¹ Poliziano, Misc. 6. Giovanni Pontano had previously alluded to the obscene sense of Catullus’ passer (Parth. 1.5, esp. lines 17–29), and perhaps Panormita had as well (Herm. 1.9.25), but that is not the same thing as an actual argument with supporting evidence. For the opposing view, that the obscene sense of passer is unhelpful to our understanding of c.2 and 3, see Jocelyn, H. D., ‘On Some Unnecessarily Indecent Interpretations of Catullus 2 and 3’, AJPh 101 (1980), 421–41Google Scholar; and for the view that it hurts our appreciation of the relevant epigrams of Martial, see Pitcher, R. A., ‘Passer Catulli: The Evidence of Martial’, Antichthon 16 (1982), 97–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Poliziano wrote mihi instead of nunc; cf. Catull. 5.7: da mi basia mille (‘give me a thousand kisses’).

³ It is possible, of course, that Martial created an obscene reference where Catullus intended none; for such an interpretation, see Jones, J. Ward Jr., ‘Catullus’ Passer as Passer’, G&R 45 (1998), 191–3Google Scholar.

⁴ Giangrande, G., ‘Catullus’ Lyrics on the Passer’, MPhL 1 (1975), 137–46Google Scholar. Genovese, E. N., ‘Symbolism in the Passer Poems’, Maia 26 (1974), 121–5Google Scholar, has not been received as well, in part because he imagines that Lesbia's passer is all at once a real pet, a symbol for the poet's penis, a magic charm, and a rival lover. For a more recent attempt to blend the obscene reading of the passer with a real pet bird, a brave reader might consult A. Vergados and S. O'Bryhim, ‘Reconsidering Catullus’ Passer’, Latomus 16 (2012), 101–13.

⁵ Hooper, R. W., ‘In Defence of Catullus’ Dirty Sparrow’, G&R 32 (1985), 162–78Google Scholar.

⁶ Thomas, R. F., ‘Sparrows, Hares, and Doves: a Catullan Metaphor and its Tradition’, Helios 20 (1993), 131–42Google Scholar.

⁷ In what follows, I will focus on the obscene interpretation of c.3, which involves impotence, but I should at least acknowledge that this poem is the second part of a diptych with c.2, where the obscene interpretation leads in another direction: Catullus wishes that he could play with the ‘sparrow’ just like Lesbia does (line 9); it appears that our poet has not quite his girlfriend's skill in handling the male member.

⁸ I assume that the collection called the Passer, arranged by Catullus himself, dedicated to Cornelius Nepos, and beginning really with c.2, included many of the poems at the beginning of the Liber Catullianus as we now have it, at least up to c.26 and perhaps further. For a convenient overview of the topic of Catullus’ editorship, see Skinner, M. B., ‘Authorial Arrangement of the Collection: Debate Past and Present’, in Skinner, M. B. (ed.), A Companion to Catullus (Malden and Oxford, 2007), 35–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But although I will argue here that Furius and Aurelius read c.3 as well as c.5, I do not assume that they read them for the first time in the Passer. Such a scenario would leave no time for them to read Catullus’ love poems, level their accusation against him, and provoke his response in c.16, which appeared in the same collection. Instead, I assume that this scandal occurred during a period when the passer-poems (c.2 and 3) and the kissing-poems (c.5 and 7) were circulating independently of any collection. Furius and Aurelius read them and accused Catullus of engaging in an unmanly sex act (perhaps in scurrilous verses of their own, if the former was indeed Furius Bibaculus), and that Catullus responded to this accusation swiftly in c.16. Then all of these poems came together in the Passer, so that Catullus’ contemporary readers could relive the drama that they had witnessed in real time.

⁹ Winter, T. N., ‘Catullus Purified: A Brief History of Carmen 16’, Arethusa 6 (1973), 262–3Google Scholar. In this sense, we can accept the interpretation of Kroll, W., Kommentar zu Catull (Leipzig, 1923)Google Scholar, ad c.16.12–13: ‘ein echter Mann begnügt sich nach dieser Anschauung nicht mit basia’. See also Wiseman, T. P., ‘Catullus 16’, LCM 1 (1976), 16–17Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Catullus himself acknowledges that impotence can lead to sexual deviance (c.67.20–8); in this case, a young bride's father-in-law must pick up the slack for his impotent son. For a clear example of impotence leading to cunnilingus, see Mart. 11.25, and the detailed discussion of F. M. Sapsford, The ‘Epic’ of Martial (Diss. Birmingham, 2012), 155.

¹¹ The charge of Furius and Aurelius, that Catullus is parum pudicum, can certainly imply os impurum. In c.21, Catullus threatens Aurelius with irrumatio ‘oral violation’ if he keeps seeing Juventius, and says that stopping is the only way for him to stay ‘pure’ (desine, dum licet pudico, line 12) – that is, to be spared irrumatio.

¹² Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (‘I will violate you anally and orally’, c.16.1 and 14) is my source for the final point. I will add here that I have always assumed the placement of these lines to be iconic. The line at the head of the poem represents oral violation, and the same line repeated at the end of the poem represents anal violation. The reader is invited to picture Catullus moving from the top to the bottom of the two men.

¹³ See the articles cited in n. 4, 5, and 6.

¹⁴ The quote is from S. E. Hinds, ‘Generalising about Ovid’, Ramus 16 (1987), 7. K. S. Myers, ‘Psittacus Redux: Imitation and Literary Polemic in Statius, Silvae 2.4’, in C. Damon, J. F. Miller, K. S. Myers, and E. Courtney (eds.), Vertis in Usum. Studies in Honor of Edward Courtney (Leipzig, 2002), 189–99, shows how Statius later picks up on Ovid's imitating parrot. I cite Hinds because earlier scholars tend to treat Am. 2.6 as a second-rate imitation of c.3; on which, see B. W. Boyd, ‘The Death of Corinna's Parrot Reconsidered: Poetry and Ovid's Amores’, CJ 82 (1987), 201, n. 6. Hinds, at least, seems to appreciate that it is a first-rate imitation, and that this is no defect in the poem – which allows for the kind of creative commentary that I propose here.

¹⁵ Hooper (n. 5), 167–8.

¹⁶ Ibid., 168.

¹⁷ Ibid., 175.

¹⁸ Ward Jones Jr. (n. 3), 193.

¹⁹ R. F. Thomas, ‘“Death”, Doxography, and the “Termerian Evil” (Philodemus, Epigr. 27 Page = A. P. 11.30)’, CQ 41 (1991), 137, suggests that Ovid in this line has the famous impotence epigram of Philodemus as his ultimate source, with an intermediate source in Catull. 50.14–15, where the poet's limbs lay half-dead (membra | semimortua…iacebant) on his bed after a day of improvising poetry with his friend Calvus. Catullus’ semimortua may be a translation of the controversial reading ἡμιθανές in line 4 of Philodemus’ poem, with a playful reference ‘to post-coital exhaustion, real for Philodemus, figurative for Catullus’. If so, and if Ovid's praemortua has the sense of ‘prematurely dead’, then his substitution of the prefix prae- for Catullus’ semi- and Philodemus’ ἡμι- has a point: whereas his predecessors took the normal rest between sex acts (real or figurative), his own game is over before it ever gets started. I would add that it helps my main point in this article if Catullus used the verb iaceo in a double sense, referring to both intellectual and sexual exhaustion: this would constitute a nice precedent for Ovid's double entendre with the same verb.

²⁰ J. C. McKeown, Ovid: Amores. Text, Prolegomena, and Commentary in four volumes. Vol. III: A Commentary on Book Two (Leeds, 1998), ad loc.

²¹ Maximianus may have seen the joke. In his fifth elegy, he uses the phrase nempe iaces twice within a single couplet, at the beginning of line 99 and the end of line 100, in a way that recalls the Ovidian versus serpentinus. The context is the lament of a young Greek woman for the death of an erection – that of the impotent poet. If Maximianus is borrowing Ovid's language about the death of Corinna's parrot and transferring it to a context of impotence, then it is reasonable to think that he recognized Amores 2.6.19–20 as an allusion to Catullus’ dead ‘sparrow’ already in the sixth century ad.

²² If the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer is right, then this means that the book called Passer would have the double sense of ‘Sparrow’ and ‘Penis’. It is worth noting that Ovid's Amores, by ancient convention, may have had an alternative title, Arma, from the first word of the collection – it was in fact called this in the Middle Ages; see E. H. Alton, ‘Ovid in the Medieval Schoolroom’, Hermathena 95 (1961), 72. But arma was likewise a slang word for ‘penis’; for an Ovidian example, see Am. 1.9.26, and for a discussion of weapon-related terms in this sense, see J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), 19–22. If Ovid meant Arma as an alternative title for the Amores, with an obscene double entendre, then this may also suggest that he understood the title of Catullus’ Passer in such a way. Ovid was willing to play around with the first words of earlier poems. Arma itself is an obvious allusion to the first word of the Aeneid; but in Tr. 2.534, Ovid accuses Vergil of bringing ‘arms and the man into Tyrian couches’ – again playing on the obscene sense of arma; see J. Ingleheart, A Commentary on Ovid, Tristia, Book 2 (Oxford, 2010), ad loc.

²³ This is the procedure assumed for Gallus by F. Jacoby, ‘Zur Entstehung der Römischen Elegie’, RM 60 (1905), 38–105, described in detail in connection with Catullus by A. L Wheeler, ‘Catullus as an Elegist’, AJPh 36 (1915), 155–84, and manifestly engaged in by all of the Latin love elegists. For a convenient and fairly recent collection, see the essays in A. Keith (ed.), Latin Elegy and Hellenistic Epigram. A Tale of Two Genres at Rome (Newcastle, 2011). To be clear, I do not endorse any theory that Latin love elegy is in some essential way an expansion of epigram. Nonetheless, epigram was obviously one of the major sources of the genre.

²⁴ See McKeown (n. 20), 108–10, with bibliography.

²⁵ See Boyd (n. 14), 204–5. As the anonymous referee points out, Ovid's Elysium is a place obscenae quo prohibentur aves (‘from which obscene birds are prohibited’, Am. 2.6.52). If my interpretation of lines 19–20 is right, then this may have been a slight obstacle to the entry of Corinna's psittacus.