by Daisy Dunn
Privately, he sought consolation for his lack of earnings elsewhere. He turned to two dear friends, Veranius and Fabullus (‘little bean’, surely a nickname much like ‘old bean’ today), who had seen overseas service of their own. In a poem, he asked them whether they did not become fed up with the cold and hunger brought on by their own thrifty commander, Piso, and whether their accounts in any way resembled his.
If their tour overlapped with his in Bithynia, as Catullus’ poems imply, they were probably stationed under Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, Caesar’s father-in-law, in Macedonia. Following his consulship of 58 BC, Piso enjoyed a protracted governorship there until 55 BC, providing his men with ample opportunity to shudder at his yellow teeth.29 The man had little talent, if Cicero was right, and had achieved his magistracies merely as a result of other men’s mistakes. Catullus had little reason to dislike the general, unlike Cicero, who suffered his exile under his watch; but that did not stop him from characterising Piso just as negatively.
Aligning him with Memmius as a man who ‘screwed’ his subordinates, Catullus bemoaned how Piso, ‘that erect Priapus’, flaunted ‘sumptuous dinner parties’ before the empty-bellied Veranius and Fabullus. So disgusting was Piso’s greed, that his dinners took place early in the day, while his friends were left outside, scavenging for invitations of their own (Poem 47).30 Drained by the injustice, Catullus sighed over the emptiness of his elders’ advice: ‘Seek noble friends, they say,’ he scoffed with an ironic splutter (Poem 28).
Fortunately, Veranius and Fabullus were capable of inspiring more jubilant verse than this. They were experienced travellers, who had spent time in Spain as well as Macedonia. Catullus wrote a poem in which he expressed how much he was looking forward to seeing Veranius speak ‘of the landscapes and habits and nations of the Spaniards the way you always do’ (Poem 9).
Basing his beliefs solely on his observations of a certain hairy, ‘rabbity’ and unrefined Spaniard named Egnatius who had set up home in Rome, Catullus considered Spain a place of curious people and customs.31 Catullus disparaged Egnatius’ red-gummed toothy grin, which was framed by a thick beard (Poem 37), and wrote that he smiled toothily regardless of the occasion – in court, at funerals, among mourners – because he was proud of his teeth, which he polished with urine ‘in the Spanish way’ to make them sparkling white (Poem 39). Rome was home to many ‘fullers’, whose job it was to wash clothes in urine, but Catullus perceived little similarity here with the Spanish tooth habit.
While his friends recounted old tales, Catullus observed the women at the table. One lady made an effort at old-fashioned decorum and sat upright beside her husband. Other guests slipped steadily onto their elbows as the dinner progressed, and picked at the fruit which dripped honey over the tabletop. Reclining on a bench, resting on a cushion, Catullus reached for olives and eggs, shellfish, crudités, and washed them down with wine. He mopped his fingers with a napkin as he ate, and drank and jested with his friends. There were knives to slice the meat and poultry, but no forks yet in Rome to lift them from the thick sauces in which they were served.
Catullus delighted in the simple Spanish napkins Veranius and Fabullus had given him as a gift: such napkins were inexpensive, but Catullus was sentimental. Men usually brought their own to the dinner table. When some boys tried to steal one from him, Catullus practically exploded in fury. The first incident occurred while he was distracted by laughter and wine, in ioco atque vino. The assonant Latin in which he described his state amply conveyed his slurred speech and stupor.
‘Do you think it witty?’ Catullus barked, as one Asinius Marrucinus secreted it away (Poem 12). Threatening him with rude verses, Catullus compared him unfavourably with his elder brother, Gaius Asinius Pollio,32 ‘a boy who brims with grace and wit’. Pollio would one day become the patron of both Virgil and Horace, and found Rome’s first public library. He was little more than a boy, but Catullus saw in him the makings of something special.
If only Catullus could say the same of young Thallus, another boy who decided to tuck into dinner and, aping Pollio’s brother, steal not just Catullus’ Spanish napkin, but also his cloak and catagraphos Thynos, ‘Bithynian sketches’ – artworks or writing tablets he had purchased there (Poem 25). By now exasperated, Catullus declared Thallus softer than ‘an old man’s floppy penis’. Guests might laugh at his fury, but then they did not understand what these objects meant to Catullus. The loss of a piece of cloth was the loss of a piece of friendship, and the loss of a piece of the world beyond. Something as mundane as a napkin could ground him when nothing else could.
GODLY RUMBLING
But after the earth was infected with unspeakable crime
And everyone put justice to flight from his grasping mind,
Brother drenched hands in the blood of brother,
Son ceased to grieve for the death of father and mother,
Father longed for the premature death of his son
So freely he could get purchase on the flower of a new wife,
Mother lay herself down beneath her naïve son,
Wrongful and unafraid of doing sacrilege to her household gods –
All things speakable and unspeakable, muddled together in evil fury,
Have turned the just minds of our gods away from us.
So they do not dignify our assemblies with their presence,
Or even bear to touch the clear light of day.
(Poem 64, lines 397–408)
WHILE CATULLUS HAD BEEN IN BITHYNIA, Cicero had languished in exile. The long, lonely days might have suited him, had he not been so in love with Rome. He had always valued opportunities for contemplation and private study, opportunities to gather his thoughts. In the isolation and frugality, the clarity that distance provides, he might have taken greater pleasure in observing that while Clodius Pulcher’s law had made him a physical outcast, it had not rendered him a forgotten man.
Cicero, however, had as good as given up. He wept bitterly for his wife and his children. He dreamed longingly of being back in their arms in Rome, where people made fiercer attempts than he realised to call him home. His brother and son-in-law rallied heartily on his behalf. Even the Senate and certain tribunes were seeking to arrange his return, a clear message to his relatives that few had willingly supported his exile after all; they had been only too weak to act against it. And so they tried, and tried again, but there was always another tribune loyal to Clodius waiting to impose his veto.
Cicero could cling to his disappointment over his desertion by the triumvirs, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, but they had only repeated a mistake he had made himself. He had never imagined that when he stood up to Clodius in the Bona Dea trial the young man would pursue him so savagely and for so long. Nor had the triumvirs considered the repercussions when they supported Clodius’ adoption into a plebeian family, happy at the prospect of silencing Cicero’s criticism of Caesar’s popular legislation. Cicero in exile and the triumvirs stood united at last, if only in their disastrous underestimation of Clodius Pulcher.
While Cicero blamed many people for the shame of his exile – his friends, his enemies, himself – he could not have known, any more than the triumvirs did, that a member of one of the noblest families in Rome, the brother-in-law of a recent consul – brother, indeed, of a staunch optimate senator – would resort to the actions of a street urchin. Whether he hungered for a dictatorship, or the opportunity to destroy the Republic forever to hand power to the masses, Clodius had succeeded in stunning the elite.
Catullus’ sabbatical from Rome could not have been better timed. Both consuls for that year were connected to Clodia: the brother of her late husband, Metellus Nepos, a former tribune who had feuded with Cicero over the Catilinarians years ago; and her son-in-law Publius Lentulus Spinther. It would have been impossible for Catullus to forget Clodia while her relatives filled such prominent seats. But Catullus’ loss was Cicero’s gain. Time, it transpired, had so healed Metellus Nepos’ wounds that, when
Lentulus put forward a proposal for Cicero’s return, he supported it, along with Pompey, who had cowered so wretchedly behind his door on the eve of Cicero’s exile.
Clodius, however, refused to give in. He had risen to the office of aedile while Catullus was abroad, the perfect base from which to draw upon his popularity among the free poor, including those who had come to Rome as immigrants and failed to find work. Gasconading through the streets, he issued instructions for a mob, supported by gladiators, to ensure that the bill for Cicero’s recall was not carried to the vote. Aediles were supposed to organise public entertainment and keep the peace, but Clodius was doing the reverse. Rival street gangs had emerged, the most prominent under the leadership of Publius Sestius and Titus Annius Milo, the fervent young tribunes of 57 BC. The struggle over Cicero had become a struggle over justice. Tensions which had been lingering for years between the most stalwart optimates and the populares who pledged allegiance to Clodius spilled over. Riots had already erupted when Clodius freed a hostage Pompey had kept from the East, and Pompey’s supporters sought to recapture him.1
Cicero was not exaggerating when he later described the continuing violence: ‘the Tiber was filled with the bodies of citizens, the sewers were clogged, blood was wiped from the Forum with sponges …’2 He might as well have quoted from Catullus’ Bedspread Poem, where, in the Heroic Age, the Scamander river was narrowed by the bodies piled up in the wake of Achilles’ spate.
Catullus was still in Bithynia when Cicero finally won the right to return following a near-unanimous vote (Clodius alone opposed). When Cicero re-entered the city, he found that the huddle of houses on his corner of the Palatine Hill had swollen into a complex, with one property spilling over into another. The late Quintus Lutatius Catulus’ monumental portico had been wrecked; Cicero’s own house was gone: Clodius had seized it and, feigning reverence, transformed the site into a shrine dedicated to the goddess Liberty.
By the time Catullus returned to Rome in 56 BC, Cicero had managed to reclaim his plot on the Palatine and the city felt comparatively calm. No sooner had Cicero begun to settle back into life in Italy, however, than reports started to come in of a series of troubling incidents across the country. High on the Alban Mount (Monte Cave, near Rome) stood a small temple of Juno. It had been built to face east, but had now mysteriously turn-tabled to face north. Strange lights and lightning strikes lit up the sky, killing more than one Roman citizen. A lone wolf was seen wandering into the city. Most frightening of all had to be the rumbling: a loud, bellicose sort of groan issuing from the surrounding countryside.3
The Romans knew that the gods voiced their displeasure at men’s ways through nature, and shuddered at what it all meant. Clodius was not an augur or haruspex, whose right it was to interpret the messages of the gods, but belonged to a priesthood, and identified Cicero’s reclamation of his property from the hands of the goddess Liberty as the obvious cause for the godly earthquakes. Cicero would not stand for this. He worked himself into a rage, marched across the city and tore down the plaques Clodius had erected in celebration of his exile. This – his exile – he said, was the reason the gods were rumbling. No, Clodius argued: the gods were angry because he had returned from exile.
Between the bloodthirstiness of Rome’s gangs, the riots, the turning upside down of political order, a reader of Catullus’ poetry had every reason to believe that the darkest days of his Iron Age had arrived. Mob rule, as everyone knew, was fertile breeding ground for a dictator. The fear of one-man rule was something that had been passed down the generations, from those who had experienced the uprising against the rapist son of Rome’s last king. The Republic had been founded on the very principle of shared rule, and that was precisely what Cicero had dedicated his life to championing. He was not about to stop now. As he fumbled for a convincing explanation for the earthquakes, he cast his eye towards the Clodii Pulchri. Spring 56 BC had been quite a time for them.
Catullus might just have been back in Rome in time to catch the last days of spring, even if he missed the April festival when the situation had erupted. He wrote nothing of this festival, the Megalensia of the Great Mother, despite his experience of the cult in Asia. He much preferred the Saturnalia – ‘the very best of days’ (Poem 14) – the midwinter festival during which people exchanged gifts, played tricks on one another, feasted, and masters and slaves swapped roles (Catullus always had loved role-reversal).4 When he discovered that the Megalensia of 56 BC had brought Clodius and Clodia into the limelight, he had even greater reason to express a preference for other public holidays.
Clodius was responsible for overseeing this year’s Megalensia celebrations, and if he was capable of organising anything, he should have been able to organise these. He barely had to get out of bed in the morning before he was confronted with the Temple of the Great Mother, which stood a matter of steps away from his house on the Palatine Hill. His very soil was soaked through with memories of her cult’s foundation in Italy. Every so often, terracotta statuettes of her worshippers poked their heads up between the poppies in his forecourt. Shards of one-time props from plays performed by her temple lay just under foot. But Clodius’ proximity to the cult proved to be no guarantee of his ability to orchestrate events. The theatres in which the festival’s plays were performed were overrun with rioting slaves – proof, Cicero said, that Clodius was intent on provoking a revolt.5 In the despoiled games of the Great Mother, Cicero found further explanation for the godly earthquakes:
And if we care to remember those traditions which have been handed down to us about the gods, we have heard this Great Mother, whose games were violated, polluted, almost turned to the massacre and burial of the citizen body, this Mother, I say, wander across the fields and groves with sure shriek and groan.6
While revellers tried to make the most of this year’s Megalensia, Cicero was in court delivering a defence speech. The law courts were supposed to be empty during festival time, but a jury had been summoned to deliberate over one man’s innocence. Standing there was Caelius Rufus, the brilliant young orator whom Clodia Metelli had taken into her bed. Contrary to Catullus’ earlier assumption, Caelius’ involvement with Clodia had been, at best, a dalliance. Had been, because Caelius’ mind was now raking over their ruined romance while he stood accused of a list of criminal charges.
While Catullus was in Bithynia, Caelius had been accused of playing a part in the attack on a deputation of Alexandrians, who were attempting to prevent their Ptolemy from regaining his throne.7 Caelius had allegedly taken property from a woman named Palla, borrowed gold from Clodia Metelli, and used it to pay slaves to carry out the assassination of Dio, the deputation’s leader. Some even claimed that Caelius Rufus had procured poison with which to silence Clodia.
Catullus could not let this opportunity slide. Turning to his writing tablets on the eve of the trial, he set about documenting Caelius’ fall in the most spectacular way. For years, he had taken pleasure in mocking the unpleasant habits of others – the father and son at Rome’s baths, the woman snatching bread from a blazing funeral pyre, toothy Egnatius smiling in solemnity, the young boy masturbating before his eyes. As he drafted two poems on Caelius Rufus, he sought the same tone:
Don’t be bewildered, Rufus, as to why no woman
Is willing to lay her delicate thighs beneath you
Even if you ply her with gifts of fine clothes
Or splendid gleaming gemstones.
There is a cruel rumour that does you discredit, according
To which you house a wild goat in your armpits.
Everyone is afraid of it, and no wonder: for it really is
A bad beast, not one a beautiful girl should bed down with.
So either kill the harsh assault on our noses
Or stop wondering why they flee.
(Poem 69)
In his second poem, Catullus described how, against the odds, stinking ‘Rufus’, who he claimed suffered from gout, found himself a girlfriend. When the woma
n betrayed him with another man, she passed on to him Rufus’ gout (Poem 71). In the poetry collection, the two poems are settled between those in which Catullus wrote of a woman’s words being written on running water, and his love for Lesbia as familial.
As witty polemic, these verses might have held their own, but Catullus embedded within their Latin a still more threatening warning to Caelius Rufus. The young lawyer had recently attempted to prosecute a certain Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for bribery during his campaign to become a praetor. Caelius and Bestia were on familiar terms when the case began. They had formerly been members of the same priesthood, whose responsibilities involved performing a ritual sacrifice of a goat each February. Sparing no thought for their earlier kinship, Caelius had used the case to accuse his former colleague of killing his own wives by poisoning them vaginally with the aconite flower while they slept.8 For all his determination, he lost the case to the more qualified lawyer: his former mentor Cicero.
The ‘bad beast’ which Rufus kept beneath his armpits in Catullus’ poems was Bestia (‘beast’ in Latin), the man he had faced in court. The ‘wild goat’ Catullus described as causing the stench was little more than a veiled reference to the two men’s former involvement in the annual goat sacrifice.9 The belied simplicity of these polemics showed how masterfully Catullus could communicate on two levels, with the man in the street, and with the people who were sufficiently involved in public life to understand his subtle references. There was much his later reader could miss between the lines of his invective.
Catullus might have been insinuating that Caelius’ professional failure had made Clodia flee, but his more pressing point was that Caelius Rufus was about to receive his comeuppance for the two misdeeds: his contretemps with Bestia and his relationship with Clodia. The chief prosecutor at the trial that was about to start in the Forum was none other than Bestia’s young son, Atratinus.