The issue of how Catullus can maintain a sense of self, a sense of masculine power in the face of desire, comes to the forefront in poem 11. He imagines a fictive potential journey with two male companions, a journey permeated with imagery of both Roman military conquest and aggressive male sexual activity. On the surface, it would seem that he is attempting to reconstitute the fractured, feminized self we saw in poem 51 and recuperate his sense of masculinity by aligning himself with traditional Roman male values. Catullus’ imagined journey to the sites of Roman imperial domination, combined with his vilification of Lesbia, would seem to suggest that he wants to regain his power, in part, by rejecting his identification with the feminine vulnerability and ‘‘near-death’’ experience of love and passion expressed in his ‘‘translation’’ of Sappho. But the complexity of poem 11 only intensifies the sense of conflict over his commitment to both Sapphic and Roman ideals that he expresses in poem 51 and elsewhere. Thus his self-presentation and his alignment with competing values and commitments are, in my view, much more difficult to sort out. On the one hand, Catullus appears to identify himself with the masculine world of adventure and action as he imagines himself on a journey with his companions to current theaters of Roman military aggression. On the other hand, he portrays himself as a fragile flower cut down by the violent, masculine plow, a symbol of Lesbia’s inhuman cruelty to him and of a dehumanized imperial culture that seems to have no room for love and love poetry. In what follows I will discuss these competing identifications expressed in poem 11, and how Catullus incorporates Sappho’s work into his poem, to explore his conflicting attitudes toward Rome’s imperial values and his own place within them.
Furius and Aurelius, companions of Catullus, whether he will penetrate into the farthest Indi, where the shore is pounded by the far-resounding eastern wave.
Or into the Hyrcani or the soft Arabians, whether to the Sagae or arrow-bearing Parthians, whether into the waters which sevenfold Nile dyes,
Whether he will cross over the lofty Alps, viewing the memorials of mighty Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, the horrible and remotest Britons,
All these things, prepared to test together, whatever the will of the gods shall bring: announce a few words to my girl, words not pleasant.
Let her live and flourish with her adulterous lovers, whom three hundred at once she holds in her embrace, loving no one of them truly, but again and again breaking the strength of them all.
And let her not look, as before, at my love, which by her fault has fallen like a flower at the furthest meadow, after it has been touched by a passing plow.
In the first four stanzas of the poem, Catullus seems to be attempting to recover his sense of masculinity by embracing a male world of action and repudiating his former life of private passion. I believe, however, that his attitudes and allegiances cannot be mapped out so clearly; he undercuts his apparent acceptance of conventional Roman male values in a number of ways. The most obvious of these is the comparison of his love for Lesbia to a flower that has been mowed down by an indifferent plow. It is quite likely that Catullus models this flower image on Sappho’s use of flowers as symbols of female sexuality and vulnerability. I will discuss the implications of the flower image in Catullus a bit later. For now I would like to focus on the ways his imagined journey and his message to Lesbia reveal a conflict between his masculine and feminine personas, between the Sappho-identified Catullus we saw in poem 51 and the attempt by him in the last stanza of that poem to align himself with traditional Roman values.
The world depicted in Catullus’ imagined journey with Furius and Aurelius is consummately Roman. In language of epic grandeur, the speaker imagines them in a wide sweep of geographical locales corresponding to the military expeditions of Caesar, Pompey, and other Roman generals. Yet Catullus’ description of the journey is charged with eroticism.15 The images of the men ‘‘penetrating’’ the places they visit and of the shore being ‘‘pounded’’ linguistically evoke male sexual aggression. Moreover, the images of venturing into the farthest Indies and crossing over the lofty Alps imply a transgressive crossing of boundaries. In the context of ‘‘penetration’’ of conquered landscapes, this crossing of boundaries suggests a link between sexual violation and unbounded imperialistic conquest (see Konstan, this volume, pp. 77-8). On one level, to be sure, Catullus identifies himself with vigorous manly activity that links him with Caesar’s own exploits. But the erotic character of Catullus’ description of his imagined journey cannot be considered simply ‘‘masculine.’’ When he imagines himself and his companions as ‘‘penetrators’’ of the landscape, the speaker simultaneously becomes carried away with his own grandiose visions of travel. In other words, the geographical catalogue in lines 1-12 seems like a flight of imagination permitting him impossibly to cross boundaries of time and space - reminiscent of his transgression of numerical restraints in poem 5. While Catullus puts himself in the role of ‘‘penetrator,’’ thereby living up to normative Roman conceptions of masculinity, his hyperbolic description of his journey also reveals a retreat into a world of poetic imagination and thus a movement away from the masculine realm of power and practicality. The erotic atmosphere of his description of his journey, then, undercuts the idea that he is simply rejecting his identification with Sappho’s world of desire and imagination and attempting to regain a masculine sense of self. It would be more accurate to say that Catullus’ fictive journey serves to heighten the impression of him as profoundly conflicted in regard to the appeal Sapphic and Roman values have for him. That ambivalence can also be observed through the way he refers to Lesbia in his message to her.
Catullus’ depiction of Lesbia as a grotesque monster, as quite literally a ‘‘ball-buster,’’ invokes male stereotypes about female sexuality. In this poem (and others), Lesbia epitomizes the image of the wayward woman inherited from a tradition of invective against women - particularly with regard to their inability to restrain their sexual impulses. Since the wanton Lesbia, who circulates her body indiscriminately, evokes Sappho, it is certainly possible to think that Catullus might be expressing his own sense of awe at (and perhaps powerless envy of) Sappho’s literary prominence, dependent in large measure on her poetry being accessible to the widest possible audience. Might the vulgarity of Lesbia’s availability as a lover suggest that Catullus, at least on one level, feels overpowered by Sappho as a poet? We might take into account his description in poem 51 of his speechlessness and near paralysis at the sight of Lesbia. In addition, Sappho, like Lesbia, expresses active erotic desire and was also thought to have presided over a community of young women.16 It was not uncommon for Romans of Catullus’ era to consider a woman who expresses and acts upon such desire as masculine, and therefore as monstrous17 to some degree. Although Catullus clearly pays homage to Sappho in many ways, he might also have a certain ambivalence toward her, given his identification, however conflicted, with traditional Roman male values. I mentioned earlier that Sappho’s reputation in Rome was mixed. The depiction of Lesbia as morally degenerate in Catullus 11 does, to a degree, correspond with the way many Romans thought of Sappho. Therefore, we ought not to think of Catullus’ identification with Sappho and the world depicted in her poetry as unproblematic or entirely straightforward. His connection to the Sapphic tradition is mirrored in his ambiguous attitudes toward both Lesbia and Rome. We can see those ambiguities in the last two stanzas of the poem.
In his request to Furius and Aurelius, in lines 15-16, to announce a few ‘‘not pleasant’’ words to Lesbia, Catullus describes his mistress as an epic monster with as much hyperbole as he described his epic journey.18 Yet his transformation of Lesbia into an entity as awe-inducing as one of Caesar’s monuments depersonalizes her, and thus objectifies her in much the same way as she herself dehumanizes her nameless lovers. Thus, one can argue that Catullus’ verbal abuse of Lesbia reinforces his identification with conventional masculine, and here misogynistic, attitudes. Yet, through his retreat into poetic images and his devaluation of the excesses of conquest and domination, he shows an alienation from male culture. That alienation is reinforced in the poem’s final images of Lesbia as a cold, utilitarian plow and Catullus as a fragile flower crushed by what seems like an inhuman killing machine. This concluding image of Catullus certainly seems to emphasize his identification with feminine sexuality and vulnerability. Indeed, it is quite possible that he draws on Sappho as a source for his image of a cut flower. In general, flower imagery is used by Sappho to suggest female sexuality and intimacy and to convey a feminine world of beauty and imagination set apart from the male world of business and politics.19 Most pertinent to Catullus 11 is Sappho’s fragment 105c, in which she is thought to compare a young girl to a purple flower trodden upon by shepherds:20
Like a hyacinth in the mountains that the shepherd men trample with their feet, and its purple flower falling to the ground....
On the basis of references to flowers and fruit in Greek archaic poetry, scholars generally interpret the flower, the hyacinth, in Sappho’s fragment as representing youth, beauty, innocence, and virginity. Some readers of the fragment have thought it to be part of a wedding-song in which Sappho or a chorus of young women laments a bride’s impending ‘‘deflowering.’’ But there is no way to reconstitute the context for Sappho’s fragment. What is important for our purposes here is how reading the fragment helps us to grasp the implications of Catullus’ possible appropriation of the image of the trampled hyacinth. In a way similar to his adoption of the Sapphic, feminine persona in poem 51, Catullus here implicitly puts himself in the feminine position, where he is vulnerable to external forces that threaten his autonomy as both lover and love poet.
In her fragment Sappho makes the masculine identity of the shepherds clear by referring to them as andres, ‘‘shepherd men’’ (my emphasis). Given the association (in Sappho and in other poets) of flower images with the ‘‘blossoming’’ of feminine sexuality, the trampling of the shepherds points to the destructiveness of the male world. Like the plow image in Catullus’ poem, which functions as a symbol of the triumph of male industriousness over leisure, the image of the shepherds in Sappho’s poem points to the mundane masculine world of work. The shepherds go about their work, heedless of the beauty of their surroundings. Likewise, the plow carries on its utilitarian function in conformity with the goals of the inexorable will of the ‘‘fatherland.’’ Both Sappho and Catullus show, implicitly, that the flower and the men who destroy it belong to very separate worlds. Sappho’s flower is associated with an ideal realm of beauty, a realm portrayed as unattainable in the larger world (outside the protected sphere of her circle). In a number of fragments she uses flower imagery to connote female eroticism and innocence within a segregated female world of erotic and social affiliation. She depicts this world as separate from normal community life and therefore apart from the world of men. Similarly, Catullus’ position, as a flower at the edge of a meadow, places him on the margins of mainstream, male Roman society - seemingly helpless in the face of an impersonal machine that symbolizes the dehumanizing effects of culture.
The plow’s indifferent mowing down of nameless living things parallels Caesar’s violent subjugation of foreign lands. Although the shepherds in Sappho’s fragment cannot be associated with the grandiose and, arguably, self-serving purposes of a Caesar, they are nonetheless part of a consumerist social fabric that is undeniably male. Both the shepherds and the plow exploit nature for ‘‘civilized’’ purposes. To be sure, the plow represents a higher degree of civilization than does herding, but both are forms of a civilizing exploitation of the natural environment. Moreover, the plow image in Catullus is a common symbol for the masculine phallus in Greco-Roman literature, while the flower often connotes female virginity.21 Catullus thus implies that female submission to the male is inevitable, that a life devoted to passion and imagination will ultimately have to give way to the demands of duty.
This idea is especially relevant to Sappho. The pathos in the image of the hyacinth being trampled, at least in part, derives from the notion that this fragment may have been part of a wedding-song. In that context, the flower may be a metaphor for female virginity. Sappho’s depiction of the hyacinth’s destruction by heedless shepherds may thus express a sense of sadness and regret at not only the girl’s loss of virginity but also the realization that on entering the realm of marriage, she must subordinate herself to her husband. The hyacinth’s fall can be seen as a metaphor for a young woman’s inevitable descent from an ideal realm of passion and imagination to the mundane realities of married life. Throughout her surviving poetry Sappho portrays herself as part of what one scholar calls ‘‘magical space,’’22 a realm in which female homoerotic desire, beauty, and imagination flourish. Whether this ‘‘space’’ was actual or imagined we will probably never know. But it is quite clear that Sappho wants to celebrate eros, imagination, and the enjoyment of beauty as crucial to a fulfilling life. In poem 11 Catullus implicitly acknowledges Sappho’s understanding of the difficulties of pursuing a life of passion and imagination within the practical constraints of the world. While marriage, for her, is not necessarily portrayed as evil, it is nonetheless a political and social institution that severely limits female autonomy. For Catullus the masculine plow is associated with the ruthless conquest embodied in both Caesar and Lesbia. In identifying himself with Sappho’s flowers Catullus expresses not only his sense of himself as a victim of a corrupt social system but also his quest to find his own ‘‘magical space,’’ however marginal, where love and poetic imagination can thrive.
Despite the fact that Sappho’s trampled hyacinth suggests loss and regret, one may argue that her flower image also has a ‘‘self-justifying intensity,’’ in the sense that the flower image serves to celebrate beauty for its own sake.23 Likewise, the pure, aesthetic beauty ofCatullus’ flower image seems to outstrip the images ofdestruction associated with Caesar and Lesbia. While Catullus cannot stop the mechanisms of conquest and destruction, he can, through his image-making, turn our attention to the pristine beauty of a singular, nameless, and isolated flower. In its suggestions of failure, his fallen flower may remind us of the questions implicitly raised in the last stanza of poem 51 about the difficulty for Roman man in occupying himself with the pleasures of beauty and imagination - occupations considered both ‘‘trivial’’ and feminine and therefore unworthy of an ‘‘upstanding’’ Roman male citizen. Yet Catullus demonstrates the worth of his erotic and aesthetic ideal, in part, by representing both Caesar’s and Lesbia’s conquests as morally degraded, in opposition to his poetic rendering of himself as a delicate, fragile flower victimized by the brutality of the world. We naturally sympathize with that flower, whose innocence and beauty have immediate, sensual appeal as well as, and perhaps more importantly, moral superiority.
Yet it is difficult to reconcile Catullus’ identification in the poem with the feminine Sappho and his aggressive, masculine stance toward Lesbia. Perhaps we have to be content with considering him as, ultimately, conflicted with regard to the Sapphic tradition. In the end, I think, he tries to have it both ways, and in many respects he succeeds. One may argue that Catullus’ attempts to distance himself from Lesbia may be his strategy for regaining a sense of a masculine self in the face of desire. It may also be plausibly argued that his verbal abuse of Lesbia allows him to assert his poetic independence from Sappho. Indeed, his difficulty in speaking when he looks at ‘‘Lesbia’’ in poem 51 may be read as an expression of his own sense of inadequacy with regard to Sappho’s powerful legacy of lyric passion. At the same time, however, the ‘‘aesthetically compelling’’ image of the flower at the end of poem 11 connects Catullus in a powerful way with a Sapphic sensibility - in particular, with the belief in passion and poetic imagination as intrinsically worthy, though often marginalized, cultural values.
World History
