To entitle a chapter ‘‘The Lesbia Poems’’ implies that Catullus’ work includes a number of poems about Lesbia, which is true; that these poems form a cycle with a sort of plot or narrative structure, which is partially true; and that this cycle is detachable from the rest of Catullus’ oeuvre, which is not true, despite the common practice of excerpting the Lesbia poems in anthologies. Much of the richness and strangeness of Catullus lies in his unsettling, brilliant decision to tell the ‘‘story’’ of his relationship with Lesbia all jumbled up, with poems about falling in love long after poems about breaking up, and poems on a variety of other topics interspersed. Whereas Propertius begins his collection with a resounding declaration of its dominant topic - ‘‘Cynthia first with those eyes of hers captured me in my misery’’ (Prop. 1.1.1) - Catullus neither begins nor ends his collection with Lesbia. Nevertheless, it is the poet’s passionate affair with this woman that forms the book’s dramatic core, giving meaning and coherence to the whole.
Before tackling the poems themselves, I should say a few words about who Lesbia was, a problem that has occupied scholars for many decades. It is nearly certain that Lesbia is a poetic pseudonym for Clodia, an aristocratic femme fatale of the late Roman Republic who was the sister of Cicero’s arch-enemy, the demagogue P. Clodius Pulcher. Catullus encourages us to lift the flimsy veil of pseudonymity when he starts a poem with an unmistakable allusion, ‘‘Lesbius is beautiful (pulcher)’’ (79.1): Lesbia/Lesbius mirrors Clodia/Clodius, and pulcher, ‘‘beautiful,’’ was Clodius' cognomen and nickname (Cicero's letters often refer to him as ‘‘Little Beauty’’). The waters become murkier when we attempt to determine which of Clodius' three sisters Lesbia was, however, because all sisters in a noble family had the same name (the feminine form of the family name). As I have argued elsewhere (Dyson forthcoming), it is most probable that the commonly accepted equation of Lesbia with Clodia Metelli (= ‘‘wife of Metellus’’) is correct. The strongest evidence for this equation comes, again, from clues Catullus plants in the poems themselves: around the time Catullus was writing (56 bc), Clodia Metelli was attacked by Cicero
In a colorful and highly public court case involving her ex-lover Marcus Caelius Rufus, and Catullus addresses a ‘‘Caelius’’ and a ‘‘Rufus’’ (probably the same man) as a rival for Lesbia’s love.
Yet the identity of the ‘‘real’’ woman behind the poetry and the ‘‘real’’ nature of her affair with the poet are in some ways irrelevant. Catullus chose to bound his poetic fiction by linking its characters with people personally known to most of his original readers. As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, however, the impressionistic portraits of Lesbia that emerge from the different sections of the collection are so utterly different from one another - whatever the reality that inspired them - that this very difference must be essential to the meaning of the poems. With the exception of Homer, whose Penelope is a match for the cunning Odysseus in every way, Catullus is the first author to depict a romantic relationship between a man and a woman as true amicitia, ‘‘friendship,’’ a meeting of minds presupposing both social and intellectual equality. So radical was this move that it was followed, as far as I can tell, by no other author before Jane Austen. Yet if we accept the division of Catullus’ poems into three sections - the polymetrics (1-60), the longer poems (61-8), and the epigrams (69-116) - it is only in the third that the idea of Lesbia as the poet’s ‘‘friend’’ emerges.
What makes Catullus so bewitching is the way he invites the reader to participate in this emotional journey, this transformation of himself and his love, even as he gives the appearance of revealing his most private thoughts. In this chapter, though necessarily highlighting certain passages to illustrate particular points, I shall give my own translations of the full text of the Lesbia poems in the order they appear, in hopes of recreating the experience of reading the story as it unfolds.
World History
