Catullus described a full emotional circle in his short life from delight in unconstrained aesthetic sensuality free of socially-defined patterns (cc. 5, 6, 13 for example) to longing for a stable bond in the relationship of man to woman. He pictured such a bond as placed within the traditional Roman frame of marriage and home, but cast in a personal mold; he wanted to preserve his aesthetic and sensual response to a woman while combining it somehow with the stability and intimacy appropriate to friendship (amare and bene velle). Poems 72 and 87, for instance, directly express the ideal in acknowledging its absence from Catullus' relations with Lesbia.

Catullus liked to feel that the possibility of complete union was what he offered Lesbia. Perhaps it was his inability to fashion a compelling synthesis of sexual intimacy and friendship with her that led him to write a series of poems exploring attempts, mainly failures, at full reciprocal love. The successful attempts are idyllic or mythic (Septimius and Acme, Peleus and Thetis, neither unambiguously positive). The failures come, in Catullus' portrayal, when union founders on the obstacle of the narcissistic personality, the man or woman unable to forfeit autonomy, desirous of holding others in thrall without being himself held. Catullus' highly developed sensitivity to narcissism must be a reaction to its prominence in the character of a certain kind of sexually attractive individual, the one who is alluring but uncapturable, the kind of woman, like Lesbia, with whom Catullus sought union. Catullus conveys the quality of narcissism in such a character in part through the image of the flower (appropriately, considering the source of the modern name for it).

For the Bacchae Lévi-Strauss' view of myth as concerned with the mediation of fundamental polarities is both fruitful and fruitfully inadequate. The conflicts between Pentheus and Dionysus clearly involve an opposition of city and wild, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, male and female. Further in the background stands another series of antitheses: mortal and immortal, man and beast, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth, fire and water. Like much of Greek literature, the Bacchae is founded on the proportion, mortal: immortal :: beast : man. That proportion, in turn, is part of an encompassing cosmic order which distinguishes the three basic categories of animate beings: god, man, and beast. What is unique and disturbing about this play is the thoroughness and violence of the reversals which take place in a situation in which god fuses with beast and beast with man.

The opening lines of the Eclogues are justly famous:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena.
(E. 1.1-2)

Tityrus, you lie beneath spread of sheltering beech
Studying the woodland Muse on a thin oat-straw.

Their rich, inviting allusiveness is well known. The sonal echo of Theocritus Idylls 1.1, the Callimachean canon (tenui, ‘thin’; cf. tēn Mousan leptaleēn, ‘the thin Muse’, Aetia fr.1.24 Pf.), the Lucretian siluestrem Musam (‘woodland Muse’) provoke the imagination, goad the intellect. Virgil's reference to his Roman predecessor especially intrigues. The context alluded to — Lucretius' ascription (DRN 4.577-89) of the fiction of satyrs, nymphs and the siluestris Musa of Pan to the echo-producing properties of rocky, solitary places — contains embryonically a theory of poetics, an evaluation of pastoral song, which, quickened into life in the Eclogues' initial statement, appears to be of programmatic significance. The theory — the viewing of pastoral poetry as essentially (to use Marie Desport's compelling phrase) ‘une poésie à écho’ — may be termed the echoic theory of pastoral song. Its main import is — as I take it — reductive: pastoral song is to be construed as the internal resonance of the singer's fictive world, condemned to triviality by its inability to reach beyond the boundaries of private experience or private vision so as to affect the world of action, events, history.

Late in the fifties Munro's long-standing and influential verdict on the Acme and Septimius poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’) suddenly came under fire. A flurry of scholarly reaction arose, and strangely enough, almost as quickly subsided, to support, then condemn, and finally to modify beyond recognition S. Baker's proposition that Catullus ‘never wrote about love without some irony’. A rehearsal of the various responses to Baker's assessment is especially illustrative both of the particular difficulties in this poem and, more importantly, of the misconceptions which have for years plagued interpretations of the love poetry of Horace as well as Catullus. Indeed, it is fortunate that the frequently observed relationship between Odes 3.9 and its predecessor enables us to examine comprehensively what is symptomatic of general critical approaches to both poets.

Baker's doubt of the idyllic proportions of the love portrait presented in Carmen 45 is certainly not unfounded. However, his arguments in favor of an overriding ironic tension result, if correctly understood, from his conviction that, since elsewhere Catullus cannot ‘speak of love directly and simply for many lines running’, the lovers' bliss is therefore immediately suspect. The poems used in corroboration of this view are nearly all drawn from the so-called Lesbia cycle (2, 5, 7, 51, together with the two epithalamia, 61-62). While in a very restricted sense Catullus' ofttimes exaggerated declaration of passionate love for Lesbia may seem a unifying feature of these pieces, it is incorrect to assume that any single modulation of the love experience is an automatic cipher for all others.

Theocritus rarely speaks in his own person. As an impersonal narrator he is concerned primarily with dramatic situations, each of which focuses upon the personalities of a few actors. Often, moreover, even as a narrator, Theocritus offers little more than brief introductions to set the scene for dramatic monologues or dialogues between the fictional characters of his poems. Sometimes his characters present themselves without any explicit commentary. As a consequence our assessment of Theocritus' own values and views is bound up with our sense of his relation to the characters whom he portrays. In many cases there is an implicit but nonetheless forceful contrast between the author and his characters, so that there is no question of taking their views as the author's or of taking the characters themselves as embodiments of the author's own values.

Rather, the reverse is true. The characterization of Gorgo and Praxinoa, for example, the two housewives who are childishly awed by the splendor and bustle of Alexandria on a holiday, suggests the poet's own confident urbanity. Similarly, the characterization of the two drinking companions in Idyll 14 who exchange accounts of misadventure in love and the virtues of service in Ptolemy's mercenary army, implies the poet's commitment to the values of refinement and restraint. Contrast between Theocritus and his characters in those poems is self-evident if for no other reason than the contrast between the refinement, self-consciousness, and obvious artificiality of Theocritus' style and the spontaneity and coarseness of the characters whom he portrays.