Yet while the elegists were unanimous, the scholars did not agree. Why? The argument centers on how the elegiac genre is defined. In the ancient world, poetic genres were in the first instance defined by meter. Archaic Greek lyric was written in meters sung to the lyre. Iambic invective was written in iambic meters. Elegy is written in elegiac couplets. By this criterion, Catullus, who wrote in a variety of meters, is not
Truly an elegist. And it is for this reason that Quintilian does not include Catullus in his canonical list of elegists (Inst. 10.1.93).
This is not of course to say that Catullus did not produce poetry in elegiac distiches. He most certainly did (65-116), but this is not the largest part of his work, which was written in a mixture of lyric and iambic meters as well as in the dactylic hexameters of epic (1-64). Moreover, there was a distinction recognized in the ancient world between two types of poems written in elegiac couplets. The first was the epigram. This is a short poem that eschews narrative and mythological elaboration in favor of compact rhetoric and a sting in the tail. Elegies by contrast are poems of some length that almost always contain narrative elements and frequently possess elaborate mythological exempla. The average elegy of Tibullus is 75 lines; the poems of Propertius in his first three books average 35 lines (86 in Book 4), and those of Ovid in the Amores 50 lines. Of Catullus’ first-person erotic poetry written in elegiac couplets only one poem is of more than 35 lines, poem 68 (160 lines).4 Poem 76, which is the next-longest erotic poem, consists of 26 lines, but it has neither the mythological nor the narrative elaboration characteristic of elegy.
The rest of the first-person erotic work in elegiac couplets is distinctly epigrammatic in nature. Catullus’ most famous erotic epigram is poem 85, a marvel of concision whose conflicting emotions become the hallmark of erotic elegy as a whole: ‘‘I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do it. I don’t know, but I feel it happen and am torn apart.’’ Yet, while a poem like this may feel like a miniature elegy, and that feeling is reinforced by the epigrammatic elegies of the only female elegist Sulpicia (average 7 lines),5 the latter are more the exception than the rule. The epigram as a form is frequently a satirical poem with little amorous content and often an obscene direct-ness.6 This is as true in Catullus as in any other practitioner of the form. A too exclusive focus on the Lesbia poems has often given a distorted picture of the collection as a whole.7 They are but one thread, although a brilliant one, in a larger tapestry. Thus the poem immediately preceding 85 is a lampoon on a certain Arrius’ affected pronunciation, while poem 88 is one of a series of poems attacking Gellius for sexual perversity. The elegiac epigrams as a unit, then, can in no sense be seen as the predecessor of such thematically unified works as Propertius’ Monobiblos or Ovid’s Amores.
There is one sense, however, in which Catullus’ poetry is the formal antecedent of the elegists. Catullus, like the elegists, wrote volumes of poetry that were meant to be read as books and that chronicled - nay, embodied and created - the experience of their first-person speaker. There has been disagreement on whether Catullus edited the collection we now have - and if so, whether he published it serially, as a unity, or first serially and then in an opera omnia edition (see Skinner, chapter 3 in this volume). Today the majority opinion has shifted firmly in the direction of Catullus as the editor of at least the major sections of the corpus (polymetrics, carmina maiora, elegiac poems),8 although there is more disagreement about whether poems 65-8 belong with the longer poems or those in elegiac meter (Skinner 2003: xxvi, 1; King 1988; Quinn 1972b: 258-9; Wiseman 1969: 121), and whether Catullus edited his opera omnia. Yet even among those who remain agnostic or continue to hold out against the view that Catullus himself had a hand in the arrangement of the poems as we read them today, there is no doubt that these poems are meant be read in terms of one another and thus presume the existence of a collection in one form or another (Janan 1994: ix, 40, 43, 90).9
Catullus’ poetry thus represents the first example of the composition of a selfconscious poetic collection in Latin, at least one that has come down to us.10 This form of composition will become the norm in the Augustan period. It is one that allows for complex narrative relations between poems as well as sharp thematic juxtapositions. It demands not only reading, but also rereading (G. Williams 1980: ix-x; Skinner 1981: 106). Thus it is now well established that the opening of the polymetrics gives an encapsulated form of the narrative of the Lesbia affair as a whole: from the coy erotics of the sparrow poems (2 and 3); to the declaration of love and dawning awareness of mortality and infidelity in the kiss-poems (5 and 7); to the initial disillusionment and final break of poems 8 and 11 (Miller 1994: 63-72; Janan 1994: 78; Wiseman 1985: 147; Hubbard 1983: 230; Segal 1968: 311-16). A similar progression can be seen in the Lesbia poems at the beginning of the elegiac portion of the collection, although the movement there is less narrative than analytic (Skinner 2003: 85; Miller 2002: 115-19; Quinn 1972b: 40). Poem 68 presents an overview of the beginning of the affair, establishes it as adulterous, and depicts Catullus as struggling to adopt an attitude of sophisticated acceptance toward Lesbia’s infidelities. Poems 70 and 72 present Lesbia’s declaration of love to Catullus and the poet’s subsequent disillusionment. Poem 72 also presents the first articulation of what will be the dominant theme in these poems: the poet’s inability either to esteem his beloved or to stop loving her. The same antithesis is condensed and sharpened in 75 before receiving a much more expansive and analytic treatment in 76 (Ferguson 1988: 15; W. R. Johnson 1982: 122-3). Poem 79, then, reveals that Lesbia has a perfidious brother, Lesbius,11 and 83 presents a flashback to an earlier, happier time, before the antithesis that defines the sequence as whole is distilled into the crystalline terms of 85’s odi et amo.
In fact, the polymetric and the elegiac sequences are more complex than this schematic presentation allows, but for our purposes this should be sufficient to show the importance of the poetic book in establishing both relations between individual poems and the possibilities of narrative elaboration that will be central to the elegiac genre. Thus Propertius’ Monobiblos will move from the moment when Cynthia first captured the poet with her eyes, through various quarrels, separations, and encounters with potential amorous and poetic rivals. The sequence is in no way a straightforward linear narrative but, on the analogy of Catullus, is replete with narrative potentiality. Similarly, Tibullus’ books on Delia and Nemesis each present affairs that unfold simultaneously through time as the reader progresses through the scroll, as do Ovid’s Amores.
World History
