In poem 40 Catullus is warning Ravidus not to carry on with his current intentions, asking repeated rhetorical questions about what has made him take such a poor decision, why he should have fallen in love with (or potentially already started a relationship with) his own (that is, Catullus’) lover, and why he should want to become famous at any cost. Catullus is giving Ravidus ‘fair warning before it is too late’.Footnote ¹ Catullus says in the final two lines of the poem: eris, quandoquidem meos amores | cum longa uoluisti amare poena, ‘You will be, since you have chosen to love my lover | at the risk of receiving a long punishment’. It is posited in this article that Catullus is making a pun on the word eris through the homophony of the Latin verb eris and the Greek noun ἔρις. The tone of the poem is not hostile but ‘dry and incisive’,Footnote ² which contributes to the possibility that Catullus is using wordplay to maintain a playful tone.

It has long been established that Catullus incorporates wordplay in his poems,Footnote ³ including bilingual puns.Footnote ⁴ Jane Ellen Harrison gives the earliest discussion of bilingual wordplay in Catullus.Footnote ⁵ In poem 84, Harrison highlights how Catullus mocks Arrius’ affected aspirated pronunciation of the Ionian Sea, which almost seems to whip the sea into a foamy state, by calling it ‘Hionios’. Harrison argues that the Greek word χιόνεος ‘snowy’ is marked by horribilis ‘dreadful’ in line 10. This mirrors how in poem 40 ἔρις seems to be marked by rixa in line 4 and by poena in line 8. Over half a century later, Bernd Latta demonstrated how in poem 1 Catullus uses lepidus to echo the Callimachean vocabulary λεπτός/λεπτότης.Footnote ⁶ It is possible for the reader to see a wordplay here because, although lepidus (‘charming’) and λεπτός/λεπτότης (‘thinness’, ‘fineness’, ‘delicacy’) are not synonyms, they do exhibit similar connotations. This is similar to what we find in poem 40, because, while ἔρις and rixa or ἔρις and poena are not synonyms, they do present similar connotations and provide a lexical field in which semiotic activation is possible.

In more recent years there have been several studies, notably by Richard Hunter and Robert Cowan, on bilingual puns in Catullus. Hunter notes that two bilingual puns can be read in poem 68, where eros in line 76 ‘lords/masters’ can be read as the Greek ἔρως (‘love’), marked by amore (‘love’) in line 73; likewise, in line 116 Hebe nec longa uirginitate foret (‘and that Hebe might not remain a virgin for a long time’) could imply the Greek ἥβη ‘bloom of youth’, which is appropriate for a line concerned with a girl's loss of virginity.Footnote ⁷ A few years after Hunter, Cowan argued convincingly that in poem 32 Catullus was punning on the name Ipsitilla and the hapax legomenon ἴψ ‘woodworm’,Footnote ⁸ and that the poet's erect penis bored through his cloak in the same way the woodworm, ἴψ, bores through wood. In a recent article, it has been argued that in poem 50 Catullus plays on the homophony of the Latin a te and the Greek ἄτη, with the pun marked by the words Nemesis and poena in the same line.Footnote ⁹ This is not to mention the numerous other (non-bilingual) puns.Footnote ¹⁰ The frequency with which Catullus employs wordplay elsewhere increases the likelihood of a pun in poem 40.

Owing to the fact that eris shares a distinct similarity in sound (paronomasia) with the Greek word ἔρις ‘strife, quarrel’, we can both read the line ‘You will be, since you have chosen to love my lover’ and understand Eris as an answer to the rhetorical question in lines 3–4: quis deus tibi non bene aduocatus | uecordem parat excitare rixam? So the goddess that sets Ravidus on the path to a senseless quarrel is Eris, because he has chosen to love the poet's lover and is now at risk of being punished.

But the suggestion that a pun can be read does not, of course, entail that a pun should be read.Footnote ¹¹ It is important to establish how the pun works in the context of the poem and how our appreciation of the poem is enhanced by the wordplay. First, in addition to the Latin verb eris and the Greek noun ἔρις being homophones, they are also metrically equivalent, which naturally contributes to the paronomasia. As Robinson Ellis points out, ‘Eris, quandoquidem is metrically noticeable, (1) as allowing strong emphasis to fall on the short syllable of Eris, (2) as bringing into prominence, by its position in the verse as an unelided word, the prosaic quandoquidem.’Footnote ¹² The emphasis the poet places on eris may thus add to the possibility that wordplay is at work. The similarity between the Latin and the Greek words is developed by the way in which poem 40 interacts with Greek poetry and imitates the opening lines of Archil. fr. 172:

In poem 40, Catullus seemingly alludes to Archilochus’ reaction to Lycambes’ apparently unhinged actions through his own exaggerated reaction to Ravidus’ supposed insanity.Footnote ¹³ Although Archilochus’ fragment does not contain the word ἔρις, Catullus’ allusion to the Greek literary tradition heightens the possibility of bilingual wordplay, because the poem assumes an awareness on behalf of the reader of Archilochus’ poem and thus there can be an assumption that the reader would, in turn, be more alive to the possibility of a bilingual pun.

Any markers earlier in the poem or links between ἔρις and another word in the immediate vicinity of the poem, in what Vallat calls the ‘semiotic activation’Footnote ¹⁴ of wordplays, would give greater reason to believe that Catullus is making a pun on ἔρις. One marker in the poem which flags up the possibility of the eris–ἔρις pun for the reader comes at the end of line 4. Catullus asks why Ravidus should want to start a quarrel, excitare rixam. While ἔρις is not etymologically connected with rixa, as was once suggested,Footnote ¹⁵ it nevertheless shares the same semantic field concerned with strife, quarrels or battle. In the Iliad ἔρις is frequently used to depict strife and the contests of war. So, in Book 1 Agamemnon says of Achilles: αἰεὶ γάρ τοι ἔρις τε φίλη πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε, ‘for always strife and wars and battles are dear to you’ (Il. 1.177; repeated at 5.891, Zeus to Ares). Ἔρις is also personified as a goddess in the Iliad as the force which creates quarrels: Ζεὺς δ᾽ Ἔριδα προΐαλλε θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν | ἀργαλέην, πολέμοιο τέρας μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχουσαν, ‘Zeus sent Strife to the swift ships of the Achaeans, the dread goddess, bearing in her hands a portent of war’ (Il. 11.3–4; cf. 11.73). The instance of Zeus sending Strife is especially poignant, because it is picked up by line 3 of poem 40 when Catullus asks which god has stirred Ravidus to start the quarrel quis deus … excitare rixam, and thus highlights the divinely sent nature of ἔρις.

One of the most famous occurrences of ἔρις in Greek literature concerns the origins of the Trojan War, which is mentioned by Proclus in the Cypria and Ps.-Apollodorus in Bibl. E3.2. Ἔρις comes to the marriage-feast of Peleus and starts a dispute among Hera, Athena and Aphrodite about who is the most beautiful. The amorous context in which Ἔρις is concerned in Proclus and Ps.-Apollodorus is echoed by Catullus in lines 7–8 of poem 40 (meos amores … uoluisti amare), when the poet tells Ravidus that he will suffer a long punishment for loving his lover. It is also worth noting that in poem 66 rixa is also used in the context of a wedding night, where Catullus uses the word to refer to sexual intercourse in the phrase ‘night-time struggle’ nocturnae … rixae (66.13).

In poem 40 Catullus connects the idea of strife with that of love and sickness of mind. For Catullus the behaviour of Ravidus in loving the poet's own lover can only be the result of some sickness of mind—something potentially divinely sent (by Eris). The connection is made in the first line of the poem in the alliterative phrase mala mens, and then in the final two lines through the use of polyptoton in amores … amare. The connection of love with sickness is, of course, nothing unique to Catullus. We see it in Virgil concerning Orpheus and his love for Eurydice: cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem (‘when a sudden madness seized the incautious lover’, Verg. G. 4.488); and concerning Dido: habes tota quod mente petisti: | ardet amans Dido traxitque per ossa furorem (‘that which you have sought with your whole mind you have; Dido burns in madness and draws the madness through her bones’, Verg. Aen. 4.100–1). While line 100 refers to the desire of Venus and not of Dido, the close proximity of mente, amans and furorem in line 101 provides the same lexical field of love and madness we see in Catullus with mala mens and amores … amare.

Moreover, it is possible that Catullus may be hinting at a further connection through his use of the noticeable polyptoton amores … amare via the Greek counterpart of amor, ἔρως, which can be connected with ἔρις, as is indicated by the famous wordplay employed by Apollonius of Rhodes (Argon. 4.445–9):Footnote ¹⁶

Both Wilhelm Kroll and Kenneth Quinn note that this passage is alluded to by Catullus at 64.94–5,Footnote ¹⁷ which implies that Catullus was himself aware of the wordplay in ἔρως–ἔρις. It is also worth noting Hunter's argument concerning eros at 68.76, which—he argues—can be read as ἔρως, as it is marked by amore a few lines earlier.Footnote ¹⁸ Both examples only heighten the likelihood that Catullus is employing a pun in his use of eris–ἔρις in poem 40.

There is also another possible dimension which the ideas of love as madness and of Ravidus’ impending punishment seem to suggest, and that is a connection between Eris and Erinys. We are told in the Scholia in Aeschyli Septem Aduersus Thebas at 726b that Eris can stand for Erinys, ὑποκοριστικῶς Ἔριν εἶπε Ἐρινύν (‘diminutively, Eris is called Erinys’), and that Erinys, which can mean madness, comes from a ruinous mind (schol. Aesch. Sept. 700j Ἐριννὺς γίνεται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἔρρειν τὸ φθείρειν καὶ τοῦ νοῦς, ‘Erinys comes from the destruction brought about from an error and from the mind’). Thus Eris works within the lexical field of love as madness. The Erinyes are also spirits of justice and vengeance, as exemplified in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and it is here that another marker of the eris–ἔρις pun appears, which is the word poena ‘punishment’ in line 8. The semantic link between Eris, Erinys and punishment is well established, being explicitly brought out by Hes. Op. 804–6:

The Erinyes, goddesses of revenge and retribution, are connected by Hesiod with Eris, stating that they assisted at the birth of Horkos, whom Eris bore. The Erinyes, writes Hesiod, are daimones who will pursue people who take false oaths, and who, by association, connect strife with the qualities of crime and punishment (at least by familial association).

The well-established precedent for bilingual and other wordplay in Catullus’ work heightens the possibility of wordplay elsewhere. The eris–ἔρις pun presents similarity in sound and metre, and is marked by rixa in line 4. But the eris–ἔρις pun seems to go beyond a simple double meaning. In addition to rixa, the poet promotes a semantic field of love, sickness of mind, and punishment through which it is possible to see how ἔρις can evoke the Erinyes—those spirits of vengeance who can bring both madness and punishment. Eris is thus a force which seems to have brought about Ravidus’ madness, answering the question quis deus in line 3, and also (through its equivalent Erinyes) looks forward to poena in line 8 and to the punishment he will suffer. The sophisticated nature of the pun can be argued to maintain a light-hearted tone in the poem, rather than a serious one, which helps keep the poem on the side of dry wit rather than scathing attack.