The arrangement and the language of Catullus' so-called polymetra with special reference to the sequence 10-11-12

It is contended that the order of the first 61 of the items transmitted under the name of Catullus Veronensis shows signs of a conscious design, whether by the author or by some editor, that item 61 should be placed with its predecessors rather than with the seven long poems which follow, that the widely used term polymetrum is a thoroughly confusing misnomer, that metrical pattern requires the division of the 61 items into three distinct groups - eπιγραμματα in Phalaecian verse, ιαμβοι, and μeλη - and, most importantly, that even where they take up apparently similar themes the μeλη distinguish themselves in verbal style markedly from the Phalaecian eπιγραμματα and only a little less markedly from the ιαμβοι. In order to illustrate this last point the lyric item 11 is compared in systematic detail with the two Phalaecian epigrams which precede and follow it in the transmitted collection. Discussion of each feature of item 10, 11 and 12 centres on its relationship with that third- and second-century BC poets might have written and with what first-century speakers of Latin might have said. The character of our record of the Latin of the two centuries following 240 BC makes a degree of tentativeness inevitable. The three groups of the 61 items in question take us to a linguistic world distant from that of items 62-68. This is not, however, the world of the Latin used in ordinary conversation by members of the Italian elite in the middle of the first century BC. It is a highly artificial world with its own quite distinct internal boundaries