The Complete Poetry of Catullus

160 Pages·2002·0.74 MB·English

by  Catullus

THE COMPLETE POETRY
OF CATULLUS
(
WISCONSIN STUDIES IN CLASSICS
General Editors
Richard Daniel De Puma and Patricia A. Rosenmeyer
THE COMPLETE POETRY
OF CATULLUS
(
Translated and with commentary by
 
D M
    
The University of Wisconsin Press
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London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 2002
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Catullus, Gaius Valerius.
[Works. English. 2002]
The complete poetry of Catullus / Catullus;translated and with
commentary by David Mulroy.
p. cm. (Wisconsin Studies in Classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-299-17770-X (cloth :alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-299-17774-2 (paper :alk. paper)
1. Catullus, Gaius Valerius—Translations into English. 2. Love poetry,
Latin—Translations into English. 3. Epigrams, Latin—Translations into
English. 4. Rome—Poetry. I. Mulroy, David D., 1943– II. Title
PA6275.E5 M85 2002
874’.01—dc21
2001005832
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
The Complete Poetry of Catullus 3
Bibliography 109
v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WI started working on my translations of Catullus, some years
ago, Martha Osvat of Milwaukee went to the trouble of arranging a public
reading in which I was given an opportunity to showcase my work, and
my former student, Shirley Yousoufian, helped me practice for the event.
I am glad to have this opportunity to acknowledge these services, which
meant a great deal to me. I must also mention the contribution of an in-
dividual whom I have never met in person, Professor William W. Batstone
of Ohio State University. At the request of the University of Wisconsin
Press, Professor Batstone provided an extraordinarily thorough and in-
sightful critique of an earlier draft of this work, and I think that I ended
up with a much better book by heeding his advice on a long list of mat-
ters. Of course, I am also indebted to the University of Wisconsin Press
for involving Professor Batstone in the project and for its general interest
and support.
vii

INTRODUCTION
THE SURVIVAL OF CATULLUS’POEMS
I   poem, Catullus asks his Muse to let his works survive for
more than one age. In fact, they were well known from the time of their
creation, in the first century ..,until the end of the first century ..In
the second century, however, when scribes began transferring classical lit-
erature from papyrus scrolls to more capacious “codices” (books in our
sense of the word), Catullus’works seem to have been neglected, perhaps
because they were not suitable for use by young students. Apparently, only
one book of his verses made the journey from antiquity to the Renais-
sance. Appropriately enough, it seems to have been kept for some time in
Verona, Catullus’hometown. The evidence consists of echoes of Catul-
lus’poetry in verses by a monk, Hildemar, who lived in nearby Brescia
from 841–845, and in a sermon in 966 by one Bishop Rather of Verona,
who mentions the study of the “previously unread Catullus” as an ex-
ample of frivolous, ungodly behavior. This Veronese manuscript might
also have been the ultimate source of the copy of Catullus’Poem 62, a
wedding song that was included in an anthology compiled in France in
the ninth century and thus nearly became the only poem by Catullus to
reach modernity.
Our ability to make such statements about the Catullan manuscript
tradition is the result of the painstaking research of a series of scholars, most
recently Julia Gaisser of Bryn Mawr College and Douglas F.S. Thomson
of the University of Toronto. An ironic possibility mentioned by Gaisser
is that Bishop Rather took Catullus’ ungodly book with him when he
moved to the Belgian Abbey of Lobbes, as he is said to have done, in 968.
In any event, for the next three hundred years, there is no evidence of
knowledge of Catullus in Verona and hardly any elsewhere.
Starting around 1290, scholars in the region of Padua and Verona are
suddenly familiar with Catullus’poems again. Textual criticism has shown
that the text first consulted by them (“V”) was soon lost, but not before a
copy was made (“A”). A was also lost after spawning at least two more
copies:“O,”an extant manuscript written around 1370 and preserved at
ix