Catullus' Bedspread

by Daisy Dunn

  The question that plagued him here was not where had it all gone wrong, but rather where had he gone wrong. He had run through Lesbia’s faults and he had run through his own faults, but never did he put to poetry a straight examination of their faults. There was the subtle moment of recognition of the inadequacy of his station, but no line-to-line study of their mutual incompatibility. The poems showed that he was not over her. When he came to contemplate the triumvirs’ progress across the furthest reaches of the known world, she remained constantly on his mind.

  While Rome was in chaos, Julius Caesar ventured like an athlete across the Alps, and repaired his strength in the dining rooms of generous hosts. His etiquette and manners were exemplary. He liked meals to be served in two separate rooms: one for his officers and any Greek friends who happened to come calling, the other for Roman citizens and important provincials. After that he was an amenable guest. He needed little wine, and was too polite to decline even the stalest of dishes.7

  Almost every winter since he had arrived in Cisalpine Gaul, Caesar had established private military quarters for himself and his men, and during these times he had the chance to develop his friendship with Catullus’ father.8 Dinner at the home of a wealthy Gaul was a luxury to which he had seldom been averse. He was treated to the best of local produce: fruit, fresh fish. The two men talked between mouthfuls about Pontic fishermen and boats, aged Transalpine Gauls who still wore leggings not togas, the Britons with their skin dyed deep blue whom Caesar longed to see for himself.9 Their friendship flew in the face of Catullus’ efforts to remain aloof from Caesar and his coterie, but there was nothing he could do to stop his father from welcoming the vain commander into their family home.

  Catullus had written nothing of his Gallic War up until now, the battles coinciding with Bithynia and the obsessions of youth. But as Caesar ventured across the Alps and beyond the Rhine, he knew that other writers, including his rival Furius Bibaculus, were turning to Caesar’s exploits for inspiration. Much to his pleasure, Furius’ long poem on the Gallic War was not entirely successful. (Horace would later deem Furius a ‘Turgid Alpine’ for his verbosity and provincial interest.10) But as the wars carried Caesar into unknown worlds, it became increasingly difficult for Catullus to ignore them.

  As it was, Caesar himself was providing regular written dispatches, and composing a seven-book commentary (eight, if counting the one a friend was writing for him) on the Gallic War. Catullus could not overlook his writing or the high regard in which his contemporaries held his penmanship. Cicero was full of praise for the clarity and elegance of Caesar’s prose. It was to-the-point, never entrenched in grandiose rhetorical flourishes, a generous compliment considering Cicero’s profession, but one that could just as well be applied to his own oratory.11 As a young man, Caesar had taken a course in rhetoric under the celebrated Greek orator Apollonius Molon, who just happened to have been one of Cicero’s tutors, too.12 When he travelled between Rome and Spain, Caesar wrote an essay he unimaginatively titled ‘The Journey’.13 In addition to his military reports, he also later found time during his tedious trips back and forward across the Alps to write an essay ‘On Analogy’. His diaries of the Gallic War were another literary offering.14

  When it came to other people’s writing, Catullus never hesitated to offer a critique, which normally took the form of a barbed attack. Caesar’s talent as a writer proved to be the one thing about him he could not criticise. The same could not be said of his chief engineer in Gaul, Mamurra.

  Catullus wrote several poems about Mamurra, whom he tended to call ‘Mentula’ – a sobriquet that could mean ‘penis’, or something less anatomical in nuance. He was of equestrian stock and a famous resident of Formiae (Formia), on the west coast of Italy.15 A thousand years later, the locals still knew the area as Mamorrano after Mamurra’s wealthy relatives.16 Catullus knew of an estate Mamurra owned containing ‘every breed of fowl, fish, meadows, fields and game’ (Poem 114). He begrudged him his money, but not the way he squandered it. Mamurra’s family owed nothing of its enduring reputation to Catullus. As Caesar went about his province and made known his intentions to carry Rome to Britain for the very first time in its history, Catullus embarked upon a quest to savage his man in Gaul.

  He battered Mamurra on so many fronts that, had it not been for his tough military armour, he should have been left a wreck. First, Mamurra had the presumption to think himself a poet when he had scant talent. His writing was atrocious:

  Mentula tries to scale the mountain of the Muses.

  The Muses hurl him headlong with pitchforks.

  (Poem 105)

  As if this was not bad enough, Memmius was ‘shagging around’ (Poem 94): Catullus wrote viciously of his girlfriend Ameana, ‘a girl fucked by everyone’, whose big nose, ugly feet, pale eyes, stubby fingers, saliva-drenched lips, inelegant tongue, were still nothing on her choice of Mamurra as a lover (Poem 43, Poem 41). Her name suggested she was little more than a slave, someone Mamurra had just picked up during his travels.17 She even had the cheek to seek 10,000 sesterces from Catullus himself (Poem 41). In Gaul, they called her a beauty; when Catullus heard that the Gauls compared her looks to those of Lesbia, he could only exclaim: ‘O saeculum insapiens et infacetum!’ (‘Ignorant and dull-witted is our age’), in clear echo of Cicero’s seminal outpouring during the Catilinarian fiasco not ten years earlier, ‘O tempora, o mores!’ (‘Oh the times, oh the customs!).

  There was room for exaggeration in an epigram, but when the source of Catullus’ anger concerned Mamurra, he felt justified in believing that the world had lost its senses. As far as Catullus was prepared to respond to the Gallic War poetically, Mamurra would be his scapegoat.

  A jibe at Mamurra proved often to be a veiled criticism of Caesar. The Mamurra Catullus described in his poems dallied with the common, money-seeking girl Ameana from Gaul. And so Romans at home composed frivolous little rhymes in which they imagined Caesar carousing Gaul for prostitutes, a fine way to spend their taxes. Hostile to Caesar personally, if not professionally, for the control he operated over the city from Gaul, these men and women played upon his popular image as a womaniser. When, years later, Caesar returned from Gaul in triumph, many greeted him with virtuosos in the same fashion.18

  Through Mamurra, too, Catullus found occasion to criticise Caesar’s foreign expenditure. Unusually for a man with money, especially new money, Catullus knew its value. As in Spain, so in Gaul, Caesar was plundering and pillaging whatever he could, anxious to repay his debts, anxious to accrue greater influence, not least by earning enough to pay for his own forum. In Britain, he hoped to find exquisite pearls to add to his personal collection of fine luxuries.19 The poor felt certain that they would be the last to see a crumb of his wealth. True to expectation, Caesar took so much gold from Gaul that he flooded the market in Italy, causing its price to plummet.20

  In an attack on such profligacy, Catullus characterised Mamurra as the king of rakes. He made an example of Mamurra because he disliked him – and he disliked him in large part because he failed to learn from his mistakes. The man was born to money, but spent it; he profited in Pontus under Pompey, but spent it, and in Spain under Caesar, but … the cycle went on. In several of his poems, Catullus called him ‘bankrupt’, yet he also described his expansive lands (Poem 115). Asset rich, but cash poor, as praefectus fabrum, or chief engineer, to Caesar once more, Mamurra clearly had his eye on one thing only.

  Like Calvus, who scorned a man ‘learned at dice’, Catullus hated chancers; and gambling was illegal.21 In one particularly vituperative poem he blustered:

  Who but a shameless, grasping gambler

  Could look on, who could endure it,

  As Mamurra acquires the riches Long-Haired Gaul

  Once had, and remotest Britain, too?

  (Poem 29)

  Catullus’ chief fear was for his native Cisalpine Gaul, more than ‘Long-Haired’ Transalpine Gaul or Britain, but with Caesar’s gaze cast sternly across the
English Channel, Catullus knew that the kind of conduct typified by Mamurra could seep into the new world. As it was, Mamurra’s greed had made prisoners of Asia Minor, Spain, and his homeland Formiae. If Caesar could not hold his men in check, it seemed that there was little chance he could hold his own greed in check either.

  Catullus had seen that the path was ready for Mamurra to take his foul habits across the mysterious seas to Britain, ‘the remotest island in the west’ (Poem 29). By August 55 BC, Caesar had subdued most of Transalpine Gaul. The Romans had enjoyed victory over the tribes of Normandy and Brittany, clearing the coasts nearest the Channel for an imminent attack.

  Catullus turned his hand away from Mamurra to unmask the roots of his displeasure: Caesar and Pompey, the ‘shameless, grasping gambler’ and his partner in crime:

  Why nurture this disgrace? What are his strengths,

  Other than devouring inherited wealth?

  Was it on his account, most dedicated men of the city,

  Father-and son-in-law, that you lost everything?

  (Poem 29)

  Sparing no thought for the prospect of Roman glory, or the need for stability on Italy’s borders in the face of ever-migrating tribes, Catullus could discern no greater reason for the Gallic War than his leaders’ unquenchable avarice.

  Perhaps it came as a relief to him to find that, for all Caesar’s hopes, the initial crossing to Britain proved anticlimactic. The British felt no real urgency to mass a large attack against their Mediterranean visitors. Documenting the landings in his Gallic War, Caesar even described the people of Kent as being particularly civilised.22 The few bloody engagements that did take place lacked finesse, and atrocious weather led to an early and swift withdrawal by Roman troops.

  For the moment, it did not matter that Caesar had not achieved war. For Rome it was enough that he had dipped his toe in British slurry. At news of his landing, the Senate decreed a twenty-day period of thanksgiving in recognition of the undertaking.23 Once back in Gaul again, Caesar set his men to preparing ships and supplies for a larger and more intimidating invasion the following spring.

  In a poem, Catullus expressed wonderment at recent events, ‘the monuments of great Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, and terrifying and far-off Britons’ (Poem 11). What must have struck his friends as a puzzling volte-face perhaps concealed a subtle dig at Furius, who had written offensive poems about Caesar in the past, but was now providing Rome with such earnest and verbose Annals in praise of his Gallic War. Perhaps Catullus’ words drew on those Furius wrote about ‘the wintry Alps’ and ‘head of the Rhine’.24

  Easy as it was for him to mock Furius’ duplicity or sudden admiration for Caesar, Catullus never questioned the accuracy of Caesar’s reports. While it was true that the mighty triumvir had penetrated far enough to confirm Roman rumours that Britons were huge and ‘terrifying’, even by the start of 54 BC, only limited inroads had been achieved there. Shortly before his first British invasion, Caesar had indeed made a bold venture across ‘the Gallic Rhine’ via an impressive yet rapidly constructed bridge, but he also wrote that he had to have that bridge destroyed merely weeks after it was completed to protect his men from future assault after he found the Germans reluctant to fight on the other side.25 In the summer of 55 BC, neither Britons nor Germans could yet countenance the full force of Caesar’s ambition. But Catullus, by listing these places, clearly could.

  The fears Mamurra had embodied, about Roman greed for the world beyond, proved prescient. Mamurra appeared to profit from all that Long-Haired Gaul possessed. His house on Rome’s Caelian Hill became the first of Rome’s residences to have its walls encrusted entirely in marble. The dedicatee of Catullus’ poetry book, Cornelius Nepos, added that it was also the first to have all its columns built from solid Euboean or Luna marble, which everyone knew was very fine indeed.

  Mamurra emerged from Catullus’ poems as a symbol of not only everything he detested about wastefulness and the Gallic War, but also as the ugly underbelly of the coalition. He was as if an alter ego to its most ambitious member, and for all Caesar’s accomplishments, Catullus was not to let him forget it. Calvus once wrote a poem lampooning Pompey, ‘the Great man everyone fears’, for scratching his head with one finger, a gesture taken to mean that he desired a male lover.26 He had also written verses mocking Caesar, and now Catullus did the same. Mamurra and Caesar, he decided, were united by more than their greed:

  A beautiful meeting of shameful lovers,

  Mamurra and penetrated Caesar.

  It’s no surprise: there are similar stains on both,

  The one a City dye, the other Formiae,

  Stamped on them and not removed.

  Equally sickly, twins, the two of them,

  Both delicately versed on one little bed,

  One no more voracious an adulterer than the other,

  Allied in their rivalry over little girls.

  A beautiful meeting of shameful lovers.

  (Poem 57)

  Was it on his account, unparalleled commander,

  That you were on the remotest island in the west,

  So that your overindulged Cock, Mentula,

  Might absorb twenty or thirty million sesterces?

  (Poem 29)

  When Caesar came by these poems for the first time, there was no pausing to consider their poetic significance.27 He could not have needed any more than a fleeting glimpse at a single page, or a whispered paraphrase of what he could only imagine the world had already put to heart, to know that his honour was again at stake. His eye might have lingered momentarily over Catullus’ phrase unice imperator, since it meant ‘unparalleled’, but could also offer a hint that Catullus saw him as the unique leader, the dictator. But the more offensive part came in Catullus’ suggestion of his erotic activity with other men. To be called a cinaedus, a penetrated man, was among the worst insults imaginable.

  Caesar had not been able to live down the verses Calvus had written mocking him over his supposed liaison with the late Bithynian king.28 Driven either by a sudden crisis of conscience or a bid to further his legal career, Calvus had, through mutual friends, made an appeal for forgiveness to Caesar. Pre-empting his apology, Caesar wrote him a letter to convey his forgiveness for his indiscretions.

  As far as anyone could see, Catullus followed suit. He issued Caesar with an apology, and in return he received not only his forgiveness, but an invitation to dinner. Catullus arrived at Caesar’s residence one evening, and joined him for a spot of feasting, some cups of wine, and entertainment, as his father did so often. Whatever the soirée meant to Catullus, he did not allude to it in his book of poems.

  The ancient biographer Suetonius, however, considered this an event so momentous that he drew special attention to it in his historical account of Caesar. Suetonius seems to have been heartily impressed by the commander’s reaction:

  He did not pretend that with his poems about Mamurra he had not put a permanent stain upon him, but on the same day as he apologised, Caesar invited him to dinner, and his friendship with his father continued as it had before. 29

  Acts of clemency were not unusual among the later emperors, who formed the focus of the remainder of Suetonius’ book. Whereas the historian Tacitus recorded that Caesar endured the harsh verses of both Furius, Catullus’ rival, and Catullus, Suetonius made no reference to Furius’ poems. If only because of his father’s friendship with Caesar, Catullus’ verses were the more shocking. As far as Suetonius was concerned, Catullus’ poems had provided Caesar with an opportunity to demonstrate his great benevolence.

  But Suetonius might not have known the whole story. While so many of his friends had been won over by Caesar’s charms and accomplishments, Catullus had not. His father was a friend of Caesar; his friend Calvus had been reconciled with Caesar; and Cinna was also to be friends with Caesar: when he eventually reached the tribunate, Cinna would even draw up a bill proposing that Caesar should be allowed to marry as many women as he liked ‘for the sake of
begetting children’.30 Surrounded by ties to the man whom, as far as anyone reading his poetry could tell, he detested, Catullus was well placed to hatch a plan.

  If he could obtain a reaction and public gesture of magnanimity from Caesar for something still cruder than his friend Calvus’ Bithynian verses, Catullus would acquire an indelible notoriety of his own. On Caesar’s side, if he could be seen to take these verses immediately in his stride, he would appear the bigger man. The risks were high, with Catullus particularly liable to go too far, but both men could benefit from a mutual agreement. It would have been, perhaps, the only thanks Catullus’ father was prepared to accept from his hibernal houseguest.

  There remained among Catullus’ surviving poems an additional threat, tacked on to the end of a series of insults directed at various men, presumably Caesar’s subordinates: ‘You’ll rage again at my innocent iambics, unparalleled commander’ (Poem 54). Had Caesar truly found the poems so offensive, he would have done everything he could to ensure that all copies were destroyed before they could be included in Catullus’ poetry collection. If some such arrangement did take place between Caesar, Catullus’ father, and Catullus, then they deceived not only Suetonius, but millennia of historians in their wake.

  A FLOWER ON THE EDGE OF THE MEADOW