Classical World

This book answers very well a perceived current need for a balanced undergraduate critical text on Catullus that digests the results of recent scholarship in an attractive form. The first chapter provides a good account of Catullus’ life and its cultural and historical context. Gaisser is prepared to believe Jerome’s report of Catullus’ life-length (death aged 29), while rightly rejecting his dates (87–58 b.c.); this is not unreasonable, but it might have been worth mentioning that some recent scholars have speculated that poem 64, with its location at Pharsalus and emphasis on slaughter, could interestingly be dated post-49.

The second chapter faces the thorny issue of the Catullan collection with typical judiciousness. For Gaisser, poem 1 (rightly seen as complimentary to Nepos) clearly introduces a poetry-book, but it is not the one we have in the circa 113 poems of Catullus which are rightly seen as too long and too diverse for a single book, though they too form an ancient construction, put together in codex form from diverse papyrus rolls. Gaisser allows that the collection as we have it shows artistic variation and may even contain some sequences which were original books (1–11 or 1–14 are canvassed), and makes excellent points about the importance of sequence in a papyrus tradition and on the possibility that ancient readers in late antiquity may have made their own selections of poems independent of the author. [End Page 261]

The third chapter deals with the question of Catullus’s poetic persona, rightly seen as a literary fiction (cf. poem 16) despite readerly intuitions of “sincerity”: Gaisser argues well for variation between the persona of the poet in the Lesbia poems (quasi-marital search for commitment and moral seriousness) and in the Juventius poems (lover abused by fickle beauty). Particularly good here are her analyses of poems 8, 10, and 24 as forms of drama and performance.

The fourth chapter looks at “What Makes It Poetry.” Here we have a lucid account of metres and very useful analyses of vocabulary variation; Grecisms, diminutives, and “terms of performance” are persuasively seen as features of the polymetrics and long poems rather than of the epigrams. On terms of performance (uenustus and the like), more might be allowed to the transfusion into life of literary Callimachean values of elegance and polish alongside Roman urbanitas.

The fifth chapter considers “Poetic Architecture” at the level of the individual poem. Here there is a good deal of excellent material on structural repetition, ring-composition, and temporal and spatial sequencing which provides a highly effective view of how Catullan poems are generally constructed, with fine analyses of poems 101 and 68b. The sixth chapter treats intertextuality, looking at Greek models, especially 64 and Medea, 70 and Callimachus, and 101 and Homer. On poem 51 and Sappho, Gaisser follows David Wray’s interesting suggestion that 51 is the poem mentioned as written in 50; she might have alluded to more recent arguments on the otium stanza of 51, e.g., in my piece in Classical Bulletin 77 (2001) 161–68.

The last two chapters draw on the excellent work Gaisser has done elsewhere on Catullan reception and translation. The first deals with Catullan reception to 1600, passing from Martial through the era of the sensual Catullus of his early rediscovery in the fifteenth century to the more learned and Alexandrian view of the sixteenth century. As she points out, both the critical discussions and neo-Catullan verse of these periods are well worth revival. The last chapter surveys more recent receptions in the UK and US: it is sobering to learn that Catullus was first printed in the UK in 1684, and first completely translated into English in 1795. Gaisser’s identification of Catullus as the eternal modern is right on the button; she might have allowed more here to the “century beat” or “revolutionary” Catullus of the 1950s and 1960s.

This is an excellent textbook on Catullus. It provides much...