Interesting. Presumably The Rape of the Lock is in turn a reference to the stellar hair story.

Great stuff. This reminds me a bit of my MA thesis, on odd ways Renaissance writers reused classical quotations--putting low into high contexts and vice versa. Catullus is all over Vergil; and I can highly recommend James O'Hara's "True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradtion of Etymological Wordplay" for more of this sort of thing.

The Lombardo is real bad, IMHO; I don't know the Fagles.

I thought you'd like it. (And I agree about the Lombardo, from what I saw of it in the review.)

One of those JSTOR links is in fact a follow-up by O'Hara to True Names specifically on Callimachus. In addition to the inherent interest of all this stuff, I found it intriguing to look at the changes in critical perspective on a fairly narrow point over about seventy-five years all at once.

The interpretation intrigued me. Here is another, more linguistic. Jeffrey Wills, in his Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford 1996), says: "The only instance of a geminated adjective in Catullus (...) drew Virgil's attention (...) Catullan syntax leads us to expect a second inuita" --- which, according to Wills, we find in Book 12: "et Turnum et terras inuita reliqui" (the only occurence of inuita in Virgil). So Virgil "divides Catullus' inuita repetition," creating a kind of "divided allusion".

OK, my Latinity fails me: what is a "geminated adjective"? And why does Catullan syntax lead us to expect a second inuita, and where is it? And did you mean "the only other occurence of inuita in Virgil"?

Well, I just quoted from the book. Catullus 66,39--40 reads: "invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi, / invita: adiuro teque tuumque caput", so there is a symmetrical repetition of "invita" at verse beginnings. About the only occurence: Wills thinks, I guess, that "invita" is only in Book 12 used in precisely this grammatical form (as opposed to "invitus", "invito" etc). I am not sure how persuasive is Wills' statement about our expectations, however. Lonely scholar too far gone?

for "geminated" I assume he means "repeated" (lit. "twinned").

Oh, and Jim O'Hara and I went to grad school together. So proud of the boy.