Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  Catullus and Caelius had a lot more in common than age, status, and literary skill. Caelius’ father, too, was wealthy and well connected. He had business interests in the Roman provinces – in his case Africa – and these could help him to pay his son’s rent on Clodius’ property on the Palatine Hill.5 Caelius had already taken the opportunity to travel there as part of a cohort, and was probably still abroad when Catullus first arrived in Rome.

  The Rufus Catullus once defined as his friend and ally had ‘crept up on me, ripped like a flame through my guts, and stolen all I had from me’ (Poem 77). At some point, maybe when he was completing negotiations over his new home with Clodius, he had become acquainted with Clodia. Caelius Rufus and Clodia walked in the same gardens and shot each other furtive glances in the umbra of the trees. They were together, and they were otiose, and all Catullus could do was picture them from his cross, where he hung on the arms of love and hate, like a prisoner undergoing his death sentence.

  As early as the seventh century BC, a Greek lyric poet, Archilochus, had written about hate and love, only for a later poet to modify his sentiments into something Catullus knew well: ‘I know how to love the man who loves me, and I know that if someone wrongs me, how to hate him.’6 Yet for Catullus, love and hatred were not so black and white. For him, it was not a question of loving some people while hating others. He had found himself in a far more vexing situation, a love-hate relationship in which his feelings were directed at one goal, neither an enemy nor a friend, or both an enemy and a friend.

  Catullus never paused to consider the possibility that his lover had not intended to be cruel or insensitive, or to lead him on. Nor did he believe that her promises of enduring love were, in fact, accidents of love itself, proof that even more than unmixed wine, love loosens the tongue. What struck him now was that he had been blind. The woman was not so much frightened of marriage, but of a commitment, to him, altogether.

  In happier times, her sparrow had bitten him, and become his. Resigning those voracious bites to memory, he pictured it, a miselle passer – ‘poor little sparrow’ – a diminutive that, as so often, conveyed not size but pathos. The sparrow was travelling ‘that shadowy path from which they allow no return’, or as Lord Byron translated it: ‘Now having past the gloomy bourne,/From whence he never can return’ (Poem 3). Catullus’ verse was overblown, ridiculous, but not even his humour could veil his sadness. He looked at his sparrow, and it was dying.

  The disorder of the love poems in Catullus’ collection only intensified the picture of Clodia sleeping with both him and Caelius Rufus, on and off. It gave the impression that they were not the only ones, either, but the poems were enveloped by such a thick fog of jealousy and angry resentment, of love and hate, that it made it impossible for a reader to imagine what Clodia’s version of events might have been.

  He compared the happy past with the sorrowful present. When she spoke of her preference for marrying him over Jupiter, he had loved her as a father does his sons, not as a man does his mistress: diligo, as opposed to amo. At that time, or so she said, he was the only man she knew intimately. But now, that had changed:

  Now I have got to know you. So even if I burn more deeply

  You are still much cheaper and less significant to me.

  How can that be, you say? Because such a wound compels a lover

  To love more, but to like less.

  (Poem 72)

  The emergence of other lovers, or the sudden ability to see ones who had been there for some time, might have heightened Catullus’ jealous desire, but it simultaneously laid him low in despair. It made him love and hate. Had he been told that, between him and Caelius Rufus, he would suffer the lesser fall, he could never have believed it.

  ‘Cheap’ was the perfect word for his new vision of Lesbia, not just because it highlighted her promiscuity, but also because it undermined her wealth. Catullus had apparently been given to believe that the husband was the chief obstacle in this equation for love. As and when he had been taken out of it and the solution still failed to materialise, the discomforting truth became manifest. In a sorrowful moment of self-recognition, he realised that he could never be – could never have been – a serious contender for this patrician woman’s hand. His love was, by the one measure that counted in Roman marriage, too cheap.

  He knew better than to believe the gossipmongers who continued to circulate rumours of an incestuous relationship between Clodia and Clodius. It was obvious that it had only been since Lucullus tainted her sister’s name in court that idlers had characterised all three sisters in the same way. But at this moment of heartbreak, the whispers illustrated a convenient truth. Hurt and desperate, Catullus threw his lot in with the muckrakers and wrote that Lesbia preferred her own brother to him and all his countrymen. With a flourish of four lines, he struck – and unveiled Lesbia’s identity:

  Lesbius is handsome Pulcher. How couldn’t he be?

  Lesbia prefers him to you and all your people, Catullus.

  But let the handsome one sell Catullus and his people together

  If he can find three kisses from the people he knows.

  (Poem 79)

  The revelation depended upon a pun on her family name. Cicero often called Clodius Pulcher ‘pretty boy’ – a play on his name pulcher. And so Catullus began ‘Lesbius is handsome’ – Lesbius est pulcher. It could not have been much clearer: ‘Lesbius’ is ‘Pulcher’ made ‘Lesbia’ one of Clodius Pulcher’s sisters. The detail that Lesbia would prefer her own brother to him ensured that the reference could not be missed. Lesbia was the tempestuous Clodia with the oxen eyes.

  Catullus’ first concern was not to expose her, nor to jibe further at her family’s alleged incest. His main point came in the third line: ‘But let the handsome one sell Catullus and his people together.’ For all his family’s wealth in Verona and Sirmio, neither Catullus nor all his Gallic countrymen together could compete with one of the oldest families in Rome. Class meant more than money; et pecunia olet – money smelled of the hands through which it passed, poor, self-made, or veined with blue blood.

  Catullus never acknowledged explicitly that by marrying Metellus Celer, Clodia had coupled with a cousin on her mother’s side. He did not consider this incest; no one did. The Caecilii Metelli had risen to prominence many centuries ago through holding the top magistracies and seats in the Senate. Catullus could compare Metellus Celer’s family with his own, and upbraid Clodia for what he interpreted as an intense social prejudice. He could fly in fury over the many great beauties of his age who prostituted themselves with despicable men in the name of lucrative marriage contracts, and frown desperately at the faces of the grooms with whom he was expected to exchange kisses in the Roman fashion. But he could hardly substantiate his argument of Clodia’s prejudice when she had such plebeian tastes. The simple fact was that it was less painful for him to accept rejection on grounds of his social standing than of his personal attractiveness.

  He needed only to look at the brother she was closest to, Clodius, who was doing all he could to sever his ties with the elite entirely. In his quest to attain a tribunate, the lowly seat at the bottom of the political hierarchy, he had married Fulvia, the daughter of a wealthy plebeian family. The union was shrewd: Clodius had purposely married beneath himself, because it was to the plebeian class that he needed to be demoted to run for the seat.

  The period surrounding Metellus Celer’s death had witnessed Clodius’ plans gather pace, causing Catullus to rail at him, as well as Clodia, in his revelatory Poem 79. If only by associating her so strikingly with her increasingly prominent brother, he could find the empathy he so desperately desired. Clodius, everyone knew, was perceptive, underhand, and had a way of picking precisely the right moment to strike a deal. He also benefited from a certain amount of luck. He had long grown frustrated by Metellus Celer’s haughty refusal to grant him the demotion he needed, and found himself instead promising to support Pompey and Caesar in return for this change of
status.

  Caesar must have felt ground down by Clodius’ persistence, as well as by the aggressive rhetoric Cicero was employing to undermine his consular policies in the Senate. Anxious to silence the garrulous orator, he passed a motion to transfer Clodius to the plebeian class.7 In a bizarre turn of events, Pompey and Crassus agreed: Clodia’s brother was adopted into a commoner family as the ‘son’ of a twenty-year-old man. Through befriending Caesar and plying him with requests, Clodius had achieved the first stage of his plan.

  Catullus might have invoked Clodius to ‘sell Catullus and his people together’, but if anyone sold out it was Clodius, who thence had little trouble in attaining the second stage of his plan: the tribunate. The triumvirs could only wince as they witnessed him reverse his promises. Since forming their coalition, Caesar, Pompey and Crassus enjoyed less support than they had had as individuals, and Clodius now wasted little time in cutting loose from the group. Caesar and Bibulus handed down their consulships to the new candidates for 58 BC: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, who was the father of Caesar’s new wife Calpurnia, and a man named Aulus Gabinius. The aspirate-loving Arrius, who failed to receive the support from the triumvirs he had expected, bellowed that the consulship had been ‘stolen from him’.8

  Making the most of his new authority as a tribune, Clodius suggested in a popular assembly that Caesar had been out of his depth – and his rights – in passing the legislation that he had during his consulship of 59 BC. Two of the fairly senior magistrates of the year, the fiercely optimate Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and Gaius Memmius, now questioned the legality of Caesar’s acts, but the leading members of the Senate failed to reach agreement.

  Clodius understood even better than Caesar the power of the lower classes. With little eye for the long term, Clodius tried to buy them off with the free distribution of corn and by legalising the collegia (effectively guilds or unions). Thanks to him, politicians could now employ bands of whomever they pleased to help them win elections. Without a police force in Rome, it would be difficult to handle the consequences – but that was not Clodius’ problem.

  At the end of his Bedspread Poem, Catullus laments: ‘All things speakable and unspeakable, muddled together in evil fury, have turned the just minds of our gods away from us.’ To found such observations required little more than a glance at the rival gangs which now lined Rome’s passageways. In fact, Clodius’ staunch acts had precedent in the previous generation, when, in 133 BC, a tribune named Tiberius Gracchus decided to override a veto supported by the Senate and bring legislation directly to the people,9 in order to support farmers who had fallen on hard times after overseas service. The fallout resulted in his murder. His brother, Gaius, had scored greater successes ten years later when he introduced subsidised corn and drafted legislation (albeit ineffective in his own day) that rendered it illegal to execute or exile any Roman citizen who had not first been represented in court. Like his brother before him, he paid for his politicking with his life.

  Still, as Catullus looked out across the city and reflected on his own sorry predicament, he found no reason to doubt that these were the very worst of times. Clodius seemed to be clinging to Gaius Gracchus’ spirit as he set forth a bill that would allow people to outlaw any citizen who put other citizens to death without trial. Even past incidents could be investigated. Clodius’ opportunity to punish Cicero for his treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators had finally come.

  Privately, secretly, the triumvirs were willing to see Cicero removed from public life. At the very least, the senators would be so horrified and distracted by the event that the triumvirs might pursue a more popular policy. Caesar threw Cicero a half-hearted lifeline, saying that he could accompany him to Gaul. But Cicero was too in love with Rome to leave. When Cato, the most obstructive optimate of them all, also left Rome in order to help oversee the annexation of Cyprus, it was clear that the Senate’s walls were weakening.

  Pompey paused for a moment. In the quietness of his study, alone with his thoughts, he experienced something close to a crisis of conscience. Cicero had written to him in the past, addressing him as a friend. There had been times when Cicero invested in him his hopes for reconciliation between the Senate and its magistrates, to put Rome back on an even keel. There was a knock at Pompey’s door. Outside, a group of men, dispatched by Cicero, stood poised to ask Pompey to intervene. Clodius had surrounded the Senate with armed bandits, rendering them powerless to act on Cicero’s behalf. Cicero assumed that they had abandoned him, that his wealth and intellect meant nothing, his humble birth, everything. Pompey could not bring himself to converse with the men in his doorway, nor to sit there, as their desperate pleas fell upon his doorstep.10 He was a son-in-law of Caesar now, and that was where his loyalties lay. He made his way to the other end of his house, and slipped out through the back door.

  Cicero, whose name translates as ‘chickpea’.

  Cicero left for exile in spring 58 BC, and grew his beard long, like a mourner. With so eminent a legal career behind him, he quickly became a symbol of justice. Catullus’ reflection that ‘everyone put justice to flight from his grasping mind’ (Poem 64) would prove to be poignant. As far as many men could see, Cicero, and with him justice, had been cast out.

  For many months, Cicero confined himself to Thessalonica (Salonika, Macedonia). Weight fell from his frame. He had left behind a wife, young son, and the daughter he admired most of all, Tullia, ‘the image of me in face and speech and mind’.11 He wrote a tearful letter to his friend Atticus: ‘Has anyone ever fallen from so significant a station, with so good a cause, with such ability and talent, resourcefulness, favour, and with such great support of all good men?’12 Word then reached him that Clodius’ legislation had been passed. If he were to come within 3,200 stadia (around 600 kilometres) of Italy, he risked punishment by execution. There was nothing left to do. From Thessalonica, he progressed to Dyrrachium (Durrës in Albania), the prostitute-ridden ‘marketplace of the Adriatic’ to wait it out (Poem 36).13

  That same spring, Caesar left for Gaul. The Celtic Helvetii tribe was trying to move west into Transalpine Gaul, savaging peoples friendly to Rome and potentially endangering the province. Caesar seized the opportunity, marched his men towards the area where Geneva now lies, and blocked the Helvetii’s path. No sooner had he engaged them in battle than other tribes were asking for Caesar’s help against hostile Germanic tribes. One move was sufficient to secure him a war. As he gazed out across the territories of Gaul on the other side of Rome’s province – in what is now the north of France, Belgium, Luxemburg, the near side of Germany – Caesar saw the key to funding his continuing career and achieving the particular glory that accompanied Roman conquest.14

  Catullus’ old rival Furius Bibaculus, who had teased him over the effeminacy of his love poetry, turned his hand to composing some Annals of the Gallic War to mark the occasion. It would be some time before Catullus felt impelled to engage poetically with the same theme. He was still young, still unstrung by heartbreak.

  While the city’s politicians hurtled onwards, Catullus grew ever more introspective. He wrote of feelings, and sought reasons. Looking down on the armour he lacked, he urged himself to ‘be strong’.

  Left alone with his imaginings, he sought vengeance through literary release. Overcome increasingly by hatred, he wrote poems in which he cast Lesbia in the guise of a harlot. He made no secret of the fact that his poems hindered reconciliation with the woman they vilified:

  Annals of Volusius, shit-smeared sheets,

  Release a vow on my girl’s behalf.

  For she vowed to holy Venus and Cupid

  That if I were restored to her

  And ceased to circulate torturous iambics

  She would give the choicest writings

  Of the very worst of poets to slow-footed Vulcan

  For burning in the merciless flames.

  (Poem 36)

  Clodia had vowed to burn ‘the choicest writings of the very wo
rst of poets’ (meaning Catullus) if he ceased to circulate his ‘torturous iambics’ about her. She would even welcome him back into her arms. Catullus jested that he would gladly see the ‘shit-smeared sheets’ of a certain Volusius burned, which he was confident the poet Clodia would be familiar with.

  He had lost count of how many people had complained about being ravaged by his poems, but he remained resolute. Catullus simply was not prepared to place limits on his own freedom of speech. His lover’s pronouncement on him as ‘the very worst of poets’ made a more lasting impression than her actual request. The torture of loving and hating in unison, Catullus showed, applied not merely to the heart, but also to the writer’s hand and voice. His poems about Lesbia became harsher and more explicit than ever before, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Anyone may shoot off cruel lines in the heat of the moment, but it was difficult for a woman to shake them off once they had been circulated. Clodia would have a difficult time trying to extract herself from the grip of gossip crafted by intelligent men.

  There is no saying that Catullus ever did find a solution to the vicious circle of loving and hating that inspired these cruel verses. He would not even be so fortunate to have much in the way of time to release him from its torment. But certain events did alter his perspective on his relationship, and cast it in new light. One message in particular was enough to drive him far from Italy in early 57 BC. His family needed him to come home to Verona at once.