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do have (very few), combined with scraps of suggestive hearsay (rather more), amount to a partial account with enough scope for creative interpolation that a convincing and absorbing story is easily constructed. Such accounts recover Catullus from anonymity and obscurity (the resting place of most Latin poets) and make of him an apparently red-blooded, three-dimensional protagonist. This attraction to biography does not rise plainly and simply from the salacious content of the poems, but equally from their seeming intimacy, the way they address the reader personally. For example, Poem 8 – the first poem this translator attempted – positions the reader as if looking through a keyhole onto a familiar, intimate, and immediate world whose relationships carry the same emotional and psychological turmoil as modern ones, while simultaneously occupying a strange world which, the longer the reader inspects and inhabits it, becomes quite other. The reader is lured into identifying with the protagonist and his lover; however, once he understands the importance of social class for Catullus and Lesbia, their very different ages (he was in his twenties, she in her mid-to-late thirties) and the significance of these two factors in historical context, the poem begins to look quite different. First: because of the relatively low life expectancy in Late Republican Rome, the age gap would be a generational one. Second: in Roman culture of the Late Republic, a marriage might be impossible because of differences in class; in this case, Clodia Metelli was of a higher class than Catullus, an affluent young man from the provinces. An affair, however, would be tolerated. Today, these are private matters, for the judgment of individuals. For the modern-day reader approaching the poem anew, unfamiliar with its cultural nuances, there is a risk: encouraged by the poem’s seeming familiarity and the apparent simplicity of the lovers’ situation, he is lured into an act of cultural appropriation, eliding the poem’s historical reality. The seduction of biographical reading has led to the popular notion that Catullus is ‘accessible’, or more accessible than other Latin poets of that period, that he is more ‘like us’, preternaturally modern. In reality the situation is more complex and problematic than it first seems. x . catullus
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The order in which we should read these poems is just as uncertain as the biography of the poet. Indeed, the information available follows a similar pattern: there is just enough evidence to support an authorial ordering and not quite enough to mark that evidence with a stamp of certainty. Who arranged the poems? The poet, or some later, unknown editor or editors? This translation holds to the ‘three-book’ structure favoured by many scholars of recent years, from T. P.  Wiseman to Marilyn Skinner, a structure rejected by other scholars and translators including A. L. Wheeler and D. F. S. Thomson. The ‘three-book’ structure tends towards authorial ordering, with some possible later editorial intervention. The translations in this volume follow the guidance of the commentaries, particularly that of Thomson in 1998, the most recent commentary on the source text. My versioning of Catullus breaks the three books into three accepted groupings: polymetrics (Poems 1–60), the long poems on marriage (61–64), and the elegies and epigrams (65–116). Most translations present all 116 as one continuous text, but there have been various attempts to re-order them. The more extreme orderings either attempt a kind of thematised poetic biography ( Jacob Rabinowitz) or corral the poems strictly by theme ( Josephine Balmer). One thing revealed by these re-orderings is how lines, phrases and whole passages are occasionally repeated. When they appear side-by-side the poems start to become repetitious and boring, and somehow lose their energy. Indeed, what becomes clear is that the poems need to be dispersed through a sequence, so that Catullus’s reflections on love, politics, friendship and so on develop across and through the body of work, across all three ‘books’, revealing (to some extent) authorial intent in the arrangement of the poems as they are. Other evidence for authorial ordering is tantalising. Perhaps most compelling is the account of critic and translator Charles Martin, who characterises the patterning of the poems and how they ‘speak’ to one another across the span of the texts as chiastic: for example, Poem 61 (on marriage) ‘speaks’ to Poem 68 (on adultery). The poems also use chiasmus internally, for example Poem 57, which is topped and tailed by the same line. Martin introduction . xi

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do have (very few), combined with scraps of suggestive hearsay (rather more), amount to a partial account with enough scope for creative interpolation that a convincing and absorbing story is easily constructed. Such accounts recover Catullus from anonymity and obscurity (the resting place of most Latin poets) and make of him an apparently red-blooded, three-dimensional protagonist.

This attraction to biography does not rise plainly and simply from the salacious content of the poems, but equally from their seeming intimacy, the way they address the reader personally. For example, Poem 8 – the first poem this translator attempted – positions the reader as if looking through a keyhole onto a familiar, intimate, and immediate world whose relationships carry the same emotional and psychological turmoil as modern ones, while simultaneously occupying a strange world which, the longer the reader inspects and inhabits it, becomes quite other. The reader is lured into identifying with the protagonist and his lover; however, once he understands the importance of social class for Catullus and Lesbia, their very different ages (he was in his twenties, she in her mid-to-late thirties) and the significance of these two factors in historical context, the poem begins to look quite different.

First: because of the relatively low life expectancy in Late Republican Rome, the age gap would be a generational one. Second: in Roman culture of the Late Republic, a marriage might be impossible because of differences in class; in this case, Clodia Metelli was of a higher class than Catullus, an affluent young man from the provinces. An affair, however, would be tolerated. Today, these are private matters, for the judgment of individuals. For the modern-day reader approaching the poem anew, unfamiliar with its cultural nuances, there is a risk: encouraged by the poem’s seeming familiarity and the apparent simplicity of the lovers’ situation, he is lured into an act of cultural appropriation, eliding the poem’s historical reality. The seduction of biographical reading has led to the popular notion that Catullus is ‘accessible’, or more accessible than other Latin poets of that period, that he is more ‘like us’, preternaturally modern. In reality the situation is more complex and problematic than it first seems.

x . catullus

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