Tantum magna suo debet Verona Catullo quantum parua suo Mantua Vergilio.
Great Verona owes as much to her Catullus as little Mantua does to her Vergil.
Mart. 14.195
Verona was always proud of her poet (Ov. Am. 3.15.7; Mart. 1.61.1, 10.103.5), and Transpadane gentlemen liked to write in his style (Plin. Ep. 4.14, 4.27). One of the fragments of wall-painting recovered from the Sirmio villa in the 1950s shows a young man holding a scroll, barefoot, with a narrow-stripe tunic beneath his toga (Fig. 4.5); the context is unknown (a matching piece shows an athlete with his trainer), but who else is it likely to be?
The year after Catullus Messallinus’ second consulship, Martial presented himself to the Roman reading public as a Catullan epigrammatist (sic scribit Catullus, Mart. 1 pref.). There are countless references and allusions to Catullus in Martial’s work, and one form of homage was to choose appropriate names like ‘‘Fabullus’’ and ‘‘Lesbia’’ for the imagined or anonymous victims of his satirical observations. ‘‘Most of the imaginary names were doubtless chosen at random, but now and again they relate to their context’’ (Shackleton Bailey 1993: 325); ‘‘Fabullus’’ first appears in a poem about the host at a party providing perfume, just as the real Fabullus did in Catullus 13 (Mart. 3.12).
One of the most interesting of these allusions comes in the eighth book of epigrams, where Martial is on his best behavior; the book is formally dedicated to Domitian, and inspired by the emperor’s own virgin goddess. Here is the poem (Mart. 8.1.4), in Shackleton Bailey’s text and translation:
Formosissima quae fuere uel sunt, sed durissima quae fuere uel sunt, o quam te fieri, Catulla, uellem formosam minus aut minus pudicam!
Fairest of women that ever were or are, but cruellest of women that ever were or are, oh,
How I would have wished you, Catulla, to become less fair or else less virtuous!
The unmistakable Catullan echo (cf. c. 49.1-2, Disertissime Romuli nepotum/quot sunt quotque fuere) might suggest that the virtuous lady is imaginary, and that Martial has simply invented an appropriate name for her (Shackleton Bailey 1993: 347, indexed with an asterisk) - but in 94, the date of Book 8, ‘‘Catulla’’ was not a name you could use for just anyone. I think it is much more likely that this is a compliment to a real woman, and the Catullan echo is a graceful tribute to her famous ancestor.
In Juvenal’s satires, written 20 years later about the people of Martial’s time (Syme 1984: 1135-57), Catulla appears as a highly sexed lady who can deny her lover nothing (Juv. 10.322). She is cited at another point (Juv. 4.49-50) for the argument that women, unlike men, refrain from homosexual relationships:
Tedia non lambit Cluuiam nec Flora Catullam:
Hispo subit iuuenes et morbo pallet utrique.
Tedia doesn’t lick Cluvia, Flora doesn’t lick Catulla; Hispo submits to young men, and is
Pallid from both vices.
These are all elite names: Mestrius Florus was consul in about 75, Cluvius Rufus in 80. And three of them, Catulla, Hispo, and Flora (Syme 1991: 489 on the Mestrii), are Transpadane. It could be just an accident that Juvenal juxtaposes Catulla with Te(i)dia and Hispo, whose names recall the grandmother and adoptive father of the Valerius Catullus who was consul in 31 (no. 4 above); but he also brings a lady called Hispulla rather gratuitously into the poem about the Catullus who escaped
Figure 4.5 Fragment of wall-painting from the villa at Sirmione (fig. 4.4 above), showing a young man with a scroll. Photo by courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i beni archeologici della Lombardia (Archivio Fotografico D 756).
Shipwreck (Juv. 12.11). For whatever reason, the names were associated in the author’s mind.
I offer another guess: that the Catulla mentioned by Martial and Juvenal and the Catullus featured in Juvenal 12 were daughter and son of L. Catullus Messallinus, mother of one of the Arvals’ attendants and father of the other.
Catullus Messallinus was blind as well as hateful. In the famous scene ofDomitian’s council about the giant turbot, Juvenal introduces him as Catullus mortifer, the bringer of death,
Qui numquam uisae flagrabat amore puellae,
Grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum,
Dignus Aricinos qui mendicaret ad axes
Blandaque deuexae iactaret basia raedae.
Who burned with love for a girl he could never see, a great monster conspicuous even in our times, fit to beg and blow flattering kisses at the wheels of a carriage descending the hill at Aricia.
(Juv. 4.114-17, with Courtney 1975: 157-8)
The carriage is a raeda, a Transpadane term (Quint. Inst. 1.5.56-7); the kisses are not oscula but Catullan basia; and the mocking line about his mistress is a complex allusion to Catullus’ poem about the bride from Brixia, whose father-in-law, blind with passion, had taken her virginity first (impia mens caeco flagrabat amore, c. 67.25).
As Tacitus’ Dialogus, Suetonius’ De uiris illustribus, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are enough to show, this was an age that looked back with particular interest to the great men of the late Republic and the early years of Augustus. A personal link with a classic author was particularly valued: the Transpadane Silius Italicus (Syme 1988: 380), consul in 68, orator and epic poet, owned an estate that had belonged to Cicero, and bought and restored the tomb of Vergil (Mart. 11.48; Plin. Ep. 3.7.8); Passennus Paullus, a distinguished eques from Asisium, was descended from Propertius, and praised by Pliny as a poet in his own right (Plin. Ep. 6.15.1, 9.22; cf. CIL 11.5405). The Valerii Catulli, still sumptuously established at Sirmio, could make a better case than either of those.
In the very first sentence of his Natural History, C. Plinius Secundus of Comum deliberately misquoted Catullus’ first poem, and excused the liberty with the following explanation to his princely dedicatee (pref. 1):
Ille enim, ut scis, permutatis prioribus syllabis duriusculum se fecit quam uolebat existimari a Veraniolis suis et Fabullis.
For as you know, by putting the first syllables [of 1.4] in a different order he made himself a bit harder than he wanted to be thought by his ‘‘dear Veranii and Fabulli’’.
The inseparable Veranius and Fabullus (cc. 12.15-17, 28.3, 47.3) also had a resonance in Flavian Rome. Fabullus found a fictitious afterlife in Martial (see above), but Veranius was still a real name, and a significant one.
Catullus’ friend Veranius, a scholarly young man (c. 9.8, ut mos est tuus), may or may not be identical with the Veranius who wrote about religious antiquities (Syme 1988: 634-6). He was no doubt father, or uncle, of the Q. Veranius who served as an equestrian officer in the fourth legion and was then tutor to Livia’s younger son Claudius Drusus in the 20s bc (AE 1981.824). That man’s son, also Q. Veranius, was legate to Drusus’ son Germanicus in ad 18, and prosecuted Cn. Piso two years later (Tac. Ann. 2.56.4, 3.10.1); his grandson, Q. Veranius the consul of 49, was adlected into the patriciate by Claudius and served as imperial legate in Britain under Nero (CIL 6.41075).
Like the Valerii Catulli, the Veranii achieved senatorial status under Augustus, rose to consular rank in the next generation, and were on close terms both with the old aristocracy of Rome and with the imperial house itself. The consul’s daughter Verania Gemina married L. Piso Frugi Licinianus, who was chosen by Galba as his heir (CIL 6.31723); after the butchery in the Forum on January 15, 69, she had to beg the soldiers for her husband’s head (Plut. Galb. 28.2). The Veranii were also related to the patrician Cornelii Dolabellae; for instance, a Verania may have married the Dolabella who was consul in 86, the year after Valerius Messallinus. That would account for the name of another of the boys who served the Arvals in 105 (p. 61 above), Cornelius Dolabella Veranianus.
Who chose the boys for this duty? Whoever it was will have known his Catullus - not only the kiss-poems and the sparrow-poems, so constantly referred to by Martial, but also the joyful greeting of a dear friend: Verani, omnibus e meis amicis/antistans mihi milibus trecentis....{c. 9.1-2). That was the ancestor of young Dolabella Veranianus, hailed by the ancestor of young Catullus Messallinus and his cousin. What made those boys aristocratic was not just their patrician descent from the Cornelii Dolabellae and the Valerii Messallae; they had also inherited a longer-lasting kind of nobility.
In that very year, 105, Pliny the Transpadane wrote to old Vestricius Spurinna {Ep. 5.17.1):
Scio quanto opere artibus faueas, quantum gaudium capias si nobiles iuuenes dignum aliquid maioribus suis faciant.
I know how much literature matters to you, and what pleasure it gives you when our young nobles do something worthy of their ancestors.
Writers had always borrowed the language of glory, like Horace with his monument more lasting than bronze {Carm. 3.30.1), or Livy on the nobilitasand magnitudo of his competitors {pref. 3); the aemulatio gloriae {Just. pref. 1) was as real in literary achievement as in the traditional aristocrat’s pursuit of consulships and triumphs. It was natural that one’s descendants should inherit that glory too.
When Catullus prayed that his work might last more than one saeculum {c. 1.10), the poem was addressed to Cornelius Nepos, a fellow-Transpadane {Plin. HN 3.127). How the goddess granted his prayer can be seen in two of Martial’s gift-tag poems {14.100 and 152), written well over a saeculum later:
Si non ignota est docti tibi terra Catulli, potasti testa Raetica uina mea.
If the land of learned Catullus is not unknown to you, you have drunk Rhaetian wines from my jar.
Lodices mittet docti tibi terra Catulli; nos Helicaonia de regione sumus.
The land of learned Catullus will send you blankets; we [rugs?] are from the region of Helicaon [son of Antenor, founder ofPatavium].
The Transpadane region was synonymous with the name of a poet - but why wasn’t it Vergil? Perhaps because Vergil belonged to everyone: he was the bard of Latium and the gens togata {Aen. 1.6, 282), familiar from school wherever Latin was spoken. Catullus was more locally specific. Besides, Mantua was a small place, and the obscure village of Andes could hardly compete with Sirmio; one couldn’t imagine senatorial or consular Vergilii still living there.
Catullus symbolized the Transpadana because his family kept the name conspicuous, right down to M. Annius Valerius Catullus {no. 12 above), who honored his grandparents in Brixia about three centuries after the poet’s time. Let us hope that he survived the invasion of the Alemanni, which shattered the peace of the Transpadana in the 260s. It was close to Lake Garda that the Alemanni were defeated {[Aur. Vict.]
Epit. de Caes. 34.2); uenusta Sirmio must now have been a military site, the villa abandoned and in ruins (Roffia 1997: 162-3).
Ausonius in the fourth century still knew Catullus as ‘‘the Veronese poet’’ (1.4.2), and it seems that his works were preserved in Verona throughout the long centuries of Ostrogothic, Lombard, and Frankish rule; a monk in Brixia evidently knew them in the 840s, and a learned bishop of Verona refers to them in the 960s (Gaisser 1993: 17; see Butrica, this volume). But some time after that, Verona lost her poet. It was only in the early fourteenth century that a manuscript of the Catulli Veronensis liber was brought back to the city, celebrated by an epigram on the poet’s ‘‘resurrection’’. It begins:
Ad patriam uenio longis a finibus exul; causa mei reditus compatriota fuit.
An exile, I come to my native land from distant parts; a compatriot was the cause of my return.
We don’t know who it was who brought Catullus home, but it’s fitting that it was one of his ‘‘own folk.’’
World History
