by Daisy Dunn
Catullus had probably only been in Rome for a few months when he heard some shocking news: Clodia’s youngest brother was due in court. The Senate had it on good authority that Clodius Pulcher had infiltrated the festival of the Bona Dea – a women-only religious festival, which had been held at Caesar’s residence the previous December – dressed in drag.
To uphold the secrecy of the Bona Dea, Caesar had given his wife, his mother, and sister free use of his property as a secure base from which to perform their duties with other female worshippers. The year that Caesar embarked formally upon his political career, 69 BC, had seen him lose his wife, Cornelia, though their daughter, Julia, survived. He was now married to Pompeia – a curious choice considering that she was the granddaughter of his late enemy Sulla, but the union might entice to his populist cause some of Sulla’s supporters.
No man yet had been so brazen as to attempt to watch the rites of the Bona Dea, which women conducted in the presence of the Vestal Virgins. Cicero tried to assure his fellow men that this was a solemn religious event, but the secrecy and obscurity that shrouded it naturally made them curious. Some reported hearing loud music emanating through the walls whenever it took place, and tried to imagine what it signified.22 Others swam in far deeper fantasies of hip-shaking women drunk on wine, their hair loose and tangled by the blow of the pipe; of bouncing bottoms and female voyeurs; of arousal that was clear for all to see, without the need for full exposure. They wagered that these women could endure the frustration for only so long, and that they would feel compelled at any moment to summon men to the celebrations, or failing men, slaves – an ass, even; anything that could satisfy their lust.23
Such fantasy had clearly got the better of Clodius, who had long had a taste for high drama. Like his brother-in-law Metellus Celer and so many men of his generation, he had spent his formative years with his eldest brother Appius, a staunch optimate, in the East as part of the war effort against Mithridates. Though placed in the service of Lucullus, the fishpond-loving commander who was married to the youngest of his three sisters until 66 BC, Clodius had incited a mutiny among his troops, and found himself discharged.24 He had subsequently travelled to Cilicia, Syria, Antioch, and Gaul, before embarking upon a political career at Rome.
Clodius’ worldliness had put no check on his appetite for adventure. Aged thirty, he was old enough to know better, but viewed the prospect of disrupting a strangely secretive women’s festival as a thrilling game. Evening fell, summoning the beginning of the rites. Like a comic stage actor, Clodius threw on a saffron gown with purple sashes, women’s slippers, and entered Caesar’s house.25
The women had already commenced their secret rites when he arrived. Clodius, who must have known that he was chancing his luck, struck unlucky. A slave girl addressed him, he replied in a suspiciously deep voice, and the game was up. The girl swiftly sounded the alarm and Clodius was ejected. The women were compelled to start their rites anew in order to preserve their sanctity. So much for that.
The Senate ruled that a trial should take place in May 61 BC. Clodius was accused of incestum, a crime which in this context described the threat male intrusion had caused to the chastity of the Vestal Virgins.26 As the date of the trial drew near, the gossips began to speculate on the meaning of Clodius’ transgression. Some said he had been driven to his dastardly deed out of lust for Caesar’s wife.27 Caesar meanwhile lodged a divorce from Pompeia, stressing that it was not right that his family should suffer suspicion and accusation.28 Driven by a desire for recognition and pre-eminence, throughout his life Caesar would do anything to distance himself from scandal.
Lucullus, returned from Pontus, was now summoned as a witness for the prosecution. Having divorced Clodius’ youngest sister, he now took the opportunity to pounce. He decided not only to shame Clodius publicly for his mutinous behaviour in the war in the East, but to swear on oath that he had committed incest with his former wife. It was not long before people were applying the incest slur to all three of Clodius’ sisters.29 At that moment, Catullus could never have imagined that he would one day be fanning the same empty rumour.
Outraged by his juvenile disregard for religious practice, Cicero prepared himself to give evidence against Clodius. Cicero came from a family of wealthy landowners in Arpinum (Arpino), a pretty hill town to the south-east of Rome, which made them worthy enough, but none of them had ever been a senator. Although Cicero was a novus homo, a new man, he was at heart a traditionalist, who was determined to do all he could to preserve Rome’s ancient institutions: the mos maiorum, custom of the elders. Clinging to the vain hope that the Republic might flourish again after the disturbances of recent decades, he sought to strengthen the authority of the Senate. He had convinced himself, if not the population in its entirety, that in foiling Catiline’s conspiracy a couple of years earlier, he had saved the Republic from ruin. The trial of Clodius presented yet another opportunity to champion sobriety.
Cicero easily destroyed Clodius’ alibi, but the young Pulcher, living up to his family name (meaning ‘beautiful’), was alluring enough to be able to wield bribes, both pecuniary and sexual, and managed to get himself acquitted.30 If Cicero needed an excuse to engage in the distasteful incest badinage that Lucullus had set in train, he now had it.
Unscathed though Caesar was by the scandal of Clodius Pulcher, the repercussions were an embarrassment. Reluctant to dwell on the matter, or have others do the same, he had hurried off to Further Spain to take up a year-long governorship, the follow-up to a praetorship in Rome. Of the two provinces Rome owned across the territory, Further Spain – consisting of the coastal region of Baetica (including modern Baelo Claudia), swinging up in an arc to incorporate modern Portugal – was the one furthest away from Italy.
Catullus watched Caesar’s departure with a newcomer’s eyes. For all his tremendous self-belief and optimism, it was evident that the commander was feeling down on his luck. As he marched he positively jangled with the bags of money Crassus had lent him for the venture.31 Electioneering had only become more expensive since the days of Sulla, and on proceeding as far as the praetorship, one post down from the coveted consulship, Caesar had accumulated considerable debts. In 65 BC, he had dazzled Rome’s crowds with spectacular games – wild beast hunts, plays, and a gladiatorial show.32 It was in honour of his late father, he said, that an unprecedented 320 pairs of gladiators fought for their entertainment. He would buy a gladiatorial school in Campania.
Increasingly through his life, Catullus would disapprove of squander, of Romans mining the provinces and despoiling the world beyond for their own gain, but it was proving more and more necessary for those who sought power to do so. All Caesar could think about were the spoils he could acquire in Further Spain, as he worked his way towards a triumph. To qualify for this noble accolade, he would need to convince the Senate that he had reduced the province to a peaceful state with little loss to his men. Although Caesar suppressed the rebellion he encountered in the province, there were rumours that he had contributed to the chaos, his eye fixed on glory.33
It had not escaped his notice either how quickly Pompey had emerged as a force. In his younger years, Caesar had wept bitterly before a statue of Alexander the Great, in sorrow at how much the commander had achieved by the time he was his age.34 As much as he courted Pompey’s favour and support, Caesar could only feel inadequate when he looked at his precocious achievements. Normally, a man was eligible for a triumph only after fulfilling a praetorship or consulship, but Pompey had celebrated two before achieving either. What was more, he expected to be granted a third.
Pompey had returned from the East to a city in jittery expectancy over his next triumph, a grand finale to his work in the East. Fearful of Pompey’s eminence, however, the senators delayed the ratification of his eastern settlement. They would provide no closure to his victories: his veteran soldiers remained in need of land; equestrian tax-farmers and landowners began demanding rebate for the financial losses they had ac
crued following his restructure of Asia and Bithynia; Crassus took up their cause, but struggled to make much progress.
Now that he was back in Italy, Pompey, like Caesar, and like Lucullus before him, filed for divorce from his wife. Mucia, a sister of Metellus Celer, had already given him children, but he had in mind a politically more lucrative match with a niece of Cato, a particularly staunch optimate senator.35 Catullus knew that ambition was not the only reason for Pompey’s divorce. In a poem, he noted how, during Pompey’s first consulship in 70 BC, Mucia had taken a lover. By popular repute Mucia – or Maecilia, as he called her, perhaps to distinguish her from a sister – was sleeping with both Pompey and Caesar.36 Fifteen years later, Catullus jested that ‘the two remain, but a thousand men compete against each’ (Poem 113). Pompey was remarkably short-sighted about the repercussions of his divorce. Not only did he fail to obtain the hand of Cato’s niece, but he incurred the wrath of Metellus Celer, who could not take in good grace such an ignoble slight to his sister. In the coming years, Pompey would face considerable opposition from Metellus as he sought to advance in his political career.
Catullus was not interested in panegyric, so it came as no surprise that he wrote nothing to mark the occasion, in September 61 BC, when on his forty-fifth birthday Pompey finally celebrated his third triumph for his achievements against the pirates and King Mithridates of Pontus. Had Catullus chosen to do so, the imagery would have been palpable: crowds packing Rome’s streets; placards proclaiming Pompey’s conquests – Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis, Iberia, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea, Arabia, ‘and everything the pirates had on land and sea that had now been overthrown’.37 Hostages, among them the chief pirates Pompey had scourged from the seas, were paraded among the trophies and pearl crowns.
One particularly large golden statue tottered on its stand. Pompey had chosen to display the statue, rather than the slain body of the king, because the embalmer had done such a bad job.38 The issue was not the gore, it was more that it would have prompted doubts as to whom Pompey had really vanquished. The youngsters of Rome jostled to catch a glimpse of the statue and, still more pressingly, of Pompey, the man who had succeeded where so many Romans had not. Within four years of being entrusted with the command, he had claimed the final defeat of King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, and reduced him to a glitzy showpiece.
Wearing a cloak he claimed was once owned by Alexander the Great, Pompey made it known that the majority of the prisoners on show would be sent home straight after the occasion.39 As Catullus must have realised, this was meant as a great show of clemency towards the defeated. Few displays could have endeared him more to the Roman people, who loved to hate eastern luxury, but could not help but be fascinated by it.
Though Catullus was not seduced by the event, he could not close his eyes to what it signified. The pitiful appearance of so many foreign faces poignantly asserted the authority Rome had regained over Asia, as well as its proud ownership of Bithynia, which stood now larger than ever on the Black Sea coast. It was as though the Romans had regained a shattered crown, and acquired extra jewels in the process. The victory at once made viable the prospect of freely walking on its soil. Catullus’ elder brother ventured to Asia, possibly to assist in the war effort or gain grounding for a political career. But Catullus, for his part, had too much to detain him in Rome to contemplate Bithynia just yet.
That blinding, tongue-freezing moment with Clodia Metelli had left its mark. But the wine had been free-flowing that night and put some of his memories to flight. It had been difficult for a Gaul like him to gauge his new limits when he realised that the Romans drank their wine with water, and frowned upon those who did not.40 The idea of drinking wine, especially a fine Falernian,41 anything but straight had long struck Catullus as anathema: ‘… water, spoiler of wine … off you pop to the dour kind’, he sang, after a few (Poem 27).
AN ELEGANT NEW LITTLE BOOK
Heroes, born in the moment most admired
Beyond measure of all Ages, godly race,
Offspring of a noble mother,
Again and again I beseech you.
I shall commemorate you often in my poem
(Poem 64, lines 23–4)
EVENINGS WERE FOR WRITING POEMS, as much as for drinking wine. Catullus could not explain why, but when he sat down to write he found himself picturing Cornelius Nepos, a historian and poet from Gaul. Inquisitive, not to say obsessive, about the figures who had shaped the world around him, Cornelius had written On Famous Men and Outstanding Generals of Foreign Peoples, and composed a recondite history of the Greeks and Romans in three volumes, the Chronica (sadly now lost).1 Cornelius also had a weakness for learned and elegant poetry – a fact which did not elude Catullus who decided that if there was anyone worth impressing while also challenging with the directness and erudition of his verse, it was he.
Rather than trouble himself with acquiring a patron – whose persistent requests and inability to be satisfied with fine lines might have proved an inconvenient distraction – Catullus decided to make Cornelius the dedicatee of his poetry collection. Poetry was a painful enough profession as it was, in which days of intense thought seldom resulted in anything other than frustration and a wax tablet stamped under foot. By the end of each day, it was less a case of finding a line he liked than one he could tolerate; and even if Catullus could do that, he would have struggled to satisfy a patron. It was finished articles they wanted, not salvaged syllables. The very notion of writing on demand was a distinctly unpoetic one. No, he would be independent, not an unusual situation for the times, but one for which he needed private means and public prominence.
Catullus possessed the means: his family had acquired riches enough to carry him through, and Rome’s foreign conquests had gilded his world in luxuries. The poor reached out to taste them, but like Tantalus forever striving to savour a drink in the Underworld, few ever reached their fruits. While landowners suffered as more and more produce was imported from the new provinces, many an equestrian exulted in the new trade. Catullus, however, was never much interested in the trappings of new money, and was at pains to play down his wealth. ‘The wallet of your Catullus is full of cobwebs,’ he once told a friend, as if he had slipped his hand into the fold of his toga and found not emptiness, but the deception of emptiness, a web that proved to have fallen short of its purpose through possessing too many holes (Poem 13).2 It was too easy for a young dandy to complain about a lack of money when his accounts ran dry, or when his father replenished them to an extent he considered pitiful.
As for public prominence, Metellus Celer could introduce him to Cornelius Nepos, in the first instance. Metellus knew the man well enough to tell him a curious tale of how the king of the Suebi, a Germanic tribe, once gave him certain Indians who had come ashore in Gaul following a storm at sea.3 He said little more on the matter, which put him at risk of sounding like a self-aggrandising fantasist. Whether the story was true or not, Cornelius Nepos believed it enough to repeat it. He was a lofty figure for Catullus to dedicate his self-confessed ‘ramblings’ to, but the elder poet did recognise their worth: twenty years after Catullus’ death, Cornelius would remember him as one of the finest poets of the age.4
Catullus pictured the ‘elegant new little book’ he would give him, a handsome papyrus scroll prepared from strips of sedge plant. A specialist craftsman pressed the strips and laid them out in the sun to fuse together. Then he used a dry pumice stone to polish the edges of the papyrus, which would otherwise prove perilous to the delicate fingertips of the learned.5 In a gruelling exercise in self-criticism, Catullus would fill the book with his best work, for not even the largest scroll in Rome was big enough to hold all the poems he had ever written.6 He hoped that his poetry would be just as well polished as his scroll and therefore survive for ‘over a hundred years’, a saeculum, the longest span a Roman supposed a man could live (Poem 1).7
Waking from his
reverie, he decided to concentrate for the moment on publishing what he had by word of mouth, and in draft form among friends and more public groups before considering any amendments and overseeing the production of further copies on papyrus. Latin poetry did not rhyme, but could be written in many different metres, to which the ancient ear was well attuned. Catullus was ever promiscuous in his choice. The first fifty-nine poems in his collection as it survives vary in metre (the ‘polymetrics’); the last fifty are epigrams, written in the elegiac metre. In between are eight poems, which rely upon a variety of different rhythms and beats.
No sooner had he begun to circulate his first drafts in Rome, than a ‘filthy slut’ told him he was a ‘joke’, and promptly made off with several of his wax tablets. He watched her, ‘strutting shamefully, laughing nastily as if in a mime with a face like a Gallic puppy’s’ (Poem 42). Even as she did so, Catullus put the joke back on himself. The Latin for ‘puppy’ was catulus; Catullus was a Gaul. Her facial expression was ugly, but she was mimicking him, like a mime actress. He looked at her and saw his reflection: a Gallic dogface.
The sight antagonised him, as did the slattern’s words. Rich men could write leisurely while other men were plying more physically exhausting trades, but it was certainly no ‘joke’. When spent wisely, leisure – otium – could produce magnificent results. He documented the process earnestly, but with heightened fervour, in a poem to another poet, Licinius:
Yesterday, Licinius, on a lazy day,
We messed around for ages in my writing tablets
Risqué as agreed,
Scribbling short verses, you then me,
Playing now with this metre and now with that,
Swapping them between us over laughter and wine.