Catullus

Catullus (born c. 87 B.C - died c. 47), Rome's first lyric poet, is arguably Rome’s greatest lyric poet. Ask a Classicist why they are a Classicist: the answer (at least in my experience) is overwhelmingly due to Catullus. One of my professors once referred to him as "ancient Rome's Eminem"; I don't think he's too far off.

Gaius Valerius Catullus

I feel that the genius of Catullus lies not only in his skills and abilities, but in his range - when speaking of ancient authorships, one is typically limited to referring to a singular genre: Homer's main purview is epic, Sophokles tragedy, Thoukydides history, &c. 
Catullus, a true doctus poeta ("learned poet") was one of the first Renaissance-poets, who was not only familiar with multiple genres of verse and song, but he was quite proficient in mimicking and composing his own versions of elegies, epigrams, epithalamia, invectives, and even epics (more accurately, the epyllion, "little epic"). His poetry is modeled on the Greek masters who sang before him, chiefly Sappho and Kallimakhos, whose own poetic movement was a reaction against the heart-pounding, verbose, and weighty epics of Homer and the like in favor of the little song, crafted with precise, imaginative wording. One story has Kallimakhos being admonished by Apollo who told him to "fatten his flocks, but to keep his Muse slender" (Aetia frag.1), and he is the source of the saying "Big book, big bad." It was from this desire to steer away from long narratives that Kallimakhos is credited with founding the neôteroi (νεώτεροι) school, "The Newsters/Youngers", or "The Moderns". These neôteroi at Rome valued words such as venustas, "charm" and lepidus, "witty", and stood opposed to the older school of the Homerians. To get a sense of the neôteroi, one should imagine Catullus and his ilk tipping glasses alongside modernist, socio-literary iconoclasts such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the others of the Beat Generation. These writers were keenly aware of the greats who had come before them; however, no one becomes great oneself by dabbling, or even mastering pure mimicry - it is often necessary to strike out anew elsewhere and mine from other untrod places. 

Hence, Catullus borrowed from many poets, not just Sappho and Kallimakhos, for a genius does not often paint with only two colors: if a list were to be compiled to include all of the bards and rhapsodes from which Catullus either translates, imitates, borrows, or references, such a tally would be a lengthy one - besides Sappho and Kallimakhos, one can discern verses belonging or alluding to Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Apollonios Rhodikos, Arkhilokhos, and Alkaios to name a few. In a writer such as Catullus we have a poet of such well-educated scope that he feels as comfortable showing off his skills has a witty Homeric epicist as he is at crafting clever and heart-felt Sapphic love poetry and jaw-dropping Arkhilokhean lambasts.

He was a Renaissance man in the truest sense of the word: rebirth. Catullus, operating under the ancient principle that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, borrowed from his elders (lots of them) and, arguably, set a new standard in verse-writing which is still being imitated today.

His poems can be divided into the following main types:

I. Elegiacs - Elegiae - "Laments"

The largest number of the poems are written in elegiac couplets (a dactylic hexameter alternating with a dactylic pentameter - the second line being one foot short of carrying on in epic verse), a meter which was originally employed chiefly for lamentations. The elegy eventually evolved to encompass nearly any theme imaginable (including an address to a lock of hair which essentially undergoes a deification - no joke), given that the verses were set in the appropriate couplets.

I include the poems not set in elegiac couplets in this tally because they were most likely grouped together by the poet when they were first published (see Publication and Manuscript Tradition below). These poems are those written in non-elegiac meter, such as hendecasyllabics, the choliambs, the Sapphic, &c. These are marked by their brevity, the theme which unifies them with the elegiacs even if differing meter may seem to separate them - in fact, Catullus sometimes works on the same theme (for instance, his political attacks) but through different meters. The meter is not all that important to Catullus - for him concern lay more in the subject matter and capturing wit and brevity, and is that aspect which also leads many of these poems to be labeled as epigrams ("inscriptions", very short, terse poems usually of a lewd nature).

All poems in this category showcase shorter, witty verses covering a variety of topics including: comedic episodes with friends, enemies, and rivals (VI, X, ; invectives against enemies, rivals, and politicians (e.g. XVI, LII ; love poems, a few about his tryst with a young man named Juventius, but these poems most famously concern the otherwise unidentified woman called "Lesbia" (V, VII, LI), who eventually grew bored with our poet and left him stewing in a perfect storm of emotional distress to compose masterpieces of love poetry (VIII, XI, LVIII); LXXXV is famous for being a textbook epigram: short, yet evoking deep emotion.

II. Epyllion - "Little Epic" - only LXIV qualifies here, and probably had its own scroll or libellus as it is significantly longer than the other works. A more detailed write-up can be found here.

III. Epithalamia - "Wedding Songs" 

Publication and Manuscript Tradition

O Manuscript fol. 1r - The first poems from the Codex Oxoniensis

The numbering system is traditional, and, as a slave of tradition, I have kept retained it below. However, evidence does not point to Catullus arranging the poems in the presented order - and on the basis of such evidence I wholeheartedly refuse to believe such a thing, as the traditional number scheme completely jars with everything we can infer about Catullus as a poet and an artist; basically, no artist would label his poetry this way, such as it is. 

I believe Poem I to have been the start of a libellus "booklet" of the elegies and other poems of varying topics (Catullus himself calls them nugae, "trifles", as their identifying mark is their wit, charm, and brevity). The dedicatory Poem I contrasts Catullus' elegies with his friend Cornelius' recently finished three volume history - though Cornelius is congratulated for completing his lengthy and laborious task, one wonders whose work Catullus thought better.

However, that does not mean that every copy of Catullus began with the dedicatory Poem I. Martial, who modeled his own poetry after Catullus, at times speaks of the Catullus corpus as Passer -- this indeed is the first line of Poem II, and is the actual start of the "nugae" proper.

Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus

        Thus mayhaps did dare tender Catullus
magno mittere Passerem Maroni.

        To send to Great Maro his own Passer.

-Martial IV.14

possum nil ego sobrius; bibenti

         I can do nothing, not while I am sober -- but when I drink
succurrent mihi quindecim poetae.

         Then all at once will rush at me fifteen poets!
Da nunc basia, sed Catulliana:

         Now give me kisses, but Catullan ones.
quae si tot fuerint quot ille dixit,

         And if they be as many as he wrote of,
donabo tibi Passerem Catulli.

         Then I shall give thee the Passer of Catullus.

-Martial XI.6

Poem LXIV, the epyllion, almost certainly had its own scroll or libellus - it is too long to have been comfortably contained on the same roll as the other poems in the corpus and it certainly would not have been labeled as a nuga "trifle", unless by purposeful sarcastic understatement (i.e. "Oh, you mean this little epic? It was nothing, composed it in an hour one afternoon."). 

I propose that the other poems which don't quite "fit" - the epithalamia and the hymns, based on their longer length and more elevated style, were either published separately by the poet himself or were distributed posthumously. 

Posthumous Manuscript Tradition
The famous tale of the survival of the manuscript is a cautionary one as well: Catullus was popular in the few centuries immediately following his death. He is oft quoted and imitated by Martial, and Pliny the Younger enjoyed spending his hours reading Catullus' poetry. However, from that time (reign of Trajan, earlier-to-mid 2nd century A.D.) to the 10 century, Catullus is almost never heard of, as if he were erased from history. A single copy of his poems (compiled from God-knows-what source) survived, the Codex Verona (labelled "V"). This text was already corrupt and error-riddled much to the lamentations of scribes of the 13-14 century A.D. in which epoch it was found. It is believed that V spawned several of the manuscripts (such as O, pictured above). Had V not survived, we would have almost none of Catullus poetry - he would have been lost to the ages of un-ending time.

"The popularity enjoyed by Catullus among the Augustan elegiasts did not preserve his memory alive through the declining centuries of the Roman empire. The scholars and poets of the latter half of the first millennium after Christ had forgotten even his name. Only Rather, bishop of Verona, in a sermon delivered there in 965 A.D., confesses that he had just become acquainted with his writings; and an anthology of Latin poets written at about the same time (now cod. Thuaneus, Parisinus 8071) contains a single poem of Catullus (c. 62). Then he drops cut of ken once more till the opening of the 14th century when a writer of Vicenza, Benvenuto Campesani (who died before 1330), celebrated in a few enigmatic verses (cf. Critical Appendix ad fin.) the rediscovery of the text of Catullus “'under a bushel”,' apparently at Verona. From this MS., or from copies of it, numerous Italian scholars, among them Petrarch, early learned to know the poet. The original MS. soon disappeared, and has never been found; but two descendants of it, apparently not more than one generation removed, are preserved to us, and form the basis of the present text of Catullus." 

-E.T Merrill, Commentary on Catullus

The playwright Tom Stoppard vividly describes the easy process by which knowledge can be snuffed out of existence in a Catullus-centered rant brilliantly written to embody an offhandly-given lecture by snobby Balliol Classicist, Benjamin Jowett to one of his (brighter) freshmen:

[Jowett]: In other words, anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice, which was about the time of the first Roman invasion of Britain: and the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about 1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries! - corruption breeding corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of copying-out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script and spelling, and absence of punctuation - not to mention mildew and rats and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as what Catullus really wrote passed down from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that one sleepy, another without scruple, and of those sober, wide-awake and scrupulous, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying themselves better Latinists than Catullus - until - finally and at long last - mangled and tattered like a dog that has fought its way home, there falls across the threshold of the Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: the Verona Codex of Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being copied with one last opportunity for error. And there you have the foundation of the poems of Catullus as they went to the printer for the first time, in Venice, 400 years ago.

He never stops grinding that axe (check out how long that one sentence is!) and so, to the delight of posterity, remains a fun caricature of a Balliol man. 

As such, the history of the Catullan poems is a scary one - think of what few large and adequate libraries were available in the ancient world and beyond, in the time well before mass-printing technology was invented - the destruction of those learning-centers meant that massive amounts of human writing, emotion and expression, knowledge and science was lost as well, never to be regained.
  
CATVLLI CARMINA - The Poems of Catullus