1.1.1 Aristophanes’ Frogs and Models of Counting Criticism

In Aristophanes’ Frogs, Dionysus ventures to the underworld with the intention of retrieving Euripides, yet on arrival at Pluto’s house it transpires that Euripides has challenged Aeschylus’ claim to be the best tragedian. The ensuing poetic contest between Euripides and Aeschylus sees the two playwrights exchange representative verses from their plays as well as critique and attempt to undermine each other’s poetic styles. The decision Dionysus must make at the end is to choose whomever he considers to be the tragedian best equipped to save Athens, and he chooses Aeschylus. The contest was important for the later tradition not just because of the focus on explicit poetic judgement within poetry itself, but also because of the range of criticism used to appraise and evaluate the tragedians’ works. As has long been observed, the contest was one of a number of key intertexts for Callimachus in the Reply. He reconfigures those many images of poetry and its evaluative criteria in staging his own contest with, and response to, the Telchines.Footnote ⁸

An underexplored aspect of the Frogs is the audience or critic as a counter of poetry. After each of the tragedians has outlined their own poetic credo, defended their verbal art and rubbished their opponent (907–1118), Euripides and Aeschylus turn to criticising lines from each other’s prologues, with Dionysus as arbiter. When Aeschylus recites the opening of the Oresteia, Dionysus asks Euripides what aspects there are to criticise.

Presenting himself as an arch-investigator, Euripides tallies up the things which can be criticised and, when Dionysus notes that only three lines have been given, he accounts more specifically the line-to-mistake ratio. Euripides later enacts a different accounting of Aeschylus’ plays: εἰς ἓν γὰρ αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ μέλη ξυντεμῶ (‘I will reduce all his lyrics into one [sort]’, 1262); Euripides shows that all Aeschylus’ lyrics are based on the same metrical pattern. In response, Dionysus joins in with the counting: καὶ μὴν λογιοῦμαι ταῦτα τῶν ψήφων λαβών (‘and indeed I will take some pebbles and reckon them’, 1263). Euripides will go on also to question the logic of Aeschylus’ plays (1139–50) and even critique the collocation of verbs (1152–7). Aeschylus’ criticism of Euripidean prologues, by contrast, is not concerned with counting mistakes or metrical patterns; he instead appends the bathetic ‘[he] lost his little oil flask’ (ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν, 1208, 1213, 1219, 1226, 1233, 1238, 1241) to Euripidean lines. It no doubt made the audience laugh, but it is a playful undermining of his poetry rather than a poetic nitpicking. Aeschylus did have specific criticisms of Euripides earlier, such as his debasement of the art and the presentation of unworthy models for the audience (1013–17, 1039–44), but when particular lines become the focus, he does not bring the same pedantic level of scrutiny as Euripides. Hellenistic poets were well versed in contemporary literary scholarship and composed their poems in such a way as to reflect literary critical interests.Footnote ¹¹ From a later standpoint, Euripides’ ‘setting of reason and inquiry into the poetic art’ (λογισμὸν ἐνθεὶς τῇ τέχνῃ | καὶ σκέψιν, 973–4) that was aimed at getting the audience to examine their household organisation more thoroughly (975–9) could be seen to present one model of Hellenistic poetic practices.Footnote ¹²

The final weighing of Aeschylean and Euripidean verses presents an enumerative appraisal of poetry from a different perspective. Euripides chooses a ‘heavy’ line from his Meleager (531 TrGF), an ‘iron-heavy club’ (σιδηροβριθές … ξύλον, 1402), while Aeschylus chooses a battle line from his Glaucus Potnieus (38.1 TrGF) with two uses of polyptoton: ‘for chariot upon chariot and corpse upon corpse’ (ἐφ’ ἅρματος γὰρ ἅρμα καὶ νεκρῷ νεκρός, 1403). Dionysus, no doubt influenced by Euripides’ counting, reduces Aeschylus’ polyptota into numbers: ‘He put in two chariots and two corpses, which even a hundred Egyptians could not lift’ (δύ’ ἅρματ’ εἰσέθηκε καὶ νεκρὼ δύο | οὓς οὐκ ἂν ἄραιντ’ οὐδ’ ἑκατὸν Αἰγύπτιοι, 1405–6). This supposed arbiter of the contest keeps straying into a rather strict numerical approach to poetic appreciations.Footnote ¹³ Aeschylus rejects this method; Euripides could throw himself, his family and all his books on the scales (1407–9), all Aeschylus needs is ‘two lines’ (δύ’ ἔπη, 1410). It is not that Aeschylus is not interested in his verses being evaluated; indeed, he is eager for the weighing to occur since he sees it as the decisive form of judgement (1366–7). Rather, he is making the point that the weight of poetry is not equivalent to its verses, however many there are and however many numbers they are stuffed with. He implies instead that the weight comes from their style. Despite this form of measurement clearly favouring Aeschylus and his weighty words in the Frogs – there is no tool for measuring ‘lightness’ … – it is not ultimately the basis on which the winner is chosen. It is the poets’ respective advice and value to the polis which ultimately informs Dionysus’ decision (1417–23). Consequently, the respective success of their poetry is defined neither against Euripides’ counting up of errors nor against Aeschylus’ weighing. These two forms of criticism can be applied to poetry but are not represented as conclusive within the logic of the play.

The contest in the Frogs thus provides Callimachus with two forms of poetic measuring: a weighing and a counting. As with other contrasts between Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ judgements in the Frogs, however, the incorporation of these two forms of criticism into Callimachus’ prologue is not straightforward. Callimachus addresses three contrasting criteria that can also be observed in the Frogs: poetic fatness versus thinness,Footnote ¹⁴ sonic contrastsFootnote ¹⁵ and the measurement of poetry.Footnote ¹⁶ The contrast in the Reply between Callimachus and what the Telchines hoped for broadly draws on the distinctions between Euripides and Aeschylus as poets, the one being bloated and bombastic, the other streamline and subtle. There is, though, no consistency in the way the contrasts in Frogs map on to those in the Reply. Elsewhere in the prologue, Callimachus intertwines numerous images and intertexts, meaning that simple polarities of poetic style are undermined. For example, in contrast to the clear cicada there is the braying sound of the ass (30–1) but there is also the thundering of Zeus, which is not obviously negative or positive (20). Similarly, the paths that Callimachus is advised to follow are not wide but both untrodden and narrow (27–8). This seems to be used to direct him to novelty of subject matter, but the contrast of wide and narrow also has stylistic connotation.Footnote ¹⁷ In engaging with earlier conceptions of poetry, he is often seeking to reconcile them or expose their contradictions at the same time as he is forging an image of his poetry’s own uniqueness.

Euripides’ counting and Aeschylus’ weighing as a contrasting pair of scenes that address the measuring of poetry are likewise cross-fertilised in the Reply to characterise both Callimachus’ poetry and the Telchines’ poetic preferences. On the one hand, it is Euripides together with his fellow accountant Dionysus who considers the numerical mode to be a (meaningful) form of criticism. This is the position of the Telchines in the opening lines when they show their concern for the number of verses that Callimachus has composed. On the other hand, it is Aeschylus who wishes for his and Euripides’ poetry to be judged in terms of their weightiness – a challenge that cannot help but favour Aeschylus. For Callimachus too, poems can be weighed against each other. Yet, in contrast to the weighing in Frogs, it is a slender work that paradoxically outweighs the larger. Callimachus states: ἀλλὰ καθέλκει | … πολὺ τὴν μακρὴν ὄμπνια Θεσμοφόρος (‘But the nourishing Lawgiver by far outweighs the long …’, fr. 1.9–10 Harder). While much is unclear in these fragmentary lines, on the basis of the scholium identifying a reference to a poem by Philetas in these verses (fr. 1b.12–15 Harder), it is probable that the ‘nourishing Lawgiver’, an epithet of Demeter, refers to Philetas’ Demeter. On the same basis, it is also probable that the Demeter was meant to be a short poem that outweighed some longer poem, either by Philetas or by another poet altogether.Footnote ¹⁸ Poetry which is λεπτός (leptos, ‘slender’) like Euripides’ words can succeed in a weighing contest just as Aeschylus’ two lines would. Callimachus rejects Euripides’ counting strategy for poetic evaluation and uses instead the idea of weighing as Aeschylus had suggested, but he also values slender Euripidean-style poetry rather than longer compositions. This adds a further level to the Reply’s reception of Aristophanes’ multiple conceptions of literary criticism in the Frogs. Callimachus may (in general) take over his poetic self-representation from the figure of Euripides, but in talking about the Demeter he utilises the mode of poetic judgement which was used by, and favoured, Aeschylus.

In seeking to elucidate this reconfiguration of Euripidean and Aeschylean poetic characterisations, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and Susan Stephens have appealed to historical context. Callimachus’ modification of the judgement that the weightiest wins highlights an interest in a different kind of wisdom or knowledge, where the subtle art of persuasion trumps the destructive art of warfare, a shift that they see as related to the political circumstances of the Ptolemaic state.Footnote ¹⁹ To my mind, the rejection of Euripides’ counting and modification of Aeschylus’ weighing together find an explanation much closer to home. Callimachus as a scholar was more than familiar with an enumerative approach to literary works. Organising the Alexandrian Library’s collection, he produced the Pinakes, a list which gave an account of its holdings. He was concerned with placing texts into generic categories but also with the number of lines in a text. It was foundational for later bibliographical writings, although it survives only in fragments.Footnote ²⁰ The form of entries is as follows:

Broadly speaking, this form of categorising influenced how genres were defined, making categorical pronouncements regarding which list a work should be written upon. Since it was placed in the catalogue of miscellaneous works, Chaerephon’s treatise was a composition that was hard to pin down generically. In creating the Pinakes, importantly, Callimachus pioneered the consistent and systematic counting up of lines. This makes the Reply all the more surprising: he characterises the Telchines as having the same enumerative habit which he himself had practised in the creation of the Pinakes.

It can be nothing but purposeful that a poet who recorded prologues and counted lines chose to respond in his prologue to an alleged interest in a poem’s number of lines. This can best be explained as a conflict between poetic composition and criticism. Counting may well make sense in the context of the Alexandrian Library, where texts were being inventoried, catalogued and stored. It makes less sense for a composing poet. Later sources record that in the generation before Callimachus, Choerilus of Iasus in the retinue of Alexander was notorious for selling his verses for a fixed price per line (SH 333). Callimachus may thus have had something to prove, both because his patron was a Macedonian monarch and because his ‘day job’ was listing books and counting up the lines of texts. He may have wanted to emphasise that composition of poetry should not be ‘by the line’ either because of the financial reward from rulers or because of bibliographic practice. His caricature of the Telchines’ counting represents them as making this precise mistake, of taking counting to be a tool of criticism rather than a bibliographic feature. Whereas Callimachus has a tendency in the Reply to align himself with Euripides’ representation in Frogs – for example, in the slender, winged and airy nature of his poetry (cf. fr. 1.32–4 Harder and 1388, 1396)Footnote ²¹ – his deviation in respect of Euripides’ counting makes it clear that as a poet he pays no heed to the number of verses, nor does he see it as an important criterion.

In responding to the Telchines’ enumerative criticism, as Acosta-Hughes and Stephens have demonstrated, Callimachus draws on various images from earlier poetry through which poets articulated their poetics: his reference to the battle of the pygmies and the cranes comes from the Iliad (3.3–6; cf. fr. 1.13–14); the battle of the Medes and Massagetae, from an epic by Choerilus of Samos (SH 317; cf. fr. 1.15–16); the wagon and the narrow path, from Pindar (Paean 7b.11–12); the fable of the ass and the cicada, from Aesop (e.g. 184 Perry; cf. fr. 1.29–34); and Aetna and Enceladus, from Euripides (Heracles 638–40; cf. fr. 1.35–6).Footnote ²² Whereas the Telchines judge using the bibliographic tool that Callimachus had invented for the Library, Callimachus himself advances an approach to poetry based on its imagery and on the terms in which poets themselves had viewed their works. The Telchines, since they are ‘no friend of the Muse’ (fr. 1.2), understand and appreciate poetry through a numerical criterion alone and not as a poetically and culturally generative process.Footnote ²³ When it comes to his use of poetic images as well as his rejection of number in this Prologue, Callimachus is very much on the side of the poets. This aspect of the Reply clarifies Callimachus’ reworking of Aeschylus’ weighing alongside the rejection of the Telchines’ counting which is so reminiscent of Euripides in Frogs. Despite his wish to have their respective verses weighed up, as I outlined above, Aeschylus corrects Euripides’ assumption that the number, or numerical content, of the verses correlates with their weight. Aeschylus defines this poetic weighing as a judgement that does not correspond to the traditional measuring and numbering of an object’s weight when set on a balance. In arguing against the application of bibliographic practice to poetic appreciation, Aristophanes’ Frogs provides Callimachus with a model of counting criticism in Euripides but also with a model for measuring the value of a poem in a way that does not involve number.

1.1.2 Apollo’s Advice and a New Measure of sophia

The opening lines of the Reply, then, see Callimachus distance himself from his bibliographical practice in the Pinakes and project counting as a form of literary criticism on to the figure of the Telchines. The poem by Philetas outweighing the longer poem in verses 9–11 presents in response a form of literary judgement that may seem to be related to measure but which does not involve enumeration.

A second address to the Telchines later in the Reply resumes the question of poetic form and how it ought to be judged. Here, Callimachus defines more clearly and positively the criterion he sees as the correct kind of poetic judgement; it is one where counting plays no part.

Callimachus wishes to get away from the Telchines as critics and forge a new means of conceptualising poetic value, drawing on his patron god Apollo for support in the endeavour. This further characterisation of the Telchines implies that they are more interested in measure and extent than enumeration per se, although the two are of course connected. The Telchines’ judgement is again of the same kind as Euripides’ in Frogs. Euripides is a counting critic, but he also presents himself as the poet who taught the Athenians ‘the introduction of subtle rulers and the set-squarings of words’ (λεπτῶν τε κανόνων εἰσβολὰς ἐπῶν τε γωνιασμούς, 956). The implication of Callimachus’ verses, that the Telchines would use the Persian schoinos, can be interpreted in two ways: as condemning poetic judgement that is interested in quantity alone, or that the schoinos, which is many stadia long, is condemned because of its excessive length. The Telchines are introduced in the Reply as interested in ‘continuous’ poems of ‘thousands’ of lines, which, in addition to representing them as interested in an enumerative form of poetic appreciation, suggests a focus on extremes of extent. The couplet following the mention of the schoinos in the above passage (19–20) provides some help in dealing with these two options. While Annette Harder seems to rule out an association between Zeus and Homer, I would instead follow those who see these lines as Callimachus distancing his own poetry from the grandeur of Homeric epic, without any negative implication for the thundering of Zeus or the Homeric style.Footnote ²⁴ Such an interpretation, moreover, helps explain the progression of Callimachus’ argument. At 17–18 there is a command to replace a criterion of measure with that of sophia. If the schoinos is bad because it is both a criterion of extent and one which is excessive, then the couplet rejecting thundering (19–20) deals with the imagined excessive quality of the poetry that the Telchines value, such as long epics, while the following four lines (21–4) deal with extent as a criterion per se by employing the language of fatness and thinness.

The image of fat and thin sacrifices seems also to have the contest in Frogs in mind, recalling Euripides’ mention of inheriting the bloated τέχνη (technê, ‘art’) of tragedy from Aeschylus, which he then thins out (941). Callimachus is likewise thinking about his poetic practice and the type of qualities he wishes to embody when he describes the Muse that he has been instructed to cultivate as thin. Although it may initially appear that this contrast of fat and thin sacrifices is concerned with numerical measure, it is important to understand that this mention of a ‘slender Muse’ follows on from the discussion of his preference for poetry to be judged by technê. The γάρ at line 21 is explanatory: his promotion of poetic judgement not beholden to measure in 17–20 is because he cultivates a ‘slender Muse’ following Apollo’s advice given at 21–4. In which case, slenderness cannot be a criterion susceptible to numerical measuring (as, for example, length and weight are), since this would make for a confused connection between the advice which Apollo gave the poet in his youth and Callimachus’ immediately preceding dismissal of the schoinos as a criterion in favour of technê: his rejection of enumerative criticism would have arisen from the god’s promotion of a numerically measurable aesthetic quality.Footnote ²⁵ The resulting sense would be something like, ‘do not judge poetry by length … although Apollo told me to cultivate a countable Muse’. The fact that sacrifices should be fat and poems slender, however, is not to say that the relationship between form and content should be abandoned, despite numerical measurement no longer being a criterion.

A roughly contemporary passage illuminates Callimachus’ thinking, since it too extracts enumeration from the critics’ toolkit (at least as an absolute concept) and has rather a speaker or poet’s intellectual ability in its sights:

This is a fragment of the comic poet Philemon, active in the decades preceding and following the start of the third century bce. Since it is recorded by Stobaeus (fifth century ce) in his collection of excerpts (his Anthology), neither a secure context for the lines nor the identity of the speaker can be ascertained. As a fragment from a comic work aimed for the stage, though, these lines provide additional evidence for a debate about the interrelation of poetic content and extent, beyond the elite, intellectual circle for which Callimachus was writing. Quite different from what Callimachus alleges the Telchines have to say about a ‘single’ poem in many lines, the contrast of the one and the many in Philemon playfully shifts from someone speaking at length but not saying a single important thing to Homer as someone who has written many thousands of lines but is not called long-winded by a single person. Still, Philemon’s passage is important for understanding the articulation of Callimachus’ poetic credo. In short: enumeration for the speaker is beside the point. Even if one speaks few and countable utterances (δύ’ εἴπῃ συλλαβάς), if they do not say ‘necessary’ or ‘essential’ things (τῶν δεόντων) then they ought to be considered long-winded.Footnote ²⁶ The speaker is not concerned with brevity, then, as Alan Cameron suggests in his important discussion of the passage, but is promoting a compact relationship between intellectual import and length, without making length (or indeed extreme brevity) a criterion per se.Footnote ²⁷ The focus on ‘not-long-windedness’ in this fragment pushes poetic judgement beyond measurement precisely by making the ‘two words’ or ‘thousand lines’ ultimately irrelevant polar opposites. Callimachus’ sophia operates in the same way as Philemon’s ‘necessary things’: it is the nature and importance of the content which dictates its judgement: ‘[W]hat matters is technê, “poetic craft”, however long the poem.’Footnote ²⁸ Thus, all too well aware of the reductive potential of numbers, Callimachus in the Reply develops technê as a measure of poetry that does not require number. The measure is technê, and it is an indication of sophia. σοφία (‘wisdom’, ‘cleverness’) is an intellectual quality of a work that is dependent on its content and far more subjective than counting; to characterise a poem numerically would be precisely to ignore its imagery and language. Callimachus places poetic skill beyond the realm of the accountable and thus beyond the reach of the Telchines and their poetic tallying. He may be measuring up literature in the Library, but his Muse is not susceptible to mathematical measurement.

Callimachus’ championing of a criterion of poetic value that does not reduce poetry to the numerically measurable demands a nuancing of the Telchines’ criticism and Callimachus’ response. Given that Callimachus will go on to reject length as a criterion altogether and focus instead on technê and the sophia it produces, it makes little sense to see his first response to the Telchines’ enumerative approach as also being interested in absolute length. Unfortunately, the beginning of Callimachus’ response, and especially the start of line 9, is irretrievable. Either a person or a poem could be being described as ὀλιγόστιχος (‘of a few lines’), and there is a possibility that a negative adverb (‘X is not of few lines’) or even a conditional conjunction (‘if X was of few lines’) has been lost in the lacuna. The surest information, but by no means correct, is the comment of the scholiast: ‘they criticise him because of the meagreness of his poems and because no length …’ (με]μφομ(έν)ο[ι]ς αὐτοῦ τὸ κάτισ̣[χνον τῶν ποιη]μάτ(ων) κ(αὶ) ὅτι οὐχὶ μῆ̣κος, fr. 1b.8–9 Harder). The fact that the scholiast understands the Telchines to be making two distinct points, that his poems are ‘meagre’ and that they lack a certain ‘length’, means that he cannot be referring to the content of lines 3–4 alone, where the Telchines’ interest is only in length.Footnote ²⁹ On this basis, I consider ὀλιγόστιχος to refer to a work by Callimachus – or less probably to Callimachus himselfFootnote ³⁰ – which does not live up to the Telchines’ expectations, but which verses 9–12 effectively defend by comparanda, not as a work of insufficient length and meagre poetic content, but as a short work that nevertheless has great poetic ‘weight’. In other words, Callimachus avoids perpetuating the Telchines’ critical frame of reference and thinking of ὀλιγόστιχος as a solely enumerative term and argues in 9–12 that works that are ὀλιγόστιχος can be brief but poetically powerful. Diogenes Laertius’ later use of the term evidences a similar strategy. When talking about Herillus of Carthage’s books, he comments that they are ὀλιγόστιχα and δυνάμεως δὲ μεστά (‘full of force’, 7.165). Again, what is important is the extension in relation to content; few lines does not necessarily imply meagre content.

What Callimachus is doing in the Reply then is articulating an aesthetics of scale. In an illuminating work, Jim Porter deals with the big question of Hellenistic poetry’s concept of λεπτότης (‘fineness’, ‘delicacy’), encapsulated by Callimachus himself with the declaration that ‘a big book is big evil’ (Καλλίμαχος ὁ γραμματικὸς τὸ μέγα βιβλίον ἴσον ἔλεγεν εἶναι τῷ μεγάλῳ κακῷ, fr. 465 Pf. = Ath. 3.72a) and with his criticism of Antimachus’ Lyde as ‘a fat poem and not lucid’ (Λύδη καὶ παχὺ γράμμα καὶ οὐ τορόν, fr. 398 Pf.). Porter convincingly proposes that ‘smallness’ as an aesthetic criterion, in both Hellenistic art and poetry, is only one side of the coin. Instead, he reads a number of Hellenistic works as operating an ‘organized aesthetic of contrastive opposites’: the large set against the small.Footnote ³¹ Posidippus’ epigrams on stones set finely wrought gems (e.g. 3–5 AB) against cyclopean boulders (19 AB), while Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17) overflows with hyperbole in a short compass. Certainly, I am not the first to propose that Callimachus’ wider outlook involves an aesthetics of scale.Footnote ³² Yet what I hope to have outlined here is that his focus on scale, on the variable relationship between extent and content, must be understood to go hand in hand with his rejection of counting criticism in the Reply. Counting has the worrying ability to reduce poems to their numerical aspects. Indeed, in the Pinakes works are presented as being defined merely by a generic label, an opening line and a sum of lines.Footnote ³³ This is a scaling down that could diminish the profile of a poetic work and its intellectual content. By doing away with numerical measure altogether and advocating for technê as the key criterion, Callimachus presents his own poetry (and those predecessors mentioned at 9–12) as enacting an aesthetics of scale where the effective contrast is between the (relatively) short compass of poems and their ability to be weighty and contain a great amount of sophia. Indeed, this sophia is not only explicitly theorised in the Reply but also demonstrated by the densely allusive texture of his verses. His response to the Telchines draws on the entire arsenal of poetic tradition. This exemplifies what a great amount of sophia in only a few lines might look like: his own complex matrix of images cannot simply be sized up or scaled down by numbers.

1.3.1 Catullus Kisses Goodbye to Criticism

Catullus c. 5 – uiuamus mea Lesbia atque amemus (‘Let us live, my Lesbia, and love’, 5.1) – is one of the most famous poems in Latin and arguably the most famous counting poem in antiquity. Together with c. 7, its focus on the numerical has garnered much attention. The substance of this subsection is devoted to arguing that an underemphasised aspect of the poems is their engagement with counting as it relates to criticism. In particular, I wish to build on the work of earlier scholars and propose that c. 5, with the help of c. 7, reworks Callimachus’ Reply to the Telchines and thus constitutes a programmatic statement about the nature of counting as a means of poetic appreciation and the extent to which it can be applied to his poetry and its erotic subject matter. I will tentatively suggest, moreover, that this problematisation of counting as a means to appreciate Catullus’ poetry may be extended to the collection as a whole.

First, though, I discuss c. 1, Catullus’ opening poem in the collection as found in the manuscripts, and the emphasis it places on Callimachean poetics and numerical appraisals of literature, at the same time as it introduces – albeit subtly – the erotic current that runs through the collection.

Since Catullus presents his libellus as a gift, the poem probably prefaced at least one collection of his works. It has long been noted that the poem, with its advertisement of the libellus as lepidus, translates the Callimachean interest in poetic refinement at the opening of the Reply – θρέψαι τὴν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην (‘[but], my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender’. fr. 1.24) – for the context of a Roman poetry collection. So too, the final line of Catullus’ poem characterises his libellus in the same way that Callimachus’ describes his own work at the conclusion of his first aition in the Aetia: ἔλλατε νῦν, ἐλέγοισι δ’ ἐνιψήσασθε λιπώσας | χεῖρας ἐμοῖς, ἵνα μοι πουλὺ μένωσιν ἔτος (‘Be gracious now and wipe your shining hands upon my elegies, so that they will remain for many years’, fr. 7.13–14 Harder).Footnote ⁵⁶ In terms of its programmatic effect, Bruce Gibson identifies how the poem ‘anticipates and outmanoeuvres criticism’ and that ‘[t]he basic technique is similar to that used by Callimachus in the Aetia prologue’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Catullus diverges from this model somewhat in emphasising Cornelius Nepos’ appreciation of his nugae rather than his (negative) criticism, although it is no simplistic positive appraisal: precisely what value he ascribes to the nugae is left pointedly vague (cf. aliquid, 4 and 8–9), and the fact that he ‘used to’ (solebas, 3) hold them in esteem begs the question of what, if anything, has changed in the present. Nevertheless, Catullus follows the broader structuring of the Reply by beginning with a response to someone else’s appraisal of his existing poetry.

He also copies the critical frame of the Reply with regards to the extent of the Chronica and of his libellus in relation to their content. The single time span of all Roman history fits in Nepos’ three books, while Catullus wishes his single libellus to last over an entire saeclum.Footnote ⁵⁸ Just as the Telchines, Callimachus claimed, focus on the numerically measurable extent of the poem that they desired of him and its nature as a continuous work, Catullus likewise measures out the three books of Nepos’ Chronica and identifies its continuous nature: omne aeuum glossing Callimachus’ διηνεκές (‘continuous’).Footnote ⁵⁹ Gibson interprets this as Catullus subtly and with playful irony critiquing Nepos’ Chronica.Footnote ⁶⁰ In effect Catullus adopts the pose of the Telchines when characterising the Chronica, despite the fact that he has scaled so much history into just three books, and so learnedly. In (re)presenting his own libellus, however, he evokes Callimachus’ emphasis on slenderness as part of a contrastive aesthetic by reworking the connection between the one and the continuous and between time scale and the quantitative aspect of the text. The hope is that his single poetry book offered in response to or in exchange for Nepos’ labouring over the Chronica will be impressive for the contrast between its small size and the length of time for which it survives. Catullus’ collection, that is, begins with a demonstration of his ability to judge literary works through enumeration as the Telchines had, but also his commitment to a Callimachean slenderness and its contrastive aesthetic when it comes to accounting for his own poetry.

The final aspect of c. 1 that is important for my current discussion is its introduction of the erotic tone, which is then immediately developed in the infamously teasing passer poems.Footnote ⁶¹ C. 1 participates in what William Fitzgerald terms an ‘erotics of poetry’ that is directed at Catullus’ readership. His overarching claim is that sexual provocation is a constituent element of Catullus’ poetry and the relation constructed between poet and audience. What Catullus is doing is ‘exploring an aesthetic relation that unsettles the rigid framework of Roman conceptions of power and position as they are metaphorised by sex and gender’.Footnote ⁶² On this view, the opening poem addressed to Nepos has flirtatious undertones. The book ‘recently polished up with dry pumice’ (c. 1.2) plays on the idea that bodies too could be polished with pumice and advertise effeminacy: ‘Catullus’ book has a teasing sexuality that is provocatively effeminate.’Footnote ⁶³ By calling his Muse patrona uirgo (9), though, he pulls the rug out from under Nepos: the book may appear sexually available, but cannot be ‘taken’ in a sexual sense since it is virginal and so is to remain ‘for more than one generation’ (10).

The opening poem thus carefully introduces three aspects of Catullus’ poetic world: his adherence to Callimachean criteria when appraising literature; his additional use of number and numerical measures of poetry as a tool of distinction; and his sexual positioning of himself and of his poetry vis-à-vis others. To put this another way, Catullus matches his drama of position through sexual language in the social sphere with a self-consciously literary positioning through both Callimachean poetics and enumeration. My argument is that c. 5 with the support of the ‘response’ in c. 7 combines these three aspects again in an equally programmatic way. It intertwines Callimachean motifs, counting and erotics in order to introduce his love for Lesbia explicitly and at the same time reject criticism of his account of that love affair. What is important about Catullus developing Callimachus’ poetics and refusing to adopt counting as a critical measure is that he adheres to these principles at the same time that his poem performs counting within its verses. In so doing, c. 5 rehearses the collocation of motifs seen in c. 1, but is fundamentally different in its use of counting not as a tool of criticism, but a tool against it.

Here is the text and a translation of c. 5 and 7.

The resonance between these two poems has long been noted: 7 is a ‘pendant’, a delayed reply, or a reworking of 5. Poem 5 begins with a call to love (1), which is made urgent by the observation of the brevity of life, a life critiqued by older generations (2–6). There follows the count of the many kisses Catullus orders Lesbia to give him (7–10). The poem concludes with the confounding of this freshly made account so that no evil onlooker may know the tally (11–13). Poem 7 begins by representing Lesbia in response having asked how many kisses would be sufficient for Catullus (1–2). He replies by offering two images of the innumerable – sands and stars – both of which he has nuanced and personalised beyond their (already) stereotypical usage (3–8): these are Libyan sands around Battus’ tomb and stars that spy on clandestine loves.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the case of the number of the stars, Catullus makes the theme particularly topical by resuming the theme of the night as a space for lovers (cf. 5.6 and 7.7). He concludes by reiterating that such an amount would satisfy ‘mad’ Catullus and mean that ‘busybodies’ will be not be able to count them up nor utter curses against them (9–12).

One early question was the type of counting Catullus represents. Harry Levy suggested that Catullus keeps the score of Lesbia’s kisses upon the abacus, while Roger Pack, considering the abacus to be too mercantile for Catullus, proposed instead that he is counting on his fingers.Footnote ⁶⁵ The issues with these two reconstructions notwithstanding, it is difficult to identify within the poem anything that demands a specific counting method, let alone one that is operative from a literary perspective.Footnote ⁶⁶ I therefore leave the matter aside since it will not have an impact on the following interpretation. In a different vein, Francis Cairns designated c. 5 an arithmetikon and compared it to arithmetic poems found in Book 14 of the Palatine Anthology.Footnote ⁶⁷ As will become evident in Chapter 4, the majority of those compositions postdate Catullus, and neither the term nor the genre would likely have been recognised by Catullus. A more useful historical contextualisation is the financial aspect of Catullus’ counting, or rather, accounting. The views of an older generation are valued by Catullus in monetary terms, but so is the treatment of his own kiss count, conturbare (11) having the sense of ‘to bring one’s financial affairs into disorder’, ‘to go bankrupt’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Catullus’ defining of his relationship with Lesbia in this way draws on definitions of social interaction in economic terms that are part of his larger transactional outlook, observable most clearly in his ‘contractual’ approach to love (e.g. cc. 76.1–6, 109). Indeed, the sense of exchange is already present in the ‘you ask: I answer’ form of c. 7. At the very least, then, counting is operative in this poem inasmuch as it reflects an everyday, economic reality in the Roman world.

Especially relevant for my current purposes, though, is the connection between c. 5 and Callimachus’ Reply, noted by Francis Cairns and Stephen Heyworth.Footnote ⁶⁹ I delineate here the Callimachean resonances in the poems, before looking at the development of counting as a theme in the two poems. Catullus’ designation of the upper limit of desired kisses turns, at the centre of c. 7, to the tomb of ‘old Battus’ (6). Contextually, his immediately preceding mention of Cyrene (4) means that he is referring to one of its kings named Battus, quite probably the first of that name and its founder (cf. Hdt. 4.150–9; Pind. Pyth. 5.87). Equally, however, since the patronymic Battiades is elsewhere used by Catullus to refer to Callimachus (cc. 65.16 and 116.2) – following Callimachus’ own presentation of his genealogical connection to Battus (cf. epigrams 29 and 30 HE) – Catullus is making a connection to one of his poetic models. His choice to allude to Callimachus’ place of birth and lineage in a pair of poems so reliant on enumeration, given Callimachus’ own rejection of counting, is clearly a provocative move. But Catullus does more than refer to Callimachus by alluding to his heritage.

Consider again the opening of Callimachus’ Aetia.

In cc. 5 and 7, Catullus responds to the opening of the Reply to the Telchines by reworking its key themes. First, Catullus’ representation of those who would criticise his and Lesbia’s love recalls the Telchines. In both cases, the poet is reacting to the chatter (cf. rumores, 5.2; ἐπιτρύζουσιν, fr. 1.1 Harder) of others who talk about him. So too, both sets of critics are connected with envy. The Telchines, as Callimachus will go on to say, are from ‘the destructive race of Bascania’ (Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος, fr. 1.17 Harder). Bascania is a malign influence or jealousy that had the capacity to bewitch those who were the object of envy; it comes to be associated with the Evil Eye (LSJ s.v. βασκανία). Likewise, Catullus emphasises at the end of both poems the invidiousness of the supposed onlooker (ne quis malus inuidere possit, 5.12; nec pernumerare curiosi | possint nec mala fascinare lingua, 7.11–12).Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, βασκαίνειν and fascinare derive from the same root (OLD s.v. fascino); Catullus may thus be etymologically alluding to Callimachus’ ‘race of Bascania’. The onlookers’ interest, as with the Telchines, is to employ counting when prying into the poet’s own affairs (cum tantum sciat esse basiorum, 5.13; pernumerare, 7.11). Catullus makes a connection between the critics’ envy and enumeration, a connection which Callimachus had implied later in the Reply where the Telchines as the breed of Bascania seek to employ the schoinos to measure poetry.

It may be thought – despite these parallels – that this is rather a coincidence of broader themes related to the envy of the poet. But even setting the reference to Callimachus’ Cyrenean lineage in c. 7 to one side, further phrases in c. 5 suggest that Catullus is looking specifically to Callimachus’ Reply and knowingly appropriating it for his own poetic needs. The Telchines’ first criticism as presented by Callimachus is that he did not compose ‘one long poem in many thousands of lines’. There is debate about how this comment relates to wider trends of criticism in the Hellenistic period.Footnote ⁷¹ The minimum that can be said is that their desire is for a poem which is both in some way ‘singular’ (ἕν) and ‘continuous’ (διηνεκές, fr. 1.3 Harder). This is a set of terms that Catullus reworks across the two poems to diverse effect. As has been observed, Catullus’ statement nox est perpetua una dormienda (5.6) responds to the Telchines’ desired poem, and indeed in later Roman poets perpetuus will come to signal an engagement with Callimachus’ poetics in the Reply, such as in Horace’s first book of Odes (1.7.6) and, famously, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.4).Footnote ⁷² The same terms are also loosely evoked by Catullus’ evaluation of the rumores of the old men: they ‘value them all at a single as’ (omnes unius aestimemus assis, 5.3). The criterion of the singular can be decidedly negative when it refers to monetary value, but it is a criterion that the Telchines value in poetry: Catullus has used the Telchines’ criticism to shut up his critics. This is also the case with his emphasis that nox est perpetua una dormienda. He again adopts the numerical aesthetics that the Telchines espoused only to use it against his own murmurers. A single continuous time span emerges as synonymous with the eternity that follows death, a simply unmanageable time frame that is meaningless for humans who occupy the repeated divisions of time into day and night (5.4–5). A time span that would be suitable for the Telchines would leave no space for the prying of the senes.

Yet, evidently, Catullus breaks away from the Callimachean model when his poem descends into a counting of kisses. In Callimachean terms, enacting enumeration in poetry is uncharted territory. This is part, I would argue, of Catullus’ strategy of co-opting the Telchines’ terms in his defence against his own (imagined) critics. As the Reply makes clear, counting is the interest of the critics. As John Elliott has shown, the Evil Eye is connected in many ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures with possessiveness and accounting: miserliness or excessive abstemiousness of one’s own possessions incurs the influence of the Evil Eye, while those who are unwilling to share their own possessions are said to cast the Evil Eye on others.Footnote ⁷³ It is this connection between the critics’ envy and enumeration which Catullus draws out of the Reply. Callimachus banishes the destructive race of Bascania (ἔλλετε Βασκανίης ὀλοὸν γένος, fr. 1.17 Harder), after which he outlines the critical framework which ought to be adopted for judging his poetry, a framework which does not require measure. Catullus’ strategy is to count up his kisses – or appear to – in a way which responds to ‘all the rumours’ (rumoresque … omnes), but which also strips the numbers of their signification. The hypnotic quality of 5.7–10 places the emphasis on sound and also responds to the Telchines’ fame for witchcraft with an incantation of Catullus’ own.Footnote ⁷⁴ In any case, the conclusion to c. 5 makes explicit the distance between his own counting and the traditional world of accounts and their susceptibility to the Evil Eye, as he exhorts himself and Lesbia to ‘throw into confusion’ (conturbabimus) the account of their affair.

Catullus, then, employs his kiss count as a countermeasure. One thing he is aiming to ensure is that the affair lasts and continues for an extended period of time, a concern which also has its roots in the Reply. There, the Telchines measure up Callimachus’ poetry and his verses but also count up the years of his life, seemingly making a connection between his age and the poetry he produces (fr. 1.5–6 Harder). Catullus’ kisses replace the counting of lifespans with a counting that cannot be turned to express temporal extension. This resistance of erotics to measurement is resumed in 7, where the kisses that would satisfy Catullus are ‘as many as the stars which watch over the stolen loves of humans, when night is silent’ (quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox | furtiuos hominum uident amores, 7.7–8). This time, within which erotic clandestine liaisons occur, allows no criticism: there are no human onlookers here, only the eternal and innumerable stars. Catullus takes the Telchines’ concern with age and counting and carves out a time which is not susceptible to envy and criticism, but which is also not the perpetua nox of c. 5. He opens up a new temporality for his love and for love poetry, moreover, that co-opts the Telchines’ own conception of poetic unity of time: not ‘one long poem on kings and heroes in many thousands of lines’ but ‘one long night for lovers with many thousands of kisses’.

This pre-emptive counting up and kissing goodbye to criticism, moreover, fits within Catullus’ wider erotics of reading. For Fitzgerald, c. 5 represents a failed assertion of masculinity through its focus on foreplay rather than penetration, reminiscent of the puer delicatus or even the impotent.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet if the poet is all mouth and no trousers, there is good reason. As Benjamin Eldon Stevens has elucidated, speech and silence are recurring themes in Catullus and can be explained against the backdrop of Rome as tam maledica ciuitas (‘so gossipy a city’, Cic. Cael. 58): in the case of Catullus’ kiss count: ‘While a sexual oral activity like kissing precludes or occludes speech, causing a sort of inarticulacy, this is yet more desirable and valuable than articulate speech, which has been, in the poet’s view, more truly perverted, put to use in worthless rumormongering and “bad, hexing speech”.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Such speech comes from those who, like the Telchines, would look upon Catullus and criticise, and they are characterised as orally polluted in that they have a mala lingua.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rather than foreplay being failure, in Fitzgerald’s terms, kisses are an empowering form of oral articulation that is not contaminated by the mala lingua of his critics.

Poems 1 and 5 therefore combine their use of Callimachean poetics with Catullus’ focus of love affairs and erotic interactions. Eroticism is insinuated in c. 1, but by c. 5 such imagery has come to the surface, undoubtedly supported by the well-explored erotic undertones of the intervening passer poems. Still, c. 5 exhibits similarities with c. 1 that suggest a close dialogue. Both respond to appraisal and judgement of Catullus (Nepos of Catullus’ nugae; the old men of Catullus’ love affair), and both are cognizant of singularly long spans of time (the single saeculum and perpetua nox). Both too engage with Callimachus at the same time that they introduce enumeration. The connection may be strengthened by the particular number of the kiss count: Nepos’ Chronica stretches over three books, while Catullus counts up 3,300 kisses with 1,100 set over three lines (7–9).Footnote ⁷⁸ Just as his Chronica contains all Italian history, there is the implication that Catullus’ kisses also stand for the duration of the affair, all the kisses that must be made before that nox perpertua comes to them. Of course, the development in 5 is equally important. If Catullus demonstrates that he is able to wield counting as criticism in c. 1 then he rejects the possibility of accounting for love in c. 5, where the enacted enumeration is swiftly undercut by his confounding of the count they have made: love, and the acts of love, cannot be so easily accounted for.

To what extent can this counting and subsequent confusion be understood as programmatic for Catullus’ collection? Counting plays an important role in Catullus’ poetic outlook in other poems. He counts up volumes elsewhere in the collection: his friend Cinna takes nine years to produce his Zmyrna (c. 95.1–2), while one Hortensius, according to the most likely construction of the couplet, ‘produces half a million verses in a year’ (milia cum interea quingenta †Hortensius uno, 95.3).Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps the most pointed case of numerical criticism on Catullus’ part is in his poem on the poetry of Suffenus:

Commentators have often observed how the poem sets form against content, material text against verbal artistry and appearance against sentiment, simultaneously highlighting how in a social context these contrasts can reveal people’s lack of self-awareness.Footnote ⁸¹ The primary contrast is that Suffenus seems witty, but writes reams upon reams of poor poetry straight on to deluxe paper. Although verbally he shares many valued qualities with Catullus, such as uenustas and urbanity, when it comes to writing it down it all reads as doggerel.Footnote ⁸² Just as with Hortensius’ many lines, Catullus diagnoses a central fault of modern poets as being their obsession with length and so sharing the Telchines’ critical framework.Footnote ⁸³ Equally, Catullus is aware that his own poetry can be counted. He implies, without providing a finite figure, that his verses are enumerable in a poem attacking his puella, calling together his hendecasyllables ‘as many as there are’ (quot estis | omnes, c. 42.1–2). In demanding that Asinius ‘return his napkin’ (linteum remitte, c. 12.11), he warns him just how many invective lines he will be sent: ‘or expect three hundred hendecasyllables’ (aut hendecasyllabos trecentos | expecta, 12.10–11). Enumeration appears as a strategy of articulating his distance from other poets and literary figures, whether in judgement of their work, as seems to be generally the case, or as part of an invective characterisation of his own poetic retaliation.

It is only in c. 5, however, that counting is directed at Catullus’ actions, and it is only in c. 5 that counting is resisted by first being performed and then confounded. The main difference is that Catullus is appraising literary works elsewhere, whereas in c. 5 it is Lesbia’s kisses that are under threat of being enumerated. Nevertheless, it is a strong supposition based on his allusion to Callimachus and the Reply that this poem is drawing on a model of poetic criticism and responses to it. As I have suggested, too, the account of the kisses could be interpreted as an account of the love affair, an affair which plays out over the course of Catullus’ libellus. What I propose is that Catullus is adapting the model of criticism in the Reply to his new poetic context, the literature of love. Catullus may count when appraising others’ mythological poetry (Cinna’s Zmyrna) or historical works (Nepos’ Chronica), but when it comes to poetry about love, the same sort of enumerative criticism cannot apply. Putting the deeply personal into poetry leaves oneself and not simply one’s work open to criticism, as will become clear in c. 16. There, Furius and Aurelius have in fact supposedly read c. 5 – quod milia multa basiorum | legistis (‘since you have read my many thousand kisses, c. 16.12–13)Footnote ⁸⁴ – and make too close a connection between what his poetry says and its relation to real life.Footnote ⁸⁵ In c. 5, at the very point when the erotics of his collection transition from flirtatious insinuation to explicit surface meaning, Catullus also chooses to emphasise that his is a new kind of poetry, for which traditional measures of poetic evaluation, such as counting, will simply not do.

This argument about the interplay of the erotic, enumerative and literary critical aspects of c. 5 supports the modern image of Catullus as a descendant of the learned Alexandrians revelling in recherché references and intricate intertexualities as well as the first Roman lyricist to create for his audience the impression of intense moments of passion fervently transcribed on to the page.Footnote ⁸⁶ In this particular case, paying attention to his reworking of Callimachean themes alongside the performance of counting shows Catullus to be a poet who is deeply aware of, and subtly thematises, the inconcinnity of applying an enumerative form of criticism to poetry so intimate, erotic and personal. A traditional form of poetic aestimatio is no match for the poet’s aestus. Indeed, those modern scholars who have attempted to analyse Catullus’ love by numbers, to adapt the title of Helen Reference DettmerDettmer’s 1997 monograph (Love by the Numbers: Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Catullus), have thus singularly ignored the programmatics of c. 5.Footnote ⁸⁷ In showing that his account is not something available for enumeration by the critic in c. 5, Catullus is making a claim also about the content of his love poetry: the inscription of love into the collection, just like its effect on the mind, is illogical, disordered and incalculable.

1.3.2 Counting up the Collection

My claim has been that Catullus’ counted kisses are utilised as a means to defend against critics not only of his love for Lesbia, but also of his literature about love. I concluded that c. 5 and its dialogue with the equally Callimachean c. 1 makes it possible that the resistance to counting as a form of poetic criticism extends to the Catullan collection as a whole. Here I wish to show that his use of enumeration, and the reworking of Callimachean themes, has a noticeable afterlife which constitutes slender but positive evidence for Roman readers’ awareness of the interweaving of counting and poetic criticism. I present just one example of a later engagement with the ideas that Catullus first raised in Latin. The most notable development will be that, while in Callimachus’ Reply there is no mention of books or their number, a programmatic wariness about the enumeration of poetry has transformed into a focus on the numbering of books, a movement which I have suggested began with Catullus.

Martial is not a love poet, but he is a keen reader of Catullus.Footnote ⁸⁸ He is also a poet for whom numbers always matter. As Victoria Rimell has explored in depth, Martial’s interest in enumeration arises from his imperial and urban context. Exchanges of gifts, favours and poems require a keen mathematical eye in order for the reader to keep track of who values whom at what, while the operations forming and forcing the many into the ‘one’ is the reflex of the Roman Empire’s ‘ecumenical’ attitude.Footnote ⁸⁹ Here, though, I focus in on a programmatic poem that crystallises the concerns which I have been tracing about numerical criticism and applies it to the question of how many books of poetry ought to be produced.

Martial’s books seem not to have been titled but simply numbered, and in joking about their numbering he shows he is well aware of their ordering.Footnote ⁹² This epigram makes that numbering programmatic. (The following poems in the book also return to the question of counting: 8.7, 9, 10, 13.) Surely if one is counting books, eight is too many? Martial already has his eternal imperishable fame. To this counting critique the ninth Muse responds: stick with epigrams, serious themes are not for you.Footnote ⁹³

In response to his concern about an excessive number of books, the ninth Muse justifies the importance of (being suited to) a more playful poetic mode with two clusters of allusions. First, verses 17–19 refer to Catullus’ poetry. As commentators have observed, the lepidos … libellos cannot but recall c. 1.1, and sal (‘spice’, ‘charm’) is a quality Catullus specifically describes his poetry as having at c. 16.7.Footnote ⁹⁴ While these references to c. 1 have been noted, it has gone unobserved that 17–18 also rework Catullus’ imagery in cc. 5 and 7. The image inverts Catullus’ own valuing of the overly serious at an as and the night as a time within which lovers love. Here, serious topics make severe old men work through the night – not unlike Callimachus’ Aratus (cf. 56.4 HE = AP 9.207.4) – while the lamp, more often the witness to lovers’ trysts, must make do with looking over them.Footnote ⁹⁵ Whereas Catullus had marked out a time within which severity is to be abandoned, Martial presents the effect of serious poetry as reversing those manners and so reversing Catullus’ poetological programme: the mark of a witty, charming poet is that his dulces nugae are reserved for the daytime alone. Second, in verses 21–2 the ninth Muse simulates the advice in Vergil’s sixth Eclogue, where Apollo warns Tityrus to avoid composing epic – ‘the shepherd, Tityrus, ought to feed his sheep fat, but speak a drawn-out song’ (pastorem, Tityre, pinguis | pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen, Ecl. 6.4–5) – which itself evokes Callimachus’ Reply.Footnote ⁹⁶ Martial’s poem thus concludes by alluding to a number of poems which in different ways draw on a Roman Callimacheanism to negotiate their poetics.

Although Martial does not directly point to the numerical concerns of those intertexts, it is nevertheless clear that he is mobilising their poetics to legitimise his production of a large number of books. Callimachus’ slender Muse cannot be appraised by a numerical criterion, but Martial employs Vergil’s ‘translation’ of that passage in Eclogue 6 to make a numerical point in his final line. Composing such finely wrought and slender poetry, Martial suggests, is acceptable if it is witty and refined enough to compete with the works of epic. Yet since he contrasts the singular auena with the many of the multorum … tubas (22), it is clear this is an unequal fight and is not simply an issue of the scale of poems, whether large or small. The question Martial leaves unresolved at the close of the epigram is: how does his single refined ‘reed’ compete with the grand works of many people? The nature of his works offers two answers that are not mutually exclusive. As Rimell has shown, the one/many distinction/s informs his attitude towards books of epigrams; they are full of many smaller compositions, but ultimately constitute a unified whole.Footnote ⁹⁷ His work beats the many since a single book of his is itself a multitude of different poems. This reading of the final lines explains how epigram can compete with loftier genres, but it does not clearly answer the opening rhetorical question of how many epigram books are sufficient. By the same token, though, if an epigram book can be understood as a unity or a unit, then books too can be added together to form a multitude. The ninth Muse’s answer to the question of how much is too much borrows from Martial’s own thinking. With a conception that seems to reverse Antipater’s attitude to epigram collections (see above), Martial makes it the adding of books together that enables the genre to compete with the likes of epic, just as adding poems together is what makes a good book.

Martial acknowledges the criticisms that might arise from the number of books he has written and seeks out earlier passages in Latin literature in order to respond. The epigram shows Martial following in Catullus’ (and Vergil’s) footsteps, engaging with Callimachus’ poetic positioning in the Reply (whether at first hand or more probably through Roman receptions) and turning it towards a goal that he had not intended and which is manifestly in contradiction to his poetics, under the guise – it seems – of continuing to reject grand epic themes. Where Callimachus had argued for poetic judgement beyond number, a Muse without numerical measure, Catullus and Martial co-opt the discourse of number in the Reply and turn it towards the ends of both framing and defending their multiple book projects. This is not to say, however, that they had not absorbed Callimachus’ articulation of an aesthetics of scale as an alternative to numerical measures of poetry; both Callimachus and Martial show a clear awareness of the slenderness advocated by Callimachus. Their engagement with number as well is thus a purposeful move. Despite Callimachus’ efforts to banish enumeration from poetry’s critical discourse, Roman poets of the first centuries bce to ce demonstrate that the habit has not been shaken and they produce ever more sophisticated ways of responding to readerly reckonings.