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Catullus’ Poetic Programme
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Catullus
In this course, Dr Gail Trimble (University of Oxford) explores the poetry of Catullus (c. 84-54 BC). In the first module, we think Catullus’ first poem and what it might tell us about what he hopes to achieve with his poetry – which he describes as a ‘charming little book’ (lepidum … libellum) filled with ‘trivialities’ (nugae). After that, we think about the figure of ‘Lesbia’, the women with whom Catullus has a tempestuous relationship – and who may or may not be based on a real Roman woman. In the third module, we think about Catullus’ presentation of myth, looking in particular at his longest poem (64), before turning in the fourth module to consider Catullus’ invective poems. In the fifth module, we read through some of Catullus’ shorter poems – in particular poems 85 and 70 – before turning in the final module to think about the generic variety of Catullus’ collection.
Catullus’ Poetic Programme
In this module, we think about Catullus’ opening poem and what it might tell us about his poetic programme, focusing in particular on: (i) Catullus’ description of his collection of poems as a ‘charming little book’ (lepidum … libellum) filled with ‘trifles’ (nugae); (ii) the figure of Cornelius Nepos, to whom the collection of poetry is dedicated, and the similarities and differences between Nepos’ literary output and Catullus’; (iii) the Greek poet and scholar Callimachus (c. 310-240 BC) and the concept of Callimacheanism; (iv) the importance of lepor (‘attractiveness, charm, wit’), as a characteristic both of Catullus’ poetry and of the people he likes to have around him; and (v) Catullus’ use of diminuatives, and the extent to which this collection of poetry, which stands at almost 2,300 lines, can justifiably be described as a ‘little book’ (libellum).
Hello. I'm Dr Gail Trimble.
00:00:05I'm Associate Professor of classical languages and
00:00:07literature at the University of Oxford.
00:00:09And this is a course about the work of the Roman poet Catullus.
00:00:12And in this first section,
00:00:16I'm going to talk a bit about Catullus’ opening poem, and one or two others,
00:00:17and what they tell us about what we might call his poetic programme.
00:00:22So
00:00:25in the first poem of Catullus’ collection, as we read it today,
00:00:27we begin with the idea of Catullus’ ‘charming little book’.
00:00:30It's a lepidum novum libellum – it's ‘new’ as well.
00:00:34It’s filled with trifles, bits and pieces – nugae is the Latin word –
00:00:37and he's dedicating his book to someone called Cornelius.
00:00:44This is Cornelius Nepos, as we call him,
00:00:47a slightly older historian and biographer.
00:00:49So what do we learn
00:00:53in Catullus 1 about what Catullus is setting out to do and why?
00:00:54Well, he calls his poetry
00:00:59nugae, these ‘trifles’.
00:01:01But he also says that, in Nepos’ eyes at least, they are aliquid,
00:01:04‘something’. Nepos used to think that his ‘trifles’ were ‘something’.
00:01:07So there's some sense that this is a book he's proud of,
00:01:11and he ends the poem by hoping that it's going to live beyond his own time.
00:01:15It's also, as a set of poetry, contrasted,
00:01:21with Nepos’ work because he’s a serious historian,
00:01:24but it could also be sort of aligned with him because Catullus says that
00:01:26Nepos has managed to write the whole of history in three pieces of papyrus,
00:01:30three ‘cartis’,
00:01:34and the idea that Catullus has written this ‘charming little book’ suggests that it's
00:01:37something like what Nepos has done in terms of concision and maybe elegance.
00:01:42What are these ‘little books’? Books in Catullus’ time were scrolls,
00:01:47individual rolls of papyrus, paper,
00:01:51and Catullus
00:01:54spends a lot of time in Poem 1 telling us what this one looks like.
00:01:55It's ‘polished with pumice stone’, which I'm sure means, you know,
00:01:58perhaps it's literally polished with stone,
00:02:03but also it's metaphorically very carefully worked, refined, polished.
00:02:05It's also small, it's a little book.
00:02:09That word is a diminutive noun, that ‘libellus’, rather than just liber.
00:02:13So this
00:02:20then is often thought of as one of the many places
00:02:20where we see what's called Catullus’ Callimacheanism,
00:02:22after the Greek poet
00:02:25Callimachus. Who was he?
00:02:26Well, he was writing in the third century BC,
00:02:29so a couple of centuries before Catullus,
00:02:31in Hellenistic Alexandria, in the city of Alexandria in Egypt,
00:02:34ruled by the Ptolemies, who had taken over that part of
00:02:38the empire that Alexander the Great had briefly created and
00:02:40of course named Alexandria after himself.
00:02:43So Callimachus is one of various poets writing in that
00:02:45period, and is sort of the the iconic one,
00:02:47the one who sums up what Alexandrian poetry is meant to be about.
00:02:50It's important that he was also a scholar.
00:02:54He was in fact librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria,
00:02:56and Callimachus became famous in the Rome more or less of Catullus’ time,
00:03:00and he's also famous in modern scholarship on Roman poetry of that period,
00:03:04for the sort of thing that Callimachus says about his poetic
00:03:07principles – that he wants to write poetry that small or slim
00:03:11but exquisite, polished, refined, pure.
00:03:16Also, what we might call learned.
00:03:21Callimachus has read a lot of other poetry, he wants to allude to it,
00:03:24he wants to fill his poetry full of complicated
00:03:27place names and so on, obscure references to myths.
00:03:30And we can see Catullus being interested in this side of Callimacheanism as well.
00:03:33He actually translates one long poem of Callimachus
00:03:38that becomes Catullus’ Poem 66,
00:03:41and that's a court poem
00:03:43that Callimachus wrote for the Queen of Alexandria when she had dedicated to the gods
00:03:45a lock of her hair after her husband had come back safely from war.
00:03:50The poem is entirely spoken by the hair itself,
00:03:53which is a very strange sort of conceit, of course, and again,
00:03:57full of all these learned allusions to places, to myths,
00:04:00and Catullus was so interested in this
00:04:03that he bothered translating it very carefully into Latin.
00:04:05There's also a sort of direct reference to Callimachus in
00:04:08Catullus, in his Poem 7,
00:04:11which we'll see in the next section
00:04:14starts out as a rather passionate poem to his lover Lesbia.
00:04:15But he starts defining the number of kisses that they might engage in
00:04:19as the number of grains of sand in the desert –
00:04:24but not just any desert – the desert near the tomb of Battus in North Africa.
00:04:27Why is this relevant? Because
00:04:32Callimachus sometimes claimed to be the descendant
00:04:35of this early North African hero,
00:04:38Battus.
00:04:40And so that's sort of pointing
00:04:40to Callimachus and perhaps suggesting that Callimachus is
00:04:42the sort of person who wouldn't just say ‘as many kisses of grains of sand’,
00:04:44but we'll get a little bit pedantic and start talking about grains of sand wear.
00:04:48And so Catullus has a rather complicated relationship with Callimacheanism.
00:04:52there, indulging in it, but perhaps slightly laughing at it as well.
00:04:54So this characteristic of the poetry – let's say its refinement –
00:05:01is established in Poem 1 as something that Catullus cares about,
00:05:06but what else can we learn from this poem about his programme,
00:05:09what his poetry is going to be like?
00:05:13Well, we discover that he also cares about people.
00:05:14Of course, he's friendly towards Cornelius Nepos in this poem,
00:05:18but we can also see the introduction of some
00:05:21words of approval that Catullus associates both with poetic style
00:05:24and with the sort of personal qualities that he approves of,
00:05:28and this is interesting.
00:05:31The book, then, as well as being a little book and as well as being new, is lepidus,
00:05:33‘neat’, ‘pretty’, but also ‘charming’. ‘witty’.
00:05:38So in Poem 6,
00:05:45when Catullus is teasing his friend Flavius that he must have a
00:05:46new girlfriend he doesn't want to tell Catullus about,
00:05:49Catullus claims that this girlfriend must be illepida,
00:05:52so not lepida, not charming and witty in this way that Catullus approves of.
00:05:55She doesn't live up to the standards, it seems, that Catullus and his friends expect.
00:06:00But Catullus does end Poem 6 by claiming – maybe tongue in cheek? –
00:06:06that he wants to celebrate this girlfriend and Flavius anyway
00:06:11in lepido versu, in poetry that is lepidus,
00:06:14and so associating the word with poetry again, whether that suits the girl or not.
00:06:17Finally, then,
00:06:24another word about what Poem 1 might be telling us
00:06:25about Catullus’ poetic programme, about his poetry as a whole.
00:06:27I said that libellus, ‘a little book’, is a diminutive,
00:06:31and diminutive themselves are something very characteristic of Catullus,
00:06:36various things are a ‘little’, part of Catullus’ aesthetic vocabulary.
00:06:39Well the collection of Catullus’ poetry that we have now
00:06:45might look like a little book to us –
00:06:47it's normally quite a slim paperback –
00:06:49but it wouldn't have been a little book to the Romans,
00:06:51not as it stands now. It's nearly 2300 lines long,
00:06:54and that's just too long for one of these papyrus scrolls,
00:06:58which were more like about 700 to 1100 lines on average.
00:07:01The very longest is perhaps about 1700.
00:07:05Also, he called those poems nugae,
00:07:09‘trifles’,
00:07:12and that seems to be true of
00:07:14some of the poems. We'll see in this course
00:07:16poems that are two lines long or not much longer.
00:07:18But we'll also hear a bit about poems that are much longer – hundreds of lines –
00:07:21and much more ambitious in what we call high genres like epic and hymn.
00:07:25So those don't sound so much like nugae.
00:07:30So I think whatever Catullus is saying in Poem 1 that
00:07:33he has carefully arranged and presented as his libellus, as his ‘little book’,
00:07:38it wasn't exactly what we have now.
00:07:42We are going to see the variety of Catullus’ work throughout these sections,
00:07:45and in the very last one will come back to the
00:07:51question of the very various genres that we see across the corpus.
00:07:53
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Trimble, G. (2022, July 14). Catullus - Catullus’ Poetic Programme [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-poetry-of-catullus-trimble/catullus-and-genre
MLA style
Trimble, G. "Catullus – Catullus’ Poetic Programme." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 14 Jul 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/the-poetry-of-catullus-trimble/catullus-and-genre