Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  All-powerful Jupiter, I wish the ships of Cecrops

  Had not touched the shores of Cnossos in the first place,

  That the traitor, bringing a gruesome tribute to

  The ungovernable bull, had not tethered his ship in Crete,

  That the evil man did not hide his cruel plans

  Behind a handsome exterior

  And stay here as a guest in our home.

  For where can I take myself now?

  (Poem 64, lines 171–77)

  ALTHOUGH CATULLUS ENJOYED SEX, he believed that certain boundaries needed to be observed. He was liberal with kisses, and his first reaction upon growing aroused in one of his poems was to arrange an imminent meeting with a lover. He found humour in the idea that vigorous intercourse could have a slimming effect upon a man, and joked about the sexual appetites of youth. Through his poems about Caesar and Mamurra, he had learned also how powerfully sex lent itself to invective.

  The poems he had gathered for his collection had lately begun to bulge with verses lambasting a certain Gellius, most often for incest. His unfortunate victim, evoked in no fewer than six of his poems, might have been Lucius Gellius Publicola who would one day serve under Mark Antony in the civil war. His relatives were known allies of Clodius, whose disputes with Milo, the young politician who had helped to recall Cicero, were raging at Rome.

  While some Romans languished on luxurious beds in smart houses, others visited brothels, known as lupanars (wolf-dens). Over each door hung a tablet bearing the name of the prostitute and her price. She turned the tablet over when she was occupata (busy).

  Catullus had once considered him a friend. Gellius was learned and cultured enough to appreciate the poetry of Callimachus, providing them with much to talk about. So when barbs began to fly between them, Catullus’ first thought was to send Gellius some Latin translations he had made of Callimachus’ poetry as a gesture of reconciliation. But then, he thought to himself, what was the point? Whatever Gellius had done (in Poem 91 Catullus accused him of seducing one of his lovers), it was enough to make Catullus give up on their relationship altogether.

  He might have guessed their friendship would end with Gellius doing something foolish. In his youth, Gellius Publicola had made a name for himself for sexual excess. His father, a former consul, had accused him of plotting parricide and of sleeping with his stepmother.1 He put his son before a line of senators at a family tribunal. Both the deciding committee and his father acquitted him of both charges, but as far as Catullus was concerned, Gellius was once again that sexual fiend. He proceeded to paint an extreme caricature of the fellow. His Gellius liked to sleep with his mother, aunt, sister, and other close female relatives, and carried the evidence for this in his physique. He was trim, and his lips were also perpetually stained with the ejaculate of another man, this time no relation:

  Something’s up. Is the rumour true that

  You suck a man’s bulging balls?

  You bet it is. The ruptured testicles of poor Victor

  Proclaim it – and your lips etched in drained semen.

  (Poem 80)

  Anticipating that his portrait might be incredible, Catullus sought a motive for his former friend’s depravity: by seducing his aunt, Gellius had hoped to censor his uncle from disparaging his sexual habits. Roman uncles were famed for their severity, and Gellius’ would only bring the incest rumours to light again if he sought to punish him. In Poem 78, Catullus described a ‘Gallus’ who taught his nephew how to be an adulterer. This was quite some family. Young Gellius, it seemed, seduced his aunt on the advice of another uncle, rendering him as much a victim as a perpetrator of his family’s profanity.

  In Catullus’ poetry, the breakdown of a family unit, such as that of Gellius, acted as a paradigm for the breakdown of the state, a bitter microcosm of a more total destruction.2 The fractured mores and perversions Catullus perceived in Gellius’ family added further nuance to the picture of Iron Age Rome he envisaged at the end of his Bedspread Poem:

  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 –

  (Poem 64)

  For Catullus, however, Gellius’ behaviour was more than a reflection of the city as it stood; it was an indication of where it was going. For centuries, the western world had associated incest with the decadent East. In late autumn 55 BC, Crassus boarded a galley with a dream of conquering territories still deeper in the East than those to which Pompey and Catullus had travelled.

  Caesar had agreed that Crassus and Pompey should proceed to five-year commands following their consulships, and while Pompey was content to conduct his command of Nearer and Further Spain from home through legates, Crassus could not wait to leave Rome. If he needed reminding of how far he had slipped to the background of the political landscape, he had only to read Catullus’ poems and their criticism of the ‘father- and son-in-law’: Crassus was quite absent from his picture. He still had his wealth – on the point of his departure he had an extraordinary 7,100 talents – but was sixty years old and lacked the glory of a foreign victory to rival that which Caesar, Pompey, even Lucullus the fishpond-loving former brother-in-law of Clodia had acquired before him.

  Catullus could now see where Crassus’ ambitions lay. Although the triumvirs had agreed that their wealthiest member would leave for Syria, this was merely a stepping stone to war against the Parthians, an Iranian people renowned for their cavalry skills and ability to shoot arrows whilst mounted on horseback. Parthia need not have been the extent of Crassus’ ambition:

  … He would consider neither Syria nor even Parthia the boundary of his noble venture, but showing up the campaigns of Lucullus against Tigranes and of Pompey against Mithridates as those of a mere infant, all the way to Bactria and India and the Outer Sea he soared on hope.3

  It was the wider map that Catullus appeared to envisage, too, writing of ‘furthest India’ alongside the extremities of Gaul and Britain, and of Parthian sagittiferos (arrow-bearers), a compound that at once conveyed the swift flight of the weapons and the inseparability of each man from them. As Crassus made his way to Syria and looked forward to a year of mustering more troops for his invasions, Catullus brought an element of Parthia back to Rome in his references to the ‘arrow-bearing Parthians’ and to incestuous Gellius. ‘Let a magus be born from Gellius and his mother and their nefarious union and may he learn Persian divination …’ (Poem 90), he wrote, momentarily reverting to cliché. It was an oblique comment upon Rome’s expansion into worlds which were at once unknown and familiar.

  Much though Catullus disapproved of the luxury and incest-loving man traditionally associated with the East, he found that he could employ these labels just as conveniently to the man in Rome. On balance, the prospect of Romans visiting remote places like Parthia proved to him more thrilling than threatening. And yet, Catullus would only be able to imagine himself joining Crassus and his men, who included the aspirate-loving Arrius, as they made their way across the ‘Hionian’ (Ionian Sea).

  In Rome, meanwhile, Catullus found himself in a rather more domestic situation. He had received an invitation to dinner at the house of Publius Sestius, a politician who had been at the forefront of the battle for Cicero’s recall from exile.

  Catullus was keen to impress him. Some ten years his senior, Sestius was a former tribune whom the Senate kept faithfully on side. Cicero’s enemies had tried to indict him for bribery and violent conduct during his attempt to have the orator recalled, and Cicero had seen him acquitted of the charges. Before dinner, Catullus sat down to read Sestius’ oratory, feeling that he ought to be up-to-date on what his host had achieved. Sadly, Catullus could not even feign excitement. In a poem he bemoaned how turgid his speeches were, ‘brimming … with poison and pestilence’, and how ‘sumptuous’ the dinner he proceeded to
feed him (Poem 44).

  Decades earlier a ‘sumptuary law’ had been passed by a tribune named Gaius Antius Restio, in order to try to limit the luxuriousness of dinner parties and thus curtail the use of lavish private gatherings for political ends. As though determined to go one better than his predecessors, who had, under Sulla, passed similar acts with little success, Antius stipulated that magistrates could only dine at the homes of particular people. Flouting this law completely, Catullus’ host had served up a meal as purple as his prose. Together, they sent the poet running for the unfetid air of the countryside.

  His stomach sick from the rich food, his lungs filled with cold from having read such frigid writing, Catullus retreated to a villa he had purchased just outside Rome, partial as he was to peregrinatio, seasonal sojourns.4 He had no qualms about admitting that his property sat on a fault line between two areas of contrasting stature: glorious Tibur (Tivoli) on the city side, and its less fanciful cousin further out, the Sabine Plain; it only added to his modesty. Those who wished to please him said that his house was Tiburtine; those who did not called it Sabine. There was considerable social cachet to be gained through owning a villa close enough that one could see the city from the porch, but far enough away for it to feel like a retreat.5

  Being either just inside or very close to Tibur provided Catullus with much the same opportunity to recuperate as Baiae afforded Clodia’s set, only without the excessive, manmade luxury. There were fresh pools and springs here, too, both to drink from and in which to soak his restless limbs; and a waterfall, gushing the long descent from a sky-lying river to a wooded ravine below.6 Its orchards grew white with foam from the flowing streams, for which they expressed their gratitude by putting forth more fruit and olives than a man could shake his felling stick at.7 In its perfection, it evoked Scheria, the dream-world island of Homer’s Odyssey, a curiously Golden Age vision of a place that felt too good to be real.

  By August 54 BC, Catullus had recovered his strength sufficiently to return to the city and the Forum, where one of the men who had attempted to incriminate the sumptuous Sestius for his support of Cicero was himself now in the dock. Publius Vatinius, scratching the unsightly growths upon his neck, stood there scowling. The triumvirs had as good as coerced him into using the bribery and force, for which he stood accused, to achieve the praetorship the previous year, so fearful had they been that Cato might win the seat, which he had proceeded to do for 54 BC. Anyone who saw Vatinius standing there might have assumed that the triumvirs had abandoned him. Caesar was busily preparing his second invasion of Britain. Crassus was in the East, pursuing glory. Pompey awaited the birth of his first child with Julia.

  As it happened, the triumvirs had given some thought to wretched Vatinius, whose downfall before a hostile crowd would have reflected badly upon them. Cicero despised him, but Caesar did not care. Haughtily, he had told Cicero that he must defend the man at his coming trial.

  These days, Cicero was waging an ever more intense war with himself. He did not want to be the triumvirs’ yes-man, but if he did not court their favour he would be powerless, trapped between them and the stagnant Senate. For the goodness of his soul, he tried to find a balance between moments in the public eye, admiring Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, and private pleasures in books and conversation. He took increasing delight in his son and nephew, and listened to them as they spoke animatedly of petty disputes and goings on. Caesar, who excelled at applying pressure in the kindest of ways, appointed Cicero’s brother Quintus as his legate in Gaul.

  It might have been in response to Cicero’s volte-face that Catullus praised him so sarcastically as ‘the very best advocate of all’ (Poem 49). He was less interested in what Cicero had to say about Vatinius, however, than he was in the performance of Vatinius’ prosecutor – who was none other than the young, increasingly determined, Licinius Calvus.

  Although poetry had proven a solid grounding for Calvus’ oratory, a previous attempt he had made to prosecute Vatinius had been unsuccessful.8 Such was the animosity between the two men that Catullus had developed a particular turn of phrase. Upbraiding Calvus one winter for giving him a copy of terrible poetry as a present, he wrote:

  If I did not love you more than my own eyes,

  Suave, suave Calvus, that gift

  Would make me hate you as much as Vatinius hates you.

  (Poem 14)

  Calvus was determined to win this time. Catullus looked on, full of pride, as his friend stepped forward to make his prosecution speech. Desperate to make his mark, little Calvus puffed out his chest and gave it all he had. He was full of animation and zeal. He had a way of making his words and sentiments appeal to the ears of the jury, who were not always endowed with long concentration spans. Anyone who heard him could tell that he knew what made a good speech.9 A small voice piped up from somewhere behind Catullus, ‘Great gods, he’s eloquent for a little man!’, and Catullus laughed (Poem 53). Not even Vatinius could fail to be impressed by Calvus’ performance. With a wry smile he turned to the jury and asked whether he was to be condemned because his accuser was so eloquent?10 But as everyone knew, Vatinius had the infinitely more experienced orator speaking in his defence. Although Calvus spoke well, he lacked the genius and gravitas of Cicero, who carried the day.11 Now free, Vatinius would travel to Gaul to attend Caesar, and support him against Pompey in the civil war. It was not now far off.

  The signs of trouble had been there for some time. The daily trials of men such as Sestius and Vatinius and the havoc wreaked by Clodius were but passing distractions from the fragility of the relationship between Caesar and his colleagues in power. Crassus was old, out of the picture, and at risk of falling victim to the scale of his ambitions in the East. Caesar and Pompey had little more than the marriage that tied them, ‘father- and son-in-law’, until, all of a sudden, they did not. During late summer, while Caesar was invading Britain, some harrowing news broke over Rome and slipped solemnly through its backstreets. Julia, Caesar’s daughter, had died in labour. The baby, the first and last she had delivered with Pompey, had not survived long after leaving the womb. Pompey, beleaguered by the heat of a long season, the relentless demands of the poor in a period of grain shortage, gave way to mourning his double loss. Everything was slipping from his fingers.

  With Rome as the compass point, a great spool of thread had been uncoiled and tugged steadily over landmasses and seas, up mountains and along river streams, across Asia and Egypt, the Rhine, Alps, both Britain and Parthia, never fraying or becoming so entrenched in dirt that it collapsed, but holding course, back and forth, turning itself into one giant, lopsided web. Catullus mapped each point in Rome’s expansion with an explorer’s keen eye. A growing empire came at a cost he could not always tolerate, but in the end it proved to be an inspiration:

  Furius and Aurelius, you are my friends.

  Should Catullus penetrate furthest India,

  Where the shore is pounded by the far-

  Resounding wave of Oceanus in the East,

  Or reach the Hyrcani and effeminate Arabs,

  Or the Sacae or arrow-bearing Parthians,

  Or Egypt where waters from the

  Seven-mouthed Nile spread their colour.

  Or should he step over the high Alps

  As he visits the monuments of great Caesar,

  The Gallic Rhine, and terrifying

  And far-off Britons –

  All of which, and whatever else the will

  Of the gods may bring, you are ready

  To attempt together;

  Deliver a few words, unpleasant ones,

  To my girl:

  May she live and flourish with her lovers,

  Three-hundred of whom she holds in a single embrace,

  Loving none truly but repeatedly breaking

  All their balls;

  And may she not expect my love as she did before,

  Which through her fault has fallen like a flower

  On the edge of a meadow, touch
ed

  By a plough passing by.

  (Poem 11)

  In light of Caesar’s British and Crassus’ Parthian expeditions – reflecting back, too, on Pompey’s happier days and great triumphs against Mithridates in the East – Catullus pictured the intrepid traveller penetrating each country and recounting the peculiar sights of each: the thunder of the waters east of ‘furthest India’ where Crassus hoped to wander; the Parthians he faced with their bows and arrows; the Sacae, nomadic tribes driven from Parthia to India in recent times; Egypt; Gaul; and to top them all, ‘terrifying and far-off Britons’, rendered utterly breathlessly in Latin, as though he was walking the whole way to them. As fond as he appeared to have been of his kidney-bean yacht, he had cast seafaring in a negative light in his Bedspread Poem. Perhaps it was no accident that in Poem 11 he seemed only to be imagining the prospect of travelling the new world, while rooted in Rome. Here he entrusted Furius and Aurelius, his ‘friends’, now, with his bitter parting valediction to his mistress. He could no longer even bring himself to face her.

  This was probably the last Lesbia poem he ever wrote. No trace of optimism remained. As far as he could see, she had become the very symbol of sexual excess, a ball-breaking machine. His Latin graphically conveyed her movement up and down on one lover’s straining penis, then another’s, then another’s identidem omnium/ilia, (‘repeatedly all of their balls’), each word dripping into another in a welter of vowels as their bodies came together. Then he reached the climax, rumpens, she was ‘breaking’ them all.

  It was an unexpectedly personal ending to a worldlier tale of travel and political expansion, because Rome’s new horizons had given love new dimensions. There was no longer any point in loving to the ends of the earth when those ends were being navigated and conquered. Two further lovers in Catullus’ collection, Septimius and Acme, set their love against the navigated map (Poem 45). Septimius chose to love his darling Acme over ‘all the Syrias and Britains’, and if he failed in his love he would venture alone to India or Libya to confront a lion face to face.