Mantua Vergilio gaudet, Verona Catullo; Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego.
Mantua rejoices in its Vergil, Verona in its Catullus: I will be called the glory of the Pelignian people.
Ovid, Amores 3.15.7-8
From the perspective of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), Catullus is the second most popular classical Latin author currently being studied in the United States at the secondary school level. Its evidence is the number of students taking each of the CEEB Latin Advanced Placement (AP) examinations.1 In the spring of 2004, 3,973 students took an examination on Vergil while 3,001 took one of three versions of an examination on Latin literature.2 All three versions of the Latin literature syllabus include the same 42 Catullan poems. One version features these poems in combination with 20 of Horace’s Odes and Satire 1.9. Another combines them with selections from Cicero’s works: previously, selections from a single oration (Pro Caelio), but, starting in 2006-7, both an entire oration (Pro Archia) and passages from De amicitia. A third joins the Catullan poems with five stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and six of his Amores. This last version, introduced only in 1993-4, has become by far the most popular, attracting 1,953 students, or 65 percent of those who took the 2004 Latin literature examination. It is noteworthy, if not necessarily significant, that this ranking of Roman poets in terms of their popularity - first Vergil, next Catullus, and then Ovid - calls to mind the couplet quoted as our epigraph. There Ovid lists himself third, after Vergil and Catullus, in the roster of Roman bards who confer glory on their native regions.
Latin textbooks published in the United Kingdom and aimed at a secondary school audience also testify to Catullus’ popularity at this level, not only in Great Britain and Ireland but in other Commonwealth countries as well. For example, the Oxford Latin Reader (OLR) edited by Balme and Morwood (1997a; first published 1988) includes 26 Catullan poems along with selections from Cicero, Caesar, Vergil, Livy, and Ovid.3 Twenty-three of these poems also appear on the current AP Latin Literature syllabus; three that do not (9, 53, and 62) appeared on the preceding version. Among the
Celebrated Catullan poems included (at least in part) on the AP syllabus but omitted by the OLR are 7, the second of the kiss-poems, and 45, the ‘‘love duet’’ of Acme and Septimius; 64 and 68, two of Catullus’ longer and more learned efforts; and various poems articulating his literary concerns, among them 35, 36, 65, and 116. The absence of Horace from the roster of OLR authors is striking, since his life and work provide the central focus of the introductory Latin materials in the Oxford Latin Course (OLC).
Catullus also figures among the authors in the advanced Latin literature curriculum designed by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme. A preuniversity course of study created in 1968 by educators in several countries, it prepares ‘‘internationally mobile’’ students aged 16-19 for universities all over the world. Fifteen of Catullus’ poems - 2, 5, 7, 8, 45, 51, 62, 70, 72, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, and 109 - are presented, along with 11 of Horace’s Odes, in their units on ‘‘Love Poetry,’’ one for ‘‘Standard Level’’ and one for ‘‘Higher Level.’’ Teachers must choose two out of five such units to read along with a ‘‘prescribed’’ author at each level, such as Ovid or Livy.4 Three of these 15 poems (62, 83, and 92) are not currently on the AP syllabus; five (7, 45, 62, 83, 92) are not in the OLR.
The differences between various ‘‘canonical’’ lists of representative Catullan poems merit further attention and explanation. So, for that matter, does another major dissimilarity between the study of Catullus at the secondary school level in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Although there is a long tradition of introducing some of Catullus’ poems to British secondary school Latin students, and although his poetry has appeared on the AP syllabus from its earliest days, in the United States Catullus’ prominence, and in many instances presence, on the secondary school Latin scene is a fairly recent development.
Simon Raven’s novel Fielding Gray (1967), set in 1945, testifies to the midtwentieth-century British curricular importance of Catullus. Raven’s eponymous hero is a 17-year-old sixth former at what is known in Britain as a public school (and in the US as a private school), clearly based on Charterhouse, Raven’s own alma mater. Early in the narrative, after presenting an accomplished verse translation of Catullus 5, Gray proceeds to champion the author’s ‘‘pagan position’’ on sexual morality to a disapproving Latin master. This classroom encounter with Catullus, moreover, is apparently not the first experienced by boys of Gray’s age at this particular school. In trying to seduce a younger, less academically talented fellow student, Gray pointedly asks, ‘‘Christopher... When you still did Latin, did you get as far as Catullus?’’ (S. Raven 1967: 37-9).5
While attending what in the US are called public (and in the UK called state) secondary schools in Pennsylvania from 1957 through 1962, one of us followed a very different curriculum. During her five years of studying Latin, which culminated in the AP Vergil exam, Judith P. Hallett never read any of Catullus’ poems.6 It was not until her first semester of Latin at Wellesley College, an all-female institution in Massachusetts, that she encountered his poetry in a Latin classroom, as the first of the three authors read in a year-long introductory Latin literature course.7 The textbook employed was E. T. Merrill’s Catullus, originally published in 1893. In a foreword to the second printing, Elder (1951a: viii) justifies Harvard University Press’s decision to reprint by claiming that ‘‘when [Merrill] was allowed to go out of print, classical studies suffered a severe blow. For this was the only brief, sufficiently annotated edition available in English of the complete works of one of antiquity’s most attractive poets.’’ The choice of the complete Merrill text for a class of young women at Wellesley in 1962 warrants notice in view of Gilbert Highet’s serious reservations about teaching Catullus’ poetry:
Even in ancient times, he was not universally studied and revered as a ‘‘classic’’... [He] was not exactly suitable to be taught in colleges and schools. He is still unsuitable. It is extraordinarily difficult to read and discuss one of Catullus’ poems of passionate love in any classroom; and still more difficult if, two or three pages away, the readers can see another poem which begins and ends with a revolting obscenity. (1957: 3)8
Hallett’s experience is evidently not unusual: in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s, students who studied Latin for four or more years in secondary schools normally postponed their encounter with Catullus until the first year of college. That experience has pedagogical consequences for those presently teaching Latin at the college and university level. In presenting Vergil’s Aeneid, instructors can often look back at their own secondary school teachers as memorable role models. Hallett uses the same textbook with which she herself was taught: Clyde Pharr’s Vergil’s Aeneid Books I-VI, first published in 1930. As she plans her Vergil classes, she can even hear the voice of her teacher, Marie Hildebrand Bintner, illuminating difficult passages, providing instruction on scansion and figures of speech. Yet she cannot draw on the inspiration of similar models who introduced her to Catullus in the secondary school classroom. When preparing contemporary teachers for that challenge, improvisation and faith in the pedagogical power of the Catullan text are all that she has.
Why has this curricular change occurred in the United States since the 1960s? During an era when secondary school Latin enrollments first declined precipitously and now are gradually increasing (though by no means to the levels that they reached in the 1960s), why have we witnessed not merely the inclusion of Catullan texts but their prominence within the curriculum?9 Our discussion will explore some reasons for that major shift in the syllabus at this educational level and reflect upon its impact. We will survey how Catullus has been presented in secondary school Latin classrooms, and which poems have been judged worthy of teaching, and hence ‘‘canonized,’’ over the past several decades; in so doing, we will accord special attention to present curricular practice in both the United States and Britain, and to how approaches to Catullus in the US and UK in turn differ from one another.
Central to this survey is an investigation of the role played by the College Board AP Examination in bringing about curricular changes in the United States. In the context of this investigation, we will consider special features of Catullus’ poems that make them so successful in the secondary school Latin classroom. First and foremost is the ‘‘adolescent personality’’ that many of the poems project, especially those that treat love and its complications. We do, however, recognize that demographic, social, and cultural developments since the 1960s, in various other Anglophone countries as well as in the United States, may have also contributed to Catullus’ ever-increasing appeal.
Such a study would be remiss if it did not contemplate some of the challenges posed by teaching Catullus to students at this level. Chief among them is, of course, the sexual context and explicit, often obscene language that so disconcerted the urbane and literarily sophisticated Gilbert Highet. But other pedagogical issues not dealt with in our study demand attention as well, i. e., how to teach the ‘‘long poem’’ 64, a substantial section of which was recently added to the Catullan selections on the AP syllabus.10 Finally, our chapter discusses some classroom strategies for tackling these and other challenges that Catullus poses for secondary school students and their teachers.
World History
