A note on Catullus 8 and 58: the fragmenting of ‘ego’,and Lesbia’s vulgarization

Abstract

A distinguishing feature of Catullus’ poetics, which was followed by other poets, is the use of his own name to present a “multivoiced ego” in his poetry, as it has been shown by Greene (1995), i.e., this ego can emerge from poetry in the first person singular or plural, in the second person singular or in the third person singular. This supposed grammatical “inconsistency” does not indicate a uitium elocutionis against the puritas or latinitas of the poetic speech, but it must be seen as a poetic uirtus which operates in the argumentative structure of his collection, no matter if we identify either one or three books of poetry in this corpus. This article aims to show how we can read this linguistic fact considering an argumentative structure whose purpose is to support the delineation of Lesbia’s poetic persona within the narrative of Catullus’ collection.