Catullus, Caesar and Roman Masculine Identity

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of Latin love poetry is its seemingly oppositional stance toward traditional Roman values. As I and others have recently argued, however, critical approaches that merely focus on a search for oppositional ideology in Roman poetry are not only reductionist but also fail to do justice to the complex literary strategies at work in those texts. As Matthew Santirocco suggests, Augustan literature does not simply reflect a pre-existing ideology but rather participates interactively in its production. It seems to me that mis applies equally well to Catullus. By problematizing the poet's relationship to male public culture, Catullus sets the stage not only for the elegists’ ambivalent stance toward political life, but also for their ambiguous gender identifications.