Catullus and the Di Parentes

Abstract

Lying against the Alpine foothills, the land from which Catullus departed for Rome was the home of many and varied local cults. Inscriptions from the first three centuries of the Empire give laconic testimony to the names of comparatively unknown gods and goddesses or to strange divine epithets which may have been an inheritance of the original Raeti or their Celtic successors who held sway until the Roman conquest. The sphere of religious life revealed in fragmentary form in these monuments was a world removed from that illuminated by the pages of ancient belles lettres; the members of the Roman poetic coteries either exalted the official pantheon or culled less-familiar divine names from the Hellenistic tradition. The reader who expects that an author not native to the city of Rome may shed some light on the religious milieu of his place of origin is therefore fated to an early disappointment.