1 Bentley 1711: 72–3.

2 A problem for this argument is presented, however, by the characterization at 100.2 of Caelius and Quintius as flos Veronensum iuuenum, ‘flower of Veronese youth’: Cicero mentions Caelius’ native city at Cael. 5 as Interamnia Praetuttiorum, modern Teramo in central Italy (though there is some uncertainty about the text).

3 Cicero regularly uses the derisive diminutive Pulchellus, with connotations of effeminacy, in his correspondence with Atticus (Att. 1.16.10, 2.1.4, 2.18.3, 2.22.1).

4 Famously, and wittily, alluded to by Cicero at Cael. 32: istius mulieris uiro – fratrem uolui dicere; semper hic erro (‘that woman’s husband – I mean brother; I always make that mistake’; see also Cael. 36); further references and discussion at Wiseman 1969: 52–5. As Wiseman points out, however, the incest rumours were also attached to Clodia’s two sisters, especially the youngest of the three, the wife of L. Licinius Lucullus (divorced in 66 bc): poem 79 is thus not as decisive as sometimes suggested. In 1974, Wiseman himself favoured identification with Clodia Luculli (Wiseman 1974: 108–14); more recently, following an unpublished suggestion of J. T. Ramsay (for which see Hutchinson 2012: 56, n. 16), he has been inclined to find Claudia, daughter of App. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 54 bc) and wife of Pompey’s elder son Cn. Pompeius, a more plausible candidate (Wiseman 2023: 8–12). For Catullus 79 as ‘unmasking’ Lesbius (and hence Lesbia), see Skinner 1982a: 197.

5 Cicero calls her plurimarum fabularum poetria (‘poet of many plays’ or ‘author of many plots’) at Cael. 64, though it is questionable how literally this should be taken: Cicero may mean no more than that she is an expert at concocting fabrications such as the present case against Caelius. Pace Schwabe, there is no clear indication anywhere in the Catullan corpus that Lesbia composed poetry.

6 Wiseman 1969: 42–60; Quinn 1972: 54–203; Stoessl 1977.

7 This is particularly true of Wiseman, whose conclusions, while not always persuasive, rest on meticulous prosopographical research: Quinn and Stoessl, in contrast, are largely reliant on intuition and guesswork. For the latter, see Wiseman’s detailed review (Wiseman 1979b).

8 Quinn 1972: 56–60; see also Quinn 1973: 241. Quinn himself credits L. P. Wilkinson (in Bayet et al. 1956: 47) with originating the ‘feeler’ theory; Gaisser, however, points out that Wilkinson does not claim originality, and that a version of the same idea is already found in the essay accompanying Jack Lindsay’s 1929 translation of the poems (see Gaisser 2009: 213–14).

9 Kroll 1968: vii.

10 Quinn 1969: 27–43 (first edition 1959). Other early challenges to the centrality of biography to Catullan criticism, and to the ‘two Catulluses’ model, include Wheeler 1934: esp. 1–3; Havelock 1939: esp. 75–86 and 122–44; and Cherniss 1943 (an influential attack on the ‘biographical method’ in the study of Classical poetry in general).

11 E. Greene 2007: 132 is representative: ‘direct and indirect references to Lesbia in Catullus’ poetry evoke the values represented in Sappho’s work as well as her iconic status as a love poet’.

12 So Wray 2001: 97–9, following Lavency 1965. Cf. Holzberg 2002: 85–6; Schafer 2020: 7–9, 107–16.

13 For poem 36 as literary manifesto, see esp. Buchheit 1959; Forsyth 1984; Solodow 1989; Watson 2005. On poem 86, see esp. Papanghelis 1991.

14 Callim. Aet. fr. 1.9–12 Pfeiffer; Papanghelis 1991.

15 Buchheit 1959; contrast Krostenko 2001: 246–50, who takes Catullus’ ‘new poetics’ to be complementary to – and, effectively, inseparable from – his ‘new erotics’ (234–41).

16 Lyne 1980: 1–61, esp. 19–20 (for Catullus and ‘whole love’). On the Roman marriage in theory and practice, see Treggiari 1991: 229–61; Dixon 1992: 61–97.

17 Cic. Phil. 2.58; Att. 10.10.5.

18 64.334–6: nulla domus tales umquam contexit amores,/nullus amor tali coniunxit foedere amantes, / qualis adest Thetidi, qualis concordia Peleo (‘no home has ever contained such love, no love has ever joined lovers in such a pact as the harmony that Thetis shares with Peleus’); Lyne 1980: 33–8. For Catullus’ depiction of his relationship as a marriage, see also G. Williams 1968: 404–12.

19 Hallett 1973. For the contrasting view that Catullus’ moral stance is essentially conservative, see e.g. Arkins 1982: 1–45, esp. 12, 34; Wiseman 1985: 107–24. On Catullus and the Augustan elegists, see further Chapter 6, pp. 115–16, below.

20 Uneasy recognition of this paradox is suggested at 68.135–48, where the speaker attempts to reconcile himself to rara furta, ‘occasional affairs’, on Lesbia’s part, on the grounds that he is not, after all, her husband.

21 Rubino 1975 (quoted phrase at 294); Skinner 1983 (and, in greater detail, 2011); Dixon 2001: 133–56.

22 Adler 1981.

23 Janan 1994; E. Greene 1995 = 1998: 1–17; Miller 2004: 31–59; Oliensis 2009: 25–54.

24 She is a candida diua, ‘a shining goddess’, at 68.70, and her arrival is attended by Cupid (68.133).

25 Or Mallius/Manlius: on the textual problems surrounding – ironically enough – the name of the laudandus, see Chapter 5, n. 16, below.

26 For further discussion of the Laodamia simile, with bibliography, see Chapter 5 below.

27 Oliensis 2009: 25–54 (quoted phrase at 49), with 5–7 for the distinction between authorial and textual unconscious. On the similes and the theme of forgetfulness in poems 65 and 68, see further Chapter 5, pp. 91–8, below.

28 An exception here is Miller 2004, who – as noted above – seeks to combine Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with a historically situated interpretation of Catullan subjectivity.

29 Miller 1994: 75–6; Gaisser 2009: 133 similarly describes the collection as ‘a dynamic ensemble or system whose parts interact with each other’ and compares the shifting patterns that form and re-form with changes in perspective on the reader’s part to the changing images of a kaleidoscope. See also Lewis 2013.

30 On audience roles and power relations in Catullus, see also Pedrick 1986, 1993; Selden 1992: esp. 487–8.

31 Holzberg 2002: esp. 11–23; see also Holzberg 2000. Other critics who posit a radical dichotomy between poet and ‘ego’ or poet and persona include Veyne 1988: esp. 34–5, 174 on Catullus; and Nappa 2001: esp. 18–35. For critique of the persona approach, see Wray 2001: 161–4; Miller 2004: 50–2. See also D. Clay 1998; Mayer 2003 (both of whom stress the prevalence of biographical modes of reading in antiquity); McCarthy 2019: esp. 17–23.

32 The social class of the elegiac puella is in itself a far from uncontroversial issue, however: for contrasting views, see e.g. Wyke 1989: 34–5 = 2002: 29–31; James 2003: 36–41.

33 Holzberg 2000: 33–5, 2002: 33–9. See also Wirshbo 1980; Gram 2019: 104–13.

34 The verb is a very rare one, and is found elsewhere in Latin literature mainly in agricultural contexts. For debate about its meaning here, see Lenz 1963: 63–4; Arkins 1979; Jocelyn 1979; Randall 1980; Skutsch 1980; Adams 1982: 168; Muse 2009: 310–11.

35 As Holzberg and others suggest, the name also seems in this sense eminently suitable for the Lesbius of poem 79, who – as we saw in Chapter 1, p. 18, above – is implied by the poet to have defiled himself by performing oral sex, as well as committing incest with his sister.

36 Similarly, in poem 70 (a close imitation, as we noted in Chapter 1, of Callimachus, Epigram 25 Pfeiffer), the speaker adopts the role played in the Greek poem by the woman, Ionis, while it is now the female beloved – not the male lover, as in the original – who swears falsely. It seems pertinent, in this connection, that both Callimachus’ poem and Catullus’ version involve an explicit focus on gender (Callignotus switches his attentions from a female to a male love object; Catullus condemns female speech as untrustworthy).

37 The transmitted text of line 9 is defective: Girolamo Avanzi’s restoration impotens noli is, however, universally accepted by modern editors.

38 In this poem, as not infrequently elsewhere, the girl is not named; intratextual echoes, however, strongly suggest that the puella in question is to be identified with Lesbia. The love poems are particularly rich in verbal echoes which suggest a kind of cross-referencing among them: this in itself is one of the factors that has encouraged the kind of novelistic reading discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In the case of poem 8, the speaker’s insistence in line 5 on the uniqueness of his love resonates with poems 58 (line 3) and 87 (lines 1–2), in both of which Lesbia is named.

39 See Chapter 1, p. 27 and n. 84, above.

40 For relations between Catullus and his male friends, and the range of social connections embraced by the term amicitia, see Chapter 1, pp. 17–19, above, and further discussion in Chapter 3.

41 Bibliography on poem 11 is extensive: see especially Putnam 1974; Yardley 1981; Sweet 1987; J. R. Heath 1989; Celentano 1991; Skinner 1992; Janan 1994: 71–6; E. Greene 1998: 26–36 and 2006; Konstan 2000; Dugan 2001; Hawkins 2018.

42 The nature of Catullus’ relationship with his addressees has been much disputed, given that Furius and Aurelius appear elsewhere in the collection – both separately and together – as invective targets: for a convenient doxography, see Fredricksmeyer 1993: 102–5.

43 Compare the image of the cut flower with Sappho fr. 105b Voigt: οἴαν τὰν ὐάκινθον ἐν ὤρεσι ποίμενες ἄνδρες/πόσσι καταστείβοισι, χάμαι δέ τε πόρφʋρον ἄνθος, ‘as shepherds in the mountains trample down a hyacinth, and on the ground the purple flower…’. The lines come probably from an epithalamium and refer to the loss of virginity, like the similar image at Catullus 62.39–47.

44 For penetrare and tundere, cf. Lucretius 4.1111, 1246; and Catullus 32.11, 59.5; see also Adams 1982: 151 and 148. On mollitia, see especially Edwards 1993: 63–97.

45 Compare esp. 76.9: omnia quae…perierunt (‘all of which is lost’) with 8.2: quod uides perisse (‘what you see is lost’); and 76.11–12: quin tu animo offirmas…/et…desinis esse miser? (‘why don’t you strengthen your resolve and stop being miserable?’) with 8.10–11: nec miser uiue/sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura (‘don’t live in misery, but be resolute, stand firm, and toughen up’). For the identification of the unnamed woman of this poem with Lesbia, see n. 38 above.

46 For Lesbia’s status as a married woman, see Chapter 1, p. 19, above.

47 A set of assumptions represented with particular clarity in Cicero’s Pro Caelio; see also Cic. Tusc. 4.68–76 (erotic love as utterly trivial), and (for both philosophical and more traditional views of friendship) the De Amicitia. On Roman conceptions of amor and amicitia in general, see esp. R. D. Brown 1987: 122–7; Brunt 1988; C. A. Williams 2012 (esp. 174–85 on Catullus).

48 D. O. Ross, in an important comparative study of the language of the polymetrics and the epigrams (Ross 1969), was the first to draw attention to this complex of vocabulary: though rightly criticized by Lyne (1980: 25–6) and others for linking it too narrowly with the political sphere, his discussion remains fundamental. See also Lyne 1980: 24–34 (whence the phrase ‘language of aristocratic obligation’ [26]); Fitzgerald 1995: 117–34.

49 For examples and some (older) bibliography, see Lyne 1980: 291–2, n. 4.

50 On Roman sexual protocols, see esp. C. A. Williams 1999: 15–61.

51 In addition to Juventius and Ipsitilla, the Ameana of poem 41 and the Aufillena of 110 may be brought in under this heading. Both are represented as having asked or accepted gifts from Catullus in return – it is implied – for sexual services (the former, however, is scornfully rejected, and the latter is attacked for having reneged on the deal). The insulting insinuation, in both cases, is that the woman is no better than a common whore (worse, in Aufillena’s case, since she ‘keeps on taking, and does not put out’; 110.4), but it is worth noting that the speaker has no objection in principle to availing himself of their favours.

52 The word fututio is probably a humorous Catullan coinage, formed from the primary obscenity futuo, ‘to fuck’.

53 This form is found as a variant in MS R; other manuscripts give ipsi illa (O) or ipsithila (G, R). The correct form is perhaps Ipsicilla: see Gratwick 1967, 1991; M. G. Morgan 1974; Wiseman 1987a.

54 See Chapter 1, p. 5, above.

55 The rival of poem 24 is identified as Furius by the repetition of the phrase ‘neither slave nor strong-box’ (5, 8, 10), a quotation from the first line of 23, to Furius. The ‘visitor from Pisaurum’ of 81 is variously identified by commentators with Furius (on the basis of echoes of poem 24, though these are less marked than the quotation of 23 in 24) or Aurelius (on the basis that the comparison with a gilded statue, inaurata…statua, at 81.4, is a pun on his name).

56 Cf. Ar. Nub. 1083; Juv. 10.314–17; Adams 1982: 128; Richlin 1992: 215.

57 Literally ‘pissed on’. For this verb as a slang term for the male orgasm, particularly in the context of ‘squalid or humiliating sexual acts’, see Adams 1982: 142. The prefix con-, with its suggestions of thoroughness, adds to the crudity of the expression.

58 Juventius’ social status has presented something of a problem for commentators: seduction of a freeborn boy or girl fell under the rubric of stuprum or illicit sexual activity, while for an adolescent to accept homoerotic advances was regarded as shaming, and incurred the risk of infamy in later life (C. A. Williams 1999: 97–112). Some have therefore argued that he must be assumed to be a freedman; others point to the well-established consular status of the Juventii, and depict him as a ‘spoilt young aristocrat’ (Wiseman 1985: 122), in which case Catullus’ open use of his real name must be interpreted either as self-consciously risqué, or as a studied insult. A third possibility is to understand the name (approximately, ‘youthful’) as a pseudonym (for comparably pseudonymous use of a real Roman nomen gentile, cf. Porcius, ‘Piggy’, in poem 47, where – given the juxtaposition with Socration, ‘little Socrates’ – this seems very likely to be a derisive nickname). For a range of views, see (e.g.) Macleod 1973: 297, Stroh 1990: 137 and nn. 30, 31, Caratello 1995, C. A. Williams 1999: 65–6 and n. 17, Gaisser 2009: 61, Ingleheart 2014: 65–7, O’Hearn 2021b: 113–17, Polt 2021: 141.

59 See Chapter 1, p. 18, above.

60 See n. 57 above.

61 For the categorization of sexual acts in relation to hierarchies of gender and power in ancient thought, see Chapter 4 below.

62 Richlin 1992: 144–56. Others (Kloss 1998, Uden 2007) have suggested that certain poems – respectively, 17, and 16 and 56 – are to be understood as, more literally, spoken by Priapus, or by Catullus ‘impersonating’ Priapus; but Richlin’s model seems, on the whole, the more convincing.

63 See Chapter 1, pp. 15–16, above.