by Daisy Dunn
Cicero had hoped to win praise for his swift response. Instead, Metellus Celer’s brother, a feisty tribune in Rome, vetoed him from delivering his parting address from his consulship, saying that he should not have had the conspirators executed without trial. Technically, he was right.8 The incident was still haunting Cicero to this day.
Catullus moved to Rome probably soon after the conspiracy. Whether it was in Verona that he had first met Metellus Celer, or in the great city itself, that moment had proved a turning point. For little though Catullus could have anticipated it upon their first meeting, Metellus Celer would become something of an obstacle for him. In recent years Catullus had fallen passionately in love with his wife.
THE HOUSE ON THE PALATINE HILL
But the house receded every which way
In regal opulence, and sparkled and glimmered
With gold and silver.
Ivory glinted off thrones, cups dazzled off tables,
The whole household delighted in the lustre of
Royal treasure.
(Poem 64, lines 43–6)
THE DIN OF MEN hammering pieces of leather, and the sighs as youths stretched them into myriad shapes; the expletives of the vendors who pushed past them, elbows first, clutching bottles of perfume to their chests. The coughs of the workers loitering outside the Argiletum; the high-pitched laughter of a drunk man on a stall and cry as he fell and cut his hand. The bark of dogs who gathered for the wound, and mutterings of the old lady passing by. The indelicate tongue of the prostitutes who were circling, doused in new scents, smelling fresh blood. But after twelve days on the road to Rome, frankly, Catullus did not have the energy this afternoon.
He laughed, moved by the earthy scenes of the Subura, where the man recently elected Pontifex Maximus had lived before relocating to the Forum to its west. The up-and-coming politician Julius Caesar had lately secured enough money from somewhere to buy a place in the elections for this prestigious post, which would make him head of Rome’s most renowned priestly college. On polling day he had kissed his mother goodbye, and told her that, if he did not return to her as Pontifex Maximus, he would not return at all. When morning passed to afternoon, he appeared again, triumphant.
As Catullus entered the Forum, he passed open-air law courts, inns, market stalls, and temples, including one dedicated to ‘Twin Castor and twin of Castor, Pollux’ – the gods of travel – whom he thanked dutifully for his safe journey from Verona. The building where Caesar was now based lay in the distance, adjacent to the hallowed residence of the Vestal Virgins, who dedicated their lives to chastity and worship of the goddess of the hearth. The goddess’ flame was burning brightly, kept alight by her servants’ diligence and the will of the Romans, who would sooner have seen an ill-omened lightning strike fill the sky than her fire be extinguished and with it, they feared, their own hearths and livelihoods.
Success in life, as Catullus well knew, depended upon the support of the gods, who were in constant need of appeasing. The divinities gave curious signs to voice their approval, or otherwise, of men’s actions. So fearful were mortals of misconstruing divine messages that they filled roles dedicated to their interpretation. Augurs examined the movements of birds. They divined the mood of the gods from the sounds the birds made and direction of their flight, while haruspices searched the livers of sacrificial animals for meaningful abnormalities.
A raven flew south towards the Palatine Hill, at the far end of the Forum. The hill’s large plateau, crosshatched with grey and clay-red masonry, dotted with umbrella pines, housed the very wealthiest Romans. As he drew near it, Catullus was half-minded to join them, but he needed something to eat before he could muster the strength for conversation. Thankfully, the Romans saw little purpose in waiting for evening to fall before retiring to their dining rooms. Darkness rendered even the simplest of walks a fiendish pursuit, during which an unexpected ditch posed almost as much risk as a bandit. The late afternoon was a more sociable hour, and for Catullus, as for the many citizens who began work after dawn, it could not come quickly enough.
Having wolfed down eggs and bread at some miserable inn, he made his way hastily towards the base of the Aventine Hill, where the poor plebeians lived. He passed streets of insulae, ramshackle tenement buildings constructed so high that they often fell down, burned down, or were pulled down for obstructing the view of the augurs as they tried to interpret bird flight.1 Catullus imagined how good life would be with ‘no fears – not fires, not grievous building collapses, not criminal activity, not creeping poison, nor any other threat of danger’.
There were men in this city who made a living from those who had lost their modest homes. The ambitious politician Marcus Licinius Crassus was notorious for it. Determined to recover the riches his family had lost in the civil wars, Crassus had been among the first to benefit from the sale of citizens’ property proscribed under Sulla. Not even his success in quelling Spartacus’ forces and reaching a consulship checked his appetite for wealth. He noted the dilapidated state of Rome’s crowded blocks and developed ravaged sites on the cheap, using slaves with builders’ training.2 Many more apartments could be squashed into the spaces occupied by the older villas, too. The new homeless could do little but accept Crassus’ miserly offers.
Catullus’ father would never have allowed his son to come to such a place had he not already established contacts for him in the heart of the city. Rome’s population exceeded a million, a quarter of whom were slaves. Metellus Celer, former governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had lately returned to Rome and intended to achieve a consulship for 60 BC. Catullus could seek him out, distract him from his campaigning.3 As his father must have told him a thousand times, being associated with a man like Metellus could do wonders for his status. If Metellus had dined at their house in Verona, then he was obliged to invite his son to dine at his in Rome.
Catullus could not have been thrilled at the prospect. He need only have exchanged a few words with Metellus to know that he was far from the most exciting man in Rome. Even Cicero, who had often praised him for his steadfastness to his beliefs, had to admit that there was something inhuman about him: Metellus was ‘not a man but “a seashore and air and utter isolation”’.4 Many of his forebears had been consuls, and though Metellus was not old, by anyone’s standards, he was worthy, bloody-minded and arrogant, falling rather too readily into the category of men Catullus liked to call senes severiores – ‘our elders … dourer than most’ (Poem 5).
Grateful as Catullus had to be for his father’s introductions to the great and the good, he itched to find his own place among the poets.5 He would not need to work as hard to sustain conversation with them as he did with the politicians – though Catullus always stayed well informed, not least because he knew that such diligence would stand him in good stead for city life. Without an acute interest in the minutiae of the law courts or small-scale political intrigues, there was very little to talk about.
This was a perennial problem for those who found themselves at dinner with men directly involved in Roman politics. The idea that business and leisure were entirely distinct was written firmly into the Latin language: negotium, the former, was simply the negative of otium, the latter. Leisure was, quite literally, an absence of business. Clutching for conversation that was both suitable to bridge that gap and sufficient to last the course of a Roman dinner – from eggs to apples – proved a headache. There was no fun to be had with men who thought that ‘salt’ was merely a condiment. For Catullus, sal sooner suggested the kind of verbal wit no dinner guest should be without. Just as salt itself was considered fundamental to human life for its healing and alimentary qualities, so ‘salt’ encapsulated the intelligent mind’s capacity to lay aside its troubles, seek pleasure, and deliver it to others through wit.6 As far as Catullus was concerned, there was no ingredient more necessary for a dinner party, and this included its hosts.
Nonetheless, even if he believed that Metellus was merely paying his father a favour, an
d had little interest in what he had to say, these were not grounds for declining his hospitality. A fleeting glance at his address would have been enough to pique anyone’s curiosity. Metellus Celer might have been short of sal, but he was evidently not short of money.
Metellus’ house stood on the north-west side of the Palatine Hill, and ‘in sight of almost the whole city’.7 It was close enough to the Forum for the booming of orators and traders to rattle the portico, but high enough up to protect its inhabitants from their germs and diseases. Apart from affording superior views, properties on this higher ground commanded a premium because they promised cleaner air and at least some protection from the commoners’ plagues.
It was said that Romulus, one of the twin sons born to the war god Mars and suckled by a she-wolf in Rome’s foundation myth, chose the Palatine on which to found his city. Where nomads constructed rounded huts to call home, the Palatine Hill grew from frugal beginnings to host the grand residences of the Roman emperors; ‘Palatine’ inspired ‘palace’.8 When Catullus arrived in the city there was a tree on its east façade that residents said was proof of Romulus’ magnanimity. The young twin had allegedly hurled a spear made from cornel wood the impossible distance of nearly a kilometre from his brother Remus’ chosen hill, the Aventine, to the Palatine Hill, and it rooted itself so deeply that no one could retrieve it. It was the sword in the stone, but with roots and soil eager to nurture them: the cornel tree was born.9 The Romans built a wall around it, and it flourished until Julius Caesar later asked for the structure to be repaired. His men dug too close to the tree’s roots, and like so many things under Caesar – as Catullus would have been quick to point out, had he lived long enough to witness his dictatorship – it withered, and died.
As Catullus made his way to the top of the Palatine Hill, he passed countless bundles of shrub and foliage. The air was fragrant with rosemary and mallow, chamomile and sage. Poppies peeped up between the umbrella pines and masonry, as they do today amidst the Forum monuments. It is as though their pollen never died.
Some of the hill’s residents took care not to be too ostentatious in what they grew: there were many who still associated beautiful, intricate gardens with wanton eastern decadence. The Persians had been among the first to celebrate the art of horticulture, and Rome’s wealthiest residents had been quick to adopt some of the more luxurious features, such as pleasure gardens, ornamental moats and fishponds. It was into these creations that Lucullus, a general whom Pompey had usurped as commander in the battles against Mithridates of Pontus in the East, poured much of his war wealth. The general’s extravagance at a time when so many Romans lived in poverty had been his downfall: a Roman praetor persuaded the people that Lucullus had protracted the war through his love of money and power, which precipitated a vote for his recall.10 At least Lucullus had something to remember it all by: cherry trees now grew in Rome, cultivated from the seeds he had extracted from eastern soils.
Though he could not approve of such flamboyance, it was difficult for Catullus not to smile. Lucullus did things that Romans had never done before. In addition to the grand gardens he arranged in the north of Rome, he had specialist fishponds created near Naples for his own pleasure. One onlooker, bristling in his masculinity, scoffed: these were the deeds of ‘Xerxes in a toga’.11 Like Xerxes, Persia’s most notorious king, Lucullus was made a woman of through his addiction to luxury.
If he was to arrive on time for a dinner with Metellus Celer, Catullus needed to stop idling and keep to the main path. Metellus’ residence was on the Clivus Victoriae (‘Slope of Victory’) which led from the Forum along the west side of the Palatine Hill. The road took its name from the temple consecrated to the goddess Victory that perched there. Nearby stood an enormous further temple, dedicated to an eastern goddess. As Catullus passed these temples he found his eye drawn more by the glinting gilt roof of the ‘holy temple of Greatest Jupiter’, which sat on the Capitoline Hill at the opposing end of the Forum (Poem 55). At the top of the sun-baked plateau, he approached a line of sprawling villas. Here was the magnificent portico and property of the late politician Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Beside it, framed by trees and grand marble columns, was the house of Cicero, ‘most fluent of the grandsons of Romulus’ (Poem 49), who had been collecting villas in and around Rome, and had acquired this one just a year earlier.12 Nearby was the home of another great orator, Hortensius, and on the other side of Catulus’ house with its rambling portico was the home of Metellus Celer.
Inside, Metellus’ property was large, and gave the impression of being larger still. Each wall carried a different vista: a distant shore, a garden with brightly coloured birds, a few of them flittering in through the window and perching on its lavish architrave; and trees laden with fruit; and dense foliage, and grand colonnades of columns which seemed to recede hundreds of paces back into nowhere, but could not, because none of it was real:13 the artists who produced these images were masters of trompe l’oeil. Along the villa’s walls were rows and rows of boxy wooden cabinets containing the death masks of magistrates, long-since deceased. When a woman married, she brought the masks of her ancestors with her to her husband’s home. To look at these walls, one would think Metellus had a dozen wives.
Metellus glided past the rows of unseeing faces, abandoned his cup upon the table, and greeted his guest. How pleased he was that Catullus had made the journey to Rome safely (and at good speed!) and was settling into his new life with such ease. Catullus was to meet his wife, whom, naturally, Catullus had already caught sight of across the room. She was lavishly adorned with jewels, and laughing in their midst.
Clodia Metelli, née Pulchra, of the illustrious Claudius dynasty, was known throughout Rome. Her acquaintances had only to stroll past the Roman Temple of Bellona, the meeting place for councils of war, for her distinguished lineage to be recalled.14 Her distant grandfather, Appius Claudius Caecus, had consecrated the building in 296 BC, and her father filled its walls with shields painted with his ancestors’ faces, and inscriptions bearing their many achievements.15 Between service under Sulla, his time as consul in 79 BC, and expeditions in Macedonia, he had barely been around to tell his children of their bloodline before he died in 76 BC, while still a young man. They had to be grateful for the memory those shields provided of faces they had never known.
Appius Claudius Caecus, Clodia’s ancestor, had been a consul twice, and had sought to challenge the power of the Senate by filling it with the sons of freedmen (former slaves).16 He was also responsible for bold public works, including the first ever aqueduct, built just outside Rome, funded by public money and without senatorial decree. Glorious though it was, like the Appian Way, another of his magnificent creations, it wrung the people dry.17
It was from Appius Claudius Caecus, perhaps, that Clodia and several of her five siblings inherited their egalitarian tastes. She, like her brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher, made the statement of changing the spelling of her name ‘Claudia’ to ‘Clodia’. The original spelling ‘Claudia’ was too upper-crust. ‘Clodia’ gave the old name a fashionable plebeian twist. It was the kind of gesture that drove young Catullus wild.18
Catullus watched her – watched her husband watching her – and almost passed out:
… my tongue freezes, a gentle flame flows down
Under my limbs and my ears ring with their own sound.
Both my eyes are blinded by night.
(Poem 51)
His inspiration was a poem by Sappho, the poet born on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BC. Her blood was blue, like Clodia’s, but had not spared her a difficult life. Lesbos’ aristocratic rulers had been deposed before her birth, and she lived under a series of tyrants, under one of whom she left with her family for exile in Sicily. In spite of her experience, her ties with Lesbos were never broken. She married a man, with whom she had a daughter, Cleïs, but it was the memory of her as Lesbos’ native poet who had feelings for women that preserved the association between her and ‘les
bian’ love.
In her poem Sappho describes a woman whom she desires enjoying the attentions of her male lover. Her tongue is paralysed – a light flame runs under her skin – her vision vanishes – she turns paler than grass. As the girl laughs sweetly in the man’s presence, Sappho feels close to death.
Catullus, who found in Sappho’s lines the unfussiness and raw honesty that he sought in his own work, adopted her Sapphic stanzas, changing only the odd detail. His senses are lost, her heart is aflutter. Clodia is laughing, and her husband is watching.19 Metellus is to the left of the frame, but too prominent to be cut out of it.20 As if to depart from earlier models, Catullus would end his version of Sappho’s poem with an original final stanza, to bring the reverie back to earth.
As Clodia stood there before him for the first time, neither youthful nor particularly noteworthy in her physical stature, she was indefinably captivating. If at first she seemed detached and aloof, there was a passion and volatility that lay beneath her round, dark, darkly shadowed eyes – Cicero called them her ‘oxen eyes’ – that promised that this veil could be lifted.21 A combination of intensity and introspection lent her a gravitas Catullus had never seen in a woman before. She unleashed in him a longing to accomplish something, even if he did not know what it was.
