Catullus’s suggestion for solving problems that may arise when an older man takes a young bride is to throw him off a bridge into a swamp. Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here. The illustration is from a fresco showing a wedding in the first century BCE.
Where and how did we get hold of Catullus? There are clues in this photo of the opening page of the Oxford text.
On the right, the footnotes above the line give details of ancient writers who quoted from the two poems above. There are a lot, which is useful for textual scholars and shows how well-known Catullus was in antiquity. The notes below the line are about places where the various manuscripts that we depend on for our text of Catullus have wording which differs from that chosen by the editor for the Oxford text. There are a lot of these too, considering that they deal with only thirteen lines of poetry, and this implies that the strength of the manuscript evidence is not particularly great. That is borne out by the left-hand page, which describes the manuscript evidence itself. This amounts to four manuscript copies of Catullus made as late as the fourteenth century. They all lead back to one manuscript, known as V – for Verona, because it existed there around the end of the first millennium. That manuscript was lost centuries ago, but it is the one and only known line of transmission through which Catullus, copied and re-copied many times with varying degrees of accuracy, survived from antiquity. If the Verona manuscript had been lost before, rather than after, being copied, we would have found ourselves with no complete Catullus poems except one (no. 62, a wedding-hymn, which survived separately in an anthology), in other words, without Lesbia and her sparrow and her kisses. It is a chilling thought.
Our last post was the poem that some commentators think was the first that Catullus wrote to Lesbia. Now we present the poem that may mark the end of the affair in bitterness and insult, written in a metre (Sapphics, developed on Lesbos more than five hundred years earlier by the poetess Sappho) that Catullus uses nowhere except in these two pieces. Perhaps as a final insult, perhaps because they are good and very tolerant friends, his messengers are two men who are used to some pretty gross treatment at his hands.
Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
In on of the less well-known Lesbia poems, Catullus translates into Latin part of a famous poem by the poetess Sappho, using the “Sapphic” metre later adopted by Horace in several of his Odes.
Commentators find it a problem poem. On inconclusive evidence, Granny Fordyce insists that it was “clearly” written in the early days of Catullus’s affair with Lesbia. He goes on to argue that the prosaic ending of the poem can have nothing to do with the more romantic first three quarters, and that its presence is probably a blip in the manuscript (there is also a line missing in the third stanza). But there are other scenarios, including one in which Catullus, at a loose end, embarks on his Sappho translation, is struck by its painful associations with his (lost?) Lesbia, and calls himself to order in a new final stanza. Who can say? The mystery does not spoil the poem. The sharp disagreements about interpretation also illustrate a general point about reading poetry: what you get out of it is often very dependent on what you bring to it.
Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
Catullus and Julius Caesar knew one another, Suetonius tells us (Jul.73). The relationship must have been interesting, since Catullus wrote a number of poems attacking Caesar and his associate Mamurra (whom he calls “Mentula”, “the Prick”). In this mild example, Catullus has a go at four other probable members of Caesar’s circle.
Othonis caput oppido est pusillum;
Hirri rustica, semilauta crura,
subtile et leve peditum Libonis,
si non omnia; displicere vellem
tibi et Fufidio seni recocto …
irascere iterum meis iambis
immerentibus, unice imperator.
“Otho’s head is pathetically small, Hirrus has legs that are still half-covered in country mud, Libo’s fart is light and subtle, but not everything else about him; I want to offend you and that warmed-over old codger Fufidius … you are going to be angry at my iambics once again, sole Imperator (Caesar), though they don’t deserve it.”
Suetonius says that Catullus apologised to Caesar, who did not bear a grudge and invited him to dinner on the same day. If this is true, Caesar was very forgiving, as Catullus’s poems accuse him and “Mentula” of gross and shameful things including addiction to the passive role in gay sex and paedophilia with little girls. One wonders whether Suetonius’s anecdote, a hundred and fifty years on, was completely accurate; and if so, whether Caesar had seen all the poems that we have. These poems are not on PantheonPoets.com, though many other wonderful Catullus pieces are, at Latin Poetry/Latin Poets. If you want to check them out elsewhere, the main Caesar poems are 29, 57 and 93 and the ones referring to Mamurra “the Prick” are 94, 105, 114 and 115.
The text of Catullus is a bit of a mess and the little poem above is one of the most corrupted bits. More in another post about Catullus’s text and how it came to us.
Catullus is in an amorous mood again, but this time he is counting on something more substantial than kisses as he asks Ipsitilla to invite him for an afternoon siesta. There is explicit material in this, one of the Catullus pieces which used to be omitted from the scholarly editions.
Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.
The death of a friend brings life into focus for John Westbrook, who sums matters up in a ballad. Read it here.
At Pantheon Poets we have met Polyphemus the Cyclops as the renegade shepherd who honours no Gods except his father Poseidon and is prone to kill and eat visitors in violation of the ancient world’s code of hospitality to strangers. Now, in one of Ovid’s most engaging passages, we find him in love with a sea-nymph, Galatea, and torn by jealousy for the mortal that she loves, Acis.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Odysseus has foiled and blinded the Cyclops. From the frequency with which the blinding is shown in ancient art, from archaic Greek pots to grand sculptural groups made for Emperors, it was a tale that must have been universally known and loved as one of the greatest exploits of the heroes of legend. In the Odyssey, however, it also carries a much darker undertone. Not for the first time, it has been Odysseus’s outsize appetite for risk and his determination to meet the monster that put him and his men in danger in the first place. And by revealing his name to the Cyclops, and blasphemously mocking his father Poseidon’s inability to restore his sight, Odysseus has made another very big mistake. Poseidon has heard Polyphemus’s prayer that, if Odysseus is fated to come home, it should be with the loss of all his companions, on a ship that is not his own, and that he should find troubles in his house. Odysseus will soon find that curse beginning to come true as the Laestrygonians destroy eleven of his twelve ships with all their crews. He may come out on top in the end, but the Odyssey is as much the story of his disasters as his triumphs.
The illustration, by Arnold Böcklin, looks ahead to Odysseus’s long and lonely captivity on Calypso’s island.
Link to the story of the Cyclops in Homer’s Greek and follow in English here.
