Conclusion

If I have depicted a Catullus who steals and reconfigures language, then looks bemusedly upon its misunderstanding, I might have given the impression of believing the Catullan project is a rhetorical game in which language has no real meaning. On the contrary, Catullus’ keywords, at any rate, are supremely precise: they appeal irresistibly to that part of the heart and mind where your brilliant companions and exquisite lovers thrill to your clever remarks and elegant verses, while your feckless enemies, deftly skewered, wail and gnash their teeth outside. That is a very particular kind of passion. To express it, Catullus forms a rhetoric of small-group identity out of the rhetoric of political performances. There’s the rub: that was a distinctly unsentimental choice. In politics there are winners and losers, and always self-interest. Likewise in Catullus, shared standards are, often as not, illustrated by exclusion and are even at their best rife with agonism. Your brilliant companions and exquisite lovers, to continue the image, share your ambition to be the cock of the walk. And sometimes they succeed.

The rhetoric of small-group identity thus reflects back on the political world from which it was borrowed, laying bare, through their own approbative language, the fervors of cliquishness and self-presentation in the late Republic. Deprived of respectable prophaseis, the aitia of style, and of politics, is clear: personal victory. In that there is a cutting critique of the nature of late Republican political life. Of course the critique falls short in one respect. Caesar might have liked the even style of Menander and affected a certain delicacy, but he also knew what Sulla and Sertorius knew and Octavian would presently illustrate: the direction of the Roman world was decided by men who had the brains to accumulate military power, the stomach to think out its implications, and the nerve to act accordingly. The Augustans saw that: but then they had reason to. Catullus’ fascination with the joys and perils of social performance, a fascination that is of course a function of wealth, leisure, and intelligence, is also the privilege of a time without civil war. But that is not to say such fascination cannot be clear-eyed. Catullus’ is, extraordinarily so. Thus he not only perceived, but also embodied in his poetry, a lepos that is as aggressive, even ruthless, as it is charming. If for that reason the polymetrics, in which our keywords are ever prominent, are not perfectly edifying to contemplate, nevertheless their harsh judgments, startling wit, and elegant style, their passions, peccadilloes, and personalities, attract contemplation irresistibly. So, too, the last generation of the Roman Republic. Such is the power of Catullus’ lepidus nouus libellus.