward appearance (Kroll 1968; Fordyce 1961), is now generally recognized as programmatically reflecting the qualities of the poetry (see Batstone, this volume, p. 236). It is likely that Catullus’ first readers might have recognized a good deal more of the associations established in this brief proem to the collection, but even against the loss of so much contemporary Latin poetry, as well as Hellenistic antecedents, the literary affiliations declared by Catullus resonate for modern readers. In particular, the role of Callimachus as a formative influence on Catullan aesthetics is clear (Elder 1966). In lepidus the reader may well detect a phonetic, as well as a semantic, echo of the adjective leptós / leptaléos “slender” (Wiseman 1979: 169–70), used to distinctive effect by Callimachus in the Aetia Prologue in describing Apollo’s injunction to him “to keep your Muse thin.” The connotations of lepidum “charming, pretty” and nouum “new, fresh” suggest the qualities espoused in Callimachus’ poetics, not to follow the beaten track. This, too, is reflected in the book, not a liber, but the diminutive libellus, a small book that exemplifies the self-depreciation of the poet who was admonished to nurture a slender Muse. For a Roman reader, who would be literate in Greek as well, this background is further underscored in the precocious feminine form arida in the following line, modifying pumice, which is elsewhere always masculine. Such variations of gender are found elsewhere in Latin poetry, often to draw attention to Greek models (Wiseman 1979: 167–8); in this case, Catullus performs the gender switch to recognize that the Greek for pumice is kísêris (f.). Thus the polish applied to his roll is, in a sense, Greek, and the verbal markers in the descriptive terms point to Callimachean aesthetics.
In poem 95, Catullus treats poetic quality by contrasting the short epic Zmyrna of his friend Helvius Cinna with two long poems by other poets; one identified as Hortensius, perhaps identical with the addressee of c. 65, the other as Volusius, whose Annales were the target of a hendecasyllabic squib in c. 36:
Smyrna mei Cinnae nonam post denique messem
quam coepta est nonamque edita post hiemem,
milia cum interea quingenta Hortensius uno
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Smyrna cauas Satrachi penitus mittetur ad undas,
Smyrnam cana diu saecula peruoluent.
at Volusi annales Paduam morientur ad ipsam
et laxas scombris saepe dabunt tunicas.
My Cinna’s Zmyrna is finally out, nine summers and nine winters after it was begun, while in the meantime Hortensius…five hundred thousand…in one…Zmyrna will be sent all the way to the hollow waves of Satrachus, the grey centuries will long peruse Zmyrna. But Volusius’ Annals will perish at Padua itself, and often will provide loose wraps for mackerel.
Catullus formulates his aesthetics in concrete terms by setting good poetry against bad (Syndikus 1987: 83– 4), by comparing the short narrative poem by Cinna with the presumably much longer Annales of Volusius, who came from Hatria in the region of Padua (Solodow 1987). In this he clearly evokes the difficult passage in the Aetia Prologue (fr. 1.9–12 Pf.), where Callimachus describes his poetics by contrasting the short (good) poems of Philitas and Mimnermus with their longer (bad) works. Catullus incorporates this contrastive manner with another characteristically Hellenistic form, the encomiastic epigram in praise of an admired author. Callimachus had written a brief, aesthetically charged epigram praising the Phaenomena of his near-contemporary Aratus (Epigr. 27 Pf.):
The song is Hesiod’s in theme and style, but it isn’t
Hesiod to the last drop: No, the man of Soloi
has skimmed the sweetness and left the rest. Hail,
delicate discourses, token of Aratus’ vigilance.
Key terms in characterizing Aratus’ poetry are leptaí “delicate,” echoing Apollo’s injunction to Callimachus in the Aetia Prologue and an important term for Aratus as well (Kidd 1997: 445–6), and agrupníē “vigilance,” denoting the intense care needed in producing poetry up to Callimachus’ standards.
Little survives of the poetry of C. Helvius Cinna, but from the fragments and testimonia (Courtney 1993: 212–24), we may gauge some sense of his importance for contemporaries, which extended into the next generations as well (Vergil Ecl. 9.35). Cinna was closely associated with the contemporary Greek poet Parthenius, whom he brought to Rome as a captive, probably after the Mithridatic war in 66 bc. Some scholars have seen Parthenius as a pivotal figure in the dissemination of Callimachean poetry to Rome, because of his own very clear Callimachean affiliations (Clausen 1964). While this may be to attribute too much significance to a single person, it is likely that he was largely influential with Cinna. The poem to which Catullus alludes told the story of the story of Smyrna (also known as Myrrha or Zmyrna), the daughter of Cinyras, king of Cyprus, who conceived an uncontrollable passion for her father. The offspring of their incestuous union was Adonis, Aphrodite’s lover. The poem was notorious for its obscurity (Courtney 1993: 219–20) and its sexual content (Ov. Tr. 2.435). Something of the poem’s manner and thematic disposition can probably be inferred from the pseudo-Vergilian Ciris, which may have borrowed passages from it (Lyne 1978a: 39– 45) and Ovid’s retelling of the story in the Metamorphoses (10.298–502). In its focus on a somewhat obscure myth and the stylistic elaboration implied in the long period of composition, Cinna’s Zmyrna exemplifies the Callimachean aesthetic embraced by Catullus and his contemporaries: stylistic refinement coupled with narrative innovation.
Catullus does not only draw on Callimachus in programmatic statements within the shorter poems; his embrace of Callimachean aesthetics is integrated into the subject matter of the polymetrics and epigrams, including poems that strike the modern reader as most personal and intense in dealing with Lesbia. In this respect it is possible to trace a more intense engagement with Callimachean resources than is found in the earlier reception by the likes of Lutatius Catulus, who adapted one of Callimachus’ erotic epigrams a generation earlier (Ross 1969: 152–3). In a well-known epigram, Callimachus light-heartedly describes his wandering affections (Epigr. 41 Pf.):
Half my soul still breathes, but the other half, I don’t know
if it’s Love or Death that’s taken it: only it’s gone.
Is it off again to one of the boys? And yet I told them
many times, “Young men, don’t take in that runaway.”
Help me to look for it, for I’m sure of one thing: somewhere,
love-sick, that good for nothing is hanging about.
Catulus’ adaptation is in many ways characteristic of Roman translation, importing themes that are then turned into a more personal framework. Where Callimachus’ epigram is playful, turning on the intellectual conceit of his soul’s splitting, Catulus focuses on the more concrete image of the runaway slave (fr. 1; Courtney 1993: 75–6):
aufugit mi animus; credo, ut solet, ad Theotimum
deuenit. sic est; perfugium illud habet.
quid si non interdixem ne illunc fugituum
mitteret ad se intro, sed magis eiceret?
ibimus quaesitum. uerum, ne ipsi teneamur,
formido. quid ago? da, Venus, consilium.
My soul has run away; to Theotimus, I think, as usual, it has fled. So it is: it always has him as sanctuary. It’s not as if I hadn’t forbidden him to admit that runaway to his home, but to throw him out. We shall go in search. But I’m afraid we’ll be caught as well. What to do? Venus, advise.
With Catulus’ epigram we have a sense that real emotions are at stake, signaled at a minimum by the foregrounding of the love interest’s name, Theotimus. No equivalent is found in Callimachus’ poem, unless a name is concealed there by textual difficulties. In the process of adaptation, however, the stylistic balance of Callimachus’ epigram is sacrificed for “a series of brief, jerky utterances” (Courtney 1993: 76). When Catullus translates one of Callimachus’ erotic epigrams, however, a feel for maintaining the stylistic focus is evident (70):
Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.
My woman says that she prefers to wed no one other than me, not if Jupiter himself should ask her. So she says, but what a woman says to an eager lover should be written on wind and running water.
Catullus’ skeptical reflections on Lesbia’s sincerity are rendered in an idiom derived from Callimachus’ ironic epigram on the fickle lover (Epigr. 25 Pf.):
Kallignotos swore to Ionis he would never love
anyone, male or female, more than her.
He swore, but it’s true, what they say: the vows
of lovers never reach the ears of the gods.
Now he burns for a boy, and the poor girl
(as they also say) is out in the cold.
While condensing and otherwise intensifying the sentiments in transferring the theme to Lesbia, Catullus preserves the smoothness and balance of the Callimachean original (Syndikus 1987: 4). The repeated dicit underscores the disillusionment, recovering the effect of Callimachus’ repeated “he swore” (ômose[n]), which in the original is in the emphatic opening position in each of the first two couplets. Catullus’ poem begins with the emotionally charged nulli, and eliminates Callimachus’ last couplet, which comes as something of an intellectual cap, but an emotional anti-climax. The interplay of stylistic elegance and emotional complexity is at the heart of Catullus’ shorter verse. Simple themes are expressed in extravagant language, while complex emotions might be condensed in the simplest language (odi et amo…), an aesthetic that he learned from Callimachus and imported, with appropriate and original modifications, into Latin verse.
Catullus and the Aetia
Catullus’ most conspicuous engagement with the heritage of Callimachus is found in the closely linked pair of poems 65 and 66. The first poem takes the form of a dedicatory address to a friend identified as Q. Hortensius Hortalus, a famous orator and early rival of Cicero’s who was by the time of this poem’s writing largely retired from the public scene (W. J. Tatum 1997: 488–97), but was still recognized as a literary figure sympathetic to the poetics of the new generation (Courtney 1993: 230–2). The poem is Catullus’ response to Hortensius’ request (65.17–18), whether for the specific poem that follows or simply for a specimen of verse we cannot say. In reply, Catullus writes that even though he is overwhelmed by grief at his brother’s death, he is sending Hortensius “these translated verses of Battus’ son” (haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae, 16). What follows in poem 66 was recognized as long ago as the fifteenth century by Angelo Poliziano as a Latin translation of a work by Callimachus; only in the twentieth century, however, did the recovery of substantial fragments of the original in papyri make possible some assessment of the relationship of Catullus’ version to the Greek original (Bing 1997). Callimachus’ poem, known familiarly as “The Lock of Berenice,” is the last narrative in the fourth book of the Aetia, although many scholars hold that it was originally produced as a separate poem and only later incorporated into the expanded Aetia (Pfeiffer 1953: xxxvii).
The subject of Callimachus’ poem makes for an unusual Latin work. The original was composed to celebrate Berenice, the young queen of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who succeeded to the throne of Egypt in 247 bc. Shortly after their marriage he departed for the wars in Syria and Berenice dedicated to the gods a lock of her hair for his safe return. When the lock disappeared the astronomer Conon identified it in a group of stars located between Leo, Virgo and the Bear. The catasterism (new constellation) thus forms the subject of an elegant piece of court poetry, which Catullus translates into correspondingly elegant Latin. The opening of the poem is devoted to the earthly events that form the background to the lock’s elevation; the second half provides a hair’s-eye view of its translation to the heavens, allowing the lock to express its own feelings about this state of affairs. It is in this part of Catullus’ poem that we are best able to compare his version with the Callimachean original, and critics differ on the effects Catullus has achieved.
A much discussed example occurs at a point where the lock laments that it will no longer be able to partake of Berenice’s exquisite hair ointments (Callim. fr. 110.75–6 Pf.):
“I am not brought pleasure by my being a star so much as I am brought distress that I shall not any more touch Berenice’s head, from which I drank, when she was still a maiden, many ordinary oils and did not taste womanly perfumes.”
In part because of the poor transmission of the text, Catullus’ rendition was scarcely interpretable before the discovery of the papyrus (66.75–8):
non his tam laetor rebus quam me afore semper,
afore me a dominae uertice discrucior,
quicum ego, dum uirgo quondam fuit, omnibus expers
unguentis, una uilia multa bibi.
“I do not so much rejoice at these things as I grieve that I shall always be parted, always be parted from my mistress’ head, with which, while she was formerly a maiden, not enjoying perfumes, I drank many frugal scents.”
In substituting dominae “mistress” for Callimachus’ neutral “that one’s” (ekeínês), Catullus highlights the opposition between the experiences of the maiden and the adult woman. For some critics this is part of an overall strategy in this poem and the introductory epistle to Hortensius to inject more pathos into the experience of the lock, drawing on themes of separation and disillusionment found elsewhere in Catullus in depictions of his relationship with his brother (Clausen 1970). Others find in Catullus’ version a more faithful rendition of Callimachean burlesque in the disharmony between the lock’s passionate discourse and the humorous content (Hutchinson 1988: 322– 4). The question assumes some importance because of two issues of direct relevance to Catullan intertextuality and its reception by later Roman poets.
The first arises with 10 lines in Catullus’ poem that were clearly not present in the papyrus fragment of Callimachus. In this passage Catullus instructs all wives to make an offering of ointments prior to marriage (79–88):
nunc uos, optato quas iunxit lumine taeda,
non prius unanimis corpora coniugibus
tradite nudantes reiecta ueste papillas,
quam iucunda mihi munera libet onyx,
uester onyx, casto colitis quae iura cubili.
sed quae se impuro dedit adulterio,
illius a mala dona leuis bibat irrita puluis:
namque ego ab indignis praemia nulla peto.
sed magis, o nuptae, semper concordia uestras,
semper amor sedes incolat assiduus.
Now you, whom with its longed-for light the marriage torch has joined, do not first hand over your bodies to your harmonious spouses, baring your breasts with opened robe, before the perfume jar offers me pleasant gifts, the jar that belongs to you who observe the laws in a chaste bed. But she who has given herself to impure adultery, ah, let the light dust drink up her wicked gifts and nullify them: for I seek no rewards from the unworthy. But rather, o brides, always may harmony, always may love dwell continually in your homes.
No trace of these lines is to be found in the papyrus that preserves this part of Callimachus’ Coma, and for a long time most scholars subscribed to the hypothesis that Catullus is following a different version of the Coma, which Callimachus integrated into the Aetia (Pfeiffer 1949: ad fr. 110.79–88). In recent years, however, most critics, but by no means all (e.g., Hollis 1992; Marinone 1997: 41–9), have pursued a different explanation of these lines as an addition to the original by Catullus (Putnam 1960; Hutchinson 1988: 322– 4). Some critics have interpreted this insertion as one way in which Catullus introduces his personal signature on this translation, by infusing the poem with images of separation and the intense feelings that accompany it (Clausen 1970: 90– 4). Others make more restrained claims for this innovation, with the solemn language addressed to the brides marking a contrast with the fanciful situation that “makes the interplay with the fantasy the more preposterous” (Hutchinson 1988: 323).
Our reading of this insertion has some bearing on the interpretation of another couplet, which presents a celebrated crux in Vergil’s reception of Catullus (and Callimachus). Earlier in the poem the lock proclaimed its reluctance to be separated from Berenice (39–40):
inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi,
inuita: adiuro teque tuumque caput.
“Unwillingly, O queen, I left your crown, unwillingly, I swear by you and by your head.”
Only a part of the pentameter survives from Callimachus’ poem: “I swear by your head and by your life” (fr. 110.40 Pf.). We cannot tell whether the pathetic repetition of inuita represents something of the Callimachean original, although it is been persuasively argued that this kind of rhetorical intensification is more likely to be a Catullan innovation (Clausen 1970: 91–2). It may then follow that here Catullus may be read as interpreting his model by injecting a stronger emotional element that evokes the images of youthful separation, drawing on such familiar themes in, for example, the poetry of Sappho (Vox 2000). Some critics would counter that Catullus has simply reproduced and at best exaggerated the element of playfulness in the original Coma. The question then arises: how did Vergil read this passage? For in a context of presumed seriousness, Aeneas’ encounter with Dido in the Underworld, his hero quotes from Catullus, inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi (“unwillingly, queen, I left your shore,” Aen. 6.460), substituting “shore” for “head” with only a slight further change to accommodate Aeneas’ masculine gender. Commentators on the two passages take a variety of positions on the significance of this obvious imitation. Some (e.g., Norden 1957: 254) merely note the echo without comment on its possible interpretative consequences; others (e.g., Fordyce 1961: 334) insist that Vergil’s attribution to Aeneas of a near-quotation of a talking lock of hair can only be unconscious; while others (e.g., Austin 1977: 164) recognize that the allusion is deliberate and see it as part of Vergil’s ability to elevate even the trivial to his grander purposes. More recently, some critics (e.g., Clausen 1970) have interpreted Catullus’ Coma on a higher plane, not inconsistent with the serious theme of Aeneas’ separation from Dido. It may just be possible that all of this is beside the point, and that in alluding to Catullus’ adaptation of Callimachus, Vergil refers to both the proximate (Catullus) and more remote (Callimachus) models. It may then be the case that Vergil’s reader, like Dido, may respond to Aeneas’ rhetorical strategy of quoting from Callimachus’ court poem by wondering if this is the best he can do.
Catullus and the Iambi
The final poem in Catullus’ corpus as it has come down to us (116) opens with an explicit reference to Callimachus:
saepe tibi studioso animo uenante requirens
carmina uti possem mittere Battiadae,
qui te lenirem nobis, neu conarere
tela infesta meum mittere in usque caput,
hunc uideo mihi nunc frustra sumptum esse laborem,
Gelli, nec nostras hic ualuisse preces.
contra nos tela ista tua euitabimus acta:
at fixus nostris tu dabis supplicium.
Often with my mind earnestly hunting I sought how I might send you poems of the Battiad, that I might soften you towards me and you might not try to land deadly shafts upon my head. But I now see that I have undertaken this toil in vain, Gellius, and that my prayers have not availed in this matter. I shall evade those shafts of yours launched against me; but you shall be pierced by mine and pay the penalty.
The reference to “poems of the Battiad” recalls the poem addressed to Hortensius (65), which is the first in elegiacs in the collection. Whether this placement is deliberate, as it seems, and whether this was the work of the poet or an editor are a matter of speculation. This poem has generally been read as an opening shot in Catullus’ vituperative relationship with Gellius, who is lampooned in several epigrams (74, 80, 88–91), but that it makes an important statement about Catullus’ relationship with Callimachus has only lately been the focus of critical inquiry. Allusion to Callimachus is signaled by the opening word of the first couplet, in which he is also named. That the lost first word of the Aetia was polláki “often” has only recently been established (Pontani 1999), opening the door to recognizing the Aetia Prologue as an active intertext here (Barchiesi 2005: 333–6). Catullus thus signals the programmatic purpose of the poem in contrasting one kind of poetry (carmina… Battiadae), which he cannot write, with another associated with the invective of archaic iambic (tela infesta). Callimachus himself had notably attempted a renovated form of iambic verse, one that was distinguished from Hipponactean iambus, by toning down the note of personal invective, scoring hits in “a devious and urbane manner” (Macleod 1973: 306). The opening iambus in his collection makes the point by having Hipponax himself return from the dead and announce a form of iambic verse that does not torment his opponent Bupalos (fr. 191.1– 4 Pf.):
Listen to Hipponax. For indeed I have come from the place where they sell an ox for a penny, bearing an iambus which does not sing of the Bupalean battle.…
This form of iambus is characterized by the familiar Callimachean values of refinement, as Catullus hints at in describing the great concentration (studioso animo uenante) and effort (laborem) involved in composition (Syndikus 1987: 144). Catullus composed 12 poems in iambic meters (4, 8, 22, 25, 29, 31, 37, 39, 44, 52, 59, 60), but there is little in these poems to suggest an association with archaic iambos; rather, it is a Callimachean background that is evoked (Heyworth 2001: 117–25). The turn to invective announced in the final line thus treats iambos in terms of tone and content rather than meter.
This accounts for the exceptional circumstance that Catullus only uses the word iambus in his hendecasyllabics, in cc. 36, 40, 54, and fragment 3 (Heyworth 2001: 125). In giving the term a wider generic application Catullus stretches ancient definitions of genre tied to meter. In one case (40) he uses the term to characterize hendecasyllabics deployed as personal invective, in a context that clearly alludes to the iambics of Archilochus (Heyworth 2001: 127). In another poem directed at Julius Caesar (54), the term refers both to an earlier poem actually written in iambics (29) and to the politically charged hendecasyllabics in which it appears. In poem 36, Catullus merges the Archilochean and invective associations of iambics with an attack on a literary target, the epic Annals of Volusius (1–10):
Annales Volusi, cacata charta,
uotum soluite pro mea puella.
nam sanctae Veneri Cupidinique
uouit, si sibi restitutus essem
desissemque truces uibrare iambos,
electissima pessimi poetae
scripta tardipedi deo daturam
infelicibus ustulanda lignis.
nec uos pessima se puella uidit
iocose ac lepide uouere diuis.
Annales of Volusius, crappy paper, discharge a vow for my girl. For she made a vow to Venus and Cupid that, if I were restored to her and ceased to hurl fierce iambics, she would give the choicest writings of the worst poet to the limping god for him to burn with ill-omened timber. But the naughty girl did not see that it was you she was wittily and charmingly vowing to the gods.
The iambics that Catullus has been hurling at Lesbia can hardly be limited to c. 37 and the end of c. 8, the only two poems in that meter directed against Lesbia in any sense (Thomson 1997: 298), and with most commentators we should see here another instance of iambos referring to the content of the verses, not the meter. Within this context of Callimachean aesthetics, deprecating pretentious epic poetry, Lesbia makes a vow to burn Catullus’ non-Callimachean, old-fashioned invective; Catullus interprets this vow, however, in a most Callimachean manner (iocose ac lepide) as an injunction to burn Volusius’ Annals.
Callimachean Narrative in Catullus
Catullus’ longest and most ambitious work is the narrative poem in hexameters known as “The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis,” a work at once “learned and laborious, a specimen of strictly premeditated art” (Clausen 1982: 187). The story of Peleus’ marriage to Thetis serves to provide a frame for the inset story of Theseus’ abandonment on Naxos. This story is couched in an ecphrasis (or digression), describing the scenes embroidered on a cover for the marriage bed (76–264). In its elaborate structure and emotional pyrotechnics, the poem resembles nothing surviving from previous Greek literature, but its debt to Hellenistic precedents in inspiration and execution has never been doubted. In its elaborate construction, the artificial connections between tapestry and wedding, and its use of lexical and metrical Grecisms, the poem has always been recognized as closely connected with the Hellenistic background (Lefèvre 2000a). Indeed, for long it was thought to have been a translation of some lost original, like poem 66 and the Coma Berenices (Kroll 1968, 1st edn.: 142). Few, if any, would now subscribe to that view, which was debunked long ago (Perrotta 1931), but it can hardly be doubted that some important sources for the narrative of Ariadne that were known to Catullus have been lost and their recovery might explain much of the poem’s intertextual nature (Knox 1998).
Among Catullus’ contemporaries we know of works in the same vein, although they exist for us practically only as titles: Cinna’s Zmyrna, Valerius Cato’s Dictynna, Calvus’ Io, and Caecilius’ Magna Mater (Courtney 1993: 189–227). Some information about the style and manner of these poems can be gleaned from the later poems mistakenly attributed to Vergil, the Culex, a mock narrative about the descent of a gnat into the Underworld, and the Ciris, which tells the story of the daughter of Nisus who fell in love with Minos (Lyne 1978: 32–6). But the most significant surviving example of the form is Catullus’ poem, and its relationship with contemporary or earlier exemplars of the genre can only be estimated from careful analysis of Catullus’ language measured against the few surviving fragments.
The opening lines of the poem establish a formal tone and a distancing from the narrator’s present, but they do so in a way that summons up recollections of a literary pedigree as well (64.1–7):
Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeetaeos,
cum lecti iuuenes, Argiuae robora pubis,
auratam optantes Colchis auertere pellem
ausi sunt uada salsa cita decurrere puppi,
caerula uerrentes abiegnis aequora palmis.
Once on Pelion’s summit long ago pine-trees were born, and swam (people say) through Neptune’s liquid waves to the waters of Phasis and the borders of Aeetes, when chosen youths, the flower of Argive manpower, desiring to carry off from the Colchians the golden fleece, ventured in a swift ship to speed over the briny seas, sweeping with blades of fir the azure plains.
In the first line Catullus evokes the stylistic background of Hellenistic narrative, with quondam (“once long ago”), “an adverb to summon up the dateless past” (Clausen 1982: 187). The mannerism is common in other Hellenistic narrative poems (Bühler 1960: 47), but it evokes most directly the opening of Callimachus’ Hecale, the first line of which has been preserved for us by an ancient commentator (Call. fr. 230 Pf. = 1 H):
Once, in the uplands of Erechtheus, lived
an Attic woman
The reader’s apprehension of other literary presences here is confirmed in dicuntur “people say,” echoed elsewhere in lines 19 fertur, 76 perhibent, 124 perhibent, 212 ferunt. The use of such terms, which serve to distance the narrator from the events related in the poem, is also a lexical marker to signal an intertextual connection with other accounts, sometimes called an “Alexandrian footnote” (Ross 1975: 77–8; Hinds 1998: 1–2). The densely allusive and learned fabric of these opening lines has been closely examined by commentators, with its points of contact to early poetry in Euripides, Apollonius, Callimachus, and Ennius duly explicated (R. F. Thomas 1982; Clare 1996).
It has been suspected that Callimachus’ Hecale exerted a powerful influence on other parts of the poem, as well as contributing to its general thematic structure and tone. It is possible, but only possible, that Catullus’ use of the ecphrastic narrative on the tapestry is itself an imitation of such a device used by Callimachus in the opening of the third book of the Aetia (R. F. Thomas 1983: 105–13; Hutchinson 1988: 302). But the influence of Callimachus’ story of Theseus in the Hecale has been detected in Catullus’ poem in the portion that also deals with Theseus. An unattributed Greek hexameter quoted by Cicero (Att. 8.5.1), “vainly venting the rage in its horns on the air,” has long been suspected as belonging to the Hecale (Hollis 1990: 323– 4). It is the merest chance that this line (fr. 723 Pf. = 165 Hollis), which must have been easily recognizable to Cicero’s correspondent, is clearly the model for Catullus’ description of Theseus’ struggle with the Minotaur (110–11):
sic domito saeuum prostrauit corpore Theseus
nequiquam uanis iactantem cornua uentis
so, overpowering its body, Theseus laid low the monster as it vainly tossed its horns at the empty air.
In transferring details from Callimachus’ celebrated account of one of the labors of Theseus to another, Catullus is likely to have utilized other parts of the narrative than this one line. One fragment of the Hecale, recently restored (238 Pf.; Supp. Hell. 281; 17 Hollis), preserves part of a conversation between Theseus and his father Aegeus, with Theseus asking to be sent out against the Marathonian bull: “so let me go, father: you’ll get me back safely.” We know from the Diegesis of the Hecale that Aegeus was not persuaded. His situation in Catullus 64 is very similar and he is there represented as reluctant to send out his recently rediscovered son on a potentially fatal mission (215–17):
gnate, mihi longe iucundior unice uita,
gnate, ego quem in dubios cogor dimittere casus,
reddite in extrema nuper mihi fine senectae.
“Son, only son, sweeter by far to me than life; son, whom I am forced to send off on perilous ventures, restored to me but recently at the extreme limit of old age.”
And just as Athena is invoked as Theseus’ hope against the bull in that fragment, so Aegeus reposes his hopes for success against the Minotaur in the patron goddess of Athens (228–30):
quod tibi si sancti concesserit incola Itoni,
quae nostrum genus ac sedes defendere Erecthei
annuit, ut tauri respergas sanguine dextram.
“But if the tenant of holy Itonus, she who consents to defend our people and the seat of Erectheus, grants you to steep your right hand in the blood of the bull.”
The hypothesis that this motif has been transferred from the Hecale (Hollis 1990: 151–2) gains some support from Catullus’ reference here to the Minotaur as a “bull” (tauri). The word Minotaurus is in fact attested no earlier than Catullus in Latin or Greek literature (Clausen 1988: 15–17), so it is unsurprising that he should have associated Theseus’ two great bullfights.
Another experiment by Catullus may also have been inspired by his experience of reading Callimachus’ narratives. Poem 63 describes the self-castration by a Greek youth named Attis, caught up in the fervor of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother of Asia Minor. The exotic features of the poem, its obvious Greek affiliations, and the unusual meter have all suggested a translation or close adaptation of some lost original. That is, of course, far from a certain conclusion, but that the poem draws on the same sources of inspiration in the Callimachean tradition seems clear even from our meager evidence (Wilamowitz 1924: II.291–5; Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 477–85). The galliambic meter was associated with Callimachus by ancient metricians, who cite from a “famous” work by him two verses on the Gallai, adherents of the Great Mother (fr. 761 Pf.):
The Gallai, thyrsus-loving runners of the mountain Mother,
whose utensils of bronze and castanets resound.
There is no telling if these lines actually belong to Callimachus (they probably do), or if he ever treated the story of Cybele and her mythical attendant Attis at any length (he probably did), but there are enough traces of it in the fragments to suggest he had an interest in the story (Knox 2002: 168–70) and that Catullus is alluding to that general ambience. But it is also likely that he is drawing on other post-Callimachean forms of dramatic monody, such as the so-called Fragmentum Grenfellianum (Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 485). What this illustrates is that Catullus is best seen as part of a continuum that stretches from the third-century Greek culture of Alexandria to Rome of the first century, an uninterrupted tradition that spans time, language, and cultural boundaries.
After Catullus
No Roman poet of the succeeding generations was unaffected by the shift in Latin poetics attributable to Catullus and his contemporaries. The loss of their work leaves him as the sole representative of this sea change in Latin poetry. Had Catullus not entered so deeply into the literary world of Callimachus, it would have been inconceivable for Vergil, to take only one example, to couch his famous declaration of pastoral poetics (Ecl. 6.3–5) in terms of the Aetia Prologue:
cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
uellit et admonuit: “pastorem, Tityre, pinguis
pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen”.
When I was singing of kings and battles, Cynthian Apollo tweaked my ear and warned me, “Tityrus, a shepherd should raise his sheep to be fat, but sing a slender song.”
Every poet of Vergil’s generation seems clearly to have taken his critical bearings from Callimachus, whose considerable influence extends also into the next generation and Ovid. That is a much longer story to be told elsewhere, but it is only a possible story because Catullus prepared the way.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
The standard text of Callimachus remains Rudolph Pfeiffer’s magisterial two-volume edition (1949, 1953), but it must now be supplemented by additional fragments found in Lloyd-Jones and Parsons (1983: 89–144). For Books 1 and 2 of the Aetia these are incorporated into the edition by Massimilla (1996); in addition, for the fragments of the Hecale, Hollis’s edition (1990) should be consulted. The recent studies by Kerkhecker (1999) and Acosta-Hughes (2002) have injected new life into the study of the Iambi. The translation by Nisetich (2001) makes Callimachus’ works accessible to the Greekless, including many fragments not translated in the Loeb edition and several new papyri. A major re-evaluation by Alan Cameron (1995) has called into question many prevailing assumptions about Callimachus’ views on literature, the circumstances of the composition of his works, and his influence on the Roman poets.
Since the publication of Wimmel’s seminal study (1960), there has been a steady flow of books and articles on Callimachus’ influence on Roman poetry. Since Wilamowitz’s important book on the subject (1924), there has also been a tradition of appending a brief treatment of the Roman poets to studies of Hellenistic poetry; recent contributions by Hutchinson (1988) and Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) contain much of interest on Catullus. Clausen (1964) exercised considerable influence upon its first appearance and is still worth consulting, as is his later paper (1970) dealing exclusively with Catullus and Callimachus. In fact, most studies of Callimachean influence on Catullus are to be found in journal articles or in commentaries on his works, but special mention might be made of the running commentary on all his poems by Syndikus (1984, 1987, 1990). Lehnus (2000) provides a full annotated bibliography for all matters Callimachean, with special sections for the reception of Callimachus’ works in Rome, including Catullus (421–9).
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