Conclusion

Not unexpectedly, Catullan invective is no simple matter. It draws on native and Greek literary traditions alike, a dual heritage that resists sorting out. Instead, the poems exhibit and exploit the contrast between the voice of righteous Roman moralizing and that of compromised iambic reviler, one effect of which is that

Catullus sometimes interrogates the very traditionalism toward which he gestures in his explosions of conventional censoriousness. Interrogates, but hardly rejects. The themes of Catullan social commentary are constructed around the values attending friendship and family: his invective concentrates on violations of trustworthiness - at every level of Roman society. The poet abominates the political enormities of the triumvirs in 55, but this reaction is expressed in the same terms as his repudiation of all those who transgress traditional values in social associations, including Lesbia, who, like Caesar or Gellius, becomes a locus for examining propriety in friendship and in elite authority. The poet often represents himself as vulnerable or marginalized, and although this is to some degree owed to the iambic background of his invective, it recurs frequently and underscores the weighty responsibilities of the nobility. Catullus is, unsurprisingly, a proponent of his own class and of its stake in Roman society: it matters that he configures himself as a municipal equestrian whose condition can be so easily and so severely affected by the personal immorality of the senatorial order. The nobility in fact ultimately failed the Republic, when Caesar and Pompey led the Romans into civil war. And the fullest integration of the Italian with the Roman aristocracy came only in the Republic’s false restoration under Augustus, a regime whose moral anxieties and moral reforms are (perhaps unexpectedly) anticipated in the social commentary of Catullus.