Acme and Septimius Recounted: Catullus 45

Abstract

Carmen 45 is a remarkable poem in the Catullan corpus. An erotic dialogue between two lovers who appear only here in the collection, the duet of Acme and Septimius stands apart from Catullus' other amatory epigrams. Belonging neither to the Lesbia cycle nor to the Juventius cycle, die idylUc account of this hyperbolically blissful couple contrasts sharply with the emotional intensity and earnestness of Catullus' other expressions of love. As E. Havelock observes, this "little lovedrama" is one of only two poems in the entire corpus which "are detached from the immediate concerns of [the poet's] daily Ufe."1 A. Wheeler classifies the piece with the few Catullan "ideal or purely fanciful poems . . . which have no basis in reaUty."2 In a similar vein, M. Skinner reads this "cool, stylized, and detached" idyll as "differ[ing] radically from the Lesbia sequence."3 But the poem is remarkable also for its careful and meticulous form. Its tripartite structure, consisting of two stanzas of nine Unes each followed by a closing stanza of eight lines, has been Ukened to die arrangement of verses in Greek tragic choruses: critics have applied the terms strophe, antistrophe, and epode to the piece.4 Especially remarkable is the arrangement of the nine occurrences of the names of Acme and Septimius. The opening sequence "Acmen-Septimius-Acme" in lines 1-2 is repeated in the final