In making a representative selection of the libellus for class study, it should be remembered that Catullus was not a Roman poet in every sense. None of the great ‘‘Roman’’ writers in poetry or prose actually came from Rome, and not all were even Italian. Like Vergil and Livy, Catullus and his family were not, strictly speaking, Italian. As he reminds us in c. 39, he was a Transpadanus, from a long-civilized part of subalpine Europe north of the Po River known at the time as Gallia Transpadana. His native Verona became a Latin colony only about the time of Catullus’ birth, and it did not become fully united with Italy until 42 bc, after the assumed date of Catullus’ death.
Catullus came from a prominent family in Verona that also owned a villa on a peninsula named Sirmio that runs out into the Lago di Garda about twenty miles west of Verona. His father was a friend of Caesar, and though Catullus had some extremely rude things to say about his father’s friend, Caesar is said to have admired Catullus’ poetry. We know little about the family beyond Catullus’ strong love for his brother, but the poet expressed a deep affection for his northern homes, both Sirmio and Verona, and appears to have returned frequently for visits. More importantly, Catullus had a sober, conservative side which emerges in several of his lyrics as an alternative to his more obsessive character. This alternative has been convincingly linked to the poet’s roots in Transpadane Gaul. The view of a husband’s duty to control a young wife expressed in c. 17 and the wedding hymns c. 61 and 62 speak in this traditional northern voice. More interesting for classroom discussion are the poems in which the soberer, saner Catullus tries to reason with the obsessive lover. Poem 8, Miser Catulle, can be paired in this way with poem 76, Siqua recordanti. Both show that more self-possessed Catullus remonstrating with the heartbroken discarded lover of Lesbia who cannot take control of himself. Similarly, the non-Sapphic coda attached to the end of c. 51, Otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est, pulls the reader out of the enchanted world of erotic seizure and returns to the hardworking, sensible ethos of Transpadane Gaul.
World History
