Catullus' Divorce

Extract

Why does Catullus in his eleventh poem tell Furius and Aurelius to take an unpleasant message to his girl-friend? After all, in the eighth poem he imagines himself able to do the job alone: ‘uale puella’ (12). Has his courage just evaporated? Or is it that he wants to put his messengers, whom he perhaps does not like, in an awkward position (so Baehrens, and more tentatively Fordyce)? Kroll is not sure why the poet chooses intermediaries. Some think they came in the first place from the girl, who wanted reconciliation, and that this poem is Catullus' response. But the poet is usually able to make it plain, as in poems 7 and 85, that he is replying to a question (cf. Prop. 2.1 and 31); here that standard device is missing, and should not be introduced. This note offers a new solution to the problem, and identifies the imagined situation in such a way that the eleventh poem can be seen to be in harmony with the poet's attitude to his idealised love-affair.