Not everyone is convinced of Allius’ good offices. Many critics think that what Allius did in lending a home to the lovers was at worst immoral - and at best the shabby act of a comic go-between (Skinner 2003: 43-4; Wiseman 1985: 160; Sarkissian 1983: 16). I cannot say that I am in sympathy with this view. This is what Catullus says about what Allius did for him (67-9):
Is clausum lato patefecit limite campum isque domum nobis isque dedit dominam ad quam communes exerceremus amores.
He opened a closed-off field with a wide path, he gave me a house and he gave a mistress.
There we could engage in our shared love.
Once more, a textual problem causes some difficulty, and we need to digress. The accusative dominam in line 68 is what the manuscripts have, but most think that this is a mistake (it would be an easy one for any scribe to make) and that what should be there is the dative dominae. In this case the translation would say ‘‘he gave a house to me and to the mistress’’ - and we might have a first precedent here for the Augustan elegists’ preference for the term domina to describe the mistress. In keeping dominam we seem to be saying that Allius gave Catullus the house and provided the girlfriend along with it - or that he provided a house with an amenable housekeeper. Both are awkward scenarios. I suggest a different solution to this problem: the closeness of domus and domina is significant, as many say. But this does not need to mean that the domina is already part of the household. What I think it could mean is that for the short time that Catullus and his beloved are at Allius’ house she becomes its domina - just as the bride in c. 61 becomes a domina on being brought to her new home: ac domum dominam uoca/coniugis cupidam noui (‘‘summon the mistress to her home, hungry for her new husband,’’ 61.31-2).18 This tallies with the way in which Catullus plays throughout the poem with the idea of Lesbia as his bride - while knowing that she is not. Allius then affords Catullus a brief glimpse of what it might have been like to live with Lesbia as his domina, in their own domus. And this would make Allius’ officium a great one indeed: putting himself and his reputation at considerable risk, to bring a moment of happiness to his friend in making the impossible possible. This is not sordid, nor the stuff of comedy, but rather too sad for words. When she arrives, as the domina to her domus, the beloved becomes a goddess - and a bride (though a doomed one). The moment of epiphany is no simile; there is no question that at the moment of her arrival Lesbia is a goddess: quo mea se molli Candida diua pede/intulit (‘‘there my gleaming goddess came with soft step,’’ 70-1). But as she rests her foot (deliberately, it seems) on the threshold rather than stepping over it as brides then and now are meant to, she crushes the hymeneal illusion even before the ill-omened simile brings things to a head: et trito fulgentem in limineplantam/innixa arguta constituit solea (‘‘and paused, her shining foot on the worn threshold, her sandal sounding as it stepped down,’’ 71-2).19 That creaking sandal on the threshold echoes into the following two lines, which sound like a wedding hymn with their reference to the new bride’s burning love and to the new home.20 The whole thing comes crashing down when we realize that this domus will never be complete (inceptam frustra) - just as Catullus’ will not. For the next 55 lines the poem will dwell on Laodamia’s tragic love for Protesilaus. The goddess remains on that threshold - until we return to her to find that things were not quite what they seemed.
World History
