A Further Point in Catullus' Attack on Volusius

Abstract

Among a number of short Latin poems by Walter Savage Landor, of which an interesting appreciation was published recently by Bruce Mackinnon, of British Columbia, is one particularly attractive pastiche of Catullan hendecasyllables. In many respects this poem could claim to reproduce the manner of Catullus himself. My own uneasiness was aroused by the rhythm of the opening line:I was aware of no rule for the composition of this type of verse which was infringed here; but the run of the words appeared curiously prosaic. After some consideration, I identified the metrical feature in question as the opening of the verse with two disyllables: the former spondaic (no examples were to turn up, as it happened, with a trochaic or iambic word), the latter of necessity trochaic. It is a rhythm often employed by Landor in the fifty and more pages of hendecasyllables found in the 1847 edition of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (pp. 125–78), occurring for example in poems 3, 5, 9, 10, and three times in 12. A particularly striking example is found in 88.8, quaedam scripsit avunculus… which nobody would mistake for a production of Catullus.

Catullan Recycling? <I>Cacata carta</I>

“…Comfort 1929, Lackenbacher 1935and Østerud 1978. For stress on the literary aspect, see Townend 1980, Gwyn Morgan 1980, Skelenár 1996and especially Buchheit 1959, who views the whole piece as a doctrinally-based attack on Volusius' poetics. Quinn ad loc.…”

Virum Volitare Per Ora: Genre And Poetic Immortality In Vergil’s Georgics

“…: isque Hellesponto pontem contendit in alto. 19 Townend 1980. On the exclusion Catullus 3.12: illuc, unde negant redire quemquam; 14.22: illuc, unde malum pedem attulistis; and 6.15: quare, quicquic habes boni malique on the grounds that the first word of each line belongs to a class of word which regularly opens hexameters where there are marked restrictions on the occupation of the first foot by spondaic words see Townend 1950asee Townend (22-39) 1950bsee Townend (365-78) and 1980. 20 Thus Friedrich 1908, Thompson 1997: milia cum interea quingenta Atrianus in uno.…”