Hey guys, Good night all. I just would to know what the word “Aereas” is doing in this excerpt? What can mean a cloud of bronze or maybe, if we take “Aerias” rather than “Aereas”, airy cloud ( in this case why detail the obvious nature airy of the cloud ? ).
" idem nunc retrahis te ac tua dicta omnia factaque
ventos irrita ferre ac nebulas aereas sinis"
No need to adjust your text, if you look at the dictionary entry for āĕrĭus you will see that āĕrĕus is an alternative spelling. Lewis and Short doesn’t quote the Catullus but OLD does.
Lewis and Short gives:
"āĕrĭus (quadrisyl. ), more rar. āĕrĕ-us , a, um, adj., = ἀέριος.
OLD gives:
āerius ia ium, a. Also -eus. [Gk. ἀέριος.]
Nice, thanks Seneca.
Reading it metrically would have avoided the confusion. It’s a catchy meter, but a challenging one for Catullus, who liked to experiment with aeolic meters.
As to your secondary question, the “aerias” is needed even more than the clouds: what he said and did is all blown away, gone for nothing. The image was picked up by later poets including Vergil, e.g. Aen.9.312 “aurae | omnia discerpunt et nubibus irrita donant.” Catullus was a great influencer.
Thanks for your gentle answer Mwh. Man I’m really slow sorry for that. So ‘Aereas’ gives the word ‘nebulas’ the figurative meaning of darkness, is that ? It’s not only a common cloud (a physical cloud) but a cloud that transcends the plan physic ( namely,it’s the nothing).I dont understand how “Reading it metrically would have avoided the confusion”.
Perhaps my adducing the Vergilian verse threw you off the track. The way I read it, calling the clouds aerias makes the point that they’re not heavy and black but light and insubstantial, like his words and his deeds, easily blown away.
(You quoted the verse with the inferior spelling aereas, but that makes no difference to the meter or the sense.)
Reading it metrically makes it clear that aerias (Gk. αεριας) is a 4-syllable word, long short short long, a “choriamb.” Each verse kicks off with two syllables (the “aeolic base”) followed by not one not two but three full choriambs before the disyllabic close.
ventos |
irrita ferr(e) |
ac nebulas |
aerias |
sinis. |
("You let the winds and airy clouds carry away (all your words and deeds), making them null and void.” irrita is a “proleptic” use of the adjective.)
So nothing to do with bronze. Makes a good contrast with Dido’s temple to Juno in Aen.1:
Hic templum Iunoni ingens Sidonia Dido
condebat, donis opulentum et numine divae,
aerea cui gradibus surgebant limina, nexaeque
aere trabes, foribus cardo stridebat aenis.
Bronze everywhere!
Trappes-Lomax, lines 3-6:
me prodere, iam non dubitas fallere, perfide?
num facta impia fallacum hominum caelicolas latent?
quos tu negligis et me miserum deseris in malis.
heu heu quid faciant, dice, homines cuiue habeant fidem?
I’m not sure about the need for caelicolas latent vs. caelicolis placent, but I think num for nec, replacing a weak statement with a more effective indignant question, is quite plausible – 19th c. conjecture, printed by Goold.
In the last two lines, 11-12, T-L wants to read:
si tu oblitus es, at di meminere, at meminit Fides,
quae te ut paeniteat postmodo facti ecficiet tui.
ecficiet is a Republican and presumably Catullan spelling for efficiet.
These suggestions are intended to restore caesuras between the second and third choriambs, as is usual in this meter (“Greater Asclepiad”, the carpe diem meter). Line 11 is apparently a Renaissance conjecture. In addition to restoring the caesura, it seems more effective than the standard text, with the anaphora of at.
The text of Catullus is a mess. All the extant mss. derive from a single, very corrupt ms. now lost, and even more conservative texts necessarily abound in conjectures, so there’s frequently little point in pleading manuscript authority against plausible conjectures.
Anyone have any reactions to T-L’s suggestions here?
As you’ll remember, we’ve been here before, in an earlier thread titled “Catullus, 30.4-6.” You mostly save me the trouble of repeating what I said there, but I’m glad you’re now more receptive to Trappes-Lomax’s efforts than you were then.
There’s always the danger of improving the author rather than the text, but for what it’s worth I unhesitatingly agree with num in 4. The rewrites in 6 are trivial. But I find “meminere at” in 11 irresistible, and it’s not all that far from the transmitted text, which is indeed in a deplorable condition—a mess, as we’ve now both said.
I’d forgotten we’d specifically discussed No. 30, but I did remember what you had said about the text of Catullus and Trappes-Lomax, and that’s exactly why I was more receptive to his suggestions. Thanks for setting me straight.
Mwh, I decided to go back to the Aeneid. I had read the first four books and then stopped it for read Catullus. I wanted to test if I could read other authors’ Latin. To be honest, I find Catullus very boring. His poems have almost no image, are so epidermal that at times irritate me. I resolved, thanks to his reply, reread the description of Juno’s temple. And my God, how beautiful is every verse of Virgil. The description of the temple, by its simultaneity, recalls the paintings of Bruegel the old : like in a large panorama we see all Carthago being built. I think I stopped reading because i read an essay of Ezra Pound and there he quotes the tree greatest latin authors ( Catullus, Propertius and Ovid). So i thought that i should read these authors. But now i perceive that i wronged in doing this. I just will read what i like.
Well, there is no accounting for taste. But of the many descriptions one one could give of Catullus that is not one that would ever have occurred to me.
No image? Picking at random VII C. compares the the number of kisses he will give Lesbia to the Lybian sands that lie on silphium bearing Cyrene, between the oracle of sultry Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus and …the stars that see the stolen loves of men… .
Think of the virtuosity of his metres. Think of the variety of experience he conveys. From the concision of LXXXV odi et amo to the “epyllion,” or miniature epic of LXIV there is such an astonishing variety. Let us also not lose sight of his invective.
Have you never been in love?
I’ve been re-reading the whole collection at random. It’s really an astonishing group of poems.
Horace, by comparison, is certainly facile, perhaps even more so than Catullus, which would be grand if poetry were ultimately measured by its author’s facility.
My teacher was fond of pointing out that Catullus was one of those poets every other poet envies. He was young, very talented, and wealthy. And in Clodia he found a Muse for the ages. (And yes, the Muses are fickle too.)
I’ve been reading his poems for nearly 50 years. Obviously I haven’t found him boring yet.
Best regards,
dp
I confess I may have made a hasty assessment. When i said there is not image in his poetry i was thinking in the astonishing colourful of vergil’s temple of juno. I remove the “boring” i was trying to say “narrow” (or maybe “brutal”) in the sense that there is only one pole in his poetry, the passion. I just dont find in catullus the other hub of the poetry, namely, mysticism.He in fact dominates very well all the modulations : from nuptial joy - “Hymen, O hymenae, hymen ades, o Hymenaee!” - to hopeless melancholy before the certainty of death- " nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,l nox est perpetua una dormienda". He is a very human poet and knows well the psychological secrets of the love - “odi et amo”. Lesbia is a real woman who make him suffer a lot: against the accusation of licenciosity he just replies : " Non est turpe, magis miserum est". He is touching but “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi” is more ‘turpe’ than ‘miserum’.
Hey man, thanks for your answer and sorry, but, I didn’t understand what you meant by " which would be grand if poetry were ultimately measured by its author’s facility".
This seems almost fair comment.
Probably because i haven’t read all the poems. But I’m curious by your answer.
a most unfair comment?
Horace often displays a technical mastery that is at times more impressive than the substance of the poems themselves. I like him more in the Sermones than in the Odes (though some of those are irreplaceable).
Merrill wrote that Catullus was “… superseded in turn by the polished Augustans, who cultivated the niceties of elegance, but at the expense of verve.” That’s a fair distinction.
Best regards,
dp