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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Catullus' forty-fifth poem has become in recent years a focus for a certain amount of controversy. In this respect it has not been alone among the poems of Catullus' libellus; Catullan criticism has been undergoing a process of reassessment whereby a somewhat indiscriminate enthusiasm for certain poems has been challenged by an attitude in some cases more sophisticated, in others, perhaps, simply more devious. In the case of the poem under discussion, a traditional view, represented by J. Ferguson who quotes with approval Munro's estimate of the poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’), has been rejected by several scholars who agree that the poem is, in some sense, ironical, while disagreeing in their reasons for so concluding. Before we examine their arguments we should, perhaps, be careful to define precisely what we mean by irony.
page 180 note 2 AJP lxxvii (1956), 12–13.Google Scholar
page 181 note 1 Heilman, R. B., quoted in Shakespeare's Tragedies (ed. Laurence Lerner, Pelican, 1963), 120.Google Scholar
page 181 note 2 See Commager, Steele, HSCP lxx (1965), 84–6.Google Scholar
page 181 note 3 e.g. hymn-form. See Horace's use of it in Odes iii. 21.
page 181 note 4 CP liii (1958), 110–12.Google Scholar
page 181 note 5 Ibid. 110.
page 181 note 6 ‘Even at the peak of his wave Catullus sees that passionate love, of its essence, must break’ (p. 111).
page 182 note 1 The Catullan Revolution (Melbourne, 1959).Google Scholar
page 182 note 2 CP lx (1965), 87–95.Google Scholar
page 182 note 3 For a similar objection see Khan, H. Akbar, Latomus xxvii (1968), 3–12.Google Scholar
page 182 note 4 CP lx (1965), 256–9.Google Scholar
page 182 note 5 Ibid. 258.
page 183 note 1 Op. cit. 257.
page 183 note 2 See Khan, Akbar, op. cit. 6.Google Scholar
page 183 note 3 Op. cit. 256.
page 183 note 4 Analysed by Comfort, H., TAPA ixix (1938), xxxiii.Google Scholar
page 184 note 1 Septimius' position in the line is, of course, fixed; Acme's, however, is not.
page 184 note 2 We note that the difference between Septimius' ‘rhetorical conceit of global significance’ (Ross, , op. cit. 256Google Scholar) and Acme's more intimate language is preserved.
page 184 note 3 So Ellis and Fordyce.
page 185 note 1 Although it is usually hazardous to suggest any specific correspondence between sound and sense, it is not, perhaps, entirely fanciful to suspect that Septimius' p's are intended to express masculine assertiveness and Acme's m's feminine submissiveness.
page 185 note 2 Such as Palaemon in the third Eclogue.
page 185 note 3 See Ferguson, , op. cit. 12.Google Scholar
page 185 note 4 See Collinge, N. I., The Structure of Horace's Odes (Oxford, 1961), 58 ff.Google Scholar
page 186 note 1 See Williams's, Gordon comment, ‘it [the poem] is a blithe Mozartian duet, ending just at the right point where the reader can sense a deepening of feeling’, The Third Book of Horace's Odes (Oxford, 1969), 76.Google Scholar
page 187 note 1 Cf. Baker, , op. cit. 111.Google Scholar