by Daisy Dunn
In his poetry collection, Catullus left his reader here, in the forecourt of the tribunal, on the eve of Caelius’ trial on 3/4 April 56 BC. He did not want to enter the open-air court, where a crowd had gathered. He was not of a mind to join the spectators as they gazed expectantly at Caelius Rufus. While Clodia entered the court to witness the prosecution, he stepped back, and left Caelius in the hands of his lawyers.
After Atratinus and two junior lawyers delivered their damning prosecution, Caelius and the defence lawyers braced themselves to speak. How fortunate Caelius was that he had his two former mentors, Crassus and Cicero, speaking on his behalf. No one was better placed than Crassus to testify to his character, and convince the jury that he was not the kind of man who stole from women.
Cicero, for his part, saw this as little more than an opportunity to incriminate the family of Clodius. Caelius might have been guilty of all or some or none of the crimes of which he was accused, but Ptolemy might well have employed him indirectly to overthrow his Alexandrian enemies. Cicero decided not to trouble himself with that possibility.
Approaching the platform, he claimed with a mischievous glint in his eye that he would say nothing of Clodia except what was necessary to counter the charges against his client. A few moments later, and he had ‘made a slip’ and referred to her incestuous behaviour, and accused her of participating in all manner of lewd outdoor activities in the debauched resort of Baiae. As if in a play, he adopted the role of her severe old bearded ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus, and taunted her over why she had been on such familiar terms with the young Caelius that she could lend him gold, but also fear poison. He veiled the matter of Dio’s assassination so tantalisingly with his talk of gold and poison that his excitable audience of jurors might easily have forgotten what they had come here to deliberate over.10 With his spiteful tongue, Cicero made Clodia out to be a prostitute with whom a young man was quite free to sport. After one such liaison, he insinuated, Caelius Rufus had spurned her, providing her with the incentive to make false allegations against him.
As Catullus might have observed, it was rather more likely that Clodia had spurned young Caelius. It was with great petulance, after all, that the young man stepped forward to declare her a quadrantia Clytemnestra, a ‘penny Clytemnestra’, a prostitute and a murderess.11 This delighted Cicero, who then exclaimed before the gawping jury that, despite her inheritance and noble birth, Clodia Metelli could be bought for a quadrans, the price of entry to the cheap Roman baths.12 She was cheap, indeed, and she was as much a murderess of her husband, Metellus Celer, as Clytemnestra was of hers, the Homeric war hero Agamemnon. Revelling still further in myth, Cicero called her a ‘Palatine Medea’13 – the woman who, according to Euripides’ drama, killed her children to spite Jason after he deserted her.
If Clodia had lent Caelius gold, ignorant of the murderous use to which he would put it, then she might have been only too happy to play a part in the trial and watch him suffer. She could hardly have anticipated that Cicero would turn the situation on its head and suggest that, like Medea spurned by Jason, she had fabricated the story, the poison and gold, to seek vengeance against the man who left her. A part of Catullus must have appreciated the comparison made between his former lover and the murderesses of myth. And yet, Clodia Metelli emerged from Cicero’s account as a figure of myth herself. Between the lines of his character assassination there was a hint that she was as vulnerable as any lover was.
When he likened her to Medea, Cicero might have quoted from Euripides’ Medea, but instead chose the very passage from Ennius’ Latin version that had inspired the beginning of Catullus’ Bedspread Poem:
Utinam ne in nemore Pelio …
If only in the forest of Pelion [the ship] had not14
In his poem, Catullus had drawn a comparison between the plights of Medea and Ariadne, who regretted the time that Jason and Theseus respectively crossed seas to acquire their help in achieving Heroism. In his defence speech for Caelius, Crassus drew upon Medea’s wish that from ‘the forest of Pelion’ the Argo had not sailed the Black Sea. His wish was that Ptolemy Auletes had never come to Rome, like a new Jason, to ask for help in reclaiming the kingship from which he had been expelled. Perhaps it was only now, as Cicero wove the myths together before the court in a new context, that Catullus appreciated how far the unhappiness he had perceived in the Heroic Age coloured all of contemporary Rome. In Cicero’s springtime law court, it was as though his Bedspread Poem had come to life.15
The flight of justice and refusal of gods to ‘dignify our assemblies with their presence’ in the Iron Age, which Catullus described in his Bedspread Poem, were there in Rome for all to see when Caelius was acquitted, free to pursue his legal career, quite unscathed. Cicero had done little to address the main charges. He had put far more energy into blackening Clodia’s character, and providing a theory about how she foiled Caelius’ plot to silence her with poison. The scenes he painted had been pure farce, with Clodia instructing her slaves to hide in the baths in order to catch the slave Caelius had employed to do the terrible deed. The defence had succeeded in offering the crowds a greater spectacle than that which Clodius had put on in the theatres for the festival of the Great Mother. Hosted so soon after his return from exile, and against the troubling background of supernatural occurrences in Italy, the trial had provided Cicero with an opportunity to persuade Rome that the source of the city’s moral depravation lay in the blood of the Clodii Pulchri.
As Catullus turned his angry hand again to his wax tablet, he offered his readers little reason to deviate from that view:
Caelius, our Lesbia, the Lesbia,
That Lesbia, whom Catullus loved alone
More than himself and all his family,
Now on crossroads and in alleys
Wanks the descendants of great-hearted Remus.
(Poem 58)
Many a Latin poet used nostra, ‘our’, for ‘my’, but when Catullus used the word in the first line of his poem he seemed to want it to be read as ‘our’. For here he stood with Caelius Rufus, both united in a victory of sorts, but convinced still that his love for Lesbia had exceeded that of any other man in the world. That very devotion had been his destruction:
My mind has been reduced to this because of you,
Lesbia, and so destroyed itself through its devotion to you
That it could not now think well of you if you were exemplary,
Nor stop loving you if you did everything.
(Poem 75)
Catullus’ Bedspread Poem and its quite coincidental reminiscences in Cicero’s rhetoric had shown that it was easier to situate the beginning of man’s fall in the Heroic Age, when the myths themselves provided tales that could be used to demonstrate heroic failings, than it was to accept that the disease of the times was purely endemic to this point in the Republic. Placing blame for man’s demise on the ancient Greek myth of the Ages diminished the culpability of the people who inhabited these times – people like Clodia, who was at once a victim of the age in which she lived. Yet at heart, Catullus believed as much as Cicero that the gods were not to blame for this, only those who failed to worship them. They were all just victims of each other’s transgressions and mistakes.
THE ROMAN STAGE
Calling upon the shining temples
When the annual rites of festival days arrived
The father of the gods would watch one hundred
Bulls fall prostrate in sacrifice.
Often wayfaring Bacchus led from the high summit
Of Parnassus his Euhoe-crying, wild-hair flowing
Bacchantes, when all of Delphi rushed from the city at once
To welcome the god, rejoicing, with smoking altars.
(Poem 64, lines 387–93)
THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN evenings since the trial when Clodia longed to find comfort in the arms of Catullus as they flapped open and closed like a bird. All the while he clung to the image of her depravity, ‘as a mule does her iron slip
per in a sticky chasm’ (Poem 20).1
He could hardly bring himself to say her name. If ever he began to fantasise about her, he hated himself for it. The more he pulled himself away from her, the more he thought about her. He wanted nothing more than to be free of her. He opened his eyes to the growing architecture of Rome’s empire, and began to notice how the city emulated that growth. But each time he looked, there she was. He found her in nascent buildings, old structures, and crumpled world maps.
Catullus watched as Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus set their sights on three different parts of the globe. The coalition that still tied them was not unbreakable. They could taste their unpopularity in Rome, where voters had asserted their right to steer politics by electing as praetors two men who despised them. Even from his quarters in Gaul, where he was waging his wars, Caesar could feel that they would suffer still worse the following year.
In the heat of summer, dour Cato, the obstructive optimate senator who had so bitterly thwarted Caesar’s ambitions for a triumph, returned from Cyprus. He and his fellow Romans had succeeded in reducing the island to form part of their province of Cilicia.2 Cato was determined that 55 BC would be his year. He made no delay in announcing his candidature for the praetorship, while one of the candidates running for a consulship had connections in Transalpine Gaul, and looked certain to want to supplant Caesar there should he be elected.
Startled, Caesar called two summits, one at Ravenna, another at Lucca. He was aware of how strained the relationship between Pompey and Crassus had been. Between its cracks and the external pressures of the magistrates at Rome he discerned disaster. Fearful of losing his hold on Gaul, as well as Rome, he renewed their agreement and told Pompey and Crassus that they were to do all they could to ensure that they were elected as consuls for 55 BC. His own command in Gaul would be renewed by five years, long enough, he hoped, to complete its annexation to Rome. Following another shared year in office, Pompey and Crassus would be rewarded with five-year commands of their own, in Spain and Syria respectively.
Caesar brushed his fingers across the bags of money he authorised as bribes. Like Jupiter nodding assent to the plans of some minor god, he signalled for the military to whisper words of intimidation in the ears of Rome’s voters. Cowering under duress, they elected Pompey and Crassus, who wrapped their arms across the shoulders of the man they backed against Cato: Publius Vatinius – an unappealing man with unsightly growths on his neck who bragged about achieving a second consulship before he had completed his first junior magistracy. In Caesar’s eyes, Vatinius was a safe choice. He had already proved himself his ally by helping him to acquire his position in Cisalpine Gaul when the Senate had allotted him merely the silvae callesque of Italy. Vatinius waltzed triumphantly into the Senate House, leaving Cato crestfallen at the doors. Eight of the ten elected tribunes were loyal to the triumvirs.
Pompey longed to be appreciated again on his own merit rather than as one wheel of an uneven wagon. While Crassus would dedicate much of his time to preparing himself and his army for Syria at the end of the year, Pompey was standing joyfully on the Campus Martius in the north-west of the city. A structure was rising beneath a giant web of scaffolds. This year, he would unveil it: Rome’s first stone theatre.
He remembered how excitedly he had gazed at the Greek theatre of Mitylene on Lesbos during an earlier trip there. Over time, he had accumulated funds to construct a building that rivalled it not only in size, but in sheer splendour. As he stood in the middle of the Campus, he surveyed the erection of his ninety-metre stage, its seats stretching in a wide convex bow.
Some of the older, more traditional residents, not least of them Cicero, looked askance at the size and permanence of the new building.3 They were used to wooden, temporary structures, not monstrosities like this. But as curious spectators perched upon steps which led up to a new Temple of Venus Victrix (the goddess in her guise as bringer of victory) to the theatre’s west, Pompey assured them that this, the religious centre, was the true highlight of his seminal complex. Bookending the vast stage was a new meeting house for the Senate and enormous portico leading to four further temples in the east.
It was the portico that obsessed Catullus. It formed a grand colonnade filled with plants, sculptures – and shade, the one key aspect that undermined the religious decorum Pompey sought by embedding his theatre within these temple precincts. Catullus wrote nothing to praise the ingenuity of the structure, or to commemorate the grand opening; these shadows fascinated him more.
In Poem 55, he described how he lost a poet friend Camerius in the city one day, and wandered over to Pompey’s portico to try to find him. Catullus was in his late twenties, but seemed like a child as he despaired over the disloyalty and arrogance Camerius had showed him by disappearing from sight. Catullus searched the portico frantically: ‘I grabbed all the young girls … gathering in the colonnade of Pompey the Great,’ before one of them bared her breasts and asked Catullus to search her cleavage for his friend. ‘Pompey’s portico with its shade-giving columns, famous for its exotic woven canopies and rows of plane trees growing in unison’ would prove no less convenient a location for sourcing lovers when Ovid, Propertius, and Martial walked through it later.4
The portico with its soliciting prostitutes and dishonourable chancers was where Catullus’ search for Camerius ended, not began. It was an afterthought. Pompey had hoped that it would encourage people away from the cramped city centre, but this part of the Campus Martius still felt to Catullus like an outpost, a suburb to the hotspots he and fellow poets like Camerius had been in the habit of visiting: the Circus Maximus, the large sandy racetrack in the shadow of the Palatine Hill; the Forum’s bookstalls; and the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.
Caesar hoped to change that. He had seen for himself how crowded the Forum’s law courts were. He would not allow Pompey to cast him in shadow. He hoped to amass enough money in Gaul to begin next year a project of his own, a new forum to be situated next to the existing one. Like Pompey’s complex, it would have porticoes and a temple to Venus, and he would name it after himself.5
Catullus, who would not live long enough to see the new forum rise, paid witness in a poem to the old centre in its sorry state. He looked up at the Temple of Castor and Pollux; where before he might have found inspiration from the twin gods of travel, he saw now merely emptiness. Clodius Pulcher had transformed the building into a storage shed for his weaponry and destroyed its grand steps. It stood like a tomb on a hillside, leaving his eye to fall solely upon a salax taberna, a seedy inn, situated nine pillars away from it.6 Catullus describes the taberna in Poem 37 – bursting to the seams with drunken idiots and horny desperadoes, the white-toothed Egnatius among them. Catullus threatened to scrawl penises all over its walls in anger. For there, awaiting a queue of men desperate to have their way with her, was the girl who was ‘loved as much as no other girl will be loved’: Lesbia.
An inn of rowdy men remained for Catullus an inn of potential suitors for Clodia’s hand. The sight of it persuaded him to revisit the strength of the lover’s pact he had once made:
No woman can truly say that she was loved
As much as my Lesbia was loved by me.
No faith in any pact was ever as great
As that discovered on my part in my love for you.
(Poem 87)
Catullus turned from addressing his words to the world in the first couplet to addressing Lesbia directly in the second. He had been so active in loving her, but she had never been anything more than passive: ‘was loved’. Passive was how he now felt. His words were eloquent, but they served as an entrée for the deeper emotions he conveyed in another of his poems, Poem 76. In this piece he looked back from the same vantage point in order to recount his loyalty to his lover alongside his religious and familial devotion:
If a man can take pleasure in recollecting former acts
Of kindness, when he considers himself to be moral,
Not to have broken t
rust that is sacred, not to have
Abused in any pact the gods’ sanctity in the interest
Of deceiving people, then many joys lie ahead over
A long life, Catullus, grown for you
From this love that was rejected.
For whatever men can say or do to be kind
To someone, it has been said and done by you.
All your kind gestures have perished for being entrusted
To the heart of a woman who did not care for them.
So why torture yourself any longer?
Why not take stock in yourself and turn away
And stop being miserable when the gods do not desire you to be?
It is difficult to relinquish suddenly a love that long endured.
It is difficult, but you must accomplish it somehow:
This is your only hope, this is what you must overcome,
You must do this, whether it is possible or not.
Oh gods, if you can take pity, or if ever you have brought
Ultimate deliverance to anyone on the very verge of death,
Look upon me in my misery and, if I have lived my life faithfully,
Seize this plague and contagion from me
Which, like a torpor creeping deep into my limbs,
Has driven every happiness from my heart.
I am not now asking that she might love me back,
Or for the impossible – that she court chastity.
But I wish that I could be well and rid of this terrible sickness.
Oh gods, grant me this in return for my morality.
(Poem 76)
In light of everything he had done, all that was left to console himself with was the knowledge that he had acted in good faith and honour. Should he have had to face his day of judgement there and then, he was confident that he would be received favourably. If it could be agreed that he had never broken faith, or abused his relationship with the gods – his reference to a pact, foedus, was more fitting here than it was in relation to Lesbia – then he believed, alas misguidedly, that he should have a long life ahead of him, touched by happiness that would grow from the love he had seen rejected. The poem was all the more melancholic in Latin, where his words meandered like broken thoughts.
