catullus and callimachus

Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Catullus and CallimachusAuthor(s): Wendell ClausenSource: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 74 (1970), pp. 85-94Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/311001Accessed: 07/04/2010 16:30

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CATULLUS AND CALLIMACHUS

WENDELL CLAUSEN

THE title I chose for this lecture' claims, I now think, too much for it. Several years ago, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

(I965), I described the relationship, as I imagined it, of Catullus and some other New Poets to Callimachus; I will not repeat here what I said there. Here I will concern myself, or rather content myself- cTros ' rI Trv rOov eatcrw - with the interpretation, necessarily incomplete, of two poems by Catullus, 65 and 66, which are hardly separable. Neither poem has been sufficiently appreciated, in my opinion: 66 because it has been read primarily as a translation, and 65 because it has been read primarily as if 66 did not exist.2

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of 66, the only example we have of a complete Hellenistic elegy translated into Latin. (Perhaps we should remember there was a time when scholars fancied that we had several such translations.) In 66 we can now see, if we care to look, how a Latin poet put himself to school to a Greek poet.

I begin with a few small observations that are relevant to my larger argument, lines 65-66:

Virginis et saeui contingens namque Leonis lumina, Callisto iuncta Lycaoniae.

For the most part the form of line 65 was imposed by poetic rhetoric: a noun at the beginning, a noun at the end, and before the caesura an adjective modifying the second noun. The extreme postposition of namque results- an odd feature, duly noted by commentators: "admodum libere namque traiectum est" (Baehrens); "namque an 5 Stelle sehr gewagt" (Kroll); "namque very rarely stands so late in the sentence" (Fordyce). These commentators cite, as do others, Virgil Ec. I.14:

hic inter densas corylos modo namque gemellos. 1 Given at the Triennial Meeting of the Roman and Hellenic Societies in

Oxford, September I968. I have made a few changes and have added footnotes. 2 As recently by C. Witke, Enarratio Catulliana: Carmina L, XXX, LXV,

LXVIII, Mnem., suppl. (I968).

Wendell Clausen

There is also Norden's summary account, "Einiges iiber Wortstellung," appended to his edition of Aen. 6; and a brief note by Housman on Manil. 5.254-255. Housman remarks, not very helpfully, that namque stands in the fourth place there, as it stands in the fifth in Cat. 66.65 and in the sixth in Ecl. 1.14. To distinguish the placement of namque in these two verses is to read with the eye, not with the ear: the phrases are rhythmically identical: namque Leonis, namque gemellos. In Latin poetry, to my knowledge, namque is so postponed in these two verses only. We can understand why Virgil wanted to imitate Catullus; but why did Catullus permit himself such a license here? Elsewhere he postpones namque to the second place only. The corresponding couplet of Callimachus is lost. But in a previous couplet, lines 61-62, there is an example of &AAa in the same place:

fCe(JLV v EroV 7TAcEEUow acpto tosg AAd yevoxaC. This follows from Lobel's punctuation of the preceding verse, of which Pfeiffer approves: "recte opinor, etsi nullum exemplum coniunctionis aAAa quarto loco positae extare uidetur." Elsewhere Callimachus postpones aAAa to the second place only, and that infrequently. It was the immediate example of Callimachus, I suggest, and his craving for elegance that led Catullus to write:

Virginis et saeui contingens namque Leonis.

Elegance, elegantia, may be attainable only in a derivative language, like Latin or Hellenistic Greek.

Lines 75-78: non his tam laetor rebus quam me afore semper,

afore me a dominae uertice discrucior, quicum ego, dum uirgo quondam fuit, omnibus expers

unguentis, una uilia multa bibi. Of the thirteen words in lines 77-78 at least six have been altered at one time or another, although, with one exception, these alterations were made before the original text of Callimachus had been recovered. The exception is Lobel's uilia (suggested by Atra of the papyrus) for milia of the Veronensis: this is certainly right.

Lines 75-78: ov oSE (LOC TroaOrjv8E (CePEL XI(dPLV oaSraov EKEWV?Sg

CaUX(cAAw Kopv/7^s OVKETL OLeo/IEVOS, S a7ro0, 7rrapOevr L Lev o'07' iV eoL, 7TroAAa XTEI7TrK

AL7(, yUVCtKELWV 8' OVK aTEXavU(Ya /LvpWv.

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In Catullus, line 77, I accept the usual punctuation. Mynors, following Maas, deletes the comma after fuit; but Catullus apparently imitated the rhythm of Callimachus.

The difficulties of Catullus' rendering have been described by Fordyce and, with some mordancy, by Axelson.3 I will not set out their criticisms in detail; for I think they are implicit in my own treatment of the passage. There are two contrasts in Callimachus' couplet: that between IrapOEvlr before the caesura of the hexameter and yvvam- KEWwv before the caesura of the pentameter; and that between ALrd and udpwcv, which enclose the pentameter. Catullus manages to represent one of these contrasts in his couplet - that between AXrd and v'zpwov, with unguentis and uilia emphatically placed - but not the other; for I believe that Morel's conjecture, nuptae for una, is wrong. Axelson accepts it; and Pfeiffer favors it, while recognizing that a harsh couplet results: "quamquam totius distichi structura satis dura fit, coniecturam mihi ualde arridere confiteor." Women tend to cause trouble obliquely - in the dactylic meter; only in the upright cases, the nominative and vocative, are they easy to handle. Too, the elegiac couplet provides the poet with little room in which to move. Catullus' translation is open to criticism: omnibus and una are both weak, but not for that reason corrupt.4 omnibus may in fact be defended as idiomatic, or natural, with expers. Axelson noticed this, citing three examples: Cic. De nat. deor. 1.119 "expertes religionum omnium"; Liv. Praef. 5 "omnis expers curae"; Sen. Dial. II.20I "omnis occupationis expers." The ordinary construction is with the genitive, as in line 91 of this poem:

unguinis expertem non siris esse tuam me. But why have most scholars not raised their eyes to the preceding couplet ?

non his tam laetor rebus, quam me afore semper, afore me a dominae uertice discrucior.

Axelson did so, to observe that the referend of quicum is uertice, not dominae: unlike some advanced alcoholics Berenice presumably did not drink hair oil. dominae corresponds to the neutral E'KEl'7S in Callimachus' couplet (line 75).5 Catullus intended, I am quite certain, a

3 "Das Haarol der Berenike bei Catull," Studi in onore di Luigi Castiglioni, vol. i (Florence I960), pp. 15-2I.

4 See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford 1968) II3 n. 6. 5 It is not surprising that Barber rendered dominae with avdaar]s in his version, "The Lock of Berenice: Callimachus and Catullus," Greek Poetry and Life: Essays Presented to Gilbert Murray... (Oxford 1936) 343-363.

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Wendell Clausen

contrast, natural enough in Latin, between dominae and uirgo: dominae, like yvvaKElcov, stands before the caesura of its pentameter. I would also suggest that quondam (line 77), to which Haupt long ago objected, now becomes intelligible. Catullus achieved in a single period - the two couplets form a period -what he was unable to achieve in a single couplet.

Catullus tends to follow Callimachus closely, but without hesitating to depart from him where he had to or wished to. And in a few places, I think, Catullus improves on Callimachus - if a Roman may judge.6

Lines 43-50: ille quoque euersus mons est, quem maximum in oris

progenies Thiae clara superuehitur, cum Medi peperere nouum mare, cumque iuuentus

per medium classi barbara nauit Athon. quid faciant crines, cum ferro talia cedant?

Iuppiter, ut Chalybon omne genus pereat, et qui principio sub terra quaerere uenas

institit ac ferri stringere duritiem. Line 44:

progenies Thiae clara superuehitur acqvaLwuv eE1tsq apyos VrTEp(EPErTat

A remarkably close translation: superuehitur renders VrEpPE'perct, to which it corresponds rhythmically and in part linguistically; in this sense it is a 6'7Tc. The examples of uehor which Pfeiffer cites from Herter are not strictly comparable.

Aen. 7.65: stridore ingenti liquidum trans aethera uectae

[Tib.] 3.7.209: siue ego per liquidum uolucris uehar aera pennis.

Catullus is more of a linguistic innovator than is generally recognized.7 Lines 45-46: 6 I am indebted to Pfeiffer's article, "BEPENIKHE I1AOKAMO2," Philol. 87 (1932) I79ff, still a most useful and interesting discussion of Catullus' translation.

See also D. E. W. Wormell, "Catullus as a Translator," The Classical Tradition: Literary and Historical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan (1966) 194-199. 7 Some of his innovations have been noticed, for example 66.8, caesariem; others have not. In 6.II, "argutatio inambulatioque," a description of the creaking and quivering of Flavius' bed, argutatio is acrra. The collocation of these

88


cum Medi peperere nouum mare, cumque iuuentus per medium classi barbara nauit Athon

9oV7ropos 'Aptrvo'gs !7TpOS OCE, Kal a&& IeCaaov MrS7Etwv oAoat vrjeS Efrqacav "AOw.

We don't know what the phrase f3ovTropos 'Apatvors Lrj1rpos cao meant, nor did Catullus: he left it out. Hence he had to expand his version, since he was trying to match couplet for couplet. The result is inferior, in point of rhetoric, to what Callimachus wrote. About the following two couplets I can be very brief. The first, lines 47-48, is again a remarkably close translation, with the addition of the Latin exclamation luppiter! The next, lines 49-50, is not: I suppose that Catullus was simply unable to render Callimachus' Greek in any way that would be intelligible in Latin.

Elsewhere we notice, as we may imagine, a somewhat frustrated Catullus.

Line 64: sidus in antiquis diua nouum posuit

KV7rpLs ev aPXatoLS' aarpov E'7/Ke veov.

Catullus would have put nouum at the end of the pentameter, like veov, but 'r07KE imposed posuit. In another place, a similar place, Catullus has improved on Callimachus (lines 25-26):

at te ego certe cognoram a parua uirgine magnanimam.

Schneider suggested that Callimachus had used a form, presumably the

two words, one new, without a caesura is meant to be expressive. Poets occasionally introduce a new word by pairing it with an old word. As in 25.9, "reglutina et remitte." reglutina is a virtual arraf: the verb recurs again only in Martianus Capella and Prudentius. Number 25 is one of Catullus' most carefully composed poems, an elegant exercise in literary pornography. Only Kroll seems to have appreciated this: "Das Gedicht wirkt akademisch." (The same might be said of other poems by Catullus on similar subjects.) The metrical technique is exquisite and may be compared with that of 4. A sophisticated metrical pattern produces ahrae forms and meanings: there are at least six in these thirteen verses. I can diagnose, but not cure, the crux in line 5: "cum diua tmulierariost ostendit oscitantes." Of these thirteen verses eight (including this one) have a caesura in the second foot; in every case - line 8 is an apparent exception: a pronoun is involved - the caesura is followed by two words, unelided: a trochee and a cretic, or a cretic and an iamb. Many conjectures have been made, most of which violate these metrical conditions. (This description of 25 is owing in part to a seminar paper by a former student, Hugh Mason.)

4+H.S.c.P. 74

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Wendell Clausen

accusative, of ,LEyaAo4hvXos; Pfeiffer notes that other adjectives are possible: tuydOavulos (which would ordinarily be rendered in Latin by magnanimus) or ucyaArorwp. The point is that none of these adjectives could stand at the end of the pentameter. There is also a play here on paruus and magnanimus, which seems to me peculiarly Latin.

But 66 should not be treated merely as a clever exercise in translation. To a lesser degree it does have the qualities of Callimachus' poem - it is witty, erudite, sophisticated; but it has also an emotional and personal reference lacking in Callimachus' poem. Callimachus was an old man when he wrote his poem, Catullus a young man when he translated it; and Catullus could never have been a court poet: "nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi uelle placere." I can best show what I mean by referring again to the text, lines 39-40:

inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi, inuita. adiuro teque tuumque caput.

There is some disquiet. Why did Virgil adapt line 39, very slightly, for one of the most emotional scenes in the Aeneid, Aeneas' encounter with Dido in the Underworld?

Aen. 6.458-460: per sidera iuro,

per superos, et siqua fides tellure sub ima est, inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi.

I quote Fordyce, who comments in some detail. (Kroll, prudent and factual, has merely " Nachahmung.") But to suppose that he deliberately raised the words from their trivial context in Catullus to one charged with tragic emotion may be as rash as to suspect that Ovid was parodying Virgil when he made the solemn hoc opus, hic labor est serve the purposes of the Ars Amatoria (i.453). The one reminiscence may be as unconscious as the other. I cannot believe that this reminiscence is unconscious. Virgil's adapted verse is also accompanied by an oath, a spacious oath; for the hexameter permits a rhetorical dimension denied to the pentameter. Would we wish to say that when Virgil wrote Ed. 4.46 "talia saecla suis dixerunt currite fusis" he had forgotten the refrain in Catullus 64 "currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi"? No; because there we do not sense any incongruity between the adaptation and the original, as we do here. Why then did Virgil adapt this verse? Because, I would say,

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he was an extremely perceptive reader of Catullus and understood this poem - as most readers have not. (You may suspect that I intend to make Virgil an accessory to my interpretation. I do.) To return to Catullus' couplet:

inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi, inuita. adiuro teque tuumque caput.

Only Baehrens comments on the form: "pulcre et praeposita et in fine repetita uox, quae fortem habet ictum." Repetition of a word in Latin elegy - epanalepsis - is fairly common; but this example, like the other two in this poem and the one in 65, is abnormal. The re- peated word is ordinarily a noun modified in some way, by an adjective, a gerundive, a participle, an appositive phrase, a relative clause.8 Is Catullus imitating Callimachus here? We cannot be sure. Most of Callimachus' pentameter is preserved, but nothing of his hexameter. It would be easy to put aKcwv at the beginning of the nonexistent hexameter, and there is room for it at the beginning of the pentameter: adKWV. arnv re Kapvjv ooaocra aov 7E tlov;9 but perhaps we should take warning from the grim example of those who have tried to restore Callimachus' Greek from Catullus' Latin. There are, as I remarked, two other such repetitions in this poem.10

Lines 75-76, cited above and below. Lines 87-88, in the atnov, in some ways the most intensely personal

part of this poem; though I am not suggesting that Catullus added the ar%iov on his own: that would be inconceivable.

sed magis, o nuptae, semper concordia uestras, semper amor sedes incolat assiduus.

In all, then, there are three such repetitions in 66 (and one in 65, meant to be anticipatory). In one place only, lines 75-76, can we compare the Greek and Latin texts, and there there is no such repetition in the Greek.

non his tam laetor rebus, quam me afore semper, afore me a dominae uertice discrucior.

8 Examples have been collected by Platnauer, Latin Elegiac Verse (Cambridge I95I), 33-35.

9 So Lenchantin di Guberatis. 10 For a sensitive treatment of these passages see M. C. J. Putnam, "Catullus 66.75-88," CP 55 (I960) 223ff.

9I

Ov 0S0e fOl roat rvoep?i xopiv roaov eKetVXjS O-r TcLE 0LLOL TcTcY17VE 9EpEl Xap"' OWUOV EKEW77SI aXocAAwa Kopv9rs OVKCETt OpLo(eVOS.

To return to the couplet in question: the vocative "o regina," like "o nuptae" in line 87, is pathetic and emotional. Is this merely an amusing parody? The test of parody is simple, subjective, and therefore un- satisfactory. It is this: can the passage be read in that way? I doubt that this can. If not, whence the un-Callimachean emotion here and elsewhere in this poem ?

The themes of 65 and 66 are those of Catullus' other late poems: love (and marriage or fidelity), separation, death. Consider 68: Laoda- mia and Protesilaus, killed on the shore of Troy - a legend consisting somehow in Catullus' imagination with his feeling about his brother's death and his love for Lesbia; 63: Attis abandoned at the seashore, like Ariadne in 64; IoI: Catullus at his brother's tomb, alluded to in 65 "Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus / ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis"; and 66: Berenice's lock of hair, abstracted from a temple on the seashore by that marvelous horse. I will not say that the seashore (litus) was a symbol for Catullus - partly because I dislike the word, with its contemporary nuance, partly because I suppose that Catullus could think of the seashore with as little emotion as any of us. But the imaginative association does exist in the poems I have mentioned. Is Virgil's adaptation then so surprising?

inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi.

A new interpretation of an old poem (insofar as mine is new) requires some justification. Why was this poem not so understood before? I believe there are two reasons: the character of the poem itself-- the grotesque tale and the erudite allusions (though no more erudite than those in 68) offend our late-romantic sensibility; and the accidental fact that 65 and 66 are separately numbered in our texts. Poem 65 is impressive: passionate and, if not quite direct, easy to understand; but without 66 it remains a beautiful fragment. Would Catullus have written such a poem to accompany an inert and unrelated translation? The relationship between 65 and 66 is intimate and demonstrable: and this I regard as a confirmation of my reading of 66.

The structure of 65 is clear: a long, loose period reminiscent of the epistolary style, held together after the parenthesis from line 5 to line 14 by the resumptive phrase sed tamen and the repetition of the friend's name Hortale.

Wendell Clausen 92


Lines II-I4: at certe semper amabo,

semper maesta tua carmina morte canam,11 qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris,

Daulias absumpti fata gemens Ityli. The repetition semper... semper anticipates, as I have remarked, similar repetitions in 66. And this feature is complemented by the simile which follows: densis, before the caesura, reinforces the prefix of concinit; the tone is intense, almost dense. The second part of this poetic epistle, like the first, ends with a simile, but a much more elabo- rate one, appropriately.

Lines 19-24: ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum

procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,

dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur, atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,

huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor.

casto ... e gremio anticipates casto ... in gremio in line 56 (in each verse casto has the same emphatic position) as well as casto... cubili in line 83. What of the simile as a whole? I quote Fordyce: "The long period is effectively rounded off, and the sombreness relieved, by the charmingly vivid and unexpected simile of the last lines." We may well agree; but why so complicated a simile at the end of this short poem? It was meant to suggest the style of a Callimachean simile; and the subject could hardly fail to remind the reader of one of the most famous episodes in the Aetia: the story of Acontius and Cydippe.12 The simile is, as it were, preliminary to the at'rov in lines 79-88.

Finally - I end as I began - two technical observations that are relevant. The word order of the last verse of 65 and the first verse of

11 canam is a Renaissance conjecture; the Veronensis has tegam. Since some- one occasionally discerns a subtlety in this impossible Latin, I will explain the error. It originated in majuscule script. (Baehrens' explanation, that it originated in minuscule script, must be wrong; for he assumes a fanciful abbreviation.) MORTECANAM became MORTECAM, the scribe's eye slipping from the first to the second A; and then TECAM suggested TEGAM - nonsense, but obvious and metrical. I have discussed errors of this sort in my review of Enk's edition of Propertius Book 2, AJP 86 (1965) 95-IOI. Such errors may seem surprising to us. But the scribe was a calligrapher, more concerned with the shape of the individual letter than with the shape of the individual word. 12 This was pointed out by Kroll.

93

94 Wendell Clausen

66 is interlocking, a stylistic detail that helps to join 65 to 66. The first verse of Callimachus' poem survives:

7TrVTa TOv EV ypacJ4xLC/lv l8C)v opov l T?E (CepOVraC. The word order is not interlocking. Another such detail: the period with which 66 begins consists of seven couplets. This cannot be Calli- machean; for there are no such periods in Callimachus. In fact this is the longest elegiac period in Catullus, with one exception: 65 itself. Again we see Catullus at pains to make 65 a suitable introduction to 66: 66 being an oblique elaboration of the mood expressed more directly in 65.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Article Contentsp.[85]p.86p.87p.88p.89p.90p.91p.92p.93p.94

Issue Table of ContentsHarvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 74 (1970), pp. i-viii+1-350Front Matter [pp.i-viii]Homeric Speech Introductions [pp.1-36]Hera's Anvils [pp.37-42] : A Postscript [pp.43-44]The Friedlaender Hydria [pp.45-53]A Further Remark on Lachmann's Law [pp.55-65]On the Family of arce, and Hittite ark- [pp.67-74]The Silence of Magna Mater [pp.75-84]Catullus and Callimachus [pp.85-94]The Original Form of the Second Eclogue [pp.95-99]Servius and the Helen Episode [pp.101-168]Notes on Ovid: III, Corrections and Interpretations in the Heroides [pp.169-185]Addenda: Some Passages of Latin Poets [p.185]Ovid, Heroides 16.45-46 [pp.187-191]Two Notes on the Heroides [pp.193-205]Pulcher Claudius [pp.207-221]A Leading Family of Roman Thespiae [pp.223-255]The Truth about Velleius Paterculus: Prolegomena [pp.257-297]Flamen Augustorum [pp.299-312]Origen, Aquila, and Eusebius [pp.313-316]Three Papyri from Fourth-Century Karanis [pp.317-331]Summaries of Dissertations for the Degree of Ph. D. (1969) [pp.333-350]

catullus and callimachus

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