Catullus and the Poetics of Incest

Abstract

Catullus is fascinated by the subject of incest. In the last third of his collection, no less than eight pieces are devoted to this particular topic. There are, in addition, thematically significant mentions of the practice in poems 59, 64 and 67. Furthermore, China'sZmyrna, the neo-Callimachean virtues of which are famously touted in poem 95, dealt centrally with the incest of the eponymous heroine and her father Cinyras. To put the matter crudely, then, the incest-theme surfaces in roughly ten per cent of Catullus' surviving poems. But the bulk of such allusions are clustered in poems 69-116, most particularly in the cycle on Gellius (74, 88-91), who, while not disdaining an oral-genital fling with a male partner (80), suffers, according to Catullus, from a psychologically and somatically unhealthy obsession with bedding his closest female relatives. Of especial importance is poem 79,Lesbius est pulcher: it will be discussed at the close of the paper.

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