CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

This solution was proposed by Frank. 53 It was also adopted by Skinner, who however treats 68a and
68b as two separate poems. 54 It runs into two objections.
First of all, Allius does not look like a pseudonym. It does not resemble the three pseudonyms used
elsewhere by Catullus: Lesbia for his beloved, passim (one Clodia according to Apuleius Apol. 10);
on one occasion (79.1) Lesbius for someone close to her (to all appearances for her brother, the
notorious tribune P. Clodius Pulcher); and Mentula for Caesar’s chief engineer Mamurra. None of
these pseudonyms are Roman names, at least not of people at Catullus’ level of society (Lesbius and
Lesbia are attested as slave names, but Lesbia was a free woman with a husband but with lifestyle
choices of her own, witness 11.17-20, 37, 79.1 and 68.146) and their meaning is clear at first sight –
Lesbia means ’a woman from Lesbos’, the island of famously beautiful women and of the fabled
poetess Sappho; Lesbius is the one-off pseudonym of a kinsman of Lesbia’s; and Mentula means
’Prick’. Allius, however, is no „flimsy pseudonym” or „redender Name”, as is suggested by Skinner,
but a real Roman gentile name, that of the male members of the gens Allia (see RE s.v.). Its
resemblance to alius is fortuitous and limited (the distinction between single and double consonants
is important in Latin) and would hardly have swayed a Roman reader into thinking that it was a
pseudonym, just as an English reader encountering the name ’John Brown’ would take it to be the
real name of one of the many men called John Brown, and not the pseudonym of someone with
brown hair or a brownish complexion.
But there are problems with the very notion that Catullus would be using a pseudonym here in order
to maintain secrecy in a delicate matter. On other occasions his attitude to discretion varies – for his
beloved he uses the pseudonym Lesbia, but he declares his intention to ad caelum lepido uocare
uersu the love-affairs of his friend the shy Flavius (6.17) and gives away much potentially
embarrassing information about himself (see poems 32 and 56) and his friends (10.13, 6.4f.). In lines
41-148 of carmen 68 he shows the same inclination to tell all: after the exclamation non possum
reticere … qua me Allius in re / iuuerit (lines 41f.) he sets out a veritable poetic programme of
preserving his friend’s name for posterity (43-50), so that no spider should weave its web over
Allius’ abandoned name (49f.). The phantasy implies a tombstone, with inscribed on it the name of
the deceased: his real name, evidently, and not a pseudonym given by the poet for the occasion. It
would have no point to try to make Allius famous under a pseudonym.
In short, Tenney’s theory is inconsistent both with the circumstance that Roman readers would have
taken Allius to be a real name rather than a pseudonym, and with the fact that Catullus states that he
wants to preserve his friend’s name from oblivion.
53
Tenney 1914: 68.
54
Skinner 2003: 143.
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