8 - Predecessors

Summary

The short poems of Catullus, which he himself calls nugae ‘trifles’ (1.4), confront the critic with a paradox: poetry of obviously major significance and power which belongs formally to a minor genre. Only poems 11 and 51, written in the metre associated with Sappho herself, were entitled to lay claim to real lyric status; Catullus' preferred metres – the elegiac couplet, the hendecasyllabic, the scazon (limping) iambus – belonged outside the grand tradition. Narrative elegy had of course been written by Callimachus, Philetas and Hermesianax; and Propertius in particular (3.1.1) acknowledged Callimachus and Philetas as his masters. It was, however, the short elegiac epigram that first served Roman poets as a model for a new kind of personal poetry, as it eventually became. Aulus Gellius and Cicero have preserved five short epigrams by a trio of accomplished amateurs, Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus and Quintus Lutatius Catulus. These are freely adapted from Hellenistic Greek originals, most of which can be identified in the Greek Anthology. This trio may have been writing as early as 150 B.C.; the fact that they are cited as a group by Gellius does not prove that they formed a literary coterie, but at least it shows that there existed in the latter part of the second century B.C. a class of Roman literati who were actively interested in exploiting the short personal poem in Latin. That this was not a flash in the pan and that this sort of piece continued to be written during the first century is shown by the fragments of nine similar, though less polished compositions unearthed among the Pompeian graffiti. There must have been also continuing stimulation from Greece.