Let me begin with the reminder that this is a poet for whom knowledge, in a variety of forms, matters. The dedicatory epigram that begins our Catullan book performs the physical gesture of handing over an objectified volume to its dedicatee before a larger audience. One likely context for such a public exchange, and the explicit subject of many other Catullan verses, was the conuiuium, a drinking party which imitates the Greek symposium as an arena in which one may win praise by putting on display a range of valued skills and qualities - wit, elegance, learning, and restraint - but also in which one may be shamed for being seen to lack them.1 Such qualities emerge from a relentlessly repeated aesthetic vocabulary: lepidus, uenustus, urbanus, and their opposites, including especially ineptus and rusticus. Catullus’ attacks on napkin-stealers like Asinius, depicted as a scion of the crude tribe of Marrucini (12), as well as compliments like that offered a Calvus (50) or a Caecilius (35), make it clear that the conuiuium was a competitive place, where behavior was being refined as it was subjected to criticism. But the evaluative criteria applied there suggest a context conspicuously apart from the many other places where a Roman male expected to make himself known: those quintessential Roman qualities of uirtus and honos, for which a reputation was won on the battlefield or through political success, nowhere appear in Catullus’ discussion of his contemporaries. Nor is there any praise of a more ambiguous, but no less powerful, personal asset: wealth. The Catullan speaker cheerfully admits his poverty - at least he does so to the audience for his poetry: his purse is full of cobwebs (13), he has no battery of Bithynian litter-bearers, though he is not above boasting that he does (10). But if Catullus’ poetry enacts a battleground of wits whereby players will try to put one another in their places for not knowing how to act, it also grants its audience inclusion in this privileged world by its vicious attacks on real outsiders whose faults are much worse than napkin-stealing: indeed the typical targets of Catullus’ wildest invective are generally tagged with one of two kinds of offence - gross sexual indulgence and importunate greed. Both are tried and true subjects of Roman invective, but they help draw attention to what is special about Catullus’ privileged readers: the restraint and tact with which they manage their desires.
But alongside ‘‘knowledge’’ as a criterion for judgment - knowing how to act or speak, for example - Catullus’ poetry also puts in play a process of knowing one another that is no less competitive. Each ‘‘performer’’ - and Catullus, whose poetry becomes material testimony to his own urbanity and wit, is very much a performer too - presents his own knowledge of aesthetic codes as a clue to the kind of person he is, and expects to be known for it in a way that will gratify his vanity and increase his status. Arrius believes that he has spoken ‘‘marvelously’’ the more chances he has had to pronounce words with false aitches - apparently a rustic habit and a sign of poor education which Arrius foolishly affects (84). Egnatius is similarly attached to his inept smile (39), and Suffenus is never happier than when he writes bad poetry (22). But unlike the poems in which Catullus’ friends like Nepos and Calvus are praised for their accomplishments, for these impostors the danger is rather that their true selves will become known through the particular mirror Catullus holds up to their habits. Thus Catullus applies his own ‘‘ethnographic’’ knowledge of the habits and peculiarities of provincials to convert Egnatius’ smile from a mark of urbane wit to one of Spanish urine-drinking. The play of knowledge at work in Catullan poetry then involves calculated revelation and concealment, with each participant aiming to know his fellows at the same time as he makes known his own judgment and skill. We may imagine that such poetic wit initiates yet another level of social differentiation among its audience, as those who appreciate and understand Catullus’ own wit will stand apart from those who do not. And yet this outwardly directed, exclusionary view of the amicitia Catullus’ poetic performance sustains also implies a more positive, and quite different, way of thinking about friendship. For his work grants a kind of ‘‘behind-the-scenes’’ view of the creation of his self-image, showing how Catullus himself can be caught out in his role-playing (10), bested in his erotic encounters (8), and vulnerable to misunderstanding of his persona, especially when measured against more traditionally Roman canons of conduct (16). Thus at the same time as Catullus claims the upper hand through his mastery of urbanitas, this other dimension of Catullan self-revelation invites his audience to a more intimate level of acquaintance, as though the very exposure of weakness implied a trust that such weakness would not be exploited.
As a transition to a more explicit consideration of where the sort of specialized literary scholarship Thomas describes fits into this picture, I want to take a closer look at another ‘‘convivial’’ poem about etiquette; Catullus’ reproof of the napkin-stealing Asinius (12). In short order, Catullus explicates a trivial faux pas in ways that make it clear why it is not in the least trivial. The work begins with a loading of value-laden terms that separate Asinius completely from the values of Catullan society. In this urbane world he is emphatically an Italian tribesman, one of the East Italian hill people called the Marrucini.2 In his own eyes, napkin-stealing makes up the kind of witty gesture that should win approval, but, thanks to Catullus, it is made to signify his ignorance of right behavior. Yet the napkin itself, we realize, functions not only as an instrument for gaining admission to this privileged world, but, in a double sense, as a symbol of belonging. First, its exotic provenance, sent back by two young friends of Catullus serving with a Roman administrator in the provinces, and its fine workmanship make it a general image of refinement itself. But it is also more directly symbolic of the intimate bond that links the giver and recipient. In trying to appropriate it, Asinius lays claim both to abstract qualities and to membership in the circle of friendship its possession implies. The poem strips him of both; in place of a woven object, he receives a ‘‘text’’ testifying to his boorishness that also circulates among friends.3 The reciprocity of text and textile, which we will see at work in other Catullan poems as well, invites even closer scrutiny of the napkin’s qualities, and here two motifs within the poem are especially important. First is the contrast between the small, enclosed space of the conuiuium, where the napkin is first seen changing hands, and the breadth of the Empire separating Catullus from his amici, who operate in what was for the Romans the last place on earth, bounded by the endless Western Ocean. Such a small object can encompass such a vast space only if we neglect to measure its merely material properties. Thus the poem also packs its own slightness, of both form and occasion, with many references to wealth and abundance, which are in turn rejected as criteria of value. Possession of the napkin for Asinius entails receipt of 300 hendecasyllables, the sort of threat that should impress someone who so misunderstands the napkin. Asinius’ brother Pollio is ‘‘stuffed with wit’’4 but would give much more of his wealth than the napkin is worth, a whole talent, to undo the consequences of his brother’s actions. And finally the poet makes clear that the napkin does not matter to him because of its aestimatione (‘‘worth’’), itself a word of some substance in the poem, whose five syllables take up almost half of one of those hendecasyllabi. This lumpen prosaic word, expressing a prosaic subject, is replaced by a very different word of almost equal size in the next line, mnemosynum (‘‘memento’’), which shows the right appreciation of the napkin. An object from the far West of Rome’s empire is to be defined by a word that is itself a foreign import, now from its eastern, Greek half. And the spatial vistas Catullus’ napkin unfolds are matched by temporal expansion, for as a memory this token of amicitia acquires a meaning that looks to the future as well as to the present. A similar programmatic transformation of another important Catullan text happens in the first poem of our collection, where the poet’s polished little book begins as an offering to a friend at a conuiuium but then becomes something that ‘‘will live for more than one age,’’ and thus reciprocate if not surpass the historical work of Nepos for which it is offered in exchange, if ‘‘the protecting maiden’’ intervenes.5 The ‘‘protecting maiden’’ is almost certainly a Muse, and the Muses, whose very name suggests remembering, were the daughters of Mnemosyne.
One would not have had to be very learned to understand mnemosynum as it’s used in Catullus 12, any more than a profound knowledge of French is required to understand the English ‘‘souvenir.’’ But if this poem doesn’t quite display specialized literary knowledge, it nevertheless provides us with some useful terms for describing and understanding its place in the social context of Catullan poetry. And here I want to apply three elements from the description of the napkin to Catullan learning. First, like the napkin, Catullus’ knowledge of Greek literature is far from dematerialized. It is physically present in the world of his original audience both in the form of the polished and exquisite texts in which he displays it and also in the material resources required to develop it. Fabullus and Veranius may have sent Catullus a napkin, but we know that elaborate manuscripts of Greek texts function in precisely the same way, as gifts that can be sent back to friends in Italy by affluent young Romans on the make in the provinces. Thus Catullus’ friend Helvius Cinna, who served with him in Bithynia, sent a deluxe edition of the fashionable Greek poet Aratus to one of his amici.6 But even beyond giving such gifts, it would have been impossible to develop the kind of knowledge required to compose a poem like Catullus 64 without wealth and access to the resources of other wealthy men. The first public library was not built in Rome until a quarter century after Catullus’ death. Books, even if they were not of the opulence of Cinna’s Aratus, had all to be copied by hand, and were never cheap in antiquity. Even if one had as much wealth and manpower as Cicero, there were still likely to be volumes one could only consult or copy if an acquaintance lent them to one. Nor do problems end with the acquisition of the text. For all that we stress the bilingualism of the Roman upper classes, understanding contemporary spoken Greek, as Nicholas Horsfall has pointed out (1979), was not the same as understanding Thucydides or Callimachus. And while many manuscripts would have had marginal notes to help with difficulties in vocabulary or obscure references, there was no such thing as a Greek-to-Latin dictionary in this period. Hence another essential ‘‘material’’ support for learning: a Greek scholar, quite often a slave, who could explain and interpret obscurities for you. And, coincidentally, that very same Cinna who sent back a text of Aratus also seems to have imported from his Bithynian expedition the learned Parthenius, an enslaved Greek who taught many of the greatest poets of the next generation.7
However, it would give a very incomplete picture of the cultural significance of Catullan scholarship to consider it only in terms of its material supports, and as an epiphenomenon of the networks of amicitia within which so much of his poetry operates. For like the Spanish napkin sent by Veranius and Fabullus, the textuality of Catullan verse extends and transcends the rituals of amicitia. The extensions allowed by the mere fact of writing are obvious - written texts preserve ephemeral moments of conversation, translating them into something not just long-lasting but eternal; they extend their audience outward beyond the privileged conversational group, and they allow the rituals of friendship to include those made absent by journeys, or by death itself, which Catullus memorably figures as a sort of sea journey that allows no return: ‘‘for just now in the whirlpool of Lethe, the flowing wave has washed over the slight pale foot of my brother’’ (65.5-6). And, as Catullus knows, his own works’ immortality - in which so much is invested - depends on the ‘‘learned virgins,’’ on the care and learning necessary to give his poetry importance not only within the synchronic sphere of social negotiations but in the diachronic literary history which the opening of poem 64 maps for us.
This gives rise to essential contradictions and uncertainties affecting Catullus’ attitudes toward the relationship between learning and the social practice of poetry, a sense of the incompleteness, even of the incompatibility, of the different horizons in which his poetry moves that provides no small part of the energy of his best work. Thus we find this supreme poet of social presence aspiring to relationships that strip away the worldliness of the conuiuium, inviting that same friend who gave him the napkin to a dinner at which he will provide no wine or food, but only salt and the savor that the love gods feast on (13). Literary exchange occurs in the competitive context of the banquet, as his verse-duel with Calvus records (50), but its effects extend to the solitary Catullus after he leaves the banquet, and precisely reverse the imagery of leisured abundance conjured up by such a scene. In remembering Calvus - as he showed himself in literary play - Catullus now can neither eat nor sleep, prey to a madness and desire quite out of place among the delicati. However good the jokes were yesterday, this work is not among them. It proclaims itself a poema, and again the Greek word, made conspicuous by its Latin gloss feci, suggests the wrought product of a different space entirely, one that pulls the protagonists into a new plot, a love story or perhaps a little Iliad in which the hero tosses sleepless on his bed out of longing for an absent friend, and Calvus is warned to fear the Greek goddess Nemesis if he neglects a suppliant’s prayers.8 But of course, for all the private passions that seem to set the amici apart from others, Catullus’ verses would not be out of place at a conuiuium; indeed we may, but are not compelled to, regard their move outside as simply the best joke of all, so that the social frame of competitive versification from which the poema removes its own creation and its subjects always threatens to enclose them again.
Another dimension of the contrasting contexts in which his learning places the poet emerges from the complex dedication to the first of two longer elegiac poems, his ‘‘translation’’ of Callimachus’ poem on the catasterism (transformation into a star) of a tress from the head of the poet’s royal patron, Berenice II.9 While the original survives only in very incomplete form, Catullus seems to have followed his Greek predecessor extremely precisely, so precisely that the significance of the work within his own oeuvre is hard to pinpoint. Some have found in the lock’s separation from its ‘‘brothers’’ a telling echo of the personal grief foregrounded in poem 65 (esp. Clausen 1970), but it is at least as plausible to relate the poem not to the inner emotional state of the poet but to the social circumstances of the poetry. For the prefatory poem 65 ensures that we see this Callimachean adaptation in terms of the social work it does, as recompense for the obligation the poet owes to the dedicatee, and in such a context there could be no more appropriate poem in the Hellenistic canon than this grand celebration of patronage.10 But it is less important to privilege one way of reading the translation as Catullan than it is to recognize that the contradiction engendered by these contrasting ways of interpolating an author into this text follows precisely from the paradoxical way the dedicatory epistle presents the learning of which this is the fruit. For the poet begins by lamenting his own separation from the cultivation of the Muses brought about by the sorrow he feels for the death of his brother. Here the Muses represent an industry placed at the service of his friends, the tools of the poet’s amicitia, and the translation an attempt to maintain connections with this outer world. And yet for all his claims to have lost his learning, it is precisely Greek literary and mythical allusions that give Catullus the language in which to describe the death of his brother; his grief insures that his songs will always be sad, like those the Daulian nightingale sung lamenting her lost Itylus (Hunter 1993c). It is a commonplace of New Criticism to wonder how someone torn by sorrow can turn such a neat allusion. But the mismatch between content and expression seems to me less important than the ambiguity about where we ‘‘place’’ learning in relation to the author’s life. For it seems at once to adorn the compositions that bind him to a world of social exchange and (as in the Calvus poem, or the suggestion that the poet’s love for Lesbia comes from her Sapphic ‘‘exemplar’’) to define the more intimate space whither he withdraws from it.
The dualism I have suggested in this poem’s configuration of literary culture implies a deep uncertainty about the significance of Greek learning in the context of elite Roman culture. This uncertainty per se is nothing surprising at any historical period in Rome, and we shall shortly sketch some of the reasons why Romans felt so ambivalent about the place of Greek modes of expression in their new Empire. First, though, I want to look more closely at how Catullus’ poetry stages the relationship between Greek literature and Roman realities. For viewing Rome through the lens of Greek myth - and it is important to realize the extent to which Greek myth did define a worldview especially associated with literary and artistic expression - at once amplifies Rome’s successes and castigates them, exposes its losses and restores them. As Greek learning testifies to the wealth and prestige of individual members of the elite, so, most noticeably in the art of the late Republic, the grandiloquent visual language of the Hellenistic kingdoms, with its giants, nereids, and heroes, becomes incorporated into the monuments of Roman conquest. Among the most striking visual transformations of the Roman city in Catullus’ lifetime would have been the great theater complex in which Pompey the Great literally staged his own conquest of the East as Agamemnon’s victory over Troy (Kuttner 1999). But victory, especially eastern victory, while an unmistakable sign of Roman supremacy, always potentially threatened to undermine that success by making the Romans less themselves. Indeed the very material abundance for which the paraphernalia of learning becomes a synecdoche was perceived as breaking the spirit of the Romans with avarice, and corrupting the conduct of individuals toward one another, an area of particular concern to a poet so engaged in preserving amicitia.
World History
