Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48

Abstract

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.