Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

8
PREDECESSORS
The short poems of Catullus, which he himself calls nugae 'trifles' (1.4), confront
the critic with a paradox: poetry of obviously major significance and
power which belongs formally to a minor genre. Only poems 11 and 5 r, written
in the metre associated with Sappho herself, were entitled to lay claim to real
lyric status; Catullus' preferred metres — the elegiac couplet, the hendecasyllable,
the scazon (limping) iambus — belonged outside the grand tradition.
Narrative elegy had of course been written by Callimachus, Philetas and
Hermesianax; and Propertius in particular (3.1.1) acknowledged Callimachus
and Philetas as his masters. 1 It was, however, the short elegiac epigram that
first served Roman poets as a model for a new kind of personal poetry, as it
eventually became. Aulus Gellius and Cicero have preserved five short epigrams
by a trio of accomplished amateurs, Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus and
Qyintus Lutatius Catulus. These are freely adapted from Hellenistic Greek
originals, most of which can be identified in the Greek Anthology. This trio
may have been writing as early as 150 B.C.; the fact that they are cited as a group
by Gellius does not prove that they formed a literary coterie,* but at least it
shows that there existed in the latter part of the second century B.C. a class of
Roman literati who were actively interested in exploiting the short personal
poem in Latin. That this was not a flash in the pan and that this sort of piece
continued to be written during the first century is shown by the fragments of
nine similar, though less polished compositions unearthed among the Pompeian
graffiti. 3 There must have been also continuing stimulation from Greece. More
than one anthology of Greek epigram was circulating in Italy during the century
or so before Catullus; one of the most influential must have been the Garland
(ZT&JXSCVOS) of Meleager, whose own poems flaunted many of the ideas and
images singled out for attack by Lucretius in his famous polemic against false
manifestations of love. 4
More original than such adaptive exercises was the highly experimental Muse
1
The extent of his debt to Philetas is obscure: Ross (1975a) 120 n. 2.
* Ross (1969a) 140-2 and n. 61.
3 Ross (19695), (1969a) 147-9.
4
Kenney (1970a) 381-5.
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