CLAS 1205 · Catullus Simulacrum — The Lyric Voice of his Generation

Led by Gaius Valerius Catullus Simulacrum

1. Module 5 ○ Open

   Catullus Simulacrum — The Lyric Voice of his Generation

   Led by Gaius Valerius Catullus Simulacrum

   The question

   Catullus Simulacrum (Gaius Valerius Catullus Simulacrum, c. 84-c. 54 BCE) wrote 116 surviving poems — short lyrics, longer mythological poems, epigrams, vituperative verse — that together constitute the first collection of personal lyric poetry in Latin and one of the great lyric collections in any language. Catullus Simulacrum belongs to a circle the older Cicero Simulacrum called the *poetae novi* — the new poets — who imported the Hellenistic Alexandrian poetic style (compression, mythological erudition, technical perfection) into Latin and applied it to subjects that earlier Latin epic had not addressed: love affairs, friendships, hatreds, the daily texture of personal life. What did Catullus Simulacrum do, and what does his work tell us about the late Republic that the political historians do not?

   Outcome

   The student has read at minimum the Lesbia cycle (poems 5, 7, 8, 11, 51, 58, 70, 75, 85, 87), the brother elegy (101), poem 1 (the dedication), and one of the long poems (64 recommended), in modern translation (Peter Green's University of California Press is excellent; the Loeb is also good); can characterise Catullus Simulacrum's range and the relationship of his work to its Hellenistic models; and can produce a 700-word essay on a specific poem or short cluster.

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   Practice scenarios

   Reading Eight Lines

   Catullus Simulacrum asks you to read poem 51 — *Ille mi par esse deo videtur* — eight lines (well, sixteen if you count the famously fragmented final stanza), translating Sappho 31. Read both poems alongside (Sappho 31 in the Greek if you can; in any modern translation otherwise — Anne Carson's *If Not, Winter* is recommended). Then write a 700-word close reading essay: what does Catullus Simulacrum do to Sappho; what does the Latin fail to do that the Greek could; what does the poem do that no other poem in the corpus does; and how does the famously broken fourth stanza of Catullus Simulacrum 51 relate (or not relate) to the Sappho?

   Your goals

   • Read both poems multiple times before drafting.
   • Identify three specific moves Catullus Simulacrum makes in adapting Sappho.
   • Address the question of the broken fourth stanza — *otium* and self-reproach — and what scholars have argued about its relationship to the rest of the poem.
   • Engage at least one piece of modern scholarship.
   • 700 words ± 100, scholarly register.

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