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Title: The Poems and Fragments of Catullus

Author: Catullus

Translator: Robinson Ellis

Release Date: July 19, 2006 [EBook #18867]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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.

[Transcriber's note: The preface uses macrons and breves above some
letters to indicate stresses. I have rendered the letters with breve
inside parenthesis (like th(i)s) and the letters with macron inside
square brackets (like th[i]s).]

PREFACE.

The idea of translating Catullus in the original metres adopted by the
poet 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 so
unsuccessful that I dropt the idea for some time altogether. In 1868,
the year following the publication of my larger critical edition[A] of
Catullus, I again took up the experiment, and translated into English
glyconics the first Hymenaeal, _Collis o Heliconici_. Tennyson's Alcaics
and Hendecasyllables had appeared in the interval, and had suggested to
me the new principle on which I was to go to work. It was not sufficient
to reproduce the ancient metres, unless the ancient quantity was
reproduced also. Almost all the modern writers of classical metre had
contented themselves with making an accented syllable long, an
unaccented short; the most familiar specimens of hexameter,
Longfellow's _Evangeline_ and Clough's _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ and
_Amours de Voyage_ were written on this principle, and, as a rule,
stopped there. They almost invari