|In What Order Should Students Read Catullus's Poems, and How Should I Deal with 64?
by Kristine G. Wallace
Retired Classics Professor
Catullus made me a Latin major and a Latin teacher. I first read the poet as a freshman in college, and his poems excited and moved me, unlike the parts of Vergil's Aeneid that I read in high school (for reasons I still speculate about, we did not read any of Book 4 in my Vergil class). I remember thinking that Vergil was a great poet, but somehow he did not speak to me. Catullus did.
I have been a Reader for both the AP Latin Literature and Vergil Exams for a number of years now, and it has been a wonderful experience for me. I am impressed with the care and integrity my colleagues use to score the students' free-response questions as well as with the generally high quality of the students' writing. The free-response questions are challenging and give the students a chance to show not only their linguistic competence but also their in-depth understanding of Catullus and his work.
For the 2005 AP Latin Literature Exam, I read students' short essays for the following free-response question on Catullus's poem 51:
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
Rather than focusing on the specific answer requested ("discuss the poet's reactions and the ways in which he uses contrasting images to express these reactions"), I want to mention a problem that cropped up in many of the students' essays, a problem that leads to one of the largest questions about Catullus's poetry and how we teach it. After giving the student the first three stanzas of poem 51, the prompt to the question says: "the poet reacts to seeing Lesbia near another man at a social gathering" -- a nice, neutral statement that deliberately doesn't give away much about the circumstances of the poem. Scholars consider poem 51, one of only two poems Catullus wrote in Sapphic meter, to be the first Lesbia poem, or at least to reflect an early stage in the poet's relationship with the woman he calls Lesbia, a name chosen to reflect Sappho's home, Lesbos. In answering the question about poem 51, however, many students, knowing the unhappy course and conclusion of Catullus's love affair, saw the ille of line 1 as a hated rival of the poet and explained the poet's physical reactions as signs of his jealousy and anger.
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens aduersus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnes
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
* * * * * * * *
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures gemina, teguntur
Catullus 51. 1-12
In the passage above, the poet reacts to seeing Lesbia near another man at a social gathering. In a short essay, discuss the poet's reactions and the ways in which he uses contrasting images to express these reactions. Refer specifically to the Latin throughout the passage to support the points you make in your essay.
This mistaken view definitely did not help them to write a good essay on this question, but it also led into the larger question of the order of Catullus's poems as they have come down to us and whether this order is that of the poet himself or of an editor who published Catullus's work after the poet's death. Why is this poem, which seems to reflect an early stage of the love affair, when the poet merely gazes in awe at Lesbia, placed so late in the group of polymetric poems (number 51 of 60), so much later than poem 11 (the other poem in Sapphic meter) in which Catullus bids harsh farewell to Lesbia and his love for her? Interestingly, for me at least, my own lifetime of reading and teaching Catullus embraces two quite different approaches to answering this question.
Did He or Didn't He: Who Arranged Catullus's Poems?
I first read Catullus in the version edited by Elmer Truesdell Merrill (Harvard University Press, first published in 1893, 66 years before I bought it in the Bryn Mawr bookstore for $3.25). Merrill is perhaps best known for this terse introduction to poem 32, the notorious Ipsithilla poem, saying: "Contents, execrable. Date, indeterminable. Metre, Phalaecean." From that first college Latin class, I do not have, alas, the complete list of the poems we read and in what order. But penciled in the front of my textbook are two weeks' assignments, and they are revealing. Merrill stated clearly in the introduction to his book that "it is . . . impossible to suppose . . . that Catullus himself arranged the book for publication." As proof, he asserted particularly his belief that Catullus would not have published the poems attacking Caesar after the reconciliation between them. My professor's syllabus reflected Merrill, and we read the Lesbia poems, for example, in an order that attempted to reconstruct the affair chronologically. We read 51 before 11, despite their positions in the text. We went from 8, "Miser Catulle desinas ineptire," to 107 (entitled by Daniel Garrison "Back with Lesbia"1) to 36 (Volusius's dirty poems that Catullus and his puella burn up together), and so on. Making up a Catullus syllabus this way is arbitrary, since one cannot order most of the poems chronologically, but I think it strongly impressed upon us the stages of the love affair and that the order of the poems in the text did not correspond to the reconstructed scenario of the affair. I think we would have been less likely to place "Ille mi par esse deo videtur" at a late stage of Catullus's love affair. We also learned a "romantic" interpretation of Catullus, who sincerely expressed his emotions as they sprang from his experiences.
Within my lifetime as a reader and teacher of Catullus, many scholars have challenged that view of Catullus's libellus. Poem 1, Catullus's dedication of his little book to Cornelius Nepos, demonstrates that the poet himself "published" some collection of his poems but does not guarantee that the collection of poems we have represents his libellus. Indeed, scholars have long identified three "books," distinguished by meter, within the corpus: 1 to 60 (the polymetrics), 61 to 68 (the longer poems), and 69 to 116 (the poems in elegiac couplets). Noted Catullus scholars Kenneth Quinn2 and T. P. Wiseman,3 however, believe that the entire sequence of poems that has come down to us in the manuscript(s) is in the order in which Catullus himself arranged it.
Helena Dettmer, whose book is entitled Love by the Numbers 4, finds within the present order elaborate patterns of correspondences and symmetrical relationships of poems both within and between the three books. Dettmer invokes subject matter, language, and addressee to establish ring structures and chiastic arrangements of the poems. She, by the way, considers poem 51 a later poem and does not relate it to poem 11, thus sidestepping any question about why Catullus placed these two poems in Sapphic meter where he did. Scholars have criticized Dettmer's numbers game, one calling it "reckless," and you can see how large a role subjectivity may play in the patterns she finds in the collection. As Charles Martin5 has noted: "Aesthetic order is everywhere apparent to those who believe Catullus responsible for the arrangement of his Book, while those who hold a later editor responsible see little but accident or 'planlessness.'"
Most recently (2002), Paul Claes6 has presented a new case for the Catullan origin of the arrangement and asserts that his thesis rests upon a more solid base. In his book, nicely titled Concatenatio Catulliana, Claes well defends the position that the poet himself arranged the poems as we have them. The great variety of subject matter, meter, length, and so forth is not proof of a "hodge-podge" but shows the Alexandrian poetic principle of poikilia (variegatedness), a quality found in the poetic books of Callimachus and later Horace.7 He points out that no classical poetry book we know of was arranged in chronological order, so the placement of 51 after 11 is not a problem.8 On the other hand, he is not impressed by the "cycles" and "rings" of poems that other scholars have identified, for they are not readily perceptible by the reader and still do not explain the particular linear arrangement of the poems in the book.9 He quotes some helpful remarks of Pliny the Younger about a contemporary poet's book: "He mingles some harsher verses with the soft and light ones, as Catullus did;"10 in discussing poems in hendecasyllabic meter, Pliny said: "In these verses we jest, play, grieve, complain, get angry, expressing ourselves in a dense or elevated way and trying, through variation, to appeal to different tastes and to please each reader in turn." 11
We might add that this constant change of tone and subject matter also keeps a reader today from getting bored. Our students surely appreciate this fact about Catullus. Claes notes, however, that variation could easily threaten coherence, and he believes Catullus used concatenation (which we Latinists know means "chaining together") to counteract the disintegrating force of variation. Claes identifies both thematic concatenation and lexical concatenation. Poems 2 and 3 (the sparrow poems) have obvious thematic connection; poems 12, 13, and 14 concern parties and gifts; 35 and 36 present good and bad writers. Thus the thematic concatenation is often based on contrast: the sparrow alive and then dead, Caecilius's good poem and Volusius's bad ones. Lexical concatenation involves the repetition of identical or similar words from one poem to the next: for example, dea in the last line of poem 50 and deo in the first line of poem 51. Every item in Claes's long lists of concatenations may not be convincing, but I believe he makes a good case (as have others before him) that the heterogeneous structure of the book(s) of Catullus's poems is not a result of chance, that the poems were arranged to secure maximal variety, and that Catullus is the most likely creator of this arrangement.
Deciding How to Teach Catullus
As teachers writing a syllabus for a Catullus course or for the Catullus portion of an AP Latin Literature course, what do we do? We must read the poems on the AP syllabus, and since we do not read all the poems, we lose some of the effect we presume Catullus intended by his sequence. In addition, in this recent view of Catullus as the Alexandrian poet arranging his variegated collection of poems, we may not see him as the sincere, romantic poet that he is.
One of the arguments of those who believe the collection disordered, and therefore not as Catullus intended it, has always been the dislocation of the poems expressing the different stages of the affair with Lesbia. Claes and others counter this argument by asserting that Catullus's poems should not be interpreted as biographical documents; that the poet is not aiming at sincerity but rather tries to give a personal form to typical experience. That Catullus was a learned (doctus) poet, we cannot doubt, but must we give up the sincere Catullus, who really loved a woman who enthralled and then wounded him, and who wrote poems expressing and exposing his "real" feelings? Must we give up that Catullus who speaks to adolescents in love today? I don't want to, and I don't think that when we as readers accept and follow the "illogical" order of the poems that modern scholars identify as Catullus's own, we must deny him real experiences and real feelings as the stimuli of those poems. Perhaps a Callimachean arrangement for the publication of these personal poems gave Catullus a kind of protective "cover." Quinn has suggested another good reason: "Catullus went to some pains to jumble chronology -- perhaps hoping that we would read his poems as poetry rather than autobiography."13
As I teach my Catullus course, I'll probably tinker with the syllabus time and again. My class reads poems 1 to 14 in order but then skips others until later. Thus we read poem 11 before 51 and discuss why Catullus arranged these poems in this way. The unexpected order can be exciting, as Catullus makes us figure out his affair. How boring, really, if he had presented all the Lesbia poems in a chronological order. A number of teachers I know are able (and I am really impressed by this) to finish the AP syllabus with time to do some review before the AP Exam. At that point, it might be worthwhile to do the poems in a different order, to begin with 51; follow it with 2, 3, 5, 7, 86, 13, 43, 8, 36, 109, 70, 72, 85, 76, and 87; and end with 11. After all, what reader, ancient or modern, always reads a book of poems in the order they appear in the book? Perhaps some of Catullus's original readers skipped around to find all the Lesbia poems, so we can, too.
The entertaining quality of Catullus's arrangement of his poems keeps a reader intrigued about what sort of poem will turn up next, and they are short enough that no one need get bogged down in a topic that doesn't excite interest. But the more than 200 lines of poem 64 that are now on the AP syllabus present a challenge, for students and teachers. I confess that I have never taught 64, in whole or in part; however, 64 is at the center of Catullus's poetry, as he has arranged it. Wiseman describes 64 as a conscious masterpiece; Martin says it demonstrates a young artist's ambition and accomplishment. So the AP syllabus is right to include some of it, and I am at fault for avoiding it. I hope my comments are not restatements of obvious features of the poem; rather, I want to make observations of characteristics of the poem that scholars have drawn attention to and that could be helpful for teaching this rather alien text to students today.
One problem and/or blessing is that the AP syllabus requires only lines 50 to 253 of the 408-line work. Teachers must explain the part to be read as the literary device that it is and place it in the context of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, which is the surrounding story. Poem 64 is a "little epic," a popular Hellenistic form of poetry, but I think Martin is right that this terminology is bad because it raises expectations the poem will not meet. The myth of Ariadne is not a major heroic fable, nor is it narrated fully. Theseus, our hero, is notoriously absent and certainly not a heroic or moral role model. We might challenge ourselves -- and our students -- to come up with another term to describe this poem: a collage, perhaps? We know that other Latin poets who were contemporaries of Catullus wrote such poems: for example, Cinna (whom Catullus addresses in poem 10 and whose poem, Zmyrna, Catullus refers to in 95, not on the AP syllabus). But it is noteworthy that Catullus's subject in 64 is marriage (achieved and frustrated), whereas the other neoterics wrote their "little epics" on myths of incestuous passion and metamorphosis. In fact, for those who do Catullus and Ovid for their AP course, poem 64 makes a good tie-in with the tales read from Ovid's Metamorphoses. With the lack of such poems today, Catullus 64 can be hard to relate to, even when we emphasize the connections between Ariadne abandoned by Theseus and Catullus abandoned by Lesbia and note Catullus's interesting tendency to identify himself with a woman (for example, 2b [end of poem 2], Atalanta; 68, Laodamia; 11, the flower, not the plow). In the Aegeus episode, Michael Putnam14 finds Catullus again identified with an abandoned mythological character, but this time the reference is to the poet's loss of his brother -- which makes a link to the portion of 68 on the AP syllabus.
Relating 64 to Painting or Film
Looking at 64 in terms of other art forms is one interesting way to bring the poem closer to us. We know that ancient poetry was read aloud, that poets often "performed" their works, and Wiseman suggests that 64 provides a superb script for six performers: a narrator, Ariadne, Aegeus, and the three Fates.15 Before tackling the Latin selection, such an oral performance of the whole poem in English translation might be worth trying if you have some good actors in class. Still better, however, are the analogies drawn by Martin and Quinn with painting and cinema. Martin notes a simultaneous revolution in Rome in painting and poetry in the Late Republic. Artists featured mythological scenes in wall paintings, which notably created an illusion of depth and thus "opened up" the wall.16 How could poetry accomplish this? He suggests the particular arrangement of scenes in 64 as a comparable experiment: their organization visually creates an illusion of depth.17
Wiseman suggests that Catullus's original readers probably knew a Hellenistic painting of the scene: on one side the sea, with Theseus's ship in the distance; in the center the shore with the distraught Ariadne gazing out after him; on the other side, the land behind her with Iacchus and his band of satyrs and bacchantes.18 In that work of art, both sides of the composition are equally important: Theseus abandons Ariadne, and the god Iacchus finds her and makes her his heavenly consort. Her anguish will be followed by unparalleled happiness. But Catullus's depiction of this is quite different. Catullus cannot rewrite the happy ending, but he can and does overshadow it by lavishing all his attention on the anguish, leaving the felicity wholly unemphasized. He has given us not a classical picture, but a more "romantic" one.
Still more relevant to our students, probably, is to look at poem 64 in terms of cinema. Martin describes Catullus's treatment of the story of Ariadne and Theseus as cinematic, in which scenes segue effortlessly into one another with only vague chronology.19 For example, from the initial description of Ariadne (lines 51 to 70), we slide back into the time when Theseus arrived in Crete from Athens (71 to 75) and then into a flashback of the story of Athens compelled to pay penalty and send youths as food for the Minotaur, and on to an account of Theseus's defeat of the monster (76ff). Students might like to plot the perspective, angle, and distance of the "shots" Catullus's "camera" gives us. Lines 50 and 51 are rather like the opening frames of a movie with the title and so forth, although Catullus's "title" -- "The Virtues/Virtuous Deeds of Heroes" ("heroum . . . virtutes," l. 51) -- is a very misleading statement of the subject matter of the coverlet. We begin with a shot of the seashore of Dia with the sound of the waves (line 52), then a distant view of Theseus receding from sight on his swift ship. Clearly we are looking at things from Ariadne's perspective. The actress will have to render somehow the heroine's "indomitos . . . furores" (line 54), her inability to believe what she sees (line 55), and her confusion since she has just been roused from sleep (line 56) and perceives herself deserted on the lonely beach (line 57). Then we see another shot of the ship with oars beating the sea (line 58). Our first real sight of Ariadne is strikingly visual and detailed. Curiously compared to a stone statue of a bacchant/maenad (line 61), this must be a bacchant in frenzy. We see that Ariadne's blond hair has come loose from its headband, her dress has slipped off, and even her milky white breasts are no longer covered by her bra (63 to 67) -- an R-rated movie, for sure!
Tackling the Vocabulary of 64
When all is said and done, or seen, however, the students must read more than 200 Latin lines. What makes 64 more difficult than the shorter poems? How can you and your students meet these challenges? Vocabulary is one problem, though in my experience, students always declare that vocabulary is their problem, when actually their grasp of the endings and their syntax is the real problem. The difference in vocabulary from the shorter poems surely reflects both the mythological subject matter and the higher style of 64. And since Catullus is showing off his learning in 64, he uses a large number of proper names, some very obscure. I counted 31 in the AP selection, both nouns and adjectives, some appearing more than once. (What surprised me is that Theseus is the most common of these proper names -- 13 occurrences -- despite his absence in the present time of the poem and his desertion of Ariadne.) Perhaps a ready-reference handout on these might help. This is the one that I use:
|I. Geography and People of Crete
||Ariadna, -ae, f. (2)
Minois, Minoidis, f. (2)
Minos, Minois, acc. Minoa (1)
Minotaurus, -i, m. (1)
Androgeoneus, -a, -um (1)
Creta, -ae, f. (2)
Gortynius, -a, -um (1)
Idaeus, -a, -um (1)
Cnosius, -a, -um (1)
|Ariadne (our heroine)
Daughter of Minos = Ariadne
Minos, king of Crete
The Minotaur, half-brother of Ariadne
Of Androgeos (son of Minos)
Of Gortyn (city on Crete), Cretan
Of Ida (mountain on Crete)
Of Cnossos (city on Crete), Cretan
|II. Geography and People of Athens
||Theseus, -ei, acc. Thesea,
voc. Theseu, m. (13)
Aegeus, -ei, m. (1)
Erectheus, -ei, m. (1)
Erechtheus, -a, -um (1)
Athenae, -arum, f. pl. (1)
Cecropia, -ae, f. (3)
Piraeus, -ei, m. (1)
Theseus (our [anti]hero)
Aegeus, king of Athens, father of Theseus
Erectheus, (earlier king of Athens)
Of Erec(h)theus, Athenian
Athens (Cecrops was first king of Athens.)
Piraeus (port of Athens)
|III. Gods, Goddesses, and Other Divinities
||Iuppiter, Iovis, m. (1)
Erycina, -ae, f. (1)
Eumenides, -um, f. pl. (1)
Iacchus, -i, m. (1)
Silenus, -i, m. (1)
Satyrus, -i, m. (1)
Venus (goddess of Mt. Eryx)
Silenus (attendant[s] of Bacchus)
A Satyr (attendant of Bacchus)
|IV. Geographical Places and Features
||Dia, -ae, f. (2)
Eurotas, -ae, m. (1)
Golgi, -orum, m. pl. (1)
Idalium, -ii, n. (1)
Taurus, -i, m. (1)
Syrtis, -is, f. (1)
Scylla, -ae, f. (1)
Charybdis, -is, f. (1)
Hiberus, -a, -um (1)
Itonus, -i, f. (1)
Nysigena, -ae, m. adj. (1)
|Aegean island (Naxos?)
Eurotas (river in Sparta)
Golgi (town on Cyprus, noted for worship
Idalium (town on Cyprus, noted for
worship of Venus)
Taurus mountain range in Asia Minor
Syrtis (shoals on North African coast)
Scylla (monster in straits of Messina) Charybdis (whirlpool in straits of
Messina, opposite Scylla)
Itonus (town in Boeotia, noted for worship
Born on Mt. Nysa (birthplace of Bacchus)
The more than 200 lines do have a variety of syntactical constructions, including such annoyances as prospective or anticipatory subjunctives, optative subjunctives, substantive result, and so on -- most of these identified in, for example, Garrison's "Notes." Participles, however, seem to me worth real concentrated emphasis with students. They are everywhere, almost always as modifiers, not in an ablative absolute construction. There are many rather long, periodic sentences, but more than half of the lines end with some mark of punctuation (in Garrison, for example), which makes comprehension easier. My favorite thing about Latin poetry is the word order, which makes any translation of a Latin poem lose so much of the original's effect and beauty. I've sometimes had students put Latin poetic sentences into English word order and Latin prose word order so they can more easily appreciate what Catullus's poetic order has achieved -- for example, lines 59 and 60: first in Latin prose order:
At fugiens iuvenis immemor vada remis pellit, linquens procellae ventosae promissa irrita.
Then in English translation order:
At immemor iuvenis fugiens pellit vada remis, linquens irrita promissa ventosae procellae.
Then what Catullus wrote:
Immemor at iuvenis fugiens pellit vada remis, irrita ventosae linquens promissa procellae.
The first position of immemor is deliberate and effective, the metrical slowdown at pellit with the conflict of accents in pellit vada likewise. Line 60 is extravagantly artful in its arrangement (untranslatable for English), and why? The separation of adjectives from their nouns here is notable, but far from unusual in this poem. In nearly every line Catullus refuses to place noun and adjective together. (Thus a good opportunity for review of noun and adjective declensions, for example, line 113, "errabunda regens tenui vestigia filo"; line 131, "frigidulos udo singultus ore cientem"; line 138, "immite ut nostri vellet miserescere pectus"; and line 163, "purpureave tuum consternens veste cubile.") Whereas scholars estimate Vergil uses chiastic word order of two nouns and their adjectives once every 43 lines in the Aeneid, Catullus does this once every seven lines in poem 64! You can tell students to assume separation of noun and adjective as the norm, and to expect that almost invariably the adjectives will come first. But once we unravel this unnatural word order, we need to ask: Why does Catullus do this? What effect does this have? I don't think this is just "playing around" with words for the fun of it; rather, it has something to do with the emotional power of the poem.
The fact that separation is the norm also makes those lines where we find noun and adjective together more striking: for example, line 141, "sed conubia laeta, sed optatos hymenaeos" (as Ariadne recalls Theseus's promises), in contrast to line 142, "quae cuncta aërii discerpunt irrita venti." Or line 237, "agnoscam, cum te reducem aetas prospera sistet" (as Aegeus concludes his instructions to Theseus), and 238, "Haec mandata prius constanti mente tenentem" (when Theseus at first remembers these instructions), which, however, left him later as clouds have left a mountain top: "aëreum nivei montis liquere cacumen" (line 240).
The length of the selection of 64 on the syllabus must always be a challenge. Just as in reading the Aeneid, it is easy for us and our students to miss the forest while stumbling through the (seemingly endless) trees. Obviously, Catullus never envisaged his poem being read laboriously in 15-line chunks! But unlike a prose version of the story, this poem seems to me to prevent even a native reader from reading too quickly, so our deliberate pace is not unreasonable. We needn't feel badly if we and our students have to puzzle over things and reread.
Although poem 64 seems artificial, rhetorical, precious, and decorative as Catullus's other poems do not, it still seems to me utterly Catullan. Ariadne and Theseus have no political baggage like Dido and Aeneas. They anticipate Ovid's sympathetic treatment of the tragic heroines of myth but differ in their special significance to the poet. Catullus did not make myth his chief subject matter, nor did he repeatedly bring up mythological examples, as Ovid and the other elegiac poets do in their love poems. This myth spoke to Catullus, just as all his poetry does to me -- and I hope to you.
1. Daniel H. Garrison, The Student's Catullus, 2nd ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, p. 85).
2. Kenneth Quinn, Catullus: The Poems, 2nd ed. (St. Martin's Press, 1973).
3. T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4. Helena Dettmer, Love by the Numbers: Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Catullus, vol. 10 (Lang Classical Studies, 1997).
5. Charles Martin, Catullus (Hermes series; Yale University Press, 1992).
6. Paul Claes, Concatenatio Catulliana (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 9, 2002).
7. Paul Claes, Concatenatio Catulliana (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 9, 2002), p. 6.
8. Paul Claes, Concatenatio Catulliana (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 9, 2002), p. 18.
9. Paul Claes, Concatenatio Catulliana (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 9, 2002), p. 21-22.
10.Ep. 1.16.5: Inserit . . . mollibus levibusque duriusculos quosdam et hoc quasi Catullus.
11. Paul Claes, Concatenatio Catulliana (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 9, 2002), p. 23-24.
12. Ep. 4.14.2-3: His iocamur, ludimus, amamus, dolemus, querimur, irascimur, describimus aliquid pressius modo elatius atque ipsa varietate tentamus efficere ut alia aliis, quaedam fortasse omnibus placeant.
13. Kenneth Quinn, Catullus: The Poems, 2nd ed. (St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. xxii.
14. Michael C. J. Putnam, "The Art of Catullus 64," HSCP 65 (1961), 165-205; reprinted in Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy, and Epic (Princeton University Press, 1985).
15. T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 128.
16. Charles Martin, Catullus (Hermes series; Yale University Press, 1992), p. 151.
17. Charles Martin, Catullus (Hermes series; Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 154-156.
18. T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 179.
19. Charles Martin, Catullus (Hermes series; Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 161-162.
Kristine Gilmartin Wallace graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1963 with a B.A. in Latin. She received her M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1967) in classics from Stanford University. She first taught at Rice University (1966-67), then at Vassar College (1967-69). In 1969 she returned to Rice University, from which she retired in 2006. At Rice she has taught all levels of Latin as well as courses in translation (Roman Civilization; Women in Greece and Rome). Her publications include articles on Vergil, Terence, and especially Tacitus. She has served as president of the Texas Classical Association (1971-73) and worked on various committees in the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. She has been a Reader for the AP Latin Examinations since 1993.