by Daisy Dunn
FAREWELL
But first I shall free my heart of countless laments,
And pour soil over my white hair and defile it with ash,
Then hang dyed sails from my bending mast
So that sails dipped in Iberian rust may proclaim
This grief of mine, this blaze in my head.
(Poem 64, lines 223–27)
SOME NEWS INVITES NO REACTION, no breath, no sound. With nothing to see, one opens one’s eyes slightly and listens to the blood pumping through the ears as the jaw stiffens. Then a pain shoots through the front of the head, like an explosion before the eyes; the whiteness is so dazzling that one is forced backwards, a step, two steps, intuitively grasping backwards. One still has not breathed, so one does, but the motion pushes the heart still higher, and then the nausea comes. And then the blaze in the head. This was the pain Catullus could not describe when he heard that his brother had died.
His brother had travelled to Asia, years before, perhaps to gain grounding for a political career. And now, somewhere near the plains of ancient Troy, he had perished. A million stadia away, on strange soils, lay his remains, his mute remains. He had been stolen from him, and for what? So his family could lament the injustice of his premature death, and the helplessness of being so far away?
In Verona, it was silent. When the rain began to fall, the men and women took cover in storage huts, and watched as steam rose from their roofs. The streets smelled of sulphur, and the dogs were maddened by it.
The river, infected by the sky, seemed to suffer for the downpour; the drops, continuous now, like the bars that divided beast from spectator, were an impediment to its spate. In the distance, the shadows of cypress trees, weeping like the metamorphosed heroines of some half-forgotten myth, bowed beneath the breeze. Only the stone of the deserted Ponte Pietra gleamed with the whiteness of babies’ teeth. It could have been night.
Work had paused on the new building sites. The ground recently cleared for a new forum was fast becoming a mud bath. The holes dug for new gates had once again become soil. Piles of sodden bricks and familiar pinkish stone lay abandoned, a gift for errant bandits.
Catullus pushed past the slaves who had gathered in his doorway, and found his way inside. He did not leave the house for some time. Days would pass as if in darkness, while sleep brought nothing but pain. His skin was mottled with cold, regardless of the hour. He did not, could not, write of how his family fared in this sorrowful household, only of the approaches of friends, who meant well, but were burdensome. Try as he might, he simply could not countenance the comparison they offered between love-loss and loss.
Since the seventh century BC, if not earlier, the Muses had been endowed with the powers to banish grief.1 When acquaintances suggested to Catullus that he divert his pain to poetry, their words somehow still felt ill-considered, and untimely. He could not see how he could welcome the Muses into his home when he was in so much pain. He was battered by the sleeplessness of bereavement, drained ‘by a grief that never ends’, an anxiety that summoned him ‘away from the versed virgins’ (Poem 65).
But then he remembered how fervently his brother had persuaded him to pursue the things he loved; he thought of all the interests which his ‘sweet love encouraged’ so long as he lived (Poem 68). It was then that he began to listen to his friends, for he perceived that they were thinking of his brother, not him. They made him realise that there was no other way that he could pay his brother homage now but by clinging to these interests with all that remained of his heart. And so Catullus made a vow; and when his friends heard it, they knew that he had seen the light (Poem 65). He would sing always of his brother’s death, and with those songs, with those poems, realise his legacy.
This did not stop Catullus from being apologetic about writing. He worried that his ability to do so in such circumstances rendered his distress less convincing. Determined, however, to do as he had resolved, he set about meeting the requests he had received from two of his friends for poems. The first came from ‘Hortalus’, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, an orator and senator, who was probably a family friend.2 Rather than attempt a new composition for him, Catullus decided to return to his roots, and did as he had done thousands of times as a youth. He set his hand to translating a Greek poem into Latin.
He explained to Hortalus, in the poem that formed the cover-letter to the piece, that he was providing him with a translation of a work by Callimachus, so that he had something. It was a close translation, too, to judge by the traces that remain of the end of Callimachus’ Aetia, from which Catullus sourced his passage. Perhaps Hortalus was bewildered by the theme at first. The poem was written from the viewpoint of a lock of hair that belonged to Queen Berenice II, the wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes of third-century BC Alexandria. But closer inspection yields some subtle comparisons with Catullus’ own sorrowful predicament, and a political debate that was now raging at Rome over the status of Egypt’s rule.
The Romans had long been in awe of Alexandria. Since the time of Caesar’s consulship in 59 BC they had recognised Egypt as their friend and ally. The brother of the current ruler, Ptolemy XII Auletes (‘The Flautist’), had been king of Cyprus until a host of Romans, including Cato, reduced it and he committed suicide. In the upheaval, Ptolemy’s subjects had driven him from his throne. Desperate, he hastened to Rome to seek help in reclaiming his power. The Alexandrians would send their own embassy to Rome to plead with them not to restore him. The usurped leader would give orders for the violent overthrow of the rival embassy, and the debacle would not be settled until a hefty sum had swapped hands to secure a Roman invasion to restore Ptolemy.3 By the close of the decade, he would be sharing his throne with his daughter, Cleopatra.
In his poem for Hortalus, Catullus reflected on the distant, more dreamlike history to this episode, which starred the earlier ruler, Ptolemy III and his queen, Berenice. Ptolemy and Berenice were cousins, and together represented a united Alexandria and Cyrene. Catullus must have read the tales of how Berenice had found her husband rather too fond of dice. A slave would be reading him aloud a list of criminals eligible for the death penalty, it was said, and Ptolemy would be gambling away. He would give his summons, but seldom raise his head from his game to do so. When Berenice told her new husband that he should be paying closer attention to his responsibilities, he was delighted, and obeyed her.4 Soon after their wedding he decided to invade Syria, leaving his bride to pray that he would return safely. If he did so, she pledged, she would dedicate a lock of her hair at a temple of Aphrodite.
Return he did. Catullus described in his poem the subsequent apotheosis of her precious lock as a constellation in the sky. It was Conon, the court astronomer, a man Callimachus described as charting ‘how the stars appear’, who fixed it in the northern hemisphere, just as Catullus defined it.5 Astronomers still refer to the tress-shaped constellation as coma Berenices, ‘hair of Berenice’.6
Through the persona of the lock, Catullus drew on the closeness of the newlyweds. While the lock lamented its separation from the queen’s head, Berenice mourned separation from her husband.7 Berenice was said to have assisted in the assassination of a former partner in order to gain power, an act Catullus considered a ‘good deed’, because the man had committed adultery with her mother. Even though he had cuckolded Metellus, adultery remained, in Catullus’ eyes, the worst of crimes.
Catullus might have found little here to alleviate his sorrow, but this was not the only opportunity he had to see how far poetry could assuage his grief. Manlius, the young Roman patrician for whom he had written a wedding hymn, now wrote to him in Verona, requiring a poem. Catullus’ prayers for marital bliss for the couple had foundered: Manlius told him in his letter that he endured a ‘shipwreck’ of a marriage and a loveless bed. The page he entrusted to Catullus’ hands was soaked in his tears and anguish.
Catullus made no secret of how troublesome it was to respond to Manlius’ request. He fought strongly the compulsion to write, and had
a long list of excuses. Just a single crate of manuscripts had followed him from Rome (‘that is my home’) to Verona, and even if he had more, he believed that no one should have expected anything of him. Though flattered that Manlius considered him a true friend, Catullus felt that this was not the time for him to cheer his spirits. He might have sensed that Manlius could do well enough without him. Though he would die at war before he could achieve his ultimate ambition of becoming a consul, Manlius Torquatus would rise to the praetorship and outlive Catullus.
After all his protestations, however, Catullus’ passions wound their way back to Rome and into Manlius’ hands. As so often his refusal to write a poem made a poem in itself. It resembled a letter, and Catullus used it to acknowledge, politely, Manlius’ lack of tact. Not only had he sought Catullus’ sympathy in his letter, he had also decided to bring Catullus up-to-date with events since he had left Rome:
So when you come to write ‘It is shameful to be at Verona,
Catullus, when this man, one of the better sort,
Warms his chilly limbs in the bed you left behind’,
That, Manlius, is more than shameful, it’s pathetic.
(Poem 68)
Catullus did not explain to Manlius, or indeed to Hortalus, how his brother had died, but in letter-poems to both he provided a clue between the lines of his Latin. His brother’s body, he wrote, was buried beneath or near the shoreline of Rhoeteum, a promontory just above Troy:
Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus
ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis …
He the land of Troy buried beneath the Rhoetean shore,
Stolen from my eyes …
(Poem 65)
Litore, from litus, was shore; tellus was land. Litus could be used to mean shore or territory more widely, but the way Catullus laid it next to tellus showed that he sought a contrast between the two. The image poignantly evoked the Homeric picture of soldiers drawing up their ships and waging battle on bloodied Trojan soil. Yet, his insistence on being ‘drowned in the waves of fate’, and on his household being ‘buried’ since his brother died (Poem 68), made it seem as though he was intentionally transferring epithets between his brother and himself. Subtly, he was insinuating that his brother had died at sea, that his body had been washed up, and was buried on the shore of Rhoeteum. Manlius had been tactless indeed to describe himself as having endured a ‘shipwreck’ in his letter.
If only inadvertently, the death of his brother had put Catullus in a new poetic mood. His poem for Manlius (Poem 68) is haunted by the emotional consequences of separation. It is as fractured and fraught with turnings and dead-ends as any of his works to date. He probably wrote it in parts, at different times, as separate poems, which scholars later sewed into one. It was only the first part he addressed to Manlius. The second half contained a retrospective thanksgiving to Allius for providing him with a safe house in Rome to pursue his affair with his mistress, but even in this part he paused to grieve for his brother.8
He tells Manlius that his brother’s death has stolen all his enthusiasm for love. At the same time, he is desperately seeking to come to terms with what it means to be just one of Lesbia’s lovers. He hopes, with one part of his being, that he might yet be reconciled with her.
Here Catullus found at last a kinship between his sorrow for his brother, and his fluctuating feelings for Lesbia: ‘our whole household has been buried’, he laments, a strong suggestion that neither he nor his brother had yet had children.
He could not conceive of a future for his family now that his brother had died, childless, and now that his lover – former lover – was reluctant to love him alone. He would describe further the similarity between death and painful love in his Bedspread Poem, where a woman, Ariadne, prays that the lover who has forsaken her catches the same grief she suffered when he neglected her.
Catullus now saw little hope that his own father might hold a grandchild and mused on the happiness a new baby could give a more fortunate man:
Not so dear to a grandparent wearied by old age
Is the child their only daughter feeds, born to her late in life,
An heir found at last for his grandfather’s riches,
His name put on the testament tablets,
Quelling the impious hurrahs of a relative now mocked,
Putting to flight the vulture from the old man’s head.
(Poem 68)
Catullus’ father’s fears over the inheritance of his properties and wealth could not have been any less pressing, and it was to Catullus’ credit that, in these dire times, he recognised this. He could see now that, as the surviving son, he had to assume his elder brother’s responsibilities. The loss had aged him, drawn a tragic line between the spring of youth, when he first tasted love, and the uncertainty of his family’s future.
In Poem 68 he returned once more to the place his brother’s body had been found, not far from Troy – nefas, unspeakable Troy – the ‘common grave of Asia and Europe’. Catullus reflected on a further tale. The Rhoetean shore was where Ajax, the mighty Greek warrior of Homer’s Iliad, was said to have been buried, while the first Greek warrior who died in the same war had been Protesilaos.9 As Ptolemy III had abandoned Berenice (as Lesbia had abandoned Catullus), so Protesilaos had abandoned his new bride, Laodamia, to fight on Troy’s battlefields. In his poem to Manlius, it was as if Catullus was insinuating that the moment Lesbia had faltered on the threshold, like Laodamia and the Trojan Horse, she had cursed his brother with the same early death as had met Protesilaos all those generations before.
There was nothing more to be done. In spring 57 BC, turgid with sorrow, red from weeping, Catullus boarded a ship for Bithynia, south of the Black Sea, not far from Rhoeteum. There was only one woman in the world who might have clasped his knees and convinced him to stay, but she did not.
A SEA OF MACKEREL
Divine Minerva, her keep a citadel
In the city’s heights
Streamlined the flying chariot to the breeze
Herself, weaving, joining the pines together
To form a curving keel.
She, the ship, inured the innocent sea
To the flight of ships.
(Poem 64, lines 8–11)
THE OARSMEN HAD MADE THIS TRIP a dozen times but, for all their familiarity with the route, remained reluctant to stray too far from the coastline. It was easy enough to sail down the Po and into the Adriatic. The risk came when their large galley glided past Greece and up through the Aegean towards Asia, where the waters and their hidden rocks could be prey to sudden storms, counter-currents, and the whims of inconstant wind gods.
It was 57 BC, and one of Rome’s praetors of the previous year was gleefully en route to his foreign posting. Gaius Memmius, who was to govern in Bithynia, cast his eye over his entourage. There were plenty of strong young Romans here, who, by the looks of them, could not wait to gain the experience they required to ascend the political ladder. There was Cinna, with whom Catullus had whiled away many an evening over poetry and wine. And there was young Catullus, looking wistfully overboard.
Weeks of close confinement with a crew of ambitious men was never going to be easy. The squeal of the sail rope could barely drown out the petty disputes of its handlers. They itched their wrists, crusted with salt, their backs, wet with perspiration, and played over an internal dialogue to dull the moans of the vessel. The one consolation was that Catullus would be safer for the company. For all his emotional experience, he was still unworldly. If business acumen ran through his blood, it was yet to surface with much observable conviction.
In theory, Gaius Memmius would seem to be the perfect mentor for him: he claimed descent from one of the founding members of Rome, and had combined that with a lucrative and strategic marriage to Sulla’s daughter, Cornelia Fausta. He had recently fallen foul of Caesar by being among the men who called into question the legality of the acts passed during his consulship in 59 BC.1 He argued that Caesar should ne
ver have received commands in Illyricum and Gaul over and above the woods and tracks of Italy which the Senate had originally allotted him.2 When there had been calls for Lucullus, Clodia’s former brother-in-law, to be awarded a triumph for his campaigns against Mithridates, Memmius had been at the head of the opposition. The commander, he argued, had diverted too much property to his own advantage and for dragging out the war so needlessly could never be worthy of a triumph.3 Though his efforts were ultimately in vain, Memmius had demonstrated his willingness to fight.
Memmius was strong-willed and not afraid to speak his mind – both qualities Catullus admired in a person. He even had proven literary interests. He wrote poetry and patronised it, and in return received a book dedication from the philosopher Lucretius. His name crops up sporadically in his six-volume work on the fundamentals of life, the De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of Things’), inspired by the teachings of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher.
But as Catullus was quick to see, being interested in just about everything did not necessarily make Memmius very good at anything at all. He knew a fraud when he saw one, especially one that had the presumption to consider himself a poet.
Memmius had tried his hand at writing love poetry, and although he was not short of romantic encounters to draw upon, it was obvious that he was more interested in making a name for himself than writing from the heart. According to Ovid, who had the opportunity to read his poetry before it was lost, the verse was crude, in more ways than one.4 Memmius flexed his oratorical muscle with somewhat more skill, but Cicero, who rightly considered himself an authority in the field, said that his efforts left much to be desired.5