Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace

Introduction

Horace's only mention of Catullus occurs in the final poem of his first collection, the initial book of Satires, published probably in 35 BCE. We come in on the narrator arguing that, for a great poet, particularly one writing in a genre like satire, whatever brings a smile (ridiculum) can often put across "mighty matters" better than what is bitter or sardonic (acri) (16-19):

illi scripta quibus comoedia prisca viris est
hoc stabant, hoc sunt imitandi; quos neque pulcher
Hermogenes umquam legit neque simius iste
nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum.

By this means those who wrote Old Comedy gained success, in this
they are worthy of imitation--men whom pretty Hermogenes never
reads nor that ape of yours whose skill lies in declaiming nothing
except Calvus and Catullus.1

What is meant as a rebuke to the simius, who has no imagination and can only imitate others, serves equally as a compliment--as the saying has it, the sincerest form of flattery--to Calvus and Catullus, friends who are on occasion linked by later authors. Both were key figures in the group of neoteric poets, the so-called poetae novi, active in the middle decades of the first century BCE and writing fresh verse in a variety of meters, often after the manner of Callimachus. Their work set a standard for originality that challenged poets to come, whatever genre they embraced. Put another way, to Horace, publishing his first book of poetry some twenty years after Catullus's death, the earlier master has already become a paragon, worthy of emulation but, for the very reason of his excellence, easily showing up the mediocrity of imitators lacking individual talent.

When we survey the four books of odes that form Horace's lyric masterpiece, we find no immediate mention of Catullus, nor in fact of any earlier, non-epic Roman forebear (at C. 4.8.15-20 Horace pays vicarious attention to Ennius for the immortalizing power of his verse). By contrast, on several occasions Horace refers to the poets of archaic Greece as creative ancestors of obvious importance (he names Sappho and Alcaeus at C. 2.13.25-27, and the latter again at C. 4.9.7). This public bow is reinforced in two ways. First, the meters that bear their names are the ones that Horace most favors (thirty-seven poems are written in alcaics, two-thirds that number in sapphics). Second, there are frequent instances where Horace begins an ode with a clear gesture toward a poem of Alcaeus via close rendering of the Greek original.2 We presume that his contemporary readership would have had the privilege, as well as the enjoyment, of testing Horace's genius against the background of the model poems that we now lack nearly completely.

Perhaps the most surprising is the later poet's failure to mention Catullus in poems like C. 3.30, where "Horace" takes pride in his achievement, in the initial gathering of three books of odes, published in 23 BCE. In the opening poem of Book 1 he had concluded by mention of the Lesbian lyre (Lesboum barbiton, C. 1.1.34) as the instrument that Polyhymnia must tune for him, and of his own hoped-for position as one situated among "lyric bards" (lyricis vatibus, 35). In C. 3.30, the concluding sphragis, or "seal" poem, that stamps the poet's "I" on what had gone before, it is Aeolian song (Aeolium carmen, 13) that is his boast to have led in triumph to Italian beats. In Epi. 1.19, moreover, where he discusses his heritage and accomplishment in more detail, it is to Alcaeus that he specifically turns (Epi. 1.19.32-33):

hunc ego, non alio dictum prius ore, Latinus
volgavi fidicen.

He is the one, not sung before by other lips, that I, the Latin
lyre-player, have made known.

In the ode, Horace sidesteps the issue by using "chief " (princeps, C. 3.30.13) rather than "first" (primus) to describe his accomplishment, and in Epi. 1.19 he reserves the latter adjective to qualify his performance in the Epodes, not the Carmina.3 Nevertheless, in neither instance does he take note of Catullus, whether directly or indirectly.

One reason for this lack of public obeisance to Catullus on Horace's part, a reason that may seem superficial to the modern reader but was of importance to the literary world of classical antiquity, is purely technical. It is the question of meter. Because of the prominence of iambic meters among Catullus's so-called polymetric poems, numbers 1-60, Quintilian, the late-first-century CE writer on rhetoric, ranks him among writers of iambic verse. This literary type he distinguishes for its sharpness (acerbitas), an abstraction, also bestowed by him upon the satirist Lucilius, that has about it notions of vitriol and anger combined with acuity of wit. Horace alone among Roman authors, according to Quintilian, deserves to be singled out as a lyricist worthy of mention: