Yeats’s notorious challenge to Latinists, ‘‘Lord, what would they say/Did their Catullus walk that way?’’ distinguishes a vigorous Catullus in the flesh from the poet as object of research by academics not especially at home in their own. By the early 1980s, though, scholars could answer that they might not walk the walk, but Catullus himself sure talked the talk. New Criticism had cast its spotlight on ‘‘the text itself’’ as an autonomous entity uninflected by the swagger of its historical author; ‘‘Alexandrianism,’’ with its imagined ideal of the refined poem that spoke through other poems to an elite audience informed by a vast and detailed literary knowledge, was seen as the foundation of Roman poets' understanding of the aims and nature of literature. Catullus was as bookish as we (Latinists), had always aspired to live on the page, and we were always his ideal readers, as well as being essential interlocutors for any informed understanding of his work. Richard Thomas’s (1982) analysis of the opening of Catullus' epic celebration of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis provides the most dazzling glimpse of Catullus the scholar-poet at work. Thomas shows that the first 15 lines of that poem, describing the voyage of the Argo on which the mortal hero Peleus first catches sight of the sea goddess he will wed, contain allusions to and corrections of no fewer than five previous literary versions of the scene. Above all, the lines figure as a polemical refinement of the second-century bc poet Ennius’ Latin adaptation of the beginning of Euripides’ Medea: Catullus corrects Ennius’ imprecise rendering of the type of tree from which the ship was built and, while citing the earlier author's idea that the ship was called the Argo because its crew came from Argos, lets his reader know that he prefers a more obscure derivation of the name, probably found in Callimachus, from a long-obsolete Homeric adjective meaning ‘‘swift.’’ To add insult to injury, Catullus recovers a threefold alliteration to be found in Euripides but not in Ennius. This kind of poetry, then, is already literary scholarship, and modern scholars must use all their skills to recover the intellectual background that would have made it comprehensible to its original Roman audience.
Such a picture of the role of learning in Catullan poetry seduces for many reasons. The sort of learnedness Catullus values looks in kind a lot like the learning valued by philologists, and the ‘‘polemical’’ edge to the Catullan art of reference bears comparison to the way professional academics put their knowledge on display by building on and correcting the work of predecessors. But it is precisely the recogniz-ability of this Catullus that ought to put us on our guard, not simply because it raises the suspicion that Latinists have followed a long tradition of finding someone like themselves in the infinitely accommodating diversity of the Catullan oeuvre, but because what seems to need no explanation is often the most important thing to explain. My aim in this chapter therefore is to expand the picture of Catullan learning that emerges from the works of critics like Thomas by considering why such learnedness matters in Catullus’ poetry and what work these displays of the mastery of Greek letters perform in the construction of his self-image. Not only was Catullus the most learned of Roman poets - doctus even in the eyes of the hyper-refined Ovid - but also his verses are explicitly embedded in contemporary social transactions. Yet for the most part the ‘‘social’’ Catullus of the polymetrics and epigrams and the ‘‘learned’’ Catullus of the longer poems move in different scholarly circles today. The former attracts the greatest share of attention from historically minded critics and the latter from formalists. By accepting this division, however, we risk both missing a rich and subtle document in the history of Rome’s engagement with Hellenic culture and underplaying an important area of contention and complexity within the poet’s work. For, as I hope to show, learnedness forms much more than a mode of poetic expression for Catullus; it is a subject his poetry explores in its own right, and its role in shaping the position and status of its author is made explicitly ambiguous. I want to begin, therefore, with a brief discussion of the social dynamics of Catullan poetry as they emerge from the shorter poems: how the work constructs its author as a social actor, ‘‘performing’’ friendships and enmities. This discussion will pay particular attention to the various functions of learnedness, as a criterion of judgment and an almost talismanic shared possession that defines Catullus’ community of amici and shields their exchanges from the comprehension of outsiders. However, this analysis also exposes a potential contradiction in Catullus’ depiction of learning: it serves as a tool and mark of social distinction in the eyes of both insiders and outsiders, yet sets the community it engenders apart from social business as usual. The second part of the chapter relates this contrast between the inward-facing and outward-facing aspects of literary culture to the thematization of Hellenism in Catullus 64, where it appears both as the cause of a contemporary moral downfall and as an elusive refuge from the social corruption it engenders. The final section then suggests some historical contexts for understanding these contradictory attitudes.
World History
