Specific examples will clarify the point. Venustas appears in the well-known epigram praising Lesbia’s beauty (c. 86):
Quintia formosa est multis. mihi candida, longa, recta est: haec ego sic singula confiteor. totum illud formosa nego: nam nulla uenustas, nulla in tam magno est corpore mica salis.
Lesbia formosa est, quae cum pulcerrima tota est, tum omnibus una omnes surripuit Veneres.
Quintia is beautiful, so they say:
I would say, fair-complected, tall, perfect posture, would grant the single points, deny
They all add up to beauty. So grand a body!
But without attraction, without a single grain of salt.
Now Lesbia is beautiful: not only the fairest in every way, but also the one woman who’s pinched from all the others every gift that Venus gave them.
Venustas here might mean simply ‘‘erotic attractiveness,’’ a frequent sense. So in a graffito from Pompeii: diligo iuuenem uenustum ‘‘I’m in love with a pretty young man’’ { CIL IV.5092.3, CLE 44.3). More usually uenustas is associated with women, corresponding to dignitas in men {Cic. Off. 1.130). But such a meaning suits the poem poorly. The poem describes the insufficiency of mere physical beauty, symbolized by Quintia, whose various pulchritudes - height and complexion and the rest - are all she has. She is, literally, statuesque: I translated candida ‘‘fair-complected’’ but candida, longa, recta, especially when Quintia’s is a ‘‘grand,’’ even ‘‘big,’’ body { magnum corpus is not a very erotic expression), recall a sculpture. Lesbia’s uenustas must transcend mere physical form.
Transcend how? Here the rhetorical use of uenustas is relevant. The conjunction of uenustas to sal ‘‘salt,’’ a word which describes ironic, dissimulating or deadpan humor {Krostenko 2001a: 220 n. 59), recalls the uenustas that describes the humor of reply. The ‘‘salty’’ mind is alert and clever; so, too, the mind that can quickly toss off rejoinders with uenustas. Lesbia’s uenustas has an active, performed quality - the sparkle of a hetaira, as it were, and not the gloss of a beautiful, but vacuous, trophy wife. The sentiment is that of an epigram of Petronius: dicta sales lusus sermonis gratia risus/uincunt naturae candidioris opus ‘‘Jests, wit, games, charming speech and laughter/overcome the handiwork of lovelier nature’’ {fr. 31 Bucheler). Hence, perhaps, Catullus’ expression for Lesbia’s excellence, tum omnibus una omnes surri-puit Veneres: Lesbia is not merely ‘‘the fourth Grace,’’ as in Greek amatory verse {e. g., Callim. Epigr. 51 Pf.; Anth. Pal. 5.70 [Rufinus], 5.148 [Meleager]), to be wondered at. Rather, Lesbia has ‘‘pinched’’ the Graces of others: she has consciously assembled her own superior repertoire. At any rate our keywords are elsewhere used for women who attract by their performative graces. Varus’ girlfriend made a good first impression: she was a scortillum /... non sane illepidum neque inuenustum ‘‘a nice piece, no witless {inuenustus) or charmless {illepidus) one here’’ {10.3-4).6 Flavius is ashamed to introduce a girlfriend who is illepida and inelegans {6.2). She was a good, or at least energetic, lover, but apparently not much else.
In short, Lesbia’s ‘‘erotic attractiveness’’ is like the ‘‘cleverness’’ or ‘‘wit’’ of a quick-thinking orator or a wry prankster. The passive meaning of uenustas has, so to speak, been partly overwritten by the active meaning. That is itself a noteworthy piece of verbal art. But there is more here than a pun. The cultural associations, as well as the semantics, of active uenustas come into play. Active uenustas, of the kind Cicero’s ideal orator needed, was a weapon of social competition - the usual arena for active wit and conscious self-presentation. Lesbia’s erotic quality is thus likened to the stylishness that served competitors vying for power and influence. To put it another way, our words described an aestheticism that represented political identity; Catullus has used the characteristic descriptors of that aestheticism to represent a purely erotic identity.
Hence the points of comparison between political and erotic uenustas in the poem. Political aestheticism was competitive: likewise Lesbia is here a competitor, outdoing other women. Political aestheticism often had a Greek flavor: so, too, here, where Lesbia has Sappho’s toponym, in distinction from the very plain name Quintia, and is praised by the refitted idioms of Greek amatory verse. An eye for wit - lacking (supposedly) in Decianus - was valued: in this poem Catullus’ subtle taste shows that he is no mooning iuuenis out of comedy but a connoisseur, above the masses rejected in a priamel (multis). The capacity of active uenustas to describe both a valuable skill - an artifice of political life - and a dubious attainment - erotic grace - has eased Catullus’ figuration of Lesbia.
Thus exploiting the meaning of aestheticism in contemporary political life, Catullus has vindicated an erotic type that existed in the Rome of his time - the modern Roman woman. The type is represented also by Sempronia, who ‘‘could compose poetry, raise a joke, give her conversation balance or delicacy or impudence; in short, hers was much wittiness (facetiae) and much charm (lepos)’’ (Sall. Cat. 25.5). Sallust, of course, whose Sempronia also ‘‘assayed many deeds as bold as a man’s’’ (25.1), admired these attainments rather less than Catullus.7 But the technique whereby Catullus has expressed his admiration raises troubling questions. For Sallust Sempronia’s talents, pleasant though they are, mean nothing for political life: lepos is, at best, irrelevant to grauitas. Catullus, by contrast, defends the apolitical by adapting the patterns of political life and their characteristic idioms - an adaptation effected, it seems, rather easily. We have begun to see, as Selden (1992: 498) puts it, that ‘‘[b]y redirecting critical attention from questions of personal circumstance to the logic of self-presentation, the poet gets to the very heart of the politico-discursive system.’’
World History
