19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gaius Valerius CatullusCatullus 51
Fiction | Poem | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Free Time (Otium)
“Free time” (Lines 13, 14, 15) holds a number of cultural and political connotations in Catullus’s poem. The term is Chris Childers’s attempt to translate the Latin word otium, which has meanings particular to Roman culture. In one sense, otium refers to time spent disengaged from an active political or social life (See: Analysis). The speaker’s statement that “Free time has leveled prosperous cities” (Line 15) highlights this political connotation.
Otium can also be understood in a positive way. The term was historically used to describe lifestyles outside of the public arena. Otium was used to describe tasks such as writing and thinking, and was only leisurely in the sense that the work was not done for financial reward. Often, Roman poets and philosophers made puns from this double meaning to establish that one can be active while at leisure. Otium was also the term used by Roman Epicureans (See: Contextual Analysis) to describe the serene bliss they sought. Read in the Epicurean sense, the speaker’s attack on otium or “Free time” (Lines 13, 14, 15), can be interpreted as him turning from Epicureanism.
Voice and Speech
Lesbia’s presence has a variety of negative effects on the speaker (See: Themes). One of the most prominent of these surrounds the speaker’s ability to communicate. The speaker is stuck “dumb” (Line 7) as he looks upon Lesbia, and does not “know where / [his] voice has gone” (Lines 7-8).
Voice and speech are potent symbols in poetry, especially when they relate to the work’s speaker. The western poetic tradition—particularly in Greece, from where Catullus draws his inspiration for “Catullus 51”—has traditionally focused on oral delivery. As the name implies, a poem’s speaker in this tradition is understood to be speaking the poem. The speaker’s inability to speak, then, correlates with his inability to perform the poem. This inability to relate or compose the poem suggests that “Catullus 51” is actually a set of reflections or memories rather than the events as they took place.
The inability to speak is also what forces the speaker into the emotional, lyrical space of the second and third stanzas. This lyricism, or expression of individual emotion through the use of literary devices, is also what makes Catullus’s and Sappho’s poetic approach unique.
Lesbia
Lesbia is a recurring character in Catullus’s poetry. Of the 116 surviving poems Catullus wrote, Lesbia is the subject of 25 of them. The name “Lesbia” connects both to Catullus’s social life and to his love of Sappho’s poetry. The name is a pseudonym for Catullus’s lover, and is traditionally identified with a woman named Clodia Quadrantaria. Clodia was the wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer—a prominent and powerful member of the plebeian nobility. Lesbia’s insertion into “Catullus 51” serves to distance Catullus’s adaptation of Sappho’s “Fragment 31” from the original, where the speaker’s love interest is unnamed.
Catullus’s choice of pseudonym for his love interest also reinforces his appreciation of Sappho’s poetry. Sappho was from the isle of Lesbos, and worked within the Lesbian poetic tradition, which has unique diction, meters, and conventions. By naming his love interest Lesbia, Catullus highlights his deep affection for this poetic tradition.
