Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  Catullus was right to be suspicious. Years after having his name embedded in Lucretius’ book of Epicurean philosophy, Memmius contemplated levelling Epicurus’ former house and garden in Athens for a new building project.6 Cicero, though never the most fervent Epicurean, wrote to Memmius to gauge his intentions over the site, which he knew was supposed to stay in the hands of teachers of the Epicurean school of thought in perpetuity.7 Whichever way the dispute was eventually resolved, Memmius was clearly a fake who did not care a fig for the philosophy of Lucretius’ book.

  Catullus had to be grateful that he was not the only true poet in the entourage. Cinna would be good company, especially as there was only room for so many books in the deckhouse. An early draft of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura might have been among them.8 Unlike Catullus, Cinna had travelled to Bithynia at least once before, and therefore knew what treats awaited them on those distant shores. Together, they were more than ready to mine the region for poetic, as well as pecuniary, gain. But first, they had to get there.

  The Aegean stretched out before them, peppered with islands. Crete was the largest, but there was no telling this when they glided past its skinny side – the point of the javelin, not the full stretch. On Crete, men said, Jupiter’s mother concealed him as an infant so that he might avoid the fate of his brothers and sisters, swallowed whole by their father, the god king Saturn, who feared usurpation by one of his offspring. It was thanks to the secure walls of a cave on Mount Ida here that Jupiter grew up to overthrow his father, and take his seat as the king of the immortals.

  The island was home to the ancient kingdom of King Minos, whose wife, it was said, was inspired by divine lust for a bull. She instructed Daedalus, an Athenian master craftsman, to fashion a contraption shaped like a cow, into which she clambered, spread her legs, and had a novel kind of intercourse. The resulting child was the Minotaur. King Minos had him locked up in a complex maze, another piece of ingenious engineering by the great Daedalus. In the story Catullus would furnish in his Bedspread Poem, the Minotaur demanded the flower of Athens’ youth to feast on until the Greek hero Theseus arrived and sought the help of Ariadne, the Minotaur’s half-sister, in navigating the labyrinth to kill him.

  On their ship, Catullus and his crew passed also the island of Naxos, where Theseus was said to have abandoned Ariadne after performing his feat. It was on a beach here, as Catullus would describe, that the wine god Bacchus clapped his lustful eyes upon the young princess for the first time.

  Naxos, Melos, Delos: ‘Eternal summer gilds them yet, but all, except their sun, is set’, as Lord Byron observed in ‘The Isles of Greece’ for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – and Memmius’ crew might have given a similar description. Mithridates had laid waste to many of these isles, leaving their inhabitants in turmoil, and their more fortunate monuments clinging to their foundations. The colours of each charming mass, more islet-like than island, proved nonetheless a welcome reprieve in the midst of the dark velvet sea.

  Catullus and his cohort might have changed ships for a smaller vessel once they neared the coast of modern Turkey. Decades later, during Emperor Trajan’s rule in the early second century AD, the author Pliny the Younger travelled to Bithynia and tied off at Ephesus before embarking on lighter vessels to complete his journey.9 On a second boat like his, Catullus could make his way past Lesbos, ancient home of Sappho, and progress up into the Hellespont.

  Catullus paused here a while, and looked out from the poop deck towards the oyster-rich city of Lampsacus. In a poem attributed to him, he dedicated the place to Priapus, the fertility god famed for his impressive erection:

  I dedicate and consecrate this place to you, Priapus,

  Where your own home of Lampsacus lies, and where [corruption] Priapus.

  For within its own cities the coastal Hellespont,

  More oyster-rich than other coasts, worships you above all.

  (Fragment I)

  Given the erotic associations of the god, Catullus’ poem was remarkably restrained and tightly focused. It was as if the novel sight of Lampsacus and its oysters touched him more at that moment than the divinity himself. Catullus was looking enthusiastically across the sea as he travelled through places he had only read about.

  His ship swam steadily on into the Propontis (Sea of Marmara), where the waves trussed relentlessly at its sides, and other men’s vessels passed like prowling tigers. Starboard was Bithynia. Port was Thrace, where the Romans believed the Bithynians had originated.10 An ancient king of Thrace, Tereus, it was said, once concealed here his sister-in-law Philomela, raped her, and silenced her by removing her tongue. The woman revealed her tragic ordeal in a tapestry, and her sister, Procne, killed Tereus’ son and fed him to his father for dinner. The gods then turned the troubled family into birds. Conquered by Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, Thrace remained a region of varied cultures and ethnic tribes.

  As Catullus gazed out across the waters that divided them, he understood why the Thracians and Bithynians shared a passion for shipcraft. Each day, the Thracians trawled their woods and mountains and the Bithynians their forests of oak, beech, plane, and pine for timber. For generations, the men of Bithynia had prided themselves on their ability to load their majestic, beautifully carved vessels with heavy planks for export. Every time a ship passed their coasts, laden with timber – or marble – the townspeople would gaze out admiringly and nod: ‘One of ours’.

  Centuries ago, Sappho had summoned prayers in a poem for the safe journey of her brother Charaxus as he returned from a trading trip across the sea.11 Catullus’ prayers of the kind had been quite fruitless. The very invention of ships would shortly mark for him, in his poetry, the beginning of man’s decline.

  For now Bithynia remained full of promise. Following so many weeks of bailing bilge from the ship’s filthy decks, that promise was more pregnant than ever as the crew beached their fat-bellied vessel, and began to make their way inland. Great fields brimmed with grain and greenery. The peaks of Mysian Olympus in the distance were still snow-capped, even though it was late spring. Baby crocodiles rolled in the spring at Chalcedon, a town that looked out across the water to Byzantium in the west.12 Great throngs of people passed by a temple dedicated to the Great Mother, a goddess Catullus would one day write about.13

  At Nicaea (modern Iznik), Bithynia’s second city, Memmius established the group’s headquarters. Measuring sixteen stadia in circumference, Nicaea was founded on a roughly rectangular plan with four gates and streets constructed on a grid system. So perfect were Nicaea’s right angles that someone standing in the middle of the city’s gymnasium could easily see every gate.14 Nearby, the waters of the gentle Ascanian Lake oozed alongside laurels and hyacinths and blossoms. Assuming, for a passing moment, the language of Homer, Catullus described Nicaea’s hot plains as ‘udder-rich’.

  Pompey had worked hard to transform the kingdom into a Roman province, but it still hovered somewhere between the two states. In the shadows of the wheat fields and makeshift enclosures on their borders lay the rust of decades of strife and broken spirits. For centuries kings had viewed the expansive territory and smiled proudly over the crops which looked, to foreign eyes, rich but monotonous. With the kings gone, Bithynia felt desolate. Nowhere was this truer than in Nicomedia, a little north of Nicaea, where the Bithynian royal quarters had been located. There was no one there now to thrash out proposals to the politicians of Rome, as had been their monarchs’ wont; only empty halls through which Romans strolled, smiling silently at the scale of their new empire.

  Convention dictated that Catullus should approach Nicomedia with solemnity, but that expectation was sufficient in itself to trigger sordid thoughts. As a poet who relished the opportunity to jest at another man’s expense, it was difficult for him not to picture Nicomedia as the hallowed spot where Julius Caesar enjoyed his first, exceedingly shameful, sexual encounter.

  Many years earlier, Caesar had taken up service in Bithynia under the governor Marcus Minu
cius Thermus. His particular instruction was to muster a fleet to blockade the port of Mitylene on Lesbos, which was siding with Mithridates in the wars. He did his duty, but dallied so long at the court of the Bithynian king Nicomedes IV that gossip quickly spread that he had become entangled in the royal bedsheets.15

  Catullus’ little poet friend Calvus, he of the bald head, wrote mockingly of ‘whatever Bithynia and Caesar’s sexual partner ever had’, and others of ‘the queen’s concubine, inside partner of the royal bed’.16 Seldom one to miss the opportunity to make a lewd reference, Memmius joined in and spread the rumour that Caesar had served as Nicomedes’ ‘cupbearer’ at a debauched dinner party. The handsome boy Ganymede famously served as both cupbearer and lover of Jupiter. It was far more entertaining to tell these stories than of how valiantly Caesar had performed in Thermus’ service. Many would sooner forget the fact that Caesar had been awarded a civic crown of oak leaves for saving the life of another man.17 The greater his success, the crueller the stories became. Cicero loved every moment of it. To think that the man who claimed descent from the goddess of love chose a foreign king to set him on love’s path:

  He was led by attendants to the royal bedchamber, lay down on a golden couch with a purple bedspread, and the virginity of the man who was sprung from Venus was taken in Bithynia …18

  It may have been nonsense, but that did not stop Caesar from having to swear on oath that it was not true, and Catullus from adding flame to the rumour whenever he so inclined.

  Bithynia, however, was not the place to discuss such things. Memmius and his men had come to help govern it as representatives of Rome. They would smooth out the problems which were endemic to a new province, and ensure that Rome was receiving the full complement of debts owed; Catullus would examine the people’s logbooks and correct their mistakes.19 They had to make decisions about how to run the prisons, deal with the lawless and establish order across the province. Ex-convicts could be put to good use at the baths and in the sewers and on sites of public works, they just needed someone to organise them.20

  Catullus would also oversee the construction of new sites and the rebuilding of old ones. When in 111 AD Pliny the Younger was sent by the Emperor Trajan to govern Bithynia, he would find a kingdom that had slipped into considerable disorder and disrepair. He wrote constantly to the emperor asking for advice, just as Pompey, who knew the region intimately, was now able to advise Memmius and his men. Pliny would find the main regions of Nicomedia, Nicaea, and Prusa clogged with unfinished projects: new temples, theatres, baths. Some of the sites had been abandoned by builders who lacked the incentive of payment to complete them, while others had sunk into the marshy ground. Bithynia was supposed to be rich in architects and tradesmen. Apparently few understood how to prevent subsidence.21

  The image of Catullus drawing up columns of taxes and debts, documenting the costs of imports and exports, instructing the tax collectors to tighten their hold on the local land workers who shied away from paying their due, was that of a man considerably matured from the youth who sought only to ‘confound’, conturbo (Poem 5) the kisses he shared with his lover, as though they were loose coins on a banking table. The vocabulary he had subverted for his own ends became in Bithynia his daily reality.

  Catullus disapproved of politicians who mined the provinces for their own gain. He was not, however, immune from hypocrisy, and hoped that this year might bring him some tangible profit of his own. Sadly, Memmius was a tough master. It was not long before Catullus realised that any dreams that he and Cinna and the rest of their party had shared of sailing the seas to pocket the rewards of a fresh province were to be dashed by the governor’s strict regime. Besides, the ease with which they might have plundered the region advised against it. Many a man in Memmius’ position had been convicted of extortion across Rome’s provinces, including Calvus’ father. There were people at home who could recall how eager Memmius had been to deprive Lucullus of a triumph after he profited from the same region. As much as he revelled in his position as the head of a noble entourage, Memmius was ever aware of how proud Pompey was of his achievements in this part of the world. The last thing the great man wanted was to see the successes he had had in creating this province marred by the behaviour of a subordinate.

  It was, however, difficult for the young men in Memmius’ cohort to adhere to such strict principles when Roman tax-farmers were pushing the province further into bankruptcy. Catullus must have seen the men who made it their responsibility to raise profits. One of them was Publius Terentius Hispo, a friend of Cicero, for whom the orator sent a letter of recommendation as he made his way to Bithynia from Italy.22 His job was to collect funds in Bithynia and taxes levied at ports throughout the region.

  Catullus managed to break from his duties and wander down to the Black Sea coast and the vast cold waters. There, in the distance, a waif-like man was casting a giant net into the air. It billowed, and touched down perfectly evenly on the sea’s surface, like a crane coming in to land. Before long, a thousand mullet, mackerel, and baby tuna were streaming into the flaxen web, ‘like battle ranks of the sea’.23

  The anchovies and mackerel which flipped through the shallows had migrated there from the Mediterranean after the last Ice Age, when the Black Sea was merely a lake.24 In spring, mackerel, the scomber scombrus, were in particular preponderance here, which was just as well because mackerel made the finest, and the most expensive salted fish sauce.

  Bithynia and the Hellespont were famous for their salted fish. The Hellenes had feasted on pickled fish for centuries, and the Romans were fond of garum,25 a coveted fish sauce that they consumed as a condiment with meals. Though it was expensive, watering it down with wine or olive oil meant that a little could go a long way. Most recipes only needed a splash, and not everyone was partial to it. Fish sauce had a habit of lingering on the breath and seeping through pores, and some men worried about whether they could sustain an erection if their girlfriends consumed too much of it.26 Others complained that it gave them heartburn.27 Rubbed on externally it was meant to have wide-ranging medicinal benefits, such as the wonderful ability to heal a crocodile bite.28 It would have been wise to keep a bottle in the cabinet, as one never knew when such an eventuality might occur.

  Making garum was a laborious process, as a surviving Bithynian recipe shows. It advises to take small fish, such as anchovies and mackerel, and put them in a bowl of the kind bakers used to knead dough, add six measures of salt per measure of fish, mix, and leave it in a clay pot, uncovered for two or three months – stirring occasionally. Then cover and store. To use it, add two measures of old wine per measure of fish mixture.29

  Considering the intensity of the manufacturing process, it became increasingly attractive to import garum from sites where it could be made on a more industrial scale. The Valerii Catulli appear to have established themselves as importers of garum from Further Spain.30 Catullus’ descendants probably procured it from the first fish-processing plant there, which was situated at Baetica (Baelo Claudia) on the Atlantic coast. At the plant, the rooms for cleaning the fish received water pumped from underground pipes. Dirt washed down their sloping floors, and away. Near the shore, salting vats sat proudly in long lines, some rectangular, others cylindrical, each with smooth, mosaicked hollows. Men sold the salted flesh as it was. The rest – intestines, brains, blood – was piled into the vats and then fermented in the sunlight and great furnaces.31

  As the salted fish fermented on the shore in the heat, the smell was indescribable. Only the ‘polyp’ did not seem to mind, as it snatched the odd fish prematurely from its vat and crawled off to enjoy it away from harm’s reach.32 What was left was carefully strained off into a sticky, viscous, but versatile sauce. With every drop of garum one mopped up with one’s bread, it was possible to forget the stench of what went into it.

  CANVAS

  This bedspread,

  Embroidered with the shapes of men

  Who lived long ago, unveils the
virtues of heroes

  Through the miracle of art.

  (Poem 64, lines 50–1)

  THE BLACK SEA was more than a giant fishpond waiting to be drained. Men sailed its waters in the belief that they were reliving the adventures of heroes, feeling their pain at the oars and valour as storms tossed them off course. They strengthened their spirits with the promise of fulfilling immortalising deeds of their own on distant shores.

  From Troy in the west to Colchis in the east, the coasts nursed rich mythological traditions. Catullus could almost taste them as he traipsed across Bithynia, the Roman province which remained decidedly pre-Roman in its details, the language its people spoke; the coins with thick Greek letters they passed between their fingers.

  He had little reason to doubt that it was a place of immense literary virtue. His dear friend Cinna, with whom he was spending long days calculating taxes under Memmius’ watchful eye, had done much to pique his interest when he returned from there a decade earlier, armed with the most exquisite literary affairs. In his hands he was carrying some dry mallow leaves, inked over with a Greek poem by a man named Aratus.1 A few paces behind him stood a poet in the flesh, Parthenius. Cinna had found him working as a slave in Nicaea, where Memmius’ cohort had their headquarters, and promptly freed him ‘on account of his education’.2 Some years from now, Parthenius would find himself tutoring a young Virgil in Greek.3

  Catullus had to admire him. Like the poets of his set, Parthenius recognised the talents of the Hellenistic poets of the third century BC, and had proved himself their ally in his distaste for verbosity.4 His poetry seemed to conform to what Callimachus preached: that a man should feed his sheep to be fat, but keep his verse slim. If they were not so long, perhaps he would have found Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey somewhat better than ‘pure filth’.5