I want now to conclude by suggesting some overlapping historical contexts that make sense of the ambivalence about Hellenic literary culture manifested in Catullus’ poetry. I offer them not as explanations of Catullan attitudes but rather as backgrounds against which the poet’s manipulation of these issues can take on an extratextual significance for contemporaries and for us. The male figures who emerge most prominently as Catullus’ amici often share similar geographical and social origins. The offspring of the wealthiest citizens of the towns of Cisalpine Gaul, a region whose prosperity and political importance increased dramatically after the civil wars of the 80s BC, these young men followed a similar career trajectory, which brought them, via a period of service in the retinue of a provincial administrator, to the metropolis. There, as the dramatis personae of the Catullan corpus shows, they enjoyed connections within the urban political elite. Because their position was so new, members of this remarkably successful generation had great flexibility in defining their own social identity within overlapping but not concentric social circles. Catullus never entirely abandoned his native Verona for Rome, and we can imagine that the friendship his father cultivated with Julius Caesar greatly enhanced his family’s prestige locally. Conversely, a Catullus’ status at home, no doubt together with his family’s wealth, provided not only the fuel for his social journey but also an alternative social context within which he could enjoy a pre-eminence greater than that he could achieve in the capital.20 Hence, as Emma Dench’s recent work on Romanization (2005) suggests, this group of young men enjoyed the possibility of ‘‘triangulating’’ their social position by playing up either their urbanity or their provincial status.
The display of literary culture plays a significant role in the complex social negotiation we are imagining. First, a sophisticated literary education provided a Catullus, or a Cinna from nearby Brescia, with an important prerequisite for advancement. We know that some of the most important grammatici (professional teachers of literature) sought employment in Northern Italy at this time (Suet. Gram. 3.6) - and that thus there was a good market for their services among men who could afford to pay them. Those who won literary distinction in Rome over the next fifty years came from this region in disproportionate numbers. But beyond being an instrument of advancement, the literary distinction Catullus’ circle claims for itself possessed, I suggest, an ambiguity that at once paralleled and facilitated the construction of overlapping urban and provincial identities. On one level, there was an obvious connection between such knowledge and the urbanity prized in the polymetrics, the poetry through which Catullus publicizes his connections among the Hellenized elite of Rome - one of the alternative social roles available to him. But, as a close reading of the poetry has shown, learning also offered a retreat from social obligations as well as an autonomous context for Catullan self-expression that transcended its social impetus. In this sense the split in the manifestations of Catullan learning map a set of alternatives similar to his contrasting geographic identities. Dench makes this particularly clear in her analysis of another Catullan dedicatory poem, the opening of the intensely learned 68. As in poem 65, Catullus stages a withdrawal from Roman society that opposes his ability to compose a learned tribute to a noble friend. This withdrawal is again connected with Catullus’ mourning for his brother, but here it assumes a geographical dimension as well. The poet has left Rome and therefore has no library at hand as a compositional resource: only one case of book rolls has followed him to Verona (68.36). And yet the slightness of his literary apparatus implies the opposite of a renunciation of abilities; on the contrary, according to the Callimachean aesthetic, the single capsula ought to have a value surpassing mere quantity (Dench 2005: 337-8). Here, very neatly, Catullus’ redefinition of his cultural knowledge through an emphasis on refinement corresponds to a return to the place of his own origin and prestige. This retreat is only partial - the very existence of poem 68 signifies his maintenance of social connections - but it allows the poet to highlight the independent terms on which he does participate.
The ambiguities of Catullus’ social position also help to explain the thematic opposition his poetry establishes between literary culture and material abundance. As we have seen, the moralizing tone of Catullus 64 with its identification of cupidity as the source of Roman social disruption helps define literary culture as an escape from the corruption brought by riches. However conventional such a condemnation of wealth as a source of corruption may be in Latin literature, we should not miss its special importance in Catullus. No age witnessed a greater increase in the material goods of empire, or of the social and political disruption they fueled, than the final decades of the republic. And, on a more intimate scale as well, Catullus’ poetry undoes the consequence of economic desire. For his work portrays the pursuit of gain through provincial service - and we should not forget that cultural capital in the form of manuscripts and grammatici were among the spoils to be won - in terms of its negative effects on the solidarity of amicitia. The ‘‘napkins’’ and texts fetishized in the epigrams and polymetrics are necessary because Fabullus and Veranius are in Spain, or Catullus is in Bithynia. Most tellingly, in Catullus’ poetry the very route that took him eastward as the up-and-coming member of a governor’s staff merges geographically with the voyage to his brother’s tomb, superimposing on his path to success reminders of the irrecoverable loss of the figure with whom he shared the closest of bonds. It is in these terms that we should understand Catullus’ connection between literary refinement and poverty - which was itself a Callimachean convention. And the other face of literary culture, its inevitable connection to material success, always stood in contrast to the surface meanings of Catullus’ claim to have a purse full of spider webs.
The opposition sketched between learning and economic prosperity, then, cannot be securely explained either in terms of a ‘‘countercultural’’ opting out of the career track that mattered, or as sour grapes. Catullus’ amici were neither dropouts nor failures. Cinna went on to hold the tribunate; Calvus was as successful an orator as he was a poet; and, had Catullus lived another decade, perhaps we would hear of him too as tribune or senator.21 Rather, the decoupling of wealth from culture helps define the terms of a generation’s success. It was wealth that gave Catullus his learning, and wealth that placed him in the urban context in which he particularly delights to display it. Yet wealth per se, however essential to accruing status, was also a very ambivalent possession. It always paled in comparison to the prestige aristocratic families acquired from political success. The material products of empire, then, offered a social standard that would always qualify the position of a Cinna or a Catullus, defining them in terms that would insure their subordination. But a ‘‘culture’’ that opposes itself to materiality at once testifies to social position and makes it unquantifiable. It also gives the poet a great measure of autonomy, revealed by the implicit rejection of any social superior as patronus. The amici define their own society; the poetic skill with which they realize their small monuments becomes the secret of their reputation and makes their words matter within the larger realms of political discourse, as Catullan invective probably did.
The question of culture’s materiality relates to another important and long-lived Roman anxiety about the role of Hellenic cultural accomplishments in their own society. Livy has Cato the Elder express a fear of the first Greek works of art brought to Rome as plunder: ‘‘these statues may have taken us captive rather than we them’’ (Liv. 34.4.3). Within the moralizing content of Livy’s work, this statement reflects the avarice the sight of such marvels engenders - itself a very Catullan attitude. But the image of Greek learning reversing the roles of master and slave has even greater resonance in Roman culture; hence Horace’s famous formulation about ‘‘Captive Greece making her fierce conqueror captive’’ (Ep. 2.1.156). Throughout the history of the Republic, the literary culture of Greece was carefully managed to differentiate Rome from its Italian rivals without assuming the subordinate position that merely participating in Greek literature as Hellenized outsiders would have implied.22 The very existence of a poetic literature in Latin results from such a careful negotiation of status, reconfiguring the Greek elements, omnipresent within Latin poetry from its inception, within the language of Rome. And such issues manifest themselves on a personal as well as a national scale; for one important way in which Greek literature was always ‘‘domesticated’’ at Rome was through the slave status of its teachers and masters. The position of these rhetoricians served as a constant reminder that it was really Rome that had taken Greece captive: it at once makes literary knowledge servile and yet makes access to it a mark of the highest social prestige.
Catullus’ accomplishment forms very much a part of this story. The first printed edition of Catullus’ work mistakenly claims that Catullus was born on the very day rhetorical instruction in Latin first began in Rome (Wiseman 1985: 207-8). Though useless as fact, the error provides a helpful reminder for gauging the cultural significance of Catullus’ work. As Corbeill (2001) has shown, the professionalization of Latin rhetoric helped consolidate the ‘‘separate but equal status’’ of Roman culture; but it also meant that the prestige of that culture was open to anyone who could pay for it. For Catullus to write the kind of poetry he does, in Latin, was remarkable. His work did not consist of the self-evidently trivial, transparently Hellenizing trifles of an aristocrat like Catulus or Hortensius, nor did it, like Volusius’, peg its value to its Roman content. It assumes the triviality that marks Hellenizing verse as something that adorns but does not define the status of a great noble, but invests it with a social role that would not be possible if his work were only to be measured by the position of the Greek relative to the Roman. The possibility that Catullus’ achievement could be denigrated by being treated simply as a Greek literary production emerges from one of the few remarks that Cicero makes about contemporary poetry that stylistically resembled Catullus’. Cicero dubs those who affected Hellenistic tastes and rejected the Latin classics like Ennius ‘‘singers of Euphorion’’ (Tusc. 3.45; see Johnson, this volume), making them follow in the path of Greek poets, and perhaps even comparing them to the performing slaves who sang at public festivals. Tellingly, in the only place where Catullus advertises his work as derivative of a specific Greek poet, in the dedication to the ‘‘Lock of Berenice,’’ he creates an opposition between the ‘‘translation,’’ which fulfils Catullus’ social obligations, and the nightingale song he sings for his brother’s death. In an important sense, then, he advertises that Callimachus’ words are not spoken in his own voice.
Cicero’s gibe reveals a final dimension of Catullus’ uses of literary culture. From one perspective, literature may have defined a space for displaying excellence and cultivating amicitia operating alongside the traditional practices of the elite, one where status was measured by learned qualities like lepos and elegantia as opposed to ancestral prestige or mere wealth. But from another it was perhaps precisely the embeddedness of literary culture within the manifestations of elite status that mattered. Without it, Catullus’ learning makes him look very like another class of person who would possess the kinds of knowledge on display in poem 64: the professional grammatici. They too could amass great wealth and reputation and often wrote as well as taught poetry. But their background was entirely different, for they were often expensive slaves or freedmen.
One of these figures in particular offers a useful foil to the Catullus that emerges from his poems - P. Valerius Cato. The two were born at roughly the same time - Cato was probably a few years older - and in the same region of Italy. Indeed they practically share the same name - Catullus is a diminutive of Cato - and may well have been related.23 Cato too wrote exquisitely learned poems, which probably shared many themes and even a couple of characters with Catullus 64, at least one on a mythological subject treated by Callimachus. Cinna predicts, in very much the
Language of Catullus 1 and 95, that it ‘‘will endure the ages’’ (saecula permaneat, fr. 14 Courtney).24 But for all his role as a trainer of nobles and poets, Cato’s own position was quite distinct from theirs. He was a freed slave, although he cared enough about escaping the stigma of this status to write a poem claiming to have been freeborn but illegally enslaved during the civil wars. And though his skills brought him enough wealth to buy a property of his own in the Alban hills, it was eventually auctioned off, and he apparently ended his life in poverty.
We know this from a pair of epigrams attributed to Furius Bibaculus advertising his deprivations. The tone of these poems is a little unclear and, like so many Catullan poems, depends on the social story we read into them. The first runs as follows (Suet. Gram. 11.3): ‘‘If by chance someone sees the home of my friend Cato, three vermilioned woodchips, and that little garden guarded by Priapus, he wonders by what arts he acquired such great wisdom that three cabbages, a half measure of spelt, and two grape clusters have nourished him, huddled under his roof tile, until great old age.’’ Catullus too claims a poverty that strips him of everything but poetic salt, but such language in his case seems all the more transparently conventional in contrast to the realism with which Bibaculus depicts someone else’s poverty. Here there is no dematerializing, no obscuring of social position, but rather an all-too-vivid portrait, which, far from reducing Cato to an essential sapientia, links sapientia itself to destitution. For the point in both epigrams is that Cato, despite his learning, is merely a bankrupted freedman. This demystification of learning to demote its possessor forms a precise and illuminating obverse to Catullus’ own deployment of knowledge.25
World History
