CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

from a private letter. This could be explained in at least two ways. Catullus could have been writing for two
sorts of public at the same time: in the first place for Manlius, but in the second place also for the general
reader, expecting posterity to look over his shoulder, as it were. 97 Obviously this need not have been a fully
conscious process. This would explain why he does not give us detailed information about Manlius’ personal
circumstances, but why he takes eight lines to recapitulate the letter he is replying to. One should compare
Eduard Fraenkel’s analysis of the recapitulation at the start of poem 50, which is ostensibly a letter from
Catullus to C. Licinius Calvus: there six lines are taken up by a description of the literary games played by
the two young men on the previous evening. 98 Fraenkel notes that since Calvus could be expected to
remember what he had done the night before, the description must have been included for the sake of the
general reader. He may well be right, and one can interpret the recapitulation in the first ten lines of poem
68a in a similar way, as intended for the general reader – though an alternative interpretation may well be
possible. In correspondence recapitulations can be used to show that the author cares for and pays attention
to the addressee: witness evergreen formulas of correspondence such as ‘It was so lovely to see you last
night, my dear’. However, it remains true that poem 68a is reasonably easy to understand in broad lines. It is
possible to see it, along with much of Catullus’ personal poetry, as Janus-faced, as intended for its addressee
and perhaps a small circle of friends on one hand, and for the general public on the other hand, with ample
opportunity for conflict between the interests of these two groups of addressees. As general readers we are
puzzled by the obscurity of poem 68a; meanwhile, Manlius probably expected to receive a more personal
reply (though I cannot bring myself to think that he was disappointed at receiving such a beautiful poem).
Alternatively, poem 68a could be less obscure than one might expect due to the generic pressure exerted on it
by the medium of poetry. Then as now, most poetry in circulation had been written for the general public: it
was concerned with matters of general interest and did not normally contain obscure references to matters
that only a limited circle of people surrounding the author could be familiar with. So even if Catullus did not
actually intend poem 68a for the general reader as well as for Manlius, he may have met the needs of the
general reader as well because this is what he normally did in his poems, or this is what he was used to in
poems in general. But this may be a tautological restatement or indeed a sub-category of the previous
explanation: a poet who is (also) writing for the general public without being aware of it, simply because of
the pressure exerted on him by the genre he is working in, is writing for a general public as much as one who
is writing (also) for the general public out of conscious choice.
97 Many Roman prose letters were in fact intended for the general public: one should think of the first nine books of the
letters of Pliny the Younger, of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, and of the ‘letters’ that served as a preface to various
works of literature. On the category see Cugusi 1983: 115-135 (with caution: Cugusi p. 115 considers as “lettere
pubbliche” all those “la cui divulgazione non lede il segreto epistolare”).
98 Fraenkel 1957: 314.
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