The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  “But perhaps, Clodia, you prefer me to speak to you as a man of the world? Let me dismiss that stern, rugged figure and choose as my spokesman, most appropriately, that perfect man of the world, your youngest brother, who loves you very much. He asks you what all this to-do is about. Are you out of your head, sister, making such a molehill into a mountain? You took a fancy to the young man next door—to his handsome face and figure. His father gave him little money; you tried to bind him to you with some of yours. But he found he must pay too high for your gifts and he has done with you. What of it? Are there no others? Those gardens of yours by the Tiber which you have fitted up so that all the young men want to take their swim there—what is the use of them if you cannot pick and choose as you want? Why make yourself a nuisance to someone who does not want you?”

  The delight of the audience may be imagined, but Cicero has not yet done with Clodia. Caelius he treats indulgently, with a touch of humorous despair over youth’s careless pursuit of pleasure. Very sad, no doubt. His client cannot be defended on that score; he did what he ought not. “And yet, gentlemen of the jury, we ourselves can remember the hot youth of some among us today. Understand me, gentlemen, I have no intention of naming anyone, but if I had, you will bear me out, I should have no trouble. To speak plain truth, if any woman throws her house open to whosoever desires, if without disguise she leads a courtesan’s life, if she so acts here in the city, in her gardens, at Baiae, that what she is is apparent not only by her gait, her dress, her burning eyes, her freedom of speech, but by such entertainments as only women of that kind offer, would you judge a young man who approached her guilty of wrong or merely bent on a moment’s pleasure? Tell me, Clodia, would a man who had intercourse with that sort of woman—completely unlike yourself, of course—[laughter] be disgraced and degraded in your eyes? If you are not such a one, as I grant you, how could Caelius act with you as he is said to have done? If you are, your life makes null and void any testimony from you.”

  Then he passes on to the charge of poison and his mocking voice takes on the deep sonorous accents of the righteously indignant: “Gentlemen, I saw—I myself saw and with as bitter pain as ever I felt in my life, the excellent Metellus, this lady’s husband, dying, him whom the day before I had met in the senate house, enjoying the full strength of his vigorous prime. I saw him struggling to speak, his voice choked with agony, striking the wall in his paroxysms. From that house Clodia comes and dares to speak of the effect of swift poison?” Cicero knew his case was won. No one in the audience but was glad to believe the worst of the woman whose beauty and wealth and arrogance had made bitterly envious enemies for her everywhere. The shrewd lawyer brought his speech to a swift close. It ends with the statement astonishing to the modern reader, that the charge rested on nothing substantial, no logical argument, no conclusion necessitated by the premises, but only on the word of witnesses (everyone there knew they were to be hired for any statement desired, on every street corner) and with a pathetic picture of the poor, wronged, innocent young Caelius and the misery of his noble old father, all due to the vilest of women. The verdict was not so much a vindication of Caelius as an overwhelming condemnation of Clodia. Such was the woman whom life’s irony made the heroine of one of the world’s great love stories.

  It is in the highest degree improbable that Clodia ever realized that she had achieved immortality or that if she had she would have cared. The present was her concern, not the future, to extract from each moment the utmost possible of exciting pleasure. The empty immortality of a name would have meant nothing to her at all. Nevertheless it is hers, not because of her charms or her sins or even her great prosecutor, but only because once she loved for a moment a man who had the power, as few before him or since, to put love’s passion into poetry.

  This was the young Catullus, the fiery poet who blackened Caesar’s name. He came to Rome from Verona, sent by a careful father to be cultivated and polished out of small town ways. He was perhaps twenty or so when he was introduced to the grand house on the Palatine where its brilliant mistress held a salon for all the great world. We must conceive him on his first entrance a very shy young provincial, hesitating on the edge of the gay company. But there is much in his verse to prove that he was extraordinarily attractive and it is impossible not to believe him beautiful, too, with the beauty so strangely given to poets in all ages everywhere. At all events, he drew to himself the attention of the lady of the house and by swift degrees he became her close companion. Clodia was a woman of mind and taste, able to see a distinguished talent. She liked to play the critic and the connoisseur with the gifted young Veronese and they had delightful times tearing bad writers to pieces: “My lady has sworn that if I will make no more bitter, biting verses she will choose out the very worst of all poets and offer up his effusions in a fiery sacrifice. Here they are, the poems of Volusius, so superlatively bad, the gods will have a merry laugh when they see the sacrifice offered them.”

  This was strong wine for a young head, a country boy preferred to all the elegant worldlings by a most beautiful great lady, full ten years his senior. Of course he fell madly in love and for a time he moved her to love him, perhaps surprised at herself that a youthful rustic could make her feel so much. The story is plain to read in the poems. They have come down to us helter-skelter, in no chronological order; poems that belong to the end of his life are among the first in the collection; but about the order of the love poems there can be no doubt. They speak for themselves.

  They are a unique chapter in the literature of love, these “Poems to Lesbia”—it was the fashion for a young man to write to his mistress under an assumed name. Their like cannot be found in all the range of English literature. Only a few poems scattered through the centuries approach them in passion and poignancy. Poets of love there have been many in England, but poets of passion almost none. The truth is that it is nature, not a mistress, who really holds the hearts of English poets, and the lady in the case is apt to be lost sight of amid trees and clouds and birds and, above all, the flowers that grow in English gardens:

  Say Rose, say Daffodil, and Violet blue, with Primrose fair,

  Since ye have seen my nymph’s sweet dainty face and gesture rare,

  Did not (bright Cowslip, blooming Pink) her view (White lily) shine

  (Ah, Gillyflower, ah, Daisy!) with a grace like stars divine

  The only poems really comparable to those of Catullus are Shakespeare’s sonnets and in respect of passion alone. In every other way the two poets are a world apart: Shakespeare torturing language to express not only passion, but the entire universe of man’s heart, with death and time and eternity and life’s tragedy of joy never fulfilled; and Catullus seeing nothing in the universe but Lesbia and able to speak with perfect simplicity because he felt nothing that was not simple. Never did there hover in his restless thoughts what his pen could not write down. He was Lesbia’s most uncomplicated lover whose place was this earth, whose precinct was strictly confined to his own loves and hates. In every way he was limited except one only, intensity. He was a great poet, but he was a Roman, and Romans, however poetically inclined, were not given to thoughts that wander through eternity. There is only one exception in all of Latin literature, Catullus’ great contemporary Lucretius, the poet of Greek philosophy.

  Catullus could write on other themes, too. He could turn out a charming bit of verse on whatever he pleased, his sailing boat, his little “almost island” home where the lake water laughed in the wind, a dinner party, a friend’s grief, or what not. He could honor a marriage with a lovely song and divert himself by telling fairy stories. And he could write any number of diatribes like the one on Caesar and Mamurra, as violent and as coarse as anything found in literature, if indeed they belong to that realm. But a poet is judged by his best; his bad makes no difference whatever in the final estimation of him. Catullus was Clodia’s lover-poet and his fame is secure.

  His distinguishing characteristic, beyond that of all oth
er poets, is to put love’s rapture and agony into words so direct, they seem to leave no veil between the reader and the poet’s heart. He pours out what he feels with a burning passion that will have nothing but the plainest expression. Figures of speech, embroidery of lovely phrase and delicate fancy, all the decorations of poetry, are swept aside. When he chose he could use them excellently well. The few long poems he wrote on impersonal subjects he ornamented, often very delightfully, in poetry’s usual way, but they are negligible beside the love poems. Only rarely, when an unhappy love is his theme or when, in the midst of most unlikely mythological figures, Lesbia suddenly enters—Catullus cannot keep her out—then the voice is once more his own passionate, ecstatic, anguished voice, speaking in words so fused by his fire, we seem to dispense with them and see only the flame.

  The love-story he tells is the concentrated story of all loves. He traverses the whole gamut of lovers’ feelings everywhere. But this is not to say that he is the typical lover; such fervor of feeling can never be typical; rather he is the quintessential lover. Into a few brief poems he puts the essence of the passion of love.

  The story begins very delicately and exquisitely as young love is wont to begin. Clodia—Lesbia—had a pet bird and the youthful stranger watched her adoringly as she played with it, and one night when he went home he wrote her a poem. No doubt he hesitated long before sending it to her:

  * Sparrow, dearest delight of my sweet lady,

  whom she plays with, who nestle in her bosom,

  Swooping down on her, small, sharp beak all ready,

  when she teases and holds out a swift finger,

  and my radiant lady, my desire,

  answers back with I know not what sweet nonsense,

  solace finds for a moment from her heartache,

  as one sick with a fever feels a respite.

  Would I too could so play with you, sweet sparrow,

  I would lift from my spirit its dark trouble.

  Lesbia was pleased with the poem and began to distinguish its author with her notice more and more, and he sent her a second, written in the same strain. But now that dark trouble has been lifted, Catullus is happy; he can make tender fun of his wonderful lady:

  Gods and goddesses all, of love and beauty,

  you too, all who are men of finer feeling,

  mourn. A sparrow is dead, my lady’s sparrow,

  my own lady’s delight, her sweetest plaything,

  dear to her as her eyes—and dearer even.

  Little honey bird, knowing its sweet mistress

  Well as ever a girl her own dear mother,

  Close to her she would hold him, sweetly nestled.

  Where she went he went after, here now, there now,

  piping only to her his little bird-note.

  Who now goes down the sombre road of shadows,

  down where never a one comes back, they tell us.

  Ill attend you, O evil gods of darkness.

  All things beautiful end in you forever.

  You have taken away my pretty sparrow,

  Shame upon you. And, pitiful poor sparrow,

  it is you that have set my lady weeping,

  Dear eyes, heavy with tears and red with sorrow.

  When a rival of Lesbia’s was praised her poet was quick to attack and defend, and Lesbia laughed delightedly at the verses and, one may be sure, passed them on to others:

  Quintia, so says the crowd, is beautiful. I grant her fairness.

  Tall she is, too, and erect. So much I give her—no more.

  Beautiful? Utterly not. What, beauty where charm is all wanting?

  Never a spice of salt seasons that heavy flesh.

  Lesbia—ah, there is beauty. From top to toe she is lovely.

  Venus has lost her grace. Lesbia stole it away.

  All of a sudden, it would seem, Lesbia was won. She was a connoisseur of lovers and a poet-lover had not come her way before; she found the combination attractive. Catullus was in heaven:

  Live, my Lesbia, love. I live—I love you.

  Not a fig will we care what grim old men say.

  Setting sun will come back again tomorrow.

  We, when once our brief daylight has faded,

  needs must sleep an unending night forever.

  Give me a thousand kisses—then a hundred.

  Now a thousand again—and now a hundred.

  Still a hundred—and in one breath a thousand.

  And when a thousand thousand we have added,

  Stop the count and throw them all together.

  So no envious eye bring evil on us,

  spying out all the number of our kisses.

  But the situation was difficult—how to meet, how to avoid the good Metellus’ suspicions—all the troubles that have beset true lovers everywhere. Lesbia of course was experienced in handling a husband under such circumstances:

  Lesbia, if her husband is near, speaks ill of me always,

  greatest delight thereby giving the blind old fool.

  Idiot, not to see she remembers me when she upbraids me.

  Silence would prove her heart-whole. Now all her jeers and her taunts

  show she never forgets. Oh, more than that. Through her anger

  I see a heart a-flame—she is on fire for me.

  But the first trembling, incredible rapture had gone. Catullus was on tenterhooks all the time. Would she come—would she not? When—where—how? He grew irritable from misery:

  Lesbia laughs me to scorn all day and never is silent.

  But, may I die else, I swear, Lesbia loves me alone.

  How can I know? I am like her. I laugh her to scorn all the day through.

  But, may I die else, I swear, Lesbia only I love.

  Ecstatic hours came still, but through them, far underneath, there was a fear.

  Dearest, my life, my own, you say our love is forever,

  What is between us shall be joy of love without end.

  Gods almighty, give her the power to promise truly,

  speak to me only truth, speak to me from her heart.

  So through all our years we shall keep faith, each to the other,

  bound by a holy bond, lovers eternally.

  This poem stands for the culmination of Catullus’ love and so of his life that was bound up with his love, and yet already he was learning the agony of doubt. He longed to believe; he could not quite. Into his lines he put the true lover’s invariable feeling of the holy purity of a great love, no matter what—a husband in the background or anything else. A passion conceived of as eternally faithful has always been felt to be its own justification and through his life Catullus loved Lesbia only.

  But his descent from that high point of—almost—believing that the same holy bond bound her was swift. No doubt the mature woman of the world soon found it trying to be a poet’s ideal and something less than passion’s lofty heights more agreeable for every day in the year. She wearied of perpetual ecstasies. His agony when he first realized that she was unfaithful to him must be imagined. If he made a poem of it, it has not come down to us. Perhaps it was too terrible for even a poet to be able to write it out. But he was very young and very eager for happiness, and humble, too, with the humility of true love. She was so great, so wonderful—how could he hope she would be his alone? Should he not be content that she, the marvelous lady, loved him best? And he wrote:

  So my light, my love, came to me in my arms,

  came with Cupid dancing, joyously circling around her,

  radiant, shining boy, wrapped in a saffron cloak.

  Past are those days. No more can Catullus alone now content her.

  She goes to others now—only a few—I forgive—

  I am no fool like the rest to plague her with jealous complainings.

  For she came not to me by right from the hand of a father,

  here to my house—these rooms, sweet with Assyrian scents,

  but through the secret night to give me love’s wonderful bount
y,

  gifts that she stole away, robbed from a husband’s heart.

  Therefore this is enough, if only when I—I—am with her,

  that day a white stone marks, shining bright in her heart.

  Lesbia, however, was used to varied entertainment. She never had an idea of confining herself to “only a few,” and Catullus’ forgiveness mattered less and less to her. From then on he was living in the specially fiery hell reserved for great passions wronged. In his first agony he wrote two lines which express within their brief compass what that experience is like:

  I hate and I love. Why—how—can it be, perhaps you will ask me.

  That I know not. What I feel, that I do know. I am tortured.

  He knew her now, and her sweet words meant nothing any more:

  Ah, what a woman says in the arms of a lover who wants her,

  Write on the wings of the wind, give to the rushing stream.

  He knew everything, but he could not free himself:

  Lesbia, once you would say none knew you, only Catullus,

  nor would you choose in my stead even a god—Jove himself.

  Then I loved you not as the common herd loves a mistress,

  but as a father his son—so you were dear to me.

  Now I know you indeed. The flame that is in me burns fiercer,