war about 65 B.C.; his captor Cinna has been identified with the Cisalpine poet of that name, who will
be familiar to readers of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ('tear him for his bad verses'). The young officer
found Parthenian poetics so seductive that he spent nine years composing a short and obscure
mythological poem on Zmyrna's passion for her father, and an admiring epigram by Catullus brings to
life what the Neoterics were about (95):
My Cinna's Zmyrna has been published at last nine summers and nine winters after it was begun, when
meanwhile Hortensius(?) has written half a million lines in a single month. Zmyrna will be sent as far as
her waters of Satrachus [a river of Cyprus which figured in the poem], Zmyrna will long be read through
by the white-haired centuries. But the Annals of Volusius [a conventional narrative poet] will expire at
the mouth of the Po [where their author belonged], and will provide lots of loose wrappers for mackerel
[i.e. to fry them in]. Dear to me be the small-scale memorials of my favourite writer, but the vulgar can
rejoice in their bloated Antimachus [a verbose poet derided by Callimachus].
The Neoteric influence on Catullus may be seen at its simplest in a harmonious wedding-poem whose
symbolism goes back to Sappho: 'ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis / ignotus pecori, nullo
conuolsus aratro,/quern mulcent aurae, fir-mat sol, educat imber' (62. 39 ff. 'as a bloom grows secluded
in a walled garden, unfamiliar to the herd, plucked by no ploughshare, that the breezes fondle, the
sunshine builds up, the shower brings on'). A more fantastic specimen of the movement's tastes is a
bizarre tour de force on the self-castration of Attis, which with its syncopated rhythms and accumulation
of short syllables evokes the orgiastic music of Cybele's eunuch-priests:
Where the cymbals' voice is sounding, and the tambourines re-echoing,
And the Phrygian piper blaring with a curved pipe's cacophony,
Where the ivy-wearing Maenads toss heads energetically
And with shrilling ululations celebrate rites inviolable,
Where is wont to come cavorting Cybele's vagrant retinue,
It befits us there to hasten with accelerated three-step. (63.21-6)In a more profound poem that was to become the prototype of Roman elegy Catullus relates the sorrows
of his life to the paradigms of myth. Just as Lao-damia's passionate marriage -was unhallowed from the
beginning, so Lesbia came to him with an omen of doom: 'my radiant goddess entered with dainty steps,
and planting her gleaming foot on the worn threshold, halted there with a click of her slipper' (68.70 ff.).
In the same way an anguished couplet on his brother's death near Troy recalls the sufferings of the Iliad:
'Troia-nefas-commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque / Troia uirum et uirtutum omnium acerba cinis' (68.
89 f. 'Troy, oh horror, the common burial-ground of Asia and Europe, Troy the untimely dust of all true
men and manhood'). Greek elegiac poetry was never as personal or as deeply felt.
Catullus' most ambitious -work is the 'Wedding of Peleus and Thetis' (64), a poem in the hexameters of
epic, but in accordance with neoteric principles lasting only for 400 lines. He begins with the wondrous
voyage of the first ship Argo 'Phasidos A.D. fluctus et fines Aeeteos' (2 'to the floods of Phasis and the
realm of Aeetes'); the exotic proper names and the slow quadrisyllabic line-ending already suggest the