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The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic. It describes the Epicurian lifestyle of the poet and his friends, as well as, most famously, his love for the woman he calls Lesbia. SOURCES AND ORGANIZATION Catullus's poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one (of two) copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300. These three surviving copies are stored at the '', eight longer poems, and forty-eight Epigram s. There is no scholarly consensus on whether or not Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems. The longer poems differ from the ''polymetra'' and the epigrams not only in length but also in their subjects: There are seven Hymn s and one mini- Epic , or epillion, the most highly-prized form for the "new poets". The ''polymetra'' and the epigrams can be divided into four major Thematic groups (ignoring a rather large number of poems eluding such categorization):
All these poems describe the Epicurean lifestyle of Catullus and his friends, who, despite Catullus's temporary political post in Bithynia, lived withdrawn from Politics . They were interested mainly in Poetry and Love . Above all other qualities, Catullus seems to have sought ''venustas'', or charm, in his acquaintances, a theme which he explores in a number of his poems. The ancient Roman concept of ''virtus'' (i.e. of Virtue that had to be proved by a political or military career), which Cicero suggested as the solution to the societal problems of the late Republic , meant little to them. But it is not the traditional notions Catullus rejects, merely their monopolized application to the '' Vita Activa '' of politics and War . Indeed, he tries to reinvent these notions from a personal point of view and to introduce them into human relationships. For example, he applies the word ''fides'', which traditionally meant faithfulness towards one's political allies, to his relationship with Lesbia and reinterprets it as unconditional faithfulness in love. So, despite seeming frivolity of his lifestyle, Catullus measured himself and his friends by quite ambitious standards. INSPIRATIONS Catullus deeply admired Sappho and Callimachus - Catullus 51 is largely a translation of a poem of the former. He was also inspired by the corruption of Julius Caesar , Pompey , and the other aristocrats of his time. INFLUENCE Catullus was a popular poet in the Renaissance and a central model for the neo-Latin love elegy. By 1347 , 2007 Catullus influenced many English poets, including , 2007 He has been praised as a lyricist and translated by writers including Thomas Campion , William Wordsworth , and Louis Zukofsky . STYLE Catullus wrote in many different meters including Hendecasyllabic and Elegiac Couplet s (common in love poetry). All of his poetry shows strong and occasionally wild emotions especially in regard to Lesbia . He also demonstrates a great sense of humour such as in Catullus 13 . Many of the literary techniques he used are still common today, including hyperbaton: ''plenus saculus est aranearum'' (Catullus 13), which translates as ‘ {Link without Title} purse is all full – of cobwebs.’ He also uses anaphora eg. ''Salve, nec minimo puella naso nec bello pede nec…''( Catullus 43 ) as well as Tricolon and Alliteration . He is also very fond of diminutives such as in Catullus 50 : ''Hestero, Licini, die otiose/multum lusimus in meis tabellis'' – Yesterday, Licinius, was a day of leisure/ playing many games in my little note books. HISTORY OF THE TEXTS OF CATULLUS POEMS Far more than for major Classical poets such as Virgil and Horace, the text of Catullus' poems is in corrupt condition, with omissions and disputable word choices present in many of the poems, making texual analysis and even conjectural changes important in the study of his poems. Stephen J., ''Notes on the text and interpretation of Catullus'', Google HTML version; for the original WordPad document available on the Web: [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sjh/documents/mannheim.doc. , both versions accessed January 12 , 2007 A single book of poems by Catullus barely survived the millennia, and the texts of a great many of the poems are considered corrupted to one extent or another from hand transmission of manuscript to manuscript. Even an early scribe lamented the poor condition of the poem and announced to readers that he was not to blame: Even in the twentieth century, not all the major manuscripts were known to all major scholars (or at least the importance of all of the major manuscripts was not recognized), and some important scholarly works on Catullus don't refer to them. Before the fourteenth century In the Middle Ages, Catullus appears to have been barely known. In one of the few references to his poetry, Isadore Of Seville quotes from the poet in the seventh century. In 966 Bishop Rather Of Verona , the poet's hometown, discovered a manuscript of his poems "and reproached himself for spending day and night with Catullus' poetry." No more information on any Catullus manuscript is known again until about 1300. The major source manuscripts up to the fourteenth century A small number of manuscripts were the main vehicles for preserving Catullus' poems, known by these capital-letter names. Other, minor source manuscripts are designated with lower-case letters. In summary, these are the relationship of major Catullus manuscripts:
Descriptions and history of the major source manuscripts
In print In 1472 the text was first printed in Venice by printer Wendelin Von Speyer . There were many manuscripts in circulation by this time. A second printed edition appeared the following year in Parma by Francesco Puteolano , who stated that he made extensive corrections of the previous edition. Over the next hundred years, Poliziano , Scaliger and other humanists worked on the text and "dramatically improved" it, according to Stephen J. Harrison : "the ''apparatus criticus'' of any modern edition bears eloquent witness to the activities of these fifteenth and sixteenth-century scholars." The divisions of poems gradually approached something very close to the modern divisions, especially with the 1577 edition of Joseph J. Scaliger, ''Catulli Properti Tibulli nova editio'' (Paris). :"Sixteenth century Paris was an especially lively center of Catullan scholarship," one Catullus scholar has written. Scaliger's edition took a "novel approach to textual criticism. Scaliger argued that all Catullus manuscripts descended from a single, lost archetype. ... His attempt to reconstruct the characteristics of the lost archetype was also highly original. [I n the tradition of classical philology, there was no precedent for so detailed an effort at reconstruction of a lost witness." In 1876, Emil Baehrens brought out the first version of his edition, ''Catulli Veronensis Liber'' (two volumes; Leipzig), which basically constituted the text from G and O alone (with a number of emendations). In the twentieth century The 1949 Oxford Classical Text by R.A.B. Mynors, partly because of its wide availability, has become the standard text, at least in the English-speaking world. One very influential article in Catullus scholarship, R.G.M. Nisbet's "Notes on the text and interpretation of Catullus" (available in Nisbet's ''Collected Papers on Latin Literature'', Oxford, 1995), gave Nisbet's own conjectural solutions to more than 20 problematic passages of the poems. He also revived a number of older conjectures, going as far back as Renaissance scholarship, which editors had ignored. Another influential text of Catullus poems, is that of George P. Goold, ''Catullus'' (London, 1983). NOTES REFERENCES Oxford Latin Reader, by Maurice Balme and James Morewood (1997) COLLECTIONS AND COMMENTARIES EXTERNAL LINKS
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