CATULLUS, GAIUS VALERIUS (84?-54 B.c.), Rome's greatest lyric poet. According to St. Jerome, in his continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, Catullus was born at Verona in 87 B.C., and died in 57 B.C. at Rome, aged 3o. His names, as given above, may be regarded as certain, but internal evidence shows that certain poems were written two or three years after 57 B.C., the date of Catullus' death according to Jerome. Thus cxiii. was composed in 55 B.C., lv. either in that year or later, while xi., xxix., xlv. all appear to be written after Caesar's first invasion of Britain (55 B.e.) . Since no poem is certainly later than S4 B.C., it is best to retain Jerome's reckoning of Catullus' age as thirty years but to suppose him to have lived from 84 to S4 B.C.
Jerome's statement that Catullus was born at Verona is con firmed by other authorities. His father was important enough to act as Caesar's host, and it was probably at or near Verona that Caesar accepted the poet's apologies for the attacks on himself and Mamurra (xxix. and lvii.: see Suetonius Jul. 73) ; xciii. may represent Catullus' reply to earlier advances on Caesar's part. The poet's attitude was not due to republican sentiment, but the result of personal animosities. In xxix. he arraigns Pompey along with Caesar, and in xi. he recognizes the latter's greatness.
Catullus' complaints of poverty are not to be taken very se riously. He possessed a villa at Tibur as well as a retreat at Sirmio on Lake Garda, and the poems prove that he had the means to figure in the best society. Still his purse was of ten no doubt, as he says, "full of cobwebs" (xiii. 8) .
On reaching manhood Catullus was sent to try his fortune at Rome. The premature death of his brother in Asia Minor seems to have recalled him to Verona (cf. lxviii.) . In 57 B.C. he made a belated attempt at a public career by accompanying Memmius, the patron of Lucretius, to Bithynia, of which province Memmius had been appointed governor. His hopes of lining his purse at the expense of the provincials were not realized, and in the spring of 56 B.C. he left Nicaea (xlvi.) and returned to Italy, perhaps on his own yacht (cf. iv.) ; en route he visited his brother's tomb in the Troad (ci.) . His delight at seeing Sirmio once more is charmingly expressed in xxxi. The poems show that his last years were divided between Verona and Rome. As a Transpadane, Catullus found many compatriots in the capital, and among them several repre sentatives of the new movement in poetry led by Valerius Cato, himself a native of Cisalpine Gaul. The poems reveal him on terms of intimate friendship with certain of the younger mem bers of this circle; e.g., Calvus (xiv., 1., liii., xcvi.), Cinna (x., xcv., cxiii.), Cornificius (xxxviii.). He appears to have been acquainted with the two leading orators of the day—Cicero (xlix.), and Hortensius (lxv. and xcv.). Among friends of less eminence he counted a Caelius (lviii.) whom some identify with Cicero's protege M. Caelius Rufus, thinking that lxix. and lxxvii. addressed to a Rufus, refer to the same man; this is possible, but in that case another Caelius must be meant in c., since Cicero's friend was not a native of Verona. Particularly dear to Catullus, but otherwise unknown to us, were two friends Veranius and Fabullus (ix., xii., xiii., xxviii., xlvii.), while in i. he dedicates his libellus to the biographer and historian Cornelius Nepos, who in after years left it on record that in his opinion Catullus and Lucre tius were the two greatest poets of that period (Nepos, Life of Atticus xii., 4). Among Catullus' enemies the most furiously at tacked in the poems—apart from Caesar and his lieutenant—are the pair Furius and Aurelius (xv., xvi., xxi., xxiii., xxiv., xxvi.), and one Gellius, who is the target of no fewer than seven epigrams. Other victims of his invective are Ravidus (xl.) and Rufus (see above), his rivals in love; a freedman Thallus (xxv.) ;'a ridiculous fop Egnatius (xxxvii., xxxix.) . To a false friend Alfenus he writes more in sorrow than in anger (xxx.) . The most important in fluence in Catullus' life was that of his mistress Lesbia. Her real name was Clodia (Apuleius, Apol. Io) ; Catullus chose the pseu donym for its connection with Sappho (li., a translation of a famous ode of Sappho, was perhaps a first tribute to his mistress' charms). There can be little doubt that Clodia was the notorious sister of the demagogue, married in 63 B.c. to Q. Metellus Celer and suspected of responsibility for his death in S9 B.C. Cicero mentions her several times in his Letters, and has left a graphic picture of this dangerous beauty in the speech (Pro Caelio), in which he defended M. Caelius Rufus (see above), also one of her lovers, against the charge of having tried to poison her. Though Cicero writes as an advocate and Catullus as a lover, their de scriptions are not inconsistent, and the final proof of identity is contained in lxxix., the Lesbius of which poem clearly covers a Clodius, not, however, the demagogue P. Clodius, but Sex. Clodius, a kinsman and associate of Publius, whom rumour represented as having relations with Clodia (Cicero, De Dom. 25) similar to those attributed to Lesbius by Catullus. A recent attempt to identify Lesbia with a younger sister and namesake of Metellus' wife, who married L. Lucullus and was divorced by him for al leged relations with her brother, appears unconvincing. Catullus was Clodia's lover during Metellus' lifetime (cf. lxxxiii.) ; the husband's death apparently brought other rivals on the scene, and Catullus' allegiance had been sorely tried before he left for Bi thynia, but xi., the final renunciation, is subsequent to his return (see above). The data do not suffice to fix the course of the liaison more exactly.
Catullus' poetical activity began soon after his assumption of the toga virilis (cf. lxviii. 15-17); references in the poems sug gest that he sometimes published his pieces separately or in small groups (cf. i. 4; xvi. 3.; xli1. ; xliii. 7; liv. 6) . Later (cf. i.) he formed a collection of his compositions and dedicated it to Cor nelius Nepos, but it is a moot point what this libellus contained, whether it was identical with the present collection, and, if not, how the latter was formed. As arranged in the mss., the poems fall into three sections, viz., (I) i.–lx., shorter lyric pieces, (2) lxi.–lxviii., longer poems in a variety of metres, (3) lxix.–cxvi., elegiac epigrams. The hypothesis most in favour recently is that our present collection was formed in outline by Catullus himself before his death, and that afterwards his literary executors in serted in the groups so arranged sundry other material discovered among his remains, including unfinished pieces like xiva. and lx.
Though Catullus was an Italian of the Italians in character and temperament, it is impossible to appreciate his poetry correctly except in relation to Greek and more particularly Alexandrian poetry. Like that of the other novi poetae, his work has two aspects. On the one hand we have the shorter pieces in which any and every emotion of the moment finds instant expression, on the other the poems which earned Catullus the title of doctus, con siderably longer than his nugae but short when compared with the Annales of a Volusius (xxxvi., xcv.). The poet's debt to Alex andrian models in these longer compositions, though hard to con trol to-day owing to the fragmentary survival of later Greek poetry, is universally admitted. Catullus himself declares lxvi. to be a translation from Callimachus (cf. lxv. 16) ; lxiv. is cast in the mould of a Hellenistic epyllion; lxviii., a mixture of the personal and narrative elegy, framed as a letter to a friend, also has Alex andrian forbears; lxii. adapts an epithalamium of Sappho after the manner of the later Greeks; even lxiii. (the Attis) which gives an impression of striking originality probably follows in the track of Callimachus or some other Alexandrian. The most original of these longer poems is probably lxi., the epithalamium for Manlius Torquatus and Vinia (or Iunia) Aurunculeia, since here Catullus has tried to fuse the native versus Fescennini with the Greek Iiymenaeus; it contains touches, e.g., 216-220, marked by a ten derness unknown otherwise before Virgil. Even in the nugae Catullus' debt to Greece is greater than was realized till recently. Just as the life of the yEWTEgoc with its interest centred on love and letters had been anticipated by that of the later Greeks (com pare 1. with the lines of Hedylus [ flor. circ. 290 B.C.] preserved in Athenaeus xi. 473a ; see also xxxv. and xxxviii.) , so the forms, lyric iralyvtov and elegiac epigram, to express these emotions, had been fixed by the same predecessors. Hellenistic lyric only surviving in meagre fragments, Catullus' originality appears greater here than in his elegiacs which we can compare with the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, but metre (especially the sca zon iambic and phalaecan hendecasyllabic), subject-matter, and of ten phrasing indicate his obligations. The poems on Lesbia's sparrow (ii. and iii.) and that on the yacht (iv.) had Hellenistic prototypes, and an Alexandrian element crops up even in such an ardent love-poem as vii. (cf. 11. 3-6) . Nevertheless it is in these shorter pieces that Catullus is most Roman and most him self. The attacks on the smaller fry who had incurred his dis pleasure often revolt us to-day by their gratuitous obscenity, but the iambi on Caesar and his associates, which recall but far sur pass in bitterness the popular lampoons current at the expense of the imperator unicus, were justly considered by their chief victim to have branded him with perpetua stigmata. On the other side the Lesbia cycle cannot be paralleled in ancient literature for sin cerity of passion, passing through all the stages of joyous con tentment, growing distrust, and wild despair to the poignant adieu of the disillusioned lover.
The best edition of Catullus is that by W. Kroll (Leipzig, 1923). The best English commentary is that by R. Ellis (2nd ed., 1889). Neither the current Oxford text (1904) nor the Teubner (1923) can be considered satisfactory. Volume vi. of the Loeb Classical Library (1912) contains a text and translation of Catullus along with Tibullus and the Pervigilium Veneris. The most recent translations into Eng lish are by Sir William Marris (1924) and F. A. Wright (n.d.). See also H. A. J. Munro, Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus (2nd ed., 1905) ; K. P. Harrington, Catullus and his Influence (1923) ; Frank Tenney, Catullus and Horace (1928). (E. A. B.)