Catullus more or less disappeared from sight between Isidore of Seville who in the seventh century quoted two passages (attributing one to Calvus) and somewhere around 1300 when Hieremias de Montagnone of Padua quoted seven passages in his Compendium Moralium Notabilium, followed in 1329 by a citation from the 22nd poem in an anonymous Liber Florum Moralium Auctoritatum in Verona. Catullus reemerges in the fourteenth century implausibly, like Ovid and Martial, as a purveyor of moral saws.

Two shafts of light break the darkness. One is a ninth-century MS (Paris Lat. 8071), Codex Thuaneus (T), once owned by Jacques de Thou (1553-1617), containing the 62nd poem, Epithalamium Catulli, in an anthology of Latin poetry. Centuries older than the rest of the tradition, in the lacuna after 62.32 and in other mistakes it is close to the rest. Still, it is independent and important. 62.7 is a simple example. Modern editors read Oetaeos. T has oeta eos, the rest hoc eos.

From external sources we have only one indication of Catullus’s birth and death, and that is wrong. Jerome’s Chronicle dates him 87-57 B.C. saying that he died in his thirtieth year. It is highly probably that C. Memmius, with Catullus on his staff, was in Bithynia in 57-56, and certain that Catullus was still writing in 55, as he alludes to Caesar’s expedition to Britain (11.11-12). Jerome is more likely to be in error about the date than the age. This led Lachmann to propose the dates of 77-47, supposing that Vatinius could not swear by his consulship before becoming consul in 47, but this is unjustified as we know from Cicero (Vat. 5.11). Paul Maas in a lively but fragile article during the Second World War noted that no poem requires a date before 56 (unless Lesbia is Clodia Metelli – and she may have remarried: see below), thought that Catullus’s brother died in 54, and that Catullus, made two voyages to Asia and lived till about 52. The case for this was further taken up by the argument (of long standing) that Jerome must have confused the consulate of Q. Caecilius Metellus Nepos in 57 with that of Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius in 52. But Metellus Pius was not one of the original consuls in 52 and could not have given his name to the year.

Levens referred to the twentieth-century cult of energy and emotion. In fact the most influential English poet of the first half of the century, T. S. Eliot, was marked by a learned allusiveness which was typically Hellenistic and Alexandrian. It would not be true to say that the Hellenistic poets have in any way ousted their predecessors in the affection of classical scholars, though we have seen major editions of Callimachus by R. Pfeiffer and Theocritus by A. S. F. Gow. But more attention has been paid to them and there have been more monumental studies of the Hellenistic Age as a whole.

Wilamowitz in his two-volume Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos (1924) covered the poetry at length in masterly fashion, and in the same year Ph. E. Legrand in Le Poésie Alexandrine produced a little gem of sensitive interpretation. Wilamowitz included Catullus in his survey showing the debt of his more formal poetry to Hellenistic models.

Catullus chooses to introduce his readers to the woman central to his life in the two poems about her pet sparrow. She is not there identified even by the pseudonym Lesbia, but, whatever other women there may have been in the poet’s life, there is no serious doubt that all the six love-poems in the first eleven refer to the same woman. We have come to appreciate that the first of these (2) is a hymn, the sparrow who drew Aphrodite’s carriage taking on her divinity, that it stands within Hellenistic traditions, and that the language is highly erotic in its details. There is one potent ambiguity: strouthos in Greek and its Latin equivalents, turtur and the like, are used of the male sex-organ. This gives a strong ambiguity to the second poem (3), where G. Giangrande has argued that the death of the sparrow has an underlying meaning of sexual impotence. Not everyone accepts this, but there is no doubt about the ambiguities of passer, pipiare, mouere, gremium, and mors. The point is not that the poem is about sexual impotence, but that it must be read at more than one level.

The four longer poems which constitute the second scroll have received their share of attention. Apart from the standard commentaries, the wedding-hymn for Manlius Torquatus and Junia Aurunculeia has been the subject of an extended commentary by P. Fideli and some pertinent remarks by Gordon Williams; the second wedding-hymn elicited a major article by no less a scholar than E. Fraenkel; Attis and Peleus and Thetis have attracted a host of interpreters.

I am not competent to evaluate translations into any language other than English, but I am told that O. Weinrich’s rendering into German verse (1960), in an edition which is both scholarly and sensitive, is outstanding.

In general the versions which have appeared since the war are free from the sort of artificiality which had dogged most earlier versions, a hangover from the Victorian age. (Catullus had his own artificiality, but that is a different story.) They are also free from expurgation and bowdlerizing, complete, frank in approach and in language, in fact authentically reflecting the original. The first of these, and one of the best, was J. Lindsay, Catullus: the Complete Poems (1948). Lindsay had made an earlier translation, but this was better. He was a vigorous Australian, an original but erratic scholar, and a minor poet of genuine merit. Other meritorious versions of the full corpus have since appeared, by F. O. Copley (1957), R. A. Swanson (1959), C. H. Sisson (1966), Peter Whigham (1966), James Michie (1969), R. Myers, and R. J. Ormsby (1972), Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1978). Several of these translators are both scholars and men of letters, holding university posts in classics. Several are poets in their own right: Sisson once wrote: ‘I have had my eye on Catullus for years – as what poet would not who could make out even a little of the Latin?’ Several have made some reputation for translations of other authors. Jean Granarolo comments that the versions are often scholarly or, at all events, conceived for a wide popularization. I omit one version of which a reviewer said that the reader was ‘confronted with a Catullus who seems to have stepped from the pages of Finnegan’s Wake’.