Kenneth Quinn once dismissed Catullus’ ‘‘poetry of social comment’’ as little more than fascinating and vivid background material for the poet’s demonstration of his affair with Lesbia, which, in his view, constituted the real subject of Catullus’ poetic collection and his principal literary achievement (Quinn 1972b: 49-50). It was not that Quinn was uninterested in the atmosphere of the late Republic or in the historicist implications of the prosopography of the Catullan collection - far from it. But, for Quinn, these poems evinced lower ‘‘levels of intent,’’ to the extent that most of Catullus’ shorter poems could be described as ‘‘strictly personal poetry,’’ exercises ‘‘in the process of working out how to record feelings in crisp, telling nonliterary language’’ (Quinn 1972b: 277). Even in instances of invective directed against conspicuous political figures ‘‘his verse expresses no political ideas, no political attitude as such, except perhaps a general disgust with politics’’ (Quinn 1972b: 267; Quinn’s work is put into context by Wray 2001: 30-5). Recent critical approaches, however, embrace a very different strategy. Current practices tend to break down distinctions between the poetics of eroticism and broader cultural concerns, a shift that has ended the strict segregation of the Lesbia poems from the remainder of the corpus (Kennedy 1993: 34-9; Skinner 2003: 60-95). Furthermore, it is now a regular habit of interpretation to detect in Catullan poetry, as in literary texts more generally, locations for the contesting and negotiation of societal dynamics (bibliography at Nappa 2001: 29; Skinner 2003: 22-3). No longer simply a backdrop for the narrative of Catullus’ romance, then, the poems’ social commentary has emerged as a persistent and even essential element of the Catullan poetic program, undeniable and unavoidable.
Understanding the degree to which Catullus’ poems should be understood as social commentary - and what a reading along these lines meant and means - remains far from uncomplicated. One recent critic has gone so far as to describe Catullus’
Unifying poetic program as ‘‘sustained scrutiny and criticism of Roman society’’ (Nappa 2001: 23). If this is perhaps pressing the matter too hard, it is nonetheless the case that the importance and pervasiveness of social commentary in Catullus can hardly be missed. His opening poem invokes themes of friendship and the nature of Italian status in late Republican Rome; similar concerns, but from a darker perspective, arise in the final poem of the extant collection (W. J. Tatum 1997). And throughout the collection one finds an abundance of lyrics and epigrams censuring (or at the very least investigating) social exclusivity, treachery, and provincialism, as well as sexual misconduct, lapses of decorum (such as the thievery of napkins), luxuriousness, and the baleful influence of the nobility - sometimes lightly but often with a dark and biting humor and equally often in a tone of undiluted vituperation that finds its expression in enormities of obscenity.
World History
