The Transpadanes

Aut Transpadanus, ut meos quoque attingam

Or a Transpadane, to mention my own folk too

(39.13)

The lands beyond the Padus had once been the territories of the Insubres, the Cenomani, and other Gallic peoples, but in 101 bc they were overrun by the invading Cimbri, a disaster which effectively wiped out the Gallic communities. After the Cimbri had been defeated the lands were settled by ex-soldiers, whose status was regularized 12 years later by a grant of the ius Latii. The old tribal oppida were now coloniae, with full Roman citizenship conferred on their ex-magistrates (Asc. 3C; Caes. B Civ. 3.87.4).

The colonists worked hard to make their raw frontier towns something to be proud of; we get a glimpse of the process in Catullus’ poem 17, about the colonia (not Verona) that needed a new bridge over the marsh. Verona itself was a stronghold in a bend of the river Athesis, guarding the point where the great military road from Genua to Aquileia - the Via Postumia, built in 148 bc - crossed the north-south route over the Brenner pass by which the Cimbri had come. But we know that its walls, gates, and sewers were not finished until after 49 bc, when Caesar granted all the colonists full Roman citizenship (Wiseman 1987: 328-34).

In Catullus’ time the colonists were subject to a proconsul, for until 42 bc all the land between the Apennines and the Alps was the province of Gallia Cisalpina (the province that thought ‘‘Ameana’’ beautiful, 43.6). But their lands were wide and proverbially fertile (Polyb. 2.15.1-3), and many of them, including the poet’s father, were rich and influential people. The candidates for office who made the journey to ask for their votes still referred to the territory as Gallia (Cic. Att. 1.1.2, Phil. 2.76) - or perhaps Gallia togata, if you wanted to be polite (Phil. 8.27; Hirt.

B Gall. 8.24.3) - but that was only how it looked from Rome. The colonists themselves knew that they were Romans, not Gauls, and that their lands belonged to Italy, not a mere province. Caesar, who knew them well and recruited his Fifth Legion from them (Suet. lul. 24.2), always supported their claim for full citizenship and granted it as one of his first acts as dictator. In the meantime, however, they defined themselves geographically as ‘‘those across the Padus,’’ Transpadani, a term whose earliest attestation is Catullus’ reference to his ‘‘own folk’’ (Fig. 4.1).

The great river that defined and fertilized the region also provided a highway to the Adriatic and the Greek world (Plin. HN 3.123). Verona’s river-port was Hostilia (Tac. Hist. 3.9.1), where the road to Bononia and the south crossed the Padus by either a pontoon bridge or a ferry. From there one sailed via the southern branch of the Padus delta (Catull. 95.7; cf. Polyb. 2.16.11), by stages down the eastern coast of Italy, stopping perhaps at Ancona (c. 36.13) and ‘‘open Urii’’ on the Gargano peninsula (c. 36.12, with Wiseman 1969: 43-4), and across to Dyrrhachium, ‘‘the tavern of the Adriatic’’ (c. 36.15). Itwas by a familiar route that the phaselus brought Catullus home from the Cyclades (c. 4.6-7). In the other direction, the Via Postumia to Genua provided good communications with the western Mediterranean and the coast road to Narbonensis and Spain (Strab. 4.1.12).

Sharing a common origin and a common prosperity, the cities of Italia Transpadana seem to have thought of themselves not as rivals or natural enemies but as members of the same family (‘‘Brixia, beloved mother of my Verona,’’ c. 67.34). That sense of kinship was strong enough to survive Augustus’ division of the area into two regions, Transpadana (XI) and Venetia et Histria (X); Brixia and Verona were in regio X, but

Figure 4.1 Transpadane Italy. The contour level is at 3,000 feet (910 m).

In AD 77 C. Plinius Secundus of Comum could refer to C. Valerius Catullus of Verona as his ‘‘fellow-landsman’’ (HNpref. 1, conterraneum meum), implying a Transpadane terra not defined by mere administrative boundaries. What the younger Pliny referred to as regio mea (Ep. 7.22.2) and Sir Ronald Syme liked to call ‘‘the Pliny country’’ (Syme 1979: 694-8) - evidently extending from Vercellae to Verona, and perhaps beyond - represented a traditional consciousness of identity that can already be detected in Catullus’ references to friends and acquaintances at Comum (35.1-4) and Brixia (67.31-6).

Sirmio lay about half way between Verona and Brixia. At the extremity of a long peninsula projecting four kilometers out from the south shore of Lake Garda (lacus Benacus), today’s little town is on the island created by a channel across the narrowest point. (See Fig. 4.2, p. 60.) Since it is called insula in a document of ad 774, five hundred years before the Scaligeri built their castle, I think we can assume that it was already an island in Roman times. Certainly it was one of the finest villa sites in the whole of Italy. It was surely there that Catullus’ father entertained Caesar (Suet. lul. 73), and there is no reason to doubt that the great villa whose remains survive today at the very tip of the island replaced in sumptuous style the home to which Catullus came joyfully back in 56 bc (Wiseman 1987: 335-6).

What exactly was Catullus doing in Bithynia? What was his brother doing in the Troad? What were Veranius and Fabullus doing in Spain? It’s clear from poems 10 and 28 that they were hoping to make serious profits, and that they expected the proconsuls of those provinces to help them do it. But there is no hint of military service. These young men were not getting booty from conquest, as Mamurra so spectacularly did (c. 29.11-20), but exploiting the economic opportunities of long-pacified provinces. It is possible to detect in Catullus’ poems the traditional values of a man who cared about profit and loss and balancing the accounts - a set of attitudes which may have been characteristic of a Transpadane upbringing (Wiseman 1985: 96-115).

Catullus settled in Rome (c. 68a.34-5), and died there (Jer. Chron. on 58-57 bc), but we don’t know when. There is no reason to suppose that the surviving collection of poems is posthumous, and there is ample but neglected evidence for other poems, and plays, that may have been published later (Wiseman 1985: 189-98). At his brother’s death the poet grieved ‘‘our whole house is buried with you’’ (c. 68b.94). We know how much the family meant to him (cc. 61.204-23, 68b.97-8, 72.4), and the implication is that at that point there was no one else to carry on the line. If we take seriously what he says about the brother’s death making ‘‘the whole business’’ of love poetry impossible (c. 68a.19, totum hoc studium), we are entitled to infer a conscious change of life. My guess is that he married and had children.