CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

methods and ideals of the doctus poeta; what is expected of him is Alexandrian poetry, translated from, or
modelled on, Greek, and for that he needs his library” – a view that had already been held by Kroll, who
writes that “in order to write poetry or to translate in the ancient sense of the word, Catullus needs a small
library containing the works of the authors who can be considered as valid examples.” 119 In fact Catullus
does not say so, and none of his surviving compositions (apart from his two translations from Greek) require
him to have consulted his source texts over and again; though he uses earlier literature extensively, he does
not appear to be more familiar with it than any erudite reader. Poem 68a itself shows that he is perfectly
capable of composing poetry off his cuff. The run of thought in lines 33-39 points in a different direction.
Catullus explains that he only has one boxful of books with him, as he left the rest at Rome (lines 33-36), and
therefore (quod cum ita sit, line 37) he hopes that Manlius will not be offended that he does not comply with
his request. This implies that he needs the books not in order to be able to comply, but in order to comply,
evidently by sending some of them to Manlius.
What kind of books did Manlius need? During his sleepless nights ‘the Muses do not relieve him with the
sweet song of the poets of old’ (lines 7f.), either because he does not have those poets to hand or for some
other reason, for example because he is already familiar with their works. Here Catullus qualifies ‘the song
of the poets of old’ with the complimentary epithet dulcis, ‘sweet’. Catullus and his ‘neoteric’ friends are
sometimes believed to have disliked all that was old and to have conceived of themselves as radical
innovators – but one should note not only Catullus’ high regard for Sappho and Callimachus and his friend
Cinna’s warm words about Aratus (frg. 11 FPL 3 ), but also his considerable debt to Ennius. 120 Catullus calls
bad poets the bane of his own epoch (14.23 saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae) and as a rule he reserves his
invective for contemporaries such as Caesius and Aquinus (14.18), Suffenus (14.19 and poem 22), Volusius
(poem 36 and 95.7f.) and Hortensius (95.3, if his name should not be emended there with Munro to
Hatrianus or with Housman to Hatriensis, ‘the man from Hatria’, i.e. Volusius). It is only once that he
criticizes an earlier poet, namely the fourth-century B.C. elegist Antimachus of Colophon – not simply for
being bad, but for being bad but nevertheless popular in his day (at populus tumido gaudeat Antimacho,
95.10). Just like Callimachus, Catullus directs his criticism not against inferior trends in the past, but against
the production and appreciation of inferior poetry in his own age.
Manlius’ troubled mind is not soothed by good classical poetry (lines 7f.). Either he has none at hand, or
what he has fails to distract him. He has asked Catullus for munera Musarum. He may have asked for
contemporary poetry, not because he preferred it to the classics, but because he needed unfamiliar readingmatter
to distract him from his worries – and Catullus, many of whose friends were poets themselves, would
119 Kroll on 68.33: “C. braucht, um dichten oder im antiken Sinne übersetzen zu können, eine kleine Bibliothek, in der
namentlich die als vorbildlich geltenden auctores vertreten sein müssen.”
120 Cinna on Aratus: frg. 11 FPL. Catullus and Ennius: Froebel 1910.
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