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

THE NEW POETS AND THEIR ANTECEDENTS
morientur ad ipsam. Nor is it fanciful to hear an echo of the first pentameter in
the second: „ ,. . .
Zmyrnam cana diu jaecula peruoluent.
et laxas scombris saepe dabunt tunicas.
A polemical poem in the Callimachean style was not merely a confutation; it
was, simultaneously, a demonstration of how poetry ought to be written.
Catullus wrote another such poem vilifying the wretched Volusius and his
Annals, 36 Armales Volusi, which has not quite been recognized for what it is. 1
Volusius must have been a neighbouring poet; otherwise there would be no
point to the emphatic reference, Paduam. . . adipsam; and the name is attested on
inscriptions from that part of Italy. Catullus pays Cinna an artful compliment:
his poem will be read even by that far distant river which it celebrates. But there
is a piquancy, also, in the oblique comparison of the two rivers: the broad,
familiar Po with its mud and flotsam, the exotic Satrachus, swift and clear — this
seems to be the implication of cauus; Lucan 2.421—2 applies the adjective
to the Tiber and the Rutuba where they rush down from the Apennines.
Callimachus had used a similar metaphor for long and short, or bad and good,
poetry at the end of his second Hymn: Envy (