Catullus 64: the Perfect Epyllion?

Gail Trimble

I

It is clear that most scholars have at great length described characteristics for these poems which fit, usually, only the Ciris and Catullus LXIV and not much of anything else.1 This paper has grown out of a sense of unease with the word “epyllion” rather like the one captured in this quotation from Walter Allen’s famous article; it is a feeling that is particularly niggling to someone who works on Catullus 64.2 After all, modern scholarly debate about the existence and nature of a genre called “epyllion” is based on a group of texts, some fully extant, some fragmentary, some known to us only by their titles. On the periphery of this group are poems that are sometimes included in the category of epyllion, sometimes ruled out, such as certain hymns and narrative elegies.3 But at its centre are a few privileged examples, poems of which many scholars would say “if anything is an epyllion, this is.” Lists of epyllia must, it seems, include these texts, and any definition advanced must somehow account for them. And the most important of them are Callimachus’ Hecale and Catullus 64. But it is Catullus 64 and not the Hecale that most people read, or at least read first. There are various reasons for this, some practical and unavoidable, some more deeply implicated in our educational practices and systems of canon formation. Catullus 64 is extant, in Latin, and by a poet who is a hugely important (and unique) witness for the sort of poetry being written in his generation; chronologically Catullus stands near the

1 Allen (1940) 24. 2 I am writing a large-scale literary-philological commentary on Catullus 64, the first part of which formed my doctoral thesis. 3 Gutzwiller (1981) includes in her study “Hellenistic narrative hymns in hexameters” (6), with a chapter on Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter; Theoc. 22 often features in lists of epyllia, perhaps because it is better known as “Theocritus 22” than as “Hymn to the Dioscuri.” Fantuzzi (1998a) claims that modern usage of “epyllion” usually includes elegiac narratives. 56 gail trimble beginning of the century that has always been seen as the core of Latin literary history, and he is read in syllabuses with Cicero and Virgil. The Hecale is fragmentary, with new fragments discovered in the twentieth century. It is in Greek, and difficult Greek, and it is only Hellenistic any- way; it is seen as a text for specialists. Even the most popular of fully extant Hellenistic “epyllia,” such as Moschus’ Europa and certain poems by Theocritus, are likely to be read much later than Catullus by students of Classics; and among other texts defined more or less often as “epyllia,” the Ciris and Culex, let alone Dracontius and Lactantius or Colluthus and Triphiodorus, may never be reached at all. I have therefore written this paper to investigate my initial worry that we might have invented the genre of epyllion in the image of one impor- tant, widely read, and perplexing Latin poem. It is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of scholarly use of the word “epyllion” over the past 150 years, although I hope to identify some interesting strands, and I believe that since, as we all happily admit, we know of no Greeks or Romans who applied the label “epyllion” to our privileged group of texts, any study of epyllion has to be a study of the modern use of the word. I will not propose a definition of “epyllion,” nor produce a list of the poems I would include. More importantly, although my anxiety to some extent resembles Allen’s, I do not intend, as he does, to be prescriptive, demand- ing that we should stop calling anything an epyllion. Allen’s acerbic, exas- perated tones have resounded down the decades since the publication of his initial article in 1940;4 the authors of books, articles, and dictionary entries about epyllion all seem to feel that they should at least acknowl- edge his critique.5 But his argument has many limitations: for instance, he rather arbitrarily excludes at the outset the evidence of fragmentary texts and attestations,6 he is enough of his time to feel that he has to account for the quarrel between Callimachus and Apollonius,7 and many of his readers would not accept (and have not accepted) his central contention that since no single set of characteristics can be shown to characterise all extant epyllia and nothing else, there is no group that it is legitimate to

4 See also the still more polemically titled Allen (1958): “The Non-Existent Classical Epyllion.” 5 I will discuss some of these works in section VI. 6 Allen (1940) 1 n. 1: “I shall disregard the poems of which we have only the names or small fragments.” 7 Allen (1940) 6–12; while dubious about the traditional accounts, Allen believes that the Aetia prologue demonstrates that there was a real quarrel between Callimachus and somebody.