Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us

Whatever their subject or inspiration, many of these poems display the wit, pith, and cleverness that were hallmarks of the avant-garde school to which Catullus belonged, the so-called New Poets—or neoteroi, as Cicero, who preferred the old ones, sniffily referred to them. The orator’s use of the Greek word for “new” was pointed: Catullus and his friends were in thrall to the theories of the Hellenistic Greek scholar and poet Callimachus, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C.E. and worked at the Library of Alexandria, the great literary and cultural center of the Mediterranean world. It was Callimachus who famously proclaimed mega biblion, mega kakon, “a long book is a great evil”; for his Roman acolytes, concision, originality, and vividness, rather than what they saw as the bombast and portentousness of an earlier generation, were the qualities to embrace. Catullus makes no bones about his literary allegiances. One poem, addressed to the grandiloquent work of a d ... Read full article.