To appreciate what is distinctive and challenging about the Catullan poems selected for the current AP Latin literature syllabus, it is profitable to compare them, as a group, to those presented in the OLR. As we have noted, the OLR differs from the AP syllabus by including fewer poems. Unlike many of the textbooks designed for students preparing to take the AP Latin literature examination, the OLR does not present the poems in the sequence found in our surviving manuscripts of Catullus: polymetrics (1-60), then longer poems (61-8), then elegiacs (69-116). The 26 poems instead appear out of order, without regard to their meter.
After an introductory discussion incorporating Catullus 1, the OLR organizes the other 25 poems into three thematic sections, entitled ‘‘Catullus and his Friends,’’ ‘‘Catullus in Love,’’ and ‘‘The Sequel.’’ The first of these sections consists of seven poems, in the order 50, 53, 49, 93, 14, 9, and 13, a sequence that surrounds an elegiac couplet, 93, with three hendecasyllabic poems on either side. The second consists of 12 poems said to be about a woman whom the OLR identifies as Clodia: 51, 2, 3, 5, 43, 109, 70, 72, 85, 8, 76, and 77. Some of these poems refer to her as Lesbia, others as Catullus’ puella, or mulier mea, or mea uita; some do not mention her at all. This section begins with one of his two poems in the Sapphic meter, followed by four in hendecasyllabics, then four in elegiac couplets, one in limping iambics, and two more in elegiacs.
The third section treats some of Catullus’ poems about imagined and actual travels as endeavors ‘‘to try to forget Clodia.’’ It consists of 11, 46, 101, 31, 4, and 10. Again, a poem in Sapphic meter heads the list, followed by a metrical assortment of poems in hendecasyllabics, elegiacs, limping iambics, and iambic trimeter.
The reasons for this thematic mode of presentation merit attention. Like the decision to limit the selection in the OLR to 26 poems, these particular poems are evidently determined by the context in which Catullus has been studied in the UK. In the United States, Catullus has since 1969 been paired on the AP Latin literature syllabus with only one other Latin author - first Horace, then Cicero or Ovid - on the assumption that his poetry will be the object of study for approximately half the academic year. But the British GSCE examination for which the OLR was originally designed covers a larger number of authors. The OLR features six: three poets and three prose writers; three authors from the late Republic and three from the Augustan period. Accommodating several more authors means less space for Catullus; it also means constructing a Catullus who resembles those other authors.
Consequently, the unit on Catullus adopts an explicitly historicist focus, and an emphasis not found in the AP curriculum: on not only the larger socio-cultural context in which he wrote but also the ‘‘real people’’ in his milieu. Such a focus parallels the historically grounded approach of the OLC, centered, as we noted earlier, on the figure of Horace. It also appears to explain why the OLR highlights Catullus’ poems about his contemporaries in the first and third sections, and why it claims that the 12 amatory poems in the second part chronicle an actual affair with Clodia. In so doing, it simplifies, and tends to distort, the Catullan text and its context, particularly in attempting to reconstruct the love affair with ‘‘Clodia’’ along the lines of earlier scholarship now fallen from fashion.18 However, it acknowledges doing so and furnishes a rationale for this decision in the teacher’s hand-book.19 And this thematic mode of presentation apparently has enjoyed considerable success in engaging the interest of its intended secondary school audience.
While by no means representative of the entire Catullan corpus, the OLR roster of 26 poems also seems to incorporate those traditionally favored, whether unofficially or officially, in a variety of British secondary schools - to judge by the reminiscences of former British secondary school Latin students, offered in response to our informal survey described above and in personal correspondence. Reflecting on his classical education in the 1940s, the distinguished author and translator Frederic Raphael - who attended Charterhouse from 1945 to 1950, overlapping briefly with Simon Raven - remarks:
Catullus was the non-curricular, not quite forbidden poet. Yet his qualities could not be denied, nor his place in the Golden Age. [A]nthology pieces - such as paene insula Sirmionis [31]; Lesbia’s sparrow (or golden finch) cutenesses [2 and 3]; the imitation of Sappho [51]; the lament for his brother [101] - must have figured in some forgotten chrestomathy. The attraction was clearly the passion and sincerity.... Catullus was the sexy young man par excellence, and aggressive and wounded as well.20
Barry Baldwin, emeritus professor of classics at the University of Calgary, attended Lincoln School from 1948 to 1956, where he did ‘‘Latin and Greek from scratch to O[rdinary], A[dvanced] and S[pecial] levels,’’ the first two linked with standardized subject examinations for 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds respectively, the third a higher special paper. He acknowledges that ‘‘Catullus made very few appearances in our classical lives,’’ but recalls ‘‘the Sirmio poem (31).. .mainly as background to the obvious Tennyson [who evokes Catullus in his Frater Ave Atque Vale], occasional small pieces, e. g. sentio et excrucior (85).’’ At the grammar school attended from 1957 through 1963 by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, now a scholar and editor with Oxford University Press:
Catullus was not on the official syllabus. However, the senior English master, who also took some Latin classes, did include him. I wasn’t in any of those classes, but from what I knew of him I think he must have treated him [and his Lesbia poems] much as he would have done an English Romantic poet of the nineteenth century.. .with sensitivity to language, and as the account of a love-affair that went wrong. I don’t mean as pure biography... rather as how relations between a man and a woman might go.
Jan Williams was introduced to Catullus in 1962 at Howell’s School, Llandaff, a girls’ school in Cardiff, during her third year of learning Latin. She still remembers the 10 poems that her class read, noting:
We started with Lugete, O Veneres (3) and also read Vivamus (5). When we read Multas pergentes (101), I was completely hooked - and I still am. Other poems studied were Furi etAureli (11), Cenabis bene (13), Paene insularum (31), Egnatius quod (39), Nulli se dicit (70), Chommoda dicit (84) and Odi et amo (85).... For me these poems were a revelation. . . the discovery that Latin could be used to express such emotion was wonderful and may have been the reason I became a classicist.
While 39 and 84, which might be characterized as depicting ‘‘Catullus and individuals he deemed unworthy of his friendship,’’ are not among the poems in the OLR, the other eight are. Together this octet creates and sustains a sentimental impression of Catullus as emotionally powerful and romantic, aggressive and wounded, yet morally palatable to mid-twentieth-century tastes. It is an impression reinforced by Highet’s portrait of Catullus, proffered along with his assertion that the poet is still unsuitable to be taught in schools and colleges:
There were three important events in his life. The first was the death of his elder brother. The second was his tour of duty as a government official in Asia Minor. The third was his love affair with a beautiful and conscienceless woman called Clodia. All three meant failure and heartbreak for him. He was a man doomed to suffer.21
Three years after Williams’s encounter with these 10 poems, five of them (3, 5, 11, 13, and 85) joined seven others (8, 45, 46, 51, 72, 75, and 104) in Aestimanda, by M. Balme and M. S. Warman. Published by Oxford University Press, it was, as Morwood notes in private correspondence, the first textbook in the English-speaking world to invite and give guidelines for practical criticism of Latin and Greek poets. Several of the 10 poems - 3,5,11,13,31,70, and 85 - read by Williams in 1962 and presented again by Aestimanda in 1965 are featured again in an experimental 1970 volume, designed to accompany the O-level selections of Catullus for 1971-2 and train ‘‘the young to read ancient poetry as poetry.’’ Entitled Nine Essays on Catullus for Teachers, it was edited by Clary Greig, production director of Cambridge School Classics. The authors include Greig himself (on 70 and 85); Balme, a Latin master at Harrow (on 3); and a variety of Latinists teaching at university level. Some were affiliated with Cambridge: E. J. Kenney (on 4), J. C. Bramble (on 5), R. O. A. M. Lyne (on 11). Others - L. A. Moritz (on 13), C. Witke (on 31), N. Rudd and
J. Foster (on 51) - were not. According to the introduction by C. O. Brink, these essays, each no more than 1,000 words in length, were commissioned to ‘‘show the diversity of competent critical approaches’’ and ‘‘to stimulate and provoke the teacher to work out his own approach.’’ Now that Catullus had been welcomed into the official, required Latin curriculum, he needed to be taken seriously.
Only one of these essays, Witke on 31, mentions what Wiseman would later call ‘‘Catullus’ world’’: the socio-cultural context in which he lived and wrote. By limiting the selections to a few, traditionally beloved, Catullan poems concerned with Lesbia and the emotions that she arouses, and by emphasizing Catullus’ emotionally charged language, these essays for the most part continue to construct Catullus in a sentimentalizing way, as a romantic. Clodia and her brother are not mentioned in these essays, but English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Scott, and Tennyson are.
Yet these essays also hint at approaches to Catullan literary interpretation that were gaining currency at the time Nine Essays was published. Balme, for instance, takes cognizance of New Critical concerns by underscoring ‘‘the recurrent note of irony’’ in 3, and labeling it ‘‘highly ambivalent’’ because ‘‘it is both a lament and a love poem’’ (Balme 1970: 12). So, too, in accounting for the changes that Catullus 51 makes to the poem by Sappho that it ‘‘imitates,’’ Rudd and Foster point out that ‘‘Callimachus and his age (the third century bc) had intervened between Sappho and Catullus’’ (Rudd and Foster 1970: 47). They thereby allude to the emerging body of scholarship on Catullus’ Hellenistic, Alexandrian dimensions, foregrounded by For-dyce in his 1961 commentary.22
Still, their narrow range of approaches to reading Catullus as poetry contrasts with what we find in the OLR, which not only expands the number and scope of Catullan selections deemed worthy of study but also widens the perspectives afforded by these strategies. While the OLR primarily presents the poems from a historicist vantage point, its notes and study questions also situate Catullus’ poetry in Callimachus’ Alexandrian traditions, focus on patterns of imagery as well as ironic modes of expression, and encourage the student to ponder the kind of questions associated with reader-response criticism. It asks too for comparisons between different modern English translations of poems 13 and 5.
Another recent attempt in the United Kingdom to expand the number of perspectives on Catullus did not fare very well. As Cathy Mercer recalls in responding to our questionnaire:
I taught Classics for 16 years in state schools in the UK, and was also chief examiner for Latin and Greek A level with the London Examinations Board. The students always loved Catullus above all other Latin poets.... The poems they responded to most enthusiastically were of course the Lesbia poems, as befits hormonally challenged adolescents. Candidates could write pages on Odi et amo. ...In the late 1980s, before I was examiner, the London board very courageously prescribed some of the fruitier erotic poems, including some with homoerotic interpretations. . . . There was quite a fuss from some teachers and the story hit the national press.
A letter to the Guardian on March 15, 1989, by Michael Bulley, a Latin teacher from Ashford, Kent, provides more information about that ‘‘fuss,’’ what Mercer also calls ‘‘the homoerotic furore.’’ It notes that the University of London Schools Examination Board had just written, late in the academic year, to announce that three poems by Catullus ‘‘prescribed as part of the Latin A-level system, will not now appear on the examination paper in the summer, because objections. . . have been made about the sexual nature of this subject matter of these poems, nos. 15, 16 and 25 in the Catullan catalogue.’’ It lists the details that apparently prompted these objections: the hope, expressed in 15, ‘‘that a certain boy will not be corrupted by you and your dangerous penis’’; the witty exploitation in 16 of the linguistic tension between the literal and expletive senses of expressions like ‘‘bugger you’’; the description in 25 of someone as ‘‘softer than the floppy, cobweb-covered penis of an old man.’’ And it defends these poems as ‘‘just the thing that intelligent sixth-formers should be reading’’ and praises Catullus as ‘‘one of the greatest poets of all time in combining wit, sophistication and verbal felicity with a sometimes surprising depth of feeling and seriousness.’’
Mercer emphasizes that Bulley’s letter to the press, along with a letter supporting the board’s choice from Mark Vermees, her predecessor as head of classics in her Catholic girls’ school in Upminster, had some impact. ‘‘In the end,’’ Mercer relates, ‘‘the board decided to stick to the prescription.’’ But teachers were informed that, in Mercer’s words, ‘‘no questions would be set specifically on the offending literature. In other words, stick to the Lesbia poems.’’
While sticking to, indeed privileging the Lesbia poems, the OLR, as we have observed, also neglects Catullus’ longer poems, many of his important poems about the creation of poetry, and the bitter expressions of abuse and invective that reveal a vicious side to this poet ‘‘of many friends.’’ Such poems, of course, include various homoerotic pieces, among them poem 16 and those featuring Juventius.
World History
