The Catullan corpus encompasses a great variety of poetic compositions: epigrams, lampoons, ‘‘occasional’’ poems, hymns, dramatic dialogues, an ‘‘epyllion,’’ translations, verse-letters, and at least one poem (63) that defies classification under any conventional rubric. The meters too are very diverse: hexameters and elegiacs, various iambic periods, the rare galliambic and priapean periods, Aeolic measures in both strophic and stichic schemes, and the distinctively Hellenistic ‘‘book’’ lyric that the poet calls his ‘‘hendecasyllables.’’ This variety and formal virtuosity are qualities that the ‘‘new’’ poetry of the late Republic owed to Hellenistic Greek influence. One of the most salient characteristics of the latter was the breakdown of traditional correlations between style and genre. As the genres became more artificial, they all tended to become more alike in their eclecticism (Kroll 1924: 202-24). Nevertheless, formal differences did remain, and indeed proliferated, once genre itself became just another color among the available choices on the poet’s stylistic pallet. This is particularly evident in the poetry of Catullus, in which many of the same stylistic artifices are found across the collection, but often in greatly different concentrations and put to very different effects. Similar themes are handled in diverse forms, and identical forms are deployed to the exposition of widely dissimilar themes. Individual poems range in length from 2 to over 400 lines, and together they cover many different subjects - love, friendship, betrayal, literature, politics, travel, personal triumphs and defeats, and death. The tonal range is equally broad: playful, contemptuous, celebratory, intimate, bitter, resigned, introspective, vulnerable, aloof. In most poems the authorial presence is emphatically foregrounded; in some it is minimized or suppressed entirely. A similar variety exists with respect to the presence, prominence, and ostensible familiarity of explicit addressees. Likewise the knowledge and attitudes imputed to a ‘‘preferred’’ reader or listener, in effect the audience constructed by the poetry, change from one poem to another and among groups of poems. In sum, the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan ‘‘style’’ is its protean character.
It should be noted at the outset that examples of stylistic features to be discussed in this chapter do not always fit into discrete categories. Our consideration of diction, for example, will begin with archaisms; yet a particular archaic usage may be conventional in the Latin poetic register as Catullus found it, in which case it could be considered as much ‘‘literary’’ as ‘‘archaic.’’ Rhythm will be discussed in connection with meter, yet rhythm is constituted by factors that include alliteration, assonance, anaphora, rhyming, etc., all of which are figures of speech. Moreover certain rhythmic effects are traditionally associated with an archaic style of poetry and prayer. Thus rhythm too can be an archaism. Vernacular usage, Grecism, and diminutives will all be treated as separate categories of diction, yet there is considerable overlap among these three categories and between them and archaism. It follows that the stylistic categories used in this chapter are not mutually exclusive.
World History
