MR. ROBINSON ELLIS'S " CATULLUS."*

IT is impossible not to feel very vividly how inadequate to the vast industry and learning of which this volume is the expression must be the brief and cursory notice which we are able to give of i in these columns. Nine years have passed, irour memory serves tk since Mr. Robinson Ellis published his text of Catullus, and in all he has devoted nearly double that time to the study of his author. The result is a work such as no ordinary critic can properly estimate. There are but few men in England, we might almost say in Europe, who are qualified to pass judgment on Mr. Ellia's scholarship, scarcely one who can rival him in the know- ledge of the writer whom he has made his special subject. All that we can pretend to do is to offer a hearty acknowledgement of the thoroughness and accuracy of his criticism, and of the wide and various learning which has furnished his copious illustrations, together with a few observations on certain points where an opinion not specially qualified may be given without presumption.

There is one point on which we must seriously question the editor's judgment and taste. We hope to do so without offence ; offence certainly we are very far from intending. There is un- happily a great deal in Catullus of which it may be quite confi- dently asserted that the less that is said of it the better. Some of the " Carmina " are as detestably obscene as anything that can be found in the Latin, or indeed in any other language. It is a ques- tion whether these might not with advantage be omitted altogether. For such a course we have the weighty authority of Mr. Mayor, who has omitted the second and sixth satires of Juvenal ; and

• A Commentary on Ortunns. By Robinson Ellis, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1876.

Juvenal, though his language is as gross as can be imagined, had always, what Catullus certainly had not, the interests of morality

in view. But if they are not omitted in the text, they certainly ought, in our judgment, to be passed over in silence, or with but the very briefest annotation in the commentary. There- is, for instance, Carmen xcvii., "unusually coarse even for Catullus," Mr. Ellis remarks, but it is furnished with as copious a commentary as if it had been one of the most delicate and blameless of the odes of Horace. More than this, the editor quotes at length, or at such length as is possible, much happily having been lost, two equally abominable fragments from the

Greek Anthology. It must have been at the cost of much disgust

to himself that Mr. Ellis has accumulated all that various learning about subjects which it is the privilege of most scholars to be able to neglect. And we can quite understand the feeling of the conscientious commentator who is unwilling to leave anything without explanation and illustration, where

explanation and illustration are possible. But, fiagitia debent abscondi, to quote the maxim which Tacitus attributes to his pure-minded Germans, and these things are truly flagi-

tious. They are not the better for having been written by a great poet. Very often they have nothing of genius about them. Any foul-mouthed scribbler could have written them, and if we cannot rub them out an we would rub out foul writings on a wall, we can

anyhow be silent about them. Who is there, to take another instance, that does not feel the Fescennina locutio which occurs in

the beautiful " Epithalamion Julire et Manlii " to be a grievous blot on the poem ? It must stand, we suppose, in the text. But can there be a necessity for showing forth by an elaborate com- mentary the hateful phase of manners which it reveals ? Mr

Ellis's annotation on this Carmen is in general so admirable, so com- plete, so thoroughly appreciative of its poetical beauty, as well as of

its genuinely national characteristics, that he might well have been content to be very brief, or even silent altogether, about the passage which disfigures it. There could not be any one who could better afford to disregard the taunt that he is silent from want of knowledge. We have said all this with great regret, and not without diffidence, but we have felt it a duty. There are those who would have Latin learnt from Prudentius and Augustine ; and really, if good scholarship needs acquaintance with all the horrors which lie under the obscenities of Catullus, they have much to say for themselves.

But if we feel that we could sometimes have spared some of the copious learning which Mr. Ellis brings to bear on his subject, our general feelingis one of the most genuine admiration. Its variety and plenty is such as it is difficult to describe. One peculiarity of it is that it passes, for the most part, the more familiar authors, to deal with those who are strange even to well-read scholars of the ordinary stamp. He has drawn, he says in his preface, his parallel citations and illustrations "from the predecessors or con- temporaries, rather than from the followers of Catullus; from the less hackneyed writers, such as Plautus, Lucilitts, Varro, rather than from such as have become insipid by familiarity ; from Greek preferably to Latin." It is difficult to describe how consistently this has been done. It is not too much to say that most scholars will often find themselves introduced to an almost unknown world

of ancient literature by this "Commentary." It is a trifling, but characteristic instance of this in lxii. 54, where tam° marito is contrasted, not with the riduas desiderat ulmos, which would occur to most scholars, but with the more recondite maritam uhnum of Quintilian.

It would not be just to pass by without special notice the exact and admirable commentary on the Alas. The poet here rises to his highest, and the editor is equal to the occasion. No such account of the singular cult us which suggests the poem is to be found elsewhere, nor does the learning of the notes at all over- power the keen and vivid sense of literary beauty which they display.

The personality of the Lesbia of Catullus naturally is made the subject of an elaborate discussion, the conclusion of which is to identify her with Clodia, sister of the notorious Clodius, the enemy of Cicero. The theory may be compared with a similar identification of Ovid's Corinna with Julia, the daughter of Augustus. It can scarcely, however, claim such good authority.

It rests, indeed, on an express statement of Apuleius, but Apuleius does not go beyond stating that Lesbia was a pseu- donym for Clodia. Of who this Clodia was he does

not give a hint. The Julia theory, on the other hand, rests on a positive and precise statement of Sidonius Apollimaris that the mistress of Ovid was Caesarea puella. This precision more than balances the fact that Sidonius was. two centuries further removed from the events of which he was writing than was Apuleitis. The Clodia theory has, how- ever, less intrinsic difficulties than the other, and is certainly sup- ported by a number of curious coincidences which Mr. Ellis mar- shals with much skill. Clodia's portrait was drawn by a vigorous hand which, when the interest of the occasion required, could be quite the reverse of flattering. Hence she ranks with Verres, Oppianicus, and sundry other personages to whom the matchless invective of Cicero has given an undying fame for more than human wickedness. We may well doubt whether these portraits are historically true. Even if in this case Cicero did not exag- gerate, yet the Clodia of the Pro Caelio could hardly have become the wretched creature described in Carmen cviii. The probabilities of the case rather point to the conclusion that, like the women celebrated by Tibullus and Propertius, and probably by Ovid, she was of the freedwoman class.

In taking leave of Mr. Ellis, we must thank him for a contribu- tion to English scholarship which takes rank with such works as Porson's "Four Plays," and Mr. Munro's Lucretius.