In November 1521 a humanist named Pierio Valeriano began a series of lectures on Catullus at the University of Rome (Gaisser 1993: 109-45, 1999: 1-39). The moment was right, for Valeriano was at the height of his success, and Roman poetry and humanism were enjoying a golden age under the patronage of the Medici pope Leo X. Valeriano was well suited to his task: he was a poet as well as a philologist, he had an interpretive method, and he was an entertaining and lively lecturer. His lectures were taken down as he spoke, with the intention that they would be published as a commentary. Valeriano’s lectures were never published, but they are preserved in a manuscript (or rather manuscript fragment) in the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5215). The fragment is substantial. There are 249 folios, which contain two introductory lectures and detailed discussions of poems 1-22. The manuscript contains no breaks except that the discussions of the obscene poems 15, 16, and 21 are missing - an important point that we will consider presently.
Valeriano was not the first humanist to lecture on Catullus. Puteolano probably promoted the sales of his edition with lectures at the University of Bologna; Calfur-nio, editor of the 1481 edition, regularly lectured on Catullus in Padua at least up to 1493; and Partenio lectured at his school in Verona in the 1480s. (Palladio may also have lectured on Catullus in the 1490s.) But the lectures of Puteolano and Calfurnio are lost, and those of Partenio were revised to make his published commentary. Valeriano’s lectures have come down to us nearly as he delivered them, if we can believe their title:
Pierii Valeriani Bellunensis Ro. Gymnasii Professoris Praelectiones in Catullum Audi-torum Quorumdam Diligentia Dum Profiteretur Ad Verbum Exceptae.
The Lectures on Catullus of Pierio Valeriano of Belluno, Professor of the University of Rome, Taken Down Word for Word as He Spoke, through the Care of Some of his Listeners. (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 1r)
There is also another difference. Partenio and Palladio were schoolmasters; Puteolano and Calfurnio, their university positions notwithstanding, were comparative small-fry. But Valeriano was a major figure, and his professorial debut was an important literary event. His lectures were learned and instructive, to be sure, but also personal, literary, and witty. to the faithful amanuensis, who has recorded interruptions, asides, and digressions along with the central material of the lectures, we are able to catch some of the flavor of his performance.
Valeriano also approached Catullus in a different spirit from that of his fifteenth-century predecessors. He was a better scholar than Partenio, Palladio, and either Guarino; and he had the advantages not only of Avanzi’s two Aldines (1502 and 1515), but also of access to Catullus manuscripts owned by the Medici or housed in the Vatican Library. (He was a Medici client and secretary of the pope’s cousin, Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII.) But two other points of difference are of greater importance. First, Valeriano was a Neo-Latin poet with a professional interest in poetic style and meter, and one of the purposes of his lectures was to encourage his students to write their own Neo-Latin poetry. Many were already doing so, for he had fellow humanists as well as university students in his audience. Second, both by temperament and because of his period and his location in papal Rome, Valeriano had a different attitude to obscenity from that of his predecessors. He was not a stiffnecked puritan like Mantuan, but he did not flaunt or revel in the obscene like Pontano and the three fifteenth-century commentators (by whom Catullan obscenity was explained more enthusiastically and knowledgeably than it would be again for nearly five hundred years).
Valeriano saw Catullus above all as a poetic model. He ends his second lecture with this exhortation:
Age esto Catullus primus, qui profecturis in poetice discipulis proponatur, ut quum unusquisque in eum ex numeris inciderit, qui genio suo sit accomodatior, quo scilicet se non aliter moveri atque attrahi sentiat quam ferrum a magnete, paleam a succino, se ad eius imitationem accingat, eoque carminis genere sese exercere incipiat, quod magis ideae suae proprium esse animadverterit.
Come, let it be Catullus first who is set before students about to make their way into poetry, so that when each has fallen upon that rhythm which is well suited to his spirit, by which he feels himself moved and attracted as iron by a magnet or chaff by amber, he will gird himselfup to imitate it and begin to practice with that type ofpoetry which he sees is proper to his ideal. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 25r)
Rhythm was of professional concern to Valeriano, and his facility with metrics (like that of Pontano in the previous century) far exceeded that of humanists who merely scanned Catullus’ verse, but did not write their own. Much of his approach is the result of his study of the metrical treatise De metris by the second-century grammarian Terentianus Maurus, apparently unknown to his predecessors.
Terentianus’ treatise was discovered in 1493. The first edition appeared in 1497, followed by several others in the period 1500-10 (Keil 1874: 6.245, 315-17). The work was interesting because of its antiquity and the metrical lore it contained, but especially because it was written in verse. Terentianus founded his treatise on the fact that the verse may be divided at different points, and that different meters can be achieved simply by omitting, adding, and transposing segments. He applied his principle to most of the main metrical types, but especially to the hendecasyllable, which he divided in seven different ways, rearranging and adding segments to form everything from hexameters to galliambics (Ter. Maur. 2539-912 in GLK6.401-11).
The demonstration provided Valeriano with the perfect opening for his lecture on poem 1 (in hendecasyllables). It had the added benefit of being appropriate to the diverse needs of his audience, which included both young students who required fairly elementary instruction and those who expected entertainment and virtuoso display. Best of all, however, Terentianus’ approach was active: he showed not how to scan, but how to create the various meters.
Valeriano turns Terentianus’ discussion into a treatment of the meter of poem 1. The first four verses are the basis of his discussion:
Cui dono lepidum novum libellum arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas meas esse aliquid putare nugas.
(Catull. 1.1-4)
He begins with the basic components of the hendecasyllable:
Id vero potissimum dignitatis habet carmen hoc, quod constat ex tomis eorum versuum, qui antiquissimi omnium ac celeberrimi censentur. Ex heroica quippe tome, atque ex iambea. Est autem tome ut iuniores intelligant, pars alicuius carminis [the following words are crossed out: uno plus pede numerosa] quae ab reliquo dissecatur, ita ut vel ipsa per se genus aliquod carminis adstruat vel sectioni alteri copulata diversam efficiat speciem.
This meter has the particular distinction of being formed from the segments [tomis] of those verses considered the most ancient and celebrated, that is, from an epic tome and from an iambic one. Moreover, (so that the younger students may understand), a tome is a portion of a verse that is cut off from the rest in such a way that it either makes some type of verse by itself or creates a different form when joined to another segment. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 28v)
Thus, we may regard the first line of poem 1 as containing an epic segment, Cui dono lepidum, which is the first half of a hexameter verse, and an iambic segment, novum libellum, the first colon of an iambic trimeter. We may turn the line into a hexameter by trimming the second segment and inserting words drawn from elsewhere in the poem. Thus: Cui dono lepidum j Corneli docte j libellum. Valeriano creates an iambic verse by completing the iambic segment with a phrase borrowed from poem 4.1. Thus: novum libellum j quem videtis hospites. The argument that follows is technical but entertaining, as Valeriano turns the verses of the first poem into alcaics, priapeans, asclepiadeans, and galliambics (Gaisser 1993: 412). ‘‘If we have a thorough understanding of this rhythm,’’ he concludes, ‘‘we can exercise our talent through many kinds ofverses.’’ ([ut] hoc uno rectepercepto numero facilepossemusper multa versuum genera ingenium exercere, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 36r.)
Valeriano’s attitude toward obscenity was highly personal, and it was closely related to his idea of an affinity between the poet and himself as the poet’s interpreter; or it might be better to say that - like all of Catullus’ interpreters, from Martial to the present - he created a Catullus in his own image (Gaisser 2002). If Pontano’s Catullus was a sensualist, Valeriano’s is a teacher who both delights and instructs. Catullus pleases by the charm of his poetry, Valeriano tells his students, but he is also instructive and useful:
Prodest utique quum virtutes celebrat... dum vitia carpit, malos mores exsecratur, et mortales omnes a sceleratorum quos carminibus proscindit imitatione conatur avertere.
He is useful particularly when he celebrates virtues [and]... chastises vice, criticizes evil ways, and attempts to deter mankind from imitating the wicked men he chastises in his poetry. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 18r)
This surprising description of Catullus is close enough to Valeriano’s conception of his own role to make him reject a reading like Poliziano’s interpretation of Catullus’ sparrow, which he found unnecessary and prurient. But Valeriano’s picture of Catullus the teacher is not always serious. Here is how he makes the sparrow useful and instructive to his students in the conclusion of his discussion of poem 3:
Nunc unum addam pro corollario, quod ad has extincti passeris inferias conferamus. Nam et vos delectare possunt audiendo et exemplo plurimum iuvare. Passeribus vitae brevitas angustissima. Eorum enim mares anno diutius durare non posse tradunt, qui rerum huiusmodi historias conscripsere; cuius rei causam esse aiunt, incontinentissimam salaci-tatem; quae tot hominum etiam ante diem effoetos tradit senectuti. Contra vero corvi-num genus, quia rarissime coit vivacissimum. Quare si vos vitae dulcedo capit adolescentes nihil vobis magis praestiterit quam venerem et caeci stimulos avertere amoris.
Now I will add one thing as a corollary, which we can apply to these rites of a dead sparrow. For they can both amuse you in the listening and benefit you greatly by their example. The life of a sparrow is very short. For, as those who write of these matters tell us, the males can live no more than a year, and they say that the reason is unrestrained lust - which also wears out so many men before their time and hands them over to old age. The crow, on the other hand, is very long-lived, since it copulates most seldom. Wherefore, young men, if the sweetness of life delights you, nothing will be more useful to you than to reject Venus and the goads of blind passion. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 63r)
Valeriano rejected Poliziano’s interpretation of the sparrow, but he was willing to give frank (not prurient) explanations of Catullus’ sexual language and obscenities. At poem 6.13, for example, he glosses latera ecfututa as ‘‘loins spent and exhausted by sexual intercourse’’ (latera coitu frequenti tam exhausta et debilitata, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 95 v). In poem 11 he explains the penultimate stanza and the force of omnium/ ilia rumpens: ‘‘by such constant activity let her continue to render so many men impotent’’ ( tali assiduitatepergat viros tot elumbes reddere. Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 164v).
Real events outside the lecture room, however, prevent us from knowing how Valeriano treated Catullus’ most obscene poetry. Valeriano began his lectures under his Medici patron, Pope Leo X, who died unexpectedly very soon afterwards. The pope’s death, Valeriano’s grief, and the election of the new pope, Adrian VI, are all reported at the beginning of the third lecture. The lectures continued, but broke off for the summer of 1522. They resumed in the late autumn, by which time Adrian VI, a pious and puritanical Dutchman, had at last arrived in Rome - ‘‘together with the plague,’’ as Valeriano was to say some years later (Valeriano, De litteratorum infeli-citate 1.16, in Gaisser 1999). As luck would have it, Valeriano came to the first truly obscene poem (15) after the new pope’s arrival. At the beginning of his lecture he debates about whether he should omit it, claiming that his students are outraged at the very idea:
Alii recidisse nos iterum in Gottica et Vandalica tempora lamentantur, quod videatur, veluti statuis omnibus illi virilia decutiebant, nunc quoque e Ubris, siquid pruriat, tolli.
Some lament that we have fallen back into the times of the Goths and the Vandals because it seems that just as they used to cut off the genitals of all the statues, so now anything titillating is taken out of books, too. (Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 194v)
Valeriano apparently gave his lecture, but we will never be sure, since he (or someone else) has cut out all the pages that would have contained it. The manuscript resumes with lectures on poems 17 and 22 (poem 21 is omitted). (For the numbering of the poems see the next section.) It is not clear how long the lectures continued. Conditions in Rome in autumn 1522 and spring 1523 were bad for humanists and poetry: the pope was hostile to secular intellectual activities; finances were so tight that university salaries often went unpaid; and the plague continued to ravage the city. A final catastrophe makes it impossible to know the extent of the lectures. In 1527 Rome was sacked by the troops of Charles V, and the manuscript with Valeriano’s lectures was among the casualties. A comment on the last folio contains the poignant note: ‘‘the rest was lost in the Sack of Rome’’ (Reliquum in direptione Romae desideratum, Vat. lat. 5215, fol. 249v). The lectures lay in obscurity until the twentieth century (Alpago-Novello 1926).
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