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A Further Point in Catullus' Attack on Volusius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
Extract
Among a number of short Latin poems by Walter Savage Landor, of which an interesting appreciation was published recently by Bruce Mackinnon, of British Columbia, is one particularly attractive pastiche of Catullan hendecasyllables. In many respects this poem could claim to reproduce the manner of Catullus himself. My own uneasiness was aroused by the rhythm of the opening line:
I was aware of no rule for the composition of this type of verse which was infringed here; but the run of the words appeared curiously prosaic. After some consideration, I identified the metrical feature in question as the opening of the verse with two disyllables: the former spondaic (no examples were to turn up, as it happened, with a trochaic or iambic word), the latter of necessity trochaic. It is a rhythm often employed by Landor in the fifty and more pages of hendecasyllables found in the 1847 edition of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (pp. 125–78), occurring for example in poems 3, 5, 9, 10, and three times in 12. A particularly striking example is found in 88.8, quaedam scripsit avunculus… which nobody would mistake for a production of Catullus.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1980
References
NOTES
1. Durham University Journal, n.s. 41 (1979), 55–9Google Scholar.
2. AJP 71 (1950), 22–39, 365–78Google Scholar.
3. I was probably rash, in the papers cited, to admit the word ‘oxytone’ as a description of these words. However, the evidence there set out indicates that all the words in question share something of the scbwebende Betonung (as E. Fraenkel called it) which somehow avoided the heavy homodyne opening of such exceptional lines as the Virgilian ibant obscuri (Aen. 6.268). Professor O. A. W. Dilke, who has provided useful advice on this matter, suggests that the Catullan examples should include 14.24, siqui forte, and 32.9, verum, siquid, on the grounds that siquis and its forms should be regarded as single words. I should doubt that the accentual effect of these would be the same even as, e.g., that of quamvis or tandem (both common at the start of the hexameter); and have the same doubts about 23.16, a te sudor abest. But if these examples are classed with the first three, they still leave the last totally exceptional.
4. AJP loc. cit. 31–2.
5. Whether or not the annales Volusi are the annales… ponderosi of Tanusius (Sen. Ep. 93.11, cited by Fordyce, who doubts it), they were evidently written in hexameters, where such an opening would not normally be admitted by Catullus himself (apart from the sonorous urbis Dardaniae in 64.367, which Virgil was to copy, and the anomalous large multiplici ibid. 304).
6. So McLeod, C. W., in CQ 23 (1973), 307Google Scholar.
7. e.g. in 22.4 (elisions), and perhaps in 95.
8. For the Odes, see Bradshaw, A., Philologus 114 (1970), 148–50Google Scholar; for the Ars Poetica, see Dilke, , JRS 62 (1972), 161–3Google Scholar.
9. 1.6.91, 2.7.75, 84, 121 (with a pause), 133, 4.3.52. 1.6.9 might be counted: iam se, quisquis is est. There are no examples in 4.9.