Embracing the Young Man in Love: Catullus 75 and the ComicAdulescens

Abstract

In the prologue of Terence'sEunuchus, written, according to the didascalia, in 161 BC, the author of the play defends himself against the charge of literary theft. He denies completely any knowledge on his part that the Greek plays he had combined to produce his own play had already been translated into Latin. In the alternative, he argues against the charge of comic theft by way of the very nature of stock characters. ‘If’, argues Terence, ‘a man isn't allowed to make use of the same characters [personae] as other writers, how, all the more, is he allowed to write of the running slave, to make his matrons good and his prostitutes wicked, his hanger-on greedy, his soldier arrogant; how is he allowed to have a child substituted, an old man deceived through his slave, to love, to hate, to be suspicious?’ This last line —amare odisse suspicari— aims to evoke the characteristic attitude of the comicadulescens, whose emotional vacillation is presented as just another stock aspect of the genre, a literary inheritance as clich6d as any of the comedy's archetypal stock characters. ‘Nothing is said nowadays which hasn't been said before’, concludes Terence. Mid second century BC, and the Latin literary lover is already afflicted by textual, as much as emotional, exhaustion.

Tibullus’ Comedy

“…(1.2.87-98) This poem is a long paraclausithyron and these closing lines reassert the dramatic situation and highlight the performance that the narrator describes. James has stressed the performative dimension of love elegy as one of its connections with Roman comedy and this setting is particularly evocative of performance.7 At this point in the poem, Tibullus addresses a bystander or, I would argue, the audience or reader and ascertains his reaction to his situation.8 He is happily laughing (laetus rides) at Tibullus' troubles.9 This response strongly aligns the situation with comedy and calls attention to the comedic 5 Similar comedic tropes and intergeneric play influence Catullus 67 (Maynes 2016) and Catullus' persona (Uden 2006). 6 Griffin 1986, 207: "These resemblances between Comedy and Elegy are more than verbal echoes.…”

Plautinisches Im Ovid: The Amphitruo And The Metamorphoses

“…Hughes 1997 discusses many other instances of comic allusion in Cicero.  Recent work includes Goldberg 2005, 113;Uden 2006;O'Bryhim 2007, all with bibliography.  For discussions of Plautine and Terentian debts throughout book four of the De rerum natura, see Rosivach 1980on Lucr.…”