Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us

Whatever their subject or inspiration, many of these poems display the wit, pith, and cleverness that were hallmarks of the avant-garde school to which Catullus belonged, the so-called New Poets—or neoteroi, as Cicero, who preferred the old ones, sniffily referred to them. The orator’s use of the Greek word for “new” was pointed: Catullus and his friends were in thrall to the theories of the Hellenistic Greek scholar and poet Callimachus, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C.E. and worked at the Library of Alexandria, the great literary and cultural center of the Mediterranean world. It was Callimachus who famously proclaimed mega biblion, mega kakon, “a long book is a great evil”; for his Roman acolytes, concision, originality, and vividness, rather than what they saw as the bombast and portentousness of an earlier generation, were the qualities to embrace. Catullus makes no bones about his literary allegiances. One poem, addressed to the grandiloquent work of a dreary historian, begins, “Hey, Volusius’ Annals (yes, I’m talking / to your hundreds of pages smeared with bullshit.)”

A startling freshness and informality are certainly the rule in these shorter poems, most of which are cast in a jauntily syncopated meter known as the “hendecasyllable”: BUM-BUM-BUM-buh-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-buh-BUM-BUM. And yet even the breeziest of Catullus’ occasional poems can suddenly betray flashes of ferocious emotion. Poem 50 begins as a giddy recollection of an afternoon spent dashing off verses to his friend Calvus, another of the neoteroi. The opening lines paint an endearing picture of the two writers “playing now with this meter, now with that one, / improvising on themes set by the other, / laughing hard.” But—typically, as it turns out—the experience becomes overwhelmingly intense for Catullus, who goes on to record how, on returning home,

I was burning with your brilliance;
Food could give me no ease, nor could I rest my
Eyes in sleep, but unsettled, flushed, I tossed and
Turned all night, as I longed for daylight, so that
Once again we could spend some time together.

The nakedness of the feelings exposed—to say nothing of the willingness to expose them—was wholly new in Latin poetry.

The way in which a poem by Catullus can veer from the innocuous to the intense is often mirrored by dramatic swerves in the tone and the register of his language. In certain poems, you can practically hear the gears shift. The first half of Poem 11, for instance, makes you think you’re reading an ode to the constancy of the poet’s friends Furius and Aurelius, who he says he knows will follow him to the ends of the earth, from Persia to the Nile to the Alps and as far as the “horrible Britons.” But the real point becomes clear only at the beginning of the second half, when Catullus, having listed the proofs of his friends’ loyalty, feels emboldened to ask them to do him a favor relating to Lesbia:

take a message now to my former girlfriend, brief and unpleasant:
tell her that I wish her a happy life with
all three hundred studs whom she fucks at one go.

Then he puts in the clutch yet again, ending with lines of astonishing delicacy, which compare his rejected love to “a flower / fallen at the edge of a field, the plowshare’s / blade slicing through it.”

The volatile emotions to which Catullus gives vent are not always so touching. Poem 16 begins with a jokey threat that he’s going to assault two male friends because they’ve teased him: “I’ll fuck you up the ass and”—inrumō again!—“fuck your face.” The offense for which they’re being menaced is that, having read some of the tender poems addressed to Lesbia, they’ve accused him of being male marem—“insufficiently manly.” Although the tone is playful, it’s hard not to feel that the friends had hit a nerve. Not for the first time, the violence of a bullying threat is directly proportional to the vulnerability that’s been exposed in the bully. Sometimes it’s as if this poet can’t hold the warring parts of his own personality together.

In jarring contrast to the polymetrics, with their accessible freshness and ingratiating openness, stand the four long poems that constitute the second section of the Liber: two wedding hymns, the mini-epic about the nuptials of Achilles’ parents, and the castrato tour de force. Contemporary readers tend to have a harder time with these; Stephen Mitchell, whom I’ve been quoting thus far, shares the general prejudice and omits them from his translation, explaining that, “despite their sporadic beauties, [they] leave me cold.” At first glance, it’s easy to see why: their tone and manner, compared with those of the other poems, are so much more self-consciously “literary” that you sometimes wonder how the same poet could have written them all. The two wedding hymns, Poems 61 and 62, bristle with learned mythological allusions (“For Junia, as beautiful / As Idalium’s mistress / Venus coming to the Phrygian / Judge, is wedding Manlius . . .”), and the hyperventilating poem about the self-mutilating Attis is steeped in the arcana of Eastern cultic practice.

As for Poem 64, the mini-epic about Achilles’ parents, for all its size—at more than four hundred lines, it’s Catullus’ longest work and accounts for almost half of the second section—it is a Fabergé egg of a poem, structured with great ingenuity and aglitter with favorite devices of the high Greek style. One of these is known as ekphrasis: an extended depiction, within a literary work, of a work of art. In Catullus’ poem, the account of the meeting and subsequent wedding of the couple, Peleus and Thetis, soon segues to a detailed description of a coverlet spread over their marriage bed, woven with images depicting the myth of the Cretan princess Ariadne, who was abandoned by her faithless lover, Theseus. (With this allusion, the poet artfully foreshadows the fact that the union being celebrated will eventually sour—after producing a child who brings grief and destruction to many.) Catullus pushes ekphrasis to unprecedented limits, allowing the description of the coverlet to metastasize to the point where the Theseus-Ariadne story grows larger than the story of Peleus and Thetis, the ostensible subject of the poem—a bravado move on the poet’s part in a work that he clearly intended to be a masterpiece.

Still, you could argue that, beneath their arch sophistication, these longer works turn out to be animated by the same hot-blooded themes and obsessions that you find in the other poems. Take the startling tenderness of the marriage hymns, with their intense empathy for the emotions of young brides leaving home for the first time (whose lot is compared, rather shockingly, to the fate of women after “a city’s brutal capture”), or Attis’ surrender to a frenzy he cannot control, followed by the morning-after self-recriminations (“Now, ah now, what I’ve done appalls me”): we recognize these feelings. Also familiar is the note of righteous outrage in the poet’s diatribe, at the end of Poem 64, against the corrupted morals of his day. Even when Catullus is being arty, the passions, the tenderness and the indignation, the wounded sense of wrongs unpunished, come through.

But nowhere in the Catulli Veronensis Liber is emotion at a higher pitch than in the Lesbia poems, which are threaded through both the polymetrics and the third section, which is devoted to poems written in the “elegiac” meter: lines of six beats alternating with lines of five beats. (A lot of the really filthy epigrams, which prompted Byron to declare that “Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,” belong to this group.) Most scholars believe that Lesbia was in fact a certain Clodia, a member of one of Rome’s greatest families. Her father was a consul; her brother, Clodius Pulcher, was a powerful demagogue and the archenemy of Cicero. Unfortunately, nearly everything we know about her, apart from what Catullus says, comes from a savage speech of Cicero’s that was intended to discredit Clodia as a witness in a politically explosive trial, and hence can hardly be taken at face value. (At one point, the great orator hints that brother and sister were lovers.) By contrast, what we glean about her from Catullus’ Liber is oddly generic. The focus, as with so much of his work, is on his feelings, his reactions.

It’s likely that Catullus met Clodia around 62 B.C.E., when he was just past twenty and she was around thirty; it was then that her husband, Metellus Celer, became the governor of the northern-Italian province where the poet’s family lived. Given the family’s prominence, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the new governor and his wife could, like Caesar, have been their guests at one point or another.

Whatever the case may be, the Lesbia poems often betray the giddiness of a callow young lover who’s already hopelessly in over his head with an older and far more sophisticated woman—one who, you sense, may well just be toying with him. It’s worth remembering that, for all his suavity, Catullus was, at heart, a boy from the hinterland: the outrage he often expresses at faithlessness, betrayals, and broken promises, whether by lovers or friends, belongs to the ethos of the straightlaced provinces, not the decadent capital. The pseudonym Lesbia, which alludes to the lyric poet Sappho (and, perhaps, to the alleged erotomania of the women who lived on her island), was presumably intended to protect Clodia’s identity—she was, after all, a married woman—although it’s hard to believe that, in gossipy Rome, the affair could have remained a total secret.

Not counting a verse dedication to the biographer Cornelius Nepos, a fellow northern Italian who “used to think that / these light things that I scribbled had some value,” the first poem of the Liber is about Lesbia, and after that she’s rarely out of sight for long. Strikingly, the glimpses we get of this notorious femme fatale are often oblique. Poem 2, for instance, is addressed to her pet sparrow, with which the poet wishes he could play “and bring ease to my heart’s ongoing torment!” Poem 3 is playful: a mock-heroic eulogy for the sparrow, now dead, whom the poet blames for making his sweetheart’s eyes swollen and red—one of a very few references to Lesbia’s physical appearance. In Poems 5 and 7, he’s counting out, apparently on an abacus, how many kisses will satisfy him: a thousand, then a hundred, then another thousand. Isobel Williams, in the introduction to her renderings of the poems, rightly observes that Catullus, who was likely the scion of successful businesspeople, has a “book-keeper’s eye.”

As giddy as Catullus seems to be in these early poems, he never forgets his clever Alexandrian technique. “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,” goes the opening of the first kiss-counting poem: a winning enough incipit. But the classicist Michael Fontaine has pointed out that the poet—who, like all educated Romans, knew Greek as well as Latin—is actually indulging in an elaborate and risqué bilingual pun here. If you translate “let us live, Lesbia” into Greek, you get Lesbia, zômen, a phrase that’s virtually identical to the Greek lesbiazômen, which you could translate as “Let’s do fellatio!”

Beneath the fun and games, however, there’s a shadow over the proceedings almost from the start. Here’s Mitchell’s translation of Poem 5 in its entirety:

My dear Lesbia, let’s just love each other
and not bother our heads about the gossip
spread about by old farts and busybodies.
Suns can die and then rise new the next morning
but for us, when our little light has vanished,
one vast night must be slept and slept forever.
So come, sweetheart, and give me first a thousand
kisses, then you might add a hundred others,
then a thousand, and then another hundred.
And then, once we have added tens of thousands,
let’s go bankrupt and cancel the whole number,
so that no one can cast a spell upon us
when they learn we’ve enjoyed so many kisses.