Altering Attis: Ethnicity, Gender and Genre in Catullus 63

Abstract

AbstractCatullus 63 is one of the most unusual of Latin poems, and also one of the most difficult for literary interpreters. In this paper I would like to discuss it from three angles, connected by the common factor of change or alteration: ethnicity, the poem's alteration of Attis' previous ethnic identity to make him Greek and to stress the contrast with the poem's Asiatic setting; gender, its transsexual use of previous female literary characters as models for Attis' two speeches;2) and genre, the literary form of the poem and its alteration and mixture of various types of generic antecedent.