THE
POEMS AND FRAGMENTS
OF
CATULLUS,

TRANSLATED IN THE METRES OF THE ORIGINAL

BY

ROBINSON ELLIS,

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,
PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.

LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

TO ALFRED TENNYSON.

[Pg vii]

PREFACE.

The idea of translating Catullus in the original metres adopted by thepoet himself was suggested to me many years ago by the admirable,though, in England, insufficiently known, version of Theodor Heyse(Berlin, 1855). My first attempts were modelled upon him, and were sounsuccessful that I dropt the idea for some time altogether. In 1868,the year following the publication of my larger critical edition[A] ofCatullus, I again took up the experiment, and translated into Englishglyconics the first Hymenaeal, Collis o Heliconici. Tennyson's Alcaicsand Hendecasyllables had appeared in the interval, and had suggested tome the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficientto reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity wasreproduced also. Almost all the modern writers of classical metre hadcontented themselves with making an accented syllable long, anunaccented short; the[Pg viii] most familiar specimens of hexameter,Longfellow's Evangeline and Clough's Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich andAmours de Voyage were written on this principle, and, as a rule,stopped there. They almost invariably disregarded position, perhaps themost important element of quantity. In the first line of Evangeline—

there are no less than five violations of position, to say nothing ofthe shortening of a syllable so distinctly long as the i inprimeval. Mr. Swinburne, in his Sapphics and Hendecasyllables, whilewriting on a manifestly artistic conception of those metres, and, in myjudgment, proving their possibility for modern purposes by the superiorrhythmical effect which a classically trained ear enabled him to make inhandling them, neglects position as a rule, though his nice sense ofmetre leads him at times to observe it, and uniformly rejects anyapproach to the harsh combinations indulged in by other writers. Thenearest approach to quantitative hexameters with which I am acquaintedin modern English writers is the Andromeda of Mr. Kingsley, a poemwhich has produced little effect, but is interesting as a step to whatmay fairly be called a new development of the metre. For the experimentsof the Elizabethan writers, Sir Philip Sidney and others, by thatstrange perversity which[Pg ix] so often dominates literature, were asdecidedly unsuccessful from an accentual, as the modern experiments froma quantitative point of view. Sir Philip Sidney has given in hisArcadia specimens of hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads,anacreontics, hendecasyllables. The following elegiacs will serve as asample.