The humanists greeted the rediscovery of Catullus with enthusiasm but did little with his poetry for nearly a hundred and fifty years. They tried to correct the text, collected quotable verses for their anthologies, and included Catullus in lists of obscene poets excusing or condemning scandalous verse. For the most part, however, they did not imitate or try to interpret his poetry - largely because they could not read it. Catullus’ text was notoriously corrupt. Meters were confused. Poems were run together. The point, and often even the subject, of many poems was lost. Furthermore, although the humanists admired the learning of Catullus’ poetry - or rather, admired the idea that it was learned - they were vague about the details. They knew that he was called doctus Catullus (‘‘learned Catullus’’) by other ancient writers, but they did not know what his learning entailed. Greek studies were in their merest infancy, and much that we take for granted about Alexandrian literature was unknown. (In fact, two of the texts most important for understanding Catullus’ learned Alexandrianism were discovered only in the twentieth century. Both are from the Aetia of Callimachus: the prologue setting out Callimachus’ poetic program, and the Lock of Berenice, which Catullus translated as poem 66.)
Real engagement with Catullus began in the fifteenth century, and the first steps were taken by two Florentine poets, Leonardo Bruni (1370?-1444) and Cristoforo Landino (1424-1504). Between 1405 and 1415 Bruni wrote an obscene hendeca-syllabic pastiche of poems 41-3 (transmitted in a single block in V), probably using either R or m - the one owned by his mentor, Coluccio Salutati, and the other probably transcribed by his friend and colleague Poggio Bracciolini (Hankins 1990; Gaisser 1993: 211-15). A generation later, Landino completed a collection of poems he called the Xandra (Landino 1939). The work opened with a dedication in hendecasyllables in imitation of Martial; but the use of hendecasyllables seems also to have been a programmatic hint of Landino’s affinity with Catullus (Ludwig 1990: 188-9). But Landino did not imitate Catullus’ hendecasyllabic poems. Instead, he wrote an imitation of poem 11 (Xandra 50) and a set of three variations on poem 8 (Xandra 6, 34, 35), keeping the Sapphics of the one and transposing the limping iambs of the other into elegiac couplets. Neither Bruni nor Landino, however, had any influence on later Catullan poetry. Bruni’s ugly pastiche sank with hardly a trace, and Landino’s imitations, metrically and thematically more like Roman elegy than Catullan lyric, were left behind in what would turn out to be the main focus of Renaissance imitation, the hendecasyllabic poems.
It was Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429-1503) who set Catullan poetry on the course it was to follow throughout the Renaissance. Pontano, one of the greatest Renaissance Latin poets, had come to Naples as a young man and become a friend and disciple of the poet Antonio Beccadelli, known as Panormita, who had written a collection of obscene poetry called Hermaphroditus in imitation of Martial and the Priapeia. Pontano’s association with Panormita and his poetry would be decisive, for it showed him that he could use Martial as a way to approach Catullus. The idea is not so strange as it might seem to a modern reader. Catullus had landed in the Renaissance virtually out of nowhere, in only the corrupt text he stood up in, and with no baggage of late antique or medieval imitation, interpretation, or scholarship. But Martial could supply the lack. Reversing what might seem to us the obvious order, most people in the Renaissance read Martial before they read Catullus. Many manuscripts of Martial were available; he had been studied by Boccaccio in the 1370s, and by nearly every humanist afterwards; and his epigrams were widely imitated (Hausmann 1980: 249-54; Sullivan 1991: 253-70; Swann 1994: 89-91). Best of all, his accessible epigrams both imitated and interpreted Catullus. Reading Catullus through Martial, Pontano saw a light and racy epigrammatist, witty and often obscene, without emotional complexity, political animus, or Alexandrian intricacy. It was this Catullus who would dominate fifteenth-century interpretation.
With Martial as his guide, Pontano produced a collection of Catullan poetry within a year of his arrival in Naples (Pruritus, 1449). Two other collections followed: Parthenopaeus sive Amores (1457) and Hendecasyllabi sive Baiae, written throughout the 1490s and completed around 1500 or so (Ludwig 1990). The three collections differed in tone and subject. Pruritus was more explicitly obscene than the others and closer to Panormita and the Priapeia. Parthenopaeus (which incorporates some of the less obscene poems from the Pruritus) embarks on a sophisticated literary program. The Hendecasyllabi, erotic poems of Pontano’s old age, have moved farthest from explicit imitation of Catullan subjects to an almost elegiac celebration of the enfeebled and fragile, but enduring, Eros of old men. (For the texts of Pruritus and Parthenopaeus see Pontano 1902; for Hendecasyllabi see Pontano 1978, 2006.)
In spite of their differences, however, the collections had two points in common that would become distinguishing features of later Catullan poetry: their models and their meter. Pontano focused on a small number of Catullus’ poems, above all the kiss-poems, especially 5 and 7, the sparrow-poems 2 and 3 (transmitted in V as a single block and printed as a single poem until the first Aldine edition of 1502), and 16, which he treated as a poetic manifesto. Pontano used the idea from 16 that light verses should arouse and titillate the reader:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.
They only have wit and charm
If they’re a little soft and not quite modest,
And can stir up what feels sexual excitement - I don’t mean for boys, but for these hairy old men unable to move their stiffened loins.
(Catull. 16.7-11)
His successors, however, would prefer the other part of Catullus’ statement in poem 16, the denial of a connection between the character of the poet and the nature of his verses:
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est.
For it is right for the true poet to be chaste himself, but not necessary for his verses to be so.
(Catull. 16.5-6)
Pontano wrote most of his imitations in hendecasyllables (other meters predominate only in Parthenopaeus), creating the particular version of the hendecasyllable that was to predominate in subsequent Catullan poetry. Pontano’s meter is recognizably Catullan, for it reproduces Catullan tricks of style and achieves a lightness and delicacy generally absent in earlier imitators like Martial and the poets of the Priapeia; but it also exaggerates Catullan features (particularly assonance, diminutives, and the use of internal repetitions or refrains) to create an effect that is unmistakably new - sensuous, lyrical, and sometimes almost hypnotic. The first verses of his poem ‘‘To Fannia’’ from Parthenopaeus exemplify his treatment:
Amabo, mea cara Fanniella,
Ocellus Veneris decusque Amoris,
Iube, istaec tibi basiem labella Succiplena, tenella, mollicella;
Amabo, mea vita suaviumque,
Face istam mihi gratiam petenti.
Please, my dear Fanniella,
Apple of Venus’ eye, and ornament of Amor,
Tell me to kiss these lips of yours Juicy, delicate, so very soft;
Please, my life, my kiss,
Do me this favor, since I ask.
(Parthenopaeus 1.11.1-6)
Pontano’s sensual erotic poetry was often more explicit than anything in Catullus himself, as in Parthenopaeus 1.5, ‘‘Ad pueros de columba’’ (‘‘To the boys, concerning the dove’’), which evokes both the kiss-poems and Lesbia’s sparrow. In it Pontano asks who should be the proper recipient for his ‘‘snow-white dove.’’ Rejecting the boys of his title as mali cinaedi (‘‘wretched catamites’’), he decides that the dove wishes to go to his girl (puella) instead:
Huius tu in gremio beata ludes,
Et circumsiliens manus sinumque Interdum aureolas petes papillas.
You will play happily in her lap,
And hopping about, you will peck her hands and bosom and sometimes her pretty golden breasts.
(Parthenopaeus 1.5.17-19)
He continues:
Impune hoc facies, volente diva,
Ut, cum te roseo ore suaviatur Rostrum purpureis premens labellis,
MelUtam rapias iocosa linguam,
Et tot basia totque basiabis,
Donec nectarei fluant liquores.
You will do this without fear, if the goddess wishes:
So that when she kisses you with her rosy mouth,
Pressing your beak with purple lips,
You may playfully snatch her honey-sweet tongue
And you will give kisses and kisses again,
Until the streams of nectar flow.
(Parthenopaeus 1.5.26-31)
There could hardly be a better example of the Renaissance tendency to read Catullus through Martial. Pontano’s poem is a contaminatio or blending of Catullus 2-3 and Martial 11.6, which interprets Catullus’ sparrow not as a bird but a penis (Ludwig 1989: 175 n. 58; Hooper 1985).
Pontano’s poem (originally in the Pruritus of 1449 and subsequently brought into Parthenopaeus) was the first obscene reading of Catullus’ sparrow in the Renaissance. But the one that everyone would remember was published 40 years later by Angelo Poliziano in his Miscellanea (1489):
Quo intellectu Catullianus passer accipiendus, locusque etiam apud Martialem indicatus. Passer ille Catullianus allegoric(is, ut arbitror, obscoeniorem quempiam celat intellectum, quam salva verecundia, nequimus enunciare. Quod ut credam, Martialis epigrammate illo persuadet, cuius hi sunt extremi versiculi:
Da mihi basia, sed Catulliana:
Quae si tot fuerint, quot ille dixit,
Donabo tibi passerem Catulli. [Mart. 11.6.14-17]
Nimis enim foret insubidus poeta (quod nefas credere) si Catulli passerem denique ac non aliud quidpiam, quod suspicor, magis donaturum se puero post oscula diceret. Hoc quid sit, equidem pro styli pudore suae cuiusque coniecturae, de passeris nativa salacitate relinquo.
In what sense the sparrow of Catullus is to be understood and a passage pointed out in Martial.
That sparrow of Catullus in my opinion allegorically conceals a certain more obscene meaning which I cannot explain with my modesty intact. Martial persuades me to believe this in that epigram of which these are the last verses:
Give me kisses, but Catullan style.
And if they be as many as he said,
I will give you the sparrow of Catullus.
For he would be too inept as a poet (which it is wrong to believe) if he said he would give the sparrow of Catullus, and not the other thing I suspect, to the boy after the kisses. What this is, for the modesty of my pen, I leave to each reader to conjecture from the native salaciousness of the sparrow. (Poliziano, Miscellanea 1.6, in Poliziano 1971: 1.230-1)
After Pontano Renaissance poets wrote scores of poems on sparrows and doves and literally hundreds on kisses, often combining the sparrow and kissing themes to speak more or less openly of both homosexual and heterosexual intercourse. As time went on many poets also added the idea of the ‘‘soul kiss’’ from pseudo-Plato (Gell. NA 19.11.11-17) - that the lover’s spirit (breath of life) departs with the kiss, entering into and animating the beloved (Perella 1969). The most important poems in this vein are the work of the major Neo-Latin poet Johannes Secundus (1511-36), especially in his elaborate sequence Basia (Godman 1988, 1990; Gaisser 1993: 249-54). But not everyone enjoyed obscene, or even erotic, poetry. Around 1490 the Carmelite poet Mantuan (Battista Spagnoli) published a long attack on all light poetry: Contra poetas impudice scribentes carmen (‘‘A poem against poets writing unchastely’’). Mantuan completely rejected the excuse for racy poetry that his contemporaries had found in Catullus 16.5-6:
Vita decet sacros et pagina casta poetas:
Castus enim vatum spiritus atque sacer.
Si proba vita tibi lascivaque pagina, multos Efficis incestos in veneremque trahis.
A chaste life and a chaste page befit holy poets, for chaste and holy is the inspiration of bards.
If your life is upright and your page lascivious,
You make many unchaste and draw them into venery.
(Mantuan, Contra poetas 19-22, in Mantuan ca. 1490)
Not only monks objected to lascivious verse: one of Pontano’s friends and proteges, the young Marco Marullo, although embracing love poetry and rejecting Mantuan’s strictures, disdained the ‘‘Catullan excuse’’ (Gaisser 1993: 231-30):
Sic iuvat in tenui legem servare pudore Et quae non facimus dicere facta pudet.
Thus, we are pleased to keep the law in delicate modesty and ashamed to speak of things we do not do.
(Marullo, Epigram 1.62.17-22, in Marullo 1951)
Poliziano’s interpretation of the sparrow was also criticized, but less by moralists than by his fellow humanists. He was a polemical man with many enemies, and many considered his interpretation an attack on Catullus himself. The sparrow-poems (or rather poem, as it was generally thought to be) seemed straightforward and affecting, and readers who had shed a tear with Catullus over the death of Lesbia’s sparrow were chagrined to be told (even indirectly) that they had really been feeling sentimental over the poet’s impotence. Feeling was still running high some thirty years later, when Pierio Valeriano broached the matter in his lectures on Catullus at the University of Rome in 1522:
Bone Deus, an non satis in corpus saevitum erat, nisi animum ipsum etiam extinguere cogitassent? ...At scimus quidem nos passeres adeo salaces esse, ut vel septies una hora saliant. Scimus ex medicorum dictatis passeribus in cibo datis, vel eorum ovis, venerem concitari. Scimus quid turpitudinis in mimis significet ton strouthon hoc est passerum nomen... Scimus ex sacerdotum Aegyptiorum commentationibus per passeris picturam prolificam hominis salacitatem significari.... Haec inquam scimus, sed quod apud Catul-lum, forte etiam apud Martialem, pudenda pace vestrarum aurium dixerim, virilia sub nomine passeris intelligi debeant, neque scimus, neque scire volumus. (Gaisser 1993: 350 n. 114)
Good god! Had Catullus’ body not been treated cruelly enough without their planning to quench his spirit? ... We know that sparrows are so salacious that they mate seven times an hour; we know from medical writings that eating sparrows (or even their eggs) has an aphrodisiac effect. We know what filth the term strouthoi (that is, ‘‘sparrows’’) signifies in mimes;... we know from the writings of the Egyptian priests that human lust is symbolized by the picture of a sparrow.... We know these things, I say, but we neither know nor wish to know that in Catullus or perhaps even in Martial the male genitals (if you’ll pardon the expression) ought to be understood under the word ‘‘sparrow.’’
World History
