This page intentionally left blank CATULLUS AND THE POETICS OF ROMAN MANHOOD This book applies comparative cultural and literary models to a reading of Catullus’ poems as social performances of a ‘‘poetics of manhood’’: a competitively, often outrageously, self-allusive bid for recognition and admiration. Earlier read- ings of Catullus, based on Romantic and Modernist notions of ‘‘lyric’’ poetry, have tended to focus on the relationship with Lesbia and to ignore the majority of the shorter poems, which are instead directed at other men. Professor Wray approaches these poems in the light of new models for under- standing male social interaction in the premodern Mediter- ranean, placing them in their specifically Roman historical contextwhilebringingouttheirstrikingly‘‘postmodern’’qual- ities. The result is a new way of reading the fiercely aggres- sive and delicately refined agonism performed in Catullus’ shorter poems. All Latin and Greek quoted is supplied with an English translation. david wray is Assistant Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He received his doctorate from Harvard and has previously taught at Georgia State University and Kennesaw State University. He has published articles on Roman and Hellenistic Greek poetry and literary translation and is currently an Associate Editor of the journal Classical Philology. C A T U L L U S A N D T H E P O E T I C S O F R O M A N M A N H O O D DAVID WRAY ab           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org ©David Wray 2004 First published in printed format 2001 ISBN 0-511-01802-9 eBook (netLibrary) ISBN 0-521-66127-7 hardback D . M . S Louise Scott Wray 1931–1997 Deiner Mutter Seele schwebt voraus. Deiner Mutter Seele hilft die Nacht umschi¤en, Ri¤ um Ri¤. Paul Celan Contents Preface Page ix 1 Catullan criticism and the problem of lyric 1 2 A postmodern Catullus? 36 3 Manhood and Lesbia in the shorter poems 64 4 Towards a Mediterranean poetics of aggression 113 5 Code models of Catullan manhood 161 Works cited 217 Passages discussed 235 General index 243 vii Preface Like Catullus himself, this book about his poems came to maturity in exciting times. A first version of it, well under way when the monographs of Paul Allen Miller and Micaela Janan gave their names to a Catullan year, had only just been submitted as a dis- sertation when William Fitzgerald’s Provocations first came into my hands. Since that time, ongoing dialogue with these refined and complex Catullan voices, and with others as well, has brought fuller elaboration and sharper focus to the critical views expressed in these pages. But exciting times never come as an unmingled gift of fortune, and what began as a revision for publication took, in the event, nearly as long as the original writing. The end result is not so much a rewritten book as a new one. By all accounts, Catullus still commands a wider audience than any other Latin poet. I have written with a varied readership in mind throughout, perhaps especially in the first two chapters on literary and critical constructions and receptions of the Catullan corpus and its author. The second chapter’s discussion of Louis Zukofsky and postmodern poetics, while ultimately crucial to the broader arguments of the book, keeps Catullus’ own words largely out of the debate for a longer time than some readers may have expected. Patience and indulgence, if tested in Chapter 2, will, I hope, be compensated in Chapter 3, where the contours of a Catullan poetics of manhood are traced through a sustained and nearly exclusive focus on the text of the poems. Chapter 4 brings comparative material drawn from the work of cultural anthro- pologists to bear on a delineation of what has always seemed to me a defining and irreducible aspect of Catullus’ poems: the aggression personated by their speaker. It was Marion Kuntz who, as a dissertation reader, first suggested to me the idea of eventually attempting to situate Catullan invective in a comparative Medi- ix