Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  In the short term, his work under Memmius might have killed off any enthusiasm he might have learned to acquire for Roman expansion and conquest. While travels across Asia provided him with rich literary material, the work he carried out under Memmius did not interest him sufficiently to inspire a single poem.

  Whatever his cohort achieved during its year on the Black Sea coast, the Senate decided not to extend Memmius’ command there, as they had his predecessor, who had remained in Bithynia for up to three years.6 Catullus did not care. Memmius had long struck him as a selfish leader, a man who would do anything to protect his own interests. Why, he had prevented his men from making any profit at all from the province. By his own admission, Catullus had taken to recording his expenses as profits in his account books, as if to make himself feel better when he looked at them (Poem 28). He did so, he wrote, ‘following my praetor’s example’. It later transpired that Memmius had a habit of fiddling his own accounts. In 54 BC he would attempt to bribe his way to a consulship for the following year. The bribery would be uncovered when he presented his account books before the Senate.

  Catullus was prone to exaggerate, but could not help but liken his service under Memmius to oral rape: ‘Oh Memmius, for long now you’ve excelled at slowly inserting the length of that pole of yours into my face’ (Poem 28). So it was that when the moment came for Catullus to return home, he was anxious to go. That opportunity came with the first signs of spring in 56 BC.

  The new season revealed itself in absences. Gone were the anchovies which had flooded the shallows in the winter months. Gone the foolhardy locals who dared to skid over the frozen sea in carts, to dig them from icy slurry.7 Urgent to follow the fish into water that was deep enough to sail over, Catullus expressed his excitement at leaving in brilliantly concise verse:

  Goodbye, sweet crowd of friends, we set out

  Together from home far away, but

  Different and varied are the roads that carry us back.

  (Poem 46, lines 9–11)

  In Latin, line 11 read merely diversae varie viae reportant. Catullus’ words were clipped, which befitted an authoritative governor like Memmius better than the average subordinate. Leaping to his feet and separating himself from the group, Catullus finally took control. His homeward path was the one that mattered.

  Among his ‘sweet crowd of friends’, Cinna would follow him in a different boat. He would be safe. He knew well from experience that only ‘the strongest sail rope will guide a stable course’ over the sea.8 Following his tour of ‘the distinguished cities of Asia’ as well as the promontory of Rhoeteum, Catullus boarded his own vessel home.

  The boat he procured came from Amastris, a city on the Black Sea coast. It had formed one of the western points of Mithridates’ kingdom while he was alive. There were two harbours here, and a proud heritage, which men traced back to Queen Amastris, niece of Darius III, whom Alexander the Great famously pursued soon after invading the Persian Empire.9 It was marred only by a long, open, reeking drain, which wafted its toxic fumes across the city’s rooftops.10 Its great mountain, Cytoris, grew what Catullus described as a ‘long-haired forest’, so thick was its carpet of leaves. Boxwood trees were in particular preponderance.

  Catullus found a second-hand yacht made from Cytoris’ boxwood. This timber was better suited to the construction of small objects than to shipbuilding, for which pine was the preferred material, but boxwood was hard, easy to carve. The resulting boat was, Catullus wrote, a phaselus, a ‘kidney bean’, named after its shape. Bean ships were sometimes made from clay. Men painted them and often relied on sails alone to carry them over the water.11 Catullus’ wooden yacht had both sails and oars.12 It had probably been constructed in the traditional Greek ‘shell-first’ method. It was worn, its timbers clogged with salt.

  Jason’s pine-built Argo might have been born from Mount Pelion’s head, but Catullus’ phaselus would not consider itself in any way inferior for being born from boxwood on Mount Cytoris in Amastris. Catullus had lingered over the troubles boats caused in his Bedspread Poem, but allowed his latest yacht to sing its own virtues. While the Argo’s flight had been one of determined necessity, he classed the yacht’s joyride in similar terms: ‘No vows were made on her behalf to the gods on the shore when she set out …’

  Diving in and out of the Aegean, his boxwood Argo sped past Lesbos and Rhodes and the long-ridged island of Naxos. It passed the fair isle of Apollo and Artemis, Delos. Mithridates might have despoiled it, but high on one of its hills stood a splendid Doric temple, gleaming in honour of the Egyptian gods Isis, Serapis, and Anubis. An ancient line of sculpted lions, holy to Apollo, stood proudly on their pedestals, not quite the fearsome monsters Odysseus encountered on his journey home, his famous nostos, but majestic in their own way. The ship passed Mykonos, where rounded rocks bore out the myth that Heracles had defeated Titans here and turned their testicles to stone. On it swam to the Adriatic.

  Brimming with confidence, the personified yacht of Poem 4 in Catullus’ collection recounted the journey from mountain forest to water, the very first movement of her oars across the Black Sea, her progress through the Propontis, and the speed with which she travelled the Aegean – she merely listed the sights she saw, the Cyclades, Rhodes, as if she could barely glimpse them. Whether this was her very last voyage, or merely her most recent (the Latin could mean either), Catullus dedicated her to Castor and Pollux, the twin gods of travel, once he reached the final port, ‘this limpid lake’.

  The lake might have been in the south of Greece, or the beginning of the Adriatic, where Catullus could board a second ship to complete his journey home, or it could equally have been Lake Garda. A kidney-bean boat sounds fragile by nature, but might have been strong enough to carry him over the seas before darting lithely up the Po.13 After all, in Catullus’ poem the yacht recounted her journey with smooth continuity, and backwards: lake, Adriatic, Aegean, then Black Sea and her origins in Amastris.

  Wherever the bean boat first landed, Catullus hastened to Lake Garda shortly after his return from Bithynia. If even the thought of disembarking after so long a journey demanded much of his sea legs, then he could find comfort in the fact that no place could ask less of him than beautiful Sirmio (Sirmione), the narrow strip that divided the waters of Lake Garda like a tongue that split a heart in two. To rest here, midway between Verona and Brixia, was like being back on a large steady deck, only one strewn with cobbles and olives. Jutting into the majestic blue lake, framed by the Alps, of which Monte Baldo loomed largest, Sirmio lingered between water and land.

  At barely a hundred metres wide, the strip of peninsula nearest the mainland was too narrow to hold a villa sufficiently large to have been his. Catullus’ house stood rather on Sirmio’s endpoint, surrounded by the waters of Garda. From a boat on the lake, this part looked particularly like an island. A stream divides the narrowest section of the aquiline peninsula by which Sirmio is connected to Italy so that the bulbous nose of land at its end seems to float like an independent landmass. So Catullus described it:

  Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque

  Ocelle, quascumque in liquentibus stagnis …

  marique vasto fert uterque Neptunus

  Eyelet of almost islands, Sirmio, and of islands,

  And whatever each Neptune balances on

  Pure waters and expanse of sea

  (Poem 31)

  He intended these lines to be seen as well as heard. ‘Sirmio’ floated in his first line between two words that were the same. In that way, it looked like an island, marooned and sprayed by water on every side. He placed the word ‘Sirmio’ between insulae, islands, because while it felt like an island, it was caught between being and not being one. What Catullus called ‘the eyelet of almost islands’ became for Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘Sweet Catullus’ all-but-island olive-silvery Sirmio!’14 Ezra Pound obsessed still more fervently over Catullus’ Sirmio in his Cantos, ‘and the water flowing away from that side of the lake/is sile
nt as never at Sirmio …’15 He heard it with the ears of Catullus, and saw it with his eyes.

  Sirmio’s eyelet could accommodate only a small number of estates, perhaps just one. A monumental villa was built upon it, which exuberant travellers established in the fifteenth century as the cave-like remains of Catullus’ home; its earliest parts in fact dated to the era of Augustus, perhaps forty years after Catullus lived.16 It elegantly traced the outline of the coast with its baths, cryptoporticus, workshops, countless bedrooms. Under later emperors, it grew to three storeys high.

  Catullus’ house was buried beneath it. On the south-east side of the peninsula, near the later villa’s entrance, remains of interconnecting cobble walls were discovered underground, rooms which dated to the first century BC. The cobbles of its walls were reused in the southern sector of the new building.17 The earlier villa was no farmer’s hut. There were brick columns, and painted plaster. Among the objects discovered from the same century across the peninsula were coins, ceramic cups, and shiny, black-glazed plates of the kind Catullus and his family dined off before the sun set over the lake.18

  The house was angled, precisely as the later villa was, to make the most of the views. Catullus perched here on higher ground, before the promontory dropped down a level towards the water before it. The lake felt so close that he might legitimately fear a deadly tumble onto the beaches it lapped.

  Richly coloured wall paintings of daisies and fruit, ferns and garlands, and human figures – including that of the poet with the lazy eye – adorned walls. Paint layered on plaster with lime and quartz made each surface glisten.19 Perhaps Catullus came home from his worldly travels and commissioned the scene of blue-grey sea filled with ships, one manned by oars alone, the other by sail and oars, both filled with men. The ships were near a coastline dotted with rocks. A man sat (his limbs alone survive) and tossed his line out to sea, confident of his catch. Another, wearing linen like a loin cloth, waded through the shallows to fix his net upon the still water’s surface. Or perhaps the family of Catullus, or Sirmio’s next residents, chose to commemorate the poet’s life with a scene that evoked his travels, and his charming portrait, too.

  Catullus’ mind was still cloaked in the canvas of Bithynia when a line of olive trees threw its familiar shadow upon him. Balls of leaves pixelated the horizon over the lake, making an artist’s palette of the sky and water, grass and Alpine snow. He made his way up towards its tip, where the opening out of the land encouraged a more leisurely pace than the narrow thoroughfare hitherto. It was no accident that he wrote his poem in ‘limping iambics’, a metre which dragged at the end of each line, like a man’s wearied feet.20 Catullus limped over the threshold of his home, greeted his household gods, and inhaled the familiar smells of home:

  How gladly, how happily I look upon you,

  Hardly even believing that I have left Thynia

  And the Bithynian plains and see you in safety.

  Oh what is happier than when the mind

  Releases its worries, lays down its burden, and

  Wearied from foreign labour we come to our hearth

  And find repose on the bed we have longed for?

  This alone is worth struggles so great.

  Hello to you, charming Sirmio, and rejoice as I,

  Your master, rejoice. And you, Lydian waves of the lake,

  Laugh with all the laughter we have at home.

  (Poem 31)

  As with all travel, but particularly far-flung protracted travel, time had gone awry. Catullus’ memories of Bithynia were suddenly those of a parallel life, one not quite his own. He caught an essence of them in the ‘Lydian’ waves, which evoked the Etruscans’ escape from Lydia in ancient times. On returning from Asia, Catullus, in a sense, had come full circle.

  He bade the waves of his ancestors ‘laugh with all the laughter we have at home’, o Lydiae lacus undae,/ridete quidquid est domi cachinnorum. He expected not merely a smile, but a hearty guffaw like a crashing wave, cachinno.21

  He did not need to imagine the waves laughing, because they were laughing in their very depths, carrying each laugh to the surface with a bubble. Thermal springs lie on the bed of Lake Garda, and bring bubbles to its surface. Their healing vapours escape to lend Sirmio’s air a heady, sulphuric oppression.

  As the sulphur of Sirmio was carried through Catullus’ dining room, he could well picture Clodia bathing elsewhere. She had her pick of naked bathers at her gardens on the Tiber’s lower bank, as Cicero cuttingly observed.22 And then there was Baiae. A more extravagant but less charming thermal resort than Sirmio, Baiae was a great attraction for the posing elite. Its natural springs ranged from the sulphur-rich to the aluminous; each treated a different disease.23

  The coastline of Baiae was overhung with sultry heat haze. Each day, the haze lifted over the sand paths and hill-chiselled caverns, half consumed by sun and half holding out to witness who would come. The rich descended here from Rome each spring, some trailing ailing limbs to bathe in the healing waters, others simply trailing. As they knew, there was fun to be had at Baiae, for which clothes were superfluous.

  Cicero could not stand the place. Between the giant dome-roofed baths and the pleasure boats piled up on the sands, it posed a risk to self-restraint. No wonder, he supposed, that Clodia loved it. The place had no local politics or trade to speak of, no particular fingerprint aside from its beauty and the people it attracted to define it to the outside world.24 Without purpose beyond its fuel for pleasure, it fell victim to the charge of excess, something it only half fulfilled by failing to convince people of a greater purpose. Baiae became what they imagined it to be.

  Those who frequented it were not just trendsetting for their own age, but for future rulers, too. ‘No bay in the world outshines gorgeous Baiae,’ wrote Horace decades later, quoting the rich man of his day.25 Caesar and Pompey purchased villas up in the hills, and later the most licentious emperors, Caligula and Nero among them, lavished their riches on grand properties overlooking the sea. By then, Baiae was a noted ‘inn of vice’.26

  Catullus disliked the extravagance that Baiae typified. That was not to say that he wanted to be perceived as penniless. Although he saw poverty as a rich man’s fashion, he liked to think that people knew he only cultivated it from a position of wealth. More, he recognised that a man’s display of ostentation could be construed as an invitation to engage with him in a dull manner. Back in Rome after Sirmio, he wrote a poem in which he demonstrated how pandering citizens could be towards the rich. He was entering the Forum where he caught the attention of his old poet friend Varus and a woman he presumed to be Varus’ new girlfriend. They asked him eagerly how he had fared in Bithynia, and how much profit he had made:

  I was idling in the Forum when my friend Varus

  Saw me and led me off to the home of his lover,

  A little tart (as she immediately struck me),

  Though not obviously inelegant or lacking in charm.

  When we arrived here we got lost in conversation,

  One topic, then another, such as what Bithynia

  Was like today, and how it had gone,

  And how much profit it had made me.

  I told it as it was – it brought nothing for the natives

  Or the praetors or the cohort,

  Which was why no one’s head was any glossier –

  Particularly for those who had a fuckwit as a praetor,

  Who split not a hair over his entourage.

  ‘But surely,’ they said, ‘You procured litter-bearers there,

  Which they say are native to the region.’

  To make myself singularly more attractive to the girl

  I said ‘Although it was a bad province

  Things did not go so badly for me

  That I could not obtain eight straight-backed boys.’

  (But in fact I had no one from here or there

  Who could lift even the broken foot of an old bed

  Onto his shoulders.) And
she, as sluttier girls will, said,

  ‘Will you lend them to me a while, dear Catullus,

  I want to take a ride to Serapis.’

  ‘Wait,’ I told her,

  ‘What I said I had a moment ago …

  My mind flew – my friend,

  Gaius, Cinna – obtained them as his own.

  But what difference does it make if they’re mine or his?

  I use them as if I bought them myself,

  But you, you are so vulgar and meddlesome

  That I can’t be off my guard at all!’

  (Poem 10)

  With great wit and insight, Catullus made fun of his friends’ ignorant assumption that province-hopping guaranteed a man wealth. All the while, he tried to save face. He knew as well as Varus’ girlfriend did that Bithynia had traditionally been famed for its export of slaves, so much so that its penultimate king, Nicomedes III, had once said that he lacked the men to support Rome’s battles against certain Gallic tribes, because they had been taken as slaves by Roman tax collectors.27 For all her charm, Varus’ girlfriend would not visit the temple of Serapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god of healing. The joke was on Catullus. The Bithynian litter-bearers? Oh, he backtracked pathetically, they were not his to lend. To the average Roman, it was incredible that when a cohort returned from one of the provinces it should do so without having earned enough for hair oil, ‘no one’s head was any glossier’.28 Catullus found the girl’s persistent questioning of his finances tiresome.