Basil Dufallo, University of Michigan
Catullus drew heavily upon Roman comedy, as an increasingly expansive body of scholarship has shown (see esp. Polt; cf., e.g., Goldberg; Agnesini; Uden; Hanses 294–316). No study, however, has yet fully examined the influence of comedy upon what may be Catullus’s most challenging work, poem 68A–B (here taken as one poem; for discussion see, e.g., Leigh). This is not to say that the poem’s comic dimensions have gone completely unrecognized: Holzberg (167), for example, followed by Skinner (64), acknowledges the comic premise of the whole text, namely, that an acquaintance has provided a house to a young man in love for an illicit meeting with his beloved. This paper, however, while adding new details to our understanding of the poem’s reminiscences of comedy, also proposes a new interpretation of what the comic echoes are doing here, and how they potentially change our view of a poem that has been read by turns as one of the most earnestly biographical, surprisingly “modern,” and richly lyrical in the Catullan corpus (see, e.g., Hubbard; Syndikus 239–96; Martin 3–25, 178–83; Johnson).
The “plot” of Catullus 68, as summarized here, is far more comic than has previously been recognized. The brother of a literary protagonist travels eastward and dies (cf. Ter. An. 923–28). Separated in two different cities, the protagonist and his friend communicate by letter about their situations (Pl. Bac., 176–77, 385–404). The protagonist expresses deep emotion over his lost brother, because of whom he has given up other pursuits (Pl. Men. 242–46). He presents himself as unable, after the loss of a close family member, to enjoy his former pleasures (Ter. Hau. 53–167) but expresses his delight over a sexual encounter hyperbolically in figurative language (Ter. Eu. 1031–35). A sympathetic acquaintance has helped him achieve an illicit liaison with his beloved by granting him access to a house (Pl. Mil. 139–44). A married woman, or matrona, is associated with adulterous desire (Pl. Cas. 199–201) and takes on a dominant role over a more passive man (Pl. Cas. 815–824). The protagonist professes to accept that the woman he desires will continue having sexual relations with other men (Ter. Eu. 1073–85; cf. esp. Hanses 309–11).
Given the number and variety of these comic elements, my claim is that the poem’s speaker continually directs his audience toward positive dramatic and emotional outcomes that the audience knows (far better than we do) from comedy but leaves unresolved the question of whether he thinks that these outcomes have any hope of really coming to pass. The audience remains tantalizingly and pleasurably in doubt, that is, as to whether the speaker really “believes” that his experience resembles comedy and that this makes it more tolerable by means of the psychological distancing and closure that such realization provides, or whether the speaker “knows” at some level that he is deceiving himself by trying unrealistically to fit his life into a stage narrative.