Not just because they were too hot for the AP selection but also because they are good reading, college level assignments should include some poems about what may be called ineptiae or hanky-panky. A good example is c. 6, Flaui delicias tuas, which is rich in the language of style, elegance, and social performance that became so important in the age of Cicero.2 It is also of interest because it brings out a voyeuristic aspect of the poet’s character or persona that some have missed. This comes out also in cc. 10, 13, 35, and 55. The cheerfully coarse Ipsitilla ode, c. 32, dispels the notion that sexuality was all pain and ecstasy for Catullus; c. 37, Salax taberna, is important not only for the vignette it provides of sleazy Rome but also for the Lesbia theme and the aggression rather than self-pity it provokes. Poem 42, Adeste, hendecasyllabi, shows another side of the demi-monde with a literary twist, reminding us, as does poem 55 and a score of others, that the libellus is a portrait of Rome as Catullus found it and as no one else of the time described it. Nor is the ribaldry confined to Rome: close to the surface of c. 17, O Colonia, set somewhere near Verona, it comes to the surface in c. 67, where a house door tells about the scandalous liaisons of its mistress.
The AP list understandably constructs a simplified world around Catullus, one free of sleaze, ugliness, and politics if not of sexual ambiguity. The college reading list should redress that imbalance, adding enough about the public world Catullus described to do justice to the diversity of his collection. Catullus did not hate politics; he was well enough connected to see that public life had been surrendered to depraved personalities about whom he loved to tell what he felt was the truth.3
World History
