Catullus

Catullus is one of the liveliest and most appealing Roman poets. His emotion, charm, and apparent spontaneity resonate with readers as strongly today as in antiquity.

This sophisticated literary and historical introduction brings Catullus to life for the modern reader and presents his poetry in all its variety of emotions, subjects, and styles. Julia Gaisser situates Catullus in his historical context, explaining the social and sexual conventions underlying his work. She treats Catullus’s language, meters, and poetic architecture as essential elements of his poetry and shows how he has used them to achieve his poetic effects. She discusses the physical constraints and artistic possibilities of the papyrus roll, the character or persona that Catullus presents in his poetry, the ways in which his poems resonate both with each other and with earlier poetry, and the interpretations of his readers from antiquity to the present.

List of Figures viii

Preface ix

1 Introduction: The Young Poet in Rome 1

2 Poetry Books 22

3 The Catullan Persona 45

4 What Makes It Poetry 72

5 Poetic Architecture 100

6 Songs for Mixed Voices: Allusions, Intertexts, and Translations 133

7 Receiving Catullus 1: From Antiquity through the Sixteenth Century 166

8 Receiving Catullus 2: England and America 194

Appendix 1 Catullus′ Meters 222

Appendix 2 Glossary of Metrical and Rhetorical Terms 223

Bibliography 225

General Index 235

Index of Catullus′ Poems 242

Julia Haig Gaisser is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College, and a past president of the American Philological Association. She is the author of Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (1993), Pierio Valeriano on the Ill Fortune of Learned Men: A Renaissance Humanist and His World (1999), and The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception (2008), and the editor of Catullus in English (2001), and Catullus (2007).

"Gaisser (emer., Bryn Mawr College), who has written extensively on ancient Roman poetry and Renaissance Latin literature, has produced an excellent comprehensive guide to the major Roman poet Catullus." ( CHOICE, December 2009)

"Such a simple and yet profound book could only have been written by someone with the authority conferred by a detailed knowledge of Catullus′ work, its transmission and its reception over the ages. … I consider [it] the best existing survey on Catullus." ( Bryn Mawr Classical Review, December 2009)