CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

and Lesbia. Twenty-five years have passed since Sarkissian published his book, and by now it is probably
general knowledge that people who are not in the least monogamous can still be experienced as desirable. In
fact, it may be the very degree of sexual liberation that makes these people so attractive, as they promise joys
that the frustrated or repressed crowds have not been able to obtain. It is no chance perhaps that Marilyn
Monroe has become a sexual idol, while millions of faithful wives have not. In any case, in the fermenting
atmosphere of Italy in the Fifties B.C. Catullus met Lesbia and he fell in love with her. She promised
genuine and free love; she was also a nymphomaniac adulteress. Catullus cared more for the content of their
relationship than for its form; it mattered more to him that he was in love with her, and that she seemed to
reciprocate his feelings (or at any rate he was able to think so), than that she was married to somebody else
and that she had other lovers alongside the poet.
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It has already been pointed out that the text does not fall neatly into these thematical sections: some of them
begin in mid-sentence. The one strong break within the poem comes before the start of the epilogue in line
149, where the poet turns to his friend Allius and refers to the preceding lines as hoc … confectum carmine
munus, ‘this gift accomplished by a poem’, as something external to the epilogue (which is of course a fake
move, as the epilogue is anchored safely within the symmetrical structure of the text). But the rest of poem
68b is notable for its unity, despite the range of subjects that it covers; it is delivered in one breath, as it were.
The poem starts off with an address to the Muses. Catullus treats them as his equals: he addresses them
somewhat informally as deae and explains to them that he cannot keep quiet about how Allius has helped
him (lines 41f.). He tells them a poem, and asks them to tell it on to many others (45-48). This is also a
model of what happens in this passage: Catullus is talking ostensibly to the Muses, but in reality to his
readers. After line 52 the Muses are forgotten as the poet continues his monologue, in the course of which he
addresses the goddess Nemesis (lines 77f.), his deceased brother (92-96) and Laodamia (105-108, 117f.,
129f.); the epilogue, on the other hand, is a letter to Allius. This technique is made possible by the fiction
that poetry speaks to all; it is to be developed further by Propertius and Tibullus, whose poems contain some
truly vertiginous shifts of perspective.
Still, the most extraordinary aspect of poem 68b may be neither its form nor its structure, but what is
achieved by Catullus within this framework. At the start he tells the Muses, and by implication also the
reader, that he wants to repay Allius for his past service by preserving his name for the ages to come (lines
41-50). This calls for a poem of the highest quality – and Catullus pulls out all the stops. He employs an
astonishing abundance of poetic devices. Most conspicuous among these are the similes: those of the heat of
Mt Etna and of the springs at Thermopylae (lines 53f.), of the stream (57-62), the storm-tossed sailors (63-
65), the tunnel dug by Hercules (109-116), the birth of an heir to an aged paterfamilias (119-124) and the
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