Catullus, as we have seen, inscribed his own meanings onto Lesbia’s words and Marrucinus’ actions. But he was not immune to the same treatment. That, at any rate, seems to be the background of c. 16. Aurelius and Furius have impugned Catullus’ manhood for writing light verse: qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis/quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum ‘‘who take my little verses, soft as they are, to mean that I must be indecent’’ (3-4). They had apparently been reading the Lesbia or Juventius cycles: uos, quod milia multa basiorum/legistis, male me maremputatis ‘‘So you read my poems of thousands of kisses, and think that I’m no man?’’ (12-13).22 These two readers, then, have done no more than apply the principle of reading we saw above: non potest alius esse ingenio, alius animo color (Sen. Ep. 114.3).
In response Catullus constructs a clever poem: its argument confutes such readers and its form entraps them. First the argument. Catullus asserts that author and text are distinct: nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est (‘‘The dutiful poet must himself be clean, his verses - not at all,’’ 16.5-6). The general claim, that persona is artifice, is predictable, given the way Furius and Aurelius interpret texts. But the particulars of the claim were not predictable. Catullus does not mount obvious defenses: that literary trifling is a harmless diversion, for example, or that literal readings betoken a dull mind.23 Rather Catullus argues that unchaste verse is defensible because its charm is especially potent:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem, si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, et quod pruriat incitare possunt, non dico pueris, sed his pilosis qui duros nequeunt mouere lumbos.
It’s then, and only then, that [verses] have wit and charm if they’re nice and soft and short of decent,
And if they’re able to stir the part that itches - and not in boys, either, but in these hairy men who cannot move their stiffened loins.
(7-11)
This rhetorical maneuver was impossible without the lepos we have come to know: it is witty (sal), slight (molliculi), and erotic (parum pudici); and despite all that - or, because of all that - its power is considerable, enough to excite stiff older men. The parallel with political aestheticism is striking. Caesar’s self-presentation provides an apt illustration. Like Catullus, Caesar affected delicacy, body depilated and tunic swashly loose. Like Catullus, Caesar was accused of unchastity, surely in part because of that style: he never shook the rumor that he had submitted to the Bithynian king Nicomedes (Suet. lul. 2.49). And like Catullus, Caesar boasted of extravagant masculinity, even as he impishly flaunted the power of effeminacy:24 having secured certain proconsular provinces despite resistance, Caesar abused his opponents in the senate, threatening to ‘‘jump on all their heads’’ (insultaturum omnium capitibus), an idiom for oral penetration. How could a woman do that? an opponent snidely remarked. The Amazons, Caesar replied, smirking (adludens), once ruled a great part of Asia (Suet. lul. 22). There was more than one way to metaphorize power relations through gender.
Political aestheticism, then, gives real strength to the argument of the poem. The form of the poem makes Catullus’ response all the keener. Catullus’ defense of himself implies a principle: the meanings of words are not absolute but depend on the conceptual frame in which they are read. That possibility is exploited in the fabric of the poem itself in three places. First, the language of Catullus’ accusers is taken from them. Furius and Aurelius had apparently called Catullus parum pudicus and his verses molliculi. The latter they meant sexually, with the diminutive signaling contempt; the former phrase sounds the equivalent of impudicus, with parum having privative value, like male in male marem.25 But in the line si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici, molliculi sounds like a literary-critical term, virtually a term of the neoteric aesthetic proper,26 and softens the imputation of insufficiency in parum, giving parum pudici the impish meaning ‘‘not quite decent,’’ ‘‘just short of decent.’’ Furius and Aurelius’ criticisms are reappropriated as literary-critical language - exactly what Catullus did with Lesbia’s pessimuspoeta (36), overwriting the ethical with the aesthetic.
Catullus also reconfigures moral language. The imputation of mollitia and impu-dicitia leads him to claim that the pius poeta is castus. This defense plainly appeals to traditional Roman morality. But as the poem unfolds, morality is not the issue, or not quite. A poet’s pudicitia, it would appear, is valuable not for its own sake but because it implies control - the very thing Catullus, through his poetry, exercises over the responses of the community. Comparably, pius poeta might at first suggest ‘‘a poet who is a pius person’’ but the poem will only support a meaning like ‘‘a poet who is true to his craft.’’27 Certainly vaunting over older men is no act of conventional pietas. Laying claim to the positive resonances of the language of morality, the poem promptly reduces morality to power relations. That reduction is, at the first, mere frankness: in Roman ideology morality and power are regularly associated. Cicero had said of Pompey ‘‘no commander can control an army who cannot control himself’’ (Leg. Man. 38). But in our poem the continentia is aesthetic and, paradoxically, sexualized: the controlled artist controls his readers. There, again, is the like of political aestheticism. The choice of decet (and not oportet or necesse est) encapsulates the issue perfectly. The word sits at the intersection of moral force with taste and appearance: does it mean ‘‘morally obligatory,’’ stressing reality, or ‘‘tasteful,’’ stressing appearance?
These doublenesses of language, then, are traps: they lure in readers with one meaning and then spring on them another. So signally in the line that begins and ends the poem, a threat of demeaning sexual violence against Furius and Aurelius: pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo. The first time the line sounds simply like a curse in a heated quarrel; comparable is 37.7-8 (non putatis ausurum/me una ducentos irrumare sessores). The insults of the second line, Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, also sound like mere curses; comparable is 57.1-2 (pulchre conuenit improbis cinaedis,/Mamur-rae pathicoque Caesarique). But the climate of the poem is different by the end: Catullus’ alleged effeminacy betokened a titillating artfulness that gives him control over his readers - and control makes a real man. In that climate the opening line sounds quite different. The literal meaning of the curses is revivified. The effect is rather as if a poem began ‘‘Go to hell!’’ and then, having established the unrepentant sinfulness of the addressee, ended, ‘‘And on the last day you/Go to hell.’’
In short, the words of the first line mean something different when they reappear at the poem’s end. That doubleness ensnares Furius and Aurelius. They misread Catullus’ versicles; now they themselves have been forced to misread: Catullus’ thousand kisses were not to be taken quite literally - but his sexual threats were. Confident in their hermeneutic, they declared Catullus parum pudicus: that same hermeneutic has robbed them of their own pudicitia, if not quite literally, then certainly as literally as the poem permits, making them sexually passive characters stigmatized in the very ideology of manliness from which their hermeneutic was derived. They took Catullus as a puer lepidus ac delicatus, as happy to be loved as to love; in Catullus’ mind that was a theft of his words, and he responds to the theft like Priapus would: jumping on both their heads.
World History
