Maybe ten years after the publication of his great three first books of Odes in 2023 BCE, Horace finds himself unexpectedly, and perhaps unwillingly, returning to the genre. He has been invited by Augustus to do so as a contribution to the glory of the new, but now very well established, imperial system, and invitations from that quarter are hard to refuse. The purpose of the second Ode in Horace’s new, fourth, book is primarily to celebrate Augustus by looking forward to a victory over a troublesome German tribe, the Sygambri, but he also takes the opportunity to put on record his critical appreciation of another great poet, Pindar. That, rather than dutifully fulsome praise of the Emperor, is what primarily makes this an attractive poem to a modern readership. Nevertheless, it is a good example of how the imperial regime approached establishing and augmenting its prestige through the arts, and the metre, singing and dancing along in Sapphics, make the piece attractive to listen to throughout. The triumph in the illustration is Caesar’s, one of a series painted by the Renaissance master, Mantegna. now in the royal collection at Hampton Court.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Are the Olympian Gods – if they exist – too remote to take an interest in human affairs, as the followers of the Philosopher Epicurus thought? An awe-inspiring natural event causes Horace to think again about his beliefs. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

In this wall painting from Herculaneum, Zeus and Hera celebrate their marriage; see photo credits for licensing details.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is often a sharp contrast between the elegance and charm of his style and the grim stories he tells. Book six, for example, has a sequence of episodes showing that it is unwise to cross either the Goddess Latona or Apollo and Artemis, her twin children by Jupiter. For performing flawlessly in a weaving contest against Artemis, Arachne has been turned into a spider. For belittling Latona’s divinity and her prowess as a mother, Niobe has been turned to stone by grief, having seen her fourteen children killed by Apollo and Artemis, and her husband, Amphion, die by suicide. In a grimly comic touch, an onlooker then tells the story of a group of peasants who were turned into frogs by Latona for denying her water. Now another recalls, almost in passing, the forfeit paid by the satyr and master aulos-player Marsyas for losing a musical contest: Apollo, the winner, skinned him alive.

‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit;
‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti!’
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat …

“Why are you pulling me apart?” he cries, “Aaah! I wish I hadn’t done it! Aaah! No flute is worth as much as this!” he yelled. And as he did so, his skin was ripped off past the ends of his limbs and he was nothing but one big wound, and everywhere the blood flows … ”

Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.

In the first elegy in his first Book, the first century BCE poet Tibullus has been extolling the virtues of a simple farming life in the country to Delia, his difficult mistress. By way of a sentimental imaginary deathbed scene, he draws the threads together with a reminder of the inevitability of ageing and death, and suggests that he and she should enjoy love and each other while the times still allow.

Hear Tibullus’s Latin and follow in English here.

The illustration is the opening of a fifth-century manuscript in the Vatican of the Eclogues of Virgil, another poet who sang the virtues of country living there and in his work on farming, the Georgics.

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.

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