by Daisy Dunn
Sometimes these measures seemed to have worked. Catullus apparently never fathered a child with his Lesbia or any other woman. He might yet have done so, but considered the subject too close to his heart to publish on. Like one of Rome’s artists decorating bowls and vases and everyday objects with explicit sexual scenes, Catullus enjoyed painting a picture in words of the sex acts he performed, or hoped to perform, on several people. He had been happy to jest with the poet Valerius Cato about buggering the ‘little boy’ of his girlfriend. Then there was a girl, Ipsitilla, whom he instructed to make ready for ‘nine consecutive fucks’ at midday (Poem 32). He had eaten and was more than ready for her: ‘I poke through my tunic and cloak.’
Silphium, a pungent spice, is weighed before export from Cyrene (on the coast of North Africa). Among women, it was a popular contraceptive. Among sheep it was a sedative; among goats, a sneeze-inducing allergen.
But there were certain matters he was unwilling to divulge. The poems in which he described his love with Lesbia contain no trace of such crudeness, or its accompanying bravado. They are far less sexually explicit, and infinitely more erotic. At most, Catullus recounted years later how his lover ‘gave me secret and wondrous little gifts in the night, taken from the very lap of her own husband’ (Poem 68). In the moment itself, he would total the number of kisses he desired, but no more.
He would plead with her like a child, each cry an emotion delivered in time with his bounding heart, ‘da mi … deinde … dein … dein … deinde … deinde … dein’ (‘give me … then … then … then … then … then … then …’):
We should live, my Lesbia, we should love,
We should value at a penny all
The rumours of our elders – they are dourer than most.
The sun can set and rise again
But once our short light has passed beneath its yardarm
We must sleep a night that never ends.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred
Then another thousand, then a second hundred.
Then – don’t stop – another thousand, then a hundred
Then when we have shared many thousands
We shall confound them so no one can know
Or cast an evil eye upon us
When he knows that our kisses are so many.
(Poem 5)
In promising to ‘confound’ their kisses, conturbo, he donned the mask of an accountant, who would sooner have used the word to describe overturned piles of money, or bankruptcy, than flustered kisses. Catullus might as well have rolled naked across the banking tables in the Forum. Piquing his elders’ interest in his poetry, he showed them quite lithely that there was no way they could know how many kisses he and his lover exchanged, or what actually took place behind closed doors.
In another poem, he desired enormous kisses, basiationes, a neologism which, like the kisses of Poem 5, he surreptitiously rendered half his own already. The standard Latin for ‘kisses’ was oscula, not basia (although basia gave rise to many European words for affection, including Italian, un bacio). The word evoked Catullus’ Gallic rather than Roman origins. He longed for many, many such kisses:
As great as the number of grains of Libyan sand
That lie on silphium-bearing Cyrene
Between the oracle of steamy Jupiter
And the holy tomb of old King Battus;
Or as many as the stars, when night is quiet,
That watch the secretive liaisons of men …
(Poem 7)
Without saying it, he subtly made it known where their kisses could lead. Though his critics would put it down to another cause, Catullus’ decision to write explicitly of little more than their kisses was a clear sign that Lesbia was more than just a persona. She was a woman he loved very much.
THE RUMOURS OF OUR ELDERS
While their minds are desirous, desperate to obtain something,
They are afraid of swearing nothing,
There is nothing they won’t promise.
But as soon as the lust in their desirous mind is sated,
They remember none of their words,
Have no fear of perjury.
(Poem 64, lines 145–48)
ALTHOUGH CATULLUS COULD feel the evil eye of spies upon him, and his lover, he was more thrilled by the intrusion than upset by it. The prospect of unnerving friends and dour elders with the depth of his passion only reaffirmed for him the importance of his affair. He could revel all he liked in his thousands of kisses, but to be certain that the relationship was as extraordinary and seminal as he believed it was he needed witnesses.
Lesbia had become his raison d’être – ‘my light, whose living makes life sweet for me’ (Poem 68). He kissed her. She bit his lips. He wanted her sexually, but he wanted more besides. Catullus followed ‘wherever the girl directed, loved by us as much as no woman again will be loved’ (Poem 8). He loved her ‘not just as a man loves his girlfriend, but as a father loves his sons and sons-in-law’, diligo as opposed to amo (Poem 72). He did not care that he had never experienced the love a parent has for their child, for he believed he knew what it felt like. Clodia was not just a lover, but nor was she merely someone he had formed, like a child; she was part of him: a woman ‘dearer to me than myself’, ‘far dearer to him than his eyes or anything else that is dearer than eyes’ (Poem 82). He described her as ‘my own life’ (Poem 104). Again and again, Catullus clutched for the word or simile or metaphor, the means of expressing how integral Lesbia was to him, but could never quite find it.
Mingled with the long, limping syllables of his disapproving elders were voices he knew well. Several men were taunting him over his thousands of kisses, branding him ‘barely male’. Marcus Furius Bibaculus, a rival poet from an elite family in Cremona in Gaul, and Aurelius, probably also a poet on the fringe of his set, had decided that he was ‘soft’.1 Soft – mollis – not because he drenched himself in perfume and over-polished his teeth, but because he dared to express how in thrall he was to a woman.2 Catullus was partial to cunnilingus as well as rampant kissing, but the least he told them ‘About my love of licking …’, the better.3 Soft men were sodomites, and men who were penetrated during sex were, by default, ‘women’. Catullus could see where this was going.
He found the accusations of effeminacy boring and predictable. He decided that jibes at his masculinity veiled the real problem, which was that his accusers were not intelligent enough to appreciate his subtle references. Only the cultured were aware that Cyrene, whose sands numbered the kisses he desired of Lesbia, was the birthplace of Callimachus, and that Callimachus called himself ‘Battiades’ (‘descendant of Battus’) after its fabled founder King Battus. Callimachus admired brevity, elegance, obscure references. Catullus had achieved the same qualities in his kiss poems to Lesbia.
While witnesses were necessary in his poems, to affirm that his love was unparalleled, he did not need the challenges they presented him with in real life. In Rome, the gossipmongers worked to preserve the social mores, such as the chastity of wives, and sought to break the careers of men they disliked. Their words spread through common inns and dining rooms and seeped perennially into the speeches of the city’s orators.
Cicero relied often on such hearsay to add colour to his orations and defence speeches, the latter being his particular talent. He had defended a poet a few years ago called Archias from the accusation that he was not enrolled as a citizen of Rome. He informed the unwitting jury that whenever Archias travelled in Asia and Greece, his arrival was met with immense excitement. Such was Archias’ genius, he argued, that if he had not been a Roman citizen to begin with, he ought to be made one at once. His defence was, in all likelihood, an unqualified success.
It was never going to be long before Lesbia’s true identity was exposed. Catullus’ poems were to become so well known over the next few years that Lesbia would be ‘more famous than Helen [of Troy] herself’.4 Metellus Celer’s political ambitions pushed him more firmly into the
limelight, and ever since Lucullus’ testimony against Clodius there was a discernible appetite for stories about the sexual peccadilloes of the Clodii Pulchri.
Catullus had his feelings alone to protect him. Although never the likeliest of moralists (which is what made the moralising edge of some his observations so powerful), he counted himself among those who believed that morality was under threat, and that sexual promiscuity among the elite classes was partly to blame for this. Any one of his friends could point out that his affair with a married noblewoman made him part of the problem, but Catullus was not about to be persuaded. The crowd’s scorn, together with the warmth of his lover’s face and the weight of her words, showed him only that their relationship was unique in its potency, and therefore sacrosanct:
No faith in any pact was ever as great
As that discovered on my part in my love for you.
(Poem 87)
He also considered himself beyond the reach of the worrying trend he observed in Rome, ‘fertile is the seed of adultery’. The precariousness of life during Rome’s civil wars had driven many to new beds, while the toll of Sulla’s proscriptions and the recent foreign wars had pushed well-born widows into having new relationships with good men who could give them children, to ensure that the elite did not die out entirely.5 When the Roman historian Livy wrote a detailed history of Rome some thirty years later, he opened his first book with words which would ring true for Catullus:
… Then as discipline gradually slides, let [my reader] pay attention to the falling morals, then how they fall more and more, then begin to precipitate at a speed, until he reaches these times, in which we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies … In recent times wealth has brought greed, and the unwieldy desires of pleasure have instilled a lust for ruining and losing everything through luxury and licentiousness
(Livy ab urbe condita prologue 9; 12)
It was in the same period that the Emperor Augustus, no moral paragon himself, passed his legislation to curb adultery, encourage the birth of legitimate children, and resurrect the importance of religion.
On bad days Catullus was given to believe that times were getting worse. On better days he accepted that humans are simply predisposed to finding their own times inferior to those that came before them. Seneca, one of the great thinkers and tragedians of the next century, would explain that ‘vice, luxury, and neglect of good morals’ were the fault of men, not the times; ‘no era has been free from blame’.6 Catullus would play with the same idea in his Bedspread Poem, when he would draw upon the Greek myth of the Ages in order to weigh up the modern world relative to the past. According to the myth, the world had declined since the pre-historical Golden Age, in which there had been no place for the kind of luxury that Seneca and Livy abhorred. Luxury was, historians insisted, the disease of developed nations, capable of inciting men to become disillusioned with each other and their leaders, and sparking mob rule.7
These thoughts might already have been in the back of Catullus’ mind as he made it his mission to counter the objections critics raised to the moral ambiguity of his love poetry. Much though he could flaunt his intellectual superiority over Furius and Aurelius, his contemporaries’ taunts went further than he acknowledged. Once they had discovered who it was that lay beneath Lesbia’s veil, it was easy for them to form their own conclusions about why Catullus wrote merely of their kisses.
Rumour had it that Clodia was a mere coquette, draped in sensual Coan silk, a teasingly transparent fabric from the island of Cos through which one might see a woman ‘almost as though she was naked’.8 ‘Coan’ punned on the Latin word ‘coitus’, which was fitting because the cloth was a favourite among the less virtuous. Irresistible and brazen though Clodia was as she sauntered through the dining room in her diaphanous robes, in the bedroom, a spurned lover claimed that she was submissive and meek. If they heard about this, Catullus’ acquaintances would have the perfect explanation for why the poet was so coy about his latest romance.
Catullus should have used this cruelty in his lover’s defence. Only whores were expected to move at all during intercourse.9 Well-born women were meant to lie still and exercise self-restraint. The trouble was, the nature of Catullus’ relationship with Clodia was such as to cast her as a high-class courtesan rather than chaste wife.
Such courtesans looked to Greece for their elegance and glamour. Even before the Romans established the province of Macedonia in the second century BC, Hellenistic culture had flooded the city. There were Greek tutors for privileged children, Greek books for the inquisitive, Greek sculpture for the cultured, Greek prostitutes for hungry men – and their female counterparts, who became their copycats. Anyone who refused to believe that Clodia was a mistress of dull frigidity could picture her as one such woman.
Catullus might have decided from the outset of their affair to keep their most intimate moments private, but if he was unwilling to give his peers the details, he did not want them imagining anything less than divine. If it was explicit sex they desired, it was explicit sex they would get – if not quite in the manner they expected it:
I shall fuck you anally and orally
Cock-in-mouth Aurelius and sodomite Furius,
Since you judge me by my short poems
Because they are sexy, not pure enough.
It is only right that a poet is restrained and proper
In himself but there is no need at all for his
Little poems to be so.
What’s more they have salt and elegance
Despite being sexy and not pure enough
And even have the power to inspire the urge for sex –
I don’t mean in boys, but in those hoary old men
Who struggle to raise their cocks up hard.
And because you read of many thousands of kisses
You think me barely male?
I shall fuck you anally and orally.
(Poem 16)
Catullus had demanded kiss upon kiss from Lesbia, but now had the presumption to call himself ‘restrained and proper’. He would go still further, swearing before the gods one day that he was a man of decency: ‘For whatever men can say or do to be kind to someone, it has been said and done by you’ (Poem 76). His rivals could accuse him of lying, but Catullus was not calling himself chaste. ‘Please, do not judge my morals by this book,’ the poet Martial later wrote, echoing Catullus’ words.10 In a poem it was difficult to convey that one understood where the line lay between what was acceptable and what was not. A young man could sow his seed and maintain his moral rectitude, provided his affairs did not disrupt the lives of others too much. As far as Furius and Aurelius were concerned, Catullus had already overstepped those boundaries in his life, and showed evidence for this in his poetry. Catullus knew differently. It was love, and that was not wrong.
Anyone reading his poem might have assumed that Catullus had suffered a gross slight. The rape of freeborn men and women was illegal, but not if the victim had committed adultery with another man’s wife. But Catullus was not married. It would take a poet to understand that the slight he had suffered was a literary one. Furius and Aurelius were simply hopeless critics, incapable of recognising good poetry – pithy, inventive, concise poetry.11 Catullus wrote Poem 16 for them because, whatever the cost, he was going to defend poetry that was elegant, witty, yet potent enough to inspire a sexual surge in even the crustiest old man. Asserting his masculinity once and for all, he bragged that he was going to sully their mouths – the source of their poems and their criticism.
With these fiends he suffered none of the concern for discretion he experienced over Lesbia. He had made the decision early in his life that he would direct harsh poems against his well-born friends, if that is what they deserved, as well as to the man in the street. Many of the Greek poems he read in the impressive poetic anthology of Meleager, some of them older than Alexander the Great, others as recent as the decade of his birth, cast aspersions on certain individuals, but seldom wer
e they freeborn men, and seldom were they threatened with punishment for their unedifying habits.12
Breaking away from these earlier literary traditions, Catullus sought to raise ‘to the skies’ not the heroes, but his friends and rivals, lovers, and the women they paid for love. Time and again he put his hand to composing poetry, often in his beloved hendecasyllables, sprightly eleven-syllable lines, which made comedy out of undesirability. Long before Martial took to the city’s streets to lambast unappealing characters in verse, Catullus lifted his wax tablet and scratched its surface with rude little ditties, full-blown polemics, elegant epigrams – all of them observational pieces on characters he knew or knew of. He combined bitter polemic with humour founded on briefly sketched caricatures.
One evening in Rome, he met with some friends at the home of a certain Flavius. Looking around, he realised that Flavius had taken a new lover. For some reason, he was keeping suspiciously quiet about her:
Flavius, if your lover were not
Inelegant and unrefined you would want to speak –
Would not be able not to speak – about her to Catullus.
No doubt you’re in love with some feverish
Little slut and it shames you to confess it.
(Poem 6)
The evidence spoke for itself. Flavius’ bedroom was ‘steeped in flowers and the oil of Syrian olive’, a fragrance made from olive oil and exotic Syrian herbs.13 His bed and pillows looked worn – ‘knackered and tattered’, clearly a result of an evening’s pounding. Flavius himself looked trim. His love handles had vanished through what had no doubt been a period of very vigorous fucking. If his secret lover was any better than an inelegant – illepida, the opposite of Catullus’ lepidus poetry book – and unrefined slut, Catullus decided, Flavius would be telling him all about her. For all his criticisms of Flavius’ new lover, Catullus felt excluded.14 It did not matter that his comments about Flavius’ secrecy were deeply hypocritical. Catullus could justify them, if pressed, by explaining that he kept quiet about the details of his affair with Lesbia, not its existence.
