Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us

Summary

Whatever their subject or inspiration, many of these poems display the wit, pith, and cleverness that were hallmarks of the avant-garde school to which Catullus belonged, the so-called New Poets—or neoteroi, as Cicero, who preferred the old ones, sniffily referred to them. The orator’s use of the Greek word for “new” was pointed: Catullus and his friends were in thrall to the theories of the Hellenistic Greek scholar and poet Callimachus, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C.E. and worked at the Library of Alexandria, the great literary and cultural center of the Mediterranean world. It was Callimachus who famously proclaimed mega biblion, mega kakon, “a long book is a great evil”; for his Roman acolytes, concision, originality, and vividness, rather than what they saw as the bombast and portentousness of an earlier generation, were the qualities to embrace. Catullus makes no bones about his literary allegiances. One poem, addressed to the grandiloquent work of a dreary historian, begins, “Hey, Volusius’ Annals (yes, I’m talking / to your hundreds of pages smeared with bullshit.)”A startling freshness and informality are certainly the rule in these shorter poems, most of which are cast in a jauntily syncopated meter known as the “hendecasyllable”: BUM-BUM-BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-BUM. And yet even the breeziest of Catullus’ occasional poems can suddenly betray flashes of ferocious emotion. Poem 50 begins as a giddy recollection of an afternoon spent dashing off verses to his friend Calvus, another of the neoteroi. The opening lines paint an endearing picture of the two writers “playing now with this meter, now with that one, / improvising on themes set by the other, / laughing hard.” But—typically, as it turns out—the experience becomes overwhelmingly intense for Catullus, who goes on to record how, on returning home,I was burning with your brilliance;Food could give me no ease, nor could I rest myEyes in sleep, but unsettled, flushed, I ...