We are, then, faced with a paradox. Catullus is widely credited with being the founder, or at least a very significant predecessor, of Roman love elegy by ancient poets and modern critics alike. Yet the majority of his output in elegiac distichs bears only a passing resemblance to the elegies written by the canonical elegists; and, while the thematic resemblance between Catullus’ poetry on Lesbia and that of Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid on their respective mistresses is undeniable, nonetheless many of the poems that had the most direct influence on the later elegists - both from a stylistic and a thematic perspective - are in the polymetrics. It is for this reason, as noted above, that Quintilian does not include Catullus in his list of canonical elegists and that Sharon James has denied any generic affiliation between Catullus’ ‘‘lyric’’ poetry and the work of the elegists (2003: 255 n. 116, 319-20 n. 13).
One element of significant commonality, however, sticks out from our previous examination. Both Catullus and the elegists composed books, that is to say poetry meant to be read and reread. Individual poems relate to one another in a complex and multifaceted fashion that allows the emergence of a multi-temporal and self-reflexive poetic subjectivity that I have dubbed ‘‘lyric consciousness’’ (1994). Catullus, I contend, is the founder, or at least the first exemplar, of lyric consciousness in western poetry. The lyric of the poetic collection that we are familiar with from the work of Petrarch, Sidney, and Shakespeare finds its first example in the liber Veronensis Catulli. The poetry of the Alexandrian elegists, while featuring complex arrangements and subjective framings, as illustrated in Callimachus’ Aitia, did not purport to present the complexity of the speaking subject’s lived experience. Archaic lyric was, of course, more subjective in pose, but the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anacreon was intended for public oral performance and symposiastic recreation. It was only later collected by the scholars of Alexandria and then preserved in books arranged largely according to meter. With Catullus, then, we see the emergence of a fundamentally new genre: collections of poetry that foreground the poet’s dialogic relation with himself as exemplified in the complex, multi-temporal inter - and intra-textual relations that make up the collection.
If we take the example of the elegiac poems in the Catullan corpus (65-116), then, as we have just demonstrated, poems 68, 70, 72, 75, 76, and 85 form a coherent sequence. That sequence presents a narrative overview of the affair paired with a progressive analysis and condensation of the conflicting emotions that define it. Nonetheless, any notion of a straightforward narrative unfolding of events is complicated by at least four elements. First, the progression from 68 to 70, and from 72 to 75, 76, and 85, is not so much temporal as analytic. Only poems 70 and 72 bear clear temporal markers in relation to one another. Second, these poems are interlaced with other poems, which although often related on the level of diction or dramatic personae, bear no explicit narrative or analytic relation to the poems in question. Thus, poems 69 and 71 on Rufus and his perplexing combination of sexual conquest and body odor are clearly a pair of poems that parallel 70 and 72 in terms of form and temporal relation. Nevertheless, how 69 and 71 relate to their matching Lesbia poems is never spelled out. Still, the two pairs of poems, owing both to their formal symmetry and to their interlacing sequence, demand to be read in terms of one another, even as the reader strives to integrate them into the larger Lesbia sequence.
Third, the sequence itself disrupts its own quasi-temporal unfolding through the inclusion of poem 83, which clearly projects a dramatic date early in the affair when not only is Lesbia’s husband12 still a factor, but the poet can also still jokingly imagine her being infatuated with Catullus. This poem, in turn, makes us reread the earlier sequence from an alternative temporal and emotional perspective. Poem 83 functions, then, as both a narrative flashback and a return of the repressed: past pleasure reveals its trace in present misery.
Lesbia always insults me with her husband present;
This is a great pleasure for that fool.
Ass, do you feel nothing? If having forgotten us she were silent, she’d be sane; because she growls and chides, not only does she remember, but what is more to the point, she is aroused. That is, she burns (uritur) and stews.
This recollection of past erotic pleasure is present on the level of diction as much as it is on that of theme. The verb uritur thus clearly recalls and anticipates 72.5’s impensius uror (‘‘I burn more passionately’’), which tells of Catullus’ continued sexual passion even as he sees Lesbia ‘‘now’’ as ‘‘cheaper and more trivial’’ (72.5-6). This verbal echo not only demands that 83 and 72 be read in terms of one another, but also provokes the questions: what is the artistic effect sought by this deliberate disruption of the temporal sequence immediately before 85’s anguished odi et amo; and what is the poetic and aesthetic consciousness that lies behind this subtle manipulation of the narrative structure? The effect is to produce a depth that is simultaneously a mise en abime.
Fourth, poem 79, ‘‘Lesbius est pulcer,’’ as Marilyn Skinner has demonstrated, not only establishes that Lesbia has a brother, but that she is in fact Clodia Metelli the sister of Clodius Pulcher, the fiery tribune. The Rufus of poem 69, 71, and 77 can on this basis be identified as Caelius Rufus, the lover of Clodia Metelli and the object of Cicero’s politically motivated defense in the Pro Caelio (Skinner 2003: 81-3, 92-3, 107; Wiseman 1985: 166-7, 1969: 28). Thus when Catullus refers to Rufus as a disease who is intestina perurens (‘‘burning my guts,’’ 77.3) and a pestis (‘‘a plague,’’ 77.6), we connect this imagery not only with his depiction of his love for Lesbia as a pestis from which he cannot free himself (76.20), but also with his own disillusioned but heightened sexual passion in 72.5 (impensius uror) and Lesbia’s secret arousal in 83.6 (uritur). The fever of desire becomes the plague of betrayal. The sequence thus requires us to read not only forward and backward but also politically and personally. In the process, we uncover the image of a complex poetic subjectivity that both is profoundly self-reflexive and never exists except as the multiple possible recursive readings the collection engenders. Catullus’ passion not only echoes (and anticipates) Lesbia’s but is also subject to betrayal by Rufus, who is retrospectively identified - thanks to poem 79’s Lesbius/Clodius - as Caelius Rufus. This identification, in turn, makes it possible to reread 69 and 71’s invective against Rufus’ sexual and hygienic sins in light of Clodius' political machinations as well as those poems' relation to 70 and 72. Each new determination thus requires a new reading as the reader unwinds and rewinds the scroll (Skinner 2003: 178-9).
This kind of complexity in the depiction of personal experience is unprecedented in the ancient world, and it was this phenomenon that I named ‘‘lyric consciousness’’ in 1994. The collections of the elegists embody these same complexities. We find in them the same internally dialogized subjectivity, but with a greater restriction of metrical and thematic materials. It is for this reason that I argued (1994: 49) that Roman love elegy was a subgenre of lyric, as defined by the Catullan collection, a definition consonant with both the explicit statements of the elegists and the perceived differences between elegy, as strictly described in terms of meter and theme, and the Catullan corpus. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to see a wider gap separating the elegiac and Catullan enterprises than there actually is. Catullus may exhibit greater thematic variation than the elegists, but it should not be assumed that because the elegists pretend to write exclusively on love they do not engage other topics, including politics, poetics, and patronage.
If we examine the opening poems of Propertius' Monobiblos we see not only the same recursive structures of reading that we have just outlined in Catullus' epigrams and polymetrics, but also that the elegist, while ostensibly writing about love, uses those structures of reading to produce a similarly complex and multifaceted speaking subject, and does so in part by alluding to the works of his acknowledged predeces-sor.13 We begin with 1.1.1-4 and its intertexts. Meleager 103, apederastic epigram, is the recognized model for the opening of Propertius' first poem:
Cynthia was the first to capture me with her eyes, I who was stricken before by no desires.
Then Amor cast down my face of unceasing pride and pressed upon my head with his feet.
Fedeli notes that Catullus 1 had begun with a similar evocation of Meleager and argues that Propertius here is indicating his adherence to the principles of Alexandrian composition while tipping his hat to one of its earliest advocates in Rome, his acknowledged predecessor in erotic verse (1983b: 1865-6, 1980: 62). One of the most obvious ways in which Propertius’ poem differs from Meleager’s is that the gender of the beloveds has been switched. This inversion of genders, however, is part of a larger pattern of pederastic intertexts used to frame the relation of Propertius to Tullus, the representative of traditional Roman values in Book 1, Gallus, the elegist, and Bassus, an iambist. The density of inter - and intra-textual reference found here can be clearly seen by examining poems 1.1, 1.4, and 1.5.
To return to 1.1.1-4, then, the first thing that strikes the attentive reader is that the Meleager epigram has been recast in heteroerotic terms on only the most superficial level. The pederastic intertext remains clearly visible throughout. Cynthia ceases to be the subject of the finite verbs in lines 3 and 4 (Hodge and Buttimore 1977: 63-4), and Amor, who is male, replaces her. This metonymic evocation of a homoerotic context is made more explicit when it is recognized that in Meleager’s poem no such substitution takes place. The eromenos, Mousikos, remains the subject throughout.
Within the first four lines, the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine, poetry and experience, the heteroerotic and the homosocial, have been called into question. The Propertian coup de foudre is an intertextual one. This process of decentering and inversion unfolds systematically throughout the poem. Indeed, as Duncan Kennedy notes, the very image of Love placing his feet upon the poet’s head is a reprise of the gesture of triumph found in Roman depictions of single combat. The poet is portrayed within the poem as subjected and effeminized at the very moment in which the text effects a double gender substitution of Cynthia for the male beloved in Meleager and Amor for Cynthia (Kennedy 1993: 48). Subject and object, masculine and feminine, then, are in a very fluid relation to one another.
We must therefore constantly reread both the poem and its intertexts in terms of one another. We do so less in the hope of achieving a final resolution to these tensions than through the acceptance of a necessary practice of reading whereby we surrender ourselves to an ever expanding dialectic of mutual determination, as we continue to work on the poem and the poem continues to work on us. This process of dialectical interaction, in fine, produces the image of a multilayered and multi-temporal consciousness behind the Monobiblos, in much the same fashion as it produces the Catullan consciousness of the epigrams, the polymetrics, and, ultimately, the opera omnia.
Poems 1.4 and 1.5 follow the pattern outlined in 1.1. On the one hand, they articulate a relation between competing homosocial values and their associated poetic genres through the figure of Cynthia (Sharrock 2000: 270). On the other, they deploy this discourse within a complex weave of inter - and intra-textual homoerotic relations and inverted gender polarities. Poem 1.4 is addressed to Bassus, an iambic poet. Iambic, as exemplified in Catullus’ polymetrics, was an invective genre that dealt with the seamier side of life. Thus, when Propertius presents Bassus trying to lure him away from Cynthia by praising the beauty of women of easy virtue, this is a recognizable iambic pose that can also be read as Bassus claiming the superiority of his own poetic genre to elegy/Cynthia (Hodge and Buttimore 1977: 100-1). Propertius responds by telling Bassus that he should cease and desist or Cynthia will so blacken his name that he will be welcome at no girl’s door. Cynthia will be transformed into an iambist (the model of phallic aggression) whose invective will reduce Bassus to the archetypal position of the effeminized elegiac lover, the exclusus amator. Elegy will show that it can beat iambic at its own game (Fedeli 1983b: 1876; Hodge and Buttimore 1977: 103; Rothstein 1979: 1.88).
Poem 1.5, in turn, is widely recognized as the companion piece to 1.4 (Fedeli 1983b: 1878; Hodge and Buttimore 1977: 100; Richardson 1977: 158). Francis Cairns has demonstrated that the two poems correspond to one another in numerous ways (1983: 62-77). In fact, there seems to have been a deliberate conflation between the addressees. Poem 1.5’s topos of erotic envy was a common theme of iambic poetry and would be appropriate for Bassus and for Propertius’ warnings to him. Nor does Propertius give any indication that he has switched addressees. The name Gallus is deferred to the last line of poem 1.5 (Fedeli 1983b: 1878; Cairns 1983: 81, 96). Thus the poems as well as their addressees are cast as mirror images. As Cairns has argued, these parallels only make sense insofar as we see the Gallus of 1.5 as a rival poet like Bassus: but the Gallus of 1.5 (like Propertius) desires only Cynthia, where Bassus has urged Propertius to play the field. The symmetry of Gallus’ desire with Propertius’, and its contrast with Bassus’, implies that Gallus is also an elegist. Where 1.4 presents the triumph of Cynthia over her rivals, 1.5 presents Propertius’ competition for the possession of the crown of elegy with Gallus himself (Oliensis 1997: 159; King 1980: 219).
The most important parallel between 1.4 and 1.5 from our perspective, however, is their common set of Catullan intertexts. First, on a thematic level, Fedeli notes that both poems examine the topic of fides betrayed, in the context of failed amicitia and amorous betrayal. He cites specific parallels with epigrams 77 against Rufus and 91 against Gellius (1983b: 1876). However, the Catullan subtext goes much deeper and is more specific. The phrase non impune feres (‘‘you will not get away with it’’) at 1.4.17 is a direct quotation from Catullus 78b.3 (Camps 1961: ad loc.; Rothstein 1979: ad loc.; Suits 1976: 88). The phrase is admittedly not uncommon, as Richardson observes (1977: ad loc.), but it is unexampled elsewhere in elegiac couplets, let alone in couplets written with clear iambic intent:
But now I am pained at this, that your foul spit has polluted the pure kisses of a pure girl.
But you won’t get away with it (non impune feres): for all the ages will know you and old lady fame will say what you are.
(78b.1-4)
The Catullan and Propertian contexts here are identical. Propertius threatens Bassus the iambist with everlasting infamy from Cynthia’s invective, while Catullus actually performs the invective and forecasts the same fate for the target of his abuse. Another interesting point for our argument, however, is the distinct possibility that Catullus’ target is either named Gallus or metonymically associated with a Gallus.
Most modern editions print 78b as a separate fragment from poem 78 (Thomson 1997; Poschl 1983; Quinn 1973a; Mynors 1958), but the relation between the two is uncertain. There may simply be a lacuna. Poem 78 is an invective elegy addressed to a Gallus accused of arranging a sexual liaison between the wife of one of his brothers and another brother’s son. Poem 78b is also an invective on sexual impropriety and so it is entirely possible that we are dealing with a later part of the same poem. If 78b is also addressed to Gallus, the parallels between 1.4 and 1.5 already remarked upon are augmented by this intertextual resonance. But even if 78b is not addressed to Gallus, then it, like Propertius 1.4, is an iambicizing poem written in elegiac couplets and immediately succeeds a poem addressed to a Gallus. Propertius 1.5, in turn, is a poem addressed to Gallus immediately following an iambicizing poem written in elegiac couplets.
Verbal echoes match the structural mirroring between the two corpora: 1.5 ends with the phrase non impune illa rogata uenit (‘‘that girl when asked does not come without you paying the price’’). Cairns has noted the parallel with 1.4.17 (1983: 77). Camps and Rothstein, however, give another Catullan parallel as well, 99.3, uerum id non impune tuli (‘‘but I did not get away with it’’). Again the context is that of kisses and sexual misconduct, but this is a pederastic poem on Catullus stealing kisses from Juventius. Thus once more we have Propertius substituting a heteroerotic context for a homoerotic one, but with both contexts, each of which has a Catullan resonance, still visible.
Propertius 1.4 and 1.5 thus constitute a Catullan pair. Each makes use of a recognizably Catullan theme, the importance of fides in the context of amor and amicitia. The first is an elegiac poem on iambic themes and the second a poem that, while recalling iambic themes, addresses the question of elegiac rivalry with Gallus. Finally, poem 1.4 contains an allusion to a Catullus poem that is either about someone named Gallus or directly juxtaposed with a poem on someone named Gallus. The line containing this allusion is echoed in poem 1.5. This is the first time Gallus is named in the poem or the collection. The same passage to which poem 1.4 alludes and that 1.5 recalls has a further echo in the Catullan corpus at 99.3, where the kisses of the pure girl that the spurca saliua pollutes in 78b become those stolen by Catullus from Juventius, who in turn seeks to wash off the spurca saliua of the poet (99.10).
At the same time, each of these poems in Propertius’ book opposes the life of poetry to the normative pursuit of the cursus honorum represented by Tullus, the dedicatee of poem 1.1 and the presumed patron of the collection. Tullus is also the addressee of poem 1.6, in which Propertius contrasts his militia amoris with Cynthia with the real-life hardship Tullus may endure accompanying his uncle, the proconsul, to his province. In the process, Propertius inverts normative Roman gender and political values by portraying Tullus as occupying the feminine position, since he is off to soft Ionia (1.6.31), while Propertius assumes the masculine, durus, position by staying home with his beloved, tum tibi si qua mei ueniet non immemor hora/uiuere me duro sidere certus eris (‘‘then if ever an hour comes when you will not forget about me, you will be certain that I live under a hard star,’’ 1.6.35-6). Poems 1.1, 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6 thus exhibit a systematic progression not dissimilar to that found at the beginning of the epigrams. In neither case is the progression so much narrative as analytical, and in both the progress of the affair is also used as a position from which to address a variety of personal, political, social, and aesthetic issues. The systematic responsion of names, themes, and intertexts between the poems shows not only that Propertius is writing in a genre of composition directly cognate with Catullan lyric consciousness, but also that he recognizes that kinship through his use of systematic allusion. Propertius, however, is working on a larger scale, integrating a variety of topics and intertexts within a single poem and then juxtaposing them to one another, while Catullus in the epigrams is building his complex structures out of smaller poems.
World History
