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Why Catullus continues to seduce us
Imbuing his work with a volatile mix of tenderness, aggression, sophistication, and obscenity, the Roman poet left a record of a divided and fascinating self.
This Catullus produced a handful of longer works that include a baroquely structured mini-epic about the marriage of Achilles’ parents and a gender-bending showstopper that the University of Virginia classicist Jenny Strauss Clay has called “the strangest poem in Latin”: a breathless narrative, cast in an extremely rare and agonizingly complex meter, about an Athenian youth named Attis, who, in a frenzy of devotion to the cult of the Eastern goddess Cybele, castrates himself. Take the startling tenderness of the marriage hymns, with their intense empathy for the emotions of young brides leaving home for the first time (whose lot is compared, rather shockingly, to the fate of women after “a city’s brutal capture”), or Attis’ surrender to a frenzy he cannot control, followed by the morning-after self-recriminations (“Now, ah now, what I’ve done appalls me”): we recognize these feelings. Every page of “Switch” is electric with that unmistakable personality: the strutting young genius who knows exactly how talented he is and wants you to know it, too, the brash newcomer from the boondocks determined to conquer the big city, the lover who proudly wears his hemorrhaging heart on his sleeve, the twentysomething with, maybe, a shadow on his lung, writing as fast as he can and bringing everyone he’s ever met, everything he’s studied, and everything he feels to the party, from Callimachus to inrumō.
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