The identity of the passer in Catullus 2 and 3 has been a subject of controversy for hundreds of years.1 Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the great authority on birds in the ancient world, sums it up best with his own musings: ‘Whatever Lesbia's “sparrow” may have been, I am pretty sure in my own mind […] that it was not Passer domesticus, the most intractable and least amiable of cage-birds.’2 Some scholars opt for an obscene interpretation of passer, while others argue that passer must refer to a bird like a bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula). To test the validity of these arguments, this paper examines four key components of the passer poems, and the passer debates. Firstly, it determines the Roman cultural view of sparrows and whether they regarded the birds as pets, pests, or something else entirely. Secondly, it analyses Roman trends in bird-keeping and looks for other examples of pet passeres in art and literature. Thirdly, it considers actual bird behaviour to reveal whether a sparrow could act the way Catullus describes. Finally, it analyses the different potential meanings of the word passer to determine which birds fell under its descriptive umbrella. In this way we can judge whether the passer was indeed a sparrow while also determining the place of sparrows in Roman thought and pet-keeping culture.

In the last three lines of Catullus’ ‘dead sparrow’ poem (. . . o miselle passer! / tua nunc opera meae puellae / flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli, Catull. 3.16–18), the poet turns his attention from the fate of the passer to the effect that its death has on Lesbia. What is remarkable here is the accumulation of diminutives (miselle, puellae, turgiduli, ocelli), a feature which most translators fail to take sufficiently into account. In particular, the employment of two (comparatively rare) diminutive adjectives is especially striking. The effect of such overkill is mock pathos, but why does Catullus end his poem on a parodic note? I would like to suggest that we view this in the light of the Romans’ tendency to criticise excessive emotional display regarding pets and especially to their deaths, the implication being that Lesbia's reaction is overdone. Catullus’ mocking of his girl's unbounded grief for her pet is also to be linked to poem 2 where, it could be argued, the poet displays jealousy of Lesbia's emotional commitment to the passer.

Catullus 17 poses a host of interpretational difficulties. The thorniest of these concerns its unity. How can the initial lines on the rickety state of Colonia's ponticulus be reconciled with the real focus of the poem, the precipitation from the bridge of a husband who is blind to his bride's erotic needs, in the hope of bringing him to his senses? Many attempts have been made to resolve the problem, but few persuade to any degree. This paper proposes that the key to the unity-question lies in Catullus’ adoption of the rare priapean metre. This manoeuvre expresses itself in two ways: first, by infusing the poem as a whole with the thematic colours ascribed to priapeans by ancient metricians, that is to say a ludic, countrified but also mock-epic ethos: second, and crucially, by constructing the doltish maritus, the thematic locus of the poem, as an alter ego of the eponymous deity of Priapean literature; for just like the god of that corpus, the husband of the poem is a conspicuous sexual under-achiever, the butt of mocking laughter, inurbane, and little more than an insensate block of wood. In sum, by reading c. 17 through a specifically Priapean lens it is possible to discover in it an otherwise elusive unity.

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.

Written in 55 BCE, carmen 113 seemingly uses the first two consulships of Pompey to measure a decline in moral standards, with one unfortunate woman as the yardstick of sexual profligacy. It closes with a focus on marital infidelity. The epigram should be read as a savage attack upon Mucia, the one-time wife of Pompey. This paper affirms her identity by postulating a punning wordplay on Mucia and C(a)ecilia that made this identification clear to the poet's readership. No textual emendation is required. It is also proposed that the observation regarding adultery, no mere aphorism, queried the legitimacy of one or more of Pompey's children.

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.

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.

In the many evocations of memory in the Catullan corpus, fantasy plays a significant, albeit discrete role. Fantasy embellishes memories in Catullus’ poems, not necessarily making them bearable but enabling them to be understood, in part. I argue that in poem 68 there are two different approaches to fantastical memories: the intense and vivid memories of his brother's death, and the memories of Lesbia that move both towards, and away from, overt fantasy. In this sense, and in the context of poem 68, fantasy communicates the memory of trauma in a way that includes vivid, hyperbolic, symbolic and metaphoric modes of expression. In the case of the fantasy embedded in the memory of Lesbia, it also entails wish fulfilment.

This article argues that Carl Orff's Catulli Carmina – a five-movement cantata comprising a selection of Catullus’ Latin poems framed by neo-Latin text written by Orff himself – occupies an ambiguous space within the cultural environment of National Socialism, especially in portraying ideals of contemporary masculinity. In its overt theatrical displays of male and female sexuality, Catulli Carmina invites association with the perceived ‘decadence’ of pre-war cabaret in France and Germany's Weimar Republic. Yet, through tendentious selection and ordering of the poems, Orff's cantata also ‘corrects’ Catullus’ emblematic triviality and erotic abjection in an era which prized productive masculinity as a symbol of the good health of the nation. Orff's motivations in engaging with Roman culture were very different from Nazism's own fetishising of Greco-Roman antiquity, yet in this chapter Catullus provides a surprising case study for demonstrating how Orff's artistic values were often ‘compatible’ with those of the Nazi regime.

The history of Catullus’ reception has been one of exclusion as much as inclusion. Since the seventeenth century, many Anglophone writers have used Catullus as inspiration for their translations, poetic adaptations, and novels. A great deal of these works occluded the role that male homoeroticism played in the Latin poems, especially by omitting Catullus’ male love object, Juventius. Writers have employed various techniques to deal with Catullus’ ‘problematic’ pagan mores: choosing to ignore the suite of poems associated with homoeroticism (for example, Wilder 1948); bowdlerising homoerotic language (such as Nott 1795, Cranstoun 1867, and Macnaghten 1899); and performing ‘gender swaps’ to portray male-male relationships as male-female (a technique employed to memorable effect by de La Chapelle in 1680, and later by Lamb in 1821). Excision of whole poems or bowdlerisation of obscene terms was also often used to deal with Catullus’ depictions of male-on-male sexual violence, a topic regularly entwined with the gentler homoerotic content. This article surveys, analyses, and explains this aspect of Catullus’ reception in English from 1659–1915.