CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Catullus in the Renaissance
The Renaissance history of Catullus begins with a riddle, the mysterious epigram written in the first years of the fourteenth century by Benvenuto Campesani commemorating the discovery of a manuscript of the poet after his works had been lost for a thousand years (for a text and translation, see Butrica, this volume, p. 27). The manuscript celebrated by Benvenuto (called V for Verona) was soon lost, but not before it was copied at least once. All of our extant manuscripts of the complete text – four from the fourteenth century (O, G, R, and m [Venice, Biblioteca Marciana lat. 12.80 (4167)]) and roughly 125 from the fifteenth – are descended from this single lost manuscript. A ninth-century florilegium or anthology preserves one poem, 62, whose text is descended from the same archetype as V (Thomson 1997: 24–38, 72–93).
The fact that Catullus survived the Middle Ages only in a single manuscript may surprise the modern reader, for Catullus (perhaps after Vergil) is the most popular Roman poet of our time, and in Antiquity he exercised a profound influence on both the Augustan poets and those of the Silver Age. Catullus is not the only ancient author to come to us in a single manuscript – Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the surviving parts of Tacitus’ Histories and Annals had the same narrow escape (Reynolds 1983: 15–16, 406–7) – but his history is still a little disquieting. How could it happen that such a poet was reduced to such a slender lifeline?
The answer – at least part of it – seems to be Martial, for it is one of the ironies of literary history that the admiration and imitation of Martial, along with that of Pliny and other lesser poets of the Silver Age, probably contributed to Catullus’ virtual eclipse from the second century on (Gaisser 1993: 7–15). Martial and his contemporaries had no interest in the qualities that our time admires in Catullus – his elegant urbanity, his learned Alexandrianism, his passionate emotion. Instead, they promoted him as a poet of light verse and epigram (see Lorenz, this volume). As a consequence he was soon supplanted by his chief imitator. Why read an old-fashioned and sometimes difficult poet like Catullus, when one could so easily enjoy Martial’s smooth and racy epigrams? In the second century Aulus Gellius and Apuleius knew some of Catullus’ poems; the poet of the Ciris and the author of an epicedion on a pet dog knew others (Goold 1969; Walters 1976). But even then texts were no doubt already becoming scarce, and we can be sure that fewer still were preserved when scribes transferred the works of ancient authors from roll to codex around the fourth century ad. There are echoes of tags and single verses in authors from the fourth to the seventh century (Schwabe 1886: xi–xiii; Wiseman 1985: 246–61; Ullman 1960); but after that Catullus goes underground. The only people we can identify with certainty as readers of his poetry in the Middle Ages are the anonymous scribes of V or its archetype and the florilegium containing poem 62.
Martial’s Legacy
The humanists greeted the rediscovery of Catullus with enthusiasm but did little with his poetry for nearly a hundred and fifty years. They tried to correct the text, collected quotable verses for their anthologies, and included Catullus in lists of obscene poets excusing or condemning scandalous verse. For the most part, however, they did not imitate or try to interpret his poetry – largely because they could not read it. Catullus’ text was notoriously corrupt. Meters were confused. Poems were run together. The point, and often even the subject, of many poems was lost. Furthermore, although the humanists admired the learning of Catullus’ poetry – or rather, admired the idea that it was learned – they were vague about the details. They knew that he was called doctus Catullus (“learned Catullus”) by other ancient writers, but they did not know what his learning entailed. Greek studies were in their merest infancy, and much that we take for granted about Alexandrian literature was unknown. (In fact, two of the texts most important for understanding Catullus’ learned Alexandrianism were discovered only in the twentieth century. Both are from the Aetia of Callimachus: the prologue setting out Callimachus’ poetic program, and the Lock of Berenice, which Catullus translated as poem 66.)
Real engagement with Catullus began in the fifteenth century, and the first steps were taken by two Florentine poets, Leonardo Bruni (1370?–1444) and Cristoforo Landino (1424–1504). Between 1405 and 1415 Bruni wrote an obscene hendecasyllabic pastiche of poems 41–3 (transmitted in a single block in V), probably using either R or m – the one owned by his mentor, Coluccio Salutati, and the other probably transcribed by his friend and colleague Poggio Bracciolini (Hankins 1990; Gaisser 1993: 211–15). A generation later, Landino completed a collection of poems he called the Xandra (Landino 1939). The work opened with a dedication in hendecasyllables in imitation of Martial; but the use of hendecasyllables seems also to have been a programmatic hint of Landino’s affinity with Catullus (Ludwig 1990: 188–9). But Landino did not imitate Catullus’ hendecasyllabic poems. Instead, he wrote an imitation of poem 11 (Xandra 50) and a set of three variations on poem 8 (Xandra 6, 34, 35), keeping the Sapphics of the one and transposing the limping iambs of the other into elegiac couplets. Neither Bruni nor Landino, however, had any influence on later Catullan poetry. Bruni’s ugly pastiche sank with hardly a trace, and Landino’s imitations, metrically and thematically more like Roman elegy than Catullan lyric, were left behind in what would turn out to be the main focus of Renaissance imitation, the hendecasyllabic poems.
It was Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503) who set Catullan poetry on the course it was to follow throughout the Renaissance. Pontano, one of the greatest Renaissance Latin poets, had come to Naples as a young man and become a friend and disciple of the poet Antonio Beccadelli, known as Panormita, who had written a collection of obscene poetry called Hermaphroditus in imitation of Martial and the Priapeia. Pontano’s association with Panormita and his poetry would be decisive, for it showed him that he could use Martial as a way to approach Catullus. The idea is not so strange as it might seem to a modern reader. Catullus had landed in the Renaissance virtually out of nowhere, in only the corrupt text he stood up in, and with no baggage of late antique or medieval imitation, interpretation, or scholarship. But Martial could supply the lack. Reversing what might seem to us the obvious order, most people in the Renaissance read Martial before they read Catullus. Many manuscripts of Martial were available; he had been studied by Boccaccio in the 1370s, and by nearly every humanist afterwards; and his epigrams were widely imitated (Hausmann 1980: 249–54; Sullivan 1991: 253–70; Swann 1994: 89–91). Best of all, his accessible epigrams both imitated and interpreted Catullus. Reading Catullus through Martial, Pontano saw a light and racy epigrammatist, witty and often obscene, without emotional complexity, political animus, or Alexandrian intricacy. It was this Catullus who would dominate fifteenth-century interpretation.
With Martial as his guide, Pontano produced a collection of Catullan poetry within a year of his arrival in Naples (Pruritus, 1449). Two other collections followed: Parthenopaeus sive Amores (1457) and Hendecasyllabi sive Baiae, written throughout the 1490s and completed around 1500 or so (Ludwig 1990). The three collections differed in tone and subject. Pruritus was more explicitly obscene than the others and closer to Panormita and the Priapeia. Parthenopaeus (which incorporates some of the less obscene poems from the Pruritus) embarks on a sophisticated literary program. The Hendecasyllabi, erotic poems of Pontano’s old age, have moved farthest from explicit imitation of Catullan subjects to an almost elegiac celebration of the enfeebled and fragile, but enduring, Eros of old men. (For the texts of Pruritus and Parthenopaeus see Pontano 1902; for Hendecasyllabi see Pontano 1978, 2006.)
In spite of their differences, however, the collections had two points in common that would become distinguishing features of later Catullan poetry: their models and their meter. Pontano focused on a small number of Catullus’ poems, above all the kiss-poems, especially 5 and 7, the sparrow-poems 2 and 3 (transmitted in V as a single block and printed as a single poem until the first Aldine edition of 1502), and 16, which he treated as a poetic manifesto. Pontano used the idea from 16 that light verses should arouse and titillate the reader:
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
They only have wit and charm
if they’re a little soft and not quite modest,
and can stir up what feels sexual excitement –
I don’t mean for boys, but for these hairy old men
unable to move their stiffened loins.
(Catull. 16.7–11)
His successors, however, would prefer the other part of Catullus’ statement in poem 16, the denial of a connection between the character of the poet and the nature of his verses:
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est.
For it is right for the true poet to be chaste
himself, but not necessary for his verses to be so.
(Catull. 16.5–6)
Pontano wrote most of his imitations in hendecasyllables (other meters predominate only in Parthenopaeus), creating the particular version of the hendecasyllable that was to predominate in subsequent Catullan poetry. Pontano’s meter is recognizably Catullan, for it reproduces Catullan tricks of style and achieves a lightness and delicacy generally absent in earlier imitators like Martial and the poets of the Priapeia; but it also exaggerates Catullan features (particularly assonance, diminutives, and the use of internal repetitions or refrains) to create an effect that is unmistakably new – sensuous, lyrical, and sometimes almost hypnotic. The first verses of his poem “To Fannia” from Parthenopaeus exemplify his treatment:
Amabo, mea cara Fanniella,
Ocellus Veneris decusque Amoris,
Iube, istaec tibi basiem labella
Succiplena, tenella, mollicella;
Amabo, mea vita suaviumque,
Face istam mihi gratiam petenti.
Please, my dear Fanniella,
Apple of Venus’ eye, and ornament of Amor,
Tell me to kiss these lips of yours
Juicy, delicate, so very soft;
Please, my life, my kiss,
Do me this favor, since I ask.
(Parthenopaeus 1.11.1–6)
Pontano’s sensual erotic poetry was often more explicit than anything in Catullus himself, as in Parthenopaeus 1.5, “Ad pueros de columba” (“To the boys, concerning the dove”), which evokes both the kiss-poems and Lesbia’s sparrow. In it Pontano asks who should be the proper recipient for his “snow-white dove.” Rejecting the boys of his title as mali cinaedi (“wretched catamites”), he decides that the dove wishes to go to his girl (puella) instead:
Huius tu in gremio beata ludes,
Et circumsiliens manus sinumque
Interdum aureolas petes papillas.
You will play happily in her lap,
and hopping about, you will peck her hands and bosom
and sometimes her pretty golden breasts.
(Parthenopaeus 1.5.17–19)
He continues:
Impune hoc facies, volente diva,
Ut, cum te roseo ore suaviatur
Rostrum purpureis premens labellis,
Mellitam rapias iocosa linguam,
Et tot basia totque basiabis,
Donec nectarei fluant liquores.
You will do this without fear, if the goddess wishes:
so that when she kisses you with her rosy mouth,
pressing your beak with purple lips,
you may playfully snatch her honey-sweet tongue
and you will give kisses and kisses again,
until the streams of nectar flow.
(Parthenopaeus 1.5.26–31)
There could hardly be a better example of the Renaissance tendency to read Catullus through Martial. Pontano’s poem is a contaminatio or blending of Catullus 2–3 and Martial 11.6, which interprets Catullus’ sparrow not as a bird but a penis (Ludwig 1989: 175 n. 58; Hooper 1985).
Pontano’s poem (originally in the Pruritus of 1449 and subsequently brought into Parthenopaeus) was the first obscene reading of Catullus’ sparrow in the Renaissance. But the one that everyone would remember was published 40 years later by Angelo Poliziano in his Miscellanea (1489):
Quo intellectu Catullianus passer accipiendus, locusque etiam apud Martialem indicatus.
Passer ille Catullianus allegoricôs, ut arbitror, obscoeniorem quempiam celat intellectum, quam salva verecundia, nequimus enunciare. Quod ut credam, Martialis epigrammate illo persuadet, cuius hi sunt extremi versiculi:
Da mihi basia, sed Catulliana:
Quae si tot fuerint, quot ille dixit,
Donabo tibi passerem Catulli. [Mart. 11.6.14–17]
Nimis enim foret insubidus poeta (quod nefas credere) si Catulli passerem denique ac non aliud quidpiam, quod suspicor, magis donaturum se puero post oscula diceret. Hoc quid sit, equidem pro styli pudore suae cuiusque coniecturae, de passeris nativa salacitate relinquo.
In what sense the sparrow of Catullus is to be understood and a passage pointed out in Martial.
That sparrow of Catullus in my opinion allegorically conceals a certain more obscene meaning which I cannot explain with my modesty intact. Martial persuades me to believe this in that epigram of which these are the last verses:
Give me kisses, but Catullan style.
And if they be as many as he said,
I will give you the sparrow of Catullus.
For he would be too inept as a poet (which it is wrong to believe) if he said he would give the sparrow of Catullus, and not the other thing I suspect, to the boy after the kisses. What this is, for the modesty of my pen, I leave to each reader to conjecture from the native salaciousness of the sparrow. (Poliziano, Miscellanea 1.6, in Poliziano 1971: 1.230–1)
After Pontano Renaissance poets wrote scores of poems on sparrows and doves and literally hundreds on kisses, often combining the sparrow and kissing themes to speak more or less openly of both homosexual and heterosexual intercourse. As time went on many poets also added the idea of the “soul kiss” from pseudo-Plato (Gell. NA 19.11.11–17) – that the lover’s spirit (breath of life) departs with the kiss, entering into and animating the beloved (Perella 1969). The most important poems in this vein are the work of the major Neo-Latin poet Johannes Secundus (1511–36), especially in his elaborate sequence Basia (Godman 1988, 1990; Gaisser 1993: 249–54). But not everyone enjoyed obscene, or even erotic, poetry. Around 1490 the Carmelite poet Mantuan (Battista Spagnoli) published a long attack on all light poetry: Contra poetas impudice scribentes carmen (“A poem against poets writing unchastely”). Mantuan completely rejected the excuse for racy poetry that his contemporaries had found in Catullus 16.5–6:
Vita decet sacros et pagina casta poetas:
Castus enim vatum spiritus atque sacer.
Si proba vita tibi lascivaque pagina, multos
Efficis incestos in veneremque trahis.
A chaste life and a chaste page befit holy poets,
for chaste and holy is the inspiration of bards.
If your life is upright and your page lascivious,
you make many unchaste and draw them into venery.
(Mantuan, Contra poetas 19–22, in Mantuan ca. 1490)
Not only monks objected to lascivious verse: one of Pontano’s friends and protégés, the young Marco Marullo, although embracing love poetry and rejecting Mantuan’s strictures, disdained the “Catullan excuse” (Gaisser 1993: 231–30):
Sic iuvat in tenui legem servare pudore
Et quae non facimus dicere facta pudet.
Thus, we are pleased to keep the law in delicate modesty
and ashamed to speak of things we do not do.
(Marullo, Epigram 1.62.17–22, in Marullo 1951)
Poliziano’s interpretation of the sparrow was also criticized, but less by moralists than by his fellow humanists. He was a polemical man with many enemies, and many considered his interpretation an attack on Catullus himself. The sparrow-poems (or rather poem, as it was generally thought to be) seemed straightforward and affecting, and readers who had shed a tear with Catullus over the death of Lesbia’s sparrow were chagrined to be told (even indirectly) that they had really been feeling sentimental over the poet’s impotence. Feeling was still running high some thirty years later, when Pierio Valeriano broached the matter in his lectures on Catullus at the University of Rome in 1522:
Bone Deus, an non satis in corpus saevitum erat, nisi animum ipsum etiam extinguere cogitassent?…At scimus quidem nos passeres adeo salaces esse, ut vel septies una hora saliant. Scimus ex medicorum dictatis passeribus in cibo datis, vel eorum ovis, venerem concitari. Scimus quid turpitudinis in mimis significet tôn strouthôn hoc est passerum nomen…Scimus ex sacerdotum Aegyptiorum commentationibus per passeris picturam prolificam hominis salacitatem significari.…Haec inquam scimus, sed quod apud Catullum, forte etiam apud Martialem, pudenda pace vestrarum aurium dixerim, virilia sub nomine passeris intelligi debeant, neque scimus, neque scire volumus. (Gaisser 1993: 350 n. 114)
Good god! Had Catullus’ body not been treated cruelly enough without their planning to quench his spirit?…We know that sparrows are so salacious that they mate seven times an hour; we know from medical writings that eating sparrows (or even their eggs) has an aphrodisiac effect. We know what filth the term strouthoi (that is, “sparrows”) signifies in mimes;…we know from the writings of the Egyptian priests that human lust is symbolized by the picture of a sparrow.…We know these things, I say, but we neither know nor wish to know that in Catullus or perhaps even in Martial the male genitals (if you’ll pardon the expression) ought to be understood under the word “sparrow.”
The First Interpreters
When the first edition of Catullus was printed in Venice in 1472, Catullus instantly became more available than he had been at any time in his history. But that does not mean that his poems appeared in a form that his readers found comprehensible or that he himself would have recognized. When Renaissance readers opened the edition, they saw and handled something quite different from Catullus’ “charming new little book, just polished with dry pumice” (Catull. 1.1–2). They held a large quarto volume that contained not only Catullus, but also Tibullus, Propertius, and Statius’ Silvae – all, like Catullus, making their first appearance (or, in the case of Propertius, first important appearance) in print (Butrica 1984: 160). The page that met their eyes was large and luxuriously arranged, with good-sized initial letters alternately colored red and blue to mark the beginning of each poem, and wide margins that presented an irresistible space for annotation – or in some cases, illumination, since wealthy readers liked having their printed books adorned as expensively as their manuscripts.
The text printed in this handsome volume had been corrected and tinkered with by various humanists since the fourteenth century, but major corruptions remained on every page; long blocks of poems were run together in defiance of sense or meter; additional metrical problems marred even correctly separated poems. All of the poems had titles, many of which were as misleading as that of poem 1: Val. Catulli Veronensis Poetę Cl. Liber Ad Cornelium Gallum (“The book of the famous Veronese poet Valerius Catullus of Verona to Cornelius Gallus”). The block containing poems 2 and 3 was entitled Fletus passeris lesbię (“Lament for Lesbia’s sparrow”).
Within a year two men of very different abilities and methods set themselves to the task of correcting the first edition – Francesco dal Pozzo, called Puteolano, a hard-working and entrepreneurial humanist, and the very young Angelo Poliziano, who would become the greatest philologist of the age. Puteolano’s corrections made their way into an influential edition (Parma 1473) and became an important element in the base text of Catullus. Poliziano’s corrections for the most part lay unpublished in the margins of his book (a handful later made their way into his Miscellanea). The book that contains them, now preserved in the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome (Corsiniana 50. F. 37), presents a valuable record not only of contemporary Catullan emendation and interpretation but also of Poliziano’s own method and scholarly development (Gaisser 1993: 42–7, 403–7).
Poliziano began to correct the first edition almost as soon as it appeared and continued to add to his notes at least until the mid-1480s, entering his own corrections and the readings he had found in manuscripts or other sources, and collating his text with each new edition as it appeared. Two dated subscriptions in his book give his own evaluations of his work. The first is dated August 12, 1473 – not quite three weeks before the publication of Puteolano’s edition. In it Poliziano, then just 18 years old, proudly announces:
Catullus Veronensis, si minus emendatus, at saltem maxima ex parte incorruptus mea opera meoque labore et industria in manibus habeatur!
Here is Catullus of Verona, if not completely corrected, at least sound for the most part through my effort and toil and industry. (Rome, Bibl. Corsiniana 50. F. 37, fol. 37r)
In his second subscription, dated 1485, he is less optimistic, excusing his errors to future readers of his book. He had been very young when he began his corrections, he says, and now he no longer approves of many of them himself (Quo fit ut multa ex eis ne ipse quidem satis [ut nunc est] probem, Rome, Bibl. Corsiniana 50. F. 37, fol. 127v).
No doubt Poliziano was more realistic about his accomplishments at 30 than he had been at 18. But his second subscription also reflects a changed state of affairs in Catullan studies. In mid-August 1473 a young man could dream of making his reputation with Catullus simply by correcting the single corrupt edition before him, but within a dozen years at least five more editions were published, and his corrections seemed less impressive. Nonetheless, Poliziano’s book is an important document. Its margins are filled with explanations of hard words and grammatical points, metrical comments, and parallel passages from other authors, both Latin and Greek. Although the ink in many places has faded almost to the vanishing point, one can still discern the horizontal lines he has drawn to separate poems and the dozens of tiny corrections he has written, very neatly, above the lines of every poem. His corrections include readings found in various manuscripts and in editions that would have been available to him before 1485, including the important editions of Francesco Puteolano and Giovanni Calfurnio (1481), and perhaps that of Antonio Partenio (1485). But they also include good readings not found before 1485, or even before Poliziano’s death in 1494, as well as two emendations with which he is credited in modern editions (66.48 Chalybum or Chalybon; 84.2 hinsidias). If Poliziano had published an edition with the corrections in his book (including his separation of poems) it would have surpassed all the editions available before the first Aldine (1502).
The young Poliziano probably intended to produce an edition, perhaps even a commentary. But by the time of his second subscription the moment for such a project had passed. Rejecting the plodding work of editing and commentary, he sought a different medium for displaying his philological genius. He wrote short essays setting out his solutions to particular problems and collected them in a work he called Miscellanea (1489). Poliziano devoted seven of the 100 chapters of the Miscellanea to Catullus (Gaisser 1993: 67–78). In five of the seven he develops ideas that appear in his marginalia. Two of these interpretations had been already been published by others: the identification of poem 84 as the one mentioned in Quintilian’s discussion of aspirates (Inst. 1.5.20) and the explanation of the hair-raising poem 74, in which Catullus tells how Laelius made his uncle a silent Harpocrates. Poliziano vehemently claims priority in both cases, and his marginalia tend to bear him out, for they not only contain these ideas, but contain them in less developed forms than those in which they appear either in other sources or in the Miscellanea itself. The marginalia on poem 84 are particularly interesting (Rome, Bibl. Corsiniana 50. F. 37, fol. 34r; Gaisser 1993: plate 4). There we find: the h’s that make sense of the epigram (in tiny letters above the appropriate words), the relevant passage from Quintilian (in the margin), and a horizontal line separating the poem from 83, with which it had been printed in a single block entitled Ad Mullum.
The two chapters without precedent in the marginalia suggest (although they cannot prove) that Poliziano did not add to his notes after he wrote the subscription of 1485, for both are apparently inspired by the famous Codex Farnesianus of Festus, which he saw in the spring of 1485 (Poliziano 1971: 1.284; Maïer 1966: 426). In Misc. 1.73 Poliziano tells how he had found the rare word suppernati (“hamstrung”) in Festus and realized that he could use it to correct poem 17.19, where separata was read by V and the editions. The second chapter without precedent in the marginalia is Misc. 1.6 (on the sparrow). Poliziano certainly knew the relevant verses from Martial (11.6.14–17) when he was writing his marginalia (he quotes them in his notes on poem 5), and he probably knew Pontano’s poem on the “snow-white dove”; but his notes on poem(s) 2–3 show no sign of Martial or that he suspected an obscene innuendo. In Festus he could have seen another hint of the sparrow’s obscene identity:
Strutheum in mimis praecipue vocant obscenam partem virilem, <a> salacitate videlicet passeris, qui Graece στρουθός dicitur.
In mimes especially they call the obscene male member “the sparrow” [strutheum], evidently from the salaciousness of the sparrow, which is called στρουθός in Greek. (Fest. 410 Lindsay DVS)
Poliziano does not mention Festus in Misc. 1.6, but he might well have used him either to arrive at or to confirm his interpretation. A portion of Poliziano’s transcription of the Festus manuscript is preserved (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3368; Lindsay 1913: xii–xiv). It contains not only suppernati (fol. 11r) but also strutheum (fol. 11v) – the latter with the marginal gloss passer Catulli (“the sparrow of Catullus”) probably in the hand of Poliziano himself (Gaisser 1993: 314 n. 38).
Poliziano’s chapters in the Miscellanea were brilliant, but they treated only a few passages in the Catullan corpus. The task of editing and explaining nearly every line of every poem had been performed four years earlier by Catullus’ fellow Veronese, Antonio Partenio (1456–1506), who was nearly Poliziano’s exact contemporary, but (like most people) nothing like his intellectual equal. The need for a commentary was clear. Perhaps the very learned could enjoy Catullus’ poetry without assistance even when much remained obscure or problematic, but most readers were unprepared to decipher Catullus by themselves. They were confused and discouraged not only by real difficulties with the text and its interpretation but also by the unfamiliar characters, place names, and mythological allusions they met on every page.
In the long preface to his commentary Partenio makes two key points (Partenio 1491: fol. 1r–v). First, he wants to make Catullus accessible, not merely to mature scholars and university students, but also to schoolboys and their teachers. His aspiration is an interesting comment both on his ambition (making an author of Catullus’ difficulty comprehensible to schoolboys was no small undertaking) and on the moral climate of his period in contrast to that of the recent past and not so distant future. Partenio had been teaching Catullus in his school for years, and his commentary displays no inhibitions. In the previous generation, however, Catullus had been deemed unsuitable for schools (Sabbadini 1914: 2.201); in the next, as we shall see, his obscenity would be an obstacle at the University of Rome. Second, Partenio has a clear conception of the progress of scholarship and of his own place in it. Standing at the beginning of the process, he does not expect to have the last word. “Under my auspices,” he says, “little by little our poet will be assisted, and through the agency of many writers inspired by equal zeal he will recover his glory” (auspiciis meis paulatim adiuvabitur poeta noster atque per multos scriptores pari studio motos decus suum reparabit, Partenio 1491: fol. 1r). Alone among Catullan interpreters of his century, Partenio makes it clear that he understands what it means for an ancient author to lack a critical tradition and that one man cannot remedy the deficiency.
Partenio had undertaken a formidable task: to explain every separate point of difficulty in a corrupt and diverse corpus as long as three books of the Aeneid – all without the benefit of any of the lexica, concordances, encyclopedias, or onomastica that later classicists would take for granted. The results were imperfect, for Partenio, as he freely admits, was a man of only moderate learning, and his ideas about Catullus are not sophisticated either as philology or as literary criticism. Like most Renaissance school commentators, he deals largely in the elementary and obvious, paraphrasing poems, spelling out details of grammar and usage, and explaining historical and mythological references. Often his basic information is wrong.
Nonetheless, he had his share of successes. One of his greatest triumphs appears in his summary of poem 1: “the poet dedicates this book to his friend Cornelius Nepos and publishes the work in his name” (poeta Cornelio Nepoti amico suo libellum hunc dicat atque in eius nomine opus edit, Partenio 1491: fol. 2r). The comment seems obvious until we remember that every previous edition had followed the lead of the first in identifying Catullus’ friend with Cornelius Gallus. Partenio had discovered from the dating in Jerome’s Eusebius that the identification with Gallus was anachronistic. Besides, Gallus was known to be an elegist (Cornelium autem Gallum elegiarum poetam fuisse constat, Partenio 1491: fol. 2r), and Catullus’ allusion to his friend’s literary endeavors points to a work of history. The relevant verses are cum ausus es unus Italorum/omne aevum tribus explicare cartis, 1.5–6 (“since you alone of the Italians have ventured to unfold all time in three rolls”). Partenio caps his discussion by producing the identity of the author and his book from Aulus Gellius, glossing 1.6 as follows:
Omne aevum: omne saeculum praeteritum. Quum autem dicit omne aevum plane indicat Cornelii Nepotis chronica quorum meminit Gellius in noctibus atticis.
omne aevum: Each past age. Moreover, when he says, “each age,” he clearly indicates the Chronica of Cornelius Nepos, which Gellius mentions in the Attic Nights [Gell. NA 17.21.3]. (Partenio 1491: fol. 2r)
When he saw that Catullus’ friend was a historian Partenio managed for once to surpass the young Poliziano, who had identified him with the poet Cornelius Cinna, thinking that the verse doctis Iuppiter, et laboriosis (“learned, by Jupiter, and full of hard work,” 1.7) referred to Cinna’s notoriously learned poetry (Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana 50. F.37, fol. 4r).
Partenio’s method, to the extent that he had one, was similar to that followed by Poliziano in his interpretation of poem 84: to seek out clues to meanings and identifications in other ancient authors. Unfortunately, such information was often confusing, mistaken, or incomplete. Sometimes it was simply extraneous, lending his comments a touch of strange, unconscious humor. On poem 15.19, for example, he explains that adulterers were punished by having radishes thrust up their anuses, and then adds irrelevantly: “In Germany radishes grow as large as babies. They thrive on cold, but dislike manure. Read more in Pliny” (Raphani in Germania ad infantum magnitudinem excrescunt. Frigore gaudent, fimum oderunt. Apud Plinium plura legito [Plin. HN 19.26.83]. Partenio 1491: fol. 6r.)
Partenio’s commentary, with all its deficiencies, fulfilled his hopes for it. It made Catullus accessible to a wide audience, proving so popular that it was reprinted five times in the 15 years after its first publication. It also laid a foundation for improvement by his successors. The commentaries that followed his, however, made only moderate headway with either interpretation or textual improvement (Gaisser 1993: 97–108). Palladio Fosco published a commentary in 1496, Alessandro Guarino in 1521. Neither had a particular interest in Catullus. Palladio, like Partenio, was a schoolmaster. He made a few contributions of his own (he made sense of poem 35, for example, by realizing that its hero Caecilius had composed a poem on the Magna Mater); but many of his ideas are taken without acknowledgment from other sources. The best that we can say for him is that his wide if unscrupulous research allowed him to correct Partenio in more than a few places and to present his readers with helpful information from various and sometimes unlikely sources. Guarino was a courtier at the court of Ferrara; his commentary is largely based on the work of his father, Battista Guarino (d. 1513), whose work was made redundant when Partenio managed to get into print first. Guarino likes to charge Partenio with ignorance, but corrects no major errors himself.
The most important successor of Partenio in the fifteenth century, however, was not a commentator, but a text critic: the Veronese humanist Girolami Avanzi. Avanzi, a generation younger than Partenio, Palladio, and Battista Guarini, produced several major works on Catullus over the course of a long career: Emendationes (1495 and 1500), the first and second Aldine editions (1502 and 1515), and the Trincavelli edition of ca. 1535. In each he revisited the text, thought about its problems again, and revised some of his earlier ideas. His most interesting work from a historical point of view is the earliest, the Emendationes of 1495. In it we can see Avanzi consulting not just the text of Partenio, but the whole printed tradition, scanning every verse, and indulging in numerous interesting (if often misguided) attacks on Poliziano (Gaisser 1993: 52–65). (He did so, it seems, largely for reasons of local patriotism: Poliziano had not only impugned the honor of Catullus’ sparrow, but attacked an important Veronese humanist, Domizio Calderini.) Avanzi was a better scholar than any of his predecessors (with the obvious exception of Poliziano), and his work provided the basis for a text that far surpassed those of the fifteenth century: the edition published in Venice by Aldo Manuzio in 1502. The novelty of the edition consists not only in its text, but also in its physical aspects: Aldo’s handy octavo, with its almost unprecedented press run of 3,000 copies, made Catullus far more widely – and more conveniently – available than he had been in the unwieldy tomes of the fifteenth century (Lowry 1979: 174 n. 96; 257; Fletcher 1988: 100–2).
Catullus at the University of Rome
In November 1521 a humanist named Pierio Valeriano began a series of lectures on Catullus at the University of Rome (Gaisser 1993: 109–45, 1999: 1–39). The moment was right, for Valeriano was at the height of his success, and Roman poetry and humanism were enjoying a golden age under the patronage of the Medici pope Leo X. Valeriano was well suited to his task: he was a poet as well as a philologist, he had an interpretive method, and he was an entertaining and lively lecturer. His lectures were taken down as he spoke, with the intention that they would be published as a commentary. Valeriano’s lectures were never published, but they are preserved in a manuscript (or rather manuscript fragment) in the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5215). The fragment is substantial. There are 249 folios, which contain two introductory lectures and detailed discussions of poems 1–22. The manuscript contains no breaks except that the discussions of the obscene poems 15, 16, and 21 are missing – an important point that we will consider presently.
Valeriano was not the first humanist to lecture on Catullus. Puteolano probably promoted the sales of his edition with lectures at the University of Bologna; Calfurnio, editor of the 1481 edition, regularly lectured on Catullus in Padua at least up to 1493; and Partenio lectured at his school in Verona in the 1480s. (Palladio may also have lectured on Catullus in the 1490s.) But the lectures of Puteolano and Calfurnio are lost, and those of Partenio were revised to make his published commentary. Valeriano’s lectures have come down to us nearly as he delivered them, if we can believe their title:
Pierii Valeriani Bellunensis Ro. Gymnasii Professoris Praelectiones in Catullum Auditorum Quorumdam Diligentia Dum Profiteretur Ad Verbum Exceptae.
The Lectures on Catullus of Pierio Valeriano of Belluno, Professor of the University of Rome, Taken Down Word for Word as He Spoke, through the Care of Some of his Listeners. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 1r)
There is also another difference. Partenio and Palladio were schoolmasters; Puteolano and Calfurnio, their university positions notwithstanding, were comparative small-fry. But Valeriano was a major figure, and his professorial debut was an important literary event. His lectures were learned and instructive, to be sure, but also personal, literary, and witty. Thanks to the faithful amanuensis, who has recorded interruptions, asides, and digressions along with the central material of the lectures, we are able to catch some of the flavor of his performance.
Valeriano also approached Catullus in a different spirit from that of his fifteenth-century predecessors. He was a better scholar than Partenio, Palladio, and either Guarino; and he had the advantages not only of Avanzi’s two Aldines (1502 and 1515), but also of access to Catullus manuscripts owned by the Medici or housed in the Vatican Library. (He was a Medici client and secretary of the pope’s cousin, Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII.) But two other points of difference are of greater importance. First, Valeriano was a Neo-Latin poet with a professional interest in poetic style and meter, and one of the purposes of his lectures was to encourage his students to write their own Neo-Latin poetry. Many were already doing so, for he had fellow humanists as well as university students in his audience. Second, both by temperament and because of his period and his location in papal Rome, Valeriano had a different attitude to obscenity from that of his predecessors. He was not a stiff-necked puritan like Mantuan, but he did not flaunt or revel in the obscene like Pontano and the three fifteenth-century commentators (by whom Catullan obscenity was explained more enthusiastically and knowledgeably than it would be again for nearly five hundred years).
Valeriano saw Catullus above all as a poetic model. He ends his second lecture with this exhortation:
age esto Catullus primus, qui profecturis in poetice discipulis proponatur, ut quum unusquisque in eum ex numeris inciderit, qui genio suo sit accomodatior, quo scilicet se non aliter moveri atque attrahi sentiat quam ferrum a magnete, paleam a succino, se ad eius imitationem accingat, eoque carminis genere sese exercere incipiat, quod magis ideae suae proprium esse animadverterit.
come, let it be Catullus first who is set before students about to make their way into poetry, so that when each has fallen upon that rhythm which is well suited to his spirit, by which he feels himself moved and attracted as iron by a magnet or chaff by amber, he will gird himself up to imitate it and begin to practice with that type of poetry which he sees is proper to his ideal. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 25r)
Rhythm was of professional concern to Valeriano, and his facility with metrics (like that of Pontano in the previous century) far exceeded that of humanists who merely scanned Catullus’ verse, but did not write their own. Much of his approach is the result of his study of the metrical treatise De metris by the second-century grammarian Terentianus Maurus, apparently unknown to his predecessors.
Terentianus’ treatise was discovered in 1493. The first edition appeared in 1497, followed by several others in the period 1500–10 (Keil 1874: 6.245, 315–17). The work was interesting because of its antiquity and the metrical lore it contained, but especially because it was written in verse. Terentianus founded his treatise on the fact that the verse may be divided at different points, and that different meters can be achieved simply by omitting, adding, and transposing segments. He applied his principle to most of the main metrical types, but especially to the hendecasyllable, which he divided in seven different ways, rearranging and adding segments to form everything from hexameters to galliambics (Ter. Maur. 2539–912 in GLK 6.401–11). The demonstration provided Valeriano with the perfect opening for his lecture on poem 1 (in hendecasyllables). It had the added benefit of being appropriate to the diverse needs of his audience, which included both young students who required fairly elementary instruction and those who expected entertainment and virtuoso display. Best of all, however, Terentianus’ approach was active: he showed not how to scan, but how to create the various meters.
Valeriano turns Terentianus’ discussion into a treatment of the meter of poem 1. The first four verses are the basis of his discussion:
Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas.
(Catull. 1.1–4)
He begins with the basic components of the hendecasyllable:
Id vero potissimum dignitatis habet carmen hoc, quod constat ex tomis eorum versuum, qui antiquissimi omnium ac celeberrimi censentur. Ex heroica quippe tome, atque ex iambea. Est autem tome ut iuniores intelligant, pars alicuius carminis [the following words are crossed out: uno plus pede numerosa] quae ab reliquo dissecatur, ita ut vel ipsa per se genus aliquod carminis adstruat vel sectioni alteri copulata diversam efficiat speciem.
This meter has the particular distinction of being formed from the segments [tomis] of those verses considered the most ancient and celebrated, that is, from an epic tome and from an iambic one. Moreover, (so that the younger students may understand), a tome is a portion of a verse that is cut off from the rest in such a way that it either makes some type of verse by itself or creates a different form when joined to another segment. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 28v)
Thus, we may regard the first line of poem 1 as containing an epic segment, Cui dono lepidum, which is the first half of a hexameter verse, and an iambic segment, novum libellum, the first colon of an iambic trimeter. We may turn the line into a hexameter by trimming the second segment and inserting words drawn from elsewhere in the poem. Thus: Cui dono lepidum | Corneli docte | libellum. Valeriano creates an iambic verse by completing the iambic segment with a phrase borrowed from poem 4.1. Thus: novum libellum | quem videtis hospites. The argument that follows is technical but entertaining, as Valeriano turns the verses of the first poem into alcaics, priapeans, asclepiadeans, and galliambics (Gaisser 1993: 412). “If we have a thorough understanding of this rhythm,” he concludes, “we can exercise our talent through many kinds of verses.” ([ut] hoc uno recte percepto numero facile possemus per multa versuum genera ingenium exercere, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 36r.)
Valeriano’s attitude toward obscenity was highly personal, and it was closely related to his idea of an affinity between the poet and himself as the poet’s interpreter; or it might be better to say that – like all of Catullus’ interpreters, from Martial to the present – he created a Catullus in his own image (Gaisser 2002). If Pontano’s Catullus was a sensualist, Valeriano’s is a teacher who both delights and instructs. Catullus pleases by the charm of his poetry, Valeriano tells his students, but he is also instructive and useful:
Prodest utique quum virtutes celebrat…dum vitia carpit, malos mores exsecratur, et mortales omnes a sceleratorum quos carminibus proscindit imitatione conatur avertere.
He is useful particularly when he celebrates virtues [and]…chastises vice, criticizes evil ways, and attempts to deter mankind from imitating the wicked men he chastises in his poetry. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 18r)
This surprising description of Catullus is close enough to Valeriano’s conception of his own role to make him reject a reading like Poliziano’s interpretation of Catullus’ sparrow, which he found unnecessary and prurient. But Valeriano’s picture of Catullus the teacher is not always serious. Here is how he makes the sparrow useful and instructive to his students in the conclusion of his discussion of poem 3:
Nunc unum addam pro corollario, quod ad has extincti passeris inferias conferamus. Nam et vos delectare possunt audiendo et exemplo plurimum iuvare. Passeribus vitae brevitas angustissima. Eorum enim mares anno diutius durare non posse tradunt, qui rerum huiusmodi historias conscripsere; cuius rei causam esse aiunt, incontinentissimam salacitatem; quae tot hominum etiam ante diem effoetos tradit senectuti. Contra vero corvinum genus, quia rarissime coit vivacissimum. Quare si vos vitae dulcedo capit adolescentes nihil vobis magis praestiterit quam venerem et caeci stimulos avertere amoris.
Now I will add one thing as a corollary, which we can apply to these rites of a dead sparrow. For they can both amuse you in the listening and benefit you greatly by their example. The life of a sparrow is very short. For, as those who write of these matters tell us, the males can live no more than a year, and they say that the reason is unrestrained lust – which also wears out so many men before their time and hands them over to old age. The crow, on the other hand, is very long-lived, since it copulates most seldom. Wherefore, young men, if the sweetness of life delights you, nothing will be more useful to you than to reject Venus and the goads of blind passion. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 63r)
Valeriano rejected Poliziano’s interpretation of the sparrow, but he was willing to give frank (not prurient) explanations of Catullus’ sexual language and obscenities. At poem 6.13, for example, he glosses latera ecfututa as “loins spent and exhausted by sexual intercourse” (latera coitu frequenti tam exhausta et debilitata, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 95 v). In poem 11 he explains the penultimate stanza and the force of omnium/ ilia rumpens: “by such constant activity let her continue to render so many men impotent” (tali assiduitate pergat viros tot elumbes reddere, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 164v).
Real events outside the lecture room, however, prevent us from knowing how Valeriano treated Catullus’ most obscene poetry. Valeriano began his lectures under his Medici patron, Pope Leo X, who died unexpectedly very soon afterwards. The pope’s death, Valeriano’s grief, and the election of the new pope, Adrian VI, are all reported at the beginning of the third lecture. The lectures continued, but broke off for the summer of 1522. They resumed in the late autumn, by which time Adrian VI, a pious and puritanical Dutchman, had at last arrived in Rome – “together with the plague,” as Valeriano was to say some years later (Valeriano, De litteratorum infelicitate 1.16, in Gaisser 1999). As luck would have it, Valeriano came to the first truly obscene poem (15) after the new pope’s arrival. At the beginning of his lecture he debates about whether he should omit it, claiming that his students are outraged at the very idea:
Alii recidisse nos iterum in Gottica et Vandalica tempora lamentantur, quod videatur, veluti statuis omnibus illi virilia decutiebant, nunc quoque e libris, siquid pruriat, tolli.
Some lament that we have fallen back into the times of the Goths and the Vandals because it seems that just as they used to cut off the genitals of all the statues, so now anything titillating is taken out of books, too. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 194v)
Valeriano apparently gave his lecture, but we will never be sure, since he (or someone else) has cut out all the pages that would have contained it. The manuscript resumes with lectures on poems 17 and 22 (poem 21 is omitted). (For the numbering of the poems see the next section.) It is not clear how long the lectures continued. Conditions in Rome in autumn 1522 and spring 1523 were bad for humanists and poetry: the pope was hostile to secular intellectual activities; finances were so tight that university salaries often went unpaid; and the plague continued to ravage the city. A final catastrophe makes it impossible to know the extent of the lectures. In 1527 Rome was sacked by the troops of Charles V, and the manuscript with Valeriano’s lectures was among the casualties. A comment on the last folio contains the poignant note: “the rest was lost in the Sack of Rome” (Reliquum in direptione Romae desideratum, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 249v). The lectures lay in obscurity until the twentieth century (Alpago-Novello 1926).
The French Connection
For over two hundred years after his discovery Catullus was studied primarily in Italy and by Italians. But in the middle of the sixteenth century Catullan studies moved farther afield, and within around twenty years three non-Italians produced important commentaries: Marc-Antoine de Muret (1554), Aquiles Estaço (better known as Statius, 1566), and Joseph Scaliger (1577).
Marc-Antoine de Muret, like Valeriano, was a successful and charismatic university lecturer with a deep interest in poetry. He arrived in Paris in 1551 at the age of 25, already a famous professor, and was soon taken up by the new school of French poets who called themselves the Brigade – especially Joachim Du Bellay, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, and Pierre Ronsard. Muret spent two years in Paris lecturing to enthusiastic crowds of students, working on a Catullan commentary, and in literary collaboration with the poets of the Brigade, who aspired to create a new French poetry integrating the French literary tradition with classical learning on the one hand and with Neo-Latin and Italian poetry on the other (Morrison 1956; Silver 1966).
One of the most important products of this collaboration was Ronsard’s Livret de folastries, published anonymously in 1553. The Folastries (“Little Follies”) were conceived as French counterparts of the Catullan hendecasyllable; their title recalls Catullus’ names for his own verses: nugae, ineptiae, lusus (“trifles,” “foolishness,” “play”). Ronsard used Catullus’ poem 16.5–6 as the epigraph for his collection, and his dedication is a contaminatio of poem 1 and a dedication by the Neo-Latin poet Marcantonio Flaminio (Laumonier 1923: 93–8). The flavor is Catullan:
A qui donnai-je ces sornettes,
Et ces mignardes chansonnettes?
A toy mon Janot,…
…
Pren le donc, Janot, tel qu’il est,
…
Afin que toy, moy, et mon livre,
Plus d’un siècle puissions revivre.
To whom do I give these trifles
and these dainty little verses?
To you, my friend Janot…
…
Take it then, Janot, such as it is
…
so that you and I and my book
may live more than a single age.
(Ronsard, A Janot Parisien, 1–3, 23, 29–30; Ronsard 1928: vv. 3–5)
Others in Paris also wrote Catullan poetry, imitating Catullus in both Latin and French and drawing on Italian Neo-Latin poetry as well. Soon the influence went both ways, so that we find French and Latin poetry borrowing from each other (Morrison 1955, 1956, 1963; Ginsberg 1986).
Near the end of 1553 Muret was forced out of Paris by charges of heresy and sexual immorality. He fled to Venice and another fruitful collaboration, this time with the printer Paolo Manuzio, who published Muret’s commentary on Catullus in 1554. The commentary shows its mixed Italian and French parentage. It contains a measure of contemporary Italian philological polemic, for Muret makes sure to attack the Catullan ideas of Manuzio’s arch-enemy, Pier Vettori (Grafton 1983: 88–96; Gaisser 1993: 151–3). But it is also steeped in the poetic interests and theory of Paris, and it is here that it is most innovative.
Fifteenth-century readers had interpreted Catullus through Martial, and like Martial himself, they largely ignored both Catullus’ emotional depth and his learned Alexandrianism. (Only Poliziano took a real interest in tracing Catullus’ Alexandrian models.) Muret and the French poets had a different approach. They separated Catullus from Martial, especially in the matter of epigram, admiring the one as much as they disdained the other (Hutton 1946: 51–3). Muret is of the same opinion, remarking:
inter Martialis autem et Catulli scripta tantum interesse arbitrer, quantum inter dicta scurrae alicuius de trivio, et inter liberales ingenui hominis iocos, multo urbanitatis aspersos sale.
I think there is as much difference between the writings of Martial and Catullus as between the words of some wag on the street-corner and the well-bred jests of a gentleman, seasoned with sophisticated wit. (Muret 1554: iii)
Like his French colleagues, Muret studied both archaic and Alexandrian Greek poetry. He regrets the loss of Callimachus’ Lock of Berenice (translated by Catullus in poem 66) and admires Catullus’ Alexandrian poems for their learning and emotion. His particular favorite is poem 68, but he also pays attention to poem 63, prefacing his commentary on it with a poem of his own in galliambics. (Here Muret was doing nothing new, for Catullus’ galliambics had inspired imitation since the fifteenth century; see Campbell 1960.) More important, however, is the fact that Muret was the first to identify Sappho 31 as the model for poem 51, publishing the two poems side by side (Muret 1554: 56v–58r). The first detailed comparison of Sappho and Catullus would appear much later, in the 1592 discussion of Janus Dousa the younger (Gaisser 1993: 165).
Muret was not a distinguished editor. He based his edition largely on the base text, unsystematically consulting various editions and an occasional manuscript. His principal contribution to the text is an error that would confuse later readers: the insertion after poem 17 of three priapeia that later editors numbered 18, 19, and 20. The priapeia were banished by Lachmann in the nineteenth century, but by then the numbering was canonical – hence the anomalous gap between poems 17 and 21 in modern texts.
Muret’s commentary was followed by those of Statius and Scaliger. Statius was Portuguese, Scaliger French. Both were better text critics than Muret and less interesting commentators (Gaisser 1993: 168–92). Statius, like Muret, published his commentary with Paolo Manuzio in Venice in 1566. He studied the text more thoroughly than anyone since Avanzi, consulting and collating (though not systematically) at least seven manuscripts including R (Ullman 1908) and controlling the whole printed tradition. He discussed his readings in his commentary, but did not produce a new edition. Like Muret, Statius began his career in Paris and took an early interest in poetry. By 1555 he had published a book of his own poems, written a commentary on Horace’s Ars Poetica, and (a sign of French influence?) translated two hymns of Callimachus. By 1566, however, he was a papal secretary in Rome and his interests had changed from pagan poetry to Christian theology. Statius is the first Catullan scholar not to express great enthusiasm for his subject, and the influence of the Council of Trent (1564) on his commentary is clear. Noting that Catullus was famed for elegance of style, he claims to have studied ancient poetry in order to master Latin meters for his own translations of the Psalms. And he excuses Catullus’ indecency by pointing out the general licentiousness of paganism (the same grounds that the Council of Trent had used to exclude ancient authors from its ban on obscene literature):
Nam, quod idem lascivius, ac mollius scripsit, id vero temporum illorum sive mos, sive licentia potius, ac vitium fuit, quamquam de se ipse tamquam suppudens dicit, “Nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est” [16.5–6].
For, as to the fact that he wrote somewhat racily and effeminately, this was the habit of those times, or rather the license and defect, although he says of himself as if in embarrassment: “For it is right for the true poet to be chaste/himself, but not necessary for his verses to be so.” (Statius 1566: A2v–A3r)
Scaliger’s commentary (the first published outside Italy) was printed in Paris in 1577. The work also includes Tibullus and Propertius. (Scaliger called the three poets tresviri amoris: “the triumvirate of love.”) Scaliger’s Catullus enjoys an exalted position in the history of textual criticism, for its method has been seen to anticipate that of the great nineteenth-century philologists (Kenney 1974: 55–7; Grafton 1977, 1983: 160–79). Scaliger was the first to understand that all the manuscripts of Catullus were descended from a single exemplar, which he reconstructed (to his own satisfaction, at least) down to its place of origin and the peculiarities of its script – creating a model that explained the genesis of errors in Catullus’ text and showed the way to their correction. But his method is more important to the history of philology than to the correction of Catullus (Gaisser 1993: 178–92, 414–15). He was a greater editor than any of his predecessors, but not because of his method, which produced far more wrong answers than right ones. Instead, his successes result from a combination of great natural ability, judicious use of his predecessors, and the knowledge of the manuscripts that he had gained from his own collations and those of Statius. Scaliger was more interested in Catullus’ text than in his poetry, and, like Statius, he felt he needed to justify studying it. His excuse is that he worked on Catullus when he was recovering from a debilitating illness and too weak to study more edifying authors (Scaliger 1577: a2r–v). Like Statius, he disliked obscenity. He avoided it as much as possible, skirting it easily, he claims, as experienced sailors avoid reefs in the sea (Scaliger 1577: a4v–5r).
Conclusion
Scaliger’s commentary was the last major Catullan event of the sixteenth century. Poets continued to write Catullan poetry in both Latin and the vernacular, and there were some textual discussions or partial commentaries, the most important being the works of the Dutch scholars Janus Dousa pater and filius published in 1581 and 1592 (Gaisser 1992: 271–5; Heesakkers 1976). The most interesting treatment, however, was a collection of parodies of poem 4 printed in 1579. This work, entitled Phaselus Catulli, was edited under the pseudonym Sixtus Octavianus by the Belgian humanists Victor Giselinus and Janus Lernutius and dedicated to their friend Janus Dousa the Elder (van Crombruggen 1959: 3–11; Gaisser 1993: 255–71). It contained both Catalepton 10 and a number of sixteenth-century parodies (convivial, invective, religious, obscene, and “literary”), together with a discussion of parody by Julius Caesar Scaliger.
But the times were not favorable to Catullan studies. Catullus’ obscenity was part of the problem (it had worried both the papal secretary Statius and the Protestant Scaliger), but all of his work was uncongenial to the general spirit of the age, which was increasingly concerned with serious moral, philosophical, and theological questions. Catullus’ highest values, by contrast, are personal and aesthetic: the bonds of trust and obligation between individuals, and a poetic credo founded on learning, craftsmanship, and – above all – charm and wit. There is no room in his poetic landscape for large moral or national themes, no reference to ideals or claims beyond those of the individual. Such a poet cannot be recruited to the cause of moral utility and can be taken seriously only by those who put a premium on poetry and poetics and the bonds of personal affection. It is no accident that those who enjoyed and profited from him most in the second half of the sixteenth century were Muret and the French poets of the Brigade, and the Dutch and Belgian parodists who studied his techniques and saw Catullus and his friends as the model for their own sodality.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Note: much of the important bibliography is in languages other than English. For additional references on specific points see the bibliography in Gaisser (1993).
For the medieval and early Renaissance transmission of Catullus, see Ullman (1960) and Thomson (1997: 22–43); both discuss the important role played by the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who commissioned and annotated R. In an important unpublished dissertation McKie (1977) discusses the relation of V and its descendants, postulating a lost intermediary (called A by Thomson) between V and O and X (the lost parent of G and R). The place of V’s discovery is disputed. Guido Billanovich (1958: 155–70, 191–9) called Benvenuto’s epigram a “fairy tale,” arguing that V was discovered in Verona in the thirteenth century and read by the Paduan poets Lovato Lovati (d. 1309) and Alberto Mussato (d. 1329). As Butrica (this volume, pp. 24–5) remarks, Ullman (1960) was skeptical about the idea and Ludwig convincingly refuted it (Ludwig 1986), but it still occasionally surfaces. Citations of Catullus by Geremia da Montangone (ca. 1315?) are discussed by Ullman (1955); McKie uses them to demonstrate the existence of A (McKie 1977: 80–93). Citations by Benzo of Alessandria (ca. 1320) are discussed by Hale (1910). Petrarch’s use of Catullus is treated by Ellis (1905) and Ullman (1960). Bosco (1942) lists Petrarch’s quotations.
Important theoretical discussions relevant to imitation both by Martial and by the Renaissance poets include Conte (1986), Pigman (1980) and especially Pasquali 1951) and T. M. Greene (1980: 4–80). Ludwig’s treatment of Pontano’s imitations (Ludwig 1989: 162–94) was the starting point of the subsequent discussions. Recently the topic has been treated more fully in a collection of essays (Baier 2003). The anthologies of Nichols (1979) and Perosa and Sparrow (1979) provide excellent starting points for texts and biographies of the Neo-Latin poets.
Several recent studies have treated the Catullan lectures of Pierio Valeriano. See especially Di Stephano (2001) and Campanelli and Pincelli (2000).
WORKS CITED
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