Poetic Interplay

Catullus and Horace

Michael C.J. Putnam

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691125374
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827428
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The lives of Catullus and Horace overlap by a dozen years in the first century BC. Yet, though they are the undisputed masters of the lyric voice in Roman poetry, Horace directly mentions his great predecessor, Catullus, only once, and this reference has often been taken as mocking. In fact, Horace's allusion, far from disparaging Catullus, pays him a discreet compliment by suggesting the challenge that his accomplishment presented to his successors, including Horace himself. In Poetic Interplay, the first book-length study of Catullus's influence on Horace, Michael Putnam shows that the earlier poet was probably the single most important source of inspiration for Horace's Odes, the later author's magnum opus.


Except in some half-dozen poems, Catullus is not, technically, writing lyric because his favored meters do not fall into that category. Nonetheless, however disparate their preferred genres and their stylistic usage, Horace found in the poetry of Catullus, whatever its mode of presentation, a constant stimulus for his imagination. And, despite the differences between the two poets, Putnam's close readings reveal that many of Horace's poems echo Catullus verbally, thematically, or both. By illustrating how Horace often found his own voice even as he acknowledged Catullus's genius, Putnam guides us to a deeper appreciation of the earlier poet as well.

CHAPTER ONE

Time and Place

There are occasions where the repetition of one word, especially if it is a unique usage by each poet, will connect a work of Catullus with one of Horace. A case in point is the word angiportum (-us). We find it in poem 58 of the earlier poet and in C. 1.25 of his successor. Both compositions are in large measure meditations on aspects of time and time’s passage. Discussion of them will serve to introduce a series of poems where Horace is clearly pondering, and reacting to, Catullus’s versions, and visions, of temporality as well as of topography. The juxtapositions, as always, have something to tell us of each writer.

First, Catullus 58:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,

illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam

plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,

nunc in quadriviis et angiportis

glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.5

Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia, that Lesbia whom Catullus loved alone more than himself and all his own, now on the street corners and in the alleyways shucks the descendants of high-souled Remus.(5)

Catullus takes us from then to now, in the narrative of his and Caelius’s relationship with Lesbia, and in the history of Rome from Remus to the doings of the founder’s offspring. The poet may wish us to sense a bitter side to magnanimus, aiming to contrast a heroic Remus with his contemptible progeny, a group given to sexual profligacy.¹ He may also have us see the story of Lesbia as parallel to that of Rome in moving from an ideal, heroic past to a realistic present. Whatever the case, the repetition of illa sends us back into a time when a third-person Catullus viewed a former Lesbia as more than the equivalent of himself and his kinfolk.² The speaker at that time viewed the bond between their distant selves as based on pietas, on a mutual respect founded on duty. She stood unique by comparison to all of Catullus’s familial world.

The pointed use of nunc takes us from a dream of the past into a present reality that use of the obscenity glubit carefully qualifies. As we move from ideal to real, we pass into a practical realm: the farmer’s peeling the bark off of his trees finds its sexual equivalent in Lesbia’s gratification of Rome’s citizenry.³ This degeneration from the spiritual into the mundane is complemented by the change from implicit interior, private space to the exterior, public sphere of crossroads and alleys. The unstated, symbolic realm of home and domestic piety based on reciprocal devotion, a piety surpassed in Catullus’s feelings for the Lesbia of once-upon-a-time, yields to a tactile, explicit universe where the plurality of trysting places for the Lesbia of the present, which the reader is asked to visualize, is matched in the countless Roman lovers to whom she is available. (The poem slides with easy, bitter rhythm from omnes to the immediate physicality of angiportis and nepotes, where the places for assignations, and pool of potential amours, find ready correspondence.)

For Horace’s parallel meditation, C. 1.25, we move from hendecasyl-labics to the meter that bears Sappho’s name, from Lesbia to Lydia:⁴

Parcius iunctas quatiunt fenestras

iactibus crebris iuvenes protervi

nec tibi somnos adimunt amatque

ianua limen,

quae prius multum facilis movebat5

cardines. audis minus et minus iam:

“me tuo longas pereunte noctes,

Lydia, dormis?”

in vicem moechos anus arrogantis

flebis in solo levis angiportu10

Thracio bacchante magis sub inter-

lunia vento,

cum tibi flagrans amor et libido,

quae solet matres furiare equorum

saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum,15

non sine questu,

laeta quod pubes hedera virenti

gaudeat pulla magis atque myrto,

aridas frondes hiemis sodali

dedicet Hebro.20

Forward youths less persistently shake your closed shutters with frequent blows, nor do they deprive you of sleep, and the door, which earlier used to move its readily compliant hinges, loves its threshold. (5) Now you hear less and less: “Are you sleeping, Lydia, while I, who am yours, perish night after long night?” In your turn, aged and inconstant, in a lonely alleyway you will weep at your lovers’ disdain, (10) as the Thracian wind grows more wild at moonless times, when the burning passion and lust, which is wont to drive mares mad, will rage around your festering liver, (15) while you complain that happy youth takes more delight in green ivy and dark myrtle, committing dry leaves to the Hebrus, companion of winter (20).⁵

Whereas Catullus makes a clear, abrupt distinction between time past and time present, Horace brilliantly poises us at a moment of transition in the life of his protagonist, giving us a sense of time actually passing. Her present—where reciprocated love, ironically, exists only between closed door and threshold—looks back on a time when her young suitors, now less and less demanding of her affection, had regularly frequented her house. Her future anticipates the further advances of age and the graphic changes it brings, as attractiveness yields to the repellant, and calm to wild, and as the luxuriant becomes dry and life’s amatory summer gives way to winter’s chill lovelessness.

If Catullus shows us a promiscuous Lesbia in the present, with no hint that the passage of time diminishes her physical charm, we find Horace’s Lydia at a liminal moment in an ongoing temporal narrative where the effects of time’s ravages became more and more apparent in her life as a courtesan—a new role for Lesbia in her poem’s present. But the commonality of angiportum (-us) between the two poems, and the fact that these are the only uses of the word by each poet, suggest that Horace looked closely at Catullus and varied one of the latter’s major themes to suit his own purposes. For Horace, too, builds his poem around the difference between inner and outer worlds, between an interior existence, implicit for Catullus and Lesbia, explicit for Lydia, that is in contrast with an exterior life in which each protagonist shares. Lesbia’s comes to her presumably of her own volition, Lydia’s because—such is the speaker’s wish—time’s passage forces it upon her.

In Catullus elsewhere, the house (domus) is at once literal and figurative, for it serves as symbol for the continuity of family as well as for the many bonds that hold it together.⁶ In poem 58 its presence is merely suggested in the mention of self and all other relatives. Catullus’s love for them is surpassed by his devotion to Lesbia, with its non-sexual as well as erotic sides. Lydia’s dwelling, by contrast, is brought before us in detail, with windows, door, threshold, and hinges. While time is on Lydia’s side, her house is also both real and symbolic. It is an actual home, presided over by a woman who is likewise the lover of one or many paramours and who is pictured so often by the Roman elegists with a swain languishing before her unresponsive door. It is also an emblem of her beauty and of the power that she has over her lovers.

Lydia was once the perfect elegiac mistress (Horace avoids the usual word domina), as haughty as she was alluring, just as Lesbia was, for Catullus, the ideal lover, adored by him, as poem 72 puts it, “as a father loves his sons and sons-in-law” (pater ut gnatos diligit et generos, 72.4). While inside, Lydia is in control, true “mistress” of her dwelling, lording it over her shut-out lovers (exclusi amatores, to borrow the designation of Lucretius7). Once her beauty begins to leave her and the journey of her life heads toward winter, she is forced from within to without. She will become “fickle” (Horace applies to her the same...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Time and Place
• CHAPTER TWO Speech and Silence
• CHAPTER THREE Helen
• CHAPTER FOUR Virgil
• CHAPTER FIVE Genres and a Dialogue
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography