Gender, Geography, and Genre

Abstract

This chapter offers a new reading of Catullus’ Lesbia by examining the poet’s spatial poetics. These poetics play a crucial role in shaping the worlds created in the poems. Catullus’ collection features three distinct poetics of place: topical, neoteric, and abstracted, clustered in specific groups of poems: the polymetrics, the carmina maiora, and the elegiac epigrams, respectively. As Lesbia is the only character (apart from the ‘Catullus’ persona) who appears in each group, she presents the ideal subject for examining how Catullus’ distinct poetics of place shape characterization in different genres of poetry. Furthermore, as a woman whose gender is frequently thematized, Lesbia presents a fulcrum for investigating how gendered ideologies of certain spaces might have shaped Catullus’ spatial poetics. This chapter offers close readings of three ‘Lesbia’ poems: 37, 68b, and 70, to highlight the importance of place and space to Lesbia’s role in each poem.