Catullus' Bedspread
Page 9
‘Father- and son-in-law’, Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great.
For now, Catullus had another politician to contend with: Metellus Celer, Clodia’s long-suffering husband. The three of them were trapped in a triumvirate of their own. Metellus had just retired from his consulship and would soon be setting out again for Transalpine Gaul to take up a senior command. If Catullus wanted to succeed in persuading Clodia to love him alone, then he needed to use this time to understand what she saw in her husband. Once he knew what Metellus’ good qualities were, he might stand a chance of undermining them.
Catullus made little room for the husband in his verse, however. As the other man, Metellus failed to emerge from his poetry as more than a two-dimensional shadow, too imperceptive to realise that his authority and masculinity were under threat. In Poem 83, the three of them stand together in a room. Clodia begins to rail at Catullus, as if his attentions are a nuisance, an embarrassment to her, and as if bitter words would really assuage her of the fact that she is, for all her many protestations, feeling something for him:
Lesbia says a lot of cruel things to me in front of her husband.
The dolt finds considerable happiness in this.
Mule, do you have no feelings? If she had forgotten me and kept quiet
She would be cured. But since she barks and abuses
Not only does she remember me but – this is far more piercing –
She is angry. This is how it is, she burns, and she talks.
(Poem 83)
Possessive, demanding, and determined to make public his lover’s allegiance to him over the ‘mule’ she is married to, Catullus places himself between the married couple, Lesbia mi praesente viro: Lesbia, Catullus, Metellus Celer. His poem reads like a lesson in logic, an impassioned speech of an orator who classifies feelings as facts. All that is missing is a witness, and without one, Catullus’ testimony is in danger of falling flat. He could raise his arms to the sky, pace the room, and laugh all he liked at the dolt’s lack of perceptiveness, but his confidence depended upon his own ignorance. There was no one else there who could confirm how vacant Metellus was, or the real reason he smiled.
It was Catullus who risked being construed as insentient, for believing his rival so easily convinced of their innocence. Anyone who saw this poem would suspect that his lover’s husband knew a lot more than he was prepared to let on. Catullus might have misread him, but his reader, anxious for what would happen next, was left hoping desperately that he had not.
Despite the fact that his wife was having an affair with a young poet, Metellus Celer was, according to Cicero, looking in remarkably good health. He had been seen in the Forum, planning his departure for Gaul. He knew it would be a long journey and a difficult posting. Caesar was looking in this direction, too. Disappointed at the prospect of governing the inglorious woods and tracks of Italy when the year came to an end, he saw a law passed by the people granting him an army and five years in which to govern Cisalpine Gaul (an area incorporating Catullus’ own Verona) and Illyricum in the Balkans, from where he would be in a strong position to wage a great war against King Burebista of the Dacian people (in Transylvania).
But then, suddenly, some grave news broke in the city. Metellus Celer had been found dead in his house on the Palatine Hill.6 Nothing could have prepared his fellow senators for this shock. One moment he had been heartily planning his expedition to the north, the next he was lying lifeless in his bed. The unexpectedness of his passing should have numbed even the hardiest of souls, but it did not go unnoticed that his seat in Transalpine Gaul was now empty – and Caesar moved quickly to acquire it.
Perhaps Cicero was being dishonest when he recorded seeing Metellus looking so well hours before his death. He recalled this three years after the event, and in a speech in which he hoped to discredit Metellus’ widow. Since no cause of death had been established, he had reached the conclusion that Clodia must have poisoned him. Catullus would never entertain such a ludicrous possibility, nor would anyone without a vendetta against her family.
For as long as she had been married, Clodia had been safe to speak to her lover as she pleased. Her marriage was, at its most rudimentary, her escape route whenever Catullus’ affections became too intense. She knew that he loved her in excess of ‘both my eyes’, and that whenever he wrote those words he meant them as more than idle idiom, because the eyes were what separated the living from the dead. Lumina were not just ‘eyes’, windows of the soul, but ‘daylight’, and when night covered them over, the soul departed. Marriage had allowed Clodia to remain aloof from such intensity, and any other man in her life had been obliged to try to accept this. Now, all that changed.
There were occasions when Catullus found her willing to become more involved with him. He raised his hopes accordingly for something more than a short season of illicit romance. He had once portrayed himself and Lesbia as evenly matched, cursing each other because they were in love. As his anticipation grew, doubts began to seep in about her sincerity and the evenness of their feelings:
You dangle before me, my love and life, the prospect
That this love of ours will be cherished and last forever.
Great gods, make it that she can promise truthfully,
And say it sincerely and from her heart
So that we may live our whole lives
By this everlasting pact of sanctified love.
(Poem 109)
Looking forwards, to the skies, to the ground, he addressed her, then the gods, and finally themselves as a couple. The prospect of their affair becoming permanent seemed too good to be true. So Catullus tried to trap her with his words. In his poem, he called their relationship a ‘pact’ – foedus – a word which cut rather too close to marriage to have been accurate. For as long as he could not literally have her as a wife, he pledged his commitment to her in absolute terms. He was, in effect now, her ‘husband’. For the time it did not matter that a pact between two people required two signatures to be valid. It was possible to live part of a life, if not a whole life, he thought, in the hope that an ‘everlasting pact of sanctified love’ would one day be verified. He deluded himself into believing that this day was now imminent.
His hope transcended emotional manipulation. Marriage was the cog by which society turned, particularly among the elite, who had seen many a feud buried before now by a lucrative union and merry occasion. A wedding offered at least the semblance of stability, and in turbulent times, this was often as good as it got.
The formality and familiar rhythm of the rites held almost as much appeal as the institution itself for Catullus as a bachelor poet, who found something of that steadiness in the measured procession and choral song, and the steady shower of nuts sprinkled like confetti, and the predictability of the bride’s departure from mother’s bosom to groom’s embrace at the end of the wedding banquet. Marriage was on his mind, and the hymns he now proceeded to compose for it were among the first to have been written in Latin. They embraced a tradition that spanned the distance from Homer’s contemporaries via Sappho to Callimachus to the Roman ceremony itself.
He had received a commission to write such a hymn for the wedding of one Lucius Manlius Torquatus, the son of a former consul, whose family had long pledged allegiance to the optimates, and his bride Junia Aurunculeia.7 Etching his tablet with joyful words, Catullus summoned Hymen, god of marriage, to attend the maiden as she put on her saffron bridal cloak and slippers. She might have been fourteen, or even younger. Catullus gave her some encouragement as her bridesmaids escorted her to the hall of her father’s house, and her right hand was placed in the right hand of her husband. The groom was some years older than his bride, and although unlikely to have been a virgin, Catullus sang just as optimistically of his faithfulness as hers. He would not fall into the arms of another woman, but be entwined with her like tree and vine in wedded pleasure. Some marriages were founded on love, and these were the only kind Catullus wished for.
Should Catullus ever marry, his wedding day would run much like theirs.8 After the joining of hands, families and guests would gather together to perform a sacrifice and enjoy a feast. There would be a wedding cake, which would be offered to Jupiter. Anticipation would mount until the evening star, Hesperus, raised its head and beckoned the domum deductio, the procession home.
Traditionally, the bride would struggle in staged resistance (sometimes she had needed little assistance in her acting) as a band of boys removed her from her mother’s side to lead her to her new husband’s home. By candlelight, the boys would target the groom with nuts and ‘Fescennine jesting’ – rude jibes to set him on the road to marital sex and mark a departure from the encounters he, like many men from elite households, would have enjoyed with other boys through adolescence. A wedding bed awaited the newlyweds, once the groom had carried his bride over the threshold without faltering. An older woman would turn down the bedspread before the young couple attempted to fulfil their wedding hymn’s desire for children to be their heirs and carers when they grew infirm:
Close the doors, virgins,
We have played enough. But
Noble husband and wife,
Live well and devote your youthful
Energies to the deed repeatedly.
(Poem 61)
Catullus hoped that Manlius Torquatus and his bride would have a son who resembled his father in looks and mother in virtue. Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, was a worthy paradigm against which he could be measured.
As if to make it known to his lover that he understood how far the female experience of marriage differed from the male, Catullus wrote a second hymn. It staged a competition between young maidens and boys. The boys feared that the girls were more diligent in their song rehearsals, and the girls lamented the loss to the virgin sisterhood that evening summoned. No sooner did the girls voice these laments than the boys, in their quarter, balked that a bride’s resistance was pure theatre:
For when you come the guard is always vigilant,
At night the thieves hide, and often you turn back on them,
Hesperus, you catch them as your name turns to Dawn.
But the maidens love to carp at you in contrived complaint.
But why, if they carp, do they seek you in the silence of their hearts?
Hymen, o Hymenaee, Hymen come, o Hymenaee.
(Poem 62)
Presenting male and female viewpoints consecutively, boys then girls then boys then girls, Catullus revealed how far they differed. He could not help but empathise more with the female experience. He compared the virgin to a hidden flower in a garden, untouched by flock or plough. A plucked or fallen flower was unattractive, but a flower kissed by sun, rain and breeze was what ‘many boys, many girls desire’. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid would use almost precisely the same line and expressive word order as Catullus to describe not a girl but a boy, Narcissus.9 A girl’s maidenhood was a third her own, a third her father’s, a third her mother’s, until, with her dowry, her husband got purchase on it. Although this was a woman’s rite, Catullus lived to bear testimony to how far a man could comprehend it. In years to come he would compare his own love to a fallen flower at the edge of a meadow, grazed by a passing plough.
Ever partial to role play, Catullus now fantasised that Lesbia was harbouring hidden desires to wed him over everyone else, Jupiter included.
My lady says that she would rather marry no one
But me, not even if Jupiter himself were to ask her.
She says, ‘But what a lady says to a lover in the moment
Ought to be written on the wind and running water’
(Poem 70)
Unfortunately, the first line of his poem, ‘My lady says that she would rather marry no one’, seemed to convey more truth than the full sentence, carried into the next line, ‘But me’. No woman could honestly have desired feckless, vengeful Jupiter as her husband. He made the most libidinous lovers of the Republic look like emaciated ciphers. The very comparison undermined the logistics of a marriage, as it suggested that she was no more likely to marry Catullus than the king of the gods himself. And yet, for a time, none of this mattered.
Catullus knew that pillow talk was rarely any different. The inaccuracy or implausibility of a lover’s words rarely diminished their appeal in the moment they were spoken. He took inspiration for these final lines from an elegy by Callimachus, and another included in Meleager’s Greek anthology. Callimachus had described a boy who swore that he would never love anyone more than his girl, but fell in love with another boy: ‘He swore; but it is true when they say that vows to a lover cannot reach the ears of the immortals.’10 In Meleager’s poem a forsaken lover complains that the man who promised her (or him) that he would love her ‘now says that those oaths are carried on water’.11 In Catullus’ version, Lesbia usurps the male role. With some foresight, Catullus renders himself the vulnerable woman. When he composed his Bedspread Poem, he lent a variation of this poem to his heartbroken protagonist, a woman, as she spoke of a man who betrayed her trust. Furius and Aurelius, his rivals, were right. Catullus was not immune from emasculation. But it did not come from writing of kisses.
As for his own relationship, Catullus was fooling himself if he believed that marriage would legitimise the affair, or even be a possibility. He could blame this at first on his lover’s grief and the decorum of her mourning. All around them, tears were being shed for Metellus Celer. In the outside world, Pompey was proposing to the Senate that Caesar should be the new governor of Transalpine Gaul, and by January 58 BC, the Senate caved. Caesar added this command to his responsibilities over Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, laying the road for his Gallic War – a road that would thread past Catullus’ home in Verona. But Catullus could barely bring himself to care. He could not help but think that something else was adrift.
I HATE AND I LOVE
If a marriage to me was not in your heart
Because you feared the savage reprimands of your aged father
You might still have led me to your home
To be a slave to you in a joyous labour,
Washing your white feet with pure water,
Spreading your bed with a purple bedspread.
(Poem 64, lines 158–63)
CATULLUS WAS HANGING torturously from a cross, excrucior, weeping at the point of its intersection. On the vertical arm lay hatred, on the horizontal, love. Love and hate were his beginning and his end, his torture. The two lines which scored him through became two lines on his tablet:
I hate and I love, why do I so, perhaps you ask?
I do not know, but I feel it, and I am crucified.
(Poem 85)
In the heat of his conflict, he found it impossible to know why, or even how he could be feeling both emotions at once. Clinging to the memory of love made it last; hate consumed. Neither made it go away. They cut his heart like a cross. The battle was a hopelessly internal one. The ‘you’ of the first line of the couplet was the wounded poet, facing his reflection, trying to pull himself together. No friend or reader of his poetry could clarify his predicament better than he could on an empty page.
Love and hatred he saw as equal forces, but founded in different time zones. Hatred is forward-looking. The pangs of an injustice formerly felt have lasting impact; some things are impossible to change. Love carries one far more pleasurably backwards into a passion enjoyed when there is no need for questions and it convinces, if momentarily, that it would be easier to start anew from that point, drowning out whatever passed between. Both love and hate require forgetfulness. But memory is what drags the mind through both, one and the other, to and fro, and explains why only time can defeat the torment.
It had come to him as if from nowhere, two thoughts colliding like chariots on a blood-strewn racetrack. His lover had been unfaithful not only to her husband, but to him, and to an extent that he could not tolerate.
Not long after Metellus Celer’s death, and before the traditio
nal mourning period had expired, another young man had climbed the Palatine Hill. It had been raining, for there were small puddles on the path, into which the dew streams dripped from the grass borders. Delicate tracks left by a discreet predator, feathers, the passing interest of gulls overhead, were otherwise all that remained of the night before. Oblivious to them all, Clodius Pulcher stood in the doorway of the grand villa he now owned there, and let the man in. Smiling charmingly, his visitor enquired whether he might rent from him one of the luxury apartments that adjoined his house. Seeing that one was vacant, and that 10,000 sesterces rent money was never to be sniffed at, Clodius nodded in agreement, and welcomed his new neighbour.1
The man’s name was Caelius Rufus. He was tall, handsome, young – Catullus’ age – and Catullus’ friend, if the ‘Rufus’ Catullus described in Poem 77 as his ‘friend and ally’ was indeed him. He had a clear complexion and sported a fashionable little beard.2
Cicero put it on record that Clodia was fond of little beards. Men of old, including her distant ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus, wore long beards, but ever since the first barbers entered Rome from Sicily in about 300 BC, most Romans – but not prisoners or mourners – had tended to be clean-shaven.3 The beard that Clodia so adored was less in the style of the Greek philosophers and more like face topiary (garden topiary was also new in Rome at the close of the Republic). The young men who wore these beardettes were not harking back to Greece so much as aligning themselves with the déclassés who could not afford a regular shave. (In Poem 59 for example, Catullus smirks as he passes a woman snatching dinner from funeral pyres whilst being ‘banged by the half-shaven cremator’.)
Like Catullus, Caelius Rufus was equestrian by station. He was born in Interamnia (modern Teramo, north-east of Rome), but had been in Rome long enough to know its ways. He was still a boy when his father, ambitious for him to pursue a political career, sent him to the city to study under Cicero and enjoy a guardianship under Crassus. In recent times he had done Cicero serious discredit by being among those who fell prey to the lure of Catiline and the revolutionaries, but had since redeemed himself by pursuing his own career ambitions. As if this was not enough to raise Catullus’ hackles, he was a natural writer, adept at combining shrewd observation with witty anecdote. In his older years, Cicero would depend on him to keep him informed of senatorial decisions in his absence from Rome.4