Difficile Est Longvm Svbito Deponere Amorem

Extract

Two articles on Catullus' eighth poem in recent issues of this journal (Greece & Rome, xiii [1966], 15–21, 155–7) appeared under the title Miser Catulle; and indeed the poem itself might aptly have its first line—Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire—as its heading. But this apparently is not how the Romans themselves would have headed it. If Ovid three times uses the phrase perfer et obdura (Am. iii. 11. 7; A.A. ii. 178; Tr. v. 11. 7; cf. Fordyce, ad Cat. 8. 11) he is clearly recalling what to him seemed to be the ‘message’ of Catullus' poem, conveniently transferring it from scazon to hexameter (or pentameter) by the simple addition of et. The word obdura, first introduced (with perfer) at the end of the central ‘stanza’ and repeated at the end of the following line and again at the very end of the second ‘half’, is surely the theme word of the whole poem. It is the positive self-admonition, after all the negative self-advice of the first part, beginning with desinas ineptire and culminating in nec miser uiue (10): it is the only thing that is left to the lover when all is over between him and his love.