Critics tend to like Catullus, a reality that emerges in the history of his interpretation and that poses a potential impediment to any modern attempt to appreciate the nature of his social commentary: it is too easy to embrace what David Wray has called ‘‘the stratagem of making Catullus into our man in Rome, our secret periscopic eye viewing his world from our own ethical viewpoint’’ (Wray 2001: 129). Which is not to say that Catullus or his world are so alien from our own as to be incomprehensible, but instead to insist that ample attention be paid to the strong contrasts between the normal and normative expectations of our own society and the one that constitutes an essential context for Catullus’ poems, not least when they are read as social commentary (Wiseman 1985: 1-14).
By their very nature Romans were censorious (Veyne 1983). Tradition was deemed irrefutably good, a habit of mind that entailed a strong belief in the value of conformity at every social level and in the importance of deference to established hierarchy. The Romans’ commitment to consensus, at the everyday and elite levels alike (Oehler 1961), was essential both for ordinary instantiations of justice and to the comprehensive stability of the republic (Nippel 1995: 4-46). As a consequence, everything in Roman society was subject to intense and skeptical scrutiny. ‘‘No man can be a good judge,’’ insists Cicero, ‘‘who is not affected by well-grounded suspicion’’ (Cic. Verr. 2.5.65). Even private life was open to view, not merely by way of gossip but also, for the aristocracy, in the very design and functionality of their homes (private life made public in politics: e. g., Q. Cic. Comment. pet. 17; cf. Richlin 1992: 83-6; houses: Wallace-Hadrill 1988). This moralizing examination went a long way in Rome: what to modern sensibilities seem nothing more than personal idiosyncrasies in physical appearance or dress or speech could be viewed, and were viewed, by the Romans as symptoms of a corrupt character and therefore a potential danger to the state (Richlin 1992; Gleason 1995; Corbeill 1996).
Consequently praise and blame were the essential tools of moral analysis. Horace (to cite a single yet illustrative example) represents his tradition-minded father as leaving moral arguments to the philosophers, instead dragging his son through the city pointing out living specimens of failure and vice, men whose immorality was demonstrated by public opprobrium (Sat. 1.4.124-6):
...an hoc inhonestum et inutile factu necne sit addubites, flagret rumore malo cum hic atque ille?
...do you doubt whether this is or isn’t disgraceful or disadvantageous, when this man
As well as that man is blasted by evil repute?
Indeed, exemplarity remained basic to the Romans’ investigation of virtue and its opposite (Roller 2004), and, as a result, negative examples served an obvious didactic purpose.
This mentality helps to explain the pervasiveness of invective in Roman society, the universal appeal of which is evidenced by its appearance in comic drama and scribbled graffiti. In political discourse, ‘‘the best of arguments was personal abuse. In the allegation of disgusting immorality, degrading pursuits and ignoble origin the Roman politician knew no compunction or limit’’ (Syme 1939: 149). Political opposition could be conveyed by means of straightforward abuse - cast in sexual and sometimes obscene terms. In forensic circumstances, vituperation advanced the case of prosecution and defense alike, so avid was each side to convince juries by means of argumenta ex vita, a staple of rhetorical education (Corbeill 2002; Craig 2004). In his defense of M. Caelius Rufus, Cicero impugned the testimony of Clodia Metelli on the grounds that she was lubricious, adulterous, and incestuous. L. Calpurnius Piso, the consul of 58, was, according to Cicero’s hostile pamphlet Against Piso, derived from base origins, a glutton, a drunkard, greedy, and guilty of sexual immorality. Examples could be multiplied.
Imputations of personal immorality were relevant to political contests in Rome, where public life was conceptualized in terms of high calling and exemplary personal conduct (Earl 1967). At the same time, it was conceded that aristocratic service to the Republic was suffused with strife: competition for personal honor, even when properly subordinated to the best interests of the state, operated along personal lines. Rome lacked political parties. Instead, individuals joined with other individuals, in senatorial and forensic practices, on the basis of personal pledges of affection and obligation. Put differently, Roman political life was sustained by friendship and similar obligations. Seen in this light, the personal element of Roman politics is obvious: trustworthiness (fides) and duty (officium) were virtues crucial in leaders and followers alike. Hence the force of invective. An immoral statesman was an abomination: men might decently disagree (at least within certain limits) about matters of policy; but a man lacking satisfactory moral fiber, especially a powerful man suffering from this deficiency, was unacceptable as a (true) friend and represented a danger to the state. For this reason, Roman political discourse often appears personal to us. One’s opponents were not merely mistaken: they were wicked. And because it was a Roman instinct that any moral lapse might well indicate every moral lapse (Cic. Inv. rhet. 2.33; Rhet. Her. 2.5), comprehensive invective frequently trumped narrower or more specific criticisms. The result is that political controversy in Rome regularly took place in more than one register: constitutional issues might rub shoulders with claims that this or that individual was insolent, immoral, or bestial (Hellegouarc’h 1971: 484-541; Achard 1981: 186-355), accusations that were simultaneously personal and of public significance.
So indispensable was invective that Cicero can attempt to deconstruct a prosecution’s entire case with animadversions on its failure to adduce ‘‘any scandal, any crime, any shameful behavior arising from lust, effrontery, or reckless audacity. If there were not true grounds for suspicion, certainly some could have been fabricated’’ (Font. 37). Now by the late Republic defamation was actionable, though this reality seems to have imposed no limitations on invective, possibly owing to the traditional quality of legitimate public shaming in Rome, which ranged from public heckling to the infliction ofignominy in the census or in the courts (Crook 1967: 252-5). As the Digest puts it, ‘‘it is not just that anyone who defames a wicked person be condemned on that account, because it is fitting and beneficial that the wrongdoings of the wicked be known’’ (Dig. 47.10.18.pref.). Or, to turn to an actual specimen of (self-justificatory) invective, ‘‘the republic is made greater through private hostilities, when no citizen can disguise his nature’’ ([Cic.] Sail. 3).
Modern approaches to Roman invective either stress its conventionality by means of typological collections of its instantiations (Craig 2004, with further references) or attempt to explore its psychological and sociological premises and implications (Richlin 1992; Corbeill 1996). Romans resorted to invective in order to isolate and revile exceptionable divergences from reputable habits and practices, an aggressive exertion that was intended at once to humiliate the alleged miscreant and to help to fashion the speaker (or writer) as a champion of normative values - a representation which, in Roman terms, entailed a masculine and masterful pose. The Roman had at his disposal an array of hostile tropes (e. g., Cic. Inv. rhet. 1.34-6, 2.28-31, 2.177-8; Rhet. Her. 3.10-15). Invective commonplaces included slurs on an enemy’s origins; reproaches for his failure to sustain his family’s reputation; excoriation of his appearance, his appetites, and his sexual proclivities; denunciation of his pretensions; complaints about his treachery; and censure of his avidness for the property of others, his luxuriousness, and his financial failures. Cicero, repeating the doctrine of the rhetoricians, insists that a conviction is impossible if one cannot adduce faults of character that make an accusation plausible. Character assassination along these lines was equally vital in purely political denunciations of a rival position: Cicero’s Second Philippic remains the classic (but scarcely the only) specimen.
But however compulsory invective was as a formal element of oratory, its claims could be rejected, not least by calling attention to its very conventionality. In his defense of Caelius Rufus, for example, Cicero reacts to the invective against Caelius delivered by the 17-year-old prosecutor, L. Sempronius Atratinus, by observing that his callowness inhibited the young man’s ferocity and thereby reduced his abuse of Caelius to something ineffectual and strained, however obligatory in a case for the prosecution (Cic. Cael. 6-8; cf. Gotoff 1986). Atratinus simply failed to come across as authentic, and his attack could be reduced to a mere exercise. Invective, then, to be successful, had to be convincing, and the personality of the calumniator played an essential role. One always ran the risk, when abusing others, of revealing a flaw in one’s own character (Cic. Off. 1.134), and while it remained the height of elegance ( urbanitas) to point out the blemishes of others, it was nothing short of stupidity (stultitia) to allow blemishes to be observed in oneself (Quint. Inst. 6.3.8). Objective rhetorical constructions unfolding in authorial absence, however finely expressed, did not count as effective and affecting invective - in oratory.
Invective presented a moral lesson to its audience: behold an exceptionable man or woman. Furthermore, any resort to moralizing invective implied at least a belief that it was carried out in a robust moral environment in which said invective could reach a discriminating audience capable of appreciating and endorsing its criticisms (Corbeill 1996: 203-4). The audience is not merely flattered by this: Romans were invited to regard the prevalence of invective in their society not as an indication that all was lost but instead as a reassuring feature that proved Roman censoriousness persisted effectually and advantageously.
World History
