Catullus and the Brothel-Creepers: Carmen 37

This article offers a new examination of the place of philosophy in Catullus’ Carmina. It focuses on Egnatius, the ‘smiling Spaniard’ of poems 37 and 39, and argues that Catullus’ attacks on this character make use of many standard invective tropes against Epicureans in the late Republic. More than merely an opportunity to show off his whitened teeth, Egnatius’ smile may well have been proof of his philosophical detachment and ataraxia. Yet Catullus maliciously misrepresents this mark of Epicurean virtue as a social gaffe, and an unflattering reminder of Egnatius’ provincial origins. I then reinterpret poems 37, 38, and 39 as a poetic series unified by the ‘banalization’ of philosophical ideas. Ultimately, Catullus creates his own singular voice – the arbiter of style and taste – by representing aspects of other people's behaviour as trite and ordinary. To banalize is an act of power, and it is a weapon that Catullus wields to articulate a sense of difference from other poets and thinkers in his intellectual world.

Section: Catullus 37: the Epicurean Herdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Egnatius the Epicurean: The Banalization of Philosophy in Catullus

Uden

2021

Introduction

Johnson¹,

O'Hearn²

2021

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.

Dismembering Cominius: Political Violence and Iambic Aggression in Catullus 108

Cowan

2021

Carmen 108 is one of the most neglected and unloved in the Catullan corpus. When it is mentioned in scholarship, it is either as a distastefully extreme instance of iambic invective or the object of a prosopographical exercise in identifying the addressee, Cominius. Gnilka alone has tried to situate it in the context of late Republican political violence, in particularly public lynching. Instead of isolating these two aspects of the poem from each other, this article argues that c. 108 is a self-conscious exploration of the interaction between poetic form and hors-texte. The terms of the invective situate it firmly within the tradition of Archilochean and Hipponactean iambos and it may even allude directly to a fragment of the latter. Yet the threats of violence are transformed when recontextualized within the world of the late Republic, where such literary violence was very much a reality. The poem performs a symbolic dismemberment of Cominius’ body, but one that cannot be safely separated from acts of mob violence in the period. The pragmatics of Catullan iambos explores the limits of verbal violence as speech-act and the point at which hate-speech becomes indistinguishable from the violence it incites.