Jesse Hill (University of Toronto)
Catullus, Nepos, and the Three Hearts of pater Ennius
This paper adds to the growing body of scholarship on Catullus’ reception of Ennius (Thomas 1982, Zetzel 1983, Prinzen 1998, Maggiali 2008, Agnesini 2012, Hill 2021) by offering a new reading of Catullus’ first poem. A few Latinists have already noted potential allusions to Ennius in this text: the language that Catullus employs to characterize his addressee, Cornelius Nepos, for instance, seems to recall the proem of Annales VII (ausus es unus Italorum / omne aevum tribus explicare chartis [5-6] ~ nec dicti studiosus [quisquam erat] ante hunc … nos ausi reserare … [Ann. 209-10]; Cairns 1969, Prinzen 1999); and just as it does more obviously at Lucr. 1.117-18, the adjective perenne in the poem’s final verse perhaps puns on Ennius’ name (Feeney 1998, Nethercut 2020).
I begin my paper by developing these implicit and tentative observations into an explicit argument: a host of factors (the character of Nepos’ literary achievement, Catullus’ use of puns elsewhere, the fact that he calls Ennius into play at other programmatic moments in his corpus [poems 64 and 116]) validate these and other Ennian allusions within poem 1. In fact, appearing in connection with Nepos’ Chronica and Catullus’ libellus at the poem’s beginning, middle, and end, pater Ennius looms much larger in this text than has hitherto been recognized.
Ennius’ presence here, as my paper goes on to argue, has two central effects. First, it is programmatic in a literary-historical sense: the opening poem of the Catullan corpus – just like the closing poem (Hill 2021) – presents its author and his addressee as auctores working within an Ennian-Callimachean tradition (and here I develop those readings of poem 1 that view Nepos as a kind of “storico neoterico” [Gigante 1967] who shares Catullus’ literary sensibilities [Wiseman 1979, Tatum 1997, Woodman 2003, Gaisser 2009, Agnesini 2013, Gale 2015]). Catullus’ and Nepos’ Ennius is no hirsute rustic (contra Prop. 4.1.61), antithetical to neoteric literary principles and postures – he is rather, like Callimachus, a central source of those principles and postures.
Second, poem 1’s Ennian allusions are programmatic in a cultural sense. As is well known, Catullus and Nepos were both born in Cisalpine Gaul, a region that was not legally incorporated within Roman Italy until after the probable date of Catullus’ death (Ando 2016). Scholarship on Catullus has drawn attention to the anxieties that these Gallic origins engender within the poet’s corpus (Fitzgerald 1995, Dench 2005), and some have noted how poem 1, with its insistence that Nepos is unus Italorum, makes a tendentious claim on Cisalpine Gaul’s behalf (Wiseman 1987, Damon 2021). I argue that Catullus exploits pater Ennius’ cultural authority (Cole 2006, Elliott 2013, 2020) and draws on that three-hearted poet’s expansive vision of Roman identity (Glauthier 2020) so as to substantiate the cultural claim at the centre of his poem: by presenting Nepos’ Chronica and his own libellus as programmatically Ennian, Catullus the Transpadane is able to legitimize himself and his Transpadane addressee as distinctly Roman. A liber per-Ennius is a liber Romanus.