Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet

Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet Daisy Dunn Living through the debauchery, decadence and political machinations of the crumbling Great Republic, Gaius Valerius Catullus’s fervent poetry was filled with emotion, wit and lurid insight into some of the republic’s most enduring figures. In his own scandalous love affairs brimmed all the decadence, debauchery and spectacle of his time.Born in Verona in c. 82BC, Catullus’ name remains famous after two thousand years for the sharp, immediate poetry with which he skewered society in the great Republic. From mocking political Rome’s sparring titans – Pompey, Crassus and his father’s friend, Julius Caesar – to his wry observations of cavorting youths, money-grabbing brothel-keepers or slaves who knew too much, Catullus was a reckless forefather of social satire. But it was by his erotic, scandalous but tender love elegies that he became known, remaining a monumental figure of reference for poets from Ovid and Virgil onwards.Tracing his journey across youth and experience, from Verona to Rome, Bithynia to Lake Garda, Daisy Dunn rediscovers the world of Catullus’ passions. She explores the adventures at sea described by his breathless syllables, the private dinners, lovers’ trysts and power games all amid the trembling death of the Roman republic, written with a wit and energy that Catullus would surely have enjoyed. Copyright (#ulink_ab9cb94f-08dc-5332-9afa-9f2abf19daa0) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016 This William Collins paperback edition published in 2017 Copyright © Daisy Dunn 2016 Cover photograph © akg-images/Rainer Hackenberg Maps by John Gilkes Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007554324 Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007554348 Version: 2016-11-28 Praise for Catullus’ Bedspread: (#ulink_f84d8017-24a3-50fb-9fe2-93a00577190a) ‘A lively, finely crafted biography. Weaving well-researched social history with a compelling account of political machinations in Rome, the picture here is not just of a libertine prone to writing of his obscene desires, but a soulful man at the heart of a remarkable age’ Observer ‘For all those of us who love counting stars, none burns brighter in the literary firmament than that of Gaius Valerius Catullus – Dunn’s brilliant new biography of the Roman master will shine beams of light on his darkly passionate poetry’ Professor Paul Cartledge ‘The task of piecing together a biography from verse alone is one that Dunn performs with creativity and diligence’ The Times ‘Hugely enjoyable … Daisy Dunn lifts the lid on an era and world that remains engrossing two millennia on’ Catholic Herald ‘Dunn writes beautifully and clearly adores her subject. She deserves plaudits for bringing this fine poet and his tumultuous times so vividly to life’ Daily Mail ‘This is a rewarding, idiosyncratic book … Catullus would certainly applaud’ Country Life ‘Not since Nicola Shulman’s Graven with Diamonds has literary criticism seemed so thrilling. An imaginative, enriching and quick-witted book reminds us that Catullus is a poet for all time’ Standpoint ‘Lyrical, playful and startlingly original … Breathes extraordinary new life into the classical world. An unforgettable journey into the high art and low life of ancient Rome’ Dan Jones ‘Young classicist and art historian Daisy Dunn imaginatively revive[s] this most accessible of Roman poets … an intelligent and often original interpreter of the poetry [she] provides clear, direct and readable translations’ Financial Times ‘Enjoyable and diligently researched … Dunn is a sure-footed and elegant literary critic, particularly when it comes to poem 64, the scintillating mini-epic (Dunn’s own deft version is included as an appendix; and she has translated, with bright-eyed intelligence, all the poems in another volume.) … Catullus’ Bedspread is richly woven, and Dunn’s deep passion for her subject is patent’ Spectator ‘Any reader of Catullus will want to have this book’ Literary Review Dedication (#ulink_3adb7b5d-396b-5b4f-8620-7f8aeba7d200) For my parents and my sister, Alice Epigraph (#ulink_3ff85f5d-0ed4-54b9-8ba4-7a90cf6652e7) This bedspread, Embroidered with the shapes of men Who lived long ago, unveils the virtues of heroes Through the miracle of art Contents Cover (#u590081fb-ead2-5dee-baa3-dda3b65b1b35) Title Page (#uf714302e-a8c2-5f94-95a7-e2f690f54490) Copyright (#u13ba0caa-177b-5679-8ad9-c3aa21a1ba78) Praise (#u1905c3ca-c500-5da4-bebe-6f3a7581ed89) Dedication (#u7a03b596-3828-5833-9c14-984019784e7a) Epigraph (#u9b63c354-33d7-5c0d-9c4a-7ae3724681ec) Maps (#u9554243d-9062-5ad3-afc1-2bc4ff567e67) Author’s Note (#ucb4b671c-9ad7-5f18-a4c8-ac0e14d7c335) Timeline (#u0f58abbc-83dc-5d70-b393-5bf4aa41d480) Prologue (#u63a3efb5-70e6-5738-844b-656b779f498e) I: In search of Catullus (#ud5c06cdc-079e-5cdc-8f9e-ffac3048c86f) II: The house on the Palatine Hill (#u8b40a547-80e4-5b12-b647-f31aa912a46b) III: An elegant new little book (#u732c7cd1-d5e1-59f7-b6ce-c28cfb8194a5) IV: Sparrow (#ua008eef8-8803-5256-a557-afe9d346edd6) V: The rumours of our elders (#litres_trial_promo) VI: The power of three (#litres_trial_promo) VII: I hate and I love (#litres_trial_promo) VIII: Farewell (#litres_trial_promo) IX: A sea of mackerel (#litres_trial_promo) X: Canvas (#litres_trial_promo) XI: The boxwood Argo (#litres_trial_promo) XII: Godly rumbling (#litres_trial_promo) XIII: The Roman stage (#litres_trial_promo) XIV: A flower on the edge of the meadow (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix: Poem 64 – Catullus’ Bedspread Poem (#litres_trial_promo) Note on Currency and Measures (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) MAPS (#ulink_b6ea922b-24b1-5d26-abe8-460a7832d30f) Map of Italy and North Africa (#litres_trial_promo) Map of Greece and the East (#litres_trial_promo) AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_6543e156-866a-5d44-8ae0-50be6693e76b) The Political System in Rome Politicians in Rome followed an established ladder of power. At the top sat two chief magistrates, known as consuls. Male citizens of Rome (aged seventeen and above) elected the two consuls each year, and the Senate guided them, while also managing the civic purse and foreign relations. The first consuls had been plucked from the richest families; the first senators’ descendants were the patricians, or aristocrats, of Catullus’ Rome. Before a man could even think about becoming a consul, he needed to gain some experience. As he approached the age of thirty, a budding patrician politician would strive first to be elected as a quaestor, whose tedious responsibilities involved supervising the treasury. At the end of the year, funds permitting, quaestors became life members of the Senate, and the more appealing prospect of running for the senior magistracies, aedile, praetor, then consul, suddenly became feasible. Beyond the consulship, men could become censors, who routinely examined the membership of the Senate. The Senatorial magistrates Before they could run for the senior magistracies, plebeian candidates, by contrast, could achieve the tribunate. Every year Catullus spent in Rome he would see ten tribunes of the people elected from the plebeian class, scurry off to their own assemblies to consider legislation, and veto measures, and each other, at will. While the four aediles (two plebeian, two patrician) took charge of public works and entertainment, the eight praetors were as though deputies to the consuls, and oversaw legal matters, such as trials and disputes arising in the provinces. Few could wait until the end of the year, when they had the chance to proceed to a command overseas. The two consuls tended to progress to more senior foreign commands at the end of their year, too. Men did not belong to political parties: they could change their allegiances at will. Some politicians aligned themselves with the optimates (‘best men’) who championed the Senate’s authority and sought to work with it; others with the populares, who sought a more liberal, reforming approach to policy by appealing to the tribunes to make their voice heard. Populares were often self-interested men who, cunningly veiling their personal ambitions, used the tribunes to propose legislation that would buy them the favour of the common man. The excessive ambition of individual tribunes would contribute to the fall of the Republic, a catastrophe that began less than a decade after Catullus died. A miserable period of civil war and dictatorship would take hold, at the end of which the Romans would bow their heads again to a sole ruler: the future Emperor Augustus. TIMELINE (#ulink_fd1cc9f0-1aee-586f-8d33-bd9a7a5bfb11) 753 BC: Rome is founded 509 BC: Overthrow of Rome’s last king 218 BC: Hannibal the Carthaginian invades Italy 204 BC: Cybele, the Great Mother, is carried to Rome 133 BC: Tiberius Gracchus becomes tribune 91–89 BC: The Social War (Italian allies demand Roman citizenship); Verona becomes a Roman colony 88 BC: Sulla becomes consul. Beginning of the wars with Mithridates, King of Pontus 80s BC: Civil war between Sulla and Marius c.82 BC: Birth of Gaius Valerius Catullus 81 BC: Sulla is proclaimed dictator 78 BC: Death of Sulla 70s BC: Ongoing conflict between Rome and Mithridates 73 BC: Spartacus leads a slave revolt 71 BC: Crassus defeats Spartacus, Pompey pursues the stragglers 70 BC: Consulship of Pompey and Crassus 67 BC: Pompey vanquishes pirates at sea 66 BC: Pompey succeeds the general Lucullus in spearheading the wars against Mithridates 63: Suicide of Mithridates. Cicero becomes consul. Conspiracy of Catiline 62: Clodius infiltrates the Bona Dea festival c.61 BC: Catullus moves to Rome 61 BC: Trial of Clodius. Caesar governorship in Further Spain. Pompey, now returned from the East, receives his third triumph 60 BC: Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius become consuls. Caesar returns from Spain 59 BC: Caesar, now part of a coalition (‘The First Triumvirate’) with Pompey and Crassus, becomes consul alongside Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. Death of Metellus Celer 58 BC: Start of Caesar’s Gallic War. Clodius is tribune. Cicero goes into exile. Ptolemy XII Auletes is driven from his throne 57 BC: Catullus goes to Bithynia. After a considerable battle for his recall, Cicero returns to Rome 56 BC: Catullus returns from Bithynia and visits Lake Garda. Trial of Caelius Rufus. The triumvirs hold summits to repair their coalition 55 BC: Pompey and Crassus become consuls again. Opening of the Theatre of Pompey. Caesar’s first invasion of Britain 54 BC: Cato becomes praetor. Crassus leaves for Syria. Caesar’s second invasion of Britain. Death of Pompey’s wife (Caesar’s daughter) Julia 53 BC: The Battle of Carrhae and death of Crassus c.53 BC: Death of Gaius Valerius Catullus 52 BC: Death of Clodius 49 BC: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, sparking civil war 48 BC: Death of Pompey 44 BC: Death of Caesar PROLOGUE (#ulink_4bf721f5-1d2e-5206-bab7-7ead61d627cc) GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS had endured a difficult night in Rome: ‘Undone by passion I tossed and turned all over the bed.’ He had spent the evening drinking wine and composing poetry, and was far too stimulated to rest. He longed only to taste daylight and swap stanzas once more with his friend and fellow poet, a small man named Calvus. Poetry remains the insomniac’s gift. Catullus was as familiar with what it was like to have another warm ‘his chilly limbs in the bed you left behind’, as he was with the bedchamber that bore the remnants of lust: Steeped in flowers and the oil of Syrian olive, Knackered and tattered, pillows everywhere, Creaking and shaking, The trembling bedstead shattered (Poem 6) He also knew what it was like to obsess over a bedspread. Even when he didn’t have the stirrings of passion and unfinished lines circling his mind, the poet was seldom at rest. Born in Verona around 82 BC, Catullus moved to Rome, and travelled the south border of the Black Sea, where men waded with fine fishing nets and built boats shaped like beans. He made his way to Rome’s countryside, and to his family’s second home on a peninsula of Lake Garda. The hundreds of poems he wrote across the course of his short life were as varied as the landscapes he wandered. Catullus was Rome’s first lyric poet. He was also a conflicted man. At any one time he could hate and love, curse and censure, consider himself rich but call himself poor. While lending themselves perfectly to poetry, such extremes of emotion at times made his life unbearable. He wrote not only of the feelings that plagued his own mind, but of the way he felt about others, not least Julius Caesar, a man his father called a friend: in one particularly scabrous poem he described the politician and future dictator as little more than ‘a shameless, grasping gambler’. One may ask why a collection of Latin poems from over two thousand years ago matters so much today. Catullus’ book is the earliest surviving poetry collection of its kind in Latin. Full of emotion, wit, and lurid insight into some of the key Roman personalities, it provides a rare and highly personal portrait of a life during one of the most critical moments in world history. Catullus lived in some of the most uncertain and turbulent times Rome had ever known: the late Republic, before the emperors came to rule. Centuries earlier, kings had governed Rome until, as legend had it, the son of the haughty seventh ruler raped a woman named Lucretia, and her husband and his friend waged a war to destroy the monarchy forever. Its legacy lived on into the Republic, which was founded after the kings on the very principle that no one man should rule Rome again. Every year, the male citizens elected magistrates to govern their city under the guidance of the Senate. The political system was carefully calibrated to prevent power from falling into the hands of any one man, but the balance of power between Senate and individual magistrates had begun to swing increasingly in the magistrates’ favour, and they knew it. So Catullus found himself surrounded by towering politicians: Pompey the Great, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Julius Caesar, who vied desperately for power over Rome and her empire, which was larger than it had ever been, and growing larger still. By the time Catullus was born, the Romans had made provinces of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; Spain, which they divided into two provinces, Nearer and Further; Transalpine Gaul, stretching across the south of France and north-east into Switzerland; Cisalpine Gaul, which encompassed northern Italy, including Catullus’ Verona; Macedonia; Asia (western Turkey), and extended their global rule through numerous allied states. Ever inquisitive, Catullus cast his eye across this tremendous world map as well as the more insular world of Roman politics. One moment he would find himself recounting adventures at sea in breathless syllables; the next, describing a private dinner with friends; the next, weeping that his lover did not feel things as intensely as he. Perhaps it is because our ideas about ancient poetry are so coloured by the awe-inspiring epics of Homer and their lofty themes of humanity that many of Catullus’ poems seem so surprising and immediate. While some of his poems are highly learned and erudite, others are mischievous, goatish, direct. With characteristic boldness, he requests a woman he loves to: Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred Then another thousand, then a second hundred. Then – don’t stop – another thousand, then a hundred … (Poem 5) In Latin these lines begin so abruptly – da, dein, deinde – it is as if we hear them with Catullus’ quickening heartbeat. I was seventeen when I first discovered them, and they made Catullus feel more alive to me than any other poet I knew. I have read them hundreds of times since, and they still have the same effect. One of the reasons Catullus’ poems are still so readable I think is that they show that the people of his world were not always so very different from us. The characters he encounters and describes in the streets and bawdy inns of Italy call to mind the stock cast of a Roman comedy – or even a scene in late-night Soho – teeming with heartbroken lovers, drunken cavorting youths, old men pining for women a fraction of their age, money-grabbing brothel-keepers, mercenary meretrices (prostitutes), slaves who know too much. Catullus’ immense skill as a poet lay in his ability to combine many literary genres in the Latin tongue, not just elements of comedy, but the clarity of Sappho, the celebrated female poet, the compact and erudite style of Hellenistic poets, and the wit of lewd graffiti in Rome, with themes as various as love, the writer’s life, and the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. The Roman province of Macedonia incorporated much of mainland Greece, and in Catullus’ day Greek culture had well and truly permeated Rome’s own. While never enslaved to his Greek predecessors, when he wanted to be particularly learned, Catullus adapted their poetic ideas to convey them with new feeling. He forged new Latin words and was partial to diminutives (miselle passer – poor little sparrow; scortillum – little tart). He feverishly combined elegantly phrased sentiment with colloquialism and obscenity, unnerving the more serious Romans who believed that a jibe at one man’s sexual inadequacy was what high-spirited youths scribbled on walls and brandished in tense moments, not what educated writers preserved in fine papyrus scrolls. His work would therefore prove unsettling for some of the older generation, as well as important public figures such as Cicero, the great orator, who had rather conservative tastes. Such readers in Rome were used to epic and chronicles and meandering excursus on the history that made Rome august. They had the patience to work through manual-like offerings on farming, if not to write them. Prior to Catullus, a cluster of poets, including the little-known Laevius and Valerius Aedituus, had tried to capture the liveliness of the Greek poets in Latin, but their attempts would not generally prove as successful as his; their names are obscure today as a result of the poor survival of their work. Catullus did not shirk sobriety, but framed it unexpectedly and with a finesse of the kind that many of his literary predecessors lacked. The apparent simplicity of Catullus’ poetry often masks far greater, deeper sentiment and subtlety of thought. He helped to shape the genre of Latin love elegy by writing a sustained series of poems to a lover. Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus: all were influenced by his work. So Ovid, in a book of love elegies, confessed that he had a wandering eye and could not help but feel attracted to many different women: ‘I hate what I am but, though I long to, can’t fail to be what I hate.’ It is a striking line, but partly because it is a response to one of Catullus’ most remarkable poems which begins: ‘I hate and I love’ (Poem 85). The Latin love-poet Propertius, who was about thirty years younger than Catullus, pledged that his poetry would make the beauty of his mistress Cynthia most famous of all, ‘pace Catullus’. Catullus remained a monumental figure of reference for the poets who sprang up over the decades following his death. In his pithy observations of day-to-day life and bitter polemic against his enemies, Catullus also pre-empted the great satirists of the Roman Empire, particularly the writers Martial and Juvenal. He called his poetry nugae (‘ramblings’, or ‘sweet nothings’) partly out of false modesty, but with the understanding that the word also meant ‘mimes’. Many of his poems offer vignettes, at once silent and resounding with the colourful characters he observed. There are secrets and allusions in Catullus’ Latin which take some teasing out, but once found, throw Catullus’ poetry in a more dazzling light than one could ever have imagined. As soon as I realised this, I decided that I wanted to know Catullus, to read his work with the emotion with which it was written, to get as close as I could to this man who lived more than two thousand years ago. And so I began to write this book, which I hope will inspire others to discover, or rediscover, his exquisite poems. There are very few surviving sources for Catullus’ life. Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his book of poetry. This may resemble a series of jumbled diary entries, describing episodes from his life, but Catullus wrote it for public consumption, and not necessarily as a faithful account. He addressed love poems to a certain ‘Lesbia’, for example, a woman he gave life to through his verse. Lesbia was a pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, the eldest sister of a wealthy and influential politician in Rome. Of the 117 poems which survive in his collection, none bears a title. They are traditionally numbered according to the order in which they appeared in the earliest manuscripts, which is neither chronological nor entirely thematic, but hardly random either. Like a good music album, there is style in the progression and unexpected swing of one story to another, back and forth in time. It might have been a poet who established the poems’ order. Catullus was much more than a love-poet. His poems to Lesbia form only a fraction of his book. The longest and most accomplished poem that survives, Poem 64, makes no explicit mention of her at all, focusing instead on a luxurious bedspread. I like to call it Catullus’ ‘Bedspread Poem’ because it contains as its centrepiece a long, digressive passage on the myths that adorned the wedding bedspread of one of Jason’s Argonauts. In it, Catullus set the themes of love and war against the backdrop of the myth of the Ages, a sequence of five eras against which writers of ancient Greece and Rome mapped their semi-mythical history. The first of these eras was the Golden Age, an idyllic, Garden of Eden-like time when there was no work, no war, no sickness, no travel; the earth gave freely and amply of its own accord, and gods and men lived harmoniously. There followed an inferior Silver Age, which Jupiter, king of the gods, destroyed since its people were criminals who no longer offered sacrifice to the gods. A Bronze Age came about, dominated by warfare and weaponry. Its people destroyed each other. Then followed the Heroic Age, which offered a reprieve from the decline, a time of heroes descended from the gods themselves, warriors who fought in the Trojan War, and Jason and his Argonauts. When they died, an Iron Age arrived. It was the worst of the five eras, an age of anxiety, pain, hard work, and murder. The Iron Age myth was a fitting tribute to the grim realities of late Republican Rome. The upheavals of the times contributed to the picture of decline that haunts a number of Catullus’ writings, particularly the Bedspread Poem. Matters in Rome had come to a head shortly before Catullus was born, when the optimates, politicians who championed the Senate’s authority, clashed with the populares, individuals who sought a more liberal, reforming approach to policy. Decades earlier, the Romans had established the province of Asia near Pontus, a Hellenised kingdom on the south coast of the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey. Not a little perturbed by the fact that the Romans had proceeded to fill the East with grasping tax-farmers, the king of Pontus, a Hellenised Iranian called Mithridates VI Eupator – who, like many ambitious men, liked to think that he was descended from Alexander the Great – embarked upon a land-grabbing mission. Six years before Catullus’ birth, the Romans had begun to wage war against Mithridates. To head the campaign, the Senate elected an optimate, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose aristocratic roots, intense eyes, and complexion like a mulberry sprinkled with oatmeal marked him out as a man to be reckoned with. His appointment to so prestigious a role proved enough to incense one of the most prominent populares of the day, a plebeian and darling of Rome’s army, Gaius Marius. Though little shy of seventy years old, Marius tried to seize control of the commission himself, but then Sulla marched determinedly on Rome with his forces. He discharged Marius and his men from the city, and hurried off to his war. Although Catullus makes no explicit mention of such disturbances, his poetry contains echoes of some of the political events which danced upon the periphery of his poetic consciousness. The wars against Mithridates in the East, and conflict between politicians such as Marius and Sulla, cast a terrible shadow over his life. The death toll in these wars was enormous. In seeking victory over Mithridates, the Romans approached the king of Bithynia, a land between Pontus and Asia where hyacinths bowed beneath the breeze. Although they persuaded the Bithynian king to attack Mithridates’ territory, they were in no way equipped for the scale of Mithridates’ retaliation. Over 80,000 Romans and Italians fell in the ensuing conflicts. Mithridates took hold of a string of cities along the Black Sea coast, and soon practically the whole sweep of Black Sea shoreline from Heracleia in the west to Georgia and Lesser Armenia in the east formed part of his sprawling kingdom. Shortly before Catullus was born, Sulla returned to Italy. He had made some bold forays in the wars, even sacking Athens, whose people Mithridates had cunningly enticed to his side, but it would be more than twenty years before the struggle was formally concluded. Back in Rome, a state of emergency was declared as Marius’ embittered forces prepared to make war on Sulla’s returning army. Sulla was declared dictator in the interest of ‘settling the state’, but his solution made Italy less settled than ever before. Catullus grew up in a world where the names of Sulla’s perceived enemies were added to miserable lists in the Forum, their property snatched, their rights destroyed, their lives, too often, cut short. Sulla doubled the number of senators from 300 to 600, and robbed the tribunes, the plebeian politicians at the bottom of the political ladder, of their function. The fallout was carried across Catullus’ native Gaul. Sulla gave up his dictatorship after two turbulent years, but then died, leaving Italy in despair and Rome’s business with Mithridates unfinished. While Catullus was growing up, the three politicians who would come to be most prominent in Rome in his adult life, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, were steadily emerging out of this fraught scene. Crassus was one of Sulla’s former adherents. He came from a respectable family, but had lost several of his relatives and estates to Marius’ forces. He had everything to fight for, which might have explained why, when Catullus arrived in Rome, he found him desperate to become the richest man in all of Italy. He was charming, unscrupulous, incredibly well connected, and owed his name to his quelling of a slave revolt spearheaded by a gladiator named Spartacus. No sooner had the Senate appointed him to stem the sudden uprising than Crassus had crucified thousands of Spartacus’ men along the Appian Way – the now-blood-drenched road leading from Rome to Naples. Crassus proceeded thence to Rome’s top political office, the consulship, in 70 BC. Elected alongside him that year was the son of a wealthy senator, a tough, rugged soldier; a man who thrived on ambition and conquest. His forehead was deeply furrowed and his face was fleshy, but his gaze was unmistakably determined. His name was Pompey, and thanks to his early successes in battle, he had earned the sobriquet ‘Magnus’ (‘the Great’). Crassus knew precisely who he was: Pompey, another of Sulla’s subordinates, had fought on his side in the civil wars against Marius, then put down the stragglers from Spartacus’ revolt. Although Catullus wrote about Pompey in a couple of poems, he did not capture him from Crassus’ perspective. Crassus could not help but look askance at the man who had won plaudits that he could only dream of. The greatest accolade a Roman could win for victories overseas was a triumph, and Pompey had by now won two. For all his efforts in the slave revolt, Crassus received merely an ovation, the next best thing. Nevertheless, Catullus was looking on as the two men proceeded to their shared consulship, during which they reinstated the powers of the tribunes, which Sulla had so shamefully diminished. Succeeding Sulla in the wars against Mithridates of Pontus was the splendidly named Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who scored a number of impressive victories, but was dismissed before he could bring the wars to an absolute conclusion. Enter Pompey, still high from his successes under Sulla and against Spartacus. He was singled out to succeed Lucullus in tackling the chief problems that plagued the world to Rome’s east. Mithridates was the obvious target, but to confront him, Pompey had first to rid the seas of pirates, who had already hindered Italy’s corn supply and kidnapped a number of her citizens, including Julius Caesar. Caesar was a patrician from one of the older families. Unlike Pompey and Crassus, his seniors by six and fifteen years respectively, Caesar had found himself on the opposing end of Sulla’s regime. By marriage, he was the nephew of Gaius Marius, the popular politician against whom Sulla had engaged in civil war. Not only that, but he was married to the daughter of Marius’ colleague and successor, Cornelia. Wisely, given his patent allegiance, Caesar lay low during Sulla’s dictatorship, and completed part of his military service in Bithynia. He was then kidnapped by pirates, not far from Rhodes. When he was eventually released, he crucified his captors. Having put the pirates to flight, Pompey skilfully led the Roman army in obliterating Mithridates’ forces. It was a difficult war and required great manpower, but Pompey saw the hostile king flee towards Colchis, a region that lay between the Black Sea and Caucasus mountains (in the territory of modern Georgia). Finally, in 63 BC, abandoned by his allies, usurped by his own son, Mithridates settled on suicide. His kingdom, Pontus, fell to Rome. Catullus subsequently evoked it in his poetry. Pompey conquered a good number of Mithridates’ territories, and reduced his former ally, Armenia, to a state of dependency on Rome. Syria was among the places which slipped into Roman control. It happened that in the midst of the wars, the king of Bithynia, Nicomedes IV, had bequeathed by agreement his land to Rome, too. Pompey’s eyes sparkled at the possibilities. Intent now on lining the south coast of the Black Sea with Roman provinces, he decided to join Pontus and Bithynia together to form one enormous new province. In his mid-twenties, Catullus boarded a ship with a cohort of other young men in order to escape Rome for this very place. One needed to be a Roman citizen to join the prestigious cohort he did, which is a strong indication that Catullus’ father was a local governor or magistrate in Verona. For while the Veronese remained eager to acquire Roman citizenship, for as long as Catullus lived, their magistrates could secure the honour for themselves and their families. Bithynia lay south of the Black Sea, which Jason and his Argonauts were said to have sailed over on their Heroic Age mission to steal the Golden Fleece. The map of Rome’s new provinces, I discovered, overlapped with that which inspired the imagery of Catullus’ verse. In the pages that follow I retrace this journey and the life Catullus described in his poems, from Verona to Rome, from Bithynia to Lake Garda. I have worked from the ancient sources that survive to draw out the story Catullus described in his ‘little book’ – his libellus. Catullus’ Bedspread, then, is my little book about Catullus and his life. It is, as far as possible, a life in the poet’s own words: Catullus’ journey as told through his carmina, his poems or ‘songs’, which I have translated from the Latin. I see this very much as a joint venture: Catullus provides the poetry; I offer something of the world that informed it. I use extracts from his Bedspread Poem as epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, in the manner of his poetry book – neither chronologically nor entirely haphazardly. If together he and I can bridge the distance that lies between us, then even the most labyrinthine of his poems should sing. IN SEARCH OF CATULLUS (#ulink_ff094ce5-9d5c-500b-9bb2-7633e67c6485) Since my fate and your determined virtue snatch you Away from me against my will, though my tired eyes are Not yet drunk with the dear shape of my son, I shall not send you rejoicing with a happy heart Or allow you to carry the signs of good fortune, But first I shall free my heart of countless laments (Poem 64, lines 218–24) CATULLUS COULD HEAR his father in the dining room, conversing with Julius Caesar on the peculiarities of the world. He was used by now to travel-weary men arriving at his home, seeking soft cushions, pickled fish, and pork fattened on the acorns of Verona’s oak trees. As this one tucked into the feast laid out before him, he talked about the wonders of the Black Sea, savage Gauls, and Britons lining the chalk-white cliffs, remote and terrifying giants. Catullus, who took more pleasure between the sheets than talking at the table with his father’s friends, stepped outside. The rain was pounding the streets which streamed and steamed with sewage. The Adige river was flowing quickly on the lap-like curve that held the town. As a boy, Catullus had often crossed its waters and felt the chill they bore from the Alps. He remembered the evening he first witnessed a locked-out lover, sitting in a doorway here on a lowly street. The youth had been crying, trying in vain to write a poem to voice his lament. For some time, Catullus had stood there, watching. Poor boy, his buttocks aching with the damp cold of the doorstep. Would not the door have more to say than the inconsolable youth? The door belonged to the house of a love-poet called Caecilius. Catullus transcribed its words: It’s not my fault (I hope to impress Caecilius, I am now in His charge), although they say it is my fault No one can honestly say I’ve done anything wrong. It’s true what people tell you – blame the door … [line partly corrupt] Whenever some crime is discovered Everyone shouts at me: ‘Door, it’s your fault!’ (Poem 67) The door was not weeping but lamenting, slammed shut and berated with every misfortune that had passed through it. Catullus captured in the pace of its speech all the urgency and forcefulness a man would expect from one whose words had been stifled for most of its lifetime. With its ear for gossip, the door went on to reveal that, before Caecilius was resident in the house, a ‘virgin’ had moved in and confided in her female slaves. ‘Virgin’, because it transpired that the scamp had a former father-in-law, who lay with her when she discovered his son’s ‘little sword dangling more flaccid than a delicate beet’. In Catullus’ poem, one image was layered upon another, contorting what was masculine, if small, into an effeminate and unedifying vegetable. The so-called virgin came from fertile Brixia (Brescia), to Verona’s west. ‘Brixia beloved mother of my Verona,’ Catullus exclaimed, reflecting on the Gauls who had travelled between it and his home. The Gauls and their many tribes were inclined like geese to migrate whenever the desire took them. Lately, Gallic tribes had been flying through Transalpine Gaul, to Verona’s north, endangering Rome’s control over its provinces. So Caesar rested here, at Catullus’ father’s home, wearied by the Gallic War he was now waging. It was 55 BC. Catullus had come back to Verona, where he reflected nostalgically upon his roots. It was a Roman colony now, but remained in his mind a place of Gauls and Etruscans. While the sleeping fields of Brescia evoked his Gallic line, the summers he spent in his family villa on nearby Sirmio (Sirmione), an attractive peninsula on Lake Garda, tended to carry him back into the arms of his ancient ancestors. Whenever its waves shivered in the breeze, he would dream of the Etruscans, the great lords of Italy before the rise of the Romans, and their curious origins in faraway lands. They had come to Italy to escape a famine that had struck their home in ancient Lydia (near Sart, Turkey). In around 1200 BC, their king had divided the surviving people into two groups, and drawn lots. The more fortunate ones followed his son Tyrrhenus out of Lydia to Smyrna (Izmir), and onwards for distant coasts. In the north and the centre of Italy they scattered, and called themselves ‘tyrrhenians’ after their prince, or ‘tusci’, ‘Etruscans’. Their descendants preferred ‘Umbrians’ and ‘Tuscans’. Part Gaul, part Etruscan, Catullus never doubted that he had Asiatic blood, however Italian he looked. His hair was light brown, and he styled it like a man who was afraid of losing it. Combed forward, it formed the beginnings of a fashionable fringe, which tickled the deep olive skin of his forehead. He had a round, boyish characterful face, which a well-meaning woman might tell him was sweet or endearing, but then immediately regret saying anything at all. He was, in sum, shapely, especially about the arms. His waist was thick (Catullus being no stranger to the odd hors d’oeuvre) but his nose was delicate, and gently curving brows met at its arch. He had full lips and a sincere smile, but his most distinctive features had to be his eyes. They were large and brown, though the left one drooped slightly beneath a heavy lid, giving the impression that it was half closed. The portrait, discovered at the site of his family home on Sirmio, had no title to identify it as the poet Catullus, only the clues that lay in the painted plaster. The young man looked contemplative and refined as he grasped a scroll in his left hand, while he drew the fingers of his right with pride across its edges, edges he perhaps ‘polished off not a moment ago with dry pumice stone’ (Poem 1). The distinctive lazy eye was meant to make him recognisable, even years later. He wore the toga of the late Republic with tunic, fringed with a narrow purple band. Dirt tended to splash against this strip of purple, which proclaimed his status – ‘equestrian’ – to passers-by. They were descended from the cavalry, the equestrians, but less likely by now to be seen on a horse than in a forum, ensuring that they still satisfied the 400,000-sesterce wealth qualification that bought them membership of the elite order. Senators wore thicker purple stripes on their togas, and had at least a million sesterces each, but Catullus knew that his stripe made him more important than ordinary plebeians, who had no purple at all. Catullus had put on the adult toga at the age of sixteen and indulged in so much sex, and so much poetry – ‘joys which your sweet love encouraged’ he once reminded his brother – that he remained forever nostalgic for those happy, carefree days. He never wrote of their mother, as he did of the mothers of friends: she might have died some years before her son enjoyed this ‘pleasant spring’: From the time the pure toga was first put upon me, When the bloom of my youth enjoyed its pleasant spring, I sported hard enough. I was no stranger to the goddess Who mixes sweet bitterness with love’s woe (Poem 68) As he pottered around his old home to the sound of slaves clattering plates – a sign that his father’s dinner was coming to an end – Catullus looked back on his youngest days. He remembered his first experiences of love and verse, his life’s spring, as well as the moment that presaged the change in season, the moment he decided to leave Verona to pursue a career as a poet in Rome. In 62 BC a carriage had pulled into Cisalpine Gaul from which there disembarked a man in his early forties – a brother-in-law of Pompey the Great, Metellus Celer. He had recently completed a senior magistracy at Rome, the praetorship, and been intent on achieving the consulship before the decade was out. His appointment to a new post, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had come about in return for his help in quelling a terrifying conspiracy in Rome. A disaffected young patrician politician, Catiline, a former ally of the erstwhile dictator Sulla, had planned with his supporters to murder the most senior members of the Roman Senate, ravage the city with fire, and fling open Rome’s gates to an army of several thousand that had gathered in the north. Catiline’s campaign for the consulship of 63 BC had been unsuccessful. Cicero, who had been elected to one of the two seats, foiled his conspiracy and took charge of a full-scale security operation. Determined to save his beloved Republic from extinction, he rounded up some of the chief conspirators – who included rogue senators – and the Senate agreed to put them to death without trial as enemies of the state. Metellus Celer helped Cicero by blocking the plotters’ rampage. Cicero had hoped to win praise for his swift response. Instead, Metellus Celer’s brother, a feisty tribune in Rome, vetoed him from delivering his parting address from his consulship, saying that he should not have had the conspirators executed without trial. Technically, he was right. The incident was still haunting Cicero to this day. Catullus moved to Rome probably soon after the conspiracy. Whether it was in Verona that he had first met Metellus Celer, or in the great city itself, that moment had proved a turning point. For little though Catullus could have anticipated it upon their first meeting, Metellus Celer would become something of an obstacle for him. In recent years Catullus had fallen passionately in love with his wife. THE HOUSE ON THE PALATINE HILL (#ulink_a033d2ee-1708-5668-a2a2-e88d9e0ae4c2) But the house receded every which way In regal opulence, and sparkled and glimmered With gold and silver. Ivory glinted off thrones, cups dazzled off tables, The whole household delighted in the lustre of Royal treasure. (Poem 64, lines 43–6) THE DIN OF MEN hammering pieces of leather, and the sighs as youths stretched them into myriad shapes; the expletives of the vendors who pushed past them, elbows first, clutching bottles of perfume to their chests. The coughs of the workers loitering outside the Argiletum; the high-pitched laughter of a drunk man on a stall and cry as he fell and cut his hand. The bark of dogs who gathered for the wound, and mutterings of the old lady passing by. The indelicate tongue of the prostitutes who were circling, doused in new scents, smelling fresh blood. But after twelve days on the road to Rome, frankly, Catullus did not have the energy this afternoon. He laughed, moved by the earthy scenes of the Subura, where the man recently elected Pontifex Maximus had lived before relocating to the Forum to its west. The up-and-coming politician Julius Caesar had lately secured enough money from somewhere to buy a place in the elections for this prestigious post, which would make him head of Rome’s most renowned priestly college. On polling day he had kissed his mother goodbye, and told her that, if he did not return to her as Pontifex Maximus, he would not return at all. When morning passed to afternoon, he appeared again, triumphant. As Catullus entered the Forum, he passed open-air law courts, inns, market stalls, and temples, including one dedicated to ‘Twin Castor and twin of Castor, Pollux’ – the gods of travel – whom he thanked dutifully for his safe journey from Verona. The building where Caesar was now based lay in the distance, adjacent to the hallowed residence of the Vestal Virgins, who dedicated their lives to chastity and worship of the goddess of the hearth. The goddess’ flame was burning brightly, kept alight by her servants’ diligence and the will of the Romans, who would sooner have seen an ill-omened lightning strike fill the sky than her fire be extinguished and with it, they feared, their own hearths and livelihoods. Success in life, as Catullus well knew, depended upon the support of the gods, who were in constant need of appeasing. The divinities gave curious signs to voice their approval, or otherwise, of men’s actions. So fearful were mortals of misconstruing divine messages that they filled roles dedicated to their interpretation. Augurs examined the movements of birds. They divined the mood of the gods from the sounds the birds made and direction of their flight, while haruspices searched the livers of sacrificial animals for meaningful abnormalities. A raven flew south towards the Palatine Hill, at the far end of the Forum. The hill’s large plateau, crosshatched with grey and clay-red masonry, dotted with umbrella pines, housed the very wealthiest Romans. As he drew near it, Catullus was half-minded to join them, but he needed something to eat before he could muster the strength for conversation. Thankfully, the Romans saw little purpose in waiting for evening to fall before retiring to their dining rooms. Darkness rendered even the simplest of walks a fiendish pursuit, during which an unexpected ditch posed almost as much risk as a bandit. The late afternoon was a more sociable hour, and for Catullus, as for the many citizens who began work after dawn, it could not come quickly enough. Having wolfed down eggs and bread at some miserable inn, he made his way hastily towards the base of the Aventine Hill, where the poor plebeians lived. He passed streets of insulae, ramshackle tenement buildings constructed so high that they often fell down, burned down, or were pulled down for obstructing the view of the augurs as they tried to interpret bird flight. Catullus imagined how good life would be with ‘no fears – not fires, not grievous building collapses, not criminal activity, not creeping poison, nor any other threat of danger’. There were men in this city who made a living from those who had lost their modest homes. The ambitious politician Marcus Licinius Crassus was notorious for it. Determined to recover the riches his family had lost in the civil wars, Crassus had been among the first to benefit from the sale of citizens’ property proscribed under Sulla. Not even his success in quelling Spartacus’ forces and reaching a consulship checked his appetite for wealth. He noted the dilapidated state of Rome’s crowded blocks and developed ravaged sites on the cheap, using slaves with builders’ training. Many more apartments could be squashed into the spaces occupied by the older villas, too. The new homeless could do little but accept Crassus’ miserly offers. Catullus’ father would never have allowed his son to come to such a place had he not already established contacts for him in the heart of the city. Rome’s population exceeded a million, a quarter of whom were slaves. Metellus Celer, former governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had lately returned to Rome and intended to achieve a consulship for 60 BC. Catullus could seek him out, distract him from his campaigning. As his father must have told him a thousand times, being associated with a man like Metellus could do wonders for his status. If Metellus had dined at their house in Verona, then he was obliged to invite his son to dine at his in Rome. Catullus could not have been thrilled at the prospect. He need only have exchanged a few words with Metellus to know that he was far from the most exciting man in Rome. Even Cicero, who had often praised him for his steadfastness to his beliefs, had to admit that there was something inhuman about him: Metellus was ‘not a man but “a seashore and air and utter isolation”’. Many of his forebears had been consuls, and though Metellus was not old, by anyone’s standards, he was worthy, bloody-minded and arrogant, falling rather too readily into the category of men Catullus liked to call senes severiores – ‘our elders … dourer than most’ (Poem 5). Grateful as Catullus had to be for his father’s introductions to the great and the good, he itched to find his own place among the poets. He would not need to work as hard to sustain conversation with them as he did with the politicians – though Catullus always stayed well informed, not least because he knew that such diligence would stand him in good stead for city life. Without an acute interest in the minutiae of the law courts or small-scale political intrigues, there was very little to talk about. This was a perennial problem for those who found themselves at dinner with men directly involved in Roman politics. The idea that business and leisure were entirely distinct was written firmly into the Latin language: negotium, the former, was simply the negative of otium, the latter. Leisure was, quite literally, an absence of business. Clutching for conversation that was both suitable to bridge that gap and sufficient to last the course of a Roman dinner – from eggs to apples – proved a headache. There was no fun to be had with men who thought that ‘salt’ was merely a condiment. For Catullus, sal sooner suggested the kind of verbal wit no dinner guest should be without. Just as salt itself was considered fundamental to human life for its healing and alimentary qualities, so ‘salt’ encapsulated the intelligent mind’s capacity to lay aside its troubles, seek pleasure, and deliver it to others through wit. As far as Catullus was concerned, there was no ingredient more necessary for a dinner party, and this included its hosts. Nonetheless, even if he believed that Metellus was merely paying his father a favour, and had little interest in what he had to say, these were not grounds for declining his hospitality. A fleeting glance at his address would have been enough to pique anyone’s curiosity. Metellus Celer might have been short of sal, but he was evidently not short of money. Metellus’ house stood on the north-west side of the Palatine Hill, and ‘in sight of almost the whole city’. It was close enough to the Forum for the booming of orators and traders to rattle the portico, but high enough up to protect its inhabitants from their germs and diseases. Apart from affording superior views, properties on this higher ground commanded a premium because they promised cleaner air and at least some protection from the commoners’ plagues. It was said that Romulus, one of the twin sons born to the war god Mars and suckled by a she-wolf in Rome’s foundation myth, chose the Palatine on which to found his city. Where nomads constructed rounded huts to call home, the Palatine Hill grew from frugal beginnings to host the grand residences of the Roman emperors; ‘Palatine’ inspired ‘palace’. When Catullus arrived in the city there was a tree on its east fa?ade that residents said was proof of Romulus’ magnanimity. The young twin had allegedly hurled a spear made from cornel wood the impossible distance of nearly a kilometre from his brother Remus’ chosen hill, the Aventine, to the Palatine Hill, and it rooted itself so deeply that no one could retrieve it. It was the sword in the stone, but with roots and soil eager to nurture them: the cornel tree was born. The Romans built a wall around it, and it flourished until Julius Caesar later asked for the structure to be repaired. His men dug too close to the tree’s roots, and like so many things under Caesar – as Catullus would have been quick to point out, had he lived long enough to witness his dictatorship – it withered, and died. As Catullus made his way to the top of the Palatine Hill, he passed countless bundles of shrub and foliage. The air was fragrant with rosemary and mallow, chamomile and sage. Poppies peeped up between the umbrella pines and masonry, as they do today amidst the Forum monuments. It is as though their pollen never died. Some of the hill’s residents took care not to be too ostentatious in what they grew: there were many who still associated beautiful, intricate gardens with wanton eastern decadence. The Persians had been among the first to celebrate the art of horticulture, and Rome’s wealthiest residents had been quick to adopt some of the more luxurious features, such as pleasure gardens, ornamental moats and fishponds. It was into these creations that Lucullus, a general whom Pompey had usurped as commander in the battles against Mithridates of Pontus in the East, poured much of his war wealth. The general’s extravagance at a time when so many Romans lived in poverty had been his downfall: a Roman praetor persuaded the people that Lucullus had protracted the war through his love of money and power, which precipitated a vote for his recall. At least Lucullus had something to remember it all by: cherry trees now grew in Rome, cultivated from the seeds he had extracted from eastern soils. Though he could not approve of such flamboyance, it was difficult for Catullus not to smile. Lucullus did things that Romans had never done before. In addition to the grand gardens he arranged in the north of Rome, he had specialist fishponds created near Naples for his own pleasure. One onlooker, bristling in his masculinity, scoffed: these were the deeds of ‘Xerxes in a toga’. Like Xerxes, Persia’s most notorious king, Lucullus was made a woman of through his addiction to luxury. If he was to arrive on time for a dinner with Metellus Celer, Catullus needed to stop idling and keep to the main path. Metellus’ residence was on the Clivus Victoriae (‘Slope of Victory’) which led from the Forum along the west side of the Palatine Hill.The road took its name from the temple consecrated to the goddess Victory that perched there. Nearby stood an enormous further temple, dedicated to an eastern goddess. As Catullus passed these temples he found his eye drawn more by the glinting gilt roof of the ‘holy temple of Greatest Jupiter’, which sat on the Capitoline Hill at the opposing end of the Forum (Poem 55). At the top of the sun-baked plateau, he approached a line of sprawling villas. Here was the magnificent portico and property of the late politician Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Beside it, framed by trees and grand marble columns, was the house of Cicero, ‘most fluent of the grandsons of Romulus’ (Poem 49), who had been collecting villas in and around Rome, and had acquired this one just a year earlier. Nearby was the home of another great orator, Hortensius, and on the other side of Catulus’ house with its rambling portico was the home of Metellus Celer. Inside, Metellus’ property was large, and gave the impression of being larger still. Each wall carried a different vista: a distant shore, a garden with brightly coloured birds, a few of them flittering in through the window and perching on its lavish architrave; and trees laden with fruit; and dense foliage, and grand colonnades of columns which seemed to recede hundreds of paces back into nowhere, but could not, because none of it was real: the artists who produced these images were masters of trompe l’oeil. Along the villa’s walls were rows and rows of boxy wooden cabinets containing the death masks of magistrates, long-since deceased. When a woman married, she brought the masks of her ancestors with her to her husband’s home. To look at these walls, one would think Metellus had a dozen wives. Metellus glided past the rows of unseeing faces, abandoned his cup upon the table, and greeted his guest. How pleased he was that Catullus had made the journey to Rome safely (and at good speed!) and was settling into his new life with such ease. Catullus was to meet his wife, whom, naturally, Catullus had already caught sight of across the room. She was lavishly adorned with jewels, and laughing in their midst. Clodia Metelli, n?e Pulchra, of the illustrious Claudius dynasty, was known throughout Rome. Her acquaintances had only to stroll past the Roman Temple of Bellona, the meeting place for councils of war, for her distinguished lineage to be recalled. Her distant grandfather, Appius Claudius Caecus, had consecrated the building in 296 BC, and her father filled its walls with shields painted with his ancestors’ faces, and inscriptions bearing their many achievements. Between service under Sulla, his time as consul in 79 BC, and expeditions in Macedonia, he had barely been around to tell his children of their bloodline before he died in 76 BC, while still a young man. They had to be grateful for the memory those shields provided of faces they had never known. Appius Claudius Caecus, Clodia’s ancestor, had been a consul twice, and had sought to challenge the power of the Senate by filling it with the sons of freedmen (former slaves). He was also responsible for bold public works, including the first ever aqueduct, built just outside Rome, funded by public money and without senatorial decree. Glorious though it was, like the Appian Way, another of his magnificent creations, it wrung the people dry. It was from Appius Claudius Caecus, perhaps, that Clodia and several of her five siblings inherited their egalitarian tastes. She, like her brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher, made the statement of changing the spelling of her name ‘Claudia’ to ‘Clodia’. The original spelling ‘Claudia’ was too upper-crust. ‘Clodia’ gave the old name a fashionable plebeian twist. It was the kind of gesture that drove young Catullus wild. Catullus watched her – watched her husband watching her – and almost passed out: … my tongue freezes, a gentle flame flows down Under my limbs and my ears ring with their own sound. Both my eyes are blinded by night. (Poem 51) His inspiration was a poem by Sappho, the poet born on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BC. Her blood was blue, like Clodia’s, but had not spared her a difficult life. Lesbos’ aristocratic rulers had been deposed before her birth, and she lived under a series of tyrants, under one of whom she left with her family for exile in Sicily. In spite of her experience, her ties with Lesbos were never broken. She married a man, with whom she had a daughter, Cle?s, but it was the memory of her as Lesbos’ native poet who had feelings for women that preserved the association between her and ‘lesbian’ love. In her poem Sappho describes a woman whom she desires enjoying the attentions of her male lover. Her tongue is paralysed – a light flame runs under her skin – her vision vanishes – she turns paler than grass. As the girl laughs sweetly in the man’s presence, Sappho feels close to death. Catullus, who found in Sappho’s lines the unfussiness and raw honesty that he sought in his own work, adopted her Sapphic stanzas, changing only the odd detail. His senses are lost, her heart is aflutter. Clodia is laughing, and her husband is watching. Metellus is to the left of the frame, but too prominent to be cut out of it. As if to depart from earlier models, Catullus would end his version of Sappho’s poem with an original final stanza, to bring the reverie back to earth. As Clodia stood there before him for the first time, neither youthful nor particularly noteworthy in her physical stature, she was indefinably captivating. If at first she seemed detached and aloof, there was a passion and volatility that lay beneath her round, dark, darkly shadowed eyes – Cicero called them her ‘oxen eyes’ – that promised that this veil could be lifted. A combination of intensity and introspection lent her a gravitas Catullus had never seen in a woman before. She unleashed in him a longing to accomplish something, even if he did not know what it was. Catullus had probably only been in Rome for a few months when he heard some shocking news: Clodia’s youngest brother was due in court. The Senate had it on good authority that Clodius Pulcher had infiltrated the festival of the Bona Dea – a women-only religious festival, which had been held at Caesar’s residence the previous December – dressed in drag. To uphold the secrecy of the Bona Dea, Caesar had given his wife, his mother, and sister free use of his property as a secure base from which to perform their duties with other female worshippers. The year that Caesar embarked formally upon his political career, 69 BC, had seen him lose his wife, Cornelia, though their daughter, Julia, survived. He was now married to Pompeia – a curious choice considering that she was the granddaughter of his late enemy Sulla, but the union might entice to his populist cause some of Sulla’s supporters. No man yet had been so brazen as to attempt to watch the rites of the Bona Dea, which women conducted in the presence of the Vestal Virgins. Cicero tried to assure his fellow men that this was a solemn religious event, but the secrecy and obscurity that shrouded it naturally made them curious. Some reported hearing loud music emanating through the walls whenever it took place, and tried to imagine what it signified. Others swam in far deeper fantasies of hip-shaking women drunk on wine, their hair loose and tangled by the blow of the pipe; of bouncing bottoms and female voyeurs; of arousal that was clear for all to see, without the need for full exposure. They wagered that these women could endure the frustration for only so long, and that they would feel compelled at any moment to summon men to the celebrations, or failing men, slaves – an ass, even; anything that could satisfy their lust. Such fantasy had clearly got the better of Clodius, who had long had a taste for high drama. Like his brother-in-law Metellus Celer and so many men of his generation, he had spent his formative years with his eldest brother Appius, a staunch optimate, in the East as part of the war effort against Mithridates. Though placed in the service of Lucullus, the fishpond-loving commander who was married to the youngest of his three sisters until 66 BC, Clodius had incited a mutiny among his troops, and found himself discharged. He had subsequently travelled to Cilicia, Syria, Antioch, and Gaul, before embarking upon a political career at Rome. Clodius’ worldliness had put no check on his appetite for adventure. Aged thirty, he was old enough to know better, but viewed the prospect of disrupting a strangely secretive women’s festival as a thrilling game. Evening fell, summoning the beginning of the rites. Like a comic stage actor, Clodius threw on a saffron gown with purple sashes, women’s slippers, and entered Caesar’s house. The women had already commenced their secret rites when he arrived. Clodius, who must have known that he was chancing his luck, struck unlucky. A slave girl addressed him, he replied in a suspiciously deep voice, and the game was up. The girl swiftly sounded the alarm and Clodius was ejected. The women were compelled to start their rites anew in order to preserve their sanctity. So much for that. The Senate ruled that a trial should take place in May 61 BC. Clodius was accused of incestum, a crime which in this context described the threat male intrusion had caused to the chastity of the Vestal Virgins. As the date of the trial drew near, the gossips began to speculate on the meaning of Clodius’ transgression. Some said he had been driven to his dastardly deed out of lust for Caesar’s wife. Caesar meanwhile lodged a divorce from Pompeia, stressing that it was not right that his family should suffer suspicion and accusation. Driven by a desire for recognition and pre-eminence, throughout his life Caesar would do anything to distance himself from scandal. Lucullus, returned from Pontus, was now summoned as a witness for the prosecution. Having divorced Clodius’ youngest sister, he now took the opportunity to pounce. He decided not only to shame Clodius publicly for his mutinous behaviour in the war in the East, but to swear on oath that he had committed incest with his former wife. It was not long before people were applying the incest slur to all three of Clodius’ sisters. At that moment, Catullus could never have imagined that he would one day be fanning the same empty rumour. Outraged by his juvenile disregard for religious practice, Cicero prepared himself to give evidence against Clodius. Cicero came from a family of wealthy landowners in Arpinum (Arpino), a pretty hill town to the south-east of Rome, which made them worthy enough, but none of them had ever been a senator. Although Cicero was a novus homo, a new man, he was at heart a traditionalist, who was determined to do all he could to preserve Rome’s ancient institutions: the mos maiorum, custom of the elders. Clinging to the vain hope that the Republic might flourish again after the disturbances of recent decades, he sought to strengthen the authority of the Senate. He had convinced himself, if not the population in its entirety, that in foiling Catiline’s conspiracy a couple of years earlier, he had saved the Republic from ruin. The trial of Clodius presented yet another opportunity to champion sobriety. Cicero easily destroyed Clodius’ alibi, but the young Pulcher, living up to his family name (meaning ‘beautiful’), was alluring enough to be able to wield bribes, both pecuniary and sexual, and managed to get himself acquitted. If Cicero needed an excuse to engage in the distasteful incest badinage that Lucullus had set in train, he now had it. Unscathed though Caesar was by the scandal of Clodius Pulcher, the repercussions were an embarrassment. Reluctant to dwell on the matter, or have others do the same, he had hurried off to Further Spain to take up a year-long governorship, the follow-up to a praetorship in Rome. Of the two provinces Rome owned across the territory, Further Spain – consisting of the coastal region of Baetica (including modern Baelo Claudia), swinging up in an arc to incorporate modern Portugal – was the one furthest away from Italy. Catullus watched Caesar’s departure with a newcomer’s eyes. For all his tremendous self-belief and optimism, it was evident that the commander was feeling down on his luck. As he marched he positively jangled with the bags of money Crassus had lent him for the venture. Electioneering had only become more expensive since the days of Sulla, and on proceeding as far as the praetorship, one post down from the coveted consulship, Caesar had accumulated considerable debts. In 65 BC, he had dazzled Rome’s crowds with spectacular games – wild beast hunts, plays, and a gladiatorial show. It was in honour of his late father, he said, that an unprecedented 320 pairs of gladiators fought for their entertainment. He would buy a gladiatorial school in Campania. Increasingly through his life, Catullus would disapprove of squander, of Romans mining the provinces and despoiling the world beyond for their own gain, but it was proving more and more necessary for those who sought power to do so. All Caesar could think about were the spoils he could acquire in Further Spain, as he worked his way towards a triumph. To qualify for this noble accolade, he would need to convince the Senate that he had reduced the province to a peaceful state with little loss to his men. Although Caesar suppressed the rebellion he encountered in the province, there were rumours that he had contributed to the chaos, his eye fixed on glory. It had not escaped his notice either how quickly Pompey had emerged as a force. In his younger years, Caesar had wept bitterly before a statue of Alexander the Great, in sorrow at how much the commander had achieved by the time he was his age. As much as he courted Pompey’s favour and support, Caesar could only feel inadequate when he looked at his precocious achievements. Normally, a man was eligible for a triumph only after fulfilling a praetorship or consulship, but Pompey had celebrated two before achieving either. What was more, he expected to be granted a third. Pompey had returned from the East to a city in jittery expectancy over his next triumph, a grand finale to his work in the East. Fearful of Pompey’s eminence, however, the senators delayed the ratification of his eastern settlement. They would provide no closure to his victories: his veteran soldiers remained in need of land; equestrian tax-farmers and landowners began demanding rebate for the financial losses they had accrued following his restructure of Asia and Bithynia; Crassus took up their cause, but struggled to make much progress. Now that he was back in Italy, Pompey, like Caesar, and like Lucullus before him, filed for divorce from his wife. Mucia, a sister of Metellus Celer, had already given him children, but he had in mind a politically more lucrative match with a niece of Cato, a particularly staunch optimate senator. Catullus knew that ambition was not the only reason for Pompey’s divorce. In a poem, he noted how, during Pompey’s first consulship in 70 BC, Mucia had taken a lover. By popular repute Mucia – or Maecilia, as he called her, perhaps to distinguish her from a sister – was sleeping with both Pompey and Caesar. Fifteen years later, Catullus jested that ‘the two remain, but a thousand men compete against each’ (Poem 113). Pompey was remarkably short-sighted about the repercussions of his divorce. Not only did he fail to obtain the hand of Cato’s niece, but he incurred the wrath of Metellus Celer, who could not take in good grace such an ignoble slight to his sister. In the coming years, Pompey would face considerable opposition from Metellus as he sought to advance in his political career. Catullus was not interested in panegyric, so it came as no surprise that he wrote nothing to mark the occasion, in September 61 BC, when on his forty-fifth birthday Pompey finally celebrated his third triumph for his achievements against the pirates and King Mithridates of Pontus. Had Catullus chosen to do so, the imagery would have been palpable: crowds packing Rome’s streets; placards proclaiming Pompey’s conquests – Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis, Iberia, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea, Arabia, ‘and everything the pirates had on land and sea that had now been overthrown’. Hostages, among them the chief pirates Pompey had scourged from the seas, were paraded among the trophies and pearl crowns. One particularly large golden statue tottered on its stand. Pompey had chosen to display the statue, rather than the slain body of the king, because the embalmer had done such a bad job. The issue was not the gore, it was more that it would have prompted doubts as to whom Pompey had really vanquished. The youngsters of Rome jostled to catch a glimpse of the statue and, still more pressingly, of Pompey, the man who had succeeded where so many Romans had not. Within four years of being entrusted with the command, he had claimed the final defeat of King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, and reduced him to a glitzy showpiece. Wearing a cloak he claimed was once owned by Alexander the Great, Pompey made it known that the majority of the prisoners on show would be sent home straight after the occasion. As Catullus must have realised, this was meant as a great show of clemency towards the defeated. Few displays could have endeared him more to the Roman people, who loved to hate eastern luxury, but could not help but be fascinated by it. Though Catullus was not seduced by the event, he could not close his eyes to what it signified. The pitiful appearance of so many foreign faces poignantly asserted the authority Rome had regained over Asia, as well as its proud ownership of Bithynia, which stood now larger than ever on the Black Sea coast. It was as though the Romans had regained a shattered crown, and acquired extra jewels in the process. The victory at once made viable the prospect of freely walking on its soil. Catullus’ elder brother ventured to Asia, possibly to assist in the war effort or gain grounding for a political career. But Catullus, for his part, had too much to detain him in Rome to contemplate Bithynia just yet. That blinding, tongue-freezing moment with Clodia Metelli had left its mark. But the wine had been free-flowing that night and put some of his memories to flight. It had been difficult for a Gaul like him to gauge his new limits when he realised that the Romans drank their wine with water, and frowned upon those who did not. The idea of drinking wine, especially a fine Falernian, anything but straight had long struck Catullus as anathema: ‘… water, spoiler of wine … off you pop to the dour kind’, he sang, after a few (Poem 27). AN ELEGANT NEW LITTLE BOOK (#ulink_30ed582b-c23a-592a-b366-7b521a304f7a) Heroes, born in the moment most admired Beyond measure of all Ages, godly race, Offspring of a noble mother, Again and again I beseech you. I shall commemorate you often in my poem (Poem 64, lines 23–4) EVENINGS WERE FOR WRITING POEMS, as much as for drinking wine. Catullus could not explain why, but when he sat down to write he found himself picturing Cornelius Nepos, a historian and poet from Gaul. Inquisitive, not to say obsessive, about the figures who had shaped the world around him, Cornelius had written On Famous Men and Outstanding Generals of Foreign Peoples, and composed a recondite history of the Greeks and Romans in three volumes, the Chronica (sadly now lost). Cornelius also had a weakness for learned and elegant poetry – a fact which did not elude Catullus who decided that if there was anyone worth impressing while also challenging with the directness and erudition of his verse, it was he. Rather than trouble himself with acquiring a patron – whose persistent requests and inability to be satisfied with fine lines might have proved an inconvenient distraction – Catullus decided to make Cornelius the dedicatee of his poetry collection. Poetry was a painful enough profession as it was, in which days of intense thought seldom resulted in anything other than frustration and a wax tablet stamped under foot. By the end of each day, it was less a case of finding a line he liked than one he could tolerate; and even if Catullus could do that, he would have struggled to satisfy a patron. It was finished articles they wanted, not salvaged syllables. The very notion of writing on demand was a distinctly unpoetic one. No, he would be independent, not an unusual situation for the times, but one for which he needed private means and public prominence. Catullus possessed the means: his family had acquired riches enough to carry him through, and Rome’s foreign conquests had gilded his world in luxuries. The poor reached out to taste them, but like Tantalus forever striving to savour a drink in the Underworld, few ever reached their fruits. While landowners suffered as more and more produce was imported from the new provinces, many an equestrian exulted in the new trade. Catullus, however, was never much interested in the trappings of new money, and was at pains to play down his wealth. ‘The wallet of your Catullus is full of cobwebs,’ he once told a friend, as if he had slipped his hand into the fold of his toga and found not emptiness, but the deception of emptiness, a web that proved to have fallen short of its purpose through possessing too many holes (Poem 13). It was too easy for a young dandy to complain about a lack of money when his accounts ran dry, or when his father replenished them to an extent he considered pitiful. As for public prominence, Metellus Celer could introduce him to Cornelius Nepos, in the first instance. Metellus knew the man well enough to tell him a curious tale of how the king of the Suebi, a Germanic tribe, once gave him certain Indians who had come ashore in Gaul following a storm at sea. He said little more on the matter, which put him at risk of sounding like a self-aggrandising fantasist. Whether the story was true or not, Cornelius Nepos believed it enough to repeat it. He was a lofty figure for Catullus to dedicate his self-confessed ‘ramblings’ to, but the elder poet did recognise their worth: twenty years after Catullus’ death, Cornelius would remember him as one of the finest poets of the age. Catullus pictured the ‘elegant new little book’ he would give him, a handsome papyrus scroll prepared from strips of sedge plant. A specialist craftsman pressed the strips and laid them out in the sun to fuse together. Then he used a dry pumice stone to polish the edges of the papyrus, which would otherwise prove perilous to the delicate fingertips of the learned. In a gruelling exercise in self-criticism, Catullus would fill the book with his best work, for not even the largest scroll in Rome was big enough to hold all the poems he had ever written. He hoped that his poetry would be just as well polished as his scroll and therefore survive for ‘over a hundred years’, a saeculum, the longest span a Roman supposed a man could live (Poem 1). Waking from his reverie, he decided to concentrate for the moment on publishing what he had by word of mouth, and in draft form among friends and more public groups before considering any amendments and overseeing the production of further copies on papyrus. Latin poetry did not rhyme, but could be written in many different metres, to which the ancient ear was well attuned. Catullus was ever promiscuous in his choice. The first fifty-nine poems in his collection as it survives vary in metre (the ‘polymetrics’); the last fifty are epigrams, written in the elegiac metre. In between are eight poems, which rely upon a variety of different rhythms and beats. No sooner had he begun to circulate his first drafts in Rome, than a ‘filthy slut’ told him he was a ‘joke’, and promptly made off with several of his wax tablets. He watched her, ‘strutting shamefully, laughing nastily as if in a mime with a face like a Gallic puppy’s’ (Poem 42). Even as she did so, Catullus put the joke back on himself. The Latin for ‘puppy’ was catulus; Catullus was a Gaul. Her facial expression was ugly, but she was mimicking him, like a mime actress. He looked at her and saw his reflection: a Gallic dogface. The sight antagonised him, as did the slattern’s words. Rich men could write leisurely while other men were plying more physically exhausting trades, but it was certainly no ‘joke’. When spent wisely, leisure – otium – could produce magnificent results. He documented the process earnestly, but with heightened fervour, in a poem to another poet, Licinius: Yesterday, Licinius, on a lazy day, We messed around for ages in my writing tablets Risqu? as agreed, Scribbling short verses, you then me, Playing now with this metre and now with that, Swapping them between us over laughter and wine. (Poem 50) He went on to describe the sleepless night that followed, worked up as he was in admiration for this man’s great wit and the passion they had made in metres and refrains. When their professional lives were so tied up together, it felt only natural for Catullus to feature the man in his lines. The poem was a gift to him – ocelle (an affectionate diminutive that literally meant ‘little eye’) – so that there could be no doubt about the depth of his affection. Catullus was no stranger to what it meant to feel an intense or passing attraction to another man. All around him, adolescent boys from good families were enjoying sexual liaisons with other boys. Some kept a concubinus at home, a man of lower social standing with whom he could while away the years of youth before proceeding to marriage with an eligible girl. Sex between the two boys could be perfunctory, but a concubinus could form a lasting emotional attachment to his partner and begrudge the day he left him behind: ‘miserable, miserable concubine’ (Poem 61). As Romans talked freely about each other’s sex lives, an adult man of respectable status could be quite open about the penetration of a male slave or subordinate. To be penetrated himself, and therefore give another man pleasure, was, on the other hand, deeply shameful. There was no word for homosexuality in Catullus’ day, but the poet was fond of using language then considered risqu? to describe a man who took on the receptive role with another man. Catullus decided to pursue Licinius – full name Gaius Licinius Calvus Macer – not as a lover, but as close enough a friend for later poets to recall them often as a pair. On further acquaintance, Catullus discovered that the fellow preferred to go by the name Calvus, an unpretentious two syllables which he hoped would put distance between him and his father’s shadow. Poor Calvus had barely to sit down to dinner before someone would ask him if he was related to Gaius Licinius Macer, an influential historian and political adviser: a wunderkind descended from 300 years of political gold. The father had committed suicide upon being indicted for extortion, but people had not forgotten the high esteem in which he had been held. And here was his son, Calvus, trying to make his way in the world, a short man with very little hair – if he lived up to his preferred name which meant ‘bald’. At least he had the example of Julius Caesar to heed. The tall and well-built commander was developing a bald patch as he aged. He tended to remove excess body hair with tweezers, but was so anxious to maintain the semblance of a full mane that he fashioned a comb-over and relished the opportunity to wear a laurel wreath when this honour was bestowed upon him. Others wrestled with the same problem. Several hundred years later, Synesius of Cyrene, a Neoplatonist who became a bishop, wrote an essay In Praise of Baldness (in response to one historian’s In Praise of Hair). There was no shame in the head being bald, he insisted, provided that the mind was hirsute, or ruffled with ideas. Sheep, after all, were hairy but stupid. Not satisfied with explaining how many of the most intelligent figures in the ancient world had been hairless – most famously of all, Socrates – he proceeded to argue that even the heroes of myth, such as Achilles, shed their hair at an early age. If that did not stop them from achieving eternal recognition, why should it stop anyone else? Calvus was trying to rise above his appearance and become a respectable lawyer, for which poetry would prove an excellent grounding and distraction. He needed only to look at Cicero, the greatest lawyer of the age, who had spent his younger years composing a poem about a fisherman from Boeotia who ate a herb and turned into a prophetic sea god. The crown of Calvus’ poetic achievements, as fortune would have it, would also involve an element of metamorphosis. He wrote about Io, a young girl whom Jupiter, king of the gods, turned into a heifer, and raped: ‘Oh unfortunate virgin, you feed on bitter grass.’ Catullus and Calvus struck up a friendship with another poet, Gaius Helvius Cinna, who probably came from Brescia, ‘mother’ of Catullus’ Verona. The proximity of Cisalpine Gaul to Rome and its varied landscapes proved a fertile combination, and Cinna, for one, did not hesitate to proclaim his provincial roots: ‘But now a swift chariot pulled by two little horses rushes me through the willow trees of the Cenomani [Gauls].’ As a man who rendered even a talented poet a mere ‘goose’ among ‘melodious swans’, Cinna had plenty to teach Catullus and Calvus. If only he was not so slow at composition. He was still hard at work on a poem he had begun perhaps five years earlier about an incestuous affair of a princess called Zmyrna. Into and out of their circle, less salon than fluid coterie, wandered several other poets, including Furius Bibaculus, whom Catullus came to know exceptionally well, and, at their helm, a poet and grammar teacher from Gaul, Publius Valerius Cato. Catullus addressed him in a few lines which made light of their closeness in name and nature, as he described the moment he punished a precocious young boy: A ridiculous scenario, Cato, hilarious, Well worth your attention and laughter. Laugh as much as you love Catullus, Cato! The scenario is ridiculous and too funny. Just now I caught my girlfriend’s little boy Wanking; If Dione approves, I took him With my hard-straining cock. (Poem 56) Determined to wind Cato up, Catullus left the identity of the boy he assaulted in his poem unclear; if he were an innocent slave, at worst Catullus would have had to compensate his owner for property damage. In a clever pun, Valerius Catullus sits side by side with Valerius Cato, ‘Catullus, Cato!’ As Catullus knew, his name was little more than a diminutive that meant ‘little Cato’. Joking with his older and wiser namesake, he made it his mission to laugh all the more heartily to make up for the best-known Cato of his day, the optimate politician Cato the Younger, who was famous for never laughing at all. Even Cicero, who was very fond of young Cato, had to confess that he spoke in the Senate ‘as if he were in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ cesspit’. There was nothing Catullus and his poet circle liked more than picking apart the work of inferior authors. In a similarly jocular tone, Catullus wrote a poem to a friend, Varus, about the poetry of a certain Suffenus: a likeable man, but a terrible poet. Not satisfied with composing ten thousand or more verses on wax tablets, ‘this Suffenus’ had them copied out on luxurious rolls of papyrus, wound up on new scroll knobs with red tie-thongs, lead-ruled, their edges smoothed. Suffenus the man and Suffenus’ poems did not go hand in hand: When you read them, that smart and sophisticated Suffenus suddenly seems like any old goat-milker Or digger, such is the transformation and discrepancy. (Poem 22) As far as Catullus was concerned, good poetry was characterised by urbanitas, which was determined less by a poet’s background and current surroundings than it was by an aptitude for incisiveness, sophistication and wit. Many a man from the city had failed in that test, and many a provincial flourished. The urbane man knew the world, but had experienced it so richly that his observations had become those of an elevated being. He used words such as lepidus to mean elegant and iucundus to describe something aesthetic and pleasurable to the senses; he spoke as Catullus wrote. Suffenus, whom Catullus described as urbanus as a man, aspired to urbanity in packaging his poems the way he did, but his presentation was merely an elaborate attempt to compensate for inadequate, rustic, verse. Happy though he was to call the poems of Suffenus and other men ‘tortures’ (Poem 14), and even to contemplate gathering all their ‘poison’ to give Calvus his comeuppance for making him a present of it, Catullus more than once referred to himself as ‘the very worst’ poet (Poems 36 and 49). As time would tell, he meant these words sarcastically, but not even sarcasm could disguise his self-knowledge. While he saw these inferior poets as ‘unsuited to our times’, he was not blind to the fact that his own work was untimely, only in a different sense. A fragment of a draft introduction preserved in his collection classed his poetry as ineptia – not just ‘ramblings’ but ‘unsuited’ or ‘untimely’ ramblings: utterings which did not quite fit. While he frowned upon some other poets’ work, not everyone around him approved of his own. Lending them epithets neither of praise nor entirely of criticism, Cicero branded his set neoteroi, ‘too new’, or poetae novi, ‘new poets’. Ever the stickler for tradition, Cicero saw them as young, subversive, inferior to the great masters who preceded them. The older elite families had grown up on a diet of epic and historic chronicle, with a smattering of comedy. In the texts of Homer lay praise for the valiant warriors of ancient times, luxurious palaces and perfect islands. The first Roman authors had written in Greek. Others proudly translated the Odyssey into Latin, and a man named Ennius then boldly claimed that Homer had entered his soul and inspired him to write. His Annales, chronicles of Rome’s august history, were precisely the kind of work Catullus despised for their weight and severity. Other Romans savoured them nonetheless, as they did dull agricultural treatises and staid comedies based upon Greek plays. Catullus might have despaired: there was a clutch of poets who had turned their hands in recent decades to translating and adapting Greek poems into Latin, and he was familiar with their efforts. But the civil wars of Sulla and Marius appeared to have resulted in something of a drought of truly elegant literature. Catullus resolved to play the situation to his advantage. Rebelling against the dry tomes of Ennius and others, seizing the new day after the tragedies of the previous decades, Catullus and his friends relished the corporeal and the earthy: not just a boy indulging himself sexually, but a man airing his buttocks at the baths, or subjecting a crowd to his terrible body odour. Catullus wrote lines that were impish and scatological: For your anus is cleaner than a salt-cellar And doesn’t shit ten times a full year (Poem 23) His first editors in Renaissance Italy reproduced such fruity poems and commented upon them freely. When it came to disseminating them in England, however, prudishness often got in the way. Some scholars omitted the rude poems or fractions of them from their editions to make them suitable for both schoolchildren and adults to read. Even in the twentieth century, famous scholars, including C. J. Fordyce, have deemed up to a third of Catullus’ poems unfit for comment. Cleverly concealing the fact that he was incredibly doctus (‘learned’) by writing Latin that looked diurnal – mundane – Catullus turned his hand also to composing smart elegiac couplets loaded with sentiment. He had four acquaintances in Verona who were ‘double-dating’. When they began to read the poem he wrote about them, they might have thought that he was mocking them: Caelius is crazy for Aufillenus, Quintius for Aufillena, The flowers of Verona’s youth, The brother one, his sister the other. Which is what they call a truly sweet fraternity. But then he unexpectedly brought the poem round to form a heartfelt tribute to an old friend: Whom am I to back of the two? Caelius, you. For your friendship alone saw me through the fire When the mad flames of passion burned me to the marrow. May you be happy, Caelius, and a master of love. (Poem 100) His poem fell comfortably into two halves, but hinged not merely upon themes of love and friendship, but on the line between life and death. This man’s friendship was not to be taken lightly, for it saved Catullus’ life. Charming as such verses were, for people more accustomed to didactics – the kind of poetry that actually taught them something – it was initially difficult to see that Catullus’ personal refrains and observations of humdrum life contained lessons of their own. Cicero, in particular, loved grandiloquence. The epics were more his style, not the colloquialisms and newly turned words of Rome’s youth. He could not appreciate strings of expletives embedded in otherwise elegant lines, and jilty rhythms, and thousands of diminutives – it was ‘little’ this, ‘little’ that – littering self-obsessed and self-obsessing ramblings on love and heartbreak. He got Catullus’ references, but not the point of them. While writing poems like these, Catullus and his friends longed also to capture the sophisticated verve of celebrated Hellenistic poets, men such as Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus, whose poetry might imbue their Latin lines with all the learnedness and erudition of the Greek East. Catullus’ interest in writing in this poised and intellectual style, as well as in the more colloquial manner favoured by the man in the street, made him a particularly bold and interesting poet. Callimachus originally came from Cyrene, a Greek foundation on the coast of North Africa (close to modern Shahat in Libya), but now capital of one of Rome’s newer provinces, Cyrenaica. He traced his lineage all the way back to its founder, King Battus, and Catullus perpetuated his claims to royal ancestry. When Callimachus was born, shortly before the third century BC, Alexandria was still a new city. It was at its great Library that he and Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the most famous epic on Jason and the Argonauts, made scholarly erudition fashionable. Quite taken with their cleverness, and with some of the Greek poems they discovered in recent anthologies, Catullus and his friends set about establishing themselves as their Latin heirs. As they did so, they also looked at the work of Meleager, a poet who lived on the island of Cos in the eastern Aegean, who over the last quarter century had gathered together a selection of Greek epigrams spanning the period of history through to the early first century BC. Other poets were producing similar compilations. Catullus was not the first to pick up these works at Rome and respond to them in Latin, but he was among the first to do so successfully. He perceived early on the ways in which the works of his predecessors could intersect, the Greek with the Latin, the past with the present; Callimachus and his descent from a king who claimed kinship with one of the Argonauts whom Apollonius was celebrating in verse. And there Catullus stood at the far end of their tangled lineage, embracing it as the fount, but just the fount, of the best Roman poetry of all, his own. Apollonius’ Argonautica would form a starting point for Catullus’ Bedspread Poem, a work whose form would be pointedly Callimachean. People like Cicero ought to have admired the scholarship that Catullus absorbed from these poets. It was said that Callimachus wrote more than 800 papyrus rolls on wide-ranging topics: treatises on the rivers of Europe and the names of fish, collections of tragedies, dramas; a poem about Io, the girl Jupiter turned into a heifer and raped, which must have influenced Calvus as he sat down to write on the same theme; and a poem about Theseus entitled Hecale. Catullus was looking particularly at his Aetia, a four-book poem on the origins of ancient customs, written in elegiacs, a metre normally reserved for short pieces. It was choppy, but meticulously structured. In its prologue Callimachus explained that his critics despised work that was not written as one continuous long poem on epic themes such as warfare. He disagreed, and argued moreover that sacrificial sheep should be fattened, but verses kept svelte, and that large ideas should be condensed into tiny phrases: For, when for the first time I put my tablet On my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me: ‘… poet, feed the sacrificial animal to be as fat As possible, but, dear fellow, the Muse to be slender. And I instruct you as follows, do not tread the path Which carriages pass over or drive your chariot Over others’ paths or a wide track, but along unworn Roads, even if you drive a narrower path.’ (Prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia, Fragment 1.22–8) Catullus heeded his advice for brevity, ingenuity, variety, and polished erudition. In paying homage to Callimachus he risked treading his path, but determined to move away from translating his poetry and begin adapting merely its precepts to his own particular tongue. That way he would prove himself capable of walking outside the existing tramlines of Latin literature. He echoed Callimachus’ criticism of a poet called Antimachus, whose work was notoriously verbose. ‘Let the plebs rejoice in puffed-up Antimachus,’ Catullus wrote (Poem 95b), while the more concise works of Cinna and Callimachus were to be savoured by those who were learned enough to appreciate the tune of the cicadas over the braying of the ass. When Catullus later attempted to write in a grand style reminiscent of epic, he would do so in the Callimachean manner of reducing greatness to a small compass, and making every word count. And so Poem 64, his Bedspread Poem, would both feature and become a rich tapestry of allusions to other poets’ works and traditions of myth, but woven to a pattern of his own invention. He would choose to use hexameters, a heavier metre than he used for many of his other poems, which gave longer works such as this a grand tone. Still, Cicero was just too aloof to appreciate his poetry. In another respect, he was too close to him. It was not just the urbanity or ‘Greekness’ of Catullus’ verse that offended him, but the provincial twang that he imposed upon it. Cicero was a new man from Arpinum, to Rome’s south; Catullus, though also nouveau riche in the eyes of the patricians, was a Gaul; both were outsiders. To Cicero’s ears, the northern tongue was abhorrent. It was normal for a writer to disguise his origins by sticking to standard forms, but Catullus’ voice was clearly transposed into some of his poems. The Gauls tended to keep their mouths open more often than the Romans as they spoke, causing one word to leak into another like a loudly dripping tap. Gaping vowels gave rise to strange inflections and distinctive dialogue, which was exceedingly difficult to lose. And Catullus was not minded to do so. The sheer languidness of the elided vowel lent itself perfectly to love. One of his most famous Latin lines, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus – ‘We should live … we should love’ (Poem 5) benefited from his dialect. In reading it, no one pronounced the ‘ia’ and ‘at’ or the ‘que’ and ‘ame’, but ran them together like this: ‘Lesbiatquamemus’. It sounded like a lover’s drawl. SPARROW (#ulink_c54ee9db-e9f0-529e-8502-d0835d01b037) Observe the couch at the heart of the palace, A fine seat for a goddess, Finished with ivory from India And spread with purple tinged with the rose-pink Dye of the murex fish. (Poem 64, lines 47–9) LANGUID SPEECH PROVED particularly helpful when Catullus was writing to woo, and he used it repeatedly in his poetry. He had learned early on that poetry had the potential both to incite and to restrain the act of love. Reading it tended to do the former, writing it the latter; but the outcome depended upon the quality of the verse. Write a good poem, and it might have been enough not to have followed his feelings through to fruition. Write too good a poem, and he risked driving himself mad with desire. It proved a lot harder to write a poem to remedy frustration than to write one for a lover. Amid the difficulties of sourcing solace in poetry, Catullus discovered increasingly that poems intended to satisfy his lust slipped easily into poems that incited him to act on it. In the hands of the person he loved, he always hoped that they might have the same effect. He decided to put this to the test. Clodia Metelli had been clouding his thoughts, making it impossible for him to think of anything else. Taking in his hands the poem he had written about watching her from under her husband’s nose, he made her a copy. He addressed it not to ‘Clodia’, but to ‘Lesbia’, establishing there and then an intellectual code for her real name. While ‘Lesbia’ meant ‘woman of Lesbos’, where Sappho was born, it also had the same number of syllables as ‘Clodia’. Both names provided him with one heavy and two short beats Clodia must have been pleased, for she was more than just a muse waiting to be flattered with a Sapphic pseudonym, she was an ‘experienced poet of very many plays’. Cicero smirked when he called her that in court one day, hoping he could shift blame away from the man he was defending by characterising her as someone who was capable enough of composing charades to incriminate him. Clodia and his client, as time would tell, had history. But Cicero’s prejudice against her ready wit need not have reduced what he said to a fallacy. The poems Catullus composed for Lesbia might well have been touched by subtle reminiscences of what she once wrote, ghosts of Clodia the poet, of whom nothing else survives. Catullus had no issue with welcoming women poets into his circle, including one Cornificia whose ‘distinguished epigrams’ were still being read 400 years after she lived. An aristocratic female poet named Sulpicia wrote romantic verses some years later about her relationship with a lover, Cerinthus. She lamented the prospect of spending her birthday without him, and described the fever that coursed her veins. She wrote of her despair when her lover took her for granted, and told him that he would do better to turn his attentions to a whore than take liberties with her affections. While some of her poems survived, bundled together with those of a male poet, Tibullus, other female poets’ work did not. Had it not been for her name and marital status, or even for Catullus himself, Clodia Metelli might have erupted with just as much force on the literary scene. But there could never have been room for both Clodia and Lesbia. Even from the very start, there was a problem. Sappho had won eternal renown for her intellect, but Clodia was already married. She was not about to earn anything more than notoriety as the object of a non-aristocratic, indeed non-Roman, poet’s affections. As it was, her illustrious ancestor Appius Claudius had helped to oversee a law against marriage between blue-blood patricians and commoner plebeians. The ruling came under the Twelve Tables legislation, which magistrates drew up in the 450s BC after Greek examples. Though the intermarriage law had since been annulled, the lasting stigma that arose when one married someone who lacked an illustrious family tree was not always lost on their descendants. Catullus could not even quite decide what it was he liked about Clodia. He tried to define his reasons, but could only do so by comparing her with another woman, Quintia, who was something of a beauty: Quintia is beautiful by popular repute. To my mind she is Pale, tall, poised: these individual qualities I readily concede. But I deny her total beauty, for there is no charm, No grain of salt in so large a frame. Lesbia is beautiful since her beauty is total, And she has stolen every Venus from every woman. (Poem 86) He could not deny that Quintia was tall, pale, and had good posture – all features Romans admired in a woman. But there were less tangible things that made her inferior to his beloved. Lesbia could not quite compete with Quintia for height, at least, for he sought to emphasise instead her ‘total beauty’. The line in which he described Quintia’s lack of ‘salt’ – or wit – was remarkably balanced so as to emphasise his point. Lesbia was almost aggressively beautiful. The word he used in Latin to describe how she acquired her good qualities was subripio, a sudden movement akin to theft. She was candida, both pale-skinned and ‘shining’, as well as beautiful and salty. If Catullus was satisfied that he had finally understood the cause of his attraction, his friend Calvus was left distraught. Quintia just happened to be his lover. While Clodia had total beauty, Catullus had his Gallic dog-face with its lazy eye, a physical shortcoming which few in society could have looked upon with much compassion. Catullus’ sensitivity was a worthy quality, but hardly strong enough to compensate for his appearance. If he was going to win Clodia’s heart, he would need to do so through his poetry. ‘A generous girl acts on her word, a chaste one makes no promise,’ Catullus once told a girl in Verona (Poem 110). Clodia, he prayed, would now promise. She needed more persuading than he did to go beyond mere flirtation. A woman’s adultery, unlike a man’s, was theoretically punishable with death. As Cato’s ancestor put it: ‘If you should discover your wife committing adultery, you may with impunity kill her without trial; but if she should discover you committing adultery or having an adulterous act performed upon you, she would not dare to lay a finger on you, nor would that be lawful.’ In practice it was exceedingly difficult to enforce such measures. The law did little to deter married women from pursuing extramarital liaisons. So it was that the first emperor of Rome, Augustus, would introduce a new law against adultery in 18 BC. Still, there was a risk; and Catullus was anxious that Clodia should take it. He employed every bit of wit and charm he could. He might only have been writing love poems, but he believed that he was fighting ‘great and glorious battles’ for her (Poem 37). Catullus the valiant hero-in-arms sat down to compose a poem about her pet sparrow. He decided he would capture the movement of the sparrow by using one of his favourite poetic metres, hendecasyllables, the origins of which lay in ancient song. The playful, eleven-syllable lines were as suited to flirtation as they were to invective. In hendecasyllables his poem would skip along lightly, like a tiny sparrow on its feet. Sappho had had the goddess of love ride a sparrow chariot in one of her poems. Meleager, the Greek epigrammatist, sought release from his heartache through a grasshopper’s song. Catullus sought to go several bases further. In Verona, sparrows fluttered in and out of human life like rain. They targeted diners distracted by laughter and wine and fearlessly stole bread from their simple linen napkins. They skimmed the waters beneath Verona’s grand bridge, the Ponte Pietra, in balletic display, and hopped here and there across the parched soils of Sirmio, unable to keep pace with the scurrying lizards. The ‘Cisalpine’ genus, Passer italiae, a cross between the common and Spanish sparrows, is delicate and tame. Inspired by the landscapes of home as much as by his poetic forebears, Catullus pictured his darling Lesbia playing with her ‘sparrow’, which nipped at her fingertips, providing her with some consolation from the ‘intolerable burning’ he liked to imagine she was feeling: Sparrow, apple of my girl’s eye, Often she plays with you, holds you in her lap, Gives you a fingertip when you want it And urges you to take passionate bites Whenever she wishes, gleaming in desire for me, To play with something for pleasure. And I believe it provides a small release from her Frustration, as then the intolerable burning fades. I wish that I could play with you as she does And lighten the ponderous cares of my mind … I would be as grateful as they say the quick-stepped Atalanta was for the little golden apple That loosed the chastity belt that bound her long. (Poem 2) Catullus used the short beats in the hendecasyllables to illustrate Lesbia’s movement as much as that of her sparrow. One can almost hear her as she ‘plays’, ludere, and moves her ‘finger’ digitum: Often she plays with you Quicum ludere, quem Gives you a fingertip Cui primum digitum Like many fantasies, Catullus’ was inconsistent. Lesbia was seductive enough to play expertly with her sparrow, yet as virginal as Atalanta, a girl from the world of myth, who was to marry the man who defeated her in a footrace after she stooped to pick up golden apples. Pre-empting Shakespeare’s Romeo, who wished that he was Juliet’s bird, Catullus longed that he would be the one to play with Lesbia’s sparrow in her stead. His persistence, like any lover’s, hovered over the indeterminate line between nuisance and flattery. And with time it did what persistence will – drift imperceptibly to where there lies the promise of consummation. Fortunately, he did not have to wait too long before that delicious day arrived. Metellus Celer had just succeeded in being elected to the consulship of 60 BC, alongside Lucius Afranius (a man accused of being better at dancing than politics). The husband’s back would now be turned on his domestic life, as he focused on affairs in the public arena. While Catullus was busy picturing Lesbia’s sparrow, Pompey was battling the Senate’s opposition to the ratification of his eastern campaigns. Its members were fearful that between the lines of his settlement lay the extension of personal powers, and with good reason. Pompey was trying to pass an agrarian law that would grant land to Rome’s poor citizens, not just his veterans, and win votes in the process. Lucullus, Clodia’s former brother-in-law, led the optimates in blocking Pompey. He was supported by Metellus Celer, who was still smarting from his sister’s divorce. As Pompey’s tribune put forward the proposals, Metellus Celer contested each point so bitterly that the Senate had him hauled off to jail. Not willing to let this stop him, Metellus haughtily asked for the debate to reconvene outside his cell. Exasperated, Pompey bade his tribune release his opponent. The settlement remained unresolved. On the other side, Metellus had Clodia’s brother to deal with. Still exalting in his freedom after the Bona Dea trial, and fresh from serving as a quaestor in Sicily, Clodius was now plotting to be elected as a tribune: a curious ambition, considering that his patrician birth and status put him above the post. To the man in the street, he must have seemed crazy. But Clodius was no fool. As a tribune, he could strengthen his ties with the plebeians, and also propose legislation to punish Cicero for opposing him in court. Cicero was now convinced that Clodius had a vendetta against him and wanted to destroy him. Since only plebeians were eligible to become tribunes, however, Clodius needed first to be demoted in class. Clodia was happy to do what she could for her brother. She was acquainted with Cicero, but better acquainted with Cicero’s loyal pen friend, Atticus, to whom she passed messages and reported Clodius’ plans, as if to antagonise Cicero further. Cicero could see that Clodia was doing her very best to help her brother succeed, even petitioning her husband on his behalf. Taking the bait, Cicero set about taunting Clodius over his ambitions for the lowly tribunate. Clodius asked him whether he had ever been in the practice of providing a place for Sicilians at gladiatorial shows. ‘No,’ replied Cicero. ‘Well, I shall initiate the practice as their new patron,’ said Clodius; ‘only, since my sister occupies so much of the consul’s position, she gives me but a single foot.’ ‘Don’t moan about one of your sister’s feet when you’re allowed to lift them both!’ Cicero croaked. He knew that incest jokes were crass, but when Clodia was so meddlesome, so unworthy of her husband, he felt that they were justified. Time and again he called her ‘ox-eyes’, a sobriquet that emphasised her tempestuousness more than her beauty. In Homer’s great epics, it was Zeus’ feisty wife Hera whose eyes were ‘ox-like’. Although Clodia seemed to be making headway on behalf of her brother and his quest for plebeian status, for all her arguments she soon found there was nothing she could do to prevent Metellus from blocking the measure in a ‘most distinguished opposition’. Her brother and her husband were at loggerheads, and for the moment, there was no way to resolve the stalemate. Whether it was this that drove her into Catullus’ arms – if she was not already there – or the simple fact that the intensity of her husband’s new position as consul provided the opportunity for temptation, there were practicalities to be addressed before an affair could become fully fledged. It could not be conducted under Metellus’ own roof on the Palatine Hill, for it would be impossible to elude the eyes of so many neighbours, visitors, and slaves. Catullus was also keen to keep any prospective activity away from his own door. A woman was entitled to dine with men, own property, and move fairly freely through the city, but her movements were hampered by her male ‘guardian’ – ordinarily her husband. So Ovid later complained of his mistress Corinna, ‘whom her husband, whom her guardian, whom the hard door (so many enemies!) were guarding, so she could not be taken by any deception’. Even if she managed it, Clodia might easily have been caught. Catullus was undeterred. He calmly turned to one of many acquaintances he had made during his first months in Rome, a certain Allius, who had offered him his house to use as he desired. The opportunity arose just as Catullus was ‘burning like Etna’. In retrospect, and with marvellous poetic litotes, he later wrote that the girl, for her part, ‘was not unwilling’ (Poem 8). Not without a flattering dose of hyberbole – litotes’ happy inverse – he likened his relief at finding such a spot in which to exercise his passion to a favouring breeze arriving suddenly and assisting sailors ‘caught in a black hurricane’ (Poem 68). As Catullus’ beloved approached the threshold for the very first time she looked like a ‘shining goddess’. Ordinarily, a woman would cross the threshold in this way when she became a man’s bride, and then carried in his arms. (Few remembered why: the ancient biographer Plutarch made this number twenty-nine of his Roman Questions and proposed that it was perhaps a memory of the forceful manner in which the first Romans had taken the Sabine women, who lived on their borders, to be their wives, or through female shyness, or to illustrate that she was now tied to that household.) In usurping the role of the bride and entering alone, Lesbia sounded an ill note; she faltered on the threshold that was already well worn, just as the Trojan Horse famously faltered as it crossed into the ancient city, an evil gift from the Greeks which heralded the collapse of Troy. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/daisy-dunn/catullus-bedspread-the-life-of-rome-s-most-erotic-poet/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.