The final poem in Catullus’ corpus as it has come down to us (116) opens with an explicit reference to Callimachus:
Saepe tibi studioso animo uenante requirens carmina uti possem mittere Battiadae, qui te lenirem nobis, neu conarere
Tela infesta meum mittere in usque caput, hunc uideo mihi nunc frustra sumptum esse laborem,
Gelli, nec nostras hic ualuisse preces. contra nos tela ista tua euitabimus acta: at fixus nostris tu dabis supplicium.
Often with my mind earnestly hunting I sought how I might send you poems of the Battiad, that I might soften you towards me and you might not try to land deadly shafts upon my head. But I now see that I have undertaken this toil in vain, Gellius, and that my prayers have not availed in this matter. I shall evade those shafts of yours launched against me; but you shall be pierced by mine and pay the penalty.
The reference to ‘‘poems of the Battiad’’ recalls the poem addressed to Hortensius (65), which is the first in elegiacs in the collection. Whether this placement is deliberate, as it seems, and whether this was the work of the poet or an editor are a matter of speculation. This poem has generally been read as an opening shot in Catullus’ vituperative relationship with Gellius, who is lampooned in several epigrams (74, 80, 88-91), but that it makes an important statement about Catullus’ relationship with Callimachus has only lately been the focus of critical inquiry. Allusion to Callimachus is signaled by the opening word of the first couplet, in which he is also named. That the lost first word of the Aetia was pollaki ‘‘often’’ has only recently been established (Pontani 1999), opening the door to recognizing the Aetia Prologue as an active intertext here (Barchiesi 2005: 333-6). Catullus thus signals the programmatic purpose of the poem in contrasting one kind of poetry (carmina... Battiadae), which he cannot write, with another associated with the invective of archaic iambic ( tela infesta). Callimachus himself had notably attempted a renovated form of iambic verse, one that was distinguished from Hipponactean iambus, by toning down the note of personal invective, scoring hits in ‘‘a devious and urbane manner’’ (Macleod 1973: 306). The opening iambus in his collection makes the point by having Hipponax himself return from the dead and announce a form of iambic verse that does not torment his opponent Bupalos (fr. 191.1-4 Pf.):
Listen to Hipponax. For indeed I have come from the place where they sell an ox
For a penny, bearing an iambus which does not sing of the Bupalean battle....
This form of iambus is characterized by the familiar Callimachean values of refinement, as Catullus hints at in describing the great concentration (studioso animo uenante) and effort (laborem) involved in composition (Syndikus 1987: 144). Catullus composed 12 poems in iambic meters (4, 8, 22, 25, 29, 31, 37, 39, 44, 52, 59, 60), but there is little in these poems to suggest an association with archaic iambos; rather, it is a Callimachean background that is evoked (Heyworth 2001: 117-25). The turn to invective announced in the final line thus treats iambos in terms of tone and content rather than meter.
This accounts for the exceptional circumstance that Catullus only uses the word iambus in his hendecasyllabics, in cc. 36, 40, 54, and fragment 3 (Heyworth 2001: 125). In giving the term a wider generic application Catullus stretches ancient definitions of genre tied to meter. In one case (40) he uses the term to characterize hendecasyllabics deployed as personal invective, in a context that clearly alludes to the iambics of Archilochus (Heyworth 2001: 127). In another poem directed at Julius Caesar (54), the term refers both to an earlier poem actually written in iambics (29) and to the politically charged hendecasyllabics in which it appears. In poem 36, Catullus merges the Archilochean and invective associations of iambics with an attack on a literary target, the epic Annals of Volusius (1-10):
Annales Volusi, cacata charta, uotum soluite pro mea puella. nam sanctae Veneri Cupidinique uouit, si sibi restitutus essem desissemque truces uibrare iambos, electissima pessimi poetae
Scripta tardipedi deo daturam infelicibus ustulanda lignis. nec uos pessima se puella uidit iocose ac lepide uouere diuis.
Annales of Volusius, crappy paper, discharge a vow for my girl. For she made a vow to Venus and Cupid that, if I were restored to her and ceased to hurl fierce iambics, she would give the choicest writings of the worst poet to the limping god for him to burn with ill-omened timber. But the naughty girl did not see that it was you she was wittily and charmingly vowing to the gods.
The iambics that Catullus has been hurling at Lesbia can hardly be limited to c. 37 and the end of c. 8, the only two poems in that meter directed against Lesbia in any sense (Thomson 1997: 298), and with most commentators we should see here another instance of iambos referring to the content of the verses, not the meter. Within this context of Callimachean aesthetics, deprecating pretentious epic poetry, Lesbia makes a vow to burn Catullus’ non-Callimachean, old-fashioned invective; Catullus interprets this vow, however, in a most Callimachean manner (iocose ac lepide) as an injunction to burn Volusius’ Annals.
World History
