CUP (2025) h/b 890pp £150 (ISBN 9781107018594)
If the Cambridge ‘Orange’ series is the grand cru of classical commentaries, this newest volume in the series is in the Premier cru classé range (perhaps a 1982 Lafite Rothschild). T. wrote her D.Phil. thesis on lines 1-201 of the poem, presenting it in 2010: in the fifteen years since then she has rewritten her thesis (changing her mind and her wording in many places) while also completing the commentary on the whole text. The result is a Brobdingnagian book: 900 pages of pure scholarship, showing on every page her authority over the material and her massive enthusiasm for this astonishing poem. T. has read simply everything about it, as the seventy pages of bibliography attest, but her wide reading is used rather than paraded, and the learning is distilled into highly readable and lucid English.
Poem 64 is by some way the longest poem in the Catullan collection and is by any standards a masterpiece of poetic and literary art: ‘allusive, exquisite and sometime shocking’ as T.’s blurb has it. It has been read as a moralising tract, as l’art pour l’art dandyism, as ‘straight’ narrative, even as personal Catullan emotions sublimated into epic language: but (like all great literature) it eludes reductive analysis and at all times the reader and the commentator have to be alive to a range of interpretations which are all somehow simultaneously available, even though they do not agree with each other.
This book opens and closes with general and wide discussion. The Introduction takes us through everything one needs to know—and more—about this poem before one reads it: the literary and cultural context, its style, its reception from the late republic to the world of late antiquity. The unexpected but highly effective ‘Epilogue’ (pp. 731-759) ‘draws together key ideas … that have emerged over the course of the commentary’ and looks back at the structure and texture of the poem, the scope for subjectivity in the characters and finally the world outside the text and the degree to which the world of the poem and the world of the poet is in any sense co-extensive with the world of the reader—ancient or modern.
T. gives us a text which works for the reader. She aims at all times to provide what Catullus is ‘most likely to have written’ and wisely prefers, she tells us (p.102), ‘to print something that Catullus might have written rather than something that he could not have written’. This means that the obelus—the crux desperationis printed where the manuscript reading is obviously wrong, but we have no idea what to put in its place—is banished. T. makes full use of the huge numbers of suggested corrections of the highly flawed manuscript tradition and is never afraid to print a modern emendation in preference to an older reading. At line 287, for instance, where Roger Mynors prints the garbled †Minosim linquens †doris (with the admission in the apparatus that this is a locus multum uexatus), T. offers (with three pages of discussion and judicious uncertainty) naiasin linquens crebris. Housman’s aperit is accepted for perit at 282, Baehrens’ nouellae for nouercae at 401 and McKie’s cui famulae instead of the MS reading qui tum alacres at 254, and so on. Where newer readings are printed T. devotes a page or three of detailed palaeographical and literary analysis to explain her decisions and she invites further discussion rather than closing it down. She prints a text which shows what will ‘look normal to twenty-first-century readers of Latin—accusative plurals in -es rather than -is, assimilated prefixes, consonantal ‘u’ rather than ‘v’ and so on. Each page prints about 20-30 lines of text with the rest of the page taken up with the meticulously produced apparatus criticus.
Some commentaries are ‘intensive’, seeking simply to elucidate the text in front of us without taking their eye off the textual ball: others are more ‘extensive’, placing the text in the wider (ancient) world into which it is a window, and ending up becoming mini-encyclopaedias of classical learning. T. does both. She takes apart every word, every sentence, every aspect of the Catullan original with close reading of language and style, but she also raises her eyes from the book to look at the world surrounding the poet in all its manifold variety: the head-band (line 63), snake-handling (line 258), Prometheus (a massive 3-page note on lines 294-7), Nemesis (line 395), how the Fates did their spinning (lines 311-14), the cypress tree (line 291) and so on. Every word is weighed, and many single words merit detailed notes (e.g. proicere [p. 251], oblito [p.400], cupido [p.664]). The curious epilogue (lines 382-408) to this poem is treated to a full seven pages of discussion before the detailed notes start (pp.676-683). This quasi-moralising ending to the poem has attracted a lot of controversy and T. acts as a judicious referee, explaining the different lines taken without necessarily agreeing with any one of them, although she does point out where a particular reading is too reductive (‘humanity has always been wicked’ is a disappointingly banal moral’ p.678). Her objective throughout is to inform and then open up the discussion. She compels the reader to see that even this massive commentary is not in any sense the last word on this inexhaustible poem.
Finding your way through this giant book is not difficult: granted that same-page text and commentary (think Jebb’s Sophocles) would not have worked for this scale of commentating, the publishers have given us the next best thing with abundant signposting of line-numbers and beautifully clear printing with no typos. Furthermore, there are four indexes (Latin words, Greek words, general index and index of passage discussed) which will (no doubt) make this book a target for what some call the ‘smash-and-grab’ researcher. Since 1950 most books on Greek literature contain a note somewhere referring the reader to Fraenkel’s 3-volume edition of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: ‘see Trimble on Catullus 64.xxx’ is going to be the standard note for Latinists from now on—and she is a lot more fun than Fraenkel.
John Godwin