Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  The temptation of the world could be overcome more easily than the passion against which it was measured. And yet, when it came to unloving, the thread could just as easily be wound up again, and love’s contours reduced to a small compass in the belief that love was love, wherever its parameters lay. And so Catullus, falling out of love, became a lonely flower not on the edge of the world, but on the edge of an anonymous meadow, wounded for having ever been touched.

  Of all his surviving poems, he wrote just this valediction, and that which he translated from Sappho at the beginning of his love affair with Lesbia, in Sapphic stanzas. Neither named Lesbia specifically, preferring to subordinate details to emotions, emotions carried along by the abrupt stop-starts of the Sapphic metre. Sappho’s fallen flower represented a girl, downtrodden not in a field by plough but in the mountains by shepherds.12 Catullus had come full circle. His return to Sappho cemented what had become of the woman he once watched laughing in the presence of another man. She was the same woman, but no longer the same.

  Like the maps of Bithynia and the Spanish napkin, the sailcloth that had drifted his bean ship over the Aegean, the very papyrus that held their stories, Catullus’ bedspread was rolled up. The Golden Age and the Heroic, the terrible Iron Age of Rome, the full stretch of lineage, past to present, layered together, indistinct. Catullus turned the scroll between his fingers, and looked out across the waves of Lake Garda. A tiny Argo cut the horizon in two. The breeze, growing stronger, quivered with the rustle of the pruning hook. Catullus listened for the laughter of the water, but could not hear it. He stayed, watching it lick the land like tears, listening still, until the sun set slowly upon him.

  EPILOGUE

  CATULLUS DIED IN ROME IN 53 BC. He was in his thirtieth year. His poetry had made him a public figure, and at his passing, people took to the streets to mourn.1 If only he had known as he slipped away, in the grip, perhaps, of some indeterminate ailment – a ’flu, pneumonia, a chill that went too far – that his name would live on for so much more than a hundred years. It would outlive his world itself.

  In 53 BC, Crassus followed him to his grave, together with much of the army he had led against the Parthians. Following a disastrous miscalculation of tactics and forces, they suffered a crushing and unforgettable defeat at Carrhae, near the border that divides modern Turkey from Syria. Gone with them were Rome’s legionary eagles, the symbols of her power and authority. Crassus never did achieve the triumph he had been seeking ever since he defeated Spartacus in 71 BC.

  For a time, Pompey and Caesar remained allies, but with Julia and Crassus gone, it could only be so long that their partnership endured. By the end of the decade, questions were being asked as to when Caesar would give up his command over Gaul. Though he was willing to let go of Transalpine Gaul, he hoped he might retain Cisalpine Gaul – Catullus’ Gaul – for rather longer.

  The Senate, anxious to see an end to Caesar’s protracted power in the north-west, rallied for change. Committed to Caesar’s support, Mark Antony, a young tribune renowned for his sexual appetites and physical strength, travelled to assist him. In 49 BC, flagrantly trampling the Senate’s authority, Caesar crossed the Rubicon that marked the boundary line between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, triggering civil war. By 48 BC, Pompey and the Senate had sent a fleet to Pharsalus, the place in Thessaly where in his Bedspread Poem Catullus had envisaged the wedding of Peleus and Thetis taking place. Serving Caesar, Mark Antony outstripped all in his performance. Pompey fled, but it was not long before Caesar was presented with his head.

  Gaius Memmius, who had led Catullus’ cohort in Bithynia, died in exile after being charged with attempting to bribe his way to a consulship for 53 BC.

  Caelius Rufus, Clodia’s former lover, was rising successfully up the political ladder when he became one of the many casualties of the civil war. He supported Caesar, but rebelled through frustration at his lack of progress, and fell victim to Caesar’s forces.

  Catullus’ friend Calvus was dead by 47 or 46 BC.2 Clodia outlived them both. In 45 BC, Cicero was hoping to buy gardens from a certain Clodia, probably Clodia Metelli herself. He believed that she would be unwilling to let them go, she did not need to. After all she had lost, she clung to her wealth.3

  The dramatic deaths tend to be the ones that survive history. Caesar cemented his claim to Rome through dictatorship in the early 40s BC. Seeing that no good could come of anything any more, Cato committed suicide, slowly as it turned out, by self-disembowelment. On the Ides of March 44 BC, Caesar was assassinated. He was in his fifty-sixth year. A funeral took place. Directly afterwards, men rushed with fire to the homes of his assassins, thirsty for vengeance, but were driven back. During their withdrawal, they happened upon Catullus’ old friend and travel companion – Caesar’s ‘friend’ too – the poet and now tribune Gaius Helvius Cinna.4 On hearing Cinna’s name, the group instantly assumed that he was Cornelius Cinna, a man who made a vituperative speech against Caesar just a day earlier. The ensuing scene inspired Shakespeare:

  First Citizen: Tear him to pieces; he’s a conspirator.

  CINNA THE POET: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.

  Fourth Citizen: Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

  CINNA THE POET: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

  Fourth Citizen: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

  Third Citizen: Tear him, tear him! Come, brands ho! fire-brands: to Brutus’, to Cassius’; burn all: some to Decius’ house, and some to Casca’s; some to Ligarius’: away, go!

  Exeunt

  (Act III, Julius Caesar)

  The bacchantes in Catullus’ Bedspread Poem hurled dismembered limbs in orgiastic frenzy. The brutes who murdered Catullus’ dear old friend Cinna put his head on a spear.

  Cicero had achieved a semblance of friendship with Caesar in his final years. When he lost his beloved daughter Tullia after complications of childbirth in 45 BC, Caesar wrote him a letter of condolence. In the aftermath of his assassination, however, Cicero supported the ‘Liberators’, the members of the Senate responsible for Caesar’s murder. He made a series of speeches, the Philippics, in which he sought to blacken the character of Mark Antony, who had taken up Caesar’s mantle. Following the formation of the Second Triumvirate, comprising Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), his supporter Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and himself, Mark Antony issued instructions for the assassination of Rome’s greatest orator. In 43 BC at his villa retreat near Formiae, Cicero was decapitated and his body deprived of the hand with which he had written his offensive words about Antony.5

  Clodius Pulcher had died nine years earlier. He was travelling on horseback with some friends and a guard of armed slaves along the Appian Way, that great path his ancestor had commissioned all those centuries ago. Near a shrine of the Bona Dea, the godhead he had so heartlessly desecrated in his younger years, he encountered a large gang of men – gladiators, some of them – and in a carriage their commander, Milo. Clodius and Milo had fought over Cicero’s return from exile, and recently clashed again as the former sought the position of praetor, the latter a consulship. The election results had not yet been resolved. A scuffle broke out. A spear was hurled. It struck Clodius. Deciding he was better off dead than wounded, Milo saw that he was finished off.6 A senator recovered his body and had it returned to Rome, where his widow Fulvia grieved and his allies swarmed in anger.7

  Catullus had been dead for a decade, but his bloodline continued to flow. His family name crops up sporadically over the next century. Suetonius wrote of a Valerius Catullus, ‘a young man of consular family’ who boasted that he slept with Emperor Caligula and was exhausted by the experience.8 A certain Lucius Valerius Catullus Messallinus was consul under the later Emperor Domitian. In 105 AD, a young Valerius Catullus Messallinus was helping in the sacrifices of a body of priests known as the Arval Brethren; it was a role reserved for well-born boys
.9 The satirist Juvenal celebrated a Catullus’ escape from a shipwreck in his twelfth satire, which dates to around 120 AD. In honour of this Catullus’ safe return, he hoped to offer a bull to the gods that was ‘fatter than Hispulla … one slowed by its sheer weight, not fed on local grasses, but exhibiting in its blood the fertile fields of Clitumnus’.10

  Catullus’ greatest legacy remains his poetry. Its survival is astonishing. Only Poem 62, one of the wedding hymns, lasted the era from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. It came down in a ninth-century AD manuscript, written by a monk with elegant handwriting. For the rest, one must return to Verona, where Catullus’ journey began.

  In 49 BC, Caesar had finally been able to grant the people of Verona full Roman citizenship. Architecturally, the city was growing from strength to strength.11 It was in these wonderfully replenished surroundings, beneath a bushel, that a sole copy of Catullus’ poetry emerged just after 1300, only to be promptly lost again.

  Snatches of Catullus’ lines had been preserved by other ancient authors, odd quotes here and there which helped to corroborate the full manuscript, not as Catullus’ own hand (it was a later copy made by someone who collected his poetry), but rather as his own poetic handiwork. In the tenth century, a bishop of Verona stumbled across Catullus’ poetry. If he did not know before, then now he did: Latin lends itself formidably well to sexual expression.

  The blushing bishop might well have been the individual who resigned the papyrus to the bushel for another three and a half centuries. A mysterious gentleman of Verona carried that manuscript back to that city ‘from distant lands’. His identity was concealed in a mysterious note: a man ‘upon whom France bestowed a name from the reeds, and who notes the journey of the passing crowd’. Whoever he was, and wherever the lands from which he retrieved them, it was thanks to him that Catullus’ poems were preserved, to be released from the jar and restored to the pale and familiar light of northern Italy.12 The humanists swiftly got to work, poring over the text and scouring it of errors. The original manuscript disappeared, but they made the copies that survived it. Through their scholarship, the first printed edition of Catullus’ work was produced in Venice in 1472.

  Fifty years later, Alfonso I d’Este, 3rd Duke of Ferrara, in the Po Valley (formerly part of Catullus’ Cisalpine Gaul), was looking for art to adorn his home. His secretary, well versed in classical literature, assembled a montage of texts for a scheme for Alfonso’s private study, in one wing of his castle. The story from Catullus’ Bedspread Poem was among them.13 Titian was commissioned to paint its scene.

  Titian’s canvas became Catullus’ bedspread turned inside out, and mildly embroidered. The cloth Catullus painted in words became a cloth inspired by words, most of them Catullus’ own. What Titian embroidered on top of Catullus’ bedspread was what Renaissance eyes wanted to see: reminiscences of Italy in the skyline; a painted version of a classical sculpture, the Laocoön, recently uncovered from Rome’s soils; animals which the painting’s patron, the duke, kept in his private zoo.

  In the centre of the canvas is Bacchus, leaping from a cheetah-drawn chariot, twirling through the air. He has hungry eyes and parted lips, ready for kissing. Naked, almost, he wears about his shoulders a red cape that is velvet and amazingly billowy for its weight, revealing deliciously strong thighs beneath it. He gazes longingly towards King Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, as she stands on the shore of Naxos. But her body is turned away from him, her heart fixed anxiously on the waters. With its canvas sails, Theseus’ ship is just visible on the horizon. She is still mourning its departure.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INTEGRATED IMAGES

  1: Arkesilas Cup, Laconia, sixth century BC (© Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY 2.5)

  2: Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great (Wikimedia Commons)

  3: Cicero (Photo by DEA/G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

  4: Bronze mirror cover, Rome, first century AD (Wikimedia Commons)

  PLATE SECTION

  1: Poet wall-painting from Sirmione (© Daisy Dunn)

  2: Manuscript page of Catullus’ poetry (© Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2010)

  3: Ships wall-painting from Sirmione (© The Lowenstam Collection, University of Oregon); Aldobrandini Frieze (courtesy The Yorck Project)

  4: Breadsellers fresco from Pompeii (Photo By DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images); fullers fresco from Pompeii (Photo by DEA/L. PEDICINI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

  5: Red-figure fish plate, Paestum, fourth century BC (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program); fish mosaic, Tunisia, third century AD (Photo by DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini/Getty Images)

  6: Theseus Liberator, Herculaneum, first century AD (© De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images); Attis and Cybele relief sculpture, Asia Minor, second century BC (Photo by Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

  7: Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian, 1522–23 (Courtesy Google Cultural Institute); Prometheus Bound by Rubens, 1611–18 (Courtesy Google Cultural Institute)

  8: The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and Sibyl by J. M. W. Turner, 1823 (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images); Sirmione viewed from Lake Garda (© Daisy Dunn)

  PICTURE SECTION

  Catullus wore a toga and tunic adorned with the narrow purple band of the equestrians, which is visible in this portrait by the writer’s right arm. Candidates running for political office in Rome whitened their wool togas with chalk.

  A manuscript of Catullus’ poems, discovered just after 1300, disappeared – but only after copies had been made. This page, showing Poems 1 and 2, is from manuscript ‘O’, thought to date from fourteenth-century Verona.

  A seafaring scene from the site of Catullus’ villa at Sirmio. On his travels, the poet sailed over the Aegean, which was home to the old man Nereus, his wife Doris, and their fifty daughters, the Nereides, among them Thetis. Men lived in hope that the watery nymphs would come to their assistance should they encounter trouble at sea.

  Hymen, god of marriage (seated beside the bed), was the handsome, slightly effeminate, son of Apollo and a Muse. Summoned to weddings from at least the fifth century BC, he was an inspiration to the bride, pictured here on the bed, veiled, her saffron wedding cloak ready beside her.

  The sale or distribution of bread. Ancient round loaves, like those displayed in this painting, have survived to this day, preserved by being carbonised during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Examination suggests that ancient bread would be too densely textured for modern tastes.

  The work of fullers – the dry-cleaners of ancient Rome – included treading clothes in cleaning agents, such as urine, rinsing them in vats and treating them, sometimes with sulphur.

  Many a man succumbed to an obsession for seafood – and this obsession could prove an expensive one. Writing in the next century, Pliny the Elder found it ludicrous that ‘cooks are being bought for the price of three horses, and fish for the price of three cooks’.

  The Athenians celebrated Theseus as their founder king. In his Bedspread Poem, Catullus recounted how the Minotaur demanded the flower of Athens’ youth to feast on, until Theseus sought the help of Ariadne, the Minotaur’s half-sister, in navigating a labyrinth to kill him.

  During the April festival of the Megalensia, eunuch priests of the Great Mother were allowed to wander Rome, begging for money. No male citizen of Rome was allowed to enter her priesthood.

  Inspired by Catullus’ description of a bedspread adorned with scenes of ancient myth, the Venetian artist Titian painted his Bacchus and Ariadne. The snakeenwrapped man at the right of the canvas was based on an ancient sculpture of Laocoön, who warned the Trojans not to trust the Horse.

  The punishment of Prometheus, which Catullus alluded to in his Bedspread Poem, was often confused with that of the sinner Tityus during the Renaissance. While Tityus had his liver consumed in the Underworld, Prometheus was generally thought to have suffered the same punishment atop the Caucasus.

>   Catullus wished that his lover Lesbia (Clodia) would give him as many kisses as there were grains of sand on Cyrene. In this painting of Baiae, Clodia’s favourite beach resort, the artist J. M. W. Turner showed not Clodia but the Sibyl of Cumae, who famously asked Apollo to grant her as many years of life as there were grains of dust beside her. She would live long, but age like Baiae.

  A magnificent cryptoporticus ran through the monumental villa on Sirmio. It provided its residents with much-needed shade on this sun-soaked peninsula on Lake Garda, or ‘Benacus’ as the Romans knew it.

  APPENDIX

  Poem 64

  Catullus’ Bedspread Poem

  They say that pines were born long ago

  From the head of Mount Pelion in Thessaly

  And swam the sea, its undulating waves

  To Phasis, pheasant river, and

  The land of Aeetes the king

  As young men, plucked from the

  Flower of Greek youth in a mission

  To steal the golden fleece

  Of Colchis

  Dared to skim with speeding stern

  The salt sea,

  Sweeping turquoise waters

  With oars upturned like hands.

  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