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Lesbia and Candida Venustae: The Beloved as Aesthetic Ideal in Catullus and Beza

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Notes

  1. J. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers, Oxford, 1993, p. 211.

  2. Ibid., p. 214.

  3. Ibid., p. 217.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., p. 220.

  6. Ibid., p. 222.

  7. Ibid., p. 228.

  8. J. Haig Gaisser, Catullus, Chichester, 2009, p. 181.

  9. For a general survey of the French authors who looked to Catullus for inspiration, see in particular the third chapter, ‘The Neo-Catullan Revolution’, of P. Ford, The Judgment of Palaemon: The Contest Between Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, Leiden, 2013, pp. 55–96. Ford’s reading of Renaissance French Neo-Catullan poetry serves as one of several examples of what he sees as ‘the almost symbiotic relationship that existed between humanist Latin and French poetry in Renaissance France’ (ibid., p. xiii).

  10. Ford, The Judgment of Palaemon (n. 9 above), p. 68.

  11. G. Soubeille, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Salmon Macrin, Épithalames et odes, ed. G. Soubeille, Paris, 1998, pp. 11–145 (35). My translation. On the subject of this influence of Italian Neo-Latin literature on 16th-century French poetry, see also C. Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode, Baltimore, 1960, pp. 193–4.

  12. Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. J.-C. Monferran, Geneva, 2007, p. 137. My translation.

  13. K. M. Summers, ‘Theodore Beza’s Reading of Catullus’, Classical and Modern Literature, 15, 1995, pp. 233–45 (233).

  14. F. Gardy, Bibliographie des œuvres théologiques, littéraires, et juridiques de Théodore de Bèze, Geneva, 1960, pp. 4–12.

  15. ‘THEODORE DE BESZE AUX lecteurs, /Salut en nostre Seigneur’, in Abraham Sacrifiant. Tragedie Françoise, ed. M. Soulié and J.-D. Beaudin, Paris, 2006, pp. 33–4. My translation.

  16. For this question of the play’s editions, see, e.g., the critical apparatus provided by Soulié and Beaudin, ibid., pp. 25 and 93, as well as Gardy, Bibliographie (n. 14 above), pp. 18–32.

  17. My translation.

  18. It is important to note that Beza’s criticism of the courtly style does not represent a total repudiation of classical letters and the humanist tradition. Indeed, even after his conversion, Beza continued to rely on his humanist education. On this point, see S. Manetsch, ‘Psalms before Sonnets: Theodore de Beza and the studia humanitatis’, in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History, ed. R. J. Bast and A. Gow, Leiden, 2000, pp. 400–16.

  19. See, e.g., V. Ferrer, ‘La lyre protestante: Calvin et la réforme poétique en France’, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1, 2009, pp. 55–75.

  20. See, e.g., Pierre de Ronsard, Hercule chrestien, in Les Œuvres complètes, ed. P. Laumonier, VIII, Paris, 1966. In this poem, Ronsard argues that Christian subject matter is just as worthy, if not more so, of the pagan heroic style than pagan mythology itself. While he claims to reject the classical literary tradition, he does not hesitate to use its forms and vocabulary: the prophets who announce the birth of Christ are called ‘les Sybilles devines’ (‘the holy sibyls’, 73) and Jesus Christ the ‘Hercule chrestien’ (‘Christian Hercules’), for example. For the question of this convergence between the ‘pagan’ or ‘worldly’ literary style and the Christian message in the French Catholic context, see, e.g., A. MacAskill, ‘“C’est un amour ou Cupidon nouveau”: Spiritual Passions and the Profane Persona in Anne de Marquets’ Les Divines poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (1568/1569)’, Renaissance and Reformation, 38, 2015, pp. 61–82. It is, of course, not so easy to distinguish between Protestant poetics and Catholic poetics in the 16th century, even in the decades surrounding France’s religious wars. Indeed, in the Iuvenilia, Beza includes a sylva based on the story of David and Bathsheba, a text that includes its own re-writing of pagan Latin topoï. See J. Nassichuk, ‘La condition tragique de l’homme dans la Silve IV des Juvenilia de Théodore de Bèze’, Études françaises, 44, 2008, pp. 85–105.

  21. Summers, ‘Theodore Beza’s Reading of Catullus’ (n. 13, above), pp. 237–8.

  22. All quotations and translations of Catullus come from The Loeb Classical Library edition, Catullus, Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris, ed. G. P. Goold, transl. F. Warre Cornish, 2nd rev. ed., Cambridge, MA and London, 1988.

  23. Summers, ‘Theodore Beza’s Reading of Catullus’ (n. 13 above), p. 238.

  24. Haig Gaisser, Catullus (n. 8 above), p. 188.

  25. Theodore Beza, Les Juvenilia, ed. A. Machard, Geneva, 1970, p. 196n. My translation.

  26. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (n. 1 above), p. 233.

  27. All citations and translations of the Iuvenilia, unless otherwise indicated, come from Theodore Beza, A View from the Palatine, ed. and transl. K. M. Summers, Tempe, AZ, 2001.

  28. It is interesting to note that of the authors Beza mentions in the following lines of the poem, Martial is the first to appear, another victim of Beza’s tinea, who threatens to consume his whole library (22–4).

  29. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (n. 1 above), p. 240.

  30. K. Summers, ‘Catullus’ Program in the Imagination of Later Epigrammatists’, Classical Bulletin, 77, 2001, pp. 1–13.

  31. An invitation that would be answered literally, it would seem, by his contemporaries, as was customary in the French literary circles of the time, when Salmon Macrin discussed it in a letter to Antoine Lion. See Ford, The Judgment of Palaemon (n. 9 above), pp. 209–11.

  32. It is no surprise that Secundus is among the authors to whom Beza addresses his epidictic verse, for he was himself the author of the neo-Catullan Liber Basiorum, and one of the examples cited for his use of hendecasyllables in Du Bellay’s La Deffence, as noted above.

  33. This is Summers’s translation, though the word also suggests charm and elegance, as in many of Catullus’s poems.

  34. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (n. 1 above), pp. 193–4.

  35. A. Dufour, Théodore de Bèze, poète et théologien, Geneva, 2006, p. 15. My translation.

  36. Ibid., p. 33. My translation.

  37. For this discussion, see, e.g., Summers, ‘Theodore Beza’s Reading of Catullus’ (n. 13 above).

  38. Dufour, Théodore de Bèze, poète et théologien (n. 35 above), p. 33.

  39. For the influence of Ovid in Beza’s Latin poetry, see P. White, ‘Representation and Illusion in the Elegies of Théodore de Bèze’, French Studies, 66, 2012, pp. 1–11.

  40. She also appears in the Elegiae section of the book, though for the purpose of this paper I am limiting myself to her representation in the Epigrammata, which more closely resemble the poetry of Catullus, as mentioned above.

  41. F. O. Copley, ‘Emotional Conflict and Its Significance in the Lesbia-Poems of Catullus’, American Journal of Philology, 70, 1949, pp. 22–40 (24).

  42. For this tradition in the Neo-Latin context, see Ford, The Judgment of Palaemon (n. 9 above), pp. 69–74.

  43. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (n. 1 above), pp. 235–54.

  44. Copley, ‘Emotional Conflict’ (n. 41 above), p. 22.

  45. S. F. Wilsthire, ‘Catullus Venustus’, The Classical World, February 1997, pp. 319–26 (319).

  46. Ibid., p. 321.

  47. In his edition, Summers cites not only Catullus but also Horace and Ovid as models for this language: Beza, A View from the Palatine (n. 27 above), pp. 353–4.

  48. T. D. Papanghelis, ‘Catullus and Callimachus on Large Women (A Reconsideration of c. 86)’, Mnemosyme, 44, 1991, pp. 372–86 (372–3).

  49. Wiltshire, ‘Catullus Venustus’ (n. 45 above), p. 319.

  50. Beza, Les Juvenilia (n. 25 above), p. 196n.

  51. Ibid., p. 196n. My translation.

  52. Beza, A View from the Palatine (n. 27, above), pp. 401–2.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Papanghelis, ‘Catullus and Callimachus’ (n. 48 above), p. 375.

  55. Ibid., pp. 375–6.

  56. Summers, ‘Theodore Beza’s Reading of Catullus’, (n. 13 above), p. 245.

  57. Pierre de Ronsard, Discours des Miseres de ce temps, ed. M. Smith, Geneva, 1979.

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  1. Department of French Studies, University of Western Ontario, Arts and Humanities Building Rm 2R 34, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada

    Annick MacAskill

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MacAskill, A. Lesbia and Candida Venustae: The Beloved as Aesthetic Ideal in Catullus and Beza. Int class trad 24, 57–77 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0432-4

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