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Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position
Abstract
Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.
... 64 is widely acknowledged by scholars, but different interpretations of Ariadne's subjectivity abound. Fitzgerald's (1995) discussion established the gaze as an integral theme of the poem, but he views Ariadne as primarily an object of the male gaze, exposed to a masculine viewer as her own desiring gaze is "frustrated" (149). Gaisser (1995) is concerned with the threads of focalization in Cat. ...
... 24 As Ross (1969) points out, Catullus adopts the language of the Roman aristocratic concept of amicitia, comparing the breaking of erotic bonds to the destruction of homosocial ties that form the foundation of Roman politics (80-95). For a brief summary of the critiques against Ross's claim by Lyne (1980), Minyard (1985), and Fitzgerald (1995), see Skinner (1997), 143-144 (especially n. 27), and (2003), 69-70 (especially n. 19). Skinner's own argument finds middle ground between the two extremes of Ross and Lyne, asserting that Catullus's language has both political and social resonances within the Roman aristocratic milieu. ...
... I, however, see no reason to ignore the prefix. 9Fitzgerald (1995) compares Lesbia's power to the might of Roman empire: "Through her association with the plough, Lesbia, who deflowers the innocent love of Catullus, is aligned with the often violent forces of civilization. However, the problem of communication with Lesbia is put in the context of empire building by the lengthy citation of Furius' and Aurelius' protestations that they would accompany Catullus to the remotest parts of the world, some of which had been the object of the farflung military campaigns of 55 B.C.E. ...
This dissertation considers the connection between love and memory (or, as often, forgetting) in Roman elegiac poetry, through the lens of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love). I argue that, by writing Remedia, the last poem in the corpus of Latin love elegy, as an ‘art of forgetting’ which purports to aid the unlucky lover by teaching him to forget love, Ovid underscores the significance of memory in the elegiac genre. By telling readers how to forget, Ovid reveals how previous poets, including himself, taught readers how to remember. I investigate the connection between love and memory in elegy by pinpointing elegiac modes of amorous memory production. My method of analysis extracts certain pieces of advice (praecepta) given by the didactic narrator of Remedia, who guides the reader to rid himself of love. Even as his purportedly curative precepts inevitably fail, they point to elegiac strategies for memory production. My chapters treat these methods of creating memory thematically, each outlining a different piece of advice for forgetting, paired with a corresponding strategy for memory production in the elegiac genre: strategies for memorialization after death (Chapter 1); strategies for rescripting the localized memory of love (Chapter 2); strategies for creating false memories of the beloved (Chapter 3); women’s strategies for epistolary memory production (Chapter 4); and strategies for scripting poetic memory through allusion and tropes (Chapter 5). I propose that Remedia offers a guide for the reader of elegy, underscoring the importance of these strategies of memory production for the program of the elegiac genre. In addition to considering how the advice Ovid gives recalls his own previous works (the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Heroides), I explore how Ovid’s Remedia receives the works of his poetic predecessors, including Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and even Homer. To investigate the broader cultural milieu of Roman memorialization and mnemotechnics, I utilize frameworks from social, poetic, and cognitive memory studies.
... 29 This 24 Despite Wiseman 1974: 119-29, I am not convinced that Catullus's Gellius is L. Gellius Publicola: we just have too little information and too many first-century Gellii. 25 See in particular poem 10 and the scholarship that discusses the boorishness of that poem's speaker (Fitzgerald 1995: 173-79, McCarthy 2013 idea finds good support in what Catullus chooses to include in his epigrams against Gellius: erudite references to foreign gods and customs (74.4, 90), 30 a parody of Greek erotic poetry (80), 31 an allusion to recondite Hesiodic myth (88), 32 in other words, just the sort of material we would expect one neoteric poet to include in a poem to or against another. ...
... Where Holzberg is interested in the function of the poems within a collection, Stroup is sustaining a thesis about literary production between elites, drawing analogies from contemporary popular music (Stroup 2010: 223n.14). The locus classicus, however, for modern interpretations of the poem is Fitzgerald (1995). His argument is that 16 above all needs to be read in terms of power relations. ...
There are forms of enjoyment in Catullus that cannot be understood within the norms of pleasure as opposed to pain or unpleasure. This is an enjoyment that Freud would claim is beyond the pleasure principle, and thus integrally related to aggression, violence, and death: an enjoyment that is at once abject and sublime. Taking off from Mario Telò’s Archive Feelings, this paper examines these forms of enjoyment and how they function within the aesthetic structure of four poems by Catullus.
... I have tried to use the concept of metapoetry in this spirit in my study of Catullus (Fitzgerald 1995), in which I argued that the metapoetic dimension of Catullus' work explores the possibilities of poetry as a drama of position between reader and writer in relation to language. ...
... 28 Catull., 64.52-67. Para Fitzgerald e Elsner, a imagem e o ato de "olhar" seriam destacados ao longo de todo o poema e sua presença apareceria de forma mais enfática na seção do poema dedicada a Ariadne; ver Fitzgerald 1995;Elsner 2007, 21-5. cena é intensificado pela disposição, no fim dessa passagem, de uma apóstrofe do poeta a Teseu, 29 como que recordando o herói dos laços que uniam Ariadne a ele, e de uma exclamatio, por meio da qual se recorda ao público como Vênus Ericina 30 é capaz de trazer sofrimentos aos mortais atingidos pela paixão. ...
Este artigo se propõe a analisar a narrativa ecfrástica relativa ao mito de Ariadne encontrada no centro do carmen 64 de Catulo e apresentar como o poeta entrelaça a narrativa acerca de Ariadne e Teseu com a celebração do casamento de Tétis e Peleu ao longo desse poema.
This paper reconstructs the history and meaning of a hitherto unexplained astronomical allusion recurring several times in Roman epithalamic poetry: the association of the evening star with Mount Oeta. By examining the iterations of this motif in surviving Latin literature (especially Catullus 62, Vergil's Eclogue 8 and the pseudo-Vergilian Ciris ), I propose to explain the original meaning of this association as a mythological reference to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, offering a reconstruction of the Hellenistic epithalamic context where it was probably invented, and an interpretation of its function in each of the poems under consideration. The results of this analysis shed new light on some of the most well-known texts of Latin literature, allowing us to understand how this allusion was used to explore the relations between the genres of epithalamic poetry, bucolic and epyllion.
p>En Catulo 16.10 se encuentra la expresión his pilosis , que la crítica ha vinculado, acertadamente, con lo obsceno. Este trabajo pretende sumar a esa lectura la consideración de his pilosis como una expresión metapoética, es decir, con el sentido de que los pilosi aludidos son aquellos “peludos”, i.e. torpes, rústicos, incapaces de entender una poesía como la de Catulo, que se destaca por un refinado pulido de las palabras. Para ello, se analizarán cuatro elementos: 1) la interpretación general del carmen , 2) una frase de las Epistulae de Séneca que puede ser de mucha utilidad para entender nuestra propuesta, 3) la cuestión de la terminología latina vinculada con la pilosidad, y 4) la utilización que el propio Catulo realiza en otros carmina de esta terminología.</p
Gaius Valerius Catullus (87-84 and 57-54 b.C.) is the main representative of the aesthetic trend in which his poetry is inserted, the so-called “neoterismo”. Also, he is considered one of the most translated Latin poets of antiquity (Vasconcellos, 1991, p. 11). Paradoxically, the transmission of his libellus has undergone several interpolations, especially in relation to the poems that contain certain sexual lexicon. In this study, we present a brief overview of how editors and Portuguese translators have dealt with the Latin text of Catullus, specifically with regard to the carmen 16. In this poem, Catullus uses, in the first and last verses, terms of a sexual nature, namely the verbs pedicabo and irrumabo, which denominate the anal and oral penetration act, respectively. The presence of these words led the Latin text editors to censure its disclosure. Thus, our goal is twofold: i) to observe how editors of the Latin text have dealt with this poem, and ii) to analyse the translation choices in Portuguese versions, in order to reflect on how suppression or attenuation of obscene vocabulary have been reconsidered, especially in Brazilian translations.
In the Satires (I, I, 24), Horace defends the cunning of laughter on the laborious craft of saying the truth. The modus loquendi used in accordance with a predefined purpose was already recognized among ancient authors as a fruitful subject, once it is admitted that the success or failure of an orator could only be determined by his rhetorical ability. Humour has been constituted, since the post-socratic philosophers, as a powerful (and dangerous) instrument capable of potentializing the effects of an outstanding speech or demoralizing decisively the one who does not make dexterous and parsimonious use of all the inexhaustible resources offered by the method of laughter. Thus, there is a proliferation of reflections on the utility of laughter that intend to clarify the nature of that which releases it, besides regulating the deployment of the laughable, taking into consideration strongly demarcated criteria. It is within this context that the De risu is inserted, the third chapter of the sixth book of Quintilian‘s Institutio oratoria – the most extensive amongst the five chapters of the book. Through the translation of the De risu, we seek to highlight the specificities of this ―treatise of convenient use of humor‖ in its dialogue with rhetorical and poetical ancient tradition, observing Quintilian‘s perception about the subject at the light of authors explicitly mentioned therein – namely: Cicero, Catullus and Horace – in the works most often alluded in the De risu (De Oratore II, Carmina Catulli, Sermones).
“Cynthia first took me with her eyes …”The Elegiac ImaginaryReading the World AwayFurther ReadingBibliography
The SubjectFurther ReadingBibliography
Performance and ReadingRoman Poetry and PerformancePerformance On-Stage and Off-StagePerformance, Power, SexPerformance and GenderFurther ReadingBibliography
In this companion, international scholars provide a comprehensive overview that reflects the most recent trends in Catullan studies. Explores the work of Catullus, one of the best Roman 'lyric poets'. Provides discussions about production, genre, style, and reception, as well as interpretive essays on key poems and groups of poems. Grounds Catullus in the socio-historical world around him. Chapters challenge received wisdom, present original readings, and suggest new interpretations of biographical evidence
The template of the body—swollen or emaciated, weak or strong, gangly or graceful—forms and informs rhetorical composition and criticism throughout antiquity. Driving this corporeal tendency is the papyrus book-roll, which makes fully palpable the size of a written discourse and allows for the careful scrutiny of its parts and their arrangement. This dissertation focuses on several key episodes when rhetoric's evaluative corporeal vocabulary becomes explicitly editorial, as demonstrated by representations of "corpus care." In a bodily idiom, certain ancient writers purport to reveal the time and labor they have spent preparing a text for publication or to demean writers who do not bother with textual polish. These representations participate in larger stylistic debates of their respective days and pertain to the rhetorical negotiation of public standards of aesthetic accountability in the wide wake of the book-roll. The study starts in fifth and fourth century Athens and by showcasing Isocrates' "philoponic rhetoric," a network of terms through which Isocrates draws attention to the exhaustive editorial efforts required to produce his political discourses. From there, the study moves to Rome. Catullus puts forth an "abrasive poetics," a harsh approach to his own poems and to the rough pages of others that he deems unfit for circulation. The next chapter transitions into the Octavian/Augustan era and to Horace, whose endorsement of the editing file is a statement of authorial principle to which he gives civic charge by appealing to Octavian's/Augustus' sensitivities about Roman supremacy in matters military and literary. Lastly, I turn to Ovid, relegated from Rome by Augustus to the outskirts of Roman influence. Across the miles, Ovid sends numerous book-rolls, all of which use dimensions of textuality—most poignantly, editing—to attempt to get their writer recalled to Rome. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding the papyrus book-roll as a rhetorical medium in and of itself and when represented in ancient writings.
p>You died two thousand years ago, Catullus,
Myriads since then have walked the earth you knew
All their long lives and faded into nothing,
And still across that waste men think of you.
J C Squire: “To a Roman” (1923)1
Hierdie bespreking ondersoek die moontlikheid dat beide Gaius Valerius Catullus en Antjie Krog in hulle digkuns gebruik maak van 'n persona as metafoor vir die kreatiewe proses van skryf.
Gedig c. 50 van Catullus word as voorbeeld gebruik waar die moontlikheid bestudeer word dat die Calvus in gedig c. 50 gebruik word as 'n metafoor vir die kreatiewe proses van skryf. Deur die bestudering van die betrokke gedig word die effek wat Calvus op Catullus uitoefen metafories vergelyk met die effek wat die kreatiewe proses op Catullus uitoefen.
Volgens hierdie lesing van c. 50 konsentreer die digter-persona op sy ervaring van die kreatiewe proses as soortgelyk aan die ervaring van 'n liefdesverhouding. Die studie verken Catullus se gebruik van die Calvus persona in c. 50 as 'n poging van die digter om beide die emosionele en erotiese ervaring van digkuns te verwoord.
In 'n soortgelyke ondersoek word Antjie Krog se gedig “die skryfproses, as sonnet” as 'n voorbeeld van moderne digkuns bespreek, waar (a) die man as metafoor gebruik word vir die proses van kreatiwiteit, en (b) voorbeelde van erotika gebruik word om die ervaring van die kreatiewe proses te verwoord.
Hierdie bespreking van die gedigte van beide 'n antieke en moderne digter plaas die kompleksiteit van Catullus se ervaring van die kreatiewe proses in perspektief ten opsigte van moderne digkuns.
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The erotic lyric of archaic Greece is often easy to read and enjoy. The songs originate as songs associated with specific contexts within archaic Greek culture. In Rome, erotic lyric maintained an intensely personal and emotional nature. Anacreon's songs often concern themselves with the powerful impact of erotic passion on the narrator, and eros is described with exuberantly expressive imagery. This chapter's discussion of Roman erotic lyric explores the methods by which authors engaged in such discourse and considers the basic, over-arching issues regarding sexuality: (1) how and why male poets engaged the dominant sexual discourse in terms of activity/passivity; and (2) why and how they subverted such discursive roles to achieve literary and political gains. It also examines selective manners in which poets engage with “normative” sexuality.
According to many recent interpretations of Catullus 101, the ritual performance it describes serves primarily as a foil, highlighting the greater expressiveness and communicative power of the poem itself. I argue instead for using the complexities of Roman funerary ritual as a model for understanding the poem's ambiguities. As funerary offerings at once establish a bond between family members and the dead and affirm a distinction between them that allows the survivors to rejoin the society of the living, so the poem articulates a tension between assertions of the brother's absence and intimations of his presence as addressee, even as speaker. Similarly, the split between the poem's fictional context as a one-time-only farewell to the brother and its existence as a repeatable literary artifact further accentuates the double allegiance of the poet. In the second section I consider how the poem, without being an epitaph itself, fulfills the functions of an epitaph, by allowing for the re-performance of the ritual, constructing the opposition between permanence and temporality present in the epitaph/monument complex, "inscribing" the brother's death at the prominent literary "crossroads" of the beginning of the Odyssey, and finally making the commemoration of the brother performed through each reading of the poem a sacrum that builds its audience into a community.
Aeneas' encounter with Deiphobus forms a critical juncture in Vergil's "Aeneid". In the underworld Aeneas retraces his past to its beginning; so too Vergil's audience returns to its starting point: the fall of Troy. Deiphobus himself is a metonym of Troy, embodying her guilt and punishment. But Aeneas is frustrated in his attempt to reconcile himself to this past. Aeneas attempts the Homeric rites of remembrance-heroic tumulus and epic fama-but these prove to be empty gestures. The aition of Deiphobus' tomb is revealed to have miscarried. Rhoeteum was known as the tomb and shrine of Telamonian Ajax, not Deiphobus, and Octavian's recent restoration of the Rhoetean memorial would have strengthened the already close association between Rhoeteum and Ajax in the mind of Vergil's audience. Vergil exploits Rhoeteum's resonance with Telamonian Ajax and Odysseus, Antony and Octavian, to reflect on the process of constructing national memory, a process of which epic is an integral part. Vergil suggests that one hero's memorial frequently involves the appropriation and effacement of another. In a similar vein, the heroic fama of Deiphobus which Aeneas had heard in Troy is proven false. Deiphobus' narrative of his death is replete with Odyssean allusions which critique both Homeric heroism and Homeric kleos. Evocative allusions to Catullus' laments for his brother suggest eternal elegiac mourning as an alternate generic model for memorial and reconciliation with the past. But Aeneas is denied this option. At the center of the epic, at high noon, on a cosmic crossroads, Aeneas is poised between past and future, between mourning and hope, between Deiphobus and Deiphobe, between epic and elegiac. The Sibyl interrupts and moves Aeneas forward. Aeneas is not purged of his past, but rather denied the opportunity for true reconciliation, which is bestowed not by forgetting but by remembrance.
This article explores the themes of travel, homecoming and homesickness in Catullus' poetry. A recurrent interest throughout much of the poet's oeuvre, the idea of the journey offers the reader multiple angles of interpretation: from the emotional to the metapoetic, and from contemporary social contexts to far-off mythical ones, all along the way contributing to the complex presentation of the poet himself. Ultimately, the reader is left with a paradoxical picture of Catullus as both a wanderer and a stay-at-home, both an achiever of nostos and a victim of incurable nostalgia.
This study examines a recurrent scenario in Roman poetry of the first-person genres: the separation of the poet from his writing tablets. Catullus' tablets are stolen (c.42); Propertius' are lost (3.23); Ovid's (Am. 1.11-12) are consigned to disuse and decay by their disappointed owner. Martial, who does not reproduce the specific narrative of loss, nonetheless engages with the tradition of lost tablets from within the fiction of festive gift-exchange in his Apophoreta (14.1-21): rather than losing or rejecting the tablets, he gives them away to guests/readers at his Saturnalian party. I argue that the representation of writing tablets and their loss is involved in the production of authorial presence. The scene of lost tablets demonstrates how the poet retains the capacity for poetic speech even when deprived of the aid of his material medium. The ostensibly accidental and sometimes lamented loss of the poet's tablets thus contributes to a sophisticated strategy of authorial self-representation. The tablets do not so much stand for the literary text as provide a focus for metapoetic concerns with voice and writing, author and text, presence and absence, immortal ingenium and expendable materia. Examination of the shifting representation of writing tablets from Catullus to Martial will provide insight into the invention of the Roman poetic author.
I argue that the prologue of Tacitus' Agricola is at pains to maintain for the work the option to be important or to be inconsequential. The goal of this effort is to anticipate a spectrum of possible receptions: if the work is welcomed by its audiences, it can serve as the first step in a prestigious literary career; if it meets with indifference or hostility, Tacitus' already-existing social self can find protection behind the claims to limited importance. In the first section, I describe the rhetorical strategies through which Tacitus advances this doubled set of claims. In the second, I discuss Agricola's relationship to Sallust's monographs and adduce for comparison Pliny the Younger's career as a Catullan poet; I show that claims to write after the manner of a canonical author directly serve the aim of "keeping options open." Copyright © 2004 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
This paper offers a close analysis of the usage of the term 'circulus' to refer to groups of Romans gathered together for various reasons. I identify such groupings as primarily non-elite in character and suggest that examination of their representation in our sources offers insight into popular sociability and communication at Rome. While 'circuli' and the related figure of the 'circulator' are often associated with what is considered to be a debased popular culture, they can also be seen as part of a more general culture of popular sociability which is politically threatening to a Roman governing class that desired to monopolize and control speech and communication and in whose interest it was to channel popular political participation into the official political institutions of the city. This paper also looks at some of the strategies developed by Roman elites to maintain, in response to such unauthorized activity, their moral, intellectual, and political hegemony over the rest of the population.
The Wife of Both's Prologue contains more references to urine than any other text produced by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is not, however, Chaucer's most scatological or disgusting work: while it abounds in urine, it makes no mention of feces. This essay examines how a surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone of the Wife's prologue. Chaucer associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because urine functioned as a deceptive medical signifier. The urine in her prologue thus makes the Wife vulnerable to a misogynistic interpretation. But fecal matter is better suited to aggressive satire than urine. The absence of feces in the Wife's urinary discourse preserves the lighthearted tone of the prologue: rather than becoming the object of satiric scorn, the Wife reposes as devious caricature who teasingly reveals the absurdity of misogynistic paranoia. In order to establish the different rhetorical effects of urine and feces, this essay ponders scatological moments in a variety of medieval works: Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, Chretien de Troyes's Cliges, and The Towneley Plays among others.
contemporary;political context;references;pompey;imperial expansion
This article describes how cc.39 and 37 create distinct tones of voice and use them to preclude the social pretensions of Egnatius in different spheres. The style of c.39, markedly oratorical--and non-Catullan--in the syntax of its opening lines, develops into the voice of a respectable senex by way of archaisms of vocabulary and syntax and is capped by a figure of humor otherwise absent from the polymetrics, the apologus. The style thus creates a voice perfectly suited to chastise Egnatius' social ineptitudes and, more importantly, constitutes on the verbal level an embodiment of the standards of the urban elite. Catullus thus illustrates to Egnatius that a subtle system of social gestures can be learned--something which Egnatius, for all his apparent pretensions to social prominence, manifestly has not grasped, marred as he is by the habit of grinning inappropriately. C.37, which ends with an attack on the same Egnatius, is far different in tone, commingling tokens of artfulness with vulgarity and forcefulness. That mixed style exercises ironic decorum towards Lesbia's lovers, who are themselves oddly mixed group, well-off on the one hand, but 'backstreet adulterers' on the other. But the two tones of voice, and indeed the two groups of lovers, also embody the paradoxes of the Roman construction of stylish behavior, which could be represented as elegant dalliance or reprehensible vice. Inasmuch as Egnatius' fashion affectations, ridiculed at the poem's end, fail to qualify him for the ranks of Lesbia's lovers he is represented as outside sophisticated society, however it be constructed. In concert the two poems utterly derail Egnatius' social pretension: c.39 as it were outflanks him on the 'right', barring him from respectable society, and c.37 outflanks him on the 'left', barring him from the 'jet set'.
Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who "sees" the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation). The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.
This paper examines Tibullus 1.9, the closing poem of the Marathus cycle, in an attempt to depart from traditional interpretations of the elegiac puer as a real-life male beloved and establish the 'boy' as a distinct gender category in the genre, analogous to 'man' and 'woman.' The paper builds on Nikoloutsos 2007, which discussed Tibullus 1.4, the opening poem of the cycle. Challenging the autobiographical mode in which Tibullus's homoerotic poetry has commonly been analyzed, in that article I showed that the erotic discourse of 1.4 forges such a strong link between the theme of boy-love and the collection's central concerns (namely, elegiac composition, gender roles, economics, and the state) that any attempt to look into the poem for reliable information about same-sex practices in Roman antiquity is doomed to fail. Furthermore, I argued that in 1.4 Tibullus introduces a new strand in the collection, parallel to that about Delia and unique in the corpus of Augustan elegy. In this poetic strand, the puer is cast, like the puella in the heterosexual cycle, as a literary construct, a fictitious character with strong intertextual connections that serves as a vehicle through which the poet expresses his artistic and socio-moral ideology. Unlike a typical puer delicatus who is expected to be submissive, the puer that the god Priapus recommends in his erotodidactic speech in Tibullus 1.4 is demanding. He crosses gender and social boundaries and so defies binary categories, such as active/passive or elite/non-elite. As such, he highlights the precarious position of a man, such as the poet but also the reader/listener, in hierarchical spheres. Given the power asymmetries in both the private and the public domain, a man, as I argued, often can (or is forced to) play the role of the 'boy' (2007, 79).
This paper applies this theoretical model to poem 1.9; its aim is to contextualize further Tibullus's choice of the theme of pederasty and thus restore a neglected group of poems to visibility in contemporary scholarship on gender and sexuality in classical antiquity. I shall argue that far from being a flesh-and-blood boy, as he has traditionally been understood, Marathus is a scriptus puer modeled in accordance with the aesthetic principles of Latin elegy and the pressing social, moral, and political issues of a rather liminal period in Roman history. Published in late 27 or early 26 B.C.E., Tibullus's book 1 was the product of a period during which Rome changed, after a series of civil wars, from Republic into an Empire under Augustus. Fashioned discursively, Marathus operates as a medium through which Tibullus achieves self-expression and communicates to his reader his goals and ambitions as a practitioner of elegy, as well as his concerns and anxieties as a male and citizen in post-civil war Rome.
Although the subordination of the beloved to the protocols of writing elegy is an issue already explored in connection with the puella by Maria Wyke (2002, 1-191) and other critics, a separate study of the elegiac puer and his semiotic role in the genre is necessary for two reasons. First, it can shed more light upon elegy's engagement with the big ideological debates of its time. Second, it can help build intellectual bridges between feminist and queer classical scholarship. A dialogue between these two strands of scholarship, as this paper proposes, can enrich and at the same time complicate the theorization of the interconnection between power, sex, gender, class, economics, and poetic practice in late Republican and early Augustan Rome.
I begin my analysis by focusing on the way the relation between amator and puer is portrayed in Tibullus 1.9. My goal in choosing to do so is to show that homoerotic desire is in intimate relation with power, a finding that can effect a smoother transition to the examination of the dynamics and asymmetries of amor puerilis as a poetic practice in the section 2 below.
Tibullus 1.9 opens with the narrator's self-representation in the role of a betrayed amator who accuses Marathus of violating his...
This paper examines the role and importance of Amphitrite in Catullus c. 64, the epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Catullus intends to conjure up Amphitrite's rich mythological background for the needs of his poem. Amphitrite's story contains thematic elements that recur in both narratives of c. 64, namely the main story of Peleus and Thetis, and the embedded story of Theseus and Ariadne. At the same time Amphitrite's meaningful presence in the prologue of c. 64 is a pointer to Bacchylides' Dithyramb 17, which treats Theseus' outbound journey to Crete and the test of his divine paternity, imposed by Minos. The several points of contact between B. Dith. 17 and Catul. c. 64 show that this Greek poem is an important subtext for c. 64, which has gone unnoticed so far.
Studying Masculinity, or Why Should We Care about Men?Studying Roman Masculinity or Why Should We Care about Dead White Men?Catullus' MasculinityRewriting Masculinity
Poetry is What is Lost in Translation”The Problem of MeterVocabulary and Lexical FidelitySexual Invective and ObscenityWhen the Soundthe SenseThe Alexandrian CatullusCatullus Translates
Definition and ExamplesBackground
Defining the Poetry Book or SequencePoems about Poets and PoetryPerforming the ProgramConclusion and Redefinition
Some Catullan KeywordsCatullus' Keywords and Political AestheticismA New EroticsA New Social OrderA New PoeticsA Total EthosThe Difficulties of Reading Catullus (1)The Difficulties of Reading Catullus (2)Conclusion
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