writing, they were produced for, and experienced primarily in, oral delivery
and performance a format that much more accurately renders all the
dimensions of elegy than does silent reading. Every elegist composed with
the expectation that his poems would be performed in dramatic readings.
Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Sulpicia could not have conceived of
the private, internalized forms of reading practiced by nineteenth and
twentieth century readers.^9A recent series of articles and a book has presented a picture of Catullus as
a performer of ‘‘dinner party recitals’’ in search of ‘‘upward mobility’’ and
‘‘self-promotion’’:
10
The basic assumptions that Catullus’ poetry is consciously composed for
readers and that his texts were first disseminated, individually or collect
ively, in written form underlie almost all contemporary studies of the poet.The author is sympathetic to those who have been misled by the ‘‘appar-
ently straightforward evidence’’ of Cat. 1, 14b, 16, 32, 35, 36, 65, 68, and
116, ‘‘among others’’:
It is not hard to understand, then, why such beliefs persist, even in the face
of new investigative approaches that treat all Greco Roman poetry as
fundamentally oral and performative in nature.^11These common assertions rest on three interrelated presuppositions
that need to be questioned in turn. The first, and by far the most influen-
tial, is the persistent belief that the Romans regularly read aloud, or
perhapscouldonly read aloud.^12 The second is the idea that the practice
of reading aloud somehow made Rome an ‘‘oral,’’ ‘‘oligoliterate,’’ or ‘‘per-
- Gamel 1998, 79 80, drawing on Quinn 1982, 81 3.
- Skinner 1993, 62, 63. The belief that poetry had to be performed here mixes with
what I find to be a misunderstanding of Catullus’s social world and an imposition of a
‘‘patron’’ to ‘‘client’’ relationship. - Skinner 1993, 61; again note the lumping together of Greece and Rome. How 1, 14b,
16, 32, 35, 36, 65, 68, and 116 ought to be understood is not explained, and this approach
seems to privilege ‘‘new investigative approaches’’ over Catullus’s own words. Cf. Skinner
2001,in which the proper interpretation of the poems turns on ‘‘stance, tone, gesture,’’ ‘‘facial
expression’’ (58), ‘‘a sweeping gesture’’ (63), ‘‘body language’’ (66; see also 71). Both articles
are at odds with another set of studies, in which Skinner looks for complex patterning in
Catullus’s poetry books and assumes that the interpretation of certain poems depends upon
their place in the collections. See Skinner 1981, and 2003: poems 69 92 need a ‘‘sequential
reading’’ (2003, 107 9), but Cat. 67 (dialogue with the door) depends on the audience
being able to see that the Catullus standing before them is a tall redhead (67.46 48). How
then could such a site specific, audience specific piece of performance art have ever been
published? - For example,Brill’s New Pauly(2: 726 27 Der Neue Pauly2: 815), ‘‘Book: Private
and public reading’’ (‘‘Lesen und Vorlesen’’) simply conflates the two: ‘‘In antiquity, the most
common way to read a book was to read it out aloud, which, particularly in public readings,
made it necessary for the reader to adapt his voice in intonation and modulation to the
specific character and rhythm of his text. A good reading was almost like the interpretation
190 Books and Texts