Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  SPARROW

  Observe the couch at the heart of the palace,

  A fine seat for a goddess,

  Finished with ivory from India

  And spread with purple tinged with the rose-pink

  Dye of the murex fish.

  (Poem 64, lines 47–9)

  LANGUID SPEECH PROVED particularly helpful when Catullus was writing to woo, and he used it repeatedly in his poetry. He had learned early on that poetry had the potential both to incite and to restrain the act of love. Reading it tended to do the former, writing it the latter; but the outcome depended upon the quality of the verse. Write a good poem, and it might have been enough not to have followed his feelings through to fruition. Write too good a poem, and he risked driving himself mad with desire. It proved a lot harder to write a poem to remedy frustration than to write one for a lover. Amid the difficulties of sourcing solace in poetry, Catullus discovered increasingly that poems intended to satisfy his lust slipped easily into poems that incited him to act on it. In the hands of the person he loved, he always hoped that they might have the same effect.

  He decided to put this to the test. Clodia Metelli had been clouding his thoughts, making it impossible for him to think of anything else. Taking in his hands the poem he had written about watching her from under her husband’s nose, he made her a copy. He addressed it not to ‘Clodia’, but to ‘Lesbia’, establishing there and then an intellectual code for her real name. While ‘Lesbia’ meant ‘woman of Lesbos’, where Sappho was born, it also had the same number of syllables as ‘Clodia’. Both names provided him with one heavy and two short beats 1

  Clodia must have been pleased, for she was more than just a muse waiting to be flattered with a Sapphic pseudonym, she was an ‘experienced poet of very many plays’.2 Cicero smirked when he called her that in court one day, hoping he could shift blame away from the man he was defending by characterising her as someone who was capable enough of composing charades to incriminate him. Clodia and his client, as time would tell, had history. But Cicero’s prejudice against her ready wit need not have reduced what he said to a fallacy. The poems Catullus composed for Lesbia might well have been touched by subtle reminiscences of what she once wrote, ghosts of Clodia the poet, of whom nothing else survives.

  Catullus had no issue with welcoming women poets into his circle, including one Cornificia whose ‘distinguished epigrams’ were still being read 400 years after she lived.3 An aristocratic female poet named Sulpicia wrote romantic verses some years later about her relationship with a lover, Cerinthus. She lamented the prospect of spending her birthday without him, and described the fever that coursed her veins. She wrote of her despair when her lover took her for granted, and told him that he would do better to turn his attentions to a whore than take liberties with her affections. While some of her poems survived, bundled together with those of a male poet, Tibullus, other female poets’ work did not. Had it not been for her name and marital status, or even for Catullus himself, Clodia Metelli might have erupted with just as much force on the literary scene. But there could never have been room for both Clodia and Lesbia.

  Even from the very start, there was a problem. Sappho had won eternal renown for her intellect, but Clodia was already married. She was not about to earn anything more than notoriety as the object of a non-aristocratic, indeed non-Roman, poet’s affections. As it was, her illustrious ancestor Appius Claudius had helped to oversee a law against marriage between blue-blood patricians and commoner plebeians. The ruling came under the Twelve Tables legislation, which magistrates drew up in the 450s BC after Greek examples. Though the intermarriage law had since been annulled, the lasting stigma that arose when one married someone who lacked an illustrious family tree was not always lost on their descendants.

  Catullus could not even quite decide what it was he liked about Clodia. He tried to define his reasons, but could only do so by comparing her with another woman, Quintia, who was something of a beauty:

  Quintia is beautiful by popular repute. To my mind she is

  Pale, tall, poised: these individual qualities I readily concede.

  But I deny her total beauty, for there is no charm,

  No grain of salt in so large a frame.

  Lesbia is beautiful since her beauty is total,

  And she has stolen every Venus from every woman.

  (Poem 86)

  He could not deny that Quintia was tall, pale, and had good posture – all features Romans admired in a woman. But there were less tangible things that made her inferior to his beloved. Lesbia could not quite compete with Quintia for height, at least, for he sought to emphasise instead her ‘total beauty’. The line in which he described Quintia’s lack of ‘salt’ – or wit – was remarkably balanced so as to emphasise his point. Lesbia was almost aggressively beautiful. The word he used in Latin to describe how she acquired her good qualities was subripio, a sudden movement akin to theft. She was candida, both pale-skinned and ‘shining’, as well as beautiful and salty. If Catullus was satisfied that he had finally understood the cause of his attraction, his friend Calvus was left distraught. Quintia just happened to be his lover.4

  While Clodia had total beauty, Catullus had his Gallic dogface with its lazy eye, a physical shortcoming which few in society could have looked upon with much compassion.5 Catullus’ sensitivity was a worthy quality, but hardly strong enough to compensate for his appearance. If he was going to win Clodia’s heart, he would need to do so through his poetry. ‘A generous girl acts on her word, a chaste one makes no promise,’ Catullus once told a girl in Verona (Poem 110). Clodia, he prayed, would now promise.

  She needed more persuading than he did to go beyond mere flirtation. A woman’s adultery, unlike a man’s, was theoretically punishable with death. As Cato’s ancestor put it: ‘If you should discover your wife committing adultery, you may with impunity kill her without trial; but if she should discover you committing adultery or having an adulterous act performed upon you, she would not dare to lay a finger on you, nor would that be lawful.’6 In practice it was exceedingly difficult to enforce such measures. The law did little to deter married women from pursuing extramarital liaisons. So it was that the first emperor of Rome, Augustus, would introduce a new law against adultery in 18 BC.

  Still, there was a risk; and Catullus was anxious that Clodia should take it. He employed every bit of wit and charm he could. He might only have been writing love poems, but he believed that he was fighting ‘great and glorious battles’ for her (Poem 37). Catullus the valiant hero-in-arms sat down to compose a poem about her pet sparrow.

  He decided he would capture the movement of the sparrow by using one of his favourite poetic metres, hendecasyllables, the origins of which lay in ancient song. The playful, eleven-syllable lines were as suited to flirtation as they were to invective. In hendecasyllables his poem would skip along lightly, like a tiny sparrow on its feet. Sappho had had the goddess of love ride a sparrow chariot in one of her poems.7 Meleager, the Greek epigrammatist, sought release from his heartache through a grasshopper’s song.8 Catullus sought to go several bases further.

  In Verona, sparrows fluttered in and out of human life like rain. They targeted diners distracted by laughter and wine and fearlessly stole bread from their simple linen napkins. They skimmed the waters beneath Verona’s grand bridge, the Ponte Pietra, in balletic display, and hopped here and there across the parched soils of Sirmio, unable to keep pace with the scurrying lizards. The ‘Cisalpine’ genus, Passer italiae, a cross between the common and Spanish sparrows, is delicate and tame.

  Inspired by the landscapes of home as much as by his poetic forebears, Catullus pictured his darling Lesbia playing with her ‘sparrow’, which nipped at her fingertips, providing her with some consolation from the ‘intolerable burning’ he liked to imagine she was feeling:

  Sparrow, apple of my girl’s eye,

  Often she plays with you, holds you in her lap,

  Gives you a fingertip when you
want it

  And urges you to take passionate bites

  Whenever she wishes, gleaming in desire for me,

  To play with something for pleasure.

  And I believe it provides a small release from her

  Frustration, as then the intolerable burning fades.

  I wish that I could play with you as she does

  And lighten the ponderous cares of my mind …

  I would be as grateful as they say the quick-stepped

  Atalanta was for the little golden apple

  That loosed the chastity belt that bound her long.

  (Poem 2)

  Catullus used the short beats in the hendecasyllables to illustrate Lesbia’s movement as much as that of her sparrow. One can almost hear her as she ‘plays’, ludere, and moves her ‘finger’ digitum:

  Often she plays with you

  Quicum ludere, quem

  Gives you a fingertip

  Cui primum digitum

  Like many fantasies, Catullus’ was inconsistent. Lesbia was seductive enough to play expertly with her sparrow, yet as virginal as Atalanta, a girl from the world of myth, who was to marry the man who defeated her in a footrace after she stooped to pick up golden apples. Pre-empting Shakespeare’s Romeo, who wished that he was Juliet’s bird, Catullus longed that he would be the one to play with Lesbia’s sparrow in her stead.9

  His persistence, like any lover’s, hovered over the indeterminate line between nuisance and flattery. And with time it did what persistence will – drift imperceptibly to where there lies the promise of consummation. Fortunately, he did not have to wait too long before that delicious day arrived. Metellus Celer had just succeeded in being elected to the consulship of 60 BC, alongside Lucius Afranius (a man accused of being better at dancing than politics). The husband’s back would now be turned on his domestic life, as he focused on affairs in the public arena.10

  While Catullus was busy picturing Lesbia’s sparrow, Pompey was battling the Senate’s opposition to the ratification of his eastern campaigns. Its members were fearful that between the lines of his settlement lay the extension of personal powers, and with good reason.11 Pompey was trying to pass an agrarian law that would grant land to Rome’s poor citizens, not just his veterans, and win votes in the process. Lucullus, Clodia’s former brother-in-law, led the optimates in blocking Pompey.12 He was supported by Metellus Celer, who was still smarting from his sister’s divorce. As Pompey’s tribune put forward the proposals, Metellus Celer contested each point so bitterly that the Senate had him hauled off to jail. Not willing to let this stop him, Metellus haughtily asked for the debate to reconvene outside his cell. Exasperated, Pompey bade his tribune release his opponent. The settlement remained unresolved.

  On the other side, Metellus had Clodia’s brother to deal with. Still exalting in his freedom after the Bona Dea trial, and fresh from serving as a quaestor in Sicily, Clodius was now plotting to be elected as a tribune: a curious ambition, considering that his patrician birth and status put him above the post. To the man in the street, he must have seemed crazy. But Clodius was no fool. As a tribune, he could strengthen his ties with the plebeians, and also propose legislation to punish Cicero for opposing him in court. Cicero was now convinced that Clodius had a vendetta against him and wanted to destroy him. Since only plebeians were eligible to become tribunes, however, Clodius needed first to be demoted in class.

  Clodia was happy to do what she could for her brother. She was acquainted with Cicero, but better acquainted with Cicero’s loyal pen friend, Atticus, to whom she passed messages and reported Clodius’ plans, as if to antagonise Cicero further.13 Cicero could see that Clodia was doing her very best to help her brother succeed, even petitioning her husband on his behalf.14

  Taking the bait, Cicero set about taunting Clodius over his ambitions for the lowly tribunate. Clodius asked him whether he had ever been in the practice of providing a place for Sicilians at gladiatorial shows.15

  ‘No,’ replied Cicero.

  ‘Well, I shall initiate the practice as their new patron,’ said Clodius; ‘only, since my sister occupies so much of the consul’s position, she gives me but a single foot.’

  ‘Don’t moan about one of your sister’s feet when you’re allowed to lift them both!’ Cicero croaked. He knew that incest jokes were crass, but when Clodia was so meddlesome, so unworthy of her husband, he felt that they were justified. Time and again he called her ‘ox-eyes’, a sobriquet that emphasised her tempestuousness more than her beauty. In Homer’s great epics, it was Zeus’ feisty wife Hera whose eyes were ‘ox-like’.

  Although Clodia seemed to be making headway on behalf of her brother and his quest for plebeian status, for all her arguments she soon found there was nothing she could do to prevent Metellus from blocking the measure in a ‘most distinguished opposition’.16 Her brother and her husband were at loggerheads, and for the moment, there was no way to resolve the stalemate.

  Whether it was this that drove her into Catullus’ arms – if she was not already there – or the simple fact that the intensity of her husband’s new position as consul provided the opportunity for temptation, there were practicalities to be addressed before an affair could become fully fledged. It could not be conducted under Metellus’ own roof on the Palatine Hill, for it would be impossible to elude the eyes of so many neighbours, visitors, and slaves. Catullus was also keen to keep any prospective activity away from his own door. A woman was entitled to dine with men, own property, and move fairly freely through the city, but her movements were hampered by her male ‘guardian’ – ordinarily her husband. So Ovid later complained of his mistress Corinna, ‘whom her husband, whom her guardian, whom the hard door (so many enemies!) were guarding, so she could not be taken by any deception’.17 Even if she managed it, Clodia might easily have been caught.

  Catullus was undeterred. He calmly turned to one of many acquaintances he had made during his first months in Rome, a certain Allius, who had offered him his house to use as he desired. The opportunity arose just as Catullus was ‘burning like Etna’. In retrospect, and with marvellous poetic litotes, he later wrote that the girl, for her part, ‘was not unwilling’ (Poem 8). Not without a flattering dose of hyberbole – litotes’ happy inverse – he likened his relief at finding such a spot in which to exercise his passion to a favouring breeze arriving suddenly and assisting sailors ‘caught in a black hurricane’ (Poem 68).

  As Catullus’ beloved approached the threshold for the very first time she looked like a ‘shining goddess’. Ordinarily, a woman would cross the threshold in this way when she became a man’s bride, and then carried in his arms. (Few remembered why: the ancient biographer Plutarch made this number twenty-nine of his Roman Questions and proposed that it was either a memory of the forceful manner in which the first Romans had taken the Sabine women, who lived on their borders, to be their wives, or through female shyness, or to illustrate that she was now tied to that household.) In usurping the role of the bride and entering alone, Lesbia sounded an ill note; she faltered on the threshold that was already well worn, just as the Trojan Horse famously faltered as it crossed into the ancient city, an evil gift from the Greeks which heralded the collapse of Troy.18

  Writing later in life, after his travels to Bithynia, Catullus recalled the myth of Protesilaos, the first Greek soldier to have died at Troy. His fate had already been decided when his passionate bride Laodamia crossed the threshold on their wedding night one year before he left for war. Laodamia had also crossed the marriage threshold incorrectly. Their marriage had taken place without due sacrifice to the gods. Catullus and his lover did not even have a marriage to legitimise their affair.

  In retrospect, and with some poetic licence, Catullus made himself look the fool for having missed the warning signs. But love, as he knew, renders one deaf and blind to anything sinister beneath the surface. This was a sentiment that anyone could understand. Looking back on his life from a later vantage point, it was clear that fate had
not been in favour of this particular relationship. In the hour itself, by contrast, and in the comfort of their safe house, ‘fragrant with Assyrian perfume’, nothing could ruddy the vision of his lover undressing and laying aside her breast band.

  Clodia was at least thirty-five when the affair began, and, it transpired, a mother. Metella, her daughter by Metellus, would marry a patrician politician named Publius Lentulus Spinther when she came of age. Although she would not care for him, and take at least one other lover, her marriage, and divorce, would ensure that the Clodii Pulchri remained in the public eye.19

  If Metella’s existence showed Catullus anything, it was that Clodia was not barren. Though past her prime, her age might not prevent her from conceiving children again. They needed to be careful. Most women around her placed greater emphasis on abortion than prevention, but that was only because the available methods of contraception were rather less than foolproof. Stories spread by word of mouth of the efficacy of various suppositories and amulets. A particular kind of spider with a large head was said to contain two parasites, which could be removed, inserted into a deer skin, attached to a woman’s body, and used to prohibit pregnancy for a year.20 Coitus interruptus was sometimes more effective. If a man feared that this would rob him of the peak of his pleasure, there were variations on the theme. He could ejaculate, but at that moment his partner was well advised to hold her breath and draw away a little, so that the semen was not thrust too deeply up inside her. Post-coitus, she should squat down and sneeze a good few times, wipe herself down, and have a cold drink.21

  If he was feeling generous, Catullus might smear some concoction of herbs or berries on his penis as a means of contraception, but the onus was on his partner to safeguard herself against unwanted pregnancy. Silphium (asafetida), a particularly pungent spice from Callimachus’ Cyrene, was a popular contraceptive, which women could ingest. She could also insert wool like a plug, or apply olive oil, honey or white lead to her cervix before sex.22