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Catullus 8: The Lover's Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

P. J. Connor
P. J. Connor*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Extract

The dichotomy between lover and poet; the relationship with comedy; the force of the metre: these are the considerations that have told most in recent years in the interpretation of Catullus' poem 8, Miser Catulle.

Wheeler, following Morris, takes the poem as a comic exercise. Fordyce, Fraenkel and Quinn think of it as a serious examination of the lover's internal conflict. Commager (‘if it would be foolish to deny the poem's comic overtones, it would be equally foolish to maintain that those are the only ones’) juggles with the two. One conviction that seems shared by most, however, is that the poem, in a sense, describes full circle, returning to its starting point.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 8 , 1974 , pp. 93 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1974

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References

1 Morriss, E. P., ‘An interpretation of Catullus VIII’, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (1909), 139-51Google Scholar; Wheeler, A. L., Catullus and the tradition of ancient poetry (University of California, 1934), pp. 227-30Google Scholar. More recently, Swanson, R. A., ‘The humor of Catullus 8’, CJ 58 (1963), 193-6Google Scholar, has also taken this line whilst stressing that this is ‘a humor of discipline without which the interior progression perhaps could not be controlled’ (p. 196).

I cite by surname alone Fordyce, C. J., Catullus, A Commentary (Oxford, 1961Google Scholar) and Fraenkel, E., ‘Two Poems of Catullus’, JRS 51 (1961), 46–53.Google ScholarQuinn, K., The Catullan Revolution (Melbourne, 1959Google Scholar) and Catullus: The Poems (London, 1970) are cited as Cat. Rev. and Commentary respectively.Google Scholar

2 Commager, S., ‘Notes on some poems of Catullus’, HSCP 70 (1965), 83–110, at p. 92.Google Scholar

3 Skinner, Marilyn, ‘Catullus 8: the comic amator as Eiron’, CJ 66 (1971), 298–305, could well serve as representative here. She writes: ‘Like Swanson … I would understand Catullus the poet to employ his material as a “distancing device” so that the speaker of the poem becomes both a projection of and a means of control over his own turbulent feelings’ (my italics).Google Scholar

4 Rowland, R. L., ‘Miser Catulle: an interpretation of the eighth poem of Catullus’, Greece and Rome 13 (1966), 15–21, at p. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Rowland refers to Quinn, Cat. Rev., p. 94 for this view.

6 Dyson, M., ‘Catullus 8 and 76’, CQ 23 (1973), 126-43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Cf. Commager, op. cit, 92: miser amator, the typical frustrated lover of comedy; Quinn, Commentary ad loc.

8 See Fordyce ad loc.

9 See Quinn, , Comm., p. 116Google Scholar; Fordyce, p. 111.

10 Fraenkel, op. cit., 53.