1. Williams 1985, 74.

2. Keats 1970, 700-701. In the "Fall of Hyperion" (i.18), we find the words "when this warm scribe my hand is in the grave," which confirms that the speaker of this poem is the dead poet.

3. Culler 1981, 154.

4. The idea originates in John Stuart Mill's 1883 essay "What is Poetry?": "Eloquence is heard , poetry is overheard . Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude." Mill 1976, 12.

5. Quinn 1982, 89.

6. The concept of "confessional" poetry was developed by Rosenthal 1967 to describe the poetry of Lowell and others writing in the 1950s and 1960s (Plath, Ginsberg, Roethke, Berryman, Sexton). Rosenthal is a little vague as to what he means by this term: the poetry is treated mainly as a form of self-knowledge on the part of the poets, but the implications of the term for the relation between poet and reader are not explored.

7. Selden 1992 is a brilliant De Manian reading of Catullus, and I am delighted to see that in some respects it reaches, by a rather different route, conclusions similar to my own (particularly on page 488, where Selden speaks of the masochism of the aesthetic relation in connection with c.16). Hubbard 1984 is a very sophisticated reading of c.68 from a similar perspective.

8. Elsewhere, Quinn (1972, 279) rightly compares this aspect of the poems of Catullus to Cicero's letters: "We have, moreover, to imagine the experiments taking place at a time and within a circle where the cult of the elegant, poised, ironic expression of the everyday was assiduously cultivated by a much wider elite , including such people as Cicero: for the more personal letters of Cicero to his friends bear a family resemblance to the lighter poems of Catullus; both represent the Latin of conversation, improved upon—not to make the words sound more impressive or more carefully chosen, but to make them sound more casual and at the same time just right.''

9. Cicero, Pis. 70—71, says of the poems of Philodemus, "Multa a multis lecta et audita." On the importance of reading aloud in Roman literary life, see Starr 1991. Wiseman 1985, 124-27, has some good remarks on the ambiguous status of the Catullan poem.

10. In a sense, criticism is itself a realization or performance of the text in which the critic attempts to speak the whole poem, to articulate everything that the written poem is saying. In this connection see the interesting remarks of Quinn 1982, 103-4, on praelegere , which he describes as "the authoritative performance of the scholar-critic, the enactment of his understanding of the text."

11. There is a considerable bibliography on the neoterics, some of it skeptical as to the existence of an identifiable group, but Lyne 1978 provides a good account of the evidence for its existence and activity and Ross 1975, 3-8, has a valuable interpretation of the context in which the neoterics emerged. On Catullus' Alexandrianism, see Buchheit 1975 and Clausen 1970.

12. In c.47 Catullus laments that Porcius and Socration, the latter possibly a nickname of Philodemus (Frank 1928, 85), are being feted by Piso, while his friends Veranius and Fabullus "beg for invitations at the crossroads" (7). Catullus berates himself in c.44 for having read a frigid speech of Sestius in order to get a dinner invitation.

13. Veyne 1988.

14. See the review of Heiden 1991.

15. Veyne excludes Catullus from this kind of analysis; unlike the elegiac poets, Catullus produces an illusion of sincerity: "The Jealous Man is on stage, and we come in on his monologue. . . . The poem is set in real time, it is spoken as it is being lived. . . . That is why this magisterial art gives such an impression of naturalness" (34, re c.8). This poetry is over heard by its readership, which judges it by the standards of mimetic truth. This positioning of Catullus in relation to the elegiac poets reflects Catullus' role within the Roman pantheon, which I will address in the next chapter: the perfect balance between artifice and naturalness that Veyne sees in Catullus' art sites the elegiac poets in relation to an unsustainable Catullan poise. Catullus' art is classical insofar as it "snips at nature and sews it back together again without falsifying it" (35), and so, according to Veyne, the elaborate game that the elegiac poets play with the reader becomes what one might call a postlapsarian activity.

16. The complexity and importance of Roman status divisions during the late Republic is succinctly described by Beard and Crawford 1985, 40-49. Interesting studies of particular manifestations of the contradictions between ideology and reality in social status can be found in White 1978, 80-82, and D'Arms 1984.

17. Zanker 1988, 25-31.

18. On writers and equestrian status, see Taylor 1968, especially 472-74, where she discusses the choice between ambitio and otium .

19. On the highly aristocratic Clodia, almost certainly the woman Catullus referred to as Lesbia, see Wiseman 1985, 15-26. Licinius Calvus, on the evidence of cc. 14, 50, and 54 a close friend of Catullus, came from what Fordyce 1961, 134, refers to as "an old and distinguished family."

20. See the remarks of David 1983, 318-13, on provincial orators at Rome.

21. Caelius' letters to Cicero constitute Book 8 of Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares .

22. On the concept of the author, see Foucault 1979, from which I quote below, and Pease 1990, a very useful study of the changing meanings and functions of the word "author" from medieval times to the modern period.

23. Friedricksmeyer 1983, 85 note 26.

24. Friedricksmeyer 1983, 1.

25. The lines Friedricksmeyer amplifies are:

cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
     ilia rumpens. (c.11, 17-20)

26. In one of the most recent studies of Catullus, Martin 1992, 116, describes Catullus' readers as bystanders whose job is "to cheer the verses on." He cites in this connection c.42, in which Catullus repeatedly insults a woman who has stolen his notebooks as a "filthy whore." Gaisser 1993, 212-13, quotes a Latin imitation of c.42 by Leonardo Bruni (early fifteenth century) that enhances and extends Catullus' insults with considerable relish.

27. The adjective lascivus (mischievous, playful) is used of Catullus by Propertius (2.34.87), Ovid ( Tristia 2.427), and Martial (7.35.5).

28. C.16, 6-11. I discuss this poem in detail in Chapter 2.

29. Compare Minyard 1985, 27: "Catullus . . . creates a new reference of feeling for these words [ fides, foedus, amicitia , etc.]. Lesbia and her husband, however much married, were not joined in a union ratified by feeling. Therefore, the marriage was not real but an imitation. Respecting it would entail repudiation of the new fides , not its realization." Stehle 1986, 220, has some good words on this aspect of Catullan criticism: "The modern audience, though, has collaborated [with the tyranny of the speaker] by providing material for constructing a 'deathless,' 'profound,' 'spiritual' love which obliges the worthy subject to return it. An audience finds poetry that is comfortable and does it violence. Perhaps our eager elaboration of the Catullan claims has denied the poetry a chance to construct the other paths of its good readings."

30. Christopher Hollis's We Aren't So Dumb , quoted by Havelock 1939, 74. In the preface to the second edition, Havelock has some very interesting remarks about the motives for constructing an anti-ideological Catullus in the thirties.

31. The more recent elaborations of this position include Rankin 1975 and Minyard 1985, 22-28. Skinner 1982 provides an interesting corrective to the view that Catullus' values were personal, not political.

32. These lines come from "The Cave of Making," Auden 1976, 523.

33. Eagleton 1990 is a powerful analysis of the ideology of the aesthetic in European thought, and the first chapter, "Free Particulars," provides an excellent framework for understanding the political concerns, conflicts, and interests that attended the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

1. Vergil alludes to Catullus in several places, but especially noteworthy are the allusions to c.101, Catullus' graveside farewell to his brother, at Aen. 6.692 (Anchises greeting Aeneas in the underworld) and 11.97-98 (Aeneas' farewell to the dead Pallas).

2. The opposition between Martial and Catullus goes back to the Renaissance and Catullus' earliest readers. Muret, for instance, protests that "there is as much difference between the writings of Martial and Catullus as between some wag on the street-corner and the well-bred jests of a gentleman." Cited by Gaisser 1993, 155.

3. Compare Quinn 1972, 256: "To fail to distinguish between Poems 5 and 7 and Poems 48 and 99 is carrying openmindedness too far. We might as soon refuse to distinguish between Catullus and Ovid."

4. See Munro 1938, 227-43, on the relative merits of Horace and Catullus. Munro quotes Fénelon: "How much are Ovid and Martial, with their ingenious and carefully wrought strokes, beneath these unstudied words [odi et amo], where the possessed heart speaks alone in a kind of despair."

5. Havelock 1939, 95.

6. Marchiesi, for example, praises Catullus for writing of love without either weighing it down with the tragic or trivializing it. He accuses Vergil of doing the former in Aen. 4. Quoted in Traina 1986, 41.

7. Traina 1986, 6, compares Lucretius' "horror ac divina voluptas" to Catullus' "odi et amo."

8. On Lucretius, see Bollack 1978, 118; on Vergil, Parry 1963.

9. On this ambivalence, see Habinek 1992a.

10. Apuleius, Apol. 10, provides our first clue to the identity of Lesbia: "accusent C. Catullum, quod Lesbiam pro Clodia nominarit." Lesbia seems to be linked to Clodius in c.79 (on this poem, see Skinner 1981), but Clodius had three sisters and not everyone agrees that Clodia Metelli is Catullus' Lesbia. The bibliography on Lesbia and Clodia is large (Holoka 1985, 9-11), but see Wiseman 1985, 216-18, and 1974, 105-6, for a skeptical view of the accepted identification and its effect. Deroux 1973 presents the case for the traditional identification quite fully and convincingly.

11. Schwabe repeatedly refers to Clodia Metelli as quadrantaria (costing a quarter), echoing the insulting name that Caelius coined for her, taken up by Cicero in the Pro Caelio (26, 29). His assessment of Clodia's treatment of Catullus (69-70) is worthy of Cicero himself, and starts modern Catullan scholarship off on its vituperation of a debauched and deceitful Lesbia who corrupted the innocent Catullus.

12. On the strategy of Cicero's Pro Caelio , see Wiseman 1985, 75-90.

13. Yeats 1956, 139. The rest of the poem reads:

All shuffle here; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord what would they say
     Did their Catullus walk that way?

14. The learned associations of the name Lesbia are brought out when Catullus compliments Caecilius' girlfriend by calling her ''Sapphica puella/Musa doctior" (c. 35.16-17).

15. Adler 1981.

16. Compare, for instance, the remark of Frank 1928, 22, a propos Catullus' comparison of his love for Lesbia to that of a father for his sons (c.72.4): "The simile was not quite correct, but his experience had somehow exceeded the pagan vocabulary of the day. " Further examples of this line of thought are given below.

17. The expression is used by Lyne 1980, who argues (1-18) that "traditional Roman society made it socially and psychologically difficult (to the point of impossibility) for gentlemen to find whole love with someone of equal status and circumstances" (17). Catullus aspired to a "relationship that was permanent, reciprocal, solemnized, and loving and sincere" (36) but had to invent new terms (like "foedus amicitiae") to express it. See also Havelock 1939, 90-96.

18. Copley 1949, 36.

19. Jaro 1988.

20. Lee 1990, xi, provides an excellent short summary of the state and history of the text (ix-xi). For a more detailed history of the the text of Catullus, see Goold 1958 and Gaisser 1993.

21. On the rediscovery of the text of Catullus and the early history of the text, see Gaisser 1993.

22. The vicissitudes of the manuscript are told in a poem of Benvenuto de Campesani attached to copies G and R. On this poem, see Skutsch 1970.

23. Goold, cited by Lee 1990, x.

24. Gaisser 1982 is a fascinating study of the work of Catullus' earliest interpreters; Gaisser quotes Poliziano's account of his labors (84-85).

25. See Gaisser 1993, 29-31. Parthenius, who published the first commentary on Catullus in 1485, refers to Catullus' poetry as a vast hydra that he has tackled with Herculean courage (Gaisser 1982, 96).

26. On the question of whether Catullus was responsible for ordering the poems, see Introduction , note 51.

27. On the Poematia of Sentinus Augurinus, which gave Pliny much pleasure and even awakened his admiration: "Multa tenuiter, multa sublimiter, multa venuste, multa tenere, multa dulciter, multa cum bile" ( Ep. 4.27.1). On Pompeius Saturninus: "Praeterea tacit versus, quales Catullus meus aut Calvus. . . . Quantum illis leporis, dulcedinis, amaritudinis, amoris! inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus levibusque duriusculos quosdam, et hoc quasi Catullus aut Calvus" ( Ep. 1.16.5). Sending a copy of his hendecasyllables to a friend, Pliny describes their variety as a product of the variety of his leisure and of the changeable exhaustiveness of his character: "Accipies cum hac epistula hendecasyllabos nostros, quibus nos in vehiculo in balineo inter cenam oblectamus otium temporis. his iocamur ludimus amamus dolemus querimur irascimur, describimus aliquid modo pressius modo elatius, atque ipsa varietate temptamus efficere, ut alia aliis quaedam fortasse omnibus placeant" ( Ep. 4.14.2-4). With the last remark about the purpose of this variety, Pliny indicates that even his leisure is a form of canvassing; the variety of his moods provides an image of the varied audience before which he performs and which his variety solicits.

28. Zanker 1988, 25-31.

29. Cicero, Pis. 70-71: "Poema porro fecit ita festivum, ita concinnum, ita elegans, nihil ut fieri possit argutius . . . ita multum ad istum de isto scripsit ut omnes hominis libidines, omnia stupra, omnia cenarum genera conviviorumque, adulteria denique eius delicatissimis verbis expresserit, in quibus si quis velit possit istius tamquam in speculo vitam intueri."

30. For a Lacanian analysis of the narrativity of the Lesbia affair, see Janan 1994.

31. Compare the reconstructions of the love affair in the introductions to the editions of Merrill (1893, xviii-xxv) and Baehrens (1885, 24-30). On Schwabe's importance, see Wiseman 1985, 216-18.

32. See, for instance, Buechner 1977, entitled "Der 'Liebesroman' des Catull," and Bayet 1953, 28: "To regroup them [sc. the Lesbia poems] in a plausible order is enough to retrace what has been called 'the novel of Catullus,' which is much more than a novel: an experience just as naked, but more eternal than that of Adolphe."

The basic narrative of Catullus' life as it was traditionally reconstructed is told so well and with such delicious irony by Havelock 1939 that it is worth quoting in full:

We may suppose . . . that Catullus spent his boyhood at Verona and on Lake Sirmio, a youth of good provincial family, but, we must assume , living a life close to that of the Gallic frontiersman. His education, no doubt received at Verona, was, we can readily imagine , assisted by tutors and grammarians of the district—we hear elsewhere of several who taught in Cisalpine Gaul at about this period—who could teach him that love of Greek poetry so manifest in his verse. At Verona ( it is tempting to assume ), he was introduced to Metellus, the husband of his future love, during Metellus' governorship of Cisalpine Gaul in 62 B.C.E. Armed ( we may imagine ) with letters of introduction, he comes, a young unsophisticated provincial, to the capital, meets Clodia (if he has not met her already), his superior in years and station, and falls violently in love with her. For a period he worships her from afar, expressing his emotion in his more romantic love-lyrics. With her assistance, however, ( it is safe to guess ) he obtains entry, despite his provincialisms, to the most exclusive circles of fashion and politics in Rome, thus achieving personal relationships which he proceeds to reveal in his verse. By the year 60 ( we may perhaps infer ) his love had been declared and consummated at the house of one Manlius Torquatus [poem 68]. . . . It was a fleeting happiness he thus enjoyed. His brother died ( probably ) next year (59); the loss may well have clouded the rest of his life. Revisiting Verona, doubtless to console his parents, he hears of Clodia's infidelities [poem 68]. . . . Her husband however had died, so ( no doubt about this time) Catullus asked her ( we infer from one epigram) to marry him. But she preferred a life of pleasurable freedom, at Rome and at Baiae the watering place, enjoying various lovers [ Pro Caelio ], among them one Caelius Rufus soon bitterly recognized and attacked by the poet as his chief rival. About this time also ( we must asssume ), responding to advice from elder and grayer leaders of literature like the orator Hortensius and Manlius Torquatus, he essayed a more learned and Alexandrian manner, deserting his earlier simplicity to attempt some longer and more elaborate poems, meanwhile maintaining a running fire of political and personal lampoons directed specially against Caesar, Pompey and Caesar's lieutenants. By 58 his love for Clodia had ( probably ) died; at any rate none of his love lyrics can be shown to past-date this year. In 57 he joined the suite of the proconsul of Asia for that year, visited his brother's grave, and ( if we can assume the poem on The Old Yacht to be autobiographical) sailed home to Sirmio in a private yacht purchased in Asia. This eastern journey ( we may imagine ) encouraged his experiments in mythological verse and romantic idyll in the Alexandrian manner. Meanwhile Rufus, after quarrelling with Clodia, had become involved in a prosecution which she assisted herself; Cicero as defending counsel counter-attacked by blackening Clodia's character as much as he could. Therefore ( we can guess ) that Catullus on his return must have learned these secrets of Clodia's private life revealed in court (56 B.C.E. ). The fresh shock ( no doubt ) helped to inspire his last address to her in 55, an address ( perhaps ) provoked by a request from her for a reconciliation. In this poem [11] he stated that his love is already dead. However, its complimentary references to Caesar's conquests in Gaul and Britain lead us to believe that in the realm of politics he had by this time accomplished a reconciliation with the dictator of Gaul. He must have died a few months later (80-81, emphasis Havelock's).

33. For instance, Merrill 1893, xxxi-xxxii, and Baehrens 1885, 30.

34. The story is complicated a little by the fact that Catullus' passion for Lesbia is often said to have made a serious poet of him (Schaefer 1966, 109; Baehrens 1885, 24, Buechner 1977, 59). However, during the course of the relationship, as reconstructed, Catullus detaches from its unworthy instigator the latent seriousness that Lesbia has elicited.

35. Segal 1968; Rankin 1972; Skinner 1981, 39-41.

36. For instance, Buechner 1977, 75: "We have followed the drama in which Catullus recklessly and completely abandons himself, experiences the oppression of the weight of his passion, seeks to master the experience of being wronged, to finally beg the gods for liberation. This drama is of boundless universality." Offermann 1977, 298, describes a movement from uncomplicated love to desperation (cc.1-60) and then back again (cc.69-116), but with an audience now endowed with a knowing suspicion of Lesbia.

37. Compare the statement of Ross 1975, 9: "Sophistication and wit . . . may have fascinated his poetic imagination, but he was no intellectual playboy , by nature or circumstances, and we can see another very different side of his genius—more serious, traditional and Roman" (emphasis mine). Another version of the collection's turn to the serious is provided by Block 1984, 54, who sees c.65, and the death of Catullus' brother, as the turning point from trivial boudoir love to more serious concerns.

38. Johnson 1982. Heine 1975, in his introduction to the Wege der Forschung volume on Catullus, begins by remarking on the dominance of the problem of unity in the recent decades of Catullan studies.

39. Havelock 1939, 85-86, and Kroll 1929, vii.

40. Originally advanced in Quinn 1959, 27-43.

41. Quinn 1972, 256.

42. Macleod's argument that the other poems containing, and attacking, Furius and Aurelius (cc.15, 16, 21, 23) are parodies is used to bolster the claim that "no cheap irony disturbs the venomous anger and the sorrowful regret which infuse the poem [c.11]" (302). There is now no reason to suppose that Furius and Aurelius, who have apparently accused Catullus of mollitia (c.16) and tried to seduce his boy (c.15, 21), are really enemies.

43. For instance, Macleod compares Eclogue 1.64-66 to the beginning of c.11 and observes that the journey as an escape from an unhappy love is a common motive, but the parallels do not lead him to conclude, as he does with Poem 51, for instance, that we are dealing with a parody; in this case, the exaggeration of the gesture reflects an intense reality, emphasizing the fidelity of Furius and Aurelius and the fact that "the journey is that of a desperate and embittered man who will go to any lengths to flee what he has lost" (301).

44. Compare the denial that "a serious poem must be describing a real situation and a funny poem an invented one" (303), to the warnings that we must not take Catullus or Furius and Aurelius seriously because their statements are just the basis of a joke (301) and that the comic features of c.21 preclude any too serious reaction to the Poem (299).

45. "The present age is all the more at home with Catullus because the feelings he expressed were those of an individualist clinging, in a disintegrating society, to the one standard which he could feel was secure, that of personal integrity." R. G. Levens (writing in 1954), quoted by Ferguson 1988, 1.

46. When Horvath, restoring a manuscript reading and adducing parallels from Catullus himself, tries to claim that one of the major Lesbia poems (c.68) revolves around a ménage à trois between Catullus, the addressee, and another woman, he draws on himself the wrath of Granarolo (1967, 186-98), who accuses him, at great length, of leveling Catullus to the moral status of his contemporaries.

47. The phrase comes from Tennyson's poem "Frater Ave atque Vale":

48. Compare Raphael and Macleish 1978, 16; Squire 1923, a poem discussed in Chapter 9; and this passage from Robert de Maria's novel Clodia (1965): "Perhaps that was why he could not survive in Rome. He did not enjoy corruption though he could participate in the outer forms of it. He did not understand that innocence and corruption are only two sides of the same coin" (352-53).

49. According to Wiseman, the obscenity with which c.16 begins and ends (Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, c.16.1, 16.14) is Catullus' reaction to "those who held his moral standards in contempt," the only way that Catullus could "get his message through to sensibilities so much cruder than his own. What Aurelius saw as a high-class bit of tail was to Catullus something chaste and innocent, to be cherished and protected" (124). So the violence and obscenity in Catullus, far from contaminating the tenderness, are simply other manifestations of that tenderness.

50. Compare Foucault 1979, 150: "These aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice."

51. Useful discussions of these questions are Minyard 1988, Skinner 1981, and Hubbard 1983, but the search for patterns in the collection, and particularly the polymetrics, has become something of an industry and the bibliography is now very large. Those who uncover patterns and cycles (and the multitude, variety, and intricacy of these might be cause for suspicion) have always assumed that those patterns and cycles must have been arranged by Catullus himself, though it is no less likely that an editor should be responsible. After all, why should an editor be any less ingenious than the critics who have "discovered" these patterns and cycles?

1. For the distinction between the disclaimer of Martial (1.4.8), which in the context of the more repressive atmosphere of the empire certainly did involve a distinction between life and art, and this passage of Catullus, see Citroni 1975, 32-33. The distinction here is between what is appropriate to the bard or epic poet (pium poetam ipsum, 5-6) and what is appropriate to the writer of versiculi . Richlin 1992a, 12-13, 145-47, has excellent discussions of this poem, pointing out that the separation of life from work is not the issue at hand and stressing the importance of Catullus' ambivalent sexual pose in the poem.

2. Richlin 1992a and Selden 1992 both make excellent cases for a sexual model of the relationship between reader and poet in Catullus. Richlin's book describes the priapic model in Roman humorous poetry (mainly invective and satire), and deals with Catullus specifically on pages 144-56, and Selden discusses Catullus' game with the reader in a framework that is quite similar to mine, though in his version the game is played on the field of interpretation.

3. A selection of English imitations of these poems can be found in Duckett 1925, 10-25.

4. The poems of Catullus are quoted according to the text of Mynors 1967.

5. On Catullus' use of this word, see Seager 1974. The combination of erotic and aesthetic senses in this word is best illustrated by c.35.13-18.

6. The OLD covers all of these meanings with appropriate citations, but I will cite a few passages mainly to illustrate the negative or questionable connotations of this word. The basic notion of "inessential/luxury" is supplied by Lucretius' lines: "Navigia atque agri culturas moenia leges / arma vias vestis [et] cetera de genere horum, / praemia, delicias quoque vitae funditus omnis, / carmina picturas, et daedala signa polire" (5.1448-51). Compare Seneca, Benef. 4.5.2: "Neque enim necessitatibus nostris provisum est, usque in delicias amamur." Cicero tells Atticus that he won't be attending the Games because he wishes to avoid "omnem deliciarum suspicionem'' ( ad Att. 2.10). Martial complains to a sluggish reader, ''Quid prodest mihi tam macer libellus, / nullo crassior ut sit umbilico, / si totus tibi triduo legatur? / numquam deliciae supiniores" (2.6.10-13). Quintilian distinguishes those readers who only consider the old poets, with their natural eloquence and manly strength, to be worth reading from those who are delighted by "recens haec lascivia deliciaeque" ( Inst. 10.1.43). For the meaning "airs" or "caprices," there is Cicero's "ecce aliae deliciae equitum vix ferendae!" ( ad Att. 1.17.9). Finally, for a usage quite close to that of Catullus 2, compare Martial's reference to the "delicias lususque iocosque leonum" (1.14.1), the miraculous playing of the lions with the hares at the Games, where the lions tease the hares by catching them in their mouths and then letting them go. Bayet 1953, 20, has described this word very well in a passage that is worth quoting in full:

Another, equally notable, aspect of the Catullan position is expressed by the word deliciae , which covers all the games of love, psychic and physical. It has a nearly unbelievable depth of suggestion, grouping meanings as different as "kindnesses" and "amusements," "caprices" and "enjoyments"; but with the etymological implication of a "temptation" and a pleasurable "seduction." So that the word, titillating in itself, represented both the opinion of commmon morality and a provocative attitude with respect to it.

7. Delicatus may not be etymologically related to deliciae ; the OLD gives lacio (entice) as the root of deliciae but gives the etymology of delicatus as dubious. To the Roman mind, though, these words were clearly related; Cicero, for instance, says that, because he wishes to avoid "omnium deliciarum suspicionum," it is inappropriate for him to appear "non solum delicate sed etiam inepte peregrinantem" ( ad Att. 2.10).

8. When Catullus spends the day playing poetic games with his friend Calvus, it is because they had agreed to be delicati (c. 50.3), and when Catullus explains to Mallius that his brother's death has chased from his mind all interest in love poetry, the expression he uses is "all toys ( delicias ) of the mind" (c.68.16).

9. See Newman 1990, 30-32, on nugae and mime.

10. Chapter 2 of Edwards 1993 is an excellent discussion of the range of associations and moral issues engaged by mollitia (softness, effeminacy). The identification of sexual effeminacy with homosexuality in modern times has led several scholars to see the versiculi criticized by Furius and Aurelius in c.48, where Catullus tells Juventius of his insatiable desire to kiss him, rather than in cc.5 and 7. Quinn 1970, 145, comments: "Can anyone doubt, after reading Poems 5 and 7, that Catullus is a man?" But for the Roman there was no incompatibility between effeminacy and heterosexual activity. Seneca's diatribe against Maecenas ( Ep. 114.4, 6), in which he accuses him of effeminacy of literary style as of lifestyle, refers, in the midst of a host of other signs of effeminacy, to the fact that Maecenas was a man "qui uxorem miliens duxit, cum unam habuerit," and this immediately after citing the fact that he was accompanied by two eunuchs, ''magis . . . viri quam ipse"!

11. Probably the most important of the polymeric poems in this connection are cc. 6, 10, 12, 17, 21, 25, 37, 42, 47, and 56.

12. As Veyne (1978, 55) points out, the old Roman sexual morality was a puritanism just as much as was the Christian, only the Roman was a puritanism of virility. The immensely popular pantomime was looked at askance by the moralists because, as Veyne puts it, "the charm of the dance and of song made these men of state and these thinkers tremble, so that they opposed to it the spectacles of the gladiators, more virile, more educational for the citizen" (54).

13. Much of my discussion of this poem focuses on passages and issues that have received attention from previous scholarship, but I treat them in different contexts and from different angles. For an excellent presentation of the main stream of scholarship on this poem, see Latta 1974.

14. Publication, like any other major decision in the life of an upper-class Roman, was undertaken after a consultation with a friend or friends. Several of the letters of Cicero and Pliny reflect this practice; see, for instance, Cicero, ad Att. 4.8a.3, and Pliny, Ep. 9.25, 2.10.

15. This effect of studied casualness was much sought after in Catullus' time: Cicero, for instance, recommends that the orator adopt a "neglegentia diligens" in the use of short phrases ( Orator 78).

16. The lightness of the poet's relation to his own work, and the invitation to audience members to make of it what they will (perhaps more than the poet does himself), are constitutive elements of what later becomes the genre of nugae or ineptiae . Pliny, sending a friend his "hendecasyllables," cuts short his introduction of his work with the words:

Sed quid ego plura? Nam longa praefatione vel excusare vel commendare ineptias ineptissimum est. Unum illud praedicendum videtur, cogitare me has nugas ita inscribers "hendecasyllabi," qui titulus sola metri lege constringitur. Proinde, sive epigrammata sive idyllia sive eclogas, sive, ut multi, poematia seu quod aliud vocare malueris, licebit voces; ego tantum hendecasyllabos praesto (4.14.8-9).

17. Richlin 1992a, 162, speaks of Catullus in this poem as a literary Priapus who "pimps his book."

18. The fullest exposition of this poem as an Alexandrian manifesto is given by Cairns 1969. See also Wiseman 1979, Chapter 11. An excellent corrective to the usual focus on the learned, philological aspect of Roman Alexandrianism is provided by Hutchinson 1988, Chapter 6, and especially pages 282-83, where Hutchinson points out the sensuous and seductive aspects of the Roman poets' descriptions of their own work: "The poets fit Callimachus into their own aesthetic language, and use that language to develop their own conception of their poetry, a conception far richer and more insidious than Callimachus' overt conception of his" (283). Hutchinson is speaking here of the elegists, but what he says is also applicable to Catullus.

19. See Latta 1974, 209.

20. Putnam 1982, 32 (especially note 1), has an interesting discussion of words meaning "smooth" or "polished" in Latin. He cites a number of passages that castigate effeminates for their use of the pumex , but does not seem to think this nuance of any importance in Catullus. Seneca's "Ite nunc et in istis vulsis atque expolitis et nusquam nisi in libidinibus viris quaerite oratores" ( Contr. 1, praef. 10, emphasis mine) tells us something about the implications of Catullus' "pumice expolitum,'' and to this one might add Persius 1.85-87 (emphasis mine): "Pedius quid? crimina rasis / librat in antithesis, doctas posuisse figuras / laudatur: 'bellum hoc.' hoc bellum? an, Romule, ceves?" Richlin 1988, 168, 188-89, has some useful material on the theme of male depilation in Roman literature.

21. "To tease" is one of the meanings of delicias facere ; compare Plautus, Cas. 528, Poen. 296. Compare also Martial 1.14.1.

22. The view that Catullus is making an invidious, Alexandrian comparison between Nepos' huge work and his own slim but polished volume is no longer held by most scholars. Three volumes do not in fact constitute a large work, and Nepos seems to have been something of a neoteric himself (Wiseman 1979, Chapter 10). The word laboriosis (7), however, does suggest that he is teasing Nepos a bit; it is, as Quinn points out in his commentary, "a word that suggests going out of one's way to make work for oneself (90); compare Cicero, Cael. 1, "vos laboriosos existumet."

23. The fact that the Muse is addressed as patrona also has the effect of withdrawing the book from Nepos. Some scholars have suggested emending what is evidently a corrupt text in this line to give the expected reference to Nepos as patronus (e.g., patroni ut ergo), but see the arguments against this in Gold 1987, 56-57. I disagree with Gold only in that I see this reference to the patron Muse as a deliberate replacement of the more usual human patron.

24. It has been argued that the sparrow would have been understood by the Romans as a phallic symbol. The evidence for this seems good enough that a suspicion of double entendre should enter the mind of the reader, but this does not mean that the whole poem becomes an elaborate allegory in which every statement has a specific sexual translation. Thomas 1993 is the most recent to put the case for the double entendre and he does so very judiciously. For the most part, those who have seen a sexual meaning in the sparrow have taken the allegorical path; see Genovese 1974, 121-25; Giangrande 1975, 137-46; Nadeau 1980, 879-90 (discreetly written in Latin!). Against the first two of these, see Jocelyn 1980, 421-24.

25. Catullus' confusion of surface and depth in c.2 is nicely illustrated by his use of the word solaciolum (a little consolation, 7). On the one hand, this word belongs to the psychological background of Lesbia's behavior: we watch Lesbia play with the sparrow and conclude that she is sublimating her desire in this game. But the grammar and form of the word assign it to the surface of the scene: Lesbia plays "carum nescioquid" (some dear thing), and she plays a solaciolum , the diminutive emphasizing the delight of the observer in what he sees. The potential narrative of frustration and consolation behind Lesbia's game is blocked by the diminutive form of the word that suggests it, and replaced by a voyeuristic delight. The same is true of the "little golden apple" (aureolum malum, 12) whose narrative potential in the myth in which it brings Atalanta's virginity to an end is blocked by the use to which it is put in the simile, where it illustrates Catullus' desire to play with the sparrow.

26. The Alexandrian poets represented Atalanta as having already fallen in love with Hippomenes and so welcoming defeat. They played up the symbolism of the apple as a love token (Fordyce 1961, 91). Pearcy 1980, 157-62, who supports the integrity of 2a and 2b, emphasizes this interpretation of the Atalanta story in order to argue that, for Catullus to see Lesbia playing with the passer , and therefore to know that she is in love with him, is as pleasing as was the apple that declared Hippomenes' love to Atalanta. Pearcy has to transpose 9-10 to the end of the poem in order to get around the awkward fact that it is playing with the passer that would be pleasing to Catullus.

27. Copley 1949, 22-40, is a classic statement of the thesis that Catullus' experience of love was on a level that could not be reciprocated by the depraved and trivial Lesbia; for an application of this model to c.2, see Williams 1968, 140-43; Bignone 1945, 360; Buechner 1977, 66; Lyne 1980, 51-52.

28. This poem presents a number of textual problems of which the only one that affects my reading is the question of the relation of 11-13 to the rest of the poem. In the ancient manuscripts, 1-13 are presented without a break, and the modern tradition of printing 11-13 as a separate fragment (like 14b, a clearer case) was begun by the renaissance editor Guarinus. Grammatically, there is nothing impossible about taking possem in line 9 as conditional with "tam gratum est" as apodosis (could I but play with you, it would be as welcome). Fordyce 1961, who cites this solution of Ellis's (91) along with Ellis's parallels for the indicative in the apodosis (Plautus, Poen. 921, Martial 2.63.3), rejects this interpretation because of the inappropriateness of the simile that would result. This supposed inappropriateness seems to be the main stumbling block to taking 1-13 as a single poem. Quinn, who has no qualms about changing "cum . . . acquiescet" in line 8 to "tum . . . acquiescat," describes Vossius' conjecture posse for possem in line 9 as "a brilliant attempt to weld 1-10 to 11-13 '' but "rather too good to be true" (95).

29. Most scholars have noticed that the language Catullus uses of the effects on him of Calvus' lepos is erotic (Finamore 1974, 11-19, especially the citations on 11-12). Others have obviously felt uncomfortable with the homosexuality of this passage, most notably Clack 1976, 50-53, who claims that the erotic language is not addressed to Calvus at all but derives from the fact that Calvus and Catullus had spent the afternoon writing about Lesbia; "Calvus had a number of amusing things to say about Roman ladies in general and Clodia especially" (52). This totally gratuitous diversion of the expression of the erotic effect of one man on another to lockerroom conversation between two men about a woman shows what it takes to save Catullus' honor!

30. Aulus Gellius' anecdote (19.9.7) about the Greeks who taunted Antonius Julianus that the Romans, with their barbarous language, had no erotic poetry of any grace apart from Catullus and Calvus is a good indication of the atmosphere in which upper-class Romans produced homosexual verse. Julianus quotes, by way of response, epigrams by Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, and Quintus Catulus, all on homosexual themes.

31. The question of Roman attitudes to homosexuality is controversial; MacMullen 1982 disagrees with scholars like John Boswell and Veyne, who have seen a tolerance of homosexuality in ancient Rome. The view that "relations with boys, provided that they were not ingenui , were both very common and very lightly viewed" has been supported more recently by Griffin 1985, 25-26. Clearly, no single answer can be given to the question of the Roman attitude to homosexuality; the various statements cited by scholars have to be considered in their context, for at Rome it very much depends on who is talking to whom and in what context. Cicero, for instance, expresses very different attitudes to augury in different works. For our purposes, MacMullen's quotation of Minucius Felix (28.10) to the effect that Romans tolerated all sexual license as urbanitas is most apposite. Wiseman 1985, 3-4, reminds us that the "The 'Julio-Claudians' were actually Iulii Caesares and Claudii Nerones, wealthy aristocrats who behaved as such," and that the attitudes of the Roman elite did not suddenly change with the end of the Republic. The sexual attitudes and practices of the emperors, amply documented by Suetonius, may tell us something about those of their republican forbears. Most recently, Richlin 1993 has presented the evidence for homophobia at Rome in a fascinating study of the cinaedus that has an excellent discussion of recent controversies about ancient sexuality.

32. A whole book of Cicero's letters, Book 13, consists of epistulae commendaticiae in which Cicero praises the commendee and stresses the closeness of his relationship with him, and how important it is for Cicero that the addressee should look out for the interests of the commendee. The particular kind of commendatio in Catullus' poem is best illustrated by Cicero, Pro Caelio 17, where he speaks of how Caelius' father entrusted (commendavit et tradidit) the young Caelius to Cicero as a mentor. For commando meaning "render agreeable or attractive," see OLD s.v. 6.

33. Compare castum and pudice in 15.4-5 to "parum pudicum" and castum in 16.4-5.

34. Veyne 1988, 18-19.

35. This pair features in one other poem of Catullus (c.11), where their long-winded protestations of friendship are answered with a request to take a short and unpleasant message to Lesbia. In c.16 the duo appear as readers who have judged Catullus from his versiculi (16.3), and again a problem arises from the fact that Catullus must entrust his words to them.

36. My interpretation of pruriat and "movere lumbos" as referring respectively to the sexual arousal and wiggling buttocks of the pathic and not, as is more usual, to erections is in agreement with Wiseman 1987, 222-24, and Buchheit 1976b, 342-44. Both authors provide ample parallels for these meanings. See also Selden 1992, 485, and especially note 117 on cevere . For the sexual stimulation caused by effeminate poetry, see Aristophanes, Thesm. 130-34, and Persius 1. 19-21, both of whom locate the excitement in the anus. For movere lumbos used of the movement of the pathic's buttocks, see Vergil, Cat. 13. 21, and for prurire used of the sexual excitement of the pathic (usque ad umbilicum), see Martial 6.37.3. Notice the use of prurit in this sense in the graffito quoted below ( CIL 4.2360). Richlin 1992a, 248, note 9, remains unconvinced by Buchheit and holds to the traditional interpretation of prurit as active rather than pathic.

37. CIL 4.2360; compare 13.10017. On this graffito, see Housman 1931. Housman interprets prurit in line 2 to mean the same as I have argued it does in Catullus 16.9. Svenbro 1988, 207-218, has recently studied the Greek parallels to this graffito and argues that pederasty is one of the models through which the Greeks understood the relation between writing and reader; according to this model, the reader is cast as the eromene * .

38. For a similar analysis of the relation between reader and author in Catullus 16, see Selden 1992, 485; Batstone 1993, 150-55, is an interesting study of the relation between literal and figurative in this poem that also raises the issue of the position of the reader. An extraordinary passage from Seneca's Epistles (46. 1-2), in which Seneca describes his encounter with a text of Lucilius, is cited by Habinek 1992b, 196-97, and it provides a fascinating example of the use of a sexual model for reading. The passage begins with Seneca the reader exploring a text that is levis (smooth), unlike his own body (and Lucilius'). But drawn on by the text's "sweetness" (dulcedo), Seneca gradually comes to take the feminine position in relation to a text that is "virile", "big," and "taut," and which he swallows whole (exhausi totum)! The process is exactly the same as in Catullus 16, where the effeminacy of the text paradoxically penetrates the reader, except that in this case the reader is actually rejoicing in his passivity.

39. Cato's words about the old Roman attitude to poetry convey an attitude that never completely disappeared: "Poeticae artis honos non erat; si quis in ea re studebat aut sese ad convivia adplicabat, grassator vocabatur" ( Mor. 2). Cicero's equation of words like urbanus, festivus , and elegans with effeminacy in his attack on Clodius ( In P. Clod. et C. Cur. , frag. 22) is a good example of the questionable reputation of these fashionable social values. As Edwards 1993, 96, points out, elite Romans of the late Republic and early principate had to perform a balancing act between urbanity, which always ran the danger of tipping over into effeminacy, and rusticity, which gave virility a bad name.

40. Pace Quinn 1970, 143, who cites c.48 and other homosexual verse. To the Roman mind, a partner of the opposite sex did not preclude effeminacy (see note 7).

41. Petronius' impotent Encolpius makes a distinction between kissing and real sex when he describes his dalliance with Circe as follows: "In hoc gramine pariter compositi mille osculis lusimus, quaerentes voluptatem robustam" (127).

42. Inambulatio would seem to be a technical term for the pacing of an orator; see Rhet. Her. 3.27 and Cicero, Brut. 158. Argutus is usually a positive term for speakers and poets ( OLD s.v. 2. and 6b), but it can also mean "garrulous" ( OLD s.v. 4).

43. The Greek word cinaedus that the Romans used for "pathic" also means "dancer."

44. See Veyne 1979, 16-19, on the problems the Romans had accepting Hellenism and the cultural indulgences with which it was associated. Though Hellenism was always seen as a threat to the Roman duty of "virile tension," it eventually became acceptable to the Romans, even if their ambivalent attitude is reflected in the pervasive theme of the "senator whose private life is nothing but soft but who shows himself nevertheless to be a man of energetic action" (19).

45. On Naevius and this exchange with the Metelli, see Jocelyn 1969.

46. Laevius (frag. 13 in Courtney 1993) compares the writing on a sheet of paper to a back marked by tattoos or a beating: "fac papyrin . . . haec terga habeant stigmata." Unfortunately, we do not know the context of this line.

47. On the status of the actor at Rome, see Edwards 1993, 123-26. Catullus' contemporary (and the dedicatee of his book) Cornelius Nepos declared that to exhibit oneself on stage to the people is considered by the Romans to be inconsistent with respectability, even though the Greeks did not find it a source of shame (quoted by Edwards 1993, 98). Dupont 1985, 95-110, argues that for the Romans the problem with the actor was that his self-display and his creation of a persona were dangerously close to the theatrics of the political arena in which the Roman elite acted their virtus to and for the people. This is confirmed by Richlin 1992b, who has shown how close the orator came to the actor in his gestures, use of voice, and even application of makeup; she also shows how this proximity was a considerable source of anxiety to Roman rhetorical theorists striving to distinguish the two: the orator must avoid being too dry and jejune while maintaining a clear boundary between his effects and the effeminate antics of the actor. In contrast, we have stories of Roman nobles dancing at their own banquets: according to Velleius Paterculus (2.83.2), Lucius Plancus danced the role of the sea god Glaucus, naked except for a fishtail and blue paint. Wiseman 1985, 47, who cites these stories (note III), comments, "When admiration of the professional's art came to mean more than the dignity of his own status, at a private party the sophisticated Roman could let his hair down and act as a mimus himself." Martial makes a connection between poets and actors when he describes the poet blowing kisses in response to applause (1.3.7, 1.76.14), a custom associated with actors (see Citroni 1975 ad loc.)

48. Pseudolus himself reminds us that the trickery by which he has outwitted his master is ultimately no protection from the absolute power that his master holds over him. When Simo promises that he will get his revenge sometime, Pseudolus answers, "Why threaten? I've got a back" (quid minitare? habeo tergum, 1325).

49. For an excellent study of Plautine "metatheater," see Slater 1985, especially 12-18.

1. Wiseman 1985, 242.

2. Whigham 1966.

3. Curran 1975 complains, with some justification, that Quinn's commentary of 1970 is still coy and squeamish on sexual matters, although it avoids "Fordyce's crude emasculation of the Catullan corpus." For complaints of unneccessarily indecent interpretations, see Jocelyn 1980 and Witke 1980.

4. Both poems quoted in Gillespie 1988, 86.

5. Typical is the passage from Granarolo, quoted approvingly by Quinn 1959, 106:

To sum up, the smutty is not something to which Catullus is committed in itself. . . . It is rather a manifestation which we may regret, but which we must describe as such, of his ebullient dynamism, of his rather swaggering and very touchy combativeness, of his overflowing vitality. Extreme in all matters . . . we will seem him bring the same flame to his emotional fevours and to his aesthetic aspirations.

6. Whigham 1966 is rather free with Campesani's poem (attached to the manuscripts G and R) describing the reemergence of Catullus' manuscript; Campesani says that the manuscript was found "sub modio" (under a bushel).

7. Lateiner 1977, 29, takes Catullus' obscenity as, among other things, a response to an obscene age. See the passages quoted on pages 32-33.

8. See Richardson 1974, 214-16, for comparative material from other cultures on this use of obscenity.

9. "Fortuna gloriae carnifex." Pliny, N.H. 28.39. For the ritual and apotropaic uses of obscenity at Rome, see Adams 1982, 4-6.

10. The word fascinum , meaning "evil spell," came to be a common word for penis because of the efficacy of representations of this part of the body against jealous emanations. Marcadé 1968, 20-26, is a good treatment of the power of obscenity and humor to avert the magic influence of the jealous.

11. Cc.32 and 56 are the only examples in Catullus of obscenity that is not used in invective.

12. Richlin 1992a, 2-13, is an excellent treatment of literary apologiae .

13. Martial I, Praef . The etymology of obscenus , also written obscaenus , is disputed, but one of the candidates is scaena , the others being caenum and scaevus ; see Thierfelder 1956, which argues for scaevus .

14. Valerius Maximus 2.10.8. Note that prostitutes took the place of mimae : "Praeter verborum licentiam, quibus obscenitas omnis effunditur." Lactantius, Inst. 1.20.10.

15. Cicero, Pro Caelio 38.

16. Adams 1982, 11, and Opelt 1965, 154-57. Skinner 1982 contains interesting material about Roman political invective as it relates to c.79.

17. Veyne 1983, 10. This "folk justice" is described at greater length by Usener 1901.

18. For repetitions, see cc. 23, 24, 29, 36, 57, 103; for graffiti in c. 59 and elsewhere, see Cèbe 1965; for folk custom, c. 17.

19. A point made by Veyne 1983.

20. Saint Denis 1965, Chapter 3.

21. Henderson 1991, 2, who gives a good definition of obscenity: "By obscenity we mean verbal reference to areas of human activity or parts of the body that are protected by certain taboos agreed upon by prevailing social custom and subject to emotional aversion or inhibition. These are in fact the sexual and excremental areas. In order to be obscene, such a reference must be made by an explicit expression that is itself subject to the same inhibitions as the thing it describes." Cicero, De Off. 1.35.127, distinguishes between word and thing: "Quodque facere non turpe est, modo occulte, id dicere obscenum est."

22. The locus classicus is Cicero, ad Fam. 9.22, but see also Celsus 6.18.1. Expressions like "latine loqui" (to speak in Latin), simplicitas (candor), and "verborum veritas" (truth of expression), all used by Martial in his preface to refer to what we would call obscene language, prove that it was possible to present this kind of language in a positive light. Both Propertius (2.34.87) and Ovid ( Tristia 2.427) call Catullus lascivus , which the OLD classes under the meaning "free from restraint in sexual matters." The word lascivus suggests playfulness rather than effrontery or dirtiness; Martial calls Propertius lascivus (8.73.5), and clearly this cannot mean "obscene" in our sense; however, Martial excuses what he calls his ''playful directness of expression" (lascivam verborum veritatem) by citing the precedent of Catullus and other writers who are read from cover to cover (1, Praef. ). On words used to characterize ''obscene" language, see Jocelyn 1985, 10-11.

23. Cèbe 1965, 228, takes obscenity to be one aspect of the revolt of Catullus and his circle against conformity, literary and social, a revolt that involves scandalizing the bourgeois. The most sophisticated and valuable psychological study of Catullan obscenity is Skinner 1991, who argues that in the polymetric love poems Catullus turns obscene language against himself, measuring "the extent of his folly in hoping to possess what he was never intended to have" (10).

24. Richlin 1992a, 27-30, 69, 150; Skinner 1982, 198-200; Krenkel 1981.

25. For discussions of obscenity in Catullus, see Richlin 1992a, 144-56; Lateiner 1977; Skinner 1979b, 1982, 1991. I have written about the figurative use of obscene material, particularly with reference to impotence, in Horace's Epodes in Fitzgerald 1988.

26. Catullus, frag. 1, seems to come from a hymn to Priapus. On the Roman cult of Priapus, see Grimal 1984, 46-49; on the literary tradition, see Parker 1988.

27. Cicero, Pro Caelio 71. For further references to this kind of vengeance, see Jocelyn 1985, 21, note 62.

28. The verb irrumare occurs six times: 16.1,14, 21.13, 28.10, 37.8, 74.5. In addition, irrumator occurs in 10.12 and irrumatio in 21.8.

29. Adams 1982, 125-30, who cites some possibly neutral uses of the word on page 127, including that of a scholiast on Juvenal 6.51: " Quia et irrumantur mulieres."

30. Richlin 1981, disagreeing with Housman 1931, 407-9, argues that irrumare never has a weakened sense (for instance, "cheat") in Catullus and Martial. Though I agree that it is neither here nor there whether the use of this verb implies that a particular sexual act actually took place or really is being threatened (see also Curran 1975, 313), I do not agree that the weaker meaning is never relevant in these authors. In some poems (e.g., Martial 2.83, Catullus 74), there is a play on both weaker and literal senses, and it would be as detrimental to the point of the poem to deny the relevance of the weaker sense as it would be to translate the word as "cheat."

31. Richlin 1992a, 148, points out that, because irrumation forces the victim to be silent, it is a particularly appropriate threat against Catullus' critics in c.16.

32. Konstan 1979 argues that the poem connects hunger and lust, though I cannot agree with him that it distinguishes Aurelius' passionate appetites from Catullus' real love.

33. See OLD s.v. sedeo 1, "awaiting hire," and Adams 1982, 165, for the meaning "ride," referring to intercourse with the woman, or effeminate, on top, a position regarded as slightly abnormal and conceded by the woman as a special favor (but see the interesting remarks on changing attitudes to the "equus eroticus" in Veyne 1978, 53). As Syndikus 1984, 1: 210-11, observes, the inmates of the tavern would not be sitting but reclining; he concludes that the word here has the sense "hanging around'' and cites parallels in page 211, note 6.

34. Compare the analogous situation in the graffito quoted on page 50, where the reader who fills his mouth with the words of another is cast as the irrumatus . Having uttered one self-destructive wish (ursi me comedant), the reader has filled his own mouth with the agressive intentions of another so that the second humiliating wish (et ego verpa[m] qui lego) is in fact a description of what has already happened. Adams 1982 quotes this graffito as an example of the weakening of the sense of irrumatio that results from its being widely threatened but never carried out(!). So the reader here "would surely have treated the imprecation as equivalent to 'I have been fooled'" (129). But the situation is more specific than that, for being fooled here takes a form that is metaphorically related to the literal sense of irrumatio . On this text, see Housman 1931, 406-7; CIL 4.8230 is a less elaborate version of the same topos.

35. Harpocrates is the graecized form of one of the names of Horus, son of Isis and Serapis. He crops up again in c.102, and may have been a proverbial figure for silence in the Roman world; see Otto 1890, 160.

36. Adams 1982, 129.

37. On this poem, and particularly Catullus' play on inanis , see Skinner 1979a, 137-40.

38. Priapea 51, 64; Martial 3.81.33.

39. Skinner 1979a, 139-40.

40. Foucault 1978 argues that the importance given to the examination of sexual thoughts and actions in the Catholic confessional was a means of extending the workings of power into the most private recesses of the mind. Before this could happen, sex had to be constituted as something secret.

41. Adams 1982, 127.

42. Wlosok 1980 contains some interesting remarks on the role of the censor, stressing the importance of shame in Roman culture.

43. Curran 1966 draws attention to the literary theme of the lover's pallor, a telltale sign that usually elicits questions about the identity of the beloved. Catullus takes the poem in very different directions after leading us to expect the traditional inquiry.

44. Emulgere (milk), serum (whey), and labra ("tub," as well as "lips") reduce Victor to an animal; see Curran 1966, 2.6.

45. See the remarks on poetry's nondialogic nature in Bakhtin 1981, 285-58.

46. As do Arkins 1982, 16-17, Skinner 1979b, 112, Scott 1971, 23, and Commager 1965, 103. Arkins (12) is on firmer ground when he cites the invective against Aufillena (cc.110, 111) to argue that Catullus has constructed a sexual ethic of his own, for those poems do adopt a rather moralistic tone.

47. Victius has been identified by some with the informer Vettius (see Skinner 1982, 204, and note 21). lf he is to be so identified, then his filthy mouth is clearly related to his trade. Skinner cites an epigram of Martial that presents us with a slanderer who was formerly a fellator; his mouth was purer when he fellated (2.61).

48. Gaisser 1982.

49. On the importance of the conception of purity for early humanism, see Jed 1989. Jed (45, note 26) cites an interesting passage from Poliziano's Miscellanea: "'Oarion' synceriter esse apud Catullum (66,94) quod 'Aorion' isti legunt qui bonos violant libros."

50. "Ex hara productos, non schola, vocabula nuda, nomina cassa, et nihili voces." Poliziano is adapting Cicero's words on Piso, the Epicurean ( Pis. 16.3).

51. "Nos de graeco instrumento, quasi de cella proma, non despicabilis, nec abrogandae fidei proferemus autoritates, quibus et lectio praestruatur incolumis, et interpretamenti nubilum discutiatur." Quoted by Gaisser 1982, 97.

52. See Baehrens 1885, 584.

53. The intemperate review of Richlin's Gardens of Priapus by Jocelyn 1985 is an interesting but reprehensible example of modern philological polemic. Jocelyn ends his review, "Students of Greek and Latin literature have always talked to each other about passages relating to sexuality. . . . The only new development is that attempts are now being made to talk to ill-prepared undergraduates and even to persons totally ignorant of the classical languages. This is not a development to be welcomed." What this says about classical scholarship is not encouraging, and it seems to cast Richlin as the thief who has broken into the private preserve of Classics and on whom the guardian of the preserve descends with all his philological rigor. Jocelyn avoids Richlin's frank translation of obscenities, wary of modern associations, and speaks, for instance, of "the expulsion of fecal gas" where Richlin speaks of "tarts"; this comes from someone who professes to find Richlin's "contemporary academic jargon'' (such as ''cuing" and "metacommunication") amusing! In the name of preserving the purity of his own academic jargon, Jocelyn resorts liberally to the language of insult ("foolish," "grossly perverse," "nonsense," "absurdity," "grossly misunderstood," etc.).

54. Quoted by Gaisser 1982, 97.

55. Fordyce 1961 recognizes that this is an obscenity ("ugly" and "offensive" are the words he uses), but he does not enter the controversy about its meaning. Presumably, the reason he does not omit this poem is that it is a crucial document in the Lesbia story.

56. For "masturbates," see Lenz 1963, Jocelyn 1979, Arkins 1979, Penella 1976; for "has intercourse with," Skutsch 1980; for "fellates," Randall 1979; for "strips (of clothes and cash)," Quinn 1970, 260; for "retracts the foreskin," Kroll 1929, 103. As sexual but deliberately ambiguous, Adams 1982, 168.

57. Randall 1979, 30, argues that "the shaping of the mouth to pronounce it, which resembles the shaping of the mouth for fellatio , suggests what Catullus has in mind." Lateiner 1977, 17, claims that the word was chosen for its obscene sound.

58. Lenz 1963, 63. Skutsch 1980, 21, maintains that the exclamatory outrage of the poem precludes glubit from meaning "masturbates": "'My own Lesbia, making herself available to anybody, anywhere!' That is the point, and it would be intolerably weakened if not intercourse but a more specific action were meant." But Lenz (64) and Arkins 1979, 86, proponents of "masturbates," both castigate Lesbia for not making herself fully available to her men and for robbing them of their semen without giving herself in return!

59. Curiosity about Lesbia's sexual charms finds its way into the scholarship every now and then. Zarker 1972, 108, introduces his research into this subject with the words: "In spite of the eloquent testimony to her literary interests, the amica omnium could not have attracted such a devoted following as a result of her intellectual talents alone. Let us see what we can learn about the physical charms of Lesbia." Whigham 1966 examines the word glubit in his introduction, and prefaces this section with the words: "Finally, the question has to be faced as to whether [Clodia] did in fact become a public prostitute" (20-21). Whigham spends several pages speculating on this matter.

60. Most recently by Skinner 1991, 8, who has some interesting remarks on the role of social status in the scenario of Catullus' love for Lesbia.

61. Ellis 1889 and Quinn 1972 have the boy "banging" his girl, as does Cerri 1989; the latter cites some parallels for this kind of threesome, and argues that the point of the poem is that the boy is trying to adopt an adult role prematurely and Catullus reminds him of his passive status. Scott 1969 also takes the scenario to be a threesome but understands puellae as a genitive and identifies the pupulus as Clodius. Kroll 1929 ad loc, Housman 1931, 402, and Adams 1982, 145-46, have the boy of Catullus' girl masturbating.

62. Quinn 1972, 245, describes this poem and c.97 as "calculated provocations of those who let themselves be scandalized. The object is to achieve what Cicero in the De Officiis was to hold unforgivable—talking about the unmentionable in so many words (si rerum turpitudini adhibetur verborum obscoenitas)—and to get away with it by sheer exuberance (an irrepressible sense of fun), or elegance of form, or both."

63. Ellis 1889, 197-98, argues for M.Porcius, as do Buchheit 1961 and Scott 1969.

64. "Pro telo" is the reading of manuscript G and is printed by Quinn 1970 and Merrill 1893 in their editions. Scott 1969 supports this reading, though his argument depends on a very indirect allusion to the Iliad . Whatever the original text, a pun was surely intended. It would be thoroughly appropriate that Catullus should describe his reaction with a word ( protelo , "in tandem") that Lucretius uses for the chain reactions in matter itself (2.531, 4.190); elsewhere, I have argued that c.5 has affinities with Lucretius' discussion of love in Book 4 (Fitzgerald 1984, 77, note 4).

65. As in the case of c.56, so here we cannot be sure of the identity of the addressee; if it is M.Caelius Rufus, erstwhile lover and later enemy of Clodia, who gave her the name "quadrantaria Clytemnestra" sometime before 56 B.C.E. , then Catullus and his addressee share a similar experience of Lesbia. On the trial of Caelius, at which he was defended by Cicero and prosecuted with the help of Lesbia, see Wiseman 1985, 54-91. A certain Rufus is addressed by Catullus in cc.69 and 77, and some have identified him, too, with Clodia's lover. Austin 1960, 148-49, discusses the identification of the addressees of cc.58, 69, and 77; he denies that the addressee of c.58 is M.Caelius Rufus, arguing that it is the Veronese Caelius addressed in c.100. Syndikus 1984, 279-80, and Lenz 1963, 65, agree with him, but Quinn 1970, 258-59, accepts the identification with M. Caelius Rufus.

66. The word impurus almost always implies contamination by oral-genital contact. In Roman invective, people with foul breath were suspected of fellatio, and assimilation of the mouth to other orifices was a common form of insult; Catullus, for instance, refers to mouths contaminated by urine in cc.39, 78b, 97, and 99. Of the three consecutive poems about the "os impurum" introduced by c.97, the second is the attack on the foulmouthed Victius discussed above; the third turns the tables and has Catullus the victim of an implicit accusation of "os impurum" when the beloved Iuventius wipes his mouth after Catullus has stolen a kiss from him. On the relation between the three poems, see Forsyth 1979.

67. Anth. Pal. 11: 241, 242, 415.

68. Rankin 1976 speculates that the allusions to incest in Catullus' poetry have to do with his jealousy of Clodia's (alleged) relation with her brother.

69. Ellis 1889, 115, documents the frequency of theft at the baths. Petronius, Sat. 92, reminds us that sexual pickups were another feature of this establishment.

70. Martial 2. 51.6 has an interesting version of the "culus vorax," which in this case belongs to a certain Hyllus who spends his last denarius on satisfying that part of his body while his unfortunate belly looks on in hunger. Here again one body part has usurped the prerogative of another.

71. Richlin 1988, 358-59, is an interesting treatment of this poem in the context of Catullus' system of food imagery.

72. "Quid ut noverca me intueris ant uti . . . belua?" (Horace, Epod. 5.9). The proverbial expression "apud novercam querere" (i.e., to deaf ears) says it all (compare Plautus, Pseud. 314).

73. Kroll 1929, 44.

74. Clearly, Catullus is mocking the traditional Roman ideal of the simple life, which is supposed to bring true happiness; see Syndikus 1984, 160-62. Horace's mention of the shiny ancestral saltcellar at c.2.16.13-14 sounds proverbial for the simple life.

75. The obscene purity of Furius' body, described in insultingly graphic terms, functions as a figure for the futility of Furius' repeated requests for a loan (26-27): he will no more get the loan than he could ever soil his hand by rubbing his own excrement.

76. Cicero's sarcastic representation of the Epicurean god, who is paradoxically incapable of pleasure, gives us a good sense of the smug self-satisfaction that this phrase may convey: "Propone ante oculos deum nihil aliud in omni aeternitate nisi mihi pulcre est et ego beatus sum cogitantem" ( N.D. 1.41.114).

77. Skinner 1979a, 143, points out that, though Mamurra is identified as the pathicus in line 2, the position of the word associates it also with Caesar. The sexual reversibility of this duo indicates that the proper chain of command has broken down.

78. Catullus' poetry is full of pairs: Furius and Aurelius (cc.11, 16); Veranius and Fabullus (cc.12, 28, 47); Porcius and Socration (c.47); Lesbius and Lesbia (c.79); Caesar and Mamurra (c.57); Aufillenus and Aufillena (pursued by Caelius and Quintius, c.100); Cato and Catullus (c.56); Acme and Septimius (c.45); Rufa and Rufulus (c.59); Castor and his twin (c.4). Often this pairing implies a certain smugness on the part of the couple, but the obsessive doubling in the language of poems like c.31 (which climaxes with "hoc est quod unum est," 11) suggests that it is a stylistic idiom of Catullus.

79. Ellis 1889, 203, sees a financial metaphor in socii (partners in. Cicero, Rosc. Amer. 40.117); with respect to the puellulae , "Mamurra and Caesar had not only equal shares, but each the shares of the other; what was proprium to one was shared by him with the other, and the totum thus belonged to both and neither."

80. Schmidt 1976 documents this meaning of the word, which is used of creatures, such as centaurs, that are composite in body. He argues that the word here refers to the sexual reversibility of the pair of which each can take either position. Lebek 1982 supports Schmidt's interpretation with a possible parallel from the Anthologia Latina .

81. Iul. 52.3. Compare Cicero on Clodius: "Contra fas et inter viros saepe mulier et inter mulieres vir" ( Dom. 54.139).

82. Skinner 1979a is an excellent treatment of Catullus' use of the standard language of political pamphleteering to reflect his own ambiguous attitude to the political scene.

1. Eagleton 1990, 36.

2. Eagleton 1990, 38. Compare the words of Minyard 1985, 26, a propos Catullus: "The qualities that make a good person are those shown by a good poem."

3. Austin 1960, 53. The only full-scale treatment of urbanitas is Ramage 1973, but there is also valuable material in Saint Denis 1965. For an analysis of several of the terms in the semantic field of urbanitas , see Monteil 1964.

4. Though sometimes a foreign element is internal to these kinds of concepts. There is an interesting symmetry between Austin 1960's recourse to the French word ton in his explication of "good form" and Cicero's wonderfully schizophrenic " autochthon * [Greek for 'native'] in homine urbanitas."

5. Syndikus 1984, 12

6. On the expansion of the meaning of urbanus during this period, see Saint Denis 1965, 152-55. The volatility of the concept appears, for instance, in Cicero's negative characterization of Clodius as urbanissimus ( Pro Caelio 15.36, compare In P. Clod. et C. Cur. , frag. 22). See also Ramage 1973 on urbanitas .

7. See the interesting remarks of David 1983, 318-23.

8. It is significant that a number of the writers associated with Catullus came from Cisalpine Gaul, including Cornelius Nepos, Valerius Cato, Cinna, Furius Bibaculus, and Caecilius (c.35); coming from the provinces to the metropolis, where they were making a literary reputation for themselves, they seem to have adopted all the more fervently the city's ideals of sophistication. The Quintia of c.86 may have been Veronese, like the Quintius of c.100; at any rate, in c.43 Catullus' comparison of Lesbia to the overpraised Ameana specifically makes a point about provincial inurbanity.

9. Catullus only uses urbanus four times (cc.22.2,9, 57.4, 39.8), but several of his favorite words ( venustus, elegans, lepos, sal etc.) belong in what Ross calls "the vocabulary of urbane Rome"; see Ross 1969, 105. Catullus' use of venustus , a word frequently conjoined with urbanus by Roman authors, is examined by Wiltshire 1977, and Seager 1974 deals with venustus, lepidus, bellus , and salsus in Catullus.

10. Compare Havelock 1939, 101-2: "[Catullus] gives no formula for this urban consciousness; to formulate it might destroy it, since its essence is a kind of tacit agreement between a certain number of people to speak and behave in a certain manner."

11. On the old Roman tradition of caustic wit (dicacitas), see Saint Denis 1965,49-79. Cicero refers to this "veterem urbanitatem" in ad Fam. 7.31.2 and 9.15.2 ("non Attici, sed salsiores quam Atticorum Romani veteres atque urbani sales"; the whole passage is very interesting).

12. Saint Denis 1965, 151.

13. Compare Cicero, De Off. 1.104.

14. Humanitas , sometimes coupled with urbanitas (e.g., Cicero, ad Fam. 3.9.1), also has this sense; compare Cicero, De Off. 1.40.144, where the man who meditates too deeply at a dinner is described as inhumanus , even though this behavior might be quite appropriate on other occasions, such as before arguing a case. The reconciliation of the gravitas and severitas of the old Roman value system with the humanitas that the man of culture was now expected to display was an important issue in the first century B.C.E. (Hellegouarc'h 1963, 288).

15. "Quid a me fieri potuit ant elegantius ant iustius quam ut sumptus egentissimarum civitatum minuerem sine ulla imminutione dignitatis tuae" (Cicero, ad Fam. 3.8.2). Here elegans , a popular word with the urban sophisticates of the period, means something like "correct"; compare Cicero, ad Att. 5.20.6. But its newer resonances may also be operative.

16. See, for instance, cc.6, 8 and 10 (in which Catullus is his own target), 17, 22, 24, 36, 39, 43, 44, 84, 86, 97, 98, and 105.

17. Compare c.6, where Catullus offers to make a "lepidus versus" out of Flavius' ineptiae .

18. Catullus has put Asinius' cognomen Marrucinus at the beginning of the poem because his inurbane behavior recalls the Italian origins of the Asinii, members of the tribe of the Marrucini, who had been led by Asinius' grandfather in the Social War. See Neudling 1955, 12-13.

19. Differtus is the conjecture of Passerat for the disertus of the manuscripts (dissertus in manuscript O). Ellis 1889, Merrill 1893, and Kroll 1929 print disertus , whereas Baehrens 1885, Mynors 1967, Fordyce 1961, and Quinn 1970 print differtus . Fordyce makes a convincing case for differtus .

20. This word that disturbs its context is compensated for by the rather precious Greek word mnemosynum (souvenir), used of the napkin, a word that stands out in the opposite direction and so balances out the discourse. The Greek word, used by Meleager of a love token that calls to mind a distant beloved ( A.P. 12.68.7) is found only here in Latin.

21. Skinner 1981, 105. A similar statement can be found in Minyard 1985, 26. Skinner's more recent work on Catullus has been some of the most challenging and interesting on this author, and I use her earlier work as an example of the standard line on Catullus' urbanity only because it is the most eloquently expressed.

22. Similarly, Catullus draws attention to the fact that his own name has a diminutive form when he juxtaposes it with Cato in c.56.3.

23. Aristotle ( Rhet. 2.12.16) defines eutrapelia as "pepaideumene * hubris."

24. Elsewhere, Cicero proudly recounts that Caesar eagerly collects his witticisms, and can now distinguish the real thing from impostors, so finely is his ear attuned ( ad Fam. 9.16.3-4). Unfortunately, some of these witticisms might give Caesar offense, and Cicero professes that he would willingly relinquish his reputation for wit if he could disown these remarks, but his style gives him away. Here Cicero is victimized by his own style in an age in which the republican freedom of speech has been lost (9.16.3) because of the very cult of personality that has contributed to the rise of people like Caesar. On the growing concern with personal style in this period, see Selden 1992, who cites Cicero, De Off. 110-14.

We might remember that Catullus, who professed to have no interest in Caesar's nature or tastes (c.93), awakened a less disinterested, but ultimately generous, response to his attacks on Caesar from the great man himself. According to Suetonius ( Iul. 73), Caesar claimed that Catullus' poems against him had cast "perpetua stigmata" on his name, but he invited Catullus to dinner that same afternoon and maintained his friendship with Catullus' father. Tacitus ( Annales , 4.34.8) reports that Caesar tolerated the insulting poems of Catullus and Furius Bibaculus.

25. On Martial and plagiarism, see Kay 1985, 258-59.

26. Forsyth 1985 shows that cc.12-14 are all concerned with gifts and giving among loving friends, and argues that they constitute a distinct unit between a Lesbia cycle (cc.2-11) and a Furius and Aurelius cycle (cc.15-26).

27. The Roman invitation poem regularly features the theme of the "smart poverty" (Edmunds 1982) of the poet and introduces with it a conflict of values. Its prototype ( A.P. 11.44) is addressed by Catullus' contemporary, Philodemus, to his patron Piso. Philodemus implies that the attractions for which Piso will sacrifice sows' udders and Chian wine, namely, good friends and sweet poetry, are in fact of greater worth; however, he also tells Philodemus that he will get a richer dinner next time if he is generous with the poet. Dettmer 1989 points out that Fabullus suffered at the hands of Piso when on his provincial staff much as Catullus did at the hands of Memmius (cc.28, 47), and that Philodemus is probably the Socration whom Catullus in c.47 identifies as taking the rightful place of Fabullus in the favors of Piso (see Neudling 1955, 140). She argues that Catullus' poem deliberately evokes Philodemus' invitation in order both to outdo Philodemus and to play a practical joke on his friend. This joke and the joke played on Catullus by Calvus in c.14 are intended, according to Dettmer, to provide examples of what constitutes a witty prank in Catullus' circle and so to contrast with Asinius' tasteless attempt in c.12.

28. D'Arms 1990 points out that there was a significant tension between the egalitarian ideals of Roman conviviality and the hierarchical realities of the Roman dinner.

29. There is considerable controversy as to what amores refers to: affection, love poetry, and the beloved (Lesbia herself) are all possibilities that have been advanced. The text at this point is uncertain: manuscript O has "meos amores," but most editors read meros . Those who believe that Catullus is offering Lesbia sexually to his guest (Littman 1977, Hallett 1978) would read meos , but meros has the advantage of trumping Fabullus' contribution of mine with undiluted (merus) love. Marcovich 1982 argues, on the basis of analogies between this poem and Philodemus 23, that "meros amores" refers to love poems.

30. For the ancient practice of anointing oneself with scent at dinner, see the references in Kroll 1929, 29-30, and Xenophon, Symp. 2.3, where perfume is called for to make the dinner perfect.

31. This is the view of Littman 1977 and Hallett 1978, refuted by Witke 1980.

32. Quinn 1970, 135.

33. Adams 1982, 35.

34. Skinner 1981, 61.

35. Compare Bakhtin's (1981, 297) admittedly overstated remarks on the monologic nature of poetry: "The poet strips the word of others' intentions, he uses only such words and forms . . . that they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and their connection with specific contexts . . . Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts " (Bakhtin's emphasis). If we see Fabullus as a figure for the reader, Catullus' poem suggests a more competitive and dramatic situation: what we bring to the poem, and we must bring the mundane linguistic prerequisites, is trumped by what the poet offers us, and even this remains ultimately his own.

36. Bernstein 1985 also interprets c.13 as a poem about poetry: "Catullus has written a programmatic piece to his intended audience: an invitation to read and appreciate his simple, elegant, and witty verse" (130). However, where Bernstein understands the unconventional invitation as involving a description of Catullus' poetic style, I would interpret the peculiarity of the invitation as a reflection of the peculiar relation between poet and reader.

37. Catullus accentuates the singsong effect of this catalectic iambic tetrameter, a meter he uses only here, by allowing no substitutions for the iambic foot. There is an intriguing possibility that the second line of this poem is quoted by Cicero, ad Quintum , 2.15.4: "auricula infima molliorem." But the phrase may be proverbial (Quinn 1972, 166).

38. Most of the scholarship on this poem is concerned with the textual crux of line 5, about which there is unlikely ever to be agreement. Unfortunately, this line seems to hold the key to the fictional setting of the poem. The "mulier aries" and "mulier alios" of the manuscripts may well conceal the word mulierarios , and the goddess could be Venus. Colin 1954 develops an interesting scenario in which the "effeminates" (mulierarios) are off their guard as they gape (oscitantes) at Thallus, a provocative dancer (the original meaning of cinaedus ) entertaining the guests, from whom in this moment of weakness he extracts gifts. A more recent attempt to solve the crux by Granarolo 1981 involves reading "cum laeva mulierarios offendit oscitantes''; in this interpretation, the mulierarii are ''skirt-chasers" who, engaged in their business, are not looking out for Thallus.

39. The ancient theory that the impotence of old men made them more liable to turn to the role of the pathic (Halperin 1990, 23-24) may motivate this simile for the softness of a cinaedus , in which the reference is ironic because Thallus' name connotes youth.

40. Jocelyn 1979, 91.

41. See, for instance, c.12.17 (Veraniolum meum et Fabullum), discussed on page 96 above, and c.56.3 (Cato Catullum).

42. Thallus is the name printed in most editions, but the manuscripts, with one exception, read Talle in lines 1 and 4. Neudling 1955, 167, suggests that this may be a corruption of Tallei , vocative of the gentilicium Tallius. If Thallos is the correct name here, Neudling suggests that it possibly belongs to Antonios Thallos, a poet of the Anthologia Palatina .

43. Ross 1969, 23-26, 158-59.

44. Plautus, Pseudolus 544-45, also compares whipping to writing in a passage examined on pages 56-57.

45. There is no certainty about the meaning of the extremely rare word catagraphos . In Pliny ( N.H. 35.56) it is used of outline drawings, and Merrill 1893, 48, argues that it here means "writing tablets," because these were commonly made of boxwood from Bithynia.

46. Philodemus' poem listing the physical attributes of a beautiful woman ( A.P. 5.132) provides an example of the kind of poem Catullus is turning on its head. Possibly, the two poems are related by more than this topos: having praised the body of his beauty, Philodemus declares that she is opike * , that is, an unsophisticated Italian who "does not sing Sappho," and yet, he says, Perseus was in love with the Indian Andromeda. With Catullus the physical merges with the spiritual in the transition from "dry mouth" to "elegant tongue,'' and part of what makes Ameana unacceptable is that she is not, like Lesbia, sophisticated.

47. For decoctus used of literary style, see Cicero, de Orat. 3.103, where it is negative (overripe), and Persius 1.125, where it is positive (mature, condensed).

48. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1924, 295-98.

49. Renaissance poets followed the example of the author of Catalepton 10 in droves. Gaisser 1993, Chapter 6, deals with many of these neo-Latin compositions.

50. Ezra Pound 1948, 76, has an interesting imitation of this poem called "Phasellus Ille," in which he mockingly adopts the tone of a self-satisfied editor whose mind "was made up in 'the seventies.'"

51. Khan 1967, 169-71, whose argument involves the parody of this poem in Catalepton 10.

52. Elegant Romans liked to keep little slave children around, almost like windup toys, to amuse them with their garrulous cuteness. This is the subject of Slater 1974. These children, usually known as delicia , amused their owners with their garrulitas . Slater, following Birt, suggests that Camerius in c.55 and the "pupulum puellae" of c.56 are delicia (and may be the same person).

53. The fact that the speech of the yacht is reported distinguishes this poem from Greek epigrams dedicating to the appropriate deity tools of the trade that are being retired; in those epigrams, it is either the dedicator or the dedicated object that speaks. Fordyce 1961, 96.

54. Besides Skinner 1981, quoted below, see Johnson 1982, 111-12, Hallett 1988, 399, and Quinn 1972, 280. Since Pucci 1961, this poem has usually been read as an important literary manifesto expressing Catullus' deep commitment to an art based on values opposed to conservative Roman ideals; Segal 1970 and Buchheit 1976a both take this line.

55. Skinner 1981, 84-85.

56. Quinn 1972, 280.

1. Suetonius, Jul. 33; Caesar, Bellum Civ. 1.7.7 and 1.9.2.

2. The comparison is made, to Catullus' advantage, by Minyard 1985, 15-29.

3. OLD s.v. 2, "delightful to be with, congenial"; OLD s.v. 3, "agreeable to the senses."

4. This is the attitude, for instance, of Copley 1949, 24-26. Quinn 1971, 71, comments, "We catch the irony, know it justified and understand as well as Catullus that he was hoping against hope." Konstan 1972, 103, interprets the change of construction for proponis as Catullus' attempt to go beyond the traditional associations of amor with a light affair "to a new expression for a new thing"; Catullus would make a contract out of words of passion, and for this he must create a new language, which is what he proceeds to do in this poem.

5. Copley makes it clear that this deeper love was latent early in the affair (and in the polymetrics) but did not become explicit until Lesbia betrayed Catullus:

It would appear that as long as Catullus and Lesbia were happy together, as long as he felt that his feelings were reciprocated, he either was unaware that his love for her possessed any special or unusual characteristics, or felt no need to attempt an expression of them (24).

6. See Ross 1969, 76-80. Syndikus 1984, 124, in contrast, argues that iucundus is a more weighty word than has usually been allowed, quoting Cicero on true friendship ( Lael. 47, 49, 51).

7. Lyne 1980, 36. Fifteen uses of this word are cited in Wetmore 1912, and this is the only use in the elegiac epigrams.

8. Cc.73, 77, 82, 91, 102.

9. Ross 1969, 80-95; 1975, 9-15. Ross follows the arguments of Reitzenstein, whose article "Zur Sprache der lateinischen Erotik," originally published in 1912, can be found (in somewhat edited form) in Heine 1975, 153-80. A detailed study of the Roman vocabulary of political alliance is provided by Hellegouarc'h 1963, who shows, among other things, that the language of politics in Rome often borrowed from the language of love; see, for instance, 142-43 (amare), 180-81 (cupere), 213 (blanditiae), 215 (amplecti-complecti).

10. Lyne 1980, 25-26. Lyne should have added that some of this language ( pietas and fides , for instance) is also used in religious contexts. The wide currency of some of these words is illustrated by the fact that officium is used in epitaphs to refer to the dutifulness of wives even in the circles of freedmen and freedwomen (see Williams 1968, 405-6). Lyne's bibliography on the aristocratic social code and its terminology on pages 291-92, note 4, is very full.

11. McGushin 1967 is an earlier version of the argument that Catullus is representing his relationship with Lesbia as a marriage, and on page 92, note 4, he identifies some of his predecessors in this view. There are some good criticisms of the marriage theory in Dyson 1973, 138-39, who also takes Ross to task on page 138, note 2.

12. Bardon 1970, 118-19, remarks on the opportunism of Catullus' use of moral language, but maintains that "Catulle est la sincerité même."

13. Commager was reacting against what had become the canonical view of Catullus as the quintessential "lyric" poet pouring forth his feelings with spontaneous and simple directness, and he gives some examples of this view on the first page of his article. Eliot's antiromantic view of lyric poetry was itself to become canonical, as Commager's quotation of Graves reveals: "The poem is either a practical answer to [the poet's] problem, or else it is a clear statement of it; and a problem clearly stated is half-way to solution . . ." (93). Quinn 1959, 91-92, had quoted both Eliot and Graves in his section on Catullus' "meditative lyric." More recent versions of Commager's therapeutic theory can be found in Skinner 1988, 340 (Catullus' poetry confronts and orders experience), and Syndikus 1984, 101-2 (the form of the epigrams provides a "purging of all too powerful emotions'').

14. Catullus' poems to his friends sometimes have the same truncated rhetoric: c.77, addressed to a Rufus who has betrayed him in some unspecified way (possibly with Lesbia), is trapped in repetitious exclamation.

15. Quoted by Commager 1965, 91.

16. References in Syndikus 1984, 106, note 9. Skinner 1971 reviews the evidence that Catullus presents himself as comic amator , but concludes that "the poem's central ironic focus depends on a razor's-edge balance of emotional commitment and intellectual detachment" (305).

17. The poem is written in scazons or choliambics (limping iambics), which are iambic trimeters with a dragging spondee as the last foot.

18. Croce 1950, 68; the translation is from Veyne 1988, 34-35.

19. Marmorale 1957, 162, calls it "the most beautiful prayer to the gods that antiquity has handed to us from a soul that has suffered," and Edna St. Vincent Millay "the most beautiful short poem in any language I know" (both quoted by Commager 1965, 105).

20. McAfee 1983.

21. Buechner 1977, 76, states that, a half century before the birth of Christ, Catullus gave witness to the divine invincibility and to the ethical character of all love: "The union of two people succeeds if they are united in something common that transcends them." He recognized divinity as the protector of his love and, after long wanderings, turned to them in prayer: "Passion has led to insight."

22. Granarolo 1967, 107.

23. Lyne 1980 and Commager 1965 agree that c.76 is a failure, but this is what makes it moving to Commager (98); according to Lyne (33), the poem is aesthetically unsatisfying. Williams 1968 points out that ending a hexameter with four long syllables, as in line 15, is a mannerism affected by Hellenistic Greek poets, but adds that in this poem the effect "signals a determination to accommodate the most simple and direct language, regardless of metrical roughness." The effect has a significance quite opposite to what it would have in other poems of Catullus, but it is "no less the result of careful artistry than the high polish of routine Alexandrianism" (411).

24. Had Catullus been vouchsafed the Christian revelation, Granarolo 1967 speculates, the pride displayed in this poem would have been chastened and the egocentric prayer "eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi " would have been changed to "libera nos a malo" (107). Earlier (96) he cites Ciaffi, who claims that Catullus' words "si vestrum est miscreri" (c.76.17) anticipate the Christian prayer ''miserere nostri."

25. See Granarolo 1967, 90, note 1, citing Marmorale and Gigante.

26. Marmorale 1957, cited in Granarolo 1967, 40.

27. Granarolo 1967, 96-103, has an interesting discussion of the idea of divine pity in ancient thought a propos Herescu's claim that Catullus is here the first to attribute the quality of mercy to the divine.

28. Compare Propertius 1.25-26 and Catullus 41.5-6.

29. Syndikus 1984, 248, note 2, lines up some of the critics on either side of the debate as to whether the praise of Cicero is meant seriously or ironically. As one might expect, the tendency in recent times has been to see irony, even parody of the Ciceronian style, in the superlatives; Quinn's commentary, for instance, is generally sympathetic to the ironic reading where Fordyce's is not. Quinn 1970, 235, makes a good presentation of the case for reading "optimus omnium patronus" as criticism of Cicero's indiscriminate and unprincipled advocacy ("best advocate of all and sundry"). Thomson 1967 is probably the most recent argument against the ironic reading, though his theory that the poem is a tactful response to Cicero's own poetical efforts requires us to supply a lot of context to the poem from rather slender evidence. See Selden 1992, 464-67, and Batstone 1993, 155-63, for deconstructive readings of this poem, both of which see it as undecidable.

30. Compare the last sentence of Cicero, ad Fam. 7.12, quoted below on page 131.

31. Editors have remarked that "in amore tuo ex parte reperta mea est" seems a clumsy and roundabout way of saying "in my love." Ellis 1889 and Merrill 1893 took it to refer to all of Lesbia's lovers, who did not love her as much as Catullus. Konstan 1972, 105, translates "amore tuo" as "in your love for me" and inteprets the whole of the second couplet as follows: "There never was in any bond a faith so great as I found in your love.'' Konstan gives its full sense to reperta and interprets the poem as being critical of Catullus' self-deception. I think, however, that the elaboration of the phrasing here is intended to produce a false impression of reciprocity.

32. "Homini alienissimo mihi et propter amicitiam tuam non aequissimo." Cicero, ad Fam. 7.12.2.

33. Ross 1975, 10, well describes the unorthodoxy of Catullus' position: "When one party in a political amicitia had done dirt to another, had committed an iniuria —when, that is, political necessity had changed and it became expedient to sever the connection—nothing was easier than to break it off, more often than not coolly and with perfect composure."

34. Hellegouarc'h 1963, 154-55, cites some of the financial metaphors used in connection with officium , which he describes as "a sort of coin of exchange."

On the coercive power of beneficia and the network of beneficium, officium, gratia , and fides , see MacMullen 1986, 521-24.

35. The deductio , in which the bride was led to the house of the groom, was a fixed part of the Roman wedding ceremony (see Williams 1958). It is therefore ironic here that Lesbia's sexual fault (culpa) is described as escorting (deducta) Catullus' mind.

36. Hellegouarc'h 1963, 161.

37. Line 1 accounts for the problem in line 3, and line 2 for that in line 4, while the alternation of active and passive in the first couplet (deducta, perdidit) is repeated in the second (fias, facias).

38. See the suggestive remarks of Northrop Frye, in Hosek and Parker 1985, 31-37, on the importance for the lyric of the fiction of turning away from our ordinary continuous experience.

39. Examples of such speculation are given by Pedrick 1986, 201, note 15. As Eva Stehle points out in her response to Pedrick's paper, Pedrick herself assumes that real words of Lesbia lie behind the poem insofar as she questions the faithfulness of the indirect speech in c.70 to what it reports (Stehle 1986).

40. To take but one example, the song cycle of Dominick Argento based on poems of Catullus is called "I Hate and I Love," and it begins and ends with c.85.

41. Lyne 1980, 40; Kroll 1929, 244; Commager 1965, 95. See also Copley 1949, 28-29.

42. Bishop 1971, 636-38, discusses the love/hate topos in Hellenistic epigram and concludes that Catullus is closest to the quasi-philosophical treatment of the theme by Euenus ( A.P. 12.172). I would suggest that a closer parallel to this poem is the epigram by Catullus' contemporary, Philodemus, about Xanthippe's charms; there the poet tells his heart that it will be set on fire: "But from what beginning, or when, or how / I do not know; you will know, poor wretch, when you are smouldering" ( A.P. 5.131.3-4). Bishop argues that Catullus' epigram follows the form of a philosophical dialogue (statement by magister , question by discipula , answer by magister ) and that the epigram fuses erotic and philosophical themes. A more extensive treatment of the love/hate theme both before and after Catullus can be found in Weinreich 1926, 32-83, which concludes that examination of the topos only shows the genuineness of Catullus' experience of the Urphaenomen of hate and love. In a sense, Weinreich's study follows the process of questioning and confirmation that the poem itself invites.

43. According to Weinreich 1926, 44-46, this Antwortformel is distinctively Roman; in poetry it begins with Catullus, to be taken up and worked to death by Martial. Weinreich takes the formula as a manifestation of the importance of the bond between poet and reader in the time of Catullus.

44. See Pedrick 1986, 201, especially note 15.

45. Catullus' epigram is modeled fairly closely on Callimachus, Ep. 25 Pfeiffer, also about the unreliability of lovers' oaths. Evidence of the proverbial character of lines 3 and 4 can be found in Syndikus 1984, 6, note 13.

46. This poem is a variant of c.83, but in that poem it is the husband, foolishly satisfied with Lesbia's denunciations of Catullus, who is the butt.

47. This is the position of Konstan 1972, 104. See also Miller 1988.

1. "Epyllion" is a term invented in the nineteenth century to designate the genre of the miniature epic; it has no ancient precedent. See Most 1981, 111, especially note 9. Lyne 1978 argues that the the mannered miniature was the distinctive genre of the neoteric "school" and describes the epyllion as a ''brief, highly wrought epos which more or less ostentatiously dissociates itself from traditional epos , concentrating on unheroic incidentals in the sagas of heroes, or on heroines as opposed to heroes, or on otherwise offbeat subject matter; employing a narrative technique that was often wilfully individual and selective; and yet largely maintaining epic language, metre and style" (172-73).

2. Gruen 1992 passim.

3. A form whose characteristic feature is "the desire to avoid the expected connection, the logical train of thought: to surprise the reader by constant change of view-point, of time scale, of addressee" (Williams 1968, 227). See also Fordyce 1961, 274.

4. Pasquali and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, cited by Klingner 1964, 161, note 2, both see a Hellenistic original behind this poem. For a more recent study of the poem's Alexandrianism, see Thomas 1982.

5. See also Konstan 1977, 108: "Catullus . . . by a subtle use of imagery and ambiguity, allusions, responsions and startling juxtapositions—in fact through all the devices of Hellenistic mannerism—creates a pervasive tension in the epyllion which is not that of antithesis . . . but of irony. Catullus exposes the contradictions and corruption of life and values of the upper class, at least, in Rome, not so much by contrast with some viable ideal, but rather from within, revealing the failure of Roman culture to meet the moral requirements of his time." Harmon 1973, 331, argues that the poem exposes the seeds of decay in the heroic and old Roman codes, but concludes that Catullus looks back with nostalgia to an age that, for all its faults, "offered at least an approximation of the life for which man's nature yearns." For an argument against the moral interpretation, see Dee 1982, rejected by Schmidt 1985, 77-86, who summarizes the evidence for a moral reading.

6. Putnam 1961 is the first sustained and thoroughgoing interpretation along these lines; Most 1981, 120, sees the poem as a combination of themes from all of Catullus' poetry, "a profound meditation on love and loss, on felicity and despair, on the relations between man and man, and man and god." See also Forsyth 1976, Glenn 1981, and Konstan 1977, 78: "Our epyllion, too, I believe, reflects Catullus' abiding concern with the problem of how private passion, which was tangential to the sphere of traditional morality, could be the basis of an enduring relationship".

7. Typical of the tendency to subordinate the poem's visual opulence to a higher meaning is O'Connell 1977, whose title is "Pictorialism and Meaning in Catullus 64." O'Connell concludes: "In a way that we can recognize as essentially Roman, Catullus employed the Alexandrian fascination with poetic pictorialism to create a poem that is serious and, in its indirect way, ultimately moral in concern" (756).

8. See Bryson 1990, 39-40, on the "Second Style," roughly contemporary with Catullus (from about 60 B.C.E. ). Granarolo 1972 argues for a common spirit between Catullus 64 and contemporary wall painting, and there are some excellent remarks on aspects of the second style relevant to Catullus' poem in Martin 1992, 155-56.

9. Granarolo' 1972, 430-31, describes the relation between the approaches of Schefold and Klingner. Schefold's analysis of decorative ensembles in Pompeian wall painting has been extended by Brilliant 1984.

10. Veyne 1988, 117-18, situates the world of myth in a time that is the object of longing— optato , as Catullus puts it at the beginning of this poem (22):

Its [sc. Myth's] essence is to call up an oneiric temporality, situated "before" our history and lacking substance. . . . This time without consistency is situated at some inestimable distance from our years, for the unit of measurement is not the same. We feel in some obscure way that we are separated from it less by a form of duration than by a change in being and truth. A nostalgia overcomes us at the idea of this cosmos, so like our own, but secretly so different and as inaccessible as the stars. Its strangeness would be even greater if those places that were myth's theater really existed and if Pelion and Pindus were mountains visible to our gaze. In what dream century was our Pelion criss-crossed by centaurs, and what kind of phantom mountain must it have been to be able to participate in this other form of temporality?

11. Johnson 1982, 159, provides the best formulation of this approach:

Here in the complex fusion of lyric monologue and lyric narrative, feelings of guilt for past innocence betrayed and feelings of anger and radical inferiority find their focus in Ariadne, in whom the victim of love, the unmanned poet, finds an answering metaphor for his impotence, for his intolerable feminization: Ariadne, the quintessential victim, the woman who, having risked all for love, is betrayed and abandoned and shrieks her outrage and her suffering to the deaf winds and the deserted beach.

12. Examples of the sleeping woman exposed can be found in Marcadé 1968, 34, 42, 43, 51. For representations of Ariadne on Pompeian wall paintings, see Reinach 1992, 111-13, and Richardson 1974, 193.

13. The classic treatment of this is Mulvey 1975. Catullus' description of the distraught, abandoned, and semi-naked Ariadne corresponds to Mulvey's contention that the woman in mainstream cinema is presented as inadequate or castrated. Silverman 1988, 1-41, adds that it is the male viewer's exclusion from the site of filmic production, itself a form of castration, that motivates the presentation of the woman as castrated. The parallels (described below) between the description of the semi-naked Ariadne in lines 63-65 and the description of the countryside unworked by the (phallic) plough, hoe, and sickle in lines 41-43 provide a striking confirmation of Silverman's argument.

In describing in this chapter the relation of the reader (or potential viewer) to the poem and its sights, I assume that this reader is cast by the poet as male. There may certainly be readers who refuse this role or read the poem from different perspectives than what is offered to them (though this is not necessarily true of all women readers).

14. Silverman 1988, 28-32.

15. Two kinds of Golden Age can be distinguished in ancient literature, a soft Golden Age in which the earth produced its bounty without human toil, and a hard Golden Age in which toil and virtue went hand in hand. Reckford 1958.

16. Bryson 1990, 48, shows how this self-conscious attitude to the sophisticated staging of country life in the Villa Rustica of the late Republic manifests itself in the decorative scheme of a wall painting in Boscoreale.

17. The text is a little uncertain here, and Baehrens 1885, 364, reads "illa rudem cursu proram [O] imbuit Amphitrite [O corr]" to get the more conventional disposition of subject and object. Baehrens is followed by Quinn 1970. But Merrill 1893, Mynors 1967, Kroll 1929, and Fordyce 1961 all print "illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten."

18. I like this very much, evidently more than Quinn 1970, who rejects the reading of the manuscripts' incanduit (grew hot) in favor of the renaissance conjecture incanuit (became white), which recalls Homer's polios and avoids an echo with candenti in the next line. Incanduit would confirm the association of the oars with hot curling tongs, but perhaps even the emended text, with candenti on the next line, already suggests the same idea.

19. The detail may be learned, but attention to detail has its own erotic or voyeuristic dimensions, as witnessed by this poem on the explicator of Calvus' notoriously thorny Zmyrna :

Uni Crassicio se credere Zmyrna probavit.
     Desinite, indocti, coniugio hanc petere!
Soli Crassicio se dixit nubere velle
     Intima cui soli nota sua extiterint.

               (Suetonius, de Gramm. 18)

To Crassicius alone has Zmyrna agreed to entrust herself.
     Cease, you unlearned, to seek her in marriage!
To Crassicius alone has she promised to be married
     For only to him have her intimate secrets been revealed.

20. Grimal 1984 (3d ed.), 376, compares the appearance of a statue (Ariadne) in the tapestry to the mixing of artistic modes in the ars topiaria of the Roman garden, whose aesthetic Catullus reflects:

It looks as though the poet is describing a setting in the manner of the gardens. . . . And the constant passage from a pictorial art to statuary can only be explained, we believe, within an aesthetic where each genre fails to recognize its own limits, in order to put itself at the service of something other than itself: in this case to create, by all means, this atmosphere of an enchanted and divine world that we have already encountered in the gardens.

Boucher 1956, 200-1, speculates on the sculptural type that Catullus may have had in mind. He points out that there is a maenad in the Capitoline Museum with the same superimposition of erotic grace onto fury as in Catullus' description of Ariadne.

21. Compare Apollonius, Arg. 1.763ff.

22. On the importance of the lamenting Ariadne in seventeenth-century music, see Bianconi 1987, 204-19; for Ariadne in literature, see Lipking 1988. It is striking that Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos is probably the most self-reflexive of all operas, and, with its opera-within-an-opera plot, it bears comparison with Catullus' poem.

23. This effect reminds us of the tapestry itself, for the figure of Ariadne on the tapestry might at one time hold our attention, and at another appear as an element in our scanning of the whole composition.

24. The contradiction of movement between comparatum and comparandum is complemented by an intertextual contradiction, for this simile is modeled on two Homeric similes, one describing the Greeks advancing in waves like breakers crashing on the headland ( Il. 4.422-60) and the other describing the opposing ranks of the Greeks and Trojans, whose bristling spears are like the sea rippling before the rising West Wind ( Il. 7.63-64). In both Homeric cases, the simile is describing a confrontation between two groups, whereas in Catullus the guests are giving place to (decedere, 268) the gods.

25. Bramble 1970, 29.

26. Konstan 1977, 57. It is interesting to see that Christian Metz has appropriated this ancient theory of vision to explain the process of watching a film; Silverman 1988, 23, cites him as follows: "Watching a film is a constant process of projection and introjection, of sending out 'a sort of stream called the look' so that objects can travel back up the stream in the opposite direction.'"

27. Bramble 1970, 24-17.

28. As the girls' choir of c.62 put it, "What do the enemy do that is more cruel when they have captured a city" (quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? 24)? The Fates turn from their prophetic song, culminating in the sacrifice of Polyxena, to the epithalamium with the words " dedatur cupido iam dudum nupta marito" (let the wife be handed over immediately to the longing husband, 374); the italicized word is regularly used for the surrender of a city or the handing over of someone for punishment, but it also seems to belong to the language of the wedding hymn (c.61.58). Both the Roman wedding and the Homeric capture of a city are symbolic rapes. Editors cite Achilles' "oioi Troies * kredemna * luoimen'' (let us loose the veil of Troy on our own, Il. 16.100) in connection with nam simul ac fessis dederit fors copiam Achivis
urbis Dardaniae Neptunia solvere vincla
alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra; (c.64.366-68) for, as soon as Fate will have given the power to the tired Achaeans
to loosen Neptune's chains around the city of Dardanus,
the high burial mound will be drenched with the blood of Polyxena;

Possibly, the sacrifice of Polyxena supplies the erotic violence implied by the Homeric phrase.

29. See Wiseman 1985, 44-48, for details on these entertainments.

30. For tremulum used of deliberate, erotic motion, see Martial's description of a dancing girl at 14.203.1 (tam tremulum crisat).

31. See Richlin 1992a, 109-16, 1984.

32. Compare "unguibus ora soror foedans et pectora pugnis" ( Aen. 4.673).

33. Parallels for such a use of variare to aestheticize bruises can be found only in the gallows humor of the characters of Plautus ( Miles 216, Poen. 26).

34. See Gruen 1992. Zetzel 1983 points out that there are references to the story of Medea in Catullus 64 that are taken not from Greek literature but from Ennius' tragedy Medea Exul.

1. A classic example of the poet as his own victim is Baudelaire in his poem "L'Heautontimoroumenos," which contains the lines:

Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et la victime et la bourreau!
     Baudelaire 1961, 85

I am the wound and the knife!
I am the blow and the cheek!
I am the limbs and the wheel,
And the victim and the executioner!

2. The figure of the bane of urbanity, who, like the woman here, takes advantage of the carelessness of others, crops up again in c.12, where Asinius Marrucinus is pilloried for stealing the napkins of dinner guests who are off their guard (neglegentiorum, 3). Cicero exemplifies the positive sense of neglegens in a letter to Atticus, where he laments the absence of his friend and the loss of the "sermonis communicatio . . . suavissima" between them; he goes on to say that he misses Atticus' conversation in various spheres, including "in publica[ne] re, quo in genere mihi neglegenti esse non licet" ( ad Att. 1.17.6). The negative side of neglegentia is best exemplified by Cicero's "legum offici rei publicae sociorum atque amicorum neglegentior" ( Verr. 3.143). Terence, in the prologues to Adelphoe and Andria , uses neglegentia in negative and positive senses respectively; see Martin 1976, 98-99. On neglegens in this poem, see Newman 1990, 161.

3. Although one of Catullus' earliest readers, Valeriano (writing in the 1520s), congratulates Catullus on escaping the "greed of harlots" by pretending that he had forgotten the litterbearers were not his but Cinna's! Gaisser 1993, 134.

4. Two recent treatments of c.10 (addressed in this chapter) are particularly interesting and provocative challenges to Catullan strategies of audience manipulation, namely, Pedrick 1986 and Skinner 1989. Both treatments emphasize the fact that the woman who engineers "Catullus'" discomfiture in the anecdote recounted by the poem is still the object of the poem's oppression, however much we may be invited to take a critical view, of "Catullus." Skinner's subtle and wide-ranging analysis of the social, political, and gender structures that are the subtext of the poem defines both the extent and the limits of the poem's analysis of the dynamics of power in the Roman world. She summarizes her reading as follows:

In C.10, then, Catullus preaches a short parable about the essential unfairness of the Roman status system. To express the equivocal nature of power, he incarnates it to a small but telling degree in a churlish alter ego , permitting him to justify conceit by calling it sophistication and to offend against the social decencies in every possible way. Meanwhile, he assigns to the figure of Varus's amica the full burden of protest against the presumptions of the speaker and therefore against the workings of a skewed system. . . . Yet her triumph must be ephemeral, for as a woman and a plebeian she cannot be allowed to have the last word. That is, why the text concludes as abruptly as it does, with its withering denunciation of her as insulsa and molesta (19, emphasis Skinner's).

5. It is interesting that both poems set up a spatial tension between the public world of Roman business and the woman: in c.10 the idling Catullus is taken from the forum by Varus to see his girl, and in c.11 Furius and Aurelius are diverted from (putative) imperial expeditions to deliver a message to Lesbia. See the remarks on huc in c.10 by Skinner 1989, 19.

6. At this point, I should say that I find the attitude of the narrator (and indeed of "Catullus") towards Varus' mistress far less negative than does Skinner. Is it a fair representation of this passage to say that Catullus terms the girl "a barely acceptable little tramp" (16)? Certainly, the speaker's attitude is (by modern standards) patronizing, but would an ancient audience have thought that this speaker exhibits "extreme gender and class prejudices" (14), or that he "ruthlessly imposes upon her a stereotyped and trivialized self-image" (14)?

7. As Skinner 1989, 13, points out, incidisset "adverts to the practice of determining the specific territorial assignments of former consuls and praetors by drawing lots."

8. Skinner 1989 has some interesting documentation of the decadent associations of the lectica: "Young, robust Roman males were not expected to resort to litters, which were normally used only by physically feeble individuals—elderly men, invalids and women." Her claim, however, that the ownership and/or use of a litter would be so outrageous that Varus and his mistress must be facetious in lines 14-16 does not convince me. As she admits, Cicero casually mentions riding a litter to dinner ( ad Q. Fr. 2.6.3) and does not tender any excuse (though Skinner points out that, at fifty, he could have pleaded age).

9. Nielsen 1987, 155-56, has a good description of the way that the groupings of characters in the society of this poem change as it progresses, finally leaving Catullus and Varus' mistress confronting one another.

10. Scholarly opinion differs as to whether the girl intends to borrow the chariot or is simply calling Catullus' bluff (Skinner 1989, 20, note 5).

11. On the cult of the Egyptian deities Isis, Osiris, and Serapis at Rome, see Latte 1967, 282-84.

12. As the Muses tell Hesiod in the Theogony (27), they know how to tell many lies that are similar to the truth. For a rather different version of Catullus' recuperation of the losses inflicted on his persona, see Nielsen 1987, 160: "Catullus has jeopardized his name and his reputation for repartee so that, by challenging the traditional reference to sal , he might refine its humor to a higher level of quality."

13. On Catullus' use of "illustrative elisions," see Lee 1962. The verb tangere often conveys a more aggressive sense than the English "touch", compare, for instance, Catullus' "tangam re prior irrumatione" (c.21.8). Both aggressive and gentle senses are operative here.

14. The flower has been interpreted as an ambivalent image of Catullus' narcissistic but aesthetically satisfying love for Lesbia by Stigers 1977, who reads the image through the argument between the boys and the girls in c.62. The literary associations of this image are also described by Putnam 1974 and Celentano 1991. Celentano particularly stresses the relevance of the epic comparison of the young man cut off in the prime of life to a flower, but also quotes, from the other end of the literary spectrum, the proverb "tam perit quam extrema faba" (91, note 29).

15. The ancient custom of ploughing over a destroyed city is illustrated in their note on Horace, C. 1.16.20, by Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 213. This practice is complemented by the use of the plough to mark out territory when founding a city ( Aen. , 5.755). Vergil uses military and imperial language of ploughing at Georgic 1, 98-99, and 104-5.

16. "Caesar crossed the Rhine in the summer of that year and reached Britain in the autumn; in the spring Gabinius had entered Egypt to restore Ptolemy to his throne; and in November Crassus set out on his ill-fated expedition to the tempting East." Fordyce 1961, 124. The word comites is applied by Catullus to the members of a praetor's cohors at c.28.1 and c.46.9.

17. The verb penetrare in the second line of this poem can also be used of ideas or emotions "getting through" to a person ( OLD s.v. 5).

18. For the identification of the "Eastern wave" (Eoa . . . unda, 3-4) with Ocean, see Merrill 1893, 25.

19. Balsdon 1979, 66, points out that the invasion of Britain brought the kudos of extending the empire beyond the ocean.

20. There has been voluminous scholarly debate as to whether Furius and Aurelius are to be thought of as friends or enemies of Catullus, and whether we are to think of the opening as sarcastic or not. In other poems addressed to one or both of this pair (cc. 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26), Catullus insults or attacks them in ways that seem to go beyond the kind of badinage that he practices with his friends (e.g., cc.6, 14). My opinion on this subject is similar to that of Sweet 1987, who provides a full survey of opinions on the problem (note 1; see also Fotiou 1975, 150-52, and Friedricksmeyer 1993, 102-5). Sweet argues that the poem sets up a mood of companionship and optimism only to undermine it at the point where the mission of Furius and Aurelius is revealed; on a second reading, "the catalogue now appears as a thinly veiled parody whose language mocks the exaggerated devotion professed by Furius and Aurelius and implies that it is a pompous fake, just as Lesbia's was, and whose length is merely a foil for Catullus' bluntness" (516-17). In Chapter 1, I discuss the attempt of Macleod 1973 to clear this poem of irony and make Furius and Aurelius in to true friends of Catullus. The most recent treatment of this poem, Friedricksmeyer 1993, argues that the address to Furius and Aurelius is sincere and marks a reconciliation with erstwhile enemies, whereas the address to Lesbia constitutes a break with an erstwhile lover.

21. Fotiou 1975, 156, draws this and other parallels between Lesbia and Furius and Aurelius, and Sweet 1987, 517, stresses the negative political overtones that emerge from the juxtaposition of the omnivorous Lesbia against the conquering Caesar.

22. Sweet 1987, 513, note 5, surveys the different opinions on the geographical catalog.

23. As Fordyce 1961, 208, points out, these journeys would have been real possibilities in 55 B.C.E. , when the expeditions of Crassus to the East and of Caesar to Britain were in the air.

24. The words sent to Lesbia here also echo the only other poem of Catullus in the Sapphic meter, the translation of Sappho c.51, often thought to be the first poem Catullus wrote to Lesbia. The identidem of 11. 19 would seem to be a bitter echo of identidem at 51.3, where it refers to the eager attention of the person who sits opposite Lesbia and seems like a god to the speaker. Yardley 1981 argues that Furius and Aurelius are being commissioned by Catullus to make a formal renunciation of friendship to Lesbia, and that the words "vivat valeatque" are formulaic in this transaction.

1. Like most of the recent students of this poem, I believe that c.68 is to be thought of as a unit, though it may be that its two parts, traditionally called 68a (1-40) and 68b (41-160), relate to each other in the same way as do cc.65 and 66. The question of whether it is actually one poem or two connected poems is not that crucial, though Skinner 1972 makes a good case for regarding 68a as "a finished artistic product" (509). The evidence of the manuscripts is quite clear on the fact that the two parts of the poem have different addressees, Mallius and Allius respectively (Most 1981, 116-17; Tuplin 1981, 113-14).

2. Wiseman 1987, 324-34, provides an excellent treatment of the growing pretensions of this part of Italy in Catullus' time.

3. On the status of literature and poetry in the late Republic, see Quinn 1982, 128-30, 136-39.

4. On the complicated relation of the Roman cultural elite to Greek culture, see Balsdon 1979, 30-58, Veyne 1979, and Gruen 1992.

5. On the allusion to the Odyssey , see Conte 1986, 32-39. Carrié 1993, 113, points out that epitaphs of soldiers often mention brothers, and that pacts between brothers to see to each other's funeral rites are quite common.

6. Quinn 1970, 440. As Quinn suggests (441), the words ''ave atque vale" may have been part of the traditional ceremony (compare Aen. 11.97-98, salve aeternum mihi . . . aeternumque vale.)

7. Celan 1970, 143.

8. Quinn 1970, 441.

9. Toohey 1984 (especially 9-11) describes the role of Trojan genealogies at Rome and the racial prejudice or Hellenophobia that may have motivated it.

10. Possibly, fluctuat in this context recalls the Greek kuma (wave), derived from the verb meaning "to conceive" or "to be pregnant." But if Catullus' mind is figured as a womb, then fluctuat could also imply the menstrual flow that would equally prevent conception. "Giving birth" was a fairly common metaphor for artistic creation; see OLD s.v. pario , 4.

11. Ellis 1889 ad loc suggests that there is an allusion to Pindar, frag. 273 Bergk, where poets are the keepers of the golden apples of the Muses.

12. Possibly, this simile refers to a passage from Callimachus' story of Acontius and Cydippe in the Aetia , though not enough is known of that part of the Aetia to allow for more than speculation. See Daly 1952.

13. "Proverbium est, quod et illa incerti et levis animi est et plerumque in gremio posita, cum in oblivionem venerunt exsurgentium, procidunt" (Festus 1165, quoted by Kroll 1929, 199).

14. Catullus himself provides a beautiful picture of the moment of transition from mother to lover at c.64.86-93, and a more cynical view in the lock of Berenice's insinuation that the parents are fooled by the bride's false tears in c.66.15-16.

15. Witke 1968, 20-24, has a good treatment of the final six lines of this poem in relation to the theme of renewed life.

16. Cicero discusses conflicts of duties and how to resolve them in De Officiis 1.59; see also Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 5.13. For an extended treatment of the moral significance of the blush for the Romans, see Seneca, Ep. 11, where after praising Pompey because "numquam non coram pluribus rubuit" (4), Seneca goes on to remark that the one thing actors cannot do at will is blush (ruborem sibi exprimere non possunt, 7). In a scene from Terence's Adelphoe , a father confronting his son with the latter's misdeed remarks in an aside "erubuit: salva res est" (643). Catullus himself, trying to shame the woman who has stolen his writing tablets, hopes that his convicium will squeeze a blush from her iron face (ruborem / ferreo canis exprimamus ore, c.42.16-17). The most famous and highly charged blush in Roman literature is, of course, Lavinia's at Aen. 12.64-69.

17. In c.50 Catullus translates one of Sappho's most famous poems (31 LP), much of which describes the physical effects on the lover of the sight of the beloved. He then appends to the Sappho poem a moralizing stanza (probably tongue-in-cheek) on otium , which reinterprets the physical symptoms of love as the restlessness caused by excessive leisure (otio exsultas nimiumque gestis, 14)

18. The irony of these lines has been a problem for those who think that this poem simply reflects Catullus' own bereavement. Kidd 1970, for instance, is forced to read the lines as a statement, not a question, thus: "Besides, in your case, your grief was not just for the loss of a husband: the important factor was the sad parting for a beloved brother" (42). Much of the critical comment on this poem has been concerned with showing how Catullus has found aspects of his own experience in the Callimachean poem. Signs of Catullus' investment in the subject matter have usually been detected in the changes in the emphasis or affect of the original made by Catullus in his translation; Putnam 1960 is a sensitive example of this line of criticism.

19. Sinon, in Aeneid 2, is the great figure of Greek mendacity in Roman literature. Cicero speaks of the "ingenia ad fallendum parata" of the Greeks ( ad Q. Fr. 1.2.4), and, more particularly, he identifies Alexandria, the place from which come the plots of the mimes, as the source of all trickery and deceit.

20. The reading of manuscript V at line 12 was "semper maesta tua carmina morte tegam ," defended by Ellis 1889, 354-56, as meaning "I will keep close or veil in silence." This reading would obviate the problem that Catullus does not seem to have been true to his word, but see the arguments against it in Clausen 1970, 93, note 11. Wiseman 1969, 17-18, and Block 1984, 50-51, argue that Catullus fulfills his promise insofar as all of the remaining poems are in elegiacs, the meter of mourning.

21. Green 1990, 405. On displacement in Alexandrian literature, see Selden, forthcoming.

22. Catullus' gremium is a direct translation of Callimachus' kolpous (frag. 110.56 Pfeiffer).

23. Compare Vergil, Georgic 4, 287-88: "Qua Pellaei gens fortunata Canopi / accolit effuso stagnantem flumine Nilum." Catullus' incola makes a stronger emphasis on the fact that the Ptolemies are not Egyptians than Callimachus' naietis (58).

24. Plutarch, Mor. 11a, quoted in Green 1990, 82.

25. As Selden 1992 points out, this poem in which Catullus claims that he is unable to write poetry is itself full of poetic figures.

26. Sarkissian 1983 and Hubbard 1984 have interesting discussions of this poem in its entirety, both focusing on Catullus' problematization of the relation between art and personal experience. Sarkissian argues that in c.68 Catullus explores "the conflict between the world a poet can create in his art and the world in which he must live" (39), and that this conflict is related to another between the desperate attempt to cling to what little is left of the relationship with Lesbia and a realization that it is over. A very similar, if more theoretically sophisticated, approach is taken by Hubbard, for whom "the author's textual articulation of personal experience destabilizes itself into two antagonistic patterns of assertion—a 'mystified' self, which sublimates the author's fantasies and anxieties directly into the poetic construct, and a 'demystified' self which reconsiders experience and feeling through rational deliberation" (43).

The nature of Mallius' request has been the subject of some controversy revolving around the meaning ofthe expression "munera . . . et Musarum . . . et Veneris" (12). Some have argued that we have a hendiadys, meaning "love poetry," others that learned poetry is being distinguished from erotic, and a third group that Catullus is being asked to supply Mallius with a woman, or even his own sexual favors. For a survey of the views on this problem, see Sarkissian 1983, 46-47, note 15. In spite of "tibi . . . utriusque petenti" (39), I do not think that Mallius has requested two specific and different kinds of things, but rather that he has two kinds of needs, both of which can be fulfilled by a love poem. Hubbard 1984, 42, has some interesting thoughts on the fact that, in spite of this recusatio , Catullus produces a poem about love.

27. The two excuses are usually explained as referring to the "munera Musarum" and the "munera Veneris" (10) respectively.

28. I have changed Mynors's Mani to Malli . Manuscript V has Mali here.

29. Fordyce 1961, 347, argues that the quod clause is a regular feature of Latin epistolary style and introduces an indirect quotation; this requires the correction Catullo and the subjunctive tepefactet for V's unmetrical tepefacit . The two alternatives and their respective problems are well described in Fordyce's note.

30. Carpitur (35) in the passive is more likely to convey the erosion of life (aetas) than the full enjoyment of it, so when Catullus says of Rome "illic mea carpitur aetas," he expresses an ambivalent attitude to this "home."

31. Wiseman 1987, 331.

32. Wiseman 1987, 333-34, argues that Catullus' family may have been expected by the coloni to donate the bridge. Inscriptions from about this time mention Valerii who had been involved in erecting public buildings.

33. On the political aspects of this poem, and especially the significance of the phrase "sexagenarios de ponte deicere," see Cenerini 1989.

34. The text in line 32 is as emended by Voss. the manuscripts have the meaningless "Brixia chinea suppositum specula."

35. Mynors 1967 prints Lachmann's corruerint for the cur iterent of manuscript V, according to which line 93 would mean "give the stars cause to repreat 'Would that I might become a royal lock.'"

36. Baker 1960.

37. Playing with the very different senses of the verb fero in detulerat (108) and ferunt (109), Catullus brings the emotional and the literary into an ironic juxtaposition.

38. Tuplin 1981, 125-31, argues that Catullus' source for the barathrum simile is Euphorion's Chiliades .

1. De Man 1979, 20.

2. There is anexcellent treatment of Catullus' in fluence on modern,mainly English-language, literature in Wiseman 1985, 211-45, partially focused on attitudes to Lesbia; Wiseman 1975 has the same focus but deals only with novels, of which there have been many. Duckett 1925 is a useful anthology of (English-language) poetry that is inspired by Catullus, and McPeek 1939 deals with the same subject up to the eighteenth century. The bibliography of Holoka 1985, 286-96, is very useful, and to this one can now add Ludwig 1990 and Gaisser 1993, 193-271, on neo-Latin Catullan poetry.

3. Macaulay, cited by Munro 1938, 233-34.

4. Ginsberg writes:

"Malest Cornfici Tuo Catullo"
I'm happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen's
finally made it; discovered a new young cat,
and my imagination of an eternal boy
walks on the streets of San Francisco,
handsome and meets me in cafeterias
and loves me. Ah don't think I'm sickening.
You're angry at me. For all my lovers?
It's hard to eat shit, without any visions;
when they have eyes for me it's like heaven.

Because I knew my Whitman like a book,
Stranger in America, tell my country: I
Catullus redivivus, once the rage
of the Village and Paris, used to play my role
of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs
who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.

5. In the poems "To Catullus" (Swinburne 1925, 5.70), "Ave atque Vale; In Memory of Charles Baudelaire" (3.44-51), and "Ad Catullum" (3.155).

6. The title of Pierson Dixon's 1953 novel about Catullus is Farewell Catullus , words taken from the letter of condolence sent by Caesar to Catullus senior, though clearly they are also addressed by the author and his audience to the poet himself

7. The term "homosocial" applies to all of the relationships between men described in this chapter, whose title "Between Men" refers to the title of Sedgwick 1985. Sedgwick uses the expression "homosocial desire" to posit ''the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual" (1), and her book charts with great subtlety the shifting relations between homosociality and patriarchy in English literature. I follow Sedgwick (20) in using the schema of the triangle in my analysis of "Catullan'' homosociality.

8. "To Catullus," Swinburne 1925, 5.70.

9. Quoted by Duckett 1925, 197-98.

10. Dixon 1953, 73, for instance, has Lesbia "twist and tantalize" Catullus in order to get him to write lampoons for her political purposes. Other examples below.

11. Allinson 1913, 1-36. Wiseman 1985, 221-22, has a short account of her life and career.

12. Ferrero 1955, 99-100.

13. The same trio dominates Pierson Dixon's Farewell Catullus (1953).

14. Suetonius, Jul. 73.

15. The pun on the name of Caesar's assassin when Clodia tells Caesar she has "brutified" herself in order not to importune him with love (44) suggests that the fruition of their love is displaced onto the final encounter between Caesar and Brutus.

Caesar's patronizing vision of an aged Lesbia reminds us that in the Catullus literature a kind of revenge against Lesbia is supplied by those who have imagined her, post-Catullus, as an old, or degraded, woman. In Arthur Symons's poem "Lesbia in Old Age," the physically decrepit Lesbia says:

Let us live and love,
My Lesbia: yes and I shall live,
A hungering, thirsting shadow of
That love I gave and could not give.
I gave him pleasure, and I sold
To him and all men; he is dead,
And I am infamous and old,
And yet I am not quieted.
Take off your curses from my soul:
     (Symons 1913, 17)

16. The references to Gaul and Britain indicate that the poem cannot have been written before late 55 B.C.E. , and there are no references to anything after that date in the poems. It is generally assumed that c.51, the translation of Sappho that names Lesbia, is written at the beginning of Catullus' affair with her and that c.11, the only other poem in the Sapphic meter, marks the end of the affair. See, for instance, Friedricksmeyer 1983.

17. Schwabe 1862, 129, was probably the first to supply this context to c.11, and it was eagerly taken up (compare, for instance, Havelock 1939, 81, Merrill 1893, Kroll 1929).

18. Friedricksmeyer 1983, 75, stresses the reconciliation with the world of men, with Caesar, and with Roman virtus that goes with this repudiation of Lesbia. In Dixon's Farewell Catullus , Caesar is again a father figure who warns Catullus away from Lesbia. In that novel, Caesar wrongs Catullus by making love to the latter's slave and lover, Poppaea, and Catullus wrongs Caesar with his lampoons. But a letter in the epilogue (273-74) from Caesar to Catullus' father delivers the forgiveness that had been absent from the relation between Catullus and Lesbia.

19. Wiseman 1985, 243-44.

20. See, for example, Forsyth 1976 and Quinn 1972, 250-51.

21. This vision of the "vagina dentata" is conjured up from the Scylla of Catullus 60: "latrans infima inguinum parte" (2).

22. Copley's translation of 1957, for instance, has Catullus writing in the style of e. e. cummings.

23. A violent tough-mindedness is paraded in passages like:

          I'm in the saddle now,
Riding the tornado—it could break the wings
Right off my glider. (4)

24. Compare this passage from Pierson Dixon's Farewell Catullus: "Since their return from Asia she [Poppaea, Catullus' slave and lover] had made him happy; or nearly, for he was troubled by moments of doubt. He was conscious that his poetic muse was becoming milder, more humane, more scholarly; flashes of wit and stormy passion came more rarely. Were Poppaea and her calming influence the cause? Ought he to break away, renounce contentment and plunge again into the intoxicating life of the capital? There Clodia waited, his Erinys, maddening and elusive. This way lay misery but it was the road to inspiration too" (248).

25. See "Deathwish Drang," Baxter 1973, 18.

26. "One can even identify a whole genre—going back to Landor and beyond—of poems on (or to) Catullus by poets who have translated him . . ." (Wiseman 1985, 242).

27. Squire 1923, 57.

28. To the examples cited on pages 119-120 and 270 n. 13 one could add Bagg 1965, 65: "When each confronts an emotional disaster, not so austerely charged as tragedy, yet nearly beyond each man's powers to master, poetry becomes for both a possible means to extend mastery."

29. Sisson had published translations of Catullus earlier, in 1966.

30. Something of the spirit of Sisson's poem is apparent in Camille Paglia 1991's version of Catullus and Lesbia: "Men and women are suddenly free, but freedom is a flood of superfluous energy, a vicious circle of agitation, quest, satiation, exhaustion, ennui" (131). Again: "Lesbia, the wellborn Clodia, introduces to Rome a depraved sexual persona that had been current, according to aggrieved comment of the Old Testament, for a thousand years in Babylon. Female receptivity becomes a sinkhole of vice, the vagina a collector of pestilence to poison Roman nobility and bring it to an end" (132).

31. One is reminded of what Catullus' brother says to him a propos his adultery in AlIinson 1913, 16-I7: "I could wish you had not fallen in love with another man's wife, and if he were still living I should try to convince you of the folly of it. But I know that this hot heart of yours is as pure as the snow we see on the Alps in midsummer. That is all I need to know."

32. Compare Friedricksmeyer 1983, quoted page 12.

33. Turnbull's poem could be described as a combination of Catullus 41, in which Ameana is told she is charging too much for a woman of her appearance, with poems like c.8, where Catullus reveals his hopeless infatuation with Lesbia.

1. Alpers 1983, 202.

2. This was pointed out to me by Jennifer Church.

3. Fitzgerald 1994.

4. Skutsch 1970 points out that papirus means both "paper" and "light."