sat es beatus (Catull. 23.27) In the aggressively philosophical poem 23, Catullus attempts to change Furius’ mind about how he perceives his poverty, ‘advice’ which has been identified as either Stoic or Epicurean. Irrespective of the precise school of thought, it is clear that the poet ridicules Furius in eudaimonistic language. The poet of social commentary seeks to define the beatus uir. In fact, the term beatus has rich philosophical resonance and Catullus uses it in several other poems where attitudes to wealth form a significant backdrop to the poet's social posturing. Catullus was no philosopher. He employs the language and ideas of different schools, and, while his work does not reflect a coherent philosophical position, he was writing at a time when public discourse increasingly drew upon philosophical language and topoi. I will examine Catullus’ use of the term beatus in poems 9, 10, 22 and 23 to demonstrate that the poet draws a contrast between its different meanings across these pairs of adjacent poems. I will argue that Catullus contrasts the eudaimonistic and material meanings of the word to show the differences between clear-sighted wisdom and deceptive pleasures, between the good life and a life filled with goods.

Catullus’ poem 48 has barely been studied, except as the “less interesting” sibling of the family of kiss poems. It continues the characterisation of Juventius as an aristocratic young man in the flower of his youth (flosculus … Iuventiorum, 24.1), but it complicates this image with agricultural imagery which suggests that the boy is on the cusp of manhood, making a transition from smooth-cheeked spring to bristly summer. Juventius’ honey-sweet eyes and kisses like thick crops of the dry beards of grain evoke the ‘young man with the first down’, a figure with a long and conflicting literary pedigree. A better understanding of the literary background of this imagery illuminates poem 48 as a complex and passionate celebration of the fragility of youthful beauty, but it also reveals more clearly just how the poem participates in the persuasive rhetoric of the kiss poems.

Many have recognised poem 63 as a study in contrasts – light versus darkness, masculine versus feminine, rationality versus madness, animal versus human, culture versus nature. Caught between these polarities is the figure of Attis, removed from everything bright, male, sane, human, and civilised by one impassioned act. The poem suggests that it is partly the nature of the place, its quasi-Hippocratic airs, waters, and places, that emasculates Attis, making him like a notha mulier, iuvenca, and famula. This article will use ecofeminist theory – in particular, Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Mastery of Nature – to investigate the logic of domination running between the poem's polarities and to show how a foreign ‘Eastern’ wilderness effeminises Greek Attis. Moreover, it will be shown that the characterisation of Attis and the galli as a dux and his comites associates the story with the Roman imperial endeavour, suggesting that we can read the poem alongside others that portray conquest (11, 29) and the experience of young men abroad on provincial cohorts (10, 28, 47). In this way, Catullus implies that the imperial project is also made weak and feminine by its very contact with foreign places.

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The symposium marked fourteen years since the first Catullus gathering at Newcastle, which resulted in the first thematic issue of Antichthon, 'Catullus in Contemporary Perspective' in 2006. This inaugural thematic issue of Antichthon marked the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies and the publication of its journal. It is especially poignant that many of the original contributors and audience members returned in 2018, and their papers appear in this second thematic volume, 'Catullus in the 21st Century.'When one compares the content of this thematic issue with its 2006 predecessor, certain topics remain constant, while new ways of engaging with Catullus also emerge. The new millennium has seen the publication of several key collections on Catullan scholarship, including Julia Haig Gaisser's Catullus (2007) for the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series, with twenty-five chapters on the poet from the second-half of the twentieth century. Serious students of Catullus would be familiar with most if not all of the readings in Gaisser's volume. The same year saw the publication of Marilyn B. Skinner's edited collection of new work on Catullus -A Companion to Catullusin the Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series. Skinner's extensive collation of commissioned chapters captured the innovations as well as the traditions in Catullan scholarship and complemented Gaisser's retrospective volume. 1 The contributions in this special issue of Antichthon reflect the content of both eminent volumes: the scholarship and traditions of Gaisser's collection, and the recent developments in the field of Skinner's volume. Twenty-first-century monographs are also in evidence in the articles herein, be they in the extension of ideas or more robust engagement with them.