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Catullus Modern bronze bust of Catullus, Sirmione Catullus’ Life • Warning! -total absence of reliable biographical data! • Gaius Valerius Catullus born 85 or 84 BC • Jerome who relies on Suetonius, puts it in 87 • Father wealthy and prominent citizen of Verona, then part of Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul • Part of Gaul located in Italy between the Alpine foothills and the river Po • Inhabitants called Transpadanes • Father had friendly relations with Julius Caesar • Villa at Sirmione at Lake Garda - half-excavated ruins Le Grotte di Catullo Catullus’ Life • Catullus moved to Rome in 60’s returned to Verona perhaps more than once • Love affair with Lesbia, thought to be a pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, from 62-57 BC • emancipated and profligate sister of Cicero’s enemy Publius Clodius and the wife of Metellus Celer, consul in 60 BC, died in 59 • Catullus’ brother died in 58 BC, buried near Troy Map of Italy Catullus’ Life • Catullus spent year on staff of Memmius, governor of Bithynia, (Roman province on NW coast of Asia Minor) in 57-56 (the one precise date we have!) • Lucretius dedicated De Rerum Natura to Memmius • may have gone to leave Clodia and visit brother’s tomb (see poem 101 “A Final Offering at a Distant Grave”), also to acquire money • Caesar’s conquests on Rhine in 55 and plans to invade Britain events mentioned in poems 11 and 45 • no poem can be dated later than 54 BC, may be year of death Traditions of Poetry before Catullus • Epic • Homer, Ennius • Long-winded epic • Dactylic hexameter meter • Patriotic, heroic, impersonal • Public audience • Rough-hewn narrative • Poetry should teach about world • Alexandrian/Hellenistic -Callimachus, Theocritus -small scale: lyric, elegy, epyllion (mini epic) -lyric or elegiac meters -private, romantic, personal -coterie poetry, written for set -display of wit, polish, erudition -art for art’s sake; wit; poetry should exist in its own world Catullus and the New Poets “novi poetae” • Social and political upheaval may have influenced circle • Poetae novae and in Greek hoi neoteroi “the modernists” • Followed in footsteps of Greek Alexandrian poets of third century BC, Callimachus and Theocritus • his poetic circle included Calvus, Cinna, and Cornelius Nepos Catullus’ oeuvre • We have just 116 poems of Catullus, varying in length from two to 480 lines, and a few fragments; this probably represents the whole of his published work. • Poems 1-60 are shorter pieces, for the most part, written in a variety of meters, on a variety of topics (love poems, attacks against enemies, witty observations on contemporary mores, short hymns), and in a variety of tones. • Are known as the polymetric poems Oeuvre continued • 25 Lesbia poems convey happiness and disallusion • wrote lyric poems, besides amatory, some satiric, occasional poems, epigrams • cameos of friends and enemies, and of chance meetings and sexual encounters • Coarse and amusing • Poems 61-68 are longer pieces, again in a variety of meters and on a variety of topics (from wedding poems to a particularly elaborate example of an epyllion or "mini-epic“) • Known as carmina docta Oeuvre continued • Others, including his longest (Poem 64), an account in hexameters of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, have mythological themes, but still show depth of poetic emotion. • Poems 69ff. are shorter pieces of varying length composed in elegiac couplets — a weightier, more reflective meter than those of poems 1-60. The subject matter of these poems parallels that of poems 1-60 for the most part, but often in a more somber or brooding tone. This is particularly true of the Lesbia poems in this part of the collection • These poems referred to as the epigrams Textual Tradition • Poems of Catullus might have suffered same fate as those of Archilochus and Sappho but for a single manuscript which made its way to Verona early in 14th century • Text we use today based on copies of copies of copies of that text which no longer survives Textual Tradition continued • Rude and obscene poetry routinely left untranslated or left out of collections all together in many editions so not to offend Catullus at Lesbia's by Sir Laurence Alma Tadema , 18361912 Lesbia Weeping Over a Sparrow, by Sir Laurence AlmaTadema