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Concatenatio Catulliana
A New Reading of the Carmina
Series: - Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, Volume: 9
Author:
The arrangement of Catullusâ Carmina is one of those controversial issues that in-cite respectable commentators to take up extreme positions. In 1914, the German scholar Bernhard Schmidt described the collection as âa wild chaosâ. Forty-five years later, his compatriot Otto Weinreich riposted with the laconic statement: âChaos? Cosmos!â Former attempts to detect a structure in the collection were based on rather subjective assumptions. While translating Catullus' poetry into Dutch, Dr Claes detected an objective foundation: the principle of concatenation, i.e. the recurrence of motifs and phrases in consecutive poems. The generality of this phenomenon proves that the poet conceived of the Carmina as a coherent collection, in which the poems fit like links in a chain. The discovery of this coherence suggests a new reading of Catullus, which has also implications for the constitution of the text.