by Daisy Dunn
At least Flavius had a girl. There were other men they knew who had no luck with the ladies at all, or anyone for that matter, making them even riper for attack. Vibennius was a thief at the baths. Ironically, given the setting, Vibennius could not keep his ‘right hand’ clean, such was his sexual appetite. His son was still more objectionable, forever offering his hairy buttocks to passers-by:
The father has the filthier right hand
But the son’s anus is the more voracious
(Poem 33)
The baths were the perfect place to satisfy one’s postprandial lusts, but by the time a man had grown his first beard, he should never have been offering himself up for the passive role.
Catullus wrote disgustedly of the diseases men and women spread among one other. He was horrified when the ‘pure kisses of a pure girl’ mixed with the ‘filthy spittle’ of someone he could not even care to name (Poem 78b). Later in life he would describe how a woman passed on gout which she had caught from a lover. Though his medical knowledge could be rather confused, he knew how quickly certain infections could spread through intimacy: Catullus could well have experienced first-hand the misery of a venereal disease.
Catullus need not have limited himself to one lover at a time: he fell in love easily. Part of him even felt that a little leeway was permissible or, more importantly, was in keeping with the lifestyle he idealised. He was anxious not to resemble the prudish men he abhorred when he could recount that even Juno, queen of the goddesses herself, put up with her husband Jupiter’s errant ways:
And although she is not satisfied with Catullus alone,
I shall make the most of the stolen pleasures
Of my modest mistress, few and far between,
So as not to live too much by the prudish precepts of dolts.
Often even Juno, mightiest of the heavenly gods,
Stifled her blazing anger at her husband’s indiscretions
And she learnt of very many pleasures
Stolen by All-Wanting Jupiter.
(Poem 68)
Although Clodia was not visiting him as often as he wished – he suspected strongly that she was still sleeping with her husband – Catullus consoled himself with ‘the stolen pleasures’. In practice, it proved difficult to abide by such rules for freedom. The fact that he could not have her completely rendered their relationship all the more tempestuous:
Lesbia always speaks badly of me,
In fact she never keeps quiet about me.
I’ll be damned if Lesbia does not love me.
How can I tell? Because with me it’s just the same.
I curse her continuously,
But I’ll be damned if I do not love her.
(Poem 92)
When Clodia wasn’t biting Catullus’ lips she was biting off his head, and he hers. In his poem, Catullus endeavoured to show how well matched they were: mirror images of one another. Metellus could be a source of contention, but perhaps, after all, he had a mirror image of his own.
Catullus’ poetic successors delighted in pointing out that he betrayed his own infidelity by writing of more than one lover in his book. Ovid scoffed that ‘not content with her [Lesbia], he shared many love poems, confessing in them his own adultery’.15 Given the depth of his poetic obsessions and jealous temperament, however, Catullus struggled to divide his attentions, poetic and otherwise. The poems he wrote about other lovers might have provided some precedent, rather than adulterous distraction, for the translation of love into poetry that he perfected with Lesbia.
The series of poems he composed about a young Roman boy named Juventius, for example, have much of the romantic longing, but far less of the familiarity of his Lesbia poems. Juventius was a wealthy aristocratic boy with lovely cheeks and plump lips which Catullus longed to kiss. He yearned to give this ‘little flower’ not one but 300,000 kisses – even more than he demanded of Lesbia. He would not be sated, he wrote, ‘even if the crop of our little kisses were thicker than dry corn’ (Poem 48). For ‘crop’ he used the word seges (literally a cereal crop). Transferring the ‘crop’ metaphorically from the fields to his lips, he rendered his kisses dry and countable. The anxious boy would read his poem and then hear one kiss rubbing against another, aridis aristis, like the rustle of dry corn.
Such restrained, dry kisses would be less threatening to the youngster, Catullus hoped. But it was no good. His kisses remained forbidden: ‘If someone allowed me to kiss forever your honeyed eyes, Juventius …’ Even when he finally got close enough to give him just one, he could do little more than steal a kiss, to which Juventius responded with utter abhorrence. A single peck was enough to make the boy reach for a bowl of water to cleanse his lips, ‘as though it were the filthy saliva of an infected whore’ (Poem 99). Poor Catullus bemoaned the tear-rendering impact of the rebuff: ‘Never again from this day forward shall I steal kisses.’ Worse still, he suspected that Furius and Aurelius, the same pair that shamed him for composing effeminate love poetry, were eager to acquire what he had failed to capture.
In Catullus’ view, Furius Bibaculus and Aurelius were disreputable chancers. Furius was always pleading penury, despite the fact that he lived with his father and stepmother:
Furius, you have neither slave nor savings
Nor bug nor spider nor fire,
But you do have a father and stepmother
Whose teeth can even grind granite.
(Poem 23)
He had a villa of his own, but faced a mortgage ‘fifteen-thousand-two-hundred steep’ (Poem 26). Catullus imagined Juventius bestowing the ‘wealth of Midas’ upon Furius, ‘that man, who has neither slave nor savings’. Furius’ very name evoked the Latin for theft – ‘fur’ – while Aurelius’ came from the Latin for ‘gold’.16
Aurelius too had ample time to chase after other men’s darlings, cock in hand. Catullus’ voice trembled in time with his bleating syllables, metuo tuoque pene (‘… your penis, that’s what I fear’). Brandishing again the vocabulary of rape, Catullus threatened Aurelius with a radish or a horridly barbed mullet up his bottom if he dared even to lay a finger on his darling boy; such was the traditional Greek way of punishing adulterers. In his collection, this poem appeared directly before the scabrous Poem 16 (‘I shall fuck you anally and orally’):
For your feet will be bound and your backdoor
Pushed open so radishes and mullets can run you through.
(Poem 15)
Catullus wished that his overbearing badinage would be deterrent enough. He need not have worried. Juventius ran off instead with a visitor from Pisaurum (a dilapidated Umbrian town Catullus had little time for). The man was ‘paler than a golden statue’ (Poem 81) – golder than Aurelius – but Juventius did not mind. Of all men, Catullus could not understand why he chose the one he did.
His aggressive jibes at Furius’ and Aurelius’ alleged poverty and sexual rivalry succeeded in disguising the fact that the deeper source of contention between them was poetry. Catullus yearned to separate himself from Furius Bibaculus by courting comparison with his work. By describing his heavily mortgaged villa, he drew upon an earlier poem Furius had written about the mortgaged home of Valerius Cato, the grammarian and poet with whom Catullus shared a name.
The more Catullus thought about his rivals, the more he took the view that it was his prerogative to write as he pleased. He was a tireless advocate of his own freedom of speech, even if that meant that he would be the one to suffer its repercussions. In his heart he believed that his poems could be a helping hand to whoever found themselves evoked. In years to come, when Caesar was in Gaul, that belief would prove quite monumental.
Mindful of how quickly rumour spread, Catullus proceeded to turn his gaze to a certain Ravidus, whom he accused of provoking a dispute with him just so that he could become famous. He would be famous, Catullus drily assured him, since he chose to love his lover (which one he did not say). Ravidus’ fame would grow less from his love affair than from his being immortalised in Cat
ullus’ poetry. For Catullus it was a safe investment. There would be immortality for his rival, albeit of a kind he would resent, and immortality for him. For each and every man and woman who achieved fame through his verse, Catullus knew that he inched nearer to immortality himself.
Furius Bibaculus once lamented the futility of studying literature if one’s memory will only fade in old age, but Catullus wrestled more with the prospect of being forgotten by the world itself.17 In his poetry, he described several threats to man’s enduring name, not just a ‘spider spinning thin web’ across it, but ‘thick rust’, and ‘time, flying over the ages of forgetfulness’ (Poem 68). Not content with leaving his legacy in the hands of the virgin muse and his dedicatee, Catullus aimed to cheat death through the permanence of work.
THE POWER OF THREE
Then Peleus is said to have burned in love for Thetis.
Then nymph Thetis did not disparage a wedding to a mortal.
Then father Jupiter himself felt that Peleus ought
To be joined to Thetis in matrimony.
(Poem 64, lines 19–21)
IN THE HOT SUMMER OF 60 BC, when Catullus’ affair with Clodia was at its height, Caesar returned from his governorship in Further Spain. Steadily, he approached the pomerium, the sacred boundary that demarcated the city of Rome, inside which no burials were allowed to take place for fear of religious corruption or ‘pollution’. As soon as a soldier crossed it upon his return from battle, he lost the military authority with which he had been endowed to perform his service. Caesar hovered here.
He did not have long before he had to declare himself a candidate for the consulship of 59 BC, which he was required by law to do inside the city itself. He waited and waited, mindful that should he canter forward across the pomerium, his military powers would be forfeited and, with them, his chance to celebrate a triumph for his work in the province. He calmly sent a request to the Senate that, in light of the circumstances and timing, he might be allowed to declare himself a candidate for the election there and then.
The politician Quintus Lutatius Catulus, whose father’s portico Catullus had passed on his way up the Palatine Hill, had recently died. Cato was proving himself just as vocal and conservative a senator as he had once been. Ever the stickler for protocol, he spoke at such length in the Senate House that there was no time to hold a vote on Caesar’s proposal. He hoped that by talking out the duration of the meeting, filibustering, he could reclaim some power for the house from its ambitious magistrates. More generous senators knew that Caesar ought to have had his way.
He now had little choice. Gritting his teeth in defiance, Caesar decided to forgo his shot at the triumph and cross the boundary line into Rome in time to declare himself a candidate. From where Catullus was standing it would have been difficult to tell who was the more perturbed: Caesar, for being so trampled on, or the dour Cato who smugly believed that he had safeguarded Rome from the most ambitious potential consul it had ever seen. Given the opportunity he had lost, there was all the more reason for Caesar to ensure that he was successful in the election. Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius would give up their consular seats to whoever had won the most votes. As always, it would be the elite who held the most sway. Voters would be divided into blocs according to their property status, and voting stopped when a majority was reached; the richest placed their vote first.1
Catullus, more interested at this stage of his life in people than politics, could not help but notice that Caesar’s electoral agent and backer for the elections, Arrius, was quite a character. From humble beginnings he had risen to wealth and prominence simply by being a hanger-on.2 He was self-important, and vacuously so. There he was, hobnobbing with Caesar, clearly expecting that he would have the chance to achieve a consulship of his own in due course. For as long as he still valued his prospects, he determined to make the right impression. As Catullus observed, Arrius had even altered his voice:
Chonvenient, Arrius would say, whenever he wanted
To say ‘convenient’, and hambush for ‘ambush’
And then assume that he had spoken magnificently
After he had said hambush as much as he could.
I suppose his mother and his freedman uncle spoke like that,
And his maternal grandfather and grandmother too.
(Poem 84)
In earlier times, Romans had sometimes aspirated their vowels, lending them an ‘h’ for effect. Recently, the aspirate had been enjoying a comeback. The fashionable elite in their faux-plebeian affectations had even taken to aspirating some of their consonants, transforming words such as cicada, into khicada.3 Given her preference for the plebeian pronunciation of her name ‘Clodia’ over the rich vowels of ‘Claudia’, Catullus could not have been surprised if his lover followed suit. As much as he liked urbanity, there was such a thing as taking it too far. Catullus could not get over quite how excessively Arrius used the aspirate in his speeches, even where there was no place for it. The young man was evidently doing all he could to make his language appealing, but could not get it right. Not only was his family poor, but his try-hard manner of speaking was ludicrous. Catullus’ mockery did not help his confidence; it made an even greater fool of him than he felt already.
When it came to Caesar and his drive for the consulship, Catullus was comparatively restrained. He did not fear reprisal, but felt that nonchalance, or even blunt dismissal, would be a better way of deflating the politician’s ego. The strategy was typical of him, for he never made his political leanings explicit in his verse. In the coming years he would find occasion to criticise the populist politics of Caesar and others, as well as leading optimates. For the moment, just an acerbic couplet acknowledged Caesar’s rise:
I have absolutely no desire to want to please you, Caesar,
Nor to know the smallest thing about you.
(Poem 93)
In Latin, this was particularly forthright. Catullus did not want to know whether Caesar was ‘black or white’ (tanned or pale-skinned) – an idiom Caesar would have found mildly offensive. Whether Catullus was purposely rebelling against the older generation or had some other plan in mind, nobody could say. His poem merely suggested that Caesar was not yet so powerful that he needed no introduction, but powerful enough to have expected people to desire his favour. Provided Caesar knew that he was not among those sycophants, Catullus was happy.
Among the crowds of Rome, there was some sympathy for Catullus’ provocative detachment. If some people suspected that the poet’s words were partly a reflection of his uncertainty over political developments, they were probably right. Caesar was manoeuvring in private. In silent studies and libraries lit by dripping oil lamps, he was shaping a triumvirate – a pact for power between three men: himself, Pompey, and Crassus. He had established a working relationship with Crassus, his ruthless money-lender who had slipped him the funds he needed to conduct his governorship in Further Spain. But Crassus expected something back. He had so far failed to satisfy the demands that equestrian businessmen were making for compensation for their lost investments in Asia and Bithynia. Caesar had supported Pompey in the past, and in return for Pompey’s help now, could promise to help him satisfy his veteran soldiers, who continued to press upon him for land and rights.
Although Crassus had long resented Pompey for winning triumphs when he had received merely an ovation for putting down Spartacus’ revolt, Caesar was able to use his skills of diplomacy to bring them together. Holding out promises to pass Pompey’s bills if he gave him his support for the election to the consulship, and to assist Crassus in satisfying the equestrians if he did the same, Caesar acquired the influence he sought.
The Senate tempered their fears over Caesar with the hope that Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, a son-in-law of Cato, would be capable of holding him in check as he was elected alongside him to the consulship. In an attempt to protect their authority further, the senators ruled that the consuls would receive merely the silvae callesque, the ‘woods and tr
acks’ of Italy, as their province for the following year, rather than the traditional foreign command.
Soon enough the crowds were speaking of the ‘consulship of Julius and Caesar’. Bibulus, a lame duck, found himself powerless to act as Caesar ensured that Crassus’ disgruntled equestrians were appeased. Violently usurping the rights normally reserved for the tribunes of the people, and not without considerable opposition from the Senate, Caesar passed his own agrarian laws in order to redistribute the land required for Pompey’s veteran soldiers.
Catullus found little poetic inspiration in such agreements. Of all the progress the triumvirs made in the early months of 59 BC, he acknowledged just one. To those who were familiar with his work the choice was hardly surprising: Pompey, who had been single since his divorce from Metellus Celer’s flirtatious sister Mucia, now wed Caesar’s daughter Julia.
While Catullus dallied with Clodia beneath the bedspread in Allius’ house, Julia and Pompey languished in the countryside and spent delicious evenings together by the fire. Catullus was quite taken with their fevered romance. Pompey was by all accounts an enthusiastic lover; women had been known to leave his bed wearing the imprint of his teeth.4
Pompey and Caesar, as Catullus wrote in a poem, were now socer generque, ‘father- and son-in-law’ (Poem 29). Aeneas’ father, Anchises, would echo Catullus’ words when he described Caesar and Pompey to his son in Virgil’s great epic.5 Cicero buried his head in his hands, convinced that the union was evidence of Pompey’s plans for a dictatorship. Meanwhile, Caesar, having renounced his scandal-marred marriage to Pompeia, took a new wife: Calpurnia, the daughter of an influential senator.
