The processes of mimesis and alterity that inhere in any form of representation are also at work in the lyrics of the poet Catullus. Like other Romans, Catullus explores and articulates his own experience both by adopting Greek ideas and practices and by positioning himself against them. Lyric, however, like satire, added a new dimension to this dynamic: the distance between self and role that representation requires allowed Catullus to explore his differences from himself and from certain aspects of the Roman world. If we can describe what we find in the Plautine slave as a multiple self, as the ability to take on many roles, we may think of the Catullan self as a divided self, a self uncomfortable within the limits of any one role.1
Catullus was born in Verona about 87. One may emphasize his role as a ‘‘new poet,’’ bringing a more refined Greek sensibility to lyric, or as an extension of the past, of comedy and epigram. He was, of course, both, and the hybrid literature he created allowed him to trope and interrogate Greek norms and forms while making Roman lyric a place where versions of himself could be represented and contested.17
Catullus and his poetic coterie brought the aesthetic ideals of Callimachus (the greatest of the Hellenistic Greek poets and arguably the most influential poet Greece produced) to Rome: these ideals included learned allusion, carefully refined and short forms, and an interest in psychological aberrations. He translates Callimachus’ “LockofEerenice’’ (65) and claims that he cannot write without his library (68.33). He contrasts Cinna’s carefully written Zmyrna with the long and muddy bombast of Hortalus and the Annales of Volusius (95). And he calls his girlfriend ‘‘Lesbia,’’ a pseudonym which refers to the Greek love poet Sappho who was born on the island of Lesbos. Eut the neo-Callima-chaean learning that would change Latin poetry is already rhetoricized in Catullus. In his introductory poem 1 he offers a presentation copy of his lyrics to the prose historian Cornelius Nepos. Nepos’ appreciation appears to be based upon shared values: Catullus’ book is new and Nepos’ work is daring; Catullus’ bookis small and Nepos’ history is brief; Catullus’ poetry is exquisitely polished, and Nepos’ history has required much labor. Eut the terms do not quite fit: Nepos’ labor recalls the work of the farm; his god is Jupiter, the god of epic and history, not the Apolline god of lyric; and his appreciation of Catullus is given in indefinite pronouns, words that are as potentially as dismissive (‘‘whatever’’) as appreciative (‘‘something’’). Thus, as Catullus announces the values that his poetry depends upon, he reaches beyond the particular reader to a Hellenistic tradition oflearned and allusive writing, at the same time that he satirizes even the appreciative reader.
The tension between the absolutist standards of a Hellenistic aesthetic and the playful realities of the (Roman) world allows Catullus to portray even his own aesthetic as a ploy. In one of his most famous poems (7), he responds to Lesbia’s question, ‘‘how many kisses are enough for you?’’: ‘‘as great as the number of Libyan sands which lie in Cyrene, rich in asafoetida, between the oracle of hot Jupiter and the sacred sepulcher of aged Eattus.’’ He has embroidered a cliche, ‘‘as many as the sands of the desert’’ with ostentatious learning. Then, he repeats his answer: ‘‘as many as the stars that gaze on the furtive love affairs of men in the silence of the night,’’ another cliche, but this time in simple language evoking a scene from popular romantic drama, an art form that Callimachus himself contemned. Part of the point, of course, is that everyone knows passion just as we know its cliches. Callimachean learning is just another way of talking about passion, perhaps it is its own passion, but there is nothing essential in its relationship to love. It is just love wearing, as it were, a professor’s mask.
The appropriation of Greek literary styles and mannerisms as a means to understanding, exploring, expanding, and differentiating the Roman experience is central to what is Roman. Catullus 51 translates a famous Sappho poem about erotic passion but ends by adding a political and moral comment. This turn to the moral is one of the most troubling in Catullus’ corpus: while pursuing a love affair with another man’s wife he makes claims on the language of political allegiance and ethics -‘‘fidelity,’’ ‘‘obligation,’’ ‘‘good will,’’ ‘‘contractual agreement,’’ ‘‘family and political friendship,’’ ‘‘good words,’’ and ‘‘good works.’’ The idea that the claims of personal erotic passions can be analogous to the claims made by contractual negotiations or to the bonds felt by fathers for their sons and sons-in-law is stunning, and it is an insight that comes from the assimilation of Sappho’s erotic world to the political world of Rome. In a sense, this form of‘‘turning’’ and ‘‘troping’’ (translation) finds the world of Sapphic eros within Catullus’ world and, at the same time, changes it.
One way Sapphic eros represents and changes Catullus’ world is through the very trope that names his lover ‘‘Lesbia.’’ Sappho’s coterie of young women on Lesbos, for whom she wrote many of her love poems, gives us the modern term ‘ ‘lesbian.’’ As Catullus poetry unpacks what it would mean to be a ‘‘Lesbian lover,’’ not only does his beloved Lesbia become his Muse, but hebecomes like a woman. Heisplowedanddeflowered(poem 11). There is a figurative coherence, then, between Catullus’ translation ofSappho, his lover’s name, Lesbia, and the gender-bending that appears so frequently in Catullan lyric.
Throughout Catullus’ corpus there is a sense that the presence ofdesire and passion, for all its intensity, does not create a full and present person. In fact, it seems to create a divided persona. Poem 16 is a riddle that addresses this issue. Here, Catullus threatens to assault two readers who have taken his poetry literally and concluded that he must be a passive homosexual, a pathicus (see also Chapter 21). He asserts that what a poet says and how he lives are two different things, that a poet should be a ‘‘good man,’’ pius, but that poems require wit and a sexy veneer. Then, he again threatens to assault the readers who thought he was a pathicus. It is, of course, witty to prove one’s aggressive manliness by threatening to assault readers sexually; but there is a problem with logic: if a poet’s life is different from his words, what is the status ofeither the threat or the claim that he is not passive? If you believe that a poet’s words and poet’s actions are different, then Catullus is not threatening his readers; he is merely making a sexy claim about his sexual aggresivity. On the other hand, ifyou take the threat literally, then you have to reject the claim that a poet’s words and a poet’s actions are different. There is no solution to the contradiction, but that is also the point. One cannot place a neat divide between what poets say and what they do, nor can one merely equate what they say and who they are. It is the mystery of self and representation that every representation tells some truth and some falsehood. And, yet, it is by virtue of these representations that we figure ourselves out as well as cut the figure of who we are.1
In Catullus’ verse we find many versions of Roman identity. He shows how the appropriation of the property of provincials in an imperialistic international culture is central to the expectations of young men in Rome, and how the inhabitants of distant places can so easily become ‘‘native products’’ (10). He shows us Rome as the place that distributes the power and wealth of empire, and as the place where personal successes and failures in the foreign service have little to do with the security and nonchalance of the Forum, which is protected by larger political and military successes. All of this is part of Roman identity. But the Catullan corpus participates in the construction of identity when it postures and plays, when it finds itself at odds with itself and uses the figures of others for self-interrogation and self-aggrandizement.
World History
