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The full text of Catullus 101 (Latin and English) at Wikisource - Poem 101 at Perseus, ed. E. T. Merrill
Catullus 101 is an elegiac poem written by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. It is addressed to Catullus' dead brother or, strictly speaking, to the "mute ashes" which are the only remaining evidence of his brother's body.
The tone is grief-stricken and tender, with Catullus trying to give the best gift he had to bestow (a poem) on his brother, who was taken prematurely. The last words, "Hail and Farewell" (in Latin, ave atque vale), are among Catullus' most famous; an alternative modern translation might be "I salute you...and goodbye".
The meter is elegiac couplet, which was usually employed in love poetry, such as Catullus' addresses to Lesbia. However, the elegiac couplet was originally used by ancient Greek poets to express grief and lamentation, making it an entirely suitable form to express Catullus' mourning.[ citation needed ]
Multās per gentēs et multa per aequora vectus | Having been carried through many nations and over many seas, |
Oxford Latin Dictionary , (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, reprinted 1985) p. 965, entry on ipse, meaning 5 ("the actual").
This is one of three poems in which Catullus tries to cope with the loss of his brother. The other poems are Catullus 65 and 68B. The cause of his brother's death is unknown; he apparently died before 57 BC in Bithynia, a northwest region of modern-day Turkey, near the ancient city of Troy.
In addition to its inclusion among the many translations of Catullus' collected poems, Catullus 101 is featured in Nox (2010), a book by Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson that comes in an accordion format within a box. Nox concerns the death of Carson's own brother, to which the poem of Catullus offers a parallel. Carson provides the Latin text of 101, word-by-word annotations, and "a close and almost awkward translation".[ citation needed ]
The poem was also adapted in 1803 by the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo as the sonnet "In morte del fratello Giovanni", ("Un dì, s'io non andrò sempre fuggendo/di gente in gente...") which commemorates the death of the poet's brother, Giovanni Foscolo.[ citation needed ]
Aubrey Beardsley made a translation of the poem, with an accompanying drawing, which he published in volume 7 of the Savoy (November 1896) [1]
It was also used as a shadowhunters farewell in The Shadowhunter Chronicles by Cassandra Clare.[ citation needed ]
This poem, as translated by Aubrey Beardsley, was set by the composer Ned Rorem under the title "Catullus: On the Burial of his Brother".[ citation needed ] The Austrian music group Dargaard have performed this poem in song on their album Rise and Fall , naming it "Ave Atque Vale".[ citation needed ] Composer Frank Brickle set it for voice and two guitars in tribute to his mentor, Milton Babbitt.[ citation needed ] The Norwegian band Tristania used "ut te postremo donarem mortis" in the choir of the song "Angina" from the album Beyond the Veil (1999); the band is famous for using the Latin choirs in their songs.[ citation needed ]
The full text of Catullus 101 (Latin and English) at Wikisource
Gaius Valerius Catullus, often referred to simply as Catullus, was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His surviving works are still read widely and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.
The elegiac couplet is a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than the epic. Roman poets, particularly Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, adopted the same form in Latin many years later. As with the English heroic couplet, each pair of lines usually makes sense on its own, while forming part of a larger work.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word derives from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα. This literary device has been practiced for over two millennia.
Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead".
Mimnermus was a Greek elegiac poet from either Colophon or Smyrna in Ionia, who flourished about 632–629 BC. He was strongly influenced by Homer, yet he wrote short poems suitable for performance at drinking parties and was remembered by ancient authorities chiefly as a love poet. Mimnermus in turn exerted a strong influence on Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and thus also on Roman poets such as Propertius, who even preferred him to Homer for his eloquence on love themes.
Moschus was an ancient Greek bucolic poet and student of the Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was born at Syracuse, Magna Graecia, and flourished about 150 BC. Aside from his poetry, he was known for his grammatical work, nothing of which survives.
The adjective elegiac has two possible meanings. First, it can refer to something of, relating to, or involving, an elegy or something that expresses similar mournfulness or sorrow. Second, it can refer more specifically to poetry composed in the form of elegiac couplets.
Sirmione is a comune in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy. It is bounded by Desenzano del Garda (Lombardy) and Peschiera del Garda in the province of Verona and the region of Veneto. It has a historical centre which is located on the Sirmio peninsula that divides the lower part of Lake Garda.
The Tristia is a collection of letters written in elegiac couplets by the Augustan poet Ovid during his exile from Rome. Despite five books of his copious bewailing of his fate, the immediate cause of Augustus' banishment of the most acclaimed living Latin poet to Pontus in AD 8 remains a mystery. In addition to the Tristia, Ovid wrote another collection of elegiac epistles on his exile, the Epistulae ex Ponto. He spent several years in the outpost of Tomis and died without ever returning to Rome.
The Priapeia is a collection of eighty anonymous short Latin poems in various meters on subjects pertaining to the phallic god Priapus. They are believed to date from the 1st century AD or the beginning of the 2nd century. A traditional theory about their origin is that they are an anthology of poems written by various authors on the same subject. However, it has recently been argued that the 80 poems are in fact the work of a single author, presenting a kind of biography of Priapus from his vigorous youth to his impotence in old age.
The Appendix Vergiliana is a collection of Latin poems traditionally ascribed as being the juvenilia of Virgil.
Catullus 85 is a poem by the Roman poet Catullus for his lover Lesbia. Its declaration of conflicting feelings, "I hate and I love", is renowned for its drama, force and brevity. The meter of the poem is the elegiac couplet.
Sirmio is a promontory at the southern end of Lake Garda, projecting 3.3 kilometers (2.1 mi) into the lake. It is celebrated in connection with the Roman poet Catullus, as the large ruins of a Roman villa known as the Grottoes of Catullus on the promontory have been supposed to be his country house. Catullus, upon his return home from a long voyage, joyously describes Sirmio as Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque ocelle in his Carmen XXXI, Ad Sirmionem insulam. A post station bearing the name Sirmio stood on the highroad between Brixia and Verona, near the southern shore of the lake. On the shore below is the village of Sirmione, with sulfur baths.
Catullus 5 is a passionate ode to Lesbia and one of the most famous poems by Catullus. The poem encourages lovers to scorn the snide comments of others, and to live only for each other, since life is brief and death brings a night of perpetual sleep. This poem has been translated and imitated many times.
The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic. It describes the lifestyle of the poet and his friends, as well as, most famously, his love for the woman he calls Lesbia.
Catullus 86 is a Latin poem of six lines in elegiac couplets by the Roman poet Catullus.
Leonard Charles Smithers was a London bookseller and publisher associated with the Decadent movement of the late 19th century.
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.