SOURCE: "The Elegies," in Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry, University of California Press, 1934, pp. 153-82.

In the essay below, Wheeler demonstrates that Catullus was a pioneer and signal influence in the genre of the classical elegy.

In elegy the Romans achieved one of their greatest literary successes. Three quarters of a century after the death of Ovid, the last of the great Augustan elegists, Quintilian, a sober critic, comparing the Roman achievement with the Greek, briefly expresses his verdict in the words, elegia … Graecos provocamus, "in elegy we challenge the Greeks." It is a verdict from which the modern critic, after studying all the remains of Greek and Roman elegy—and the material is abundant—is not likely to dissent. Undoubtedly the Romans possessed a remarkable gift for this kind of poetry, and even if we had before us today the entire product of all the...