Catullus’ longer poems.—These, unlike the shorter personal poems, are mostly due to Alexandrian influence, to which Catullus may have been introduced by his teacher, Valerius Cato. To these poems Catullus owes his title doctus (Tibull. iii. 6, 41; Martial, i. 62, 1, etc.). They include: c. 66, ‘coma Berenices,’ from Callimachus; cf. c. 65, ll. 15-6,
‘Sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto
haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae’;
c. 68 to Allius, also Alexandrian; c. 64, the ‘Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis,’ l. 30 of which,
‘Oceanusque, mari totum qui amplectitur orbem,’
is from Euphorion, fr. 158 (Meineke), Ὠκεανὸς, τῷ πᾶσα περίρρυτος ἐνδέδεται χθών; c. 63, the ‘Attis’ in Galliambic metre; c. 62, a translation of a Sapphic epithalamium. C. 51, and possibly some parts of c. 61, are from Sappho. Catullus was the first Roman to use the Sapphic measure (in cc. 11 and 51).
Publication of the Poems.—From the arrangement of the poems, which accords neither with chronology nor with subjects, and from the large number of lines extant (2286), which does not suit libellus (c. i. 1), it is highly probable that they were not left by Catullus as we find them. C. 2, beginning ‘Passer, deliciae meae puellae,’ was the first of a series of short poems. Cf. Martial, iv. 14, 13,
‘Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus
magno mittere passerem Maroni’;[37]
the book being named from its first word, like Arma virumque of the Aeneid. C. 1 (to Cornelius Nepos) is the first of another series of short pieces (cf. the epithet nugae in l. 4). Catullus doubtless published his larger pieces together. The traditional arrangement, due to a later hand, is as follows: (1) The lyric poems in various metres; (2) the larger poems and the elegies; (3) the shorter poems written in elegiacs. Catullus began to be popular as soon as his works were published; cf. Nep. Att. 12, 4 (quoted [p. 124]). He is imitated in the Priapea, in Ovid, in Ausonius, in the Ciris, in Martial, etc. C. 4 is closely parodied in Verg. Catal. 8.
CONTEMPORARY POETS:
(a) Ticidas wrote the Hymenaeus and love-poems on Perilla. For the latter cf. Ovid, Trist. ii. 433-4 and 437-8 (read by Riese immediately after),