The discontinuous nature of Catullan invective has been observed and is sometimes perceived as a problem (e. g., Skinner 1991: 1-3): the poem’s speaking persona is often inept or disgraced, no longer a figure of thundering and morally intimidating moral outrage, like the speaker of poem 29, but instead a fallible or fallen figure evoking the iambic personalities of Archilochus or Hipponax. The contrast is made unmistakable more than once in the collection. The poem immediately preceding poem 29, for instance, is, like its successor, a hostile complaint about provincial governors and their relationships, again depicted in obscene and sexual language, with their equestrian subordinates.
Pisonis comites, cohors inanis aptis sarcinulis et expeditis,
Verani optime tuque mi Fabulle,
Quid rerum geritis? satisne cum isto
Vappa frigoraque et famem tulistis? 5
Ecquidnam in tabulis patet lucelli
Expensum, ut mihi, qui meum secutus
Praetorem refero datum lucello?
O Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum
Tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti. 10
Sed, quantum video, pari fuistis
Casu: nam nihilo minore verpa
Farti estis. pete nobiles amicos!
At vobis mala multa di deaeque
Dent, opprobria Romuli Remique. 15
Lieutenants of Piso, an empty-handed cadre, with baggage ready and unencumbered, excellent Veranius and you, my friend Fabullus, how are you? Have you endured enough cold and hunger with that stale fellow? Is there any expense counted as profit in your account books, as is the case with me, inasmuch as I, after serving my praetor, put my losses in the profit column? O Memmius, after you lowered me you made a fellator out of me - at considerable length and without hurry - cramming my mouth with that enormous beam of yours. Still, so far as I can see, you two are in the same condition, because you have been stuffed with no smaller a dick. Seek noble friends! Instead, may the gods and goddesses bring many curses on you, you blots on Romulus and Remus.
The thematic similarities between poems 28 and 29 can scarcely be missed. And the ostensible speaker of poem 28 is, once more, the historical Catullus, who served in Bithynia on the staff of C. Memmius (pr. 58 and, though wealthy and well-connected, not technically a noble; the advice to ‘‘seek noble friends’’ is clearly general and not specific to the poet’s particular situation). Here the poet expresses his resentment at the unprofitable nature of his relationship with Memmius, misfortune he shares with his friends Veranius and Fabullus, who were in Macedonia with C. Calpurnius Piso (cos. 58 - father-in-law to Caesar and unquestionably noble). Here, unlike poem 29, the exploitation of provincials is itself unproblematic: the poet’s objection is that neither he nor his friends were allowed even a taste of the spoils of empire. The poem is plainly intended to discredit Memmius and Piso. Memmius’ mistreatment of Catullus is represented in terms of sexual penetration - he is an irrumator (a man who reduces another to the condition of a fellator) of exaggerated proportions, who subdues Catullus by way of oral rape - an action that was in fact a crime in Rome (the sexual violation of a free man was illegal). Memmius’ masculine pose is not merely a threat of domination (itself a legitimately masculine gesture): instead we are shown an actualized violation of the law, which makes Memmius into a distorted parody of the manliness inherent in the Roman idea of virtus, the quality that defined the aristocracy and especially the nobility. Like poem 29, then, this poem exhibits a perversion of social relations between the senatorial and equestrian order configured in obscene terms.
But here the speaker is not an indignant observer: he is the emasculated victim, whose humiliation was total and extended (28.9-10). The poem’s concentration on the duration and ease of Catullus’ violation, it has been proposed, ‘‘causes the language of aggression to teeter over into the language of pleasure’’ (Fitzgerald 1995: 69; Nappa 2001: 95-6), a critical reaction that appreciates the fallen condition of the poem’s speaker, who is no less polluted for having been unwilling and overpowered. Again we have Roman leaders who corrupt, but in this poem the speaker cries out from a far less lofty perspective than that of the speaker of poem 29. Indeed, in his avidity this Catullus resembles Mamurra, though he is far less successful: whereas the prodigal from Formiae was able to dominate his master, in poem 28 it is Catullus who is left supine (the entire experience is revisited, and again the Catullan persona displays blemishes, in poem 10, a piece of vers de societe; cf. Nappa 2001: 85-93). There exists, then, a fracture between poems 28 and 29, a distinct discontinuity between the mishap and misery ofthe iambic protagonist in one poem and the righteous Roman of the other. This discrepancy is emphasized by the poems’ common themes - each is an investigation into the morality of politicized Roman friendship established for the purpose of profit and power - and by their juxtaposition in the collection, an arrangement that urges the reader to confront the implications of Catullus’ shifting invective voice.
Catullus insists that his poetic voice and its relationship to his historical identity remain an issue for the reader. In poem 16, perhaps Catullus’ fiercest specimen of (non-political) invective, the poet deploys obscenities and super-masculine menaces in order to give a lesson on the perils of reading (text and translation in Manwell, this volume, p. 120). Here Catullus, reacting to the wrong readings of his work by Aurelius and Furius, explodes in threats of conventional masculinity, amidst which he makes the explicit point that readers err in attempting to grasp the poet’s authentic identity byway of simple readings of his poems (16.5-6), a prescription expressed in a poem that once more gestures toward a reception of Archilochean poetics (Wray 2001: 185). The reader who accepts the interpretive principle of lines 5 and 6, a lesson the poet threatens to cram down his throat, seems obliged to draw no conclusions about the poet from the contents of his verses, all of which is fine for literariness of a familiar stripe but here entails the effect of problematizing certain aspects of poetic invective itself. For the orator who sought to dominate in vituperative exchanges in the senate or in the courtroom, an essential factor in his performance was self-fashioning, an activity that demanded convincing demonstrations of his own, unquestionably authentic, moral superiority: the practicing orator was a flesh-and-bone performer, known or at the very least knowable (one can compare Cicero’s exploitation of Atratinus’ youth in his Defense of Caelius, cited above). Poem 16 on the other hand draws attention to the invective poet’s different circumstances: this author, indicted for being unmanly, retaliates with conventional aggression - the reality of which is put into question by the single literary-critical principle on which the poem insists. Catullus’ inclination to repudiate authenticity, found in this poem and elsewhere (Selden 1992: 484), is - self-consciously and conspicuously - at odds with the requirements of invective in the performance of Roman oratory.
Throughout the collection, Catullus represents himself as an elite municipal who oscillates between the glamorous set in Rome and his hometown of Verona, self-fashioning that can be shown to be grounded in the realities of the rising fortunes of the Transpadane Valerii Catulli (Wiseman 1987: 311-70). The question of the degree to which Catullan fiction can be and must be mapped onto historical reality is confronted whenever a poem addresses a contemporary and public figure. An important instance is poem 79:
Lesbius est pulcher: quid ni? quem Lesbia malit quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua. sed tamen hic pulcher vendat cum gente Catullum, si tria notorum savia reppererit.
Lesbius is handsome (also: is a Pulcher); why not? Lesbia prefers him to you and your entire family, Catullus. Nonetheless, let this handsome fellow (also: this Pulcher) sell Catullus and his entire family if he can get three acquaintances to kiss him.
Here the cryptonyms of Catullan erotic are dissolved in political invective. Lesbius Pulcher strips away the veil protecting the identity of Lesbia, who is here revealed as one of the sisters of P. Clodius Pulcher. Each is calumniated in poem 79, but the chief focus of Catullan hostility is clearly Clodius, who is vilified for incest and sexual perversion (his refusal to win the kisses of acquaintances is an unmistakable reference to os impurum). Furthermore, Clodius constitutes a potential threat to the freedom, the political identity, of Catullus and his family (W. J. Tatum 1993; Skinner 2003: 80-3).
Rumors of incest with his sisters dogged Clodius’ public life, and this element in poem 79 both dishonors Lesbius and contributes to his proper identification. The charge of incest recurs in Catullus: another practitioner is Gellius (see below). Like Clodius, this Gellius was a formidable noble, L. Gellius Publicola (cos. 36), and also, like Clodius, derived from a family keen to maintain its traditional affinities and to exclude outsiders. Incest, then, while obviously reprehensible in itself, also points to elite Roman exclusivity that was certainly discouraging and potentially perilous to the municipal aristocracy whose admission to inner circles of power was not without resistance in the first century bc (W. J. Tatum 1997: 496-7, with further references). But in poem 79 it is the noble Clodius who is excluded from the greetings of his connections, owing to his degrading and effeminate personal qualities (because Clodius had once been tried for violating the rites of the Bona Dea while dressed in drag, he was especially liable to imputations along these lines despite his acquittal). Thus the poet is (only just) saved by public objections to Clodius’ perversions. The suggestion that Clodius might put Catullus and his family up for sale - might strip them of their freedom - cannot fail to recall Clodius’ legislation exiling Cicero (who as a senator enjoyed greater political resources than Catullus): this enactment also confiscated and auctioned off Cicero’s property (W. J. Tatum 1999: 156-8).
Clodius was also a participant in the violence that thrust Pompey and Crassus into consulships in 55. Again sexual invective is the vehicle of political abuse, but here the link between depravity and oppression is explicit. The threat Lesbius poses to Catullus in this poem, though configured in invective language less graphic than that of poem 28, is in fact far more dangerous. Clodius, who was in Roman politics a champion of popular liberty (his law exiling Cicero was justified by the orator’s violation of the basic Roman right to a trial), is here depicted as an enemy to the property and freedom of the prosperous classes, Clodian criticism common in Ciceronian invective (see especially Cicero’s speech On His Own House). Catullus, then, once more comes very close to the voice of poem 29. Here he is vulnerable, but not obviously debased or suspect - until or unless he is viewed by readers as Lesbia’s lover, a figure who elsewhere identifies himself as an adulterer and represents himself as unstable and inept. This Catullus, who once again locates his investigation of political probity in the issue of correct relations between the nobility and the equestrian order, blurs the distinction between the invective voices that contrasted so sharply through juxtaposition of poems 28 and 29, not least because the poet, in poem 16, has threatened the reader who attempts to make too much of his erotic persona.
Nevertheless, poem 79 shatters any attempt to segregate the Lesbia cycle from the poetry of social commentary, and it has not gone unobserved that the breakdown of the poet’s relationship with his beloved is presented to the reader not only in terms of brutal (mostly sexual) abuse - Lesbia becomes every bit as repellent as Clodius or Gellius - but also and more importantly in terms of infidelity and ingratitude (Skinner 1991). Catullus’ attacks on Lesbia, notably poems 11, 37, and 58, display the same complications in the speaker’s fashioning that we have encountered already, with the added twist here that the poet’s ineffectuality in confronting Lesbia’s superior social status enacts an interrogation of ‘‘the notion of aggressive masculinity’’ (Skinner 1991: 10) that subtends the basic stance of Roman and Catullan invective in the first place. Put differently, the sheer efficacy of vituperation, when it is conveyed in terms of domineering machismo, is put into question (one can compare poem 42, where traditional flagitatio proves unsuccessful in the face of feminine resistance), all of which, at the very least, tends to interrogate the traditionalism to which conventional invective makes its appeal for validation. Still, as we shall see below, the poet by no means abandons the medium: in fact, he concludes his collection with invective threats.
The relationship between Catullus and Lesbia is regularly figured as a friendship entailing trustworthiness (fides), duty (officium), grateful reciprocity (gratia), and loyalty (pietas). Now this vocabulary once perplexed Catullan critics as an engaging intrusion of what was deemed technical political vocabulary into the realm of love poetry, a misunderstanding both of amicitia and of the role of personal morality in politics and political discourse (see above). The word ‘‘friend’’ could be used by the Romans in more than one register. On the one hand, friendship represented an ideal bond of mutual affection and goodwill, sustained by trust and common virtue. At the same time, the word ‘‘friend’’ could be applied, by way of a courtesy, to inferior acquaintances, even clients and supporters, and to others with whom one shared a relationship of more or less strict utility. Political life, and Roman society generally, relied on an application of the positive connotations of ideal friendship to its more practical counterpart (Brunt 1988: 351-81; Verboven 2002), a conflation that was indispensable to normal (not normative) political relationships. This is why it is a mistake to view the language of morally sound aristocratic relationships as something primarily political in connotation. Still, as Marilyn Skinner has rightly insisted, the vocabulary of friendship in the Lesbia poems, while not exclusively political, cannot be entirely excluded from the complaints of false friendship or any of the remaining moral failures that blight the reputations of the political figures whom Catullus attacks. Lesbia, like her brother, is depraved. And, like other nobles in the Catullan universe, she violates the principles of friendship and fidelity, not least because, when it concerns a municipal equestrian like Catullus, she can get away with it. While not everyone will go so far as to believe that Lesbia’s vices ‘‘point to incurable defects in the system’’ (Skinner 1991: 10) of Roman society, her failure to enact the normative values of the aristocracy is unquestionably akin to the lapses of Caesar: treachery destroys everything, be it love or the Republic, and Catullus’ Lesbia poems, in their engagement with the same issues of power and dishonesty that emerge in what is more straightforwardly political invective, underscore the degree to which public life in Rome was predicated on matters of personal integrity.
‘‘Seek noble friends’’ was the unhelpful advice recollected by Catullus in poem 28, in which he recollects playing fellator to the violent sexual advances of Memmius. Not all of Catullus’ contacts with Roman elites, however, were so disastrous, though each remains tinged by social anxiety. Lying outside the category of invective, but within the class of social commentary, are poems 65 and 66. In the former, Catullus responds to a literary request from Hortalus, presumably Hortensius Hortalus (cos. 69) though possibly his son, by protesting that his own grief for the loss of his brother renders poetic composition impossible. The poem configures a friendship, which constitutes the basis for Hortensius’ request and the poet’s desire to comply. But here the social gulf between Catullus and his addressee, who if not actually noble was nevertheless one of the leading senators of his day, is enormous. What Catullus ultimately offers Hortensius, poem 66, is a translation of Callimachus (the Coma Berenices), a literary gift the offering of which enacts their friendship. At the same time, however, by offering Hortensius a Latin translation of Alexandria’s leading court poet, Catullus introduces the possibility that his composition might be read along the lines of the subordinate work of a court poet, a potentiality made more likely in Rome by the very real abundance of Greek poets-for-hire, whose second-class status was unmistakable, and by the very real tensions that existed in the late Republic between senators and municipal equestrians, who, because they often had to look to senators for protection, were seen and saw themselves as inferior friends to the mighty. That construction of Catullus’ gift is never more than latent in the combination of poems 65 and 66, but their combination establishes a context for the two pieces in which it is the reception of these poems on the part of Hortalus that will ultimately put Catullus in his place, as friend or dependent, whatever the language of polite society (W. J. Tatum 1997: 488-97).
This relationship stands in contrast to Catullus’ contest with Gellius. The two men, it is claimed in poem 91, had long been friends, though the poet, despite their acquaintance, had been unable to deter Gellius from his baser instincts (the poet’s effort, however, displays the correct quality in his view of friendship). Still, it was a blow when Gellius violated fides (sperabam te mihi fidum, ‘‘I was hoping you would be loyal to me,’’ 91.1) by seducing the poet’s lover. Despite this break, Catullus endeavored to salvage their friendship, he reports in poem 116, by offering Gellius translations of Callimachus, the strategy of gift exchange operative in poems 65 and 66 - but to no avail. So instead Catullus turned to invective, and in poems 74, 88, 89, 90, and (even) 91 he depicts Gellius as the most abominable figure in his collection: Gellius seduced his uncle’s wife and threatened the man with irrumatio; he himself is stained with os impurum (he is even imagined in self-fellation!); he extends the field of his incest to his mother and sister and ultimately to any woman related to him - in fact, this is what led to his seduction of Catullus’ girlfriend: his friendship with the poet rendered her sufficiently forbidden fruit.
In the final poem of the collection, Catullus, by resorting to invective, turns the tables on the noble who proved his false friend:
Saepe tibi studioso animo venante requirens carmina uti possem mittere Battiadae, qui te lenirem nobis, neu conarere
Tela infesta meum mittere in usque caput, hunc video mihi nunc frustra sumptum esse laborem, 5 Gelli, nec nostras hic valuisse preces. contra nos tela ista tua evitabimus acta: at fixus nostris tu dabi’ supplicium.
Often, with a searching and serious mind, I have looked for some way to send you poems of Callimachus in order to soften you towards me, so that you would not try to cast hostile weapons at my head. Now I see that this effort on my part has been spent to no purpose, Gellius, and that my prayers have, in this instance, proved pointless. Those missiles ofyours launched against me I shall evade, but you will be transfixed by mine and pay the penalty of death.
Here invective will triumph over compliment (unlike poem 42). Though patently the inferior man in contest with the noble Gellius - and hence the frustrated attempts to restore their friendship despite the extreme wrong Gellius has done him - Catullus closes this poem by echoing Romulus’ fatal last words to Remus in Ennius’ Annales, when the latter had leapt over the city’s new wall (Enn. Ann. 1.95 Sk.). In this way, Catullus fashions himself as the very founder of Rome, a remarkable usurpation of status by the Transpadane, and transforms Gellius into the twin who made himself the ultimate outsider. The collection, then, closes with violent threats against a false and former friend from the ranks of the nobility. Although Gellius was not inactive in Roman politics, his quarrel with Catullus, admittedly implicated in the same moral topics - friendship, exclusivity, sexual probity - as the poet’s disapprobation of Caesar, Memmius, or Clodius, nevertheless seems more an investigation of elite responsibilities in the matter of friendship and of the status of the Italian newcomer to the Roman cultural scene than a reaction to the triumvirate and its political violence (W. J. Tatum 1997: 497-500). But it is all of a piece. And it must surely matter that the collection closes, not in passive despair, but with violent and markedly Roman acerbity.
World History
