ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH: MESOSTIC AND EPITAPH IN CATULLUS POEM 60

Abstract

In addition to the acrostic–telestic combination natu ceu aes ‘from birth like bronze’, Catullus poem 60 contains the earliest attested Latin mesostic (mi pia ‘dutiful to me’), which runs down its caesuras. The use of pius anticipates the language of aristocratic obligation that is used of Lesbia in the epigrams and is perhaps also a wordplay on the praenomen of Clodia’s father, Appius. The complex acrostics and the syntax of mi pia, along with the setting of poem 59 (in sepulcretis), suggest that poem 60 can be read as a literary epitaph. Additional closural elements in the poem include an allusion to Callimachus and a sphragis in the form of a play on the author’s name.

1. A MESOSTIC IN POEM 60

A few years ago, I put forward some arguments for reading poem 60 as the closing poem of Catullus’ polymetrics. ¹ In this view, the contrasts between loyal friends and the betrayals of greedy and depraved politicians and lovers pile up in the final polymetric poems and create a series of related images marked by terminal features, such as the language of weariness, death, leave-taking and words meaning ‘last’. Together these build a sense of closure for the libellus that arrives in poem 60, which bids farewell to the polymetric Lesbia and clears the way for new representations of her in poem 68 and in the epigrams. I argued that the poem specifically calls to mind a passage of Jason’s farewell to Medea in Euripides’ play of that name, and that it invokes an infamous line from the play (ἔρρ’ αἰσχροποιέ, 1346) that had come to associate Medea with the same sexual proclivity implied in the use of the pseudonym Lesbia. The insinuation is perhaps present also in the mention of Scylla, if we are meant to think of Callimachus’ Hecale 90 Hollis/288 Pf., where Scylla is called a fellatrix. I noted that the sentiment of poem 60’s akroteleuton (a combination of acrostic and telestic), which reads natu ceu aes ‘from birth like bronze’, agrees with the depiction of the addressee in the rest of the poem. I further suggested that aes, in a playful and daring touch, is a wink at Clodia Metelli’s cognomen. In sum, it was a reading of the poem as a bitter and final repudiation of Lesbia/Clodia that brings the polymetric poems to a close.

But perhaps nothing is ever truly final in matters of love, for if we look at poem 60 once again, this time with attention to its caesuras, we find that there is yet more to read: mi pia ‘dutiful/devoted to me’.

While acrostics are more familiar and heavily outnumber mid-line phenomena, mesostics are indeed occasionally sighted in the wild. ² If we accept this as one example, it would appear to be the earliest mesostic yet identified in Latin literature. Given the fact that the poem already contains an acrostic and a telestic, I suggest that it is unlikely to be mere happenstance. ³

The mesostic falls at the caesura of each choliambic line, and the elision in verse four creates a striking effect. There are one hundred and twenty-six choliambic lines in Catullus’ libellus. One hundred and nineteen of these, or 95 per cent, have a break after the fifth syllable. Lines with a break after the fourth syllable, but not after the fifth, all have a break after the seventh, where the line caesura falls. As Loomis has shown, all of these lines fill the space of syllables five to seven with a single verb that is central to the line and crucial to the poem. ⁴ For example, in his attack on Egnatius’ teeth, Catullus repeats the verb renidere five times, and in line 7 the verb falls in this emphatic place: quodcumque agit, renidet. hunc habet morbum. Unique among the choliambs of Catullus is 60.4, which does not follow this pattern. Semantically, the line falls into two clear halves, ut supplicis uocem and in nouissimo casu, with an elision in the sixth syllable. Loomis, who notes that the most common elisions in the choliambics are at syllables 2, 6 and 8, argues that the purpose of elision at the sixth syllable is ‘to preserve the important break after the fifth syllable’; that is, to preserve the initial colon. ⁵ Since the effect of elision in this line is to eliminate the -em of uocem, the suppliant’s ‘voice’ is not just held in contempt (contemptam haberes), but is in fact cut off as the line is read. This suggests that Catullus is playing here with the (false) etymology of (con)temno that connects it to Greek τέμνω ‘cut’. ⁶ The effect is striking and yet another indication of the poem’s artful construction. Furthermore, given the very common practice of signposting acrostic play by Hellenistic and later authors, we might consider whether it is plausible that contemno/τέμνω hints at the mesostic that runs down those ‘cuts’, the caesuras. ⁷ Possibly, supplicis uox is a further clue to this acrostic/telestic play. That is, we may suppose that supplex is here understood as a formation built on the root of plectere, as if meaning ‘to bend down or under’, or even, as an indication of the suppliant’s posture, ‘embrace’ (so amplect- and complect-). ⁸ In other words, perhaps both the acrostic/telestic and the mesostic are subtly hinted at by the poet, directing the readers to ‘turn’ their eyes up and down the lines.

Another noteworthy feature of the poem is the syntax of pius with the dative. The syntax is not problematic in itself, as it is merely an example, or an extension, of the freer use of the dative of reference, which is common in adjective/adverb + personal pronoun phrases and unexceptional in Catullus. ⁹ The point of interest is that nearly all of the attestations of pius + dative are epitaphic. There are at least fifteen inscriptional attestations of this phrase dating from the first century b.c.e. to the fourth century c.e. They are widely distributed geographically but appear most importantly in Rome and even at Como near Catullus’ Sirmio. With a single exception, literary attestations only appear in the fourth century or later. ¹⁰ This distribution and the fact that thirteen of the fifteen inscriptions are sepulchral seem significant. With this in mind, we may now consider whether there are further characteristics of poem 60 that might be considered epitaphic and, following that, propose some interpretations of the phrase mi pia.

2. POEM 60 AS EPITAPH

The use of names in acrostics and forms of pius/pia are also common in a context that seems suitable to what may be the final poem of the polymetric poems. In what follows I argue that poem 60 exhibits the characteristics of a literary epitaph and that reading it as an epitaph opens new possibilities for interpreting the poem. As noted above, it seems significant that almost all of the attestations of the pius + dative construction listed above come from epitaphs. The deceased are very often referred to with forms of pius and pietas (piissimus/pientissimus) in funerary inscriptions. According to a statistical analysis by Nielsen, these words are the most commonly used after bene merens and are slightly less frequent than dulcis and carus and their superlatives. ¹¹ Catullus, too, is aware of this conventional way of speaking of the dead: si ad pii rogum fili lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater ‘if one mourns at the funeral pile of a dutiful son, when the bereaved mother weeps for her only child’ (39.4–5). pietas was clearly an expectation in Roman conjugal relationships, and both pius and pietas are terms applied to spouses in epitaphs and, in even greater number, to sons or daughters on behalf of their parents. ¹² One is reminded of the marital language Catullus uses of his relationship with Lesbia, but also his surprising use of familial and parental imagery. ¹³

Given these considerations, and the fact that epigraphical acrostics are by and large funerary, ¹⁴ it seems possible that the acrostics of poem 60 and the marked diction of the mesostic would suggest to an ancient reader an epitaph—the last word, as it were, and perhaps yet another strategy of closure in the poem. ¹⁵ What I mean to suggest is not that poem 60 takes the form of an actual epitaph, but that it does what Richard Reitzenstein once wrote of an epigram—namely, that it plays freely with the form of an epitaph without actually wanting to be one. ¹⁶ A look at some of the characteristics of the literary epitaph helps one to see how poem 60 can be read in this manner.

A great deal of attention has been given to the process by which epigrammatic memorialization moved, as Martin Dinter succinctly puts it, ‘from its inscriptional roots to become a literary genre and thus an abstract concept’ and which was thereafter open to reception in other genres. ¹⁷ This was a well-advanced process already in the Hellenistic period, and the remarkable flourishing of epigraphic material in the Augustan period, a so-called furor epigraphicus, corresponds with the incorporation of various kinds of epigraphic writing, including sepulchral epigrams and epitaphs, in the works of Augustan poets. ¹⁸ Dinter, again, argues that epigraphic markers, phrases or formulae ‘that bear the connotation of the inscriptional’, are used ‘to construct epitaphic gestures in Latin poetry’, which is to say that Latin poets adopted expressions associated with funerary epigram in its memorializing function while blurring inscriptional and narrative modes in their poetry, in order to echo or gesture toward the epitaphic. This is similar to what I would like to suggest of poem 60: while not itself an epitaph, certain clearly identifiable features of the poem gesture to that form, which was a common, even traditional, technique of closure.

To be sure, poem 60 does not at first glance resemble an epitaph. It seems to lack even the most common features of an epitaph, such as the name, parentage and birthplace of the deceased. It might be pointed out first, however, that a reading of the poem as literary epitaph is not altogether surprising since elsewhere in his corpus we find Catullus working within the tradition of epitaphs to dead pets (poem 3), employing the characteristic language of epitaphs used to address passers-by (poem 4.1), echoing the language of sepulchral inscriptions at the close of the first Lesbia cycle (uiuat ualeatque, 11.17) and elsewhere (si quisquam, 96.1), including the formal conclamatio (the threefold repetition of frater in poem 101) and the final farewell to the departed (aue atque uale, 101.10). ¹⁹ In poem 60 itself the nouissimo casu of line 4 signals the termination of the relationship and perhaps also life itself. ²⁰ And, though its significance depends on one’s view of the authorial arrangement of the poems, we should also keep in mind that the immediately preceding poem is set in a graveyard (in sepulcretis, 59.2; rapere de rogo cenam, 59.3).

The vogue for literary epitaphs among Hellenistic authors is most clearly evident from the collection of sepulchral epigrams that form Book Seven of the Greek Anthology. Typically, these epigrams identify the name, patronym and birthplace of the deceased, but there developed a noticeable tendency among poets to play with the question of identity in which the ingredients necessary for identification were obscured, engaging the reader in a process of interpretation by creating a puzzle to be solved. Some of these are essentially riddles for the reader, who must piece together clues to derive the identity of the deceased. ²¹ Peter Bing writes about this tendency in epitaph as a product of the increasingly literary nature of a form that was sparked by the separation of the epitaph from its monument and by an expressive brevity that was exploited and refined into a self-conscious artistic device. The form called for a kind of poetic playfulness that engaged the reader and encouraged an act of supplementation that Bing dubbed Ergänzungsspiel. ²² As Bing and others have pointed out, Callimachus appears to have played an important role in pushing the type to its limits. ²³

Among the strategies poets employed to engage the reader are what George Walsh describes as ‘poems that try to make the generic demands of epitaph seem to come from the reader’, wherein the reader questions the monument by reciting the questions the epitaph itself provides. ²⁴ These typically work like a conversation in which the inscription includes the questions of the reader and the response from the tomb in the voice of the dead. But here also we find examples, such as Callim. Anth. Pal. 7.522 (40 G.–P./15 Pf.), in which, as Walsh puts it, ‘what might have been cast as a dialogue between the reader and the epitaph … has been taken over by the reader, who talks … to himself’. ²⁵

Bing further observes how literary epigram plays with a conventional practice of sepulchral epigram in omitting the name of the deceased and inscribing it elsewhere, extra metrum, above or below the poem. This is the case, for example, with Callimachus’ epigram on the tomb of his (unnamed) father (Pf. 21 = 29 G.–P. = Anth. Pal. 7.525) and with the epigram on his own tomb (Pf. 35 = 30 G.–P. = Anth. Pal. 7.415), in which he is identified only by his patronymic (Bαττιάδης). The two poems must be read together in order to make the best sense out of either. Bing draws an important conclusion from this fact:

Callimachus can reckon with the reader’s ability to see through his game and realize that the poems supplement each other. For the reader knows about such family grave-plots, and so possesses the information necessary to play the game. One of the pleasures of Ergänzungsspiel, in this instance, is that the reader must translate the context of such real-life family-plots on to the very different landscape of the scroll: the Sitz im Leben becomes the Sitz im Buch. And if we do this, if we imagine the Callimachus family plot set on the papyrus, it follows with virtual certainty that his two epigrams (though separated in the tradition) were juxtaposed on the scroll. ²⁶

As ‘the deixis of the old inscriptional poems lost its real point of reference’, literary epigrams filled the vacuum by inviting readers to supply those references not merely to people, objects or places but also to other works of literature. ²⁷

There is a final development to consider with regard to precedents: some time ago Reitzenstein noted the tendency among Hellenistic epigrammatists to mark the conclusions of individual books in their collections with literary epitaphs. ²⁸ He singled out the sepulchral epigrams of Nossis, Leonidas and Callimachus, and three by Meleager. ²⁹ This practice was continued by the Roman elegists and, I suggest, by Catullus before them. The adoption of epitaphic language in poetic writing on death seems natural, almost inevitable, and death (real or metaphorical) is a common device of literary closure. ³⁰ Unsurprisingly, then, we may find such epitaphic language placed at or near the end of books. As Teresa Ramsby points out, however, epigraphic passages in poetry are not simply closural, but appear at other key points—often between major themes—to provide structure in a work. Epitaphs, therefore, can themselves be ‘significant elements of the narrative structure’, both internally and in conclusion. ³¹

Now that we have seen how poem 60 might be read as an epitaphic poem, let me return to the words of the mesostic and propose some ideas for its interpretation. To begin, one notes immediately that, unlike the poem’s akroteleuton, the sentiment expressed in the mesostic mi pia appears to be one that is very different from that found in the poem. One could argue that the stark contrast is not so surprising in a poet who followed his odi immediately with et amo; expressions of conflicting emotions are found in other Lesbia poems (such as poems 8, 72 and 92) and seem typically Catullan. ³² Although there is some ambiguity in the word, since it can be applied to several different kinds of family and social relations, including amicae, meretrices and pueri dilecti, it is worth noting that pius, like certain other words Catullus applies to his affair with Lesbia (amicitia, fides, foedus, pietas), belongs to the terminology of aristocratic obligation (for example 76.2). ³³ This language is almost entirely confined to the epigrammatic poems, and there the subject is without exception Lesbia, so its appearance in poem 60 is worth noting. One can only speculate about its use at this point; perhaps it signals a change in theme as foedus-related language becomes more common beginning with poem 64 and appears thereafter in the epigrammatic poems about Lesbia, where she is consistently portrayed as incapable of such devotion (for example desine … aliquem fieri posse putare pium, 73.1–2). ³⁴

Another possibility, however, is that pia here has a somewhat nuanced meaning that is found on epitaphs and which we also find in Catullus. According to Nielsen, the use of pius and pietas often has a particular motivation in epitaphs: ‘Being no longer alive, the dead were unable to demonstrate their pietas and thus to fulfil the expectations inherent in the notion.’ As he notes, the dead son in Catullus poem 39, the pius filius, ‘would not be able to support his mother in old age and eventually bury her as he should have done. Instead, the roles are reversed. She is now doing for him what he should have done for her. In a situation where the son receives pietas from his mother, he is still the one called pius’. ³⁵ If we may assume the same dynamic in poem 60, it resolves any sense of contradiction with the rest of the poem, as the duty that is being commemorated is not Lesbia’s but Catullus’.

There was possibly an additional and altogether different kind of motivation for the use of pia in the mesostic of poem 60. I have already suggested that the aes of the telestic was a play of words on Clodia’s maternal cognomen, Metelli. ³⁶ Although proper names are the common stock of literary acrostics, they are usually authorial signatures such as in the well-known cases of Nicander, Aratus, Ennius and Virgil. As pointed out earlier, however, there is also some precedent for using the name of a lover. ³⁷ I suggest, then, that pia is a nod to another family name—the praenomen of Clodia’s father, Appius (Claudius Pulcher). As David Ross points out, pietas as a matter of loyalty to ties of kinship and alliances of marriage is an important aspect of familial connection or propinquitas, ‘and Catullus can imagine the alliance [with Lesbia] … as one resulting from a marriage between families, a bond of pietas linking the father-in-law and sons-in-law’ (dilexi tum te non tantum ut uulgus amicam, | sed pater ut gnatos diligit et generos, 72.3–4). ³⁸ We even have a precedent for the pun in Varro’s play on the name of Clodia’s older brother, also Appius Claudius Pulcher, and the noun apis ‘bee’ (Rust. 3.16.3). ³⁹ There is no etymological connection between pius (or apis) and Appius, just as Metellus is not etymologically related to Latin metallum (or μέταλλον), but there need not be for the sake of a homophonic paronomasia.

3. EPITAPH AND CLOSURE IN CATULLUS

The use of epitaphic language as a closural or structural element is also a phenomenon we find in Catullus, and here we may set poem 60 in the larger context of his work as well as of Hellenistic and neoteric poetry. The funereal and epitaphic language in Catullus, already noted above, appears in the farewell to Lesbia that marks the supposed break in their relationship (poem 11). It also appears, albeit in a lighter mood, in poem 14 (perderes, 5; periret, 14), which forms the short transition (poems 12–14) between the Lesbia poems and the uersus proteruiores (poem 14B). Catullus’ address to his dead brother forms the core of the last of the longer poems (68). ⁴⁰ Of poem 96, to Calvus on the death of Quintilia, Marylin Skinner writes that ‘Catullus speaks for one last time as a member of an artistic circle and affirms the value of major productions by neoteric colleagues’. ⁴¹ She notes that the juxtaposition of two thematically related poems, in this case 95 on Cinna’s Zmyrna and 96, is also a strategy used to structure epigrams near the conclusion of the libellus. Ettore Paratore, in particular, has argued that Catullus wished to close this poem celebrating the poetry of Calvus with an allusion to his friend’s own poetry (quantum gaudet amore tuo, 96.6; Calvus 28 forsitan hoc etiam gaudeat ipsa cinis ‘perhaps your very ash feels pleasure at this’), which functioned as his own proper σφραγίς. ⁴² Surveying the poem’s use of typical neoteric language and its allusive Alexandrian qualities, he characterizes poem 96 as a programmatic manifesto with connections to both the poetry of Calvus and Hellenistic epigram. ⁴³ Skinner, again, remarks of poem 101, Catullus’ powerful lament over his brother, that ‘the closure it marks by its position in the elegiac libellus—involving the failure of art to bridge the chasm between life and death, the illusory nature of Callimachean poetic immortality, and the end of Catullus’ resolve to sing songs made poignant by his brother’s fate (65.12)—is definitive.’ ⁴⁴

All these considerations help us understand poem 60. The reader engages with the text and comes to ask a single connected question in the act of reading, much as the readers of certain epitaphs recite the often puzzling questions posed therein. That single question is a complex one, because it compels the reader to question the identity of te in line 1 and of the supplex in line 4. Moreover, the first word of the poem, num, suggests a certain incredulity in a question that ought to receive a negative answer. But if it was neither the mountain lioness nor Scylla who mothered the unnamed addressee, then who did? The poem cannot be read without leaving the reader to ponder both the identity and the parentage of the addressee.

The poem is thus something of a puzzle that, in the practice of literary epigram referred to above, invites the reader to supply the appropriate references in order to fill the vacuum it creates. The missing information, as we saw, was often extra metrum in inscriptions and could be found in acrostics. As the conventions of epitaph moved from burial plots to book scrolls, readers might also find that information in the juxtaposition of poems as they were arranged in individual collections. In keeping with that practice, which we also noted is found in Catullus, we may read 59 and 60 as juxtaposed poems. ⁴⁵ As noted, the setting of poem 59 is in sepulcretis and the two poems also share their metrical form. Further, while poem 59 appears to invoke an epigraphic type, the graffito, the first line and a half reads very much like an epitaph, Bononiensis Rufa Rufulum … uxor Meneni, the effect of which is however upended as the first line concludes with fellat. ⁴⁶ As Christopher Nappa points out, the ‘collocation Rufa Rufulum raises questions of genealogy—under what circumstances might there be a woman and a man whose names are a simple and a diminutive form respectively’. ⁴⁷ Thus Catullus hints at incest and then proceeds to adultery and finally indiscriminate prostitution as ‘a bustuaria moecha, a prostitute of the lowest order, whose patrons find her in cemeteries’. ⁴⁸ Nappa also argues that saepe … uidistis in lines 2 and 3 implicates the audience of the poem in a typically Catullan way: ‘For to have seen Rufa ply her trade among the tombstones often, we must have been there often’, that is, presumably, as customers. It is reminiscent too, however, of the epideictic address to the passer-by, common in sepulchral epigram and epitaphic poetry. ⁴⁹

If poem 60 marks the conclusion of the libellus as a literary epitaph, it keeps in following with a number of Catullus’ predecessors mentioned above. For one, there was certainly a precedent for Catullus to follow in attempting a literary epitaph in choliambs. The revival of archaic limping iambics in the fourth century b.c.e. subsequently led to a number of poems on moralizing topics in choliambs, which included Theocritus’ epitaph for Hipponax, fittingly, and Aeschrion’s for Philaenis, the reputed female author of a sex manual. ⁵⁰ Among the fragments of the choliambic poet Phoenix of Colophon is an epitaph for Ninus. ⁵¹ Callimachus’ Iambs 1–5 and 13 are in scazons, the first of which features the ghost of Hipponax. ⁵² Moreover, to Reitzenstein’s list of literary epigrams that marked the conclusions of individual books, we can add Meleager in Anth. Pal. 5.215, a poem that, according to Kathryn Gutzwiller, concludes Meleager’s erotic book and also happens to close with an epitaph: ϵἰ καί μϵ κτϵίναις, λϵίψω φωνὴν προϊέντα γράμματ’ Ἔρωτος ὅρα ξϵῖνϵ μιαιφονίην ‘if you slay me, I will leave letters speaking thus: Look, stranger, on the murderous act of Love.’ ⁵³ The invocation of the language of epitaph in both Meleager and Catullus poem 60 offers additional support to her proposal that allusions to the framing poems of the Garland structure the Catullan corpus. ⁵⁴

4. SIGNING OFF

Finally, I would like to point out the possibility of two additional wordplays in this poem that have not been noticed. While neither is essential to the arguments above, both of them add to our impression that poem 60 is quite a recherché poem with strong closural elements. First, that a lion’s offspring might be described as having a mente taetra seems unexceptional; taeter is applied both to animals (including lions, Rhet. Her. 4.51) and men. In montibus Libystinis … mente dura, however, Catullus perhaps alludes to a learned etymology. The association of rugged mountains haunted by horrifying beasts and hard-heartedness is very old and already a Hellenistic trope. ⁵⁵ What are the montes Libystini? Perhaps they are to be identified with the Atlas Mountains, traditionally understood as the home of the Titan Atlas. Scholars have pointed out that Virgil refers to Atlas durus (Aen. 4.247) in what has been recognized as a reference to the (folk) etymology of Atlas from Greek τλάω/τλῆναι, as suggested in the name Atlas Telemon ‘Atlas the Enduring’. Although it need not have been the case, perhaps he and Catullus were also aware of the claim, as Strabo reports, that the native name for the mountain was Duris. ⁵⁶ At any rate, Catullus’ montibus Libystinis (= Atlas)/durus conceivably involves a wordplay that anticipates Virgil’s Atlas durus. ⁵⁷

Another possibility, however, is that the phrase refers to the mountain range (Jebel Akhdar) surrounding Cyrene, the birthplace of Callimachus, and that we are to take this as a somewhat recherché allusion to a poet whose importance for Catullus is well known. ⁵⁸ The first mention of this region in Catullus is the Libyan sands of Cyrene, identified as the location of the sacred tomb of the ruler Battus. ⁵⁹ It is, of course, in the sepulchral epigram discussed above that Callimachus identifies himself as the descendant of this Battus (Bαττιάδϵω σῆμα). Catullus uses this patronymic in the opening and closing poems of the epigram collection (carmina Battiadae, 65.16 and 116.2). Perhaps, then, we are to read the lion in the hills of Libya alongside the Callimachean Scylla fellatrix, mentioned at the beginning of this paper, as invocations of Callimachus.

The second wordplay is in Scylla latrans, which clearly refers to the Homeric etymology implied by the description of Scylla’s voice as that of a σκύλαξ ‘puppy’ (Σκύλλη … δϵινὸν λϵλακυῖα | φωνὴ μὲν ὅση σκύλακος νϵογιλῆς | γίγνϵται ‘Scylla … barking fiercely, her voice was in fact such as that of a new-born puppy’, Od. 12.85–7). Previously I discussed how this folk etymology and others (for example σκύλλϵιν ‘to shave’ but also, sensu obsceno, ‘to skin’) were used to characterize Scylla and Scylla-like women, and I would add here that the possibility of identifying another wordplay is difficult to resist: a Scylla latrans, or σκύλαξ, by another name in Latin is a catulus or perhaps, as a matter of wordplay, a Catullus. ⁶⁰ Clearly Catullus has no problem working his own name into his poetry when he wishes to do so, including in his choliambics (44.3), but textual sites with acrostics often contain other kinds of sphragis material, including allusions to, or puns on, authors’ names. One might object that there is not a particularly close connection between the context of Scylla latrans in the poem and the name Catullus, but it is not clear that such a connection would have been considered necessary. For example, perhaps one of the best-known puns on an author’s name was Aratus’ play on his own name ἄρρητον (that is, Ἄρητος) at Phaen. 2. This pun seems to have been widely known by ancient authors and perhaps even by Catullus. ⁶¹ But, as Bing noted, ‘The pun, if such it is, is entirely detached from the surface meaning of the sentence.’ ⁶²

On the other hand, one may need look no further than the canine imagery that frequently shows up in iambic poetry, where it is both applied to the poet’s enemies and is also assumed as one aspect of the iambic identity. ⁶³ Consider, as an example of the latter, Callimachus’ characterization of Archilochus (fr. 380 Pf.): ϵἵλκυσϵ δὲ δριμύν τϵ χόλον κυνὸς ὀξύ τϵ κέντρον | σφηκός, ἀπ’ ἀμφοτέρων δ’ ἰὸν ἔχϵι στόματος ‘he drew the bitter bile of the dog and the sharp sting of the wasp, from both he gets the poison of his mouth.’ Such an allusive (cf. Il. 18.322 δριμὺς χόλος αἱρϵῖ) and playful line (iambos from ἰός or even ἰὸς ἀμφοτέρων) must have made an impression. As for Catullus, one thinks of the adeste hendecasyllabi of poem 42 and the moecha turpis who has the poet’s writing tablets. The flagitatio fails even to wring a blush out of the brazen-faced bitch (si non aliud potest, ruborem | ferreo canis exprimamus ore, 16–17). What is left to do except give such a woman the labels she supposedly truly fears: pudica et proba (24)? In lines 8–9 she is attacked with another canine reference and a possible wordplay: mimice … | ridentem catuli ore Gallicāni ‘laughing like a mime actress … with the maul of a Gaulish hound dog’. Skinner calls this ‘a self-referential pun … that, as often in iamb, equates poet and victim’. ⁶⁴ The same might be said of Scylla latrans.