by Daisy Dunn
(Poem 50)
He went on to describe the sleepless night that followed, worked up as he was in admiration for this man’s great wit and the passion they had made in metres and refrains. When their professional lives were so tied up together, it felt only natural for Catullus to feature the man in his lines. The poem was a gift to him – ocelle (an affectionate diminutive that literally meant ‘little eye’) – so that there could be no doubt about the depth of his affection.
Catullus was no stranger to what it meant to feel an intense or passing attraction to another man. All around him, adolescent boys from good families were enjoying sexual liaisons with other boys. Some kept a concubinus at home, a man of lower social standing with whom he could while away the years of youth before proceeding to marriage with an eligible girl. Sex between the two boys could be perfunctory, but a concubinus could form a lasting emotional attachment to his partner and begrudge the day he left him behind: ‘miserable, miserable concubine’ (Poem 61). As Romans talked freely about each other’s sex lives, an adult man of respectable status could be quite open about the penetration of a male slave or subordinate. To be penetrated himself, and therefore give another man pleasure, was, on the other hand, deeply shameful. There was no word for homosexuality in Catullus’ day, but the poet was fond of using language then considered risqué to describe a man who took on the receptive role with another man.
Catullus decided to pursue Licinius – full name Gaius Licinius Calvus Macer – not as a lover, but as close enough a friend for later poets to recall them often as a pair.8 On further acquaintance, Catullus discovered that the fellow preferred to go by the name Calvus, an unpretentious two syllables which he hoped would put distance between him and his father’s shadow. Poor Calvus had barely to sit down to dinner before someone would ask him if he was related to Gaius Licinius Macer, an influential historian and political adviser: a wunderkind descended from 300 years of political gold. The father had committed suicide upon being indicted for extortion, but people had not forgotten the high esteem in which he had been held. And here was his son, Calvus, trying to make his way in the world, a short man with very little hair – if he lived up to his preferred name which meant ‘bald’.9
At least he had the example of Julius Caesar to heed. The tall and well-built commander was developing a bald patch as he aged. He tended to remove excess body hair with tweezers, but was so anxious to maintain the semblance of a full mane that he fashioned a comb-over and relished the opportunity to wear a laurel wreath when this honour was bestowed upon him.10
Others wrestled with the same problem. Several hundred years later, Synesius of Cyrene, a Neoplatonist who became a bishop, wrote an essay In Praise of Baldness (in response to one historian’s In Praise of Hair). There was no shame in the head being bald, he insisted, provided that the mind was hirsute, or ruffled with ideas. Sheep, after all, were hairy but stupid. Not satisfied with explaining how many of the most intelligent figures in the ancient world had been hairless – most famously of all, Socrates – he proceeded to argue that even the heroes of myth, such as Achilles, shed their hair at an early age. If that did not stop them from achieving eternal recognition, why should it stop anyone else?
Calvus was trying to rise above his appearance and become a respectable lawyer, for which poetry would prove an excellent grounding and distraction. He needed only to look at Cicero, the greatest lawyer of the age, who had spent his younger years composing a poem about a fisherman from Boeotia who ate a herb and turned into a prophetic sea god. The crown of Calvus’ poetic achievements, as fortune would have it, would also involve an element of metamorphosis. He wrote about Io, a young girl whom Jupiter, king of the gods, turned into a heifer, and raped: ‘Oh unfortunate virgin, you feed on bitter grass.’11
Catullus and Calvus struck up a friendship with another poet, Gaius Helvius Cinna, who probably came from Brescia, ‘mother’ of Catullus’ Verona. The proximity of Cisalpine Gaul to Rome and its varied landscapes proved a fertile combination, and Cinna, for one, did not hesitate to proclaim his provincial roots: ‘But now a swift chariot pulled by two little horses rushes me through the willow trees of the Cenomani [Gauls].’12 As a man who rendered even a talented poet a mere ‘goose’ among ‘melodious swans’, Cinna had plenty to teach Catullus and Calvus.13 If only he was not so slow at composition. He was still hard at work on a poem he had begun perhaps five years earlier about an incestuous affair of a princess called Zmyrna.
Into and out of their circle, less salon than fluid coterie, wandered several other poets, including Furius Bibaculus, whom Catullus came to know exceptionally well, and, at their helm, a poet and grammar teacher from Gaul, Publius Valerius Cato. Catullus addressed him in a few lines which made light of their closeness in name and nature, as he described the moment he punished a precocious young boy:14
A ridiculous scenario, Cato, hilarious,
Well worth your attention and laughter.
Laugh as much as you love Catullus, Cato!
The scenario is ridiculous and too funny.
Just now I caught my girlfriend’s little boy
Wanking; If Dione approves, I took him
With my hard-straining cock.
(Poem 56)
Determined to wind Cato up, Catullus left the identity of the boy he assaulted in his poem unclear; if he were an innocent slave, at worst Catullus would have had to compensate his owner for property damage. In a clever pun, Valerius Catullus sits side by side with Valerius Cato, ‘Catullus, Cato!’ As Catullus knew, his name was little more than a diminutive that meant ‘little Cato’.15 Joking with his older and wiser namesake, he made it his mission to laugh all the more heartily to make up for the best-known Cato of his day, the optimate politician Cato the Younger, who was famous for never laughing at all.16 Even Cicero, who was very fond of young Cato, had to confess that he spoke in the Senate ‘as if he were in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ cesspit’.17
There was nothing Catullus and his poet circle liked more than picking apart the work of inferior authors. In a similarly jocular tone, Catullus wrote a poem to a friend, Varus, about the poetry of a certain Suffenus:18 a likeable man, but a terrible poet. Not satisfied with composing ten thousand or more verses on wax tablets, ‘this Suffenus’ had them copied out on luxurious rolls of papyrus, wound up on new scroll knobs with red tie-thongs, lead-ruled, their edges smoothed. Suffenus the man and Suffenus’ poems did not go hand in hand:19
When you read them, that smart and sophisticated
Suffenus suddenly seems like any old goat-milker
Or digger, such is the transformation and discrepancy.
(Poem 22)
As far as Catullus was concerned, good poetry was characterised by urbanitas, which was determined less by a poet’s background and current surroundings than it was by an aptitude for incisiveness, sophistication and wit. Many a man from the city had failed in that test, and many a provincial flourished. The urbane man knew the world, but had experienced it so richly that his observations had become those of an elevated being. He used words such as lepidus to mean elegant and iucundus to describe something aesthetic and pleasurable to the senses; he spoke as Catullus wrote. Suffenus, whom Catullus described as urbanus as a man, aspired to urbanity in packaging his poems the way he did, but his presentation was merely an elaborate attempt to compensate for inadequate, rustic, verse.
Happy though he was to call the poems of Suffenus and other men ‘tortures’ (Poem 14), and even to contemplate gathering all their ‘poison’ to give Calvus his comeuppance for making him a present of it, Catullus more than once referred to himself as ‘the very worst’ poet (Poems 36 and 49). As time would tell, he meant these words sarcastically, but not even sarcasm could disguise his self-knowledge. While he saw these inferior poets as ‘unsuited to our times’, he was not blind to the fact that his own work was untimely, only in a different sense. A fragment of a draft introduction preserved in his collection classed his poetry as ineptia �
�� not just ‘ramblings’ but ‘unsuited’ or ‘untimely’ ramblings: utterings which did not quite fit.
While he frowned upon some other poets’ work, not everyone around him approved of his own. Lending them epithets neither of praise nor entirely of criticism, Cicero branded his set neoteroi, ‘too new’, or poetae novi, ‘new poets’.20 Ever the stickler for tradition, Cicero saw them as young, subversive, inferior to the great masters who preceded them.
The older elite families had grown up on a diet of epic and historic chronicle, with a smattering of comedy. In the texts of Homer lay praise for the valiant warriors of ancient times, luxurious palaces and perfect islands. The first Roman authors had written in Greek. Others proudly translated the Odyssey into Latin, and a man named Ennius then boldly claimed that Homer had entered his soul and inspired him to write. His Annales, chronicles of Rome’s august history, were precisely the kind of work Catullus despised for their weight and severity. Other Romans savoured them nonetheless, as they did dull agricultural treatises and staid comedies based upon Greek plays. Catullus might have despaired: there was a clutch of poets who had turned their hands in recent decades to translating and adapting Greek poems into Latin, and he was familiar with their efforts.21 But the civil wars of Sulla and Marius appeared to have resulted in something of a drought of truly elegant literature. Catullus resolved to play the situation to his advantage.
Rebelling against the dry tomes of Ennius and others, seizing the new day after the tragedies of the previous decades, Catullus and his friends relished the corporeal and the earthy: not just a boy indulging himself sexually, but a man airing his buttocks at the baths, or subjecting a crowd to his terrible body odour. Catullus wrote lines that were impish and scatological:
For your anus is cleaner than a salt-cellar
And doesn’t shit ten times a full year
(Poem 23)
His first editors in Renaissance Italy reproduced such fruity poems and commented upon them freely. When it came to disseminating them in England, however, prudishness often got in the way. Some scholars omitted the rude poems or fractions of them from their editions to make them suitable for both schoolchildren and adults to read.22 Even in the twentieth century, famous scholars, including C. J. Fordyce, have deemed up to a third of Catullus’ poems unfit for comment.23
Cleverly concealing the fact that he was incredibly doctus (‘learned’) by writing Latin that looked diurnal – mundane – Catullus turned his hand also to composing smart elegiac couplets loaded with sentiment.24 He had four acquaintances in Verona who were ‘double-dating’. When they began to read the poem he wrote about them, they might have thought that he was mocking them:
Caelius is crazy for Aufillenus, Quintius for Aufillena,
The flowers of Verona’s youth,
The brother one, his sister the other.
Which is what they call a truly sweet fraternity.
But then he unexpectedly brought the poem round to form a heartfelt tribute to an old friend:
Whom am I to back of the two? Caelius, you.
For your friendship alone saw me through the fire
When the mad flames of passion burned me to the marrow.
May you be happy, Caelius, and a master of love.
(Poem 100)
His poem fell comfortably into two halves, but hinged not merely upon themes of love and friendship, but on the line between life and death. This man’s friendship was not to be taken lightly, for it saved Catullus’ life.
Charming as such verses were, for people more accustomed to didactics – the kind of poetry that actually taught them something – it was initially difficult to see that Catullus’ personal refrains and observations of humdrum life contained lessons of their own. Cicero, in particular, loved grandiloquence. The epics were more his style, not the colloquialisms and newly turned words of Rome’s youth. He could not appreciate strings of expletives embedded in otherwise elegant lines, and jilty rhythms, and thousands of diminutives – it was ‘little’ this, ‘little’ that – littering self-obsessed and self-obsessing ramblings on love and heartbreak. He got Catullus’ references, but not the point of them.
While writing poems like these, Catullus and his friends longed also to capture the sophisticated verve of celebrated Hellenistic poets, men such as Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus, whose poetry might imbue their Latin lines with all the learnedness and erudition of the Greek East. Catullus’ interest in writing in this poised and intellectual style, as well as in the more colloquial manner favoured by the man in the street, made him a particularly bold and interesting poet.
Callimachus originally came from Cyrene, a Greek foundation on the coast of North Africa (close to modern Shahat in Libya), but now capital of one of Rome’s newer provinces, Cyrenaica.25 He traced his lineage all the way back to its founder, King Battus, and Catullus perpetuated his claims to royal ancestry.
When Callimachus was born, shortly before the third century BC, Alexandria was still a new city. It was at its great Library that he and Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the most famous epic on Jason and the Argonauts, made scholarly erudition fashionable. Quite taken with their cleverness, and with some of the Greek poems they discovered in recent anthologies, Catullus and his friends set about establishing themselves as their Latin heirs. As they did so, they also looked at the work of Meleager, a poet who lived on the island of Cos in the eastern Aegean, who over the last quarter century had gathered together a selection of Greek epigrams spanning the period of history through to the early first century BC. Other poets were producing similar compilations. Catullus was not the first to pick up these works at Rome and respond to them in Latin, but he was among the first to do so successfully.26
He perceived early on the ways in which the works of his predecessors could intersect, the Greek with the Latin, the past with the present; Callimachus and his descent from a king who claimed kinship with one of the Argonauts whom Apollonius was celebrating in verse. And there Catullus stood at the far end of their tangled lineage, embracing it as the fount, but just the fount, of the best Roman poetry of all, his own. Apollonius’ Argonautica would form a starting point for Catullus’ Bedspread Poem, a work whose form would be pointedly Callimachean.
People like Cicero ought to have admired the scholarship that Catullus absorbed from these poets. It was said that Callimachus wrote more than 800 papyrus rolls on wide-ranging topics: treatises on the rivers of Europe and the names of fish, collections of tragedies, dramas; a poem about Io, the girl Jupiter turned into a heifer and raped, which must have influenced Calvus as he sat down to write on the same theme; and a poem about Theseus entitled Hecale. Catullus was looking particularly at his Aetia, a four-book poem on the origins of ancient customs, written in elegiacs, a metre normally reserved for short pieces. It was choppy, but meticulously structured. In its prologue Callimachus explained that his critics despised work that was not written as one continuous long poem on epic themes such as warfare. He disagreed, and argued moreover that sacrificial sheep should be fattened, but verses kept svelte, and that large ideas should be condensed into tiny phrases:
For, when for the first time I put my tablet
On my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me:
‘… poet, feed the sacrificial animal to be as fat
As possible, but, dear fellow, the Muse to be slender.
And I instruct you as follows, do not tread the path
Which carriages pass over or drive your chariot
Over others’ paths or a wide track, but along unworn
Roads, even if you drive a narrower path.’
(Prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia, Fragment 1.22–8)
Catullus heeded his advice for brevity, ingenuity, variety, and polished erudition. In paying homage to Callimachus he risked treading his path, but determined to move away from translating his poetry and begin adapting merely its precepts to his own particular tongue. That way he would prove himself capable of walking outside the existing
tramlines of Latin literature. He echoed Callimachus’ criticism of a poet called Antimachus, whose work was notoriously verbose.27 ‘Let the plebs rejoice in puffed-up Antimachus,’ Catullus wrote (Poem 95b), while the more concise works of Cinna and Callimachus were to be savoured by those who were learned enough to appreciate the tune of the cicadas over the braying of the ass.28
When Catullus later attempted to write in a grand style reminiscent of epic, he would do so in the Callimachean manner of reducing greatness to a small compass, and making every word count. And so Poem 64, his Bedspread Poem, would both feature and become a rich tapestry of allusions to other poets’ works and traditions of myth, but woven to a pattern of his own invention. He would choose to use hexameters, a heavier metre than he used for many of his other poems, which gave longer works such as this a grand tone.
Still, Cicero was just too aloof to appreciate his poetry. In another respect, he was too close to him. It was not just the urbanity or ‘Greekness’ of Catullus’ verse that offended him, but the provincial twang that he imposed upon it. Cicero was a new man from Arpinum, to Rome’s south; Catullus, though also nouveau riche in the eyes of the patricians, was a Gaul; both were outsiders. To Cicero’s ears, the northern tongue was abhorrent.29 It was normal for a writer to disguise his origins by sticking to standard forms, but Catullus’ voice was clearly transposed into some of his poems.
The Gauls tended to keep their mouths open more often than the Romans as they spoke, causing one word to leak into another like a loudly dripping tap. Gaping vowels gave rise to strange inflections and distinctive dialogue, which was exceedingly difficult to lose.30 And Catullus was not minded to do so. The sheer languidness of the elided vowel lent itself perfectly to love. One of his most famous Latin lines, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus – ‘We should live … we should love’ (Poem 5) benefited from his dialect. In reading it, no one pronounced the ‘ia’ and ‘at’ or the ‘que’ and ‘ame’, but ran them together like this: ‘Lesbiatquamemus’. It sounded like a lover’s drawl.