CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

to be rather flexible; evidently Catullus was able to treat mythological lore in a more orderly way than the
complex realities of his own life.
Why did he structure the poem in this way? Westphal argues that the structure is traditional and goes back
ultimately to the division of the citharodic nomes into parts that is attributed by Pollux to Terpander. 139
There the parts would have corresponded to each other in the sequence A-B-C-B’-A’, with a mythical
narrative standing in the centre, as in Catullus 68b. The same structure would have been exhibited by
Stesichorus’ songs and by Pindar’s non-epinician poetry, which is where Catullus would have encountered it.
Westphal was writing in 1867, but already in 1892 Franz Skutsch pointed out that his reconstruction of the
terpandric nome has been refuted by Crusius. 140 Skutsch noted that he could not find anything similar to the
compositional scheme of poem 68b anywhere in ancient literature, but he believed that it was surely based
on a model in Alexandrian poetry. 141 More recently, Stephen Harrison compared the structure of the proem
to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and suspected that the two poems may share a Hellenistic model. 142 But it is
the question whether we need to look for its model at all. My view is that the extravagant structure of
Catullus 68b is just one of the characteristics that make it a virtuoso piece: Catullus was not following any
example, but he simply gave an exceptional structure to the poem with which he wanted to honour Allius.
Lyne may have hit the mark when he called Catullus 68b an experimental poem – one that was meant to
stand out, rather than conforming to any tradition. 143 Ring-composition was common in ancient literature
from the Iliad onwards 144 – but it appears to have been a spectacular one-off strategy on the part of Catullus
to compose a poem that consisted of pairs of thematic blocks of text that were arranged symmetrically
around a central core.
*****
139
Westphal 1867: 73-92; Pollux 4.66 = Terpander test. 39 Gostoli.
140
Franz Skutsch 1892: 138 = 1914: 47; on the structure of the nomoi see now Gostoli 1990: XXIIIf. --- Westphal’s
idea that lost poems by Pindar and Stesichorus must have displayed a similar structure can no longer stand in view of
the substantial fragments of Pindar’s paeans and of Stesichorus’ poetry that have been rediscovered since the beginning
of the 20 th century.
141
Franz Skutsch 1892: 144 = 1914: 52.
142
Thus he told me uiua uoce. The pattern that he detects is not completely symmetrical, but ABCDEDCB in the case
of Lucretius 1.1-145, and ABCDEFEDCB in the case of Catullus (where his sections and mine are by and large
identical, except that he sees lines 1-40 as the initial section and lines 141-148 as the second section on Allius). The
problem with this is that lines 1-40 do not appear to be connected in any way to 41-160.
143
Lyne 1980: 52.
144 On ring-composition in the Iliad see Mark Edwards 1991: 44-48, with references.
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