Catullus

To this point, we have left aside a discussion of Catullus 68, the single poem in the Catullan corpus that most resembles a fully elaborated Roman love elegy. In it, we have a lengthy poem in elegiac couplets, devoted to the topic of the poet’s relation to his beloved, one that features narrative and mythological elaboration as well as Hellenistic refinement. Thus a wide variety of scholars have claimed that Catullus virtually invented elegy with this one poem.14 Nonetheless, as we have already seen, the situation is not quite so straightforward. Many of the borrowings made by the elegists derive from the polymetrics, and to a lesser extent the epigrams. Likewise, the complex and recursive narrative structures that animate the elegiac collection, from the Propertian Monobiblos to Tibullus’ subtle interweaving of poems on Delia, Marathus, and Messalla, to Ovid’s self-conscious three-volume elegiac magnum opus, derive necessarily more from relations between the poems of the Catullan corpus than from any single text.

Poem 68, moreover, is anomalous. Not only is it much longer than the average elegy, but its mythological exempla are also more complex than anything found in the elegiac works that come after it. In addition, those exempla are embedded in a complex interlocking set of epic similes that are unexampled either before or after in Greek and Roman poetry (Feeney 1992: 38; Whitaker 1983: 62; G. Williams 1980: 52; Luck 1960). Poem 68 is, thus, not the first Roman love elegy, if we mean by that the archetype from which all later instantiations can be said to derive. Rather it is a poem that in its relation to the rest of the Catullan corpus anticipates what will become some of the typical forms and themes of the elegiac subgenre.

In fact, as I have argued (2004: 32-3), the most significant relation tying Catullus 68 to the elegists is best described in terms of the speaking subject’s self-constitution.15 More specifically, I contend that Catullus bequeaths to the elegists the poetic precedent of a subject position constituted by a fundamental conflict between the speaker’s imaginary self-identification and its recognition as a subject in the world of codified, signifying practices. The result of this conflict is a split subject whose own discourse is self-undermining and recognizably double, and whose position vis-a-vis communal, symbolic norms is therefore profoundly ambivalent.

To illustrate more precisely this split Catullan consciousness, let us examine selected passages from the poem. The last 120 lines of 68 (68b), as noted above, are written ostensibly to thank Allius for providing a domus in which Catullus and

Lesbia consummate their adulterous love. I want to look now at the theme of the house and show how the slippages embodied in its usage within the poem can be traced out into the larger corpus and its complex engagement with the norms of Roman ideology. Domus is not only a keyword in Roman ideology - Cicero terms it the principium urbis et quasi seminarium rei publicae (‘‘the first principle of the city and the virtual seedbed of the republic,’’ De officiis 1.17.54) - it is also one of the major structuring devices of the poem. The word domus simultaneously charts the poem’s progression and establishes verbal links between its major portions: the initial similes describing Allius’ aid; the mythological exemplum of Laodamia and Protesi-laus; and the death of Catullus’ brother (Whitaker 1983: 61).16 The interpretive problem posed by this word stems from the fact that these contexts, which the poem invites us to compare to one another, are not commensurable. Not only are these different houses (Allius’ in Rome, Laodamia’s in Greece, Catullus’ in Verona but buried with his brother at Troy), they mean different things. The domus Allius provides for Catullus and Lesbia is strictly a physical building. That of Laodamia and Protesilaus is both the household they would have established and the building that would never be completed due to Protesilaus’ early death (domum/inceptam frustra, 68.74-5; Janan 1994: 121). Finally, the domus of the Valerii Catulli is the least substantial of all, since it refers not to Catullus’ ancestral seat but to the ideal family unit for which the house stands as synecdoche, and which effectively perished with his brother (68.94). Thus there is a clear progression from the merely physical to the abstract and ideal, but that process of rarefaction is in turn associated with death, as each step beyond the initial threshold leads closer to the evocation of Catullus’ brother’s grave.

Indeed, the final domus of this series seems to defy any placement in space since it must be conceived as existing simultaneously in Verona, the actual home of the Valerii, and Asia Minor, the site of Catullus’ brother’s grave. This latter location is in turn assimilated within the poem to the mythical territory of Troy (68.89-92), a place outside of space and time that joins Catullus’ loss of his brother to Laodamia’s loss of her husband, the first Greek soldier to die in the Trojan War (68.83-8). The losses of Catullus and those of Laodamia in their common relation to Troy are then joined together, at the end of the poet’s apostrophe to his brother’s grave, by an evocation of the adultery of Paris with Helen, a violation of a lawfully constituted domus, which, as scholars note, echoes Catullus’ adulterous affair with Lesbia (Janan 1994: 131; G. Williams 1980: 59). In this fashion, Catullus directly associates the death of his brother with his own adulterous behavior.

Moreover, the first and last usages of domus just examined are both accompanied by nostalgia for what could have been. In line 68, when Allius’ domus is first introduced, Catullus writes isque domum nobis isque dedit dominae (‘‘he gave the house both to me and to my mistress’’). The word domina here is much debated. Many see it as the first example of the later elegiac usage in which the mistress is portrayed as the dominant partner in the relationship, as opposed to the poet’s role as seruus amoris. This reading is strengthened by Catullus’ use of the word era (slave-mistress) to describe Lesbia later in the poem (68.136). Such a reading is also consistent with the poet’s anticipation of the elegist’s inversion of normative sexual roles. Whether one accepts this reading or not, however, there is a definite etymological play on the relation between domus and domina that necessarily recalls the more normative use of the word domina, the mistress of a lawfully constituted household (Lyne 1980: 6-7), a household for which the poet can wish, but which he can never have.

This brings us to our fourth example of the domus motif, the ideal house of Catullan desire:

She was not led to me by the hand of her father, nor came to a house suffused with Syrian perfume.

Yet one wondrous night she gave me her dear gifts, stolen from the lap of her husband himself.

(143-6)

This is how a Roman domina (as opposed to an elegiac one) comes to the lawfully constituted domus of her husband, the center of the Roman family and cultic life, the seat of the household gods. The domus is the site where individual desire is joined with the norms of law, property, and marriage, the institutions that constitute the foundation of political life. This is the ideal domus, which Catullus’ brother’s death has buried, and which the poet’s adulterous desire can never realize.

The word domus then displays the slippages that constitute the Catullan subject position both in this poem and throughout the corpus: slippages between normative Roman sexual ideology (the matrona as domina or era of a lawfully constituted domus); Catullus’ imaginary self-identification (the projection of such values onto his adulterous relationship with Lesbia); and a real world in which these two realms can never coincide. Moreover, as the complex and overdetermined use of the word domus - with its fusing of the themes of adultery, family, marriage, and death - indicates, poem 68 displays a profound disaggregation of the relation between the poet’s constitution of his personal identity and the categories that Roman life offered to make sense of it.17 The result is a gap or absence at the subject’s center, a kind of death, that the poem identifies metonymically with his brother’s tomb.

This gap, with its complex ideological articulations around traditional concepts of household, marriage, and their simultaneous sanctity and nullification, is evident throughout the poem. It posits a beyond that can only be imagined as absence or death. The sequence of thought is strikingly emblematic. We move from the sepulta domus of the gens Valerii (94) to the domus violated by the illicit love of Paris and his moecha (103), then to the passion of Laodamia’s domus incepta frustra imagined as an abyss or tomb (107-8), and finally to Catullus’ ideal domus unto which Lesbia’s father never led her as a bride (143-6). At each stage in the progression, there is an evocation of the normative vision of the Roman household so dear to Catullus from the wedding hymns 61 and 62 (Feeney 1992: 33-4; G. Williams 1980: 56; Wiseman 1969: 20-3; see Panoussi, this volume).

In the end, the domus theme and its slippages reveal a longing for a lawful household with a lawful domina that Catullus cannot acquire. This slippage and the inversion of values it creates are parallel to the slippage and longing for lawfully constituted relationships in poem 76. Yet in that poem, as here, the invocation of traditional values such as pietas, fides, and reciprocal benefacta cannot manufacture a return to a vanished ideal of Roman normality, but instead produces images of transgression, splitting, and death.18

Catullus bequeaths this deeply divided subjectivity to the elegists, one in which the recognized structures of the Roman ideology are no longer adequate to contain the forces of the imaginary desire. Such a split subject can only be symptomatic of profound disturbances in the world beyond the text. It is the moment both obscene and sublime in which the subject cries out ‘‘neither is it possible to wish you well if you became the best of women,/nor to cease to love you, no matter what you would do’’ (75.3-4). It is a moment of crisis that constitutes and makes possible both Catullan lyric subjectivity and the elegiac poetry that deliberately and self-consciously follows in its wake.