As mentioned above, in two of his best-known poems, poems 5 and 7, Catullus rejoices in his love for Lesbia. Given that the name Lesbia evokes Sappho, Catullus would seem to be implicitly celebrating not only his specific love for his mistress but in more general terms a life devoted to eros and the poetic imagination. It may also be argued that in poems 5 and 7 Catullus celebrates the poetic relationship he has with Sappho. In other words, he is paying homage not only to his love for Lesbia but also to his ‘‘love’’ for the poet Sappho.
Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
And value at one cent the talk of crabby, old men.
Suns may set and rise again.
For us, once the brief light has set, night is one continuous sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands, we will confuse our counting, so that we may not know, nor will anyone be able to cast an evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.
(poem 5)
You ask, Lesbia, how many kisses would be enough, and more than enough.
As many as the huge number of the Libyan sands
In the desert near silphium-bearing Cyrene,
Between the oracle of lusty Jove
And the sacred tomb of Battus,
Or as many as the stars, when the night is silent,
That watch the furtive loves of mortals.
To kiss you with so many kisses would be enough and more than enough for mad Catullus, kisses which neither the gossips could count up, nor an evil tongue bewitch.
(poem 7)
The two poems translated above are Catullus’ most emphatic expressions of his erotic and aesthetic ideal. He defiantly asserts that, for him, life and love are inextricably entwined and that the woman whose name evokes Sappho is the focal point of that assertion. He implies not only that Sappho is his creative muse but also that his identification with her serves as a vehicle for him to challenge traditional Roman values. Like Sappho, who often represents love as transcending the contingencies of time and circumstance, Catullus’ passionate, hypnotic expression of love’s power also refuses to acknowledge limits, at least in the poems cited above. The world, for the moment, is blotted out and all that exists is the energy generated by the lover’s kisses, which have no practical use in the world, but rather exist as an end in themselves. This is analogous to Sappho’s repeated demonstrations that memory and the poetic imagination have the power to overcome the intrusions of the exterior world (Stehle [Stigers] 1979, 1981; Burnett 1983; E. Greene 1994). In Sappho’s case, these intrusions usually take the form of either forced separations between lovers or erotic rejection and loss. For a Roman male, the poetic expression of a commitment to passion and imagination as a way of life means not only an encounter with potential loss and abandonment, but also a confrontation with a masculine-dominated culture that on the whole values duty over pleasure, stoic fortitude over emotion, industry over leisure. We can see that confrontation played out in Catullus’ attempts to defy the crabby old men who disapprove of the passionate life he so confidently advocates.
By applying monetary standards to human worth, Catullus implicitly negates the world to which the old men belong, which makes money - numerical quantification - the primary means of human exchange and validation. In exposing the absurdity of rendering human worth accountable, he subverts the mechanism of accounting altogether. Although he uses numerical reckoning to ‘‘count’’ the number of kisses, his use of repetition has a spellbinding effect that contradicts the practical, controlled discourse of the commercial world. Not only does Catullus imagine the lovers becoming confused by their number of kisses, but the mixing of the languages of love and money confounds the narrow expectations of the old men. Catullus not only exposes the ‘‘bankruptcy’’ of their world, but also shows how the calculative impulse is, in itself, a kind of death, a way of making things static, frozen in meaning and possibility. The limits set by numerical calculation, by the rational knowledge of things, are overturned in Catullus’ contravention of numerical restraints, his discourse of passion - in which finite, arithmetical calculations explode into the realm of the incalculable and unknowable - the ‘‘many thousands of kisses’’ and the infinite grains of sand.
Although Catullus formally addresses Lesbia in both 5 and 7, his focus ofattention is on the shadowy presence of the men whose hostile gaze and uncomprehending perspective threaten to negate the value of his erotic ideal and poetic identity. His address to Lesbia in both poems is merely a dramatic means of asserting the value of the passionate life. While we cannot be sure that she will respond to his request for kisses and that their union will be consummated, that scarcely matters. What is most striking in these poems is the fact that Catullus’ request for kisses takes on a life of its own. His passionate utterance of unmediated desire in its expression of ‘‘infinite potency and energy’’ seems to stand on its own, an end in itself rather than a means to an actual, consummated erotic union. In these poems, at least, the realities of the external world become subordinated to the poet’s imaginative vision of idyllic, ‘‘mad’’ passion. Similarly, in one of her best-known surviving poems, fragment 94, Sappho creates a vivid picture of idyllic erotic union, despite impending separation from her beloved and questions about whether the other woman even remembers what they experienced together.8 For both Sappho and Catullus, what matters most is the capacity of their poetic voices to transform the disappointing realities of the external world, whether those realities take the form of separation, rejection, or a society that devalues a life of passion and poetic imagination.
Although Catullus imagines blissful passion with Lesbia, whose name evokes Sappho, it is really he, rather than Lesbia, who more nearly approximates the legendary Greek poet. It is highly ironic that the name ‘‘Lesbia’’ should call Sappho to mind, given Catullus’ mostly negative depiction of his mistress throughout the corpus. Even in poems 5 and 7 Lesbia seems more like a catalyst for, rather than a mutual participant in, his unbounded desire. Indeed, the fact that in poem 7 Lesbia asks Catullus to quantify their kisses seems to align her with the materialistic values associated with the crabby old men - the very values he scorns. As Micaela Janan puts it, Lesbia ‘‘pulls the request (for kisses) back from infinity by asking Catullus to number infinity’’ (1994: 62). Moreover, since Catullus is addressing Lesbia when he refers to himself as ‘‘mad Catullus,’’ one can infer that his passion and his imaginative flights from the mundane and practical seem as ‘‘mad’’ to her as to the crotchety, evil-tongued scandalmongers. The irony here is that the female beloved, Lesbia, is implicitly associated with the material and practical concerns of conventional Roman males while the male lover, Catullus, is identified with the ‘‘un-masculine’’ realm of beauty, imagination, and the pursuit of erotic fulfillment, a realm that we may also associate with Sappho’s feminine poetic world. We can see that association most dramatically in Catullus’ adoption of the Sapphic persona in his translation and adaptation of Sappho’s famous poem 31. In his version, c. 51, he assumes a woman’s voice, yet at the same time expresses the conflict this poses for him as a Roman male.
World History
