Catullus and the Limits of the Light

Abstract

This chapter shows : a) how Catullus, especially in the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, but in ways that are built into the whole of his poetic corpus, thought through what we might term the disenchantment of his world as a whole. b) how this disenchantment was made not only national, but global, through manipulations of the inherited Hellenistic archive of, and contemporary Roman applications of, conceptions of the path of the sun and of solar (political-)theology, and c)how Catullus’ dynamic model of the limits of the light allows him to build on Cicero’s example to connect the cosmic and the (Republican) imperial with himself as individual, thus connecting the public, the private, and the solitary spheres (Kachuck 2021) to explain his place in the world, and that world’s place in him. The devil is in Catullus’ details, and this chapter will not be a study of the cult of the sun Rome—now the subject of a major two-volume study several decades in the works by Steven Hijmans 2023)—but of how Catullus’ poetry does not only reflect what Greeks or Romans thought about or performed in cultic service of the sun, but what about how it makes for itself what the spirits of Virgil’s underworld enjoy, those who “know their own sun, their own stars” (Aen. 6.641 solemque suum, sua sidera norunt). Catullus’ interest in light as a way to structure his world, his thought and his works comes within the particular context of the use of the sun as metaphor for human political leaders in the late Roman Republic, most especially in the works of Cicero, whose first political speech (De imperio Pompeii, 66 BCE) and who’s poem on his first consulate (De consulatu suo, 60 BCE), provide the building-blocks for what will be Catullus’ achievement: thinking through his own place in a world grown larger, and less enchanted, than ever before. Following this, we explain the role of cosmography in Catullus’ works in general, before turning to Catullus 64, and its role within that broader corpus