[In the essay below, Raphael and McLeish provide a portrait in miniature of Catullus's life and enduring accomplishment, piecing together a likely outline of the poet's life and that of Lesbia using such sources as are available.]

Tennyson called him tender; Harold Nicolson was unable to understand why. Gaius Valerius Catullus, the greatest Roman lyric poet, who was said by St Jerome to have died at the age of thirty, has always excited contradictory judgments. He is prized by some for the sincerity and deprecated by others for the crudeness of his feelings; romantics credit him with spontaneity, classics with erudition; his eroticism gives him a dubious reputation among the austere; the sentimental see in his delicacy the very instance of the sensibility which proves too fine for this world: those whom the Muses love, they say, die young.

Of the specific nature of his death nothing is known, and of his life very little. Did the cruelties of his mistress indeed bring on despair and death? He may as well have died of malaria or in a street accident. (Juvenal, a century and a half later, reminds us that such things were commonplace.) Perhaps like Cinna, his friend and the unluckiest of poets, he was killed in some brawl which did not concern him personally—or, like Marlowe, in one that concerned him closely, for Catullus had a savage tongue as well as a tender heart. He was reckless enough, and brave enough, to make savage fun of Caesar and of Pompey (poems '29', '54', '57', etc.) at a time when a dagger in the back was a more likely response to libel than a civilised injunction. We are promised that Caesar took the young man's ribaldry in good part, but Catullus hit with contemptuous accuracy right below the belt, his favourite target. He saw the republic collapsing into tyranny and in that collapse of public modesty he read the ruin of his own hopes of a decent life among decent people, and he raged accordingly. Rome had never been a just society in any egalitarian sense, but it had been governed according to conventions of self-restraint (the consuls yielding power annually to their elected successors) and respect for the common good, however narrowly that might be interpreted. The vanity of wealth and the megalomania of conquest were in the process of rupturing all that, and forever. But though he was a caustic observer of social degeneration, it would be quite false to represent Catullus as a revolutionary; like many young aristocrats when they devote themselves to the arts, he was more disgusted by the graceless style of ces princes qui nous gouvernent than the advocate of any ideology of social change. He was a sort of Tory romantic (if one must plump for an anachronism): like so many ancient poets, he affected to revere the values of the golden age, whenever that was. In an age of shifting political and sexual alliances, he dreamed of fidelity and true friendship. His denunciations of his mistress, pitched at the highest level of poetic despair, and even of the dinner guest who stole his napkins pitched somewhat lower, might prove tiresome in their whining reproach, were it not that one has a sense always of a dream of true constancy and affection muffled by the sour blanket of reality. 'It need not be like this' is ever at war with 'this is how it is'. Such tension is at the heart of the Catullan character; hate and love rise and fall on an eternal see-saw, each counter-weighted and held in suspense by the other.

Catullus was probably born about 84 B.C., if we are to accept Jerome's statement that he died at thirty, since poem 29 alludes to Caesar's conquest of Britain, which took place in 55 B.C. (Jerome says that he was born in 87 B.C., but this is incompatible with the text.) But the date of his death is of merely academic interest, for his immortality is assured. His best poems speak with a directness unique in surviving Roman literature. One need not disparage Horace and Virgil, I.ucretius and Ovid, or indeed Propertius and Juvenal, to justify the view that Catullus is a case gloriously apart. It was not always so. His work disappeared from public knowledge for the best part of a thousand years and he might easily have shared the fate of Cinna, who not only perished in the flesh because he happened to be mistaken for a hated politician of the same name, but whose poems also failed to elude the oubliette of time: scarcely a line remains. Catullus himself survives only because some wine merchant in his native city of Verona chose', in the fourteenth century, to stuff a bundle of his poems in an unused measuring vessel. (The story that they were wedged in a wine cask is a romance.) From that precarious source—the so-called Veronensis MS—all our present manuscripts derive.

What proportion of the poet's complete output the existing 113 poems represent, no one can say. There are fragments and traces of poems which are not represented in the present œuvre. Some scholars believe that these are the selected works as collated and edited by Catullus himself; others maintain that they cannot be regarded as definitive. Equally, one party declares that it is absurd to suppose that the poet himself arranged them in so haphazard, even silly, an order; the other insists that there is subtle art in the apparently casual interleaving of passion with pretentiousness, of satire with sentiment. Professor J. P. Sullivan has kindly pointed out that Professor Clausen strongly believes that no ancient editor would have classified a poetic corpus by metre. No doubt Catullus did indeed issue a libellus, but the present text, in both Clausen's and Sullivan's view, is the work of a later editor. This does not, of course, mean that no signs are evident of the poet's own adroit juxtapositions. Certainly Catullus was a master of variatio: his poems rang the changes on metre and subject in a manner which was indeed, in a literary sense, revolutionary. He drew his inspiration from the Greek poets of Alexandria, above all Callimachus who, in a famous and prescriptive polemic, pronounced the superiority of the contemporary short poem over the long. Catullus endorsed his view that a thoroughly elaborated small work was in every way better than a sprawling, jerry-built long one (see poems '22', '36' and '95'). It used to be said that he deplored longer poems because he was incapable of writing them: one of the 'problems' of Catullus was that his œuvre was broken abruptly into two halves, the successful shorter works and the allegedly inferior longer ones, '61-68'. This supposed dichotomy—the idea of 'two Catulluses'—does not endure sympathetic scrutiny, although it remains true that the long poems are longer than the short ones. The same poet is unmistakably at work in both areas and the same obsessions reveal themselves. It has been suggested that poem '63', for instance, was written as a kind of exercise, because Catullus was concerned to discover whether or not he could handle the metrical difficulties. If it is true that every conscious artist (and Catullus was certainly that) is likely to present himself with stylistic challenges, like a great golfer who disdains the easy shot as unworthy of his idea of himself, the terrible donnee of poem '63', the castration theme, has surely a more than academic significance. Catullus' sense of being somehow irrevocably unmanned by his, as they say, ball-crushing mistress gives the Attis poem a characteristic personality. Some scholars have suggested that it is merely a translation from Callimachus, though no Callimachan poem on the theme is known to us. Here again we may say that, even if such a poem existed, Catullus chose this particular one and made it his own, just as the 'Imitations' of Robert Lowell are very much Lowell. An inspired translator does not translate just anything.

The old debating points recur frequently in one's attempts to understand Catullus. Did he write for others or for himself? Did he rely on inspiration or was he hardly more than a gifted pasticheur? Was he serious or was he flippant, a unique genius or merely the sole instance to come down to us of a whole school of similar talents? If his generation did indeed boast of several poets of his quality, it must have been uniquely blessed, for its sky blazed with suns. Yet Catullus certainly did belong to a movement, famously labelled by Cicero 'the neoteroi', which could mean merely 'the newer/younger ones', though one suspects a sarcastic overtone to the soubriquet. Cicero larded his letters with Greek tags and was an honest admirer of Greek culture, but the Hellenistic affectations of those brilliant young men who looked to Alexandria for their models probably struck him as both suspect and impertinent. The iconoclastic wit of men like Cinna, Calvus (another possible genius lost to us forever) and Catullus gave them, it seemed, an easy entree into the highest social circles, where their affectations of disdain for the prosaic platitudes of public life must have added to Cicero's sense of uneasiness. There was, he might be forgiven for thinking, something positively dangerous about a drop-out who could drop in on the smartest people and take his place among them with only an arrogant epigram to serve as a calling card. Cicero himself was regarded by Catullus with ambivalence: witness the two ways of reading 'Poem 49.' A man capable of celebrating his consulship and the victory over Catiline with a verse like O fortunatam natam me consule Romam (lucky Rome, born again with me as consul) can scarcely have been regarded with undiluted admiration by a poet who placed a premium on subtlety. The neoteroi formed an aristocracy of taste, with a slang and style of its own, and Cicero—himself a 'new man' socially and politically—must have felt his exclusion with something of the bitterness of one who, having travelled hopefully, liked to think that he had now undoubtedly arrived. That Catullus was soon in love with one of the sisters of Cicero's most implacable enemy salted the wound stingingly. However, it would be wrong to make too much of the antagonism between the Ciceronian and the Catullan view of life and of letters. If Cicero, who had so needed patrons when he began his career, was disposed, in middle age, to patronise the next generation, he recognised Catullus' quality with the grudging condescension of old talent for young genius.

Catullus may have paraded a certain patrician stylishness, but he was hardly less provincial in origin than Cicero himself. He came from Verona, where his father was a landowner sufficiently prominent to entertain Julius Caesar when the great man came through Cisalpine Gaul on official business. Catullus grew up on his father's estates by Lake Garda. As poem '31' proves, he remained devoted to the beauties of his native region. He loved his elder brother, whose premature death, in the Troad, occasioned the touching elegy of poem '101' and perhaps, by analogy, the consolatory lines of poem '96'. There is no direct allusion anywhere to his feeling for his father or mother. Perhaps it is anachronistic to wonder whether or not he loved them. The Roman family was held together by traditional rights and duties rather than by the tenuous bonds of affection. However, one is tempted to see something of Baudelaire in the young poet: he had an appetite for the shocking. His ostentatious insolence towards Caesar suggests a certain desire to scandalise his father by attacking so boasted a guest. (It can equally be argued that there were good reasons for satirising Caesar apart from a wish to embarrass one's parents.) Baudelaire's outrageousness was, of course, directed especially against his step-father and the analogy should not be pressed with any vigour. However, the complexities of the Catullan psychology are perhaps at least made less 'inexplicable' in the light of the Baudelairean syndrome. For Catullus too seems to have pitched himself into a blatantly doomed relationship; he too had a certain fastidious nostalgie de la boue. That the object of his notorious passion was a woman of mature years, though scarcely old enough to be his mother, suggests (if such suggestions are illuminating) an Oedipal obsession. So too, though Catullus may sincerely have wished it otherwise, does his fidelity to a married woman notorious for her faithlessness. The hope that he could wrest Lesbia from her husband and from the way of life which she found so amusing may have been genuine enough. Passionate lovers are not in the habit of weighing the odds. Yet to hope, as he did, that he and Lesbia could ever be married, to hope even that she would cease to have other lovers, comes very close to the infantile fantasy that one's mother can become one's sole property, the father displaced from his own bed. Such psychological speculations neither tarnish nor explain the poetry which came of Catullus' eventually ruinous involvement, but they may enable us to see a unity behind the diversity of tone, style and content. Innocence and guilt, fastidiousness and coarseness, tenderness and perversity complement rather than contradict each other in the context of a passionate yet impossible love.

How could he ever have dedicated the purity of his feelings to an affair soon sordid with cynicism and betrayal? What may well have begun as a smart and casual affair—what better way to mark one's arival in smart society than by humping the hostess?—devloped into a dominating obsession. Even when he was supplanted in Lesbia's bed by his erstwhile friend, Caelius Rufus, he could not call it a day. He knew very well what sophisticated convention required—that one accept the transience of love with cynical grace—but he could not keep the rules, much as he may have wished to. Sensible men about Rome put such things down to experience and went on to the next adventure. Catullus was hooked. The apparently chic provincial poet, with his bold confidence in matters of aesthetics, fell victim to a naivete he could wholly conceal, although he managed to ape the coolness of the in-crowd, to catch their tone and echo it in amusing squibs and sardonic epigrams which seemed to endorse their casualness in sexual matters. His own fervent fidelity to Lesbia did not entirely inhibit him from sexual indulgence in other directions, both with girls and with boys. The females were almost certainly professionals—Ameana and Ipsitilla (see poems '32' and '41')—whose charms were available when more sentimental satisfactions were denied, but the homosexual attachments, especially to Juventius, did not lack their emotional element. It may be said that we have no evidence that Catullus was literally involved with young men. Perhaps he was merely amusing himself by developing a standard erotic theme. The recommendation not to read biographical facts into a writer's work has led some critics to deny that there can be any inference at all from the text to the life. However, can anyone truly believe that Catullus did not actually love a woman whom he addresses as Lesbia but who was almost certainly the infamous Clodia? (T. P. Wiseman maintains in his essay Lesbia—Who? that it night as well have been her youngest sister, who also had the hot blood of the family, but his agile arguments are not wholly convincing.) Catullus' poems are lively with the names of actual persons of the day and they would surely have had small point if they did not make equal play with their actual characters and actions. How can his accusation that Vibennius pere et fils (poem '33') stole from the changing rooms in the public baths have been amusing unless it had some credible foundation in daily life? We should remember that Roman poetry was not written merely to be published but also to be performed; reading aloud was a standard part of poetic practice. Catullus and his clan undoubtedly competed in entertaining and dazzling one another. The reproaches which the anguished poet flings at his faithless friends (he seems to have been singularly ill-served) were not infrequently delivered to their faces, if they cared or dared to show them. The lighter poems in particular were intended to get laughs no less than to prick consciences. They can be best enjoyed, even today, by being spoken aloud. The sometimes abrupt changes of tone, even within the text of a short poem, make better sense if one presupposes an audience, rather than a solitary and silent reader. The dramatic or comic pause is part of the skilful machinery; the habit of taking Latin poetry as a printed text whose complexities must be construed and unravelled at an even, tortuous pace, has led generations of readers to miss the ironies which Catullus' implied timing was surely designed to emphasise. Often a twist in the last line turns solemnity to laughter, self-pity to self-deprecation.

An instance where the irony is usually missed is poem '35'. The usual interpretation is that Catullus, the earnest critic, secretary-general of the neoteroi, writes to his friend Caecilius, who is some hundred miles away, and commands him at once to leave the girl whom he is enjoying in order to some post-haste to a literary tutorial. Catullus has just read his friend's Ode dedicated to the Great Mother and wants to tell Caecilius what is wrong with it. Scholars have assumed the poem to be a serious summons, as if Catullus genuinely expected a young man (a young Latin!) to leap from his mistress's bed, having reminded her of Catullus' belief that poetry takes priority over love, and rush to be told what is wrong with his work. Well, of course Catullus took poetry seriously and of course that is one way of reading the poem. But it is precisely because Catullus and his friends did take their craft seriously that the lines also have a comic undertone. Surely they read more entertainingly as an ironic comment on Caecilius' affections of dedication to the Muse and also, perhaps, as an example of Catullan self mockery: how can an inadequate poet like Caecilius be entitled to so enviably delicious a girl? Catullus presents himself here in the role, somewhat inverted, of Stevie Smith's Person From Porlock: he interrupts lovers with the news that a poem has to be worked out. Happiness as Stevie Smith herself remarked, does not make us write, but rather puts thoughts of literature out of one's mind. The comedy of poem '35' lies in Catullus' confidence that Caecilius will not come. What comedy could have been left in it, had Catullus' audience seriously assumed that the dutiful lad would immediately obey his tutor's summons? There is a kind of final, tragic irony in the fact that Catullus himself whose aesthetic convictions held poetry to be largely a matter of the intellect, proved no more able to abandon his mistress than was Caeilius. Here again the audience must have recognised how badly bitten was the biter We are all good at enjoining sobriety on others, but who can be sure of his own?

Critics of Catullus have often emphasised the distinction between his sober and his scandalous self, without perhaps realising how closely they are linked. It seems incredible to certain prosaic people that Catullus can have been all that hurt by his wrecked affair with Lesbia. (The chronology is arguable—and argued about—-but he seems to have been her official lover for a short time, during which they enjoyed the idyllic passion he naively imagined would endure forever. After that, he shared her favours for another period, before finally being excluded from them, either by his own belated nausea or by her decisive cruelty.) That he could have continued to be stricken three whole years after the collapse of his hopes may seem absurd to hard heads, but to imagine that a single affair cannot dominate a writer's thoughts for that long is to forget that Flaubert, for instance, loved Madame Schlesinger all his life, though he never shared her bed and only briefly her company. The imposition on himself of a rigorous system of impersonal literary endeavour in no way precluded Flaubert from an endless obsession with the woman of his dreams. 'Get over it' is precisely what writers so often cannot do. Affectations of tough-mindedness are often calculated to dissimulate embarrassingly persistent, even puerile softheartedness. Cynicism is sentiment that dare not speak its name. Somerset Maugham was notably beady-eyed in his attitude to the sexual and sentimental attachments of others, but he continued to weep over the death of his mother eighty years after the event; Proust's whole sense of life was coloured by the memory of a goodnight kiss. The sexual pathology of Catullus may now, at last, be discussed without false tact; such discussion is not necessarily more important than textual elucidation and need not be unduly prolonged, but it may help to establish an underlying unity which prudishness has obscured. It is generally held that the Lesbia poems are the sincere centre of the Catullan oeuvre. Some of them are admittedly peripheral, like that alluding to Lesbia's brother, Lesbius (poem '79'), the clearest evidence we have that Lesbia was indeed Clodia, the sister of that notorious Clodius whose appetite for scandal led him to dress up as a female and intrude on the ceremonies of the vestal virgins, thus breaking a taboo in a fashion which all decent Romans, however privately sceptical, were obliged to regard as sacrilegious. Clodia is widely believed to have committed incest with her racy brother, though the main evidence of this, apart from their dissolute reputations, comes from Cicero's speech Pro Caelio, in which he was defending Clodia's ex-lover and Catullus' ex-friend. It was essential to his case to blacken Clodia, which he seems to have done to such good effect that her name ceases to be mentioned in any chronicles of the period. Catullus' lampoon suggests that the rumour was generally current, though poem '79' too could be regarded as suspect on grounds of parti pris. However peripheral it may be, this little poem is the hinge, as it were, joining the 'sincere' side of Catullus, the side most agreeable to moralists, with the morally less sweet-smelling. For it needs no great psychological acuteness to see that Catullus was as much fascinated by betrayal as he was hurt by it. He was obsessed by Lesbia's lovers, about whom there is a considerable number of poems, particularly if one includes her husband among them. We need not regard these poems as symptoms of immaturity in order to see in them a psychological pattern which keeps step very well with the Oedipal syndrome. Catullus' 'confusion'—his inability to be 'grown-up', his incessant havering between one posture and another, between purity and lechery, hard and soft—makes singular sense if we admit that his sexuality was stimulated, however much it may have appalled him, by the very treachery which so painfully soured his love. Why does Catullus both love and hate? Why does he desire Lesbia more but love her less? The conflict between sex and love is less strange to us now than it was to generations of critics with little experience of life and reluctant powers of inferential self-analysis. Proust saw jealousy as the single greatest motive for love. If this view is exaggerated by his own sexual proclivities, it is surely one which enables us to understand Catullus better.

Swann's love for Odette consumes the elegant cosmopolite no less thoroughly, and no less bewilderingly, than did love for Lesbia obsess Catullus; time and again Swann is aware that Odette is not really his type, but his dread of losing her, even when he has ceased to love her in the sentimental sense, makes him a slave to her moods. Jealousy replaces tenderness, but is almost more effective (and painfully tenacious) as an aphrodisiac. Herbert Gold's story Love And Like has a striking conclusion when a man, saying goodbye to the wife who is about to divorce him, is suddenly filled with a lust he has not felt for years and virtually rapes her. Many relationships are sustained by that kind of ambivalence. We diminish the complexity of Catullus' character, rather than preserve its integrity, when we choose to ignore the likely pattern of its emotional and sexual nature. Had Lesbia agreed to be as faithful as her lover's courtly side would have liked, had she honoured that notion of a true marriage he seemed so touchingly to desire, would their relationship really have prospered? What future in mundane fact could it ever have had? Clodia was a powerful woman, with a salon at the very centre of Roman political and social life. She had a complaisant and elderly husband (who died in 59 B.C.) and she pleased herself, as we have seen, with whatever man she fancied. Could Catullus ever seriously have supposed that she wanted to come and live with him in a country cottage? Even if it played a part in their amorous dialogue, one cannot see Clodia settling down for long to a life of well-water and rural charcuterie; even when Catullus seduces us, and convinces himself, most thoroughly with his idyllic visions, they remain manifestly illusory. His choice of Lesbia was, in some sense, perverse from the outset. She did not become impossible, but was always so. Was not that her attraction? For though there have indeed been cases in amorous history where sophisticated married ladies have been lured from a life of glittering cynicism, touched and sustained by the purity of their youthful lovers, Clodia was hardly a promising candidate for such redemption. She was too blatantly urban and urbane; to absent herself from her many felicities for the sake of a moon-struck poet, however many kisses he promised, or wanted, was virtually unthinkable. (Oddly enough, there is a vague literary parallel, an exception which hardly embarrasses the rule, in D. H. Lawrence's affair with Baroness von Richthofen, who was married, though in significantly more provincial and discontented circumstances, when the passionate young genius met and carried her off, though Frieda probably did quite as much of the carrying as Lawrence. Those who care to press analogies may diagnose in Catullus' urgent fervour the possibility that he, like Lawrence, was suffering from that frenzy for life which so often inflamed the tubercular.)

The enduring vitality of the Catullan æuvre is due not only to the genius of the poet, but also to the ageless immediacy of his predicament. He lends himself to translation both because he is a great poet and because his 'case', however particular and however unchallengeably unique in its original expression, has an undying call on our imaginations. The names of the woman he loved and of those he fucked, the men whom he trusted and who let him down, may bear an antique ring, but his situation has not dated at all. It may be that there are or will be societies where jealousy is unknown, where love and possessiveness have nothing in common, where Oedipus has no taste for Jocasta and where the eternal triangle, in all its contorted forms, is an unknown figure of speech or pattern of life, but until such a society is commonplace, the passion and anguish of Catullus will continue to seem abidingly modern. After that, his genius will have to work its own way with the reader; its chances of survival are unlikely to be very much impaired.