Catullus thought that Suffenus was a dud as a poet but – against form – was prepared to make allowances for the inability that we all have, as humans, to see ourselves as we are. The illustration shows that even real talent may get carried away by its own publicity …
Hear the Latin and follow in English here. The photograph of Oscar Wilde is by Sarony.
See the new Latin poetry selection here, with pieces from Boethius, Horace and Virgil.
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.
Catullus’s shortest poem, and one of his most famous, is his epigram about loving and hating simultaneously. Hear it in 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 envious of Lesbia’s little playmate. Hear about it in Latin and follow in translation here.
