Trojan Reunion
When Catullus' brother dies at Troy, Catullus writes a poem, spoken from the graveside, that begins with a reference to that great poem of homecoming, the Odyssey , but this new poem is troubled in its sense of place and time:
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias
Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. (c.101)
Transported through many peoples and through many seas
I come, brother, to these unhappy funeral rites,
so that I might present you with the last gift of death
and might address in vain the mute ash.
Because fortune has taken your person from me,
alas, poor brother, taken unjustly from me,
Now, for the meantime, receive what is given as a sad gift
at the funeral in accordance with the ancient custom of
our fathers, wet with a brother's copious weeping,
and forever, brother, hail and farewell.
Reversing the movement of the Odyssey from Troy to home, Catullus arrives "through many peoples and through many seas" (compare Homer, Od. 1.1–4) to perform the final rites for the dead.[5] Odysseus is reunited with his wife, but Catullus' reunion with his brother is at the same time a definitive separation. Odysseus' return to Ithaca inaugurates the resumption of tradition; Catullus, it is true, performs the rites of ancestral tradition in this outlandish place, but these rites are only a substitute for the communion with his brother that death has rendered impossible. The moment and the place of this poem are full of contradictions, condensed into the final "hail and farewell," words that both accompany the ceremony and gesture toward a communication that transcends its inadequate formulae.[6] It is toward these simple gestures
of hailing and bidding farewell that the poem moves, putting behind it the burden of futile and ironic preliminaries. Both gestures assume a presence that death has in fact removed, and yet the placing of this composite and contradictory gesture at the poem's end aligns the moment of Catullus' address to his brother with the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the completed poem, which flashes into presence only to merge with silence. The modern German poet Paul Celan, also deeply concerned with remembering the dead, has remarked that "a poem asserts itself on the edge of itself," a description appropriate to Catullus' displacement of the poem's burden to a point both of arrival and of severance, where the rhythm of the poem touches the time that resumes when it ends.[7] It is at this liminal point that the reader of the poem is most conscious of the gap across which the poem speaks, a gap that for most of its readers includes the poet's own death. To read this poem is to address to Catullus the very greeting he addressed to his brother, as the many poems hailing Catullus as brother attest (see chap. 9). So communication across the grave proves possible, but only if the addressee is displaced by Catullus himself, for it is only the poem as poem that can overcome the futility of the poem's address to the dead. In this connection, Catullus' "meanwhile" (interea, 7) suggests that the poem is provisional in the sense that it will only activate its system of positions once the poet has died. A written poem is a communication in which one or other of the parties is absent—depending on whether you look at it from the poet's or the reader's point of view—and this is what makes Catullus' address to his dead brother reversible.
The fact that Catullus' poem threatens to make him the recipient of the final "hail and farewell" is not the only ambiguity in the poet's position. It is not clear, for instance, whether Catullus is offering his brother what ancient custom has "handed down" (tradita) to him as a "sad duty" (tristi munere) to the dead or what is "handed over" (tradita) as a "sad gift" (tristi munere) to the dead;[8] the ambiguity of the phrasing points to a situation in which Catullus is both active (as gift giver) and passive (as recipient of a duty). This ambiguity applies also to the logic of the reference to the Odyssey , for it is poignantly inappropriate that, reversing the Odyssey , Catullus has gone to Troy to be reunited with his brother, and yet it is entirely appropriate that the Roman should find his brother at the home of Rome's great ancestor. If Catullus the brother experiences a tragic parody of Odyssean homecoming, Catullus the Roman distinguishes himself from the Greek Odysseus by returning to the Troy that is Rome's origin.[9] When he follows the ancient custom of
his ancestors at Troy, the moment is both familial and national, and, if the Odyssean parallel gives a bitter quality to the family reunion, it also overlays that event with the proud cultural claims of Rome to Trojan ancestry, for the speaker of this poem is not only a grieving brother but also a Roman poet. In fact, Catullus finds that, at the moment of severance from his brother (which perhaps signals the end of his family line, c.68.22), he is also the nodal point in the sustaining of a long tradition. The mythical reference inserts the event into a scale that changes its valences, and on this larger scale the words of this poet of a world-historical Rome are themselves handed down (tradita) so that the modern reader can address the poet. The words of the poem, then, are spoken from several positions that tend to displace each other.
In the paired poems poems 65 and 66, a covering letter to Ortalus and the translation of Callimachus sent as a substitute for poems that grief prevent him from writing, Catullus juxtaposes a quintessentially Alexandrian jeu d'esprit against a very Roman poem about obligations and responsibility. As we shall see, these poems are engaged in a complex, and at times disturbing, dialogue about poetic expression and sincerity.