SOURCE: "The Poetry of Social Coment," in Catullus. An Interpretation, B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1972, pp. 204-82.

[In the following essay, Quinn explores Catullus's poems that focus upon political and social commentary: those poems which, in the main, "establish a norm (if one can speak of a norm in connexion with a segment of society whose habits are often so abnormal), set against which the Lesbia affair stands out in sharp contrast, without any more needing to be said."]

There are only something like twenty-five to thirty Lesbia poems in a collection which numbers in all one hundred and thirteen poems. Among the rest are old favourites such as 'Catullus' Yacht' ('Poem 4'), 'Sirmio' ('Poem 31') and 'Arrius and his Aitches' ('Poem 84'.) And then of course there are the 'Attis' ('Poem 63') and the 'Peleus and Thetis' ('Poem 64') and the two marriage hymns (Poems '61' and '62'). Anyone who knows his Catullus could easily list a score of poems, some equally well known, others poems which just happen to appeal to him personally. But one does this very much in the frame of mind of a man who is making up a supplementary list: it is the Lesbia poems, we feel, that matter; the rest are sometimes striking, not infrequently obscene, often poems we haven't read for years. No doubt it was all part of the urbane casualness with which Catullus presents his collection in Poem I to offer the reader a very mixed bag, in which the Lesbia poems, however much they stood out, were deliberately classed as nugae along with the rest. It is easy to forget that 'the rest' means three quarters of the collection.

If we look only at the figures (one in four a Lesbia poem), it may seem paradoxical to claim that the Lesbia poems form the really important part, not just of the first group of sixty poems, but of the total of one hundred and thirteen, and to relegate the rest to the status of background. Yet I doubt very much that any critic would want to deny primacy of importance to the Lesbia poems, at any rate in the two groups of short poems, '1-60' and '69-116'. What puzzles some is the presence in such numbers of other poems, and the apparent triviality of many of these. Even when allowance has been made for the unusual range in the level of intent—the result of the way in which Catullus became, so to speak, a serious poet by accident—the trivial pieces seem to outnumber needlessly the pieces we can take seriously as poems. Most critics resolve their puzzlement by assuming a haphazard collection, in which everything that has survived got preserved, simply because Catullus was known to have been the author.…

[My own view] is that, in the collection which Catullus planned, the Lesbia poems were placed in a contrasting context against which the poet's affair with his mistress stands out in sharp, implicit relief. The mixed bag isn't the result of a haphazard collection gathered together by somebody else: it is an effect planned by Catullus himself; more thought has been devoted to the contents of the bag than is obvious on first inspection; the mixed bag, in short, is largely an illusion.

That is not to say of course that the other poems were written to form this contrasting background. Still less that they were written to compose Catullus' picture of social life and politics, say, in his day. Each poem is self-contained and self-sufficient. At first reading, the poems break up into small, apparently unrelated subseries—the Bithynia poems, the Juventius poems, and so on; others don't seem to fit in particularly anywhere. There is no hope of piecing all the background poems together into a single picture: however much those who find the game attractive rack their brains over the jig-saw puzzle, there aren't enough pieces to form anything you could call a comprehensive background, and there are always pieces left over that can't be fitted in at all.

I believe none the less that the picture—a tantalizing, fragmentary sort of picture—was the guiding principle of the collection. Here and there a poem may have been revised, or specially written (though I imagine there was more of this with the Lesbia poems than with the rest). But in the main the picture is built up by poems already written. I am confident all the same that when Catullus came to arrange his poems for publication, some such guiding principle dictated choice and arrangement of the pieces which were to provide the background to the Lesbia poems. Perhaps people were already saying of Lucilius what Horace was to say a generation later (Satires 2.1.30-4):

ille uelut fidis arcane sodalibus olim
credebat libris, neque si male cesserat umquam
decurrens alto, neque si bene; quo fit ut omnis
uotiua pateat ueluti descripta tabella
uita senis.…

He used to confide secrets to his books, as if
they were trusted friends, turning nowhere
   else, whether
things had gone badly, or gone well. So that
   old Lucilius'
whole life, as if painted on a votive tablet,
   was there
for all to see.…

Cicero said much the same of the poems of Philodemus in 55 B.C., just at the time when Catullus may be supposed to have been putting his collection together: they constituted a picture, or as Cicero put it, a mirror, of the way of life of Philodemus' patron Piso. It didn't occur perhaps to Lucilius that his poems, taken together, built up a picture of a personality and a way of life. Nor does Cicero mean Philodemus intended his poems to mirror his patron's way of life; it hadn't perhaps occurred to Philodemus either that a collection of poems written at different times and in different circumstances could be used in this way. Both poets perhaps simply thought of themselves as writing poems about what went on around them. It was only when collections came to be made that the collective force of such poems became apparent.

By 55 B.C., however, the idea that a collection of poems could work this way was in the air. I find it easy to believe that Catullus, casting round for a guiding principle for a collection of poems traditionally too slight to be taken seriously, should have hit upon the principle of a picture of the way of life of a section of society, as a background against which he could set the poems about himself and his mistress. He need not have taken the idea very seriously. It would be absurd to suppose a rigid principle of selection and arrangement, strictly adhered to. But that Catullus did set himself some such principle to work to in selecting and arranging the poems he had written is hardly a rash hypothesis: it would help him in deciding which to keep and which to reject, as well as helping in his decisions about the order in which to place the poems he chose.

There are a few cases where the function of a poem as social comment may fairly be pointed to. Political poems, such as 'Poem 29' (Quis hoc potest uidere, quispotestpati? …) or 'Poem 52' (Quid est, Catulle, quid moraris emori?…) are cases in point. Their function as social comment is clear because in them Catullus is following a recognized tradition of political lampoon. At the same time they form part of the picture of the world in which Catullus moved, and his reactions to it. Or take Poems '43' (Salue, nec minimo puella nave …) and '86' (Quintia formosa est multis…). Here the social comment lies in the explicitly stated contrast: in 'Poem 43' it is 'fools compare Ameana with Lesbia'; in 'Poem 86' it is 'Quintia has good looks, but lacks Lesbia's personality'. In both poems Catulllls opposes his own standards to conventional standards, scornfully rejecting the latter. Mostly, however, the social comment is implicit: the function of the background poems is to establish a norm (if one can speak of a norm in connexion with a segment of society whose habits are often so abnormal), set against which the Lesbia affair stands out in sharp contrast, without any more needing to be said.

A familiar name frequently provides an easy transition from the Lesbia poems to their context. Plainly the Egnatius of 'Poem 39'

(39. 1-2):

Egnatius, quod candidos habet dentes,
renidet usquequaque.…

Egnatius' teeth are shining white, and so he
   breaks
on every conceivable occasion into a flashing
   grin.…

is also the Egnatius who is the subject of the thumbnail sketch in the concluding lines of 'Poem 37', where he is singled out for special attention among the lovers of Lesbia who frequent the salax taberna. To miss the connexion with 'Poem 37' is to miss the reason for the savagery which lies so near the surface in the fantasy of 'Poem 39'.

Of the five Caelius and Rufus poems, 'Poem 58' (Caeli, Lesbia nostra. …) is a Lesbia poem; so too, possibly, is 'Poem 7', (Rufe mihi frustra ac nequiquam credite amice …). 'Poem 69' (Noli admirari, quare tibifemina nulla…), 'Poem 71' (Si cui lure bono sacer alarum obstitit hircus…) and 'Poem 100' (Caelius Aufillenum et Quintius Aufillenam…) belong, like the second Egnatius poem, to the background; they are part of the poetry of social comment. But at the same time we feel we know why Rufus is being got at in Poems '69' and '71': like Egnatius, he is now one of the 'small-time back-street lechers' (37. 16 pusilli et semitarii moechi), however close a friend of Catullus he may have been once. The first and the third of the elegiac fragments (Poems '69' and '71') are addressed to Rufus, while the second and the fourth (Poems '70' and '72') are addressed to Lesbia. Then in 'Poem 77' Rufus is bitterly reproached for betraying his friend: I find the obvious inference hard to avoid, that Rufus, like Gellius in 'Poem 91' (Non ideo, Gelli, sperabam te mihi fidum …) has betrayed his friend by stealing his mistress. When we come to 'Poem 100' (100. 1-4):

Caelius Aufillenum et Quintius Aufillenam
flos Veronensum depereunt inuenum,
hic fratrem, ille sororem. hoc est, quod dicitur,
   illud
fraternum uere dulce sodalicium.…

My story is of Caelius and Quintius, cream of
   Verona's
youth: the one's madly in love with
   Aufillenus, the
other with Aufillenus' sister. That's what they
   mean
when they talk of true, sweet brotherly
   solidarity.…

the reader who knows his Catullus stretches out to bridge the gap between Catullus' feelings for Caelius once (100. 5-8):

cui faueam potius? Caeli, tibi: nam tua nobis
perspecta est igni tum unica amicitia,
cum uesana meas torreret flamma medullas,
sis felix, Caeli, sis in amore potens.

Whom shall I back? Why, you, Caelius, for
   your outstanding friendship for me has
   stood the test of fire, that time
when mad passion's flame scorched the
   marrow of my bones.
Good luck to you, Caelius! Much success in
   love!

and his feelings, left so eloquently unexpressed, for that friend who has stood the test of fire, on another occasion ('Poem 58'):

Caeli, Lesbia rostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam

plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes,
nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.

Lesbia, Caelius, this Lesbia of ours,
this Lesbia, no one else, whom Catullus loved
more than self, more than all to whom he
   owed love,
now on street corners and in back alleys
peels Remus' generous descendants bare.

There is no way of lining these five poems up in a chronological sequence. We can only guess at the circumstances, at Catullus' attitude to Caelius at the time of writing each. As biography the poems are of little use. But that they reflect widely different circumstances and sharply different attitudes is evident.

Or take the Furius and Aurelius poems. We have seen the extent to which an apparent shift in attitude has worried commentators on 'Poem 11'. The Furius and the Aurelius of 'Poem 11', however, are no less friends of Catullus, in my view, than they were in Poems '15', '16', '21', '23' and '26'. But the circumstances and the level of intent are different. Friends can be teased ('Poem 26'—Furius' family have had to raise the wind on their villa), even teased a little unmercifully ('Poem 23'—Furius, his father and his stepmother are incredibly hard up, so … let them make a virtue of poverty: they aren't at any rate going to get any money out of Catullus). Or abused with that lurid extravagance in abuse which is possible between friends, especially if the charges border on literary fantasy (Poems '15' and '21'—Aurelius is accused of making passes at Juventius): as Cicero said, of comparable libellous accusations levelled at Caelius when he was younger, such insinuations, so long as they are wittily expressed and innocent of malice, are a mark of urbanitas. 'Poem 16' is a prise de position: it is unreasonable, protests Catullus, to assume a man is a queer simply because he writes risque homosexual verse; but the lines are also outrageously witty, and therefore an example as: well of urbanitas. In 'Poem 11', speaking of matters where urbanitas has no role to play (because the abuse is directed this time against Lesbia and is meant to hurt), Catullus perhaps feels both closer to his friends, and at the same time a little resentful at their uncomprehending anxiousness to help.

These changes in attitude are one of the things that lend the collection an exciting quality of depth. When Catullus selected and arranged his poems for publication, there must have been many which expressed attitudes to friends, former friends and acknowledged enemies that no longer corresponded to the way he' felt. Where his mistress was concerned, it was important to put on record the way he felt at the end, and 'Poem 11' does this. But she was a special case. Where the rest were concerned, didn't matter if circumstances and attitudes had altered. There was certainly no more need to reject poems on that account than there was to reject poems to and about Lesbia. The reader senses the clash in attitudes from one poem to another. Often it is plain enough. But usually he can do no more than guess the reasons for the change: he has something to go on, but never quite enough. The effect is oddly moving. I am inclined to think Catullus knew what he was doing.

I. The urbani

'Poem 37' (Salax taberna uosque contubernales. … is both a Lesbia poem and a satirical picture of the members of a smart set and the life they live within the confines of their self-conscious non-conformity: Lesbia prefers the company of tines fatuously arrogant Don Juans to that of Catullus (37 14-20):

hanc boni beatique
omnes amatis, et quidem, quod indignum est,
omnes pusilli et semitarii moechi
tu praeter omnes, une de capillatis,
cuniculosae Celtiberiae fili
Egnati, opaca quem bonum facit barba
et dens Hibera defricatus urine.

Her you fine gentlemen love—
the lot of you; and what's more to be
   ashamed about,
all you small-tine back-street lechers too.
You especially, O uniquely hairy one,
son of Celtiberian bunny-land,
Egnatius, all black-bearded distinction
and teeth that gleam with Spanish piss.

Egnatius, though singled out (17 tu praeter omnes….), is summarily disposed of, no doubt because he had already been dealt with at length in 'Poem 39', which begins with a string of vignettes of Egnatius—occasions when he succeeds in making himself conspicuous, without quite succeeding in being a social success (39. 1-8):

Egnatius, quod candidos habet dentes,
renidet usquequaque. si ad rei uentum est
subsellium, cum orator excitat fletum,
renidet ille; si ad pii rogum fili
lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater,
renidet ille. quidquid est, ubicumque est,
quodcumque agit, renidet: hunc habet morbum,
neque elegantem, ut arbitror, neque urbanum.…

Egnetius' teeth are shining white, and so he
   breaks
on every conceivable occasion into a flashing
   grin. The prisoner's
in the dock, his counsel's working on our
   tears: Egnatius

breaks into a flashing grin. Or a funeral; grief
   on every
side, mother bereaved laments her only son:
   Egnatius
breaks into a flashing grin. On every
   conceivable occasion,
no matter what he's doing—flashing grin. It's
   a disease,
and one that's neither smart, I feel, nor
   sophisticated.…

Compare with these sketches of Egnatius and his friends the fuller picture we get from a different pen. Writing to his friend Atticus in February 61 B.C., Cicero describes a meeting of the Assembly called to pass a bill providing for the trial of Clodius (Clodia Metelli's brother) on a charge of desecrating the rites of the Bona Dea the previous year. A special bill was necessary because the case did not fall within the jurisdiction of any of the standing courts. The meeting was thrown into well organized chaos:

When the day came for submitting the bill under the terms of the Senatorial decree, there was a crowd of young men with little beards charging around—all the Catilinarian gang, with that little queer, young Curio, as ring-leader—demanding that the people should throw the bill out.… Clodius' thugs had occupied the gangways; when the voting tablets were distributed, nobody got one with FOR THE BILL on it.…

These young men with their little beards are the smart young debauchees whom Cicero, when the Catilinarian affair came to a head a couple of years before, had grouped along with the bankrupts, the ex-soldiers and the criminals among the supporters of Catiline:

Finally comes that group which is so typical of Catiline, not just in numbers but in its whole way of life. This is the group that really appeals to him, the one he embraces and holds onto with affection. You see them with their combed hair, all dolled up, beardless and fully bearded, long-sleeved, ankle-length tunics—or dressed in sails, you'd think, not togas; the one great purpose in their lives, the labour of their waking hours, to organize dinner parties that last till dawn's early light. Mixed up in their gangs are all the gamblers, all the adulterers, all the foul perverts in Rome. For these charming, precious youngsters are not only versed in the arts of making love and being loved, in dancing and in singing; they are also versed in dagger-play and in slipping a dose of poison in your cup. You can take it from me that, unless they are exiled or killed, our state will be a breeding ground of Catilines, even when Catiline himself is dead and gone. But what on earth do these poor fools think they're doing? Surely they can't take their girl friends along with them when they join Catiline's private army? But if they don't, how will they be able to stand it without them, the nights being what they are at this time of year? How will they be able to endure the Apennine frosts and snows? Do they think that dancing in the nude at parties is good training for standing up to winter? What a war it's going to be: I'm scared to death when I think of General Catiline with whores on his staff! …

Catiline was dead of course by the time of Cicero's letter to Atticus, but the phrase 'all the Catilinarian gang' (totus Me grex Catilinae) was too useful a label to pin on young men whose ways and ideas he disliked for Cicero to abandon it simply because Catiline was dead and the threat of a coup d'etat by Catiline a thing of the past. Had he not predicted that, even when Catiline was dead and buried, Rome would be 'a breeding ground of Catilines' (scitote hoc in re publica Catilinarum seminarium futurum)? Ten years later, on the eve of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, these will be 'the lost generation' (tam perdita iuuentas) whom Cicero lists among the supporters of Caesar.

Circumstances alter cases, of course, and in another letter to Atticus, a few months after the letter in which he described the breaking up of a meeting of the Assembly, Cicero preens himself at the thought that 'our friends' the goatee-bearded cafe revolutionaries' (nostri isti commissatores coniurationis) are linking his name with that of Pompey. And when he returned from exile (in September 57 B.C.), anxious for proof that he had not become a political has-been, it gave him pleasure to fancy the smart young men about town felt some grudging respect for an elder statesman like himself. Indeed, within six months of his return, he found himself defending one of these smart young men against the machinations (as Cicero would have us believe) of his ex-mistress Clodia. It was a forensic operation that called for some skilful footwork on thin ice, for there was no getting round the fact that Caelius had been, to say the least, one of the Catilinarian gang, and the cognoscenti must have admired Cicero's display of sympathetic indulgence towards those who had been unable to resist the undeniable charm of that, in so many ways, attractive swine:

He was a supporter of Catiline, you say, some years after entering public life? So were many, of all ages and ranks of society. The fact is that Catiline, as I expect you remember, showed very many signs of admirable qualities, even if the signs were only sketched in outline, not clearly printed. There was a time, to be frank, when he came close to deceiving me. … If, among such crowds of friends, Caelius was also a friend of his, it is rather for him to regret his mistake, just as I sometimes regret the mistake I made about Catiline.…

It is characteristic of such groups of sophisticated young men everywhere that their individual commitment to the common interests of the group varies: if some are passionately involved in politics, the interest of other members of the group in politics is lukewarm, or non existent; for them, all that matters. in life is poetry, or women, or the demonstration of their emancipation from convention by the simple fact of belonging to a smart set. Cicero's picture of Catiline's supporters isn't that of a band of committed revolutionaries: there are determined, ruthless men among them, Cicero would have is believe, but for the rest toying with revolution is clearly just another way of breaking with convention. We may suspect that some of the habitues of the salax taberna of 'Poem 37' talked politics as much as of wine, women and song; while others (Catullus, among them, perhaps, till he quarrelled with the group) were savagely contemptuous of politics and politicians.

These are the urbani, the elegant young men about town. It is very noticeable how the key words of their jargon, as reflected in Catullus (words like lepidus and delicatus), are taken up by Cicero to deride their preciousness; urbanitas itself, however, was a different matter. It is a quality ('wit', but with; overtones suggesting that the wit expresses the values of a socially acceptable group) frequently spoken of with approval by Cicero. He prided himself on possessing urbanitas, and was anxious that the credit should not be denied him for his witty remarks, complaining if the bad jokes of others were attributed to him. But urbanitas wasn't just a matter of cracking jokes, even good ones, it was a way of behaving, of being able to use ridicule effectively but without malice or meanness.

We can call these elegant young men, if we like, the members of a leisured class, though that term, to the modern ear, lays too strong an emphasis upon social background. The words used by Roman writers are luxuria ('soft living') and otium (half-way—because otium always suggested negotium—between 'leisure' and 'idleness'); the former if you were against it, the latter if you were not. For the urbani, otium meant that freedom to take life easy which is guaranteed by independent means or by patronage. The idea that one could lead a life of leisure was still comparatively novel in a society upon which, at one end, poverty weighed heavily (and continued to weigh heavily, of course, throughout antiquity) and, at the other end, extreme social constraint, the need (expressed through family pressure, or simply through the pressure of convention) to serve the republic as a member of her citizen armies in time of war or provincial uprising. To say nothing of the moral responsibility, amounting for those of any rank or standing in the old republic to something close to moral obligation, to serve the state as patronus, or as a member of an amateur administrative hierarchy that extended from such relatively minor offices as the curule aedileship to the higher 'magistracies' of the state. For Catullus' comments on the sort of people into whose hands these exalted offices sometimes fell, see 'Poem 52' (52. 2-3):

sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet,
per consulatum peierat Vatinius.…

In the curule chair that boil Nonius sits;
by his consulship Vatinius swvears, and lies.…

For many of the urbani, the pursuit of otium was no more than a brief period of social irresponsibility. Even during that period, we have seen that some at any rate of the barbatuli iuuenes took politics seriously enough to demonstrate at meetings called for the transaction of public business. Calvus and Cinna, friends of Catullus and, like him, poets, followed the traditional path of public service and public office, as did Caelius Rufus, about whose career we know a good deal, chiefly as a result of his letters to Cicero and Cicero's letters to him. Catullus himself 'served' (the word hardly exaggerates the Roman view of the matter, at any rate in theory) as a member of the personal staff of C. Memmius in Bithynia—and perhaps served again, three years later, under Crassus or Caesar. His friends Veranius and Fabullus served in similar fashion, once in Spain ('Poem 9') and then a second time, it seems, in Macedonia (Poems '28' and '47'), under Calpurnius Piso. We are still a generation removed from Horace's life-long commitment (after his early adventures in politics, military life and administration) to a career as man of letters; from the dedicated craftsmanship of Virgil; or from the life of acknowledged desidia of the poet-lover Propertius.

The key concepts of the urbani occur more often as adjectives than as nouns. In addition to the adjective urbanus itself, there are elegans, lepidus, salsus and uenustus, and the corresponding negatives—for it is not given to all to be elegans, lepidus, salsus or uenustus; or because it can be modestly asserted of a person or a thing approved of that the person or thing, far from being insulsus (say) is really non inelegans, or non illepidus, or non inuenustus. Varus' girl friend, for example, seemed (on first impression) non sane illepiduni, neque inuenustum (10. 4), a phrase which is repeated in 'Poem 36' of the view the goddess of love will take, Catullus hopes, of his proposal to substitute the Annals of Volusius as a burnt offering in place of some verses of his own (36. 17). We should add ineptus and infacetus (only the negative form is used in this connexion, though both facetiae and infacetiae occur); from ineptus comes the verb ineptire (8. 1 Miser Catulle? desinas ineptire…) and a noun ineptiae, used as a suitably depreciatory description of Catullus' poems on an occasion when he was immodest enough to reckon with the possibility that they might survive ('Poem 14b'):

Si qui forte mearum ineptiarum
lectores eritis manusque uestras
non horrebitis admouere nobis.…

You (if such there are) who may chance to
   read
this poor stuff of mine, you whose hands
may without repugnance turn these pages…

Catullus had in mind perhaps the 'obscene' jeux d'esprit which follow; but he assumes the same urbane tone in 'Poem 1'—the tone of a man who can speak lightly of things that matter to him none the less.

To miss out on these qualities elicited urbane rejection. 'Poem 86' (Quintia formosa est multis…) for example: poor Quintia, though people rave about her good looks, is utterly devoid of uenustas. Or 'Poem 12' (Marrucine Asini, manu sinistra non bella uteris…): Asinius Pollio's brother thinks going round souveniring people's table napkins is smart, whereas in fact it is a shabby trick, not in the least uenustus (5 quamuis sordida res et inuenusta est). Or, to take a more serious case, there is Suffenus: one might think, just to meet the man and hear him talk, that he deserved to be ranked among the urbani (22. 1-2):

Suffenus iste, Vare, quem probe nosti,
homo est uenustus et dicax et urbanus.…

Friend Suffenus, Varus, you know him well of
   course,
a charming fellow, good talker, man about
   town.…

Suffenus, however, prides himself as a poet. He writes the stuff by the yard, publishes it in editions de luxe. And it's tripe (22. 9-11 and 12-14):

haec cum legas tu, bellus ille et urbanus
Suffenus unus caprimulgus aut fossor
rursus uidetur.…

… qui modo scurra
aut si quid hac re scitius uidebatur,
idem infaceto est infacetior rure.…

When one reads the stuff, this elegant man
   about town
Suffenus seems just any ordinary goat-milker
   or ditch-digger.…

… the man who just now
seemed a wit or whatever there is that's
   slicker than that—
that's the man who's now uncouther than the
   uncouth
countryside.…

On a par, in fact, with the Annals of Volusius (36. 19-20):

pleni ruris et infacetiarum
annales Volusi, cacata carte.

you countrified, uncouthness-stuffed
Annals of Volusius, paper shat upon.

When it comes to bad verse, Catullus' feelings almost get the better of him. Passionate denunciation, however, is reserved for more extreme cases—Caesar's hangers-on in 'Poem 54', or the bath-house pickpocket Vibennius and his obscene son in 'Poem 33'; or Aemilius, the unspeakable Don Juan of 'Poem 97'.

The key-words express a code of behaviour in terms that are external and conventional within the group; they are flung out casually, with no claim to moral seriousness or philosophical system. For the urbani they express judgments which imply deliberate, appreciative restraint in approval. Or which damn.

II. The Pursuit of Love

Nearest to the Lesbia poems among the poems of social comment are those which build up a picture of typical relationships between the urbani and their mistresses. These are:

'Poem 6' Flaui, delicias tuas Catullo …
'Poem 10' Varus me meus ad suos amores …
'Poem 17' O Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere longo..
'Poem 32' Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla …
'Poem 35' Poetae tenero, meo sodali …
'Poem 41' Ameana, puella defututa …
'Poem 45' Acmen Septimius suos amores …
'Poem 55' Oramus, si forte non molestum est…
'Poem 58b' Non custos si fingar Me Cretum …
'Poem 69' Noli admirari, quare tioi femina nulla…
'Poem 71' Si cui lure bono sacer alarum obstitit hircus …
'Poem 74' Gellius audierat patruum obiurgare solere.…
'Poem 78' Gallus habet fratres …
'Poem 88' Quid facit is, Gelli, qui cum matre atque sorore…
'Poem 90' Nascatur magus ex Gelli matrisque nefando …
'Poem 94' Mentula moechatur …
'Poem 97' Non (ita me di amens) quicquam referre putaui.…
'Poem 100' Caelius Aufillenum et Quintius Aufillenam …
'Poem 103' Aut sodes mihi redde decem sestertia, Silo …
'Poem 110' Aufillena, bonae semper laudantur amicae …
'Poem 111' Aufillena, uiro contentam uiuere solo …
'Poem 113' Consule Pomnelo primum duo. Cinna. solebant …

Naturally, these poems form a group only in the sense that it is critically useful to consider them together because in them certain themes preponderate. It is no more sensible to detach the group arbitrarily from the rest of the collection than it is to detach the Lesbia poems. Like any other such list we might make, it imposes decisions which are quite artificial. For example, I have included poems which involve Catullus himself (Poems '32', '103', '110')—he is after all one of the urbani; but I have omitted three poems in which Lesbia figures by name or certain allusion:

'Poem 43' Salue, nec minimo puella nave …
'Poem 86' Quintia formosa est multis …
'Poem 91' Non ideo, Gelli, sperabam te mihifidum …

It is a good example of how the collection resists attempts at rigid classification. The list, like the list of Lesbia poems, also cuts across any prosopographical grouping: it includes only some of the Mamurra poems, for example. One can argue even that it should (again like the list of Lesbia poems) cut across the division into short and long poems, since we might very reasonably add 'Poem 67' (O dulci iacunda uiro, iacunda parenti…)—the shortest of the long poems (apart from 'Poem 65', which is only an introductory note to 'Poem 66'); or even the two marriage hymns (Poems '61' and '62'), since marriage and furtiuus amor are themes that go very much hand in hand in Catullus. It is also the place, I think, to consider 'Poem 63', as I hope to show.

To call these poems about the urbani and their mistresses 'poems about love' or 'poems about social life' is to define too loosely, or too arbitrarily, the area within which they move. A moral standard is clearly discernible: it challenges, or rather, it runs counter to, contemporary morality (which young men in all ages tend to shun as sham); but Catullus substitutes his own standards, and claims the right to be morally outraged when these are transgressed. It is probably exaggerated to speak of a moral intent: Catullus, I suspect, was too much influenced by Philodemus' doctrine of the conscious uselessness of poetry to allow himself to preach; at any rate this is the attitude flaunted. The fact remains that many of the poems on the list have the bitter, tight-lipped tone of Brechtian satire: the picture of a corrupt society is set as A background to the record of a shattered personal ideal.

The Human Comedy: the urbani and their mistresses in Poems 1-60

When Catullus writes about the relationships of young men and their mistresses in the poems which make up the first of the three groups in the Catullan collection, he presents an urbanely ironical picture of contemporary mores. At least he purports to do this. For the picture, though plainly presented as a picture of life in contemporary Rome (with occasional glances at Verona), is surprisingly like that painted by Plautus and Terence a century and more earlier; and the picture they paint is based on that painted by Menander and the writers of Greek New Comedy of life in fourth-century Athens: indeed, Athens, or at any rate Greece, is the ostensible setting of the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Admittedly we hear nothing in Catullus of domineering, skinflint fathers (and if there are references to censorious uncles, the uncles are quickly reduced to silence, as in 'Poem 74'); nor do we hear anything of ingenious, witty slaves (the ancient-world version of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves), quick to put right all that goes wrong when a young master's ability to cope with the problems of life is reduced even further by infatuation with a pretty girl. That this remained the comic plot par excellence as long as Roman comedy survived (which is to say, until the Augustan age) is indicated by Horace's summary of a typical plot from a comedy of Fundanius, thee leading comic writer of the time. But the skinflint father and the witty slave are the result of the exigencies of plot-construction: their function is to produce the bewildering sequence of hopeless complication hard on the heels of hopeless complication. Their absence from the pages of Catullus isn't surprising, therefore. As far as the young men and their mistresses are concerned, little seems to have changed in a century to a century and a half.

The tempo of 'Poem 10' is more relaxed than that of comedy, but Varus, his unnamed girl friend and Catullus move essentially in the same world:

Varus me meus ad suos amores
uisum duxerat e foro otiosum—
scortillum (ut mihi tum repente uisum est)
non sane illepidum neque inuenustum;
huc ut uenimus, incidere nobis
sermones uarii, in quibus, quid esset
iam Bithynia, quo modo se haberet,
et quonam mihi profuisset acre.
respondi id quod erat—nihil neque ipsis
nec praetoribus esse nec cohorti,
cur quisquam caput unctius referret—
praesertim quibus esset irrumator
praetor, nec faceret pill cohortem.
'at certe tamer,' inqulunt 'quod illic
natum dicitur esse, comparasti
ad lecticam homines.' ego (ut puellae
unum me facerem beatiorem)
'non' inquam 'mihi tam fuit' maligne,
ut, prouincia quod male incidisset,
non possem octo homines parare rectos.'
(at mi nullus erat nec hic neque illic,
fractum qui ueteris pedem grabati
in collo sibi collocare posses.)
hic illa, ut decuit cinaediorem,
'quaeso', inquit 'mihi, mi Catulle, paulum

istos commode: nam uolo ad Serapim
deferri.' 'mane,' inquii puellae,
'istud quod modo dixeram me habere …
fugit me ratio: meus sodalis—
Cinna est Gaius—is sibi parauit;
uerum utrum illius an mei, quid ad me?
utor tam bene quam mihi pararim—
sed tu insulsa male et molesta uiuis,
per quam non licet esse neglegentem!'

Varus had taken me off to meet his girl,
finding me in the Forum with time upon my
   hands.
An attractive wench, my first impression was
agreeable to talk to and not without a certain
   charm.
Well, when we got there, we began to discuss
a variety of subjects, including the sort
of place Bithynia was, the present state of it
and how I'd done in terms of cash while I
   was there.
I told them the facts: nothing in it for either
natives, chiefs of mission or their entourage,
not a hope of coming home with pocket
   lined—
specially when you had a bugger of a praetor
who didn't give a damn for his entourage.
'All the same', they said, 'you must have got
   a team
of men to haul your litter round. It's
the local product, so they say.' Just to
make her suppose I wasn't too badly off, I
   said,
'I've got to admit things were really not so
   bad—
even though I'd landed a rotten province—
that I couldn't round up eight able-bodied
   men.'
In fact, neither then nor now had I a single
   man
that could have loaded on his neck as much
as a second-hand bedstead's broken foot.
Then she (it's the sort of shameless bitch she
   was)
said, 'Do me a favour, please, Catullus. Let
   me have
those men of yours a bit. I'd like them to take
   me
to Serapis' service.' 'Wait,' I said to the girl,
'when I said just now I had these chaps, there
   was
something I forgot. Actually, a close friend of
   mine,
Cinna—Gaius Cinna—got them together.
   They're his.
The position is that, his or mine, it's all the
   same:
I can use them just as if I'd bought them
   myself.
Really, what a tiresome, tactless creature you
   are!
The way a man's got to watch his words if
   you're around!'

The characters in this little drama might slip so easily into the pages of a Roman comedy, one asks to what extent Catullus and the urbani are living up to an ideal—attempting to create, to thrust into the ruder reality of contemporary life, a code of behaviour that existed only in imaginations fed by the traditions of the Hellenizing stage. I think the answer must be that, if it is an ideal, it is an ideal in the sense that the world created by Cicero's letters (his letters to Atticus in particular) is an ideal. A world that is witty, well read, ironically frank about its own ambitions and shortcomings. A world in which Cicero can write with graceful cynicism about a day in the Senate, urbanely tolerant of the motives and foibles of others, and even of his own. A world whose affectionate intimacy with all the best writers, Greek and Roman is so much a common possession that that knowledge can be aired without self-consciousness or pedantry. A world that is no less proud of its humanity, its involvement in what is going on, than it is of its doctrina. A world which can boast urbanely, like Terence's Chremes, humani nihil a me alienum puto and believe the boast, unconscious of the limitations of its humane vision.

What of the mistresses of these young men? Here Cicero's letters are of limited assistance. True, Clodia appears in them a number of times; but it is chiefly her relations, political and otherwise, that interest Cicero; for the more public side of her career we have to turn to the Pro Caelio. We can, however, appeal to Horace, if with some caution (Horace's mistresses somehow lack substance), and once again it is surprising how little different the picture is from that we find in Roman comedy.

'Poem 10,' taken by itself, tells us little about Varus' girl friend. We do not even learn her name—Catullus simply refers to her as a scortillum, a 'bit of a wench'. The word is scarcely complimentary, but the overtones, I think, are of tolerant approval, as when Horace proposes sending a message to Lyde to come and join the picnic, not forgetting to bring her lyre along with her (Odes 2. 11. 21-4):

quis deuium scortum eliciet domo
Lyden? eburna dic age cum lyre
maturet, in comptum Lacaenae
more comam religata nodum.

Who will get Lyde, that shy, retiring wench
away from home? Tell her to be quick and
   bring
her lyre, her hair tied back neatly in a knot,

in Spartan style.

To suppose Horace and his friend have in mind only to satisfy their lust is clearly a gross misreading of the text. Lyde is no slave girl, at Horace's beck and call: for plainly, since she has to be enticed, she is free to refuse to join the party, if she is not in the mood. But at the same time the word scortum rules out social equality: the girl's standing in society is not that of the men who seek the pleasure of her company. Her role is to amuse and be decorative. The situation in 'Poem 10' seems very similar. One can presume the social standing of the girl is not that of the young man who has fallen in love with her—whether Varus is the lawyer Alfenus Varus (the Alfenus, probably, of 'Poem 30'), or the Quintilius Varus who was to become the friend of Horace and Virgil: her interest in attending the rites of Serapis suggests she was a foreigner, not a native born Roman, just as Lyde's hair-style places her. A real-life girl doesn't have to come from Sparta simply because she favours Spartan hair-styles, nor is there any reason why a Roman girl in real life mightn't somehow have developed an interest in Serapis: but competent poets don't drop false, or worthless, clues. We must not, however, read too much into Catullus' scortillum. After all, Catullus does not call her that to her face, any more than Horace calls Lyde a scortum to her face: these are the private thoughts of men in a men's world about the women who grace that world, but are not of it.

But if she might be a character out of Plautus or a girl we meet in an ode of Horace, there can be no doubt that Varus' girl friend existed. 'Poem 10' is set firmly in contemporary time and space: Varus and Catullus meet in the Forum; when they join the girl and the conversation gets going, it quickly turns to Bithynia and Catullus' recent tour of duty there. It all has the ring of something that actually happened, and happened the way Catullus tells it. One cannot say this of Horace's Odes. And note that the girl joins in the conversation; and note too that, if Catullus is annoyed when she asks him to lend her his team of litter-bearers, it isn't because she has no right to ask, but because her request puts Catullus on the spot—in a situation from which he can't gracefully extricate himself—and that annoys him. What shows her less uenusta and lepida than on his first appraisal of her is her failure to respect the limitations of her role within a man's world; to appreciate that men are entitled to boast without being embarrassed by a nuisance of a girl (33 sed tu insulsa male et molesta uiuis) who hasn't the sense to realize that what a man says in conversation (especially when there's a pretty girl present) isn't to be pressed.

Then there is Flavius' girl friend, of whose existence we have such abundant evidence (the facts speak for themselves), even though Flavius is at pains to keep her out of sight ('Poem 6')

Flaui, delicias tuas Catullo,
ni sint illepidae atque inelegantes,
uelles dicere nec tacere posses,
uerum nescio quid febriculosi
scorti diligis: hoc pudet fateri.
nam te non uiduas iacere noctes
nequiquam tacitum cubile clamat
sertis ac Syrio fragrans oliuo,
puluinusque peraeque et hic et ille
attritus, tremulique quassa lecti
argutatio inambulatioque.
nam nil stupra ualet, nihil tacere.
cur? non tam latera ecfututa pandas,
ni tu quid facias ineptiarum.
quare, quidquid haloes bond malique,
dic nobis. uolo te ac tuos amores
ad caelum lepido uocare uersu.

Flavius, you've a sweetheart, but she must be
just a bit uncouth, a graceless lass perhaps,
or you'd want to talk of her, couldn't help it
   even.
I expect it's some hot little piece or other
you're cherishing, and ashamed of owning up.
They're no celibate nights you're passing.
   Your room,
though tongueless, shrieks its testimony just
   the same.
All those flowers, that oily Syrian scent,
those pillows crumpled just as much on either
   side,
that rickety bed, so knocked about it emits
falsetto creaks as it wanders round the room.
Not the slightest use refusing to talk.
Why, you're an obvious case of shagger's
   back.
There must be funny business going on.
So tell us who she is you've got—whether
   good
or bad. I want to poeticize your love and you
and raise you to the sky in polished verse.

The reason Flavius' leg is being pulled isn't that he has fallen in love with a scortum; it is because the scortum is nothing to write home about—or so Catullus is quick to insinuate, since Flavius hasn't produced the girl (as Varus did) for inspection by his friends. The strategy of 'Poem 6' is the reverse of that employed by Horace in Odes 2. 4: there the joke lies in suggesting that the maid-servant Horace's friend is in love with is really perhaps some exotic foreign princess who has fallen on evil days; that the ancilla was in fact a princess isn't a suggestion which is thrown out any more seriously than Catullus' suggestion that the girl on whom Flavius is lavishing his affection (5 diligis) is just 'some hot little piece or other' (4-5 nescio quid febriculosi scorti), and pretty ill-favoured to boot (2 illepidae atque inelegantes). The closing lines come nearer the truth of the matter. If the affair were as sordid as lines 4-5 make it sound, there'd hardly be any question of 'celebrating the affair to the skies in polished verse'.

'Poem 45' provides a useful corrective to hasty assumptions about Poems '6' and '10'. We shift from ironic realism to something we can perhaps describe as an ironic study in Romantic love ('Poem 45'):

Acmen Septimius suos amores
tenens in gremio 'mea' inquit 'Acme',
ni te perdite amo atque amare porro
omnes sum assidue paratus annos,
quantum qui pote plurimum perire,
solus in Libya Indiaque tosta
caesio ueniam obuius leoni.'
hoc ut dixit, Amor sinistra ut ante
dextra sternuit approbationem.
at Acme leuiter caput reflectens
et dulcis pueri ebrios ocellos
illo purpureo ore suauiata,
'sic', inquit 'mea uita Septimille,
huic uni domino usque seruiamus,
ut multo mihi major acriorque
ignis mollibus ardet in medullis.'
hoc ut dixit, Amor sinistra ut ante
dextra sternuit approbationem.
nunc ab auspicio bono profecti
mutuis animis amant amantur.
unam Septimius misellus Acmen
mauult quam Syrias Britanniasque:
uno in Septimio fidelis Acme
facit delicias libidinesque.
quis ullos homines beatiores
uidit, quis Venerem auspicatiorem?

Holding his sweetheart Acme on his lap,
Septimius said, 'If I do not, my darling,
love you to distraction, if I am reluctant
to love you unswervingly in all the years to
   come—
and as distractedly, moreover, as ever human
   can:
then may I, among the roasting sands of Lybia
   or of India,
run slap into a lion, green eyes and all.'
When this was said, the god of love, on left
   hand now
as previously on right, sneezed his
   approbation.
Whereas Acme, head arching gently
   backwards,
with those brightly coloured lips began to kiss
the love-drunk eyes of her darling lover.
'Likewise, Septimius my darling, all life to
   me, may I
your slave for ever be and you my master.
For a much greater and far fiercer fire
burns within the marrow of my bones!'
When this was said, the god of love, on left
   hand now
as previously on right, sneezed his
   approbation.
With good omen thus they began their journey
   into love.
Now each lover's loved with responsive
   passion.
Poor Septimius would rather have his Acme
than all the Syrias and the Britains that there
   are.
While Acme, faithful to Septimius alone,
in all love's delights is co-operative.
Who ever saw human beings happier,
or affair embarked on with better omen?

The starting point of 'Poem 45' is a traditional form which we find idealized in the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil—a singing match between two contestants at some rustic festival. Out of this Catullus has made an elegantly structured conversation-piece between two lovers, in which the girl caps the boy's protestations of undying, passionate devotion by an assertion of her even more fiercely burning love for him. A brief comment from the poet sets the scene at the beginning of each speech, and each speech is followed by a kind of refrain reporting how the god of love sneezed in approval. A third stanza, one line shorter than the others, gives the poet's final summing up. Almost everything in this graceful, charming study in romantic love—the lovers' unashamed rhetoric, an unusual descriptive lushness, the almost open irony of the poet's comments in the third stanza—warn against assuming anything like total commitment on Catullus' part to this dextrously executed exercise in urbanitas. A date late in 55 B.C. is indicated by the reference to Syria and Britain in line 22—the natural interpretation is that, so long as he can have his Acme, Septimius is willing to renounce thoughts of the glamour of travel to the East with Crassus, or to the Far North with Caesar. 'Poem 45,' in other words, is not only close in date to 'Poem 11' (Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli…), but also, perhaps, an ironic study in what might have been.

These young men, it seems, once they left the paternal household to set up quarters of their own and thus free themselves from paternal surveillance, had to fend for themselves. If there were slaves (and it seems hard to imagine there were none at all, in a society so dependent on slave-labour) they presumably played so minor a part (like the eight Bithynian litter-bearers in Poem lo that Catullus didn't actually have and that his friend Cinna didn't perhaps actually have either), there was normally no place for them in so economically structured a dramatic form as the poems of Catullus. Catullus and his friends had to rely on themselves in getting out of trouble.

Or rather, they relied on one another. The members of a close-knit group are well placed to keep an eye on each other. And, in this man's world which is reflected in the poems of Catullus, they feel the obligation to do so. Your friends form a kind of mutual protection society, on the watch for the latest victim of the folly of love or the predatory female, quick to check on the whereabouts of one of their number if he disappears from circulation, in order to make sure the girl is all right, and perhaps even worthy of something like honorary membership of the group for the duration of her affair with one of its members.

It is a game in which the unwritten rules are well understood, if not always accepted. Varus produces his girl friend for inspection. Flavius doesn't, and is told not to be so secretive. Likewise Camerius in 'Poem 55':

Oramus, si forte non molestum est,
demonstres ubi sint tuae tenebrae.
te Campo quaesiuimus minore,
te in Circo, te in omnibus libellis,
te in templo summi louis sacrato.
in Magni simul ambulatione
femellas omnes, amice, prendi,
quas uultu uidi tamen serenas.
taueltet, sic ipse flagitabam,
Camerium mihi, pessimae puellae.
quaedam inquit, nudum reduc …
'en hic in roseis latet papillis.'
sed te iam ferre Herculi labos est:
tanto te in fastu negas, amice.
dic nobis ubi sis futurus, ede
audacter, committe, crede luci.
nunc te lacteolae tenent puellae?
si linguam clauso tenes in ore,
fructus proicies amoris omnes.
uerbosa gaudet Venus loquella.
uel, si uis, licet obseres palatum,
dum uestri sim particeps amoris.

If it isn't too much trouble, would you please
   reveal the location of your hide-out?
I've scoured the lesser Campus, hunting after
   you.
Been to the Circus too, looked in all the little
   books.
Visited the holy temple of all-mighty Jove.
In great Pompey's Portico, my friend,
I interrogated every female, but I saw not one display an apprehensive look.
'Restore to me', so ran my personal appeal,
'my Camerius, you naughty, naughty girls!'
'Look!' said one, hand raised in full-breasted
   disclosure,
'that's him, hiding in my pinky bosom.'
It's hell's own job putting up with you,
my friend, when you're such an arrogant
   recluse.
Tell us where it is you'll be. Come,
boldly share the secret, give it light of day.
The blondes have got you, have they? Fine!
But if your tongue is held and mouth is
   sealed,
you throw away all love's profit.
It's the man who talks brings Venus joy—
though lock your lips in silence if you will,
so long as I am let into the secret.

If Varus' girl friend was a scortillum, we must assume she was a cut above the pessimae puellae of 'Poem 55', who answer, as far as we can tell (for something has gone wrong with the text) with a ribald rejoinder and a gesture to match when Catullus questions them in the Portico of Pompey's Theatre (the Piccadilly Circus of ancient Rome in Ovid's day, if not in Catullus') concerning the whereabouts of his friend Camerius Though to call a girl pessima means that you are cross with her, rather than that you disapprove of her sexual mores (the that any rate seems the way to take Catullus' words when he calls Lesbia pessima puella in 'Poem 36'). Anyway, the blondes have got Camerius, it appears (17 nunc te lacteolae tenent puellae?). The plural includes the girl's colleagues from the Portico, one suspects, or perhaps it is what the grammarians call a generalizing plural, or even a mock-heroic 'poetic plural'. Be that as it may, the important thing is to track Camerius down, and get the truth out of him.

The member of the group who drops out of circulation (the Latin word is latet) is a theme we find in Horace too. The Sybaris Ode (Odes 1. 8) gives it a slightly more serious twist: Sybaris' infatuation with Lydia has made him cut cavalry parades and generally behave like a sissy; but much the same was true (or so Horace archly pretends) of the great Achilles—and he turned out all right in the end.

Poems '6' and '55' suggest an interpretation of 'Poem 18' that fits the text better than the usual reading of these lines. For 'Poem 13' is not an invitation to dinner: it is a put-off, a poem wriggling out of inviting Fabullus to dinner with the excuse that the dinner will be forthcoming—any day now, if Fabullus is lucky (2 paucis, si tibi di fauent, diebus). One suspects that Fabullus (just back from Spain, perhaps, like Veranius in 'Poem 9') is angling for an introduction to Lesbia, and is told he'll have to wait. The fact that Catullus is hard up isn't the reason for delay, since Catullus makes it clear that, even when the invitation eventuates, Fabullus will have to provide everything out of his own pocket. It was fashionable, of course, in the circle in which Catullus moved to boast of being hard up—to be flush with cash stamped you as a Mamurra. But as the poem proceeds, a pretty clear hint is dropped that the reason for the delay (and the reason perhaps why Catullus is completely broke) is … Lesbia. Let Fabullus be patient for a day or two, Catullus seems to be saying between the lines, and (provided Fabullus does the decent thing) Catullus will turn on a foursome (Fabullus providing his own girl) at which Fabullus and Lesbia can meet (13. 9-14):

sed contra accipies meros amores,
seu quid suauius elegantiusue est:
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque;
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis,
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.

In return, I'll offer something irresistible,
you couldn't imagine anything more charming,
   more tasteful:
a perfume I can provide, personally presented
to my derring by the Powers of Desire.
When you've had one sniff, you'll ask the
   gods,
Fabullus, to turn you into one great big nose.

'Poem 35' utilizes the traditional material but introduces a fresh component. The girl friend of the poet Caecilius is herself interested in poetry. Even so, she mustn't be allowed to stand in the way of a serious discussion about poetry between Catullus and Caecilius:

Poetae tenero, meo sodali,
uelim Caecilio, papyre, dicas
Veronam ueniat, Noui relinquens
Comi moenia Lariumque litus.
nam quasdam uolo cogitationes
amici accipiat sui meique.
quare, si sapiet, uiam uorabit,
quamuis candida mikes puella
euntem reuocet, manusque collo
ambas iniciens roget morari.
quae nunc, si mihi uera nuntiantur,
illum deperit impotente amore;
nam quo tempore legit incohatam
Dindymi dominam, ex eo misellae
ignes interiorem edunt medullam.
ignosco tibi, Sapphica puella
muse doctior: est enim uenuste
Magna Caecilio incohata Mater.

Please, papyrus, tell the tender poet,
my good friend Caecilius, I want him to
come to Verona, abandoning the walls of
New Comum and the Larian shore, for
I have certain reflections to impart
of a friend of his and mine.
If he's wise, therefore, he'll eat up the road,
though his blonde mistress call him back
a thousand times, and, clasping both arms
around his neck, beseech him to wait a while.
For she, if the news I have is true,
loves Caecilius madly, uncontrollably;
ever since she read the first draft of his
Mistress of Dindymus, the fire has been eating
into the marrow of the poor girl's bones.
Nor do I blame you, girl more endowed with
   taste
than Sapphic muse: Caecilius' Great Mother
is jolly good, for a first draft.

Pretty obviously, there is an element of leg-pull in the reference to the girl's literary attainments. We needn't doubt it is her passion for Caecilius which makes her so reluctant to let him out of her sight, rather than her passion for poetry. But we are on the edge here of one of the great traditions of Roman love poetry—the docta puella. The girl is no blue-stocking: docta means something more like 'knowledgeable about literature'—she hadn't just read a lot, she had taste as well. Clearly the Roman love poets liked to think their mistresses could appreciate what they wrote about them. Ovid lays down a formidable reading list for the girl who wants to succeed in society: Callimachus, Philetas, Anacreon, Sappho of course (quid enim lasciuius illa?), Menander, Propertius, Cornelius Gallus, Tibullus, Varro of Atax (who wrote a version of Apollonius' Argonautica), Virgil (only the Aeneid, apparently) … and perhaps Ovid's own Amores. No doubt, like all reading lists, Ovid's set a standard to aim at rather than one the ordinary candida puella about town could be expected to take in her stride. Caecilius' girl friend belongs almost two generations earlier, and she may have been only a local girl whom Caecilius had got to know in Novum Comum. All the same, she is one sign that a love affair, in the group in which Catullus moved, could mean something more than sophisticated sensuality. The urbani were getting used to the idea that a girl might provide a young man with the kind of intellectual companionship he had traditionally got only from men. We are on the way to Lesbia, with whom the adventure starts with a translation of Sappho, and to Propertius' Cynthia, who reads her lover's poems while she waits for him to rejoin her. A poet's mistress needs after all special qualifications.

Observe, too, that Caecilius' girl is not referred to as a scortum (let alone a nescioquid febriculosi scorti, like Flavius' girl friend), or even as a scortillum (like Varus' girl friend): she is a candida puella, like the girl Fabullus is invited to bring with him to the party. We have to remember that not all not wholly respectable women were scortilla. Some were mime actresses, like the famous Cytheris, who was in her time the mistress of several leading figures in Roman public life: the poet Cornelius Gallus (who called her Lycoris in his poetry), Marcus Brutus, Mark Antony, and earlier on the occasion when Cicero dined with her in 46 B.C. (a little taken aback to find himself in such fast company) the mistress of his host Volumnius Eutrapelus, after whom she was known for a time as Volumnia.

Others were married women. The readiness of allegedly respectable women at this time to take lovers is well attested. A generation later Horace thought it worth advising lusty young bloods to stick to libertinae (freed slaves), as being safer—husbands of respectable married women were liable to take the law into their own hands.

Some matronae were relatively innocent amateurs, like the pretty young wife of 'Poem 17' whose husband drew down Catullus' angry censure upon his head for not keeping a better eye on her (17. 14-22):

cui cum sit uiridissimo nupta flore puella,
et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
adseruanda nigerrimis diligentius uuis,
ludere hanc sinit ut lubet, nec pili facit uni,
nec se subleuat ex sua parte; sed uelut alnus
in fossa Liguri facet suppernata securi,
tantundem omnia sentiens quam si nulla sit
   usquam,
talis iste meus stupor nil uidet, nihil audit,
ipse qui sit, utrum sit an non sit—id quoque
   nescit.…

He's got a wife, a girl that's lush with
   youthful growth,
tenderer than a tiny baby kid, a girl you'd
   watch with
greater care than your ripest, darkest grapes.
   Well, all
the fun she wants, she takes. He lets her,
   doesn't give a hoot.
Doesn't bestir himself on his own account,
   lies like an
alder log left hamstrung in a ditch by a
   Ligurian axeman,
no more perception of what's going on than if
   it didn't exist.
He does not see, the stolid lump, he does not
   hear,
who he is he doesn't know, or whether he's
   alive at all.…

The tone is by conventional standards frankly amoral, despite the presence of scandalized morality. But it is an amorality devoid of cynicism. And in place of conventional morality the poem imposes its own moral perspective, according to which a man who shows no concern whether his pretty young wife is playing fast and loose is a fool—not because he lets himself be deceived, but because his sense of values is false; the point is made, rather more bluntly, with regard to Lesbia's husband in 'Poem 85'.

The frisky young wife of 'Poem 17' is a mere giovan principiante among married woman. Very different, in age, experience and the quality of the pity one feels for her, is the battered moecha of 'Poem 41':

Ameana puella defututa
tote milia me decem poposcit,
ista turpiculo puella naso,
decoctoris amica Formiani.
propinqui, quibus est puella curae,
amicos medicosque conuocate:
non est sane puella, nec rogare
qualis sit soles aes imaginosum.

Ameana's a girl who's fucked about a lot
but ten cool thousand's what she's quoted me—
That girl with the rather horrid nose,
friend of the bankrupt from Formiae.
Relations, on you the care devolves:
call friends and doctors into conference.
This girl is sick; she checks her looks no
   more
against reflection-crowded mirror made of
   bronze.

We're not told that Ameana was married. But she sounds more like Lesbia than Varus' unnamed girl friend in 'Poem 10', or Flavius' in 'Poem 6'—a puella, not a scortum, who has a family that can be appealed to to look after her (rather as Clodia's interests were supposed to be looked after, we gather from Cicero, by a family council after the death of her husband). Indeed a comparison with Lesbia is made specifically in the second Ameana poem (43. 7 tecum Lesbia nostra comparatur?)

The type seems to have been not uncommon. Take Sallust's Sempronia. Sallust singles her out as a case among many—one example of the kind of woman Catiline gathered round him in the sixties. Society women who had acquired expensive tastes, and then, as they got older, ran into debt:

He is said to have attached to himself at that time large numbers of men from all classes and conditions of society. There were some women, too, who had begun by prostituting themselves to meet their enormous expenses, and had then run heavily into debt when age had limited their earning power without limiting their appetite for luxury.…

Sempronia was doubtless more interesting than most. She was certainly a woman of exceptional talents:

Among these was Sempronia.… Of good family, attractive, with a husband and children, she had little to complain of; knowledgeable about literature, both Greek and Latin, able to play the lyre and to dance more elegantly than is indispensable to a woman of virtue, she was in many ways cut out for a life of luxury… It would he hard to decide which worried her less, money or reputation. Her appetite for sex was such that she took the initiative with men more often than they with her.… And yet she had a brain that was far from negligible: she could write poetry, raise a laugh, adapt her style of conversation so that it was modest, suggestive, or quite shameless, while never failing to display considerable wit, and even charm.…

Then there is poor Rufa ('Poem 59'),

Bononiensis Rufa Rufulum fellat,
uxor Meneni, saepe quam in sepulcretis
uidistis ipso rapere de rogo cenam,
cum deuolutum ex igne prosequens panem
ab semiraso tunderetur ustore.

Rufa from Bologna sucks her Rufulus.
Menenius' wife, I mean. You've seen her
   often
in the graveyards, as she grabs up for dinner
a lump of bread tumbling from the burning
   pyre,
the half-shaved slave in charge laying into
   her.

The women we meet in the background poems in the group 'I-60' vary a good deal, then, though most are types we recognize. We mustn't expect, however, we can synthesize a Lesbia out of any or all of them. Of the nine (leaving out of account, that is, the pessimae puellae of 'Poem 55'—and Lesbia), the gay young wife of 'Poem 17' and poor Rufa are explicitly described as adultresses; the former is treated with good-natured indulgence—it is her husband who is reproached for not taking proper care of her; as for Rufa, she is treated with the detached contempt appropriate to this vignette from the seamy side of life. The rest—Flavius' girl friend in 'Poem 6', Varus' girl friend in 'Poem 10', Ipsitilla ('Poem 32'—-another Sempronia, or perhaps an Orestilla?), Caecilius' girl friend in 'Poem 35', Ameana (Poems '41' and '43'), Septimius' girl friend in 'Poem 45' and the unnamed teenager (one presumes) in 'Poem 56'—are set in an ambience which is stripped of all moral censure, explicit or implicit. The ridicule levelled at them implies on the contrary acceptance by Catullus. His only real complaint is that his contemporaries are tasteless enough to compare Ameana with Lesbia. His attitude in Poems '1-60', if more gaily, more exuberantly expressed, is very; much that of those epigrams from the Greek Anthology which J. W. Mackail collected under the apt title 'The human comedy'. Catullus, we feel, isn't greatly concerned to have the world otherwise.

The Sick Society

The elegiac epigrams are a different matter. The picture we get from the poems about men and their mistresses in Poems '69-116' is that of a sick society, drawn by an artist whose pen is sharpened by an anger and a contempt which have blunted his sense of fun, or the inherently absurd in the human situation. 'Poem 86' (Quintia formosa est multis…), which reverts to the theme of 'Poem 43' (Salue, nec minimo puella naso), is perhaps alone in recalling the tone of '1-60'.

In a sense we are closer to what many would call realism. The basis is the smart world of which we see something in the pages of Sallust's Catiline, but on a smaller scale, closer to the kind of everyday gossip which Caelius Rufus reports to Cicero during the latter's absence from Rome as governor of Cilicia:

No news, really, unless you want an account of the following—as no doubt you will. Young Cornificius has become engaged to Orestilla's daughter. Paulla Valeria, Triarius' sister, filed a petition for divorce (with no reasons stated) on the very day her husband was due back from his province; she's going to marry D. Brutus.… Many incredible things like this have happened while you've been away. Servius Ocella wouldn't have got anybody to believe he had it in him to be an adulterer, if he hadn't been caught red-handed twice in the space of three days. You will want to know where they caught him. The answer, I'm afraid, is: in the last place I could have wished. I leave it to you to get the details from others: I rather like the idea of General Cicero having to ask everybody he writes to who the lady was with whom so and so was caught in flagrante delicto.…

But though we find here an urbanity to match that of Catullus (granted the more diffuse form of a prose letter), Caelius' pleasure in witty gossip is superficial and petty by comparison with the incisive scorn we find in Catullus.

Those singled out for the most savage ridicule are more often men than women. Take Aemilius. He is the subject of quite the most hair-raisingly lurid imagery in the whole of Catullus (97. 5-8):

    os dentis sesquipedalis,
gingiuas uero ploxeni habet ueteris,
praeterea rictum qualem diffissus in aestu
meientis mulae cunnus habere soles…

Catullus is remarkably savage about the laughter of those whom he dislikes—Egnatius in 'Poem 39', the moecha putida of 'Poem 42.' But nowhere else is there anything like this. Yet this crude creature is a successful lecher who can preen himself at conquest after conquest (9 hic futuit multas et se facit esse uenustum)—whereas the girls flee from Rufus in distaste (69. 7–8):

hunc metuunt omnes, neque mirum: nam mala
   ualde est
bestia, nec quicum bella puella cubet. …

All the girls are scared of him—and no
   wonder: the
beast's a real stinker, not one any smart girl'd
   go to bed with.

By comparison with 'Poe m 97', 'Poem 56', The Chain Reaction (O rem ridiculam, Cato, et iocosam.…), which must by any conventional criterion be regarded as the most obscene poem in Catullus, is a gay, light-hearted jeu d'esprit. 'Poem 97' is meant to wound.

Or take Gallus. His forte is for recherche match-making. The fool ('Poem 78'):

Gallus habet fratres, quorum est lepidissima
   coniunx
alterius, lepidus filius alterius.
Gallus homo est bellus: nam dulces iungit
   amores,
cum puero ut bello bella puella cubes.
Gallus homo est stultus, nec se uidet esse
   maritum,
qui patruns patrui monstret adulterium.

Gallus has two brothers. One has an utterly
   charming
wife, the other's got a charming son.
Gallus is a terrific lad. In love's pleasures he
   has joined
the two, sending charming girl to bed with
   charming boy.
Gallus is a fool. That he's married he has
   forgotten, when
showing how to make an uncle cuckold,
   though he's an uncle too.

The first couplet sketches in the basic data; the second presents Gallus' view of himself (Gallus homo est bellus) and the evidence in support of that view; the third couplet offers a contradictory assessment (Gallus homo est stultus). The sting is in the tail, and it is directed at Gallus. But at the same time the epigram passes judgment on a society in which this sort of thing is reckoned no more than good, clean fun, and in which Gallus' clever scheme can be confidently relied upon to rebound on himself.

The women involved are more often ingenuae, it seems, than scortilla. Only two (always excepting Lesbia) are mentioned by name (but then only three are mentioned by name in '1-60'). Maecilia is a pathetic figure, almost, by comparison with Ameana or Ipsitilla; she is closer to Rufa perhaps ('Poem 113'):

Consule Pompeio primum duo, Cinna, solebant
Maeciliam: facto consule nunc iterum
manserunt duo, sed creuerunt milia in unum
singula. fecundum semen adulterio.

In Pompey's first consulship, Cinna, Maecilia
   had
two lovers. Now he's consul for a second
   time,
the two remain, but behind each stand a
   thousand
more who've come of age: fertile business,
   fornication!

Pompey's first consulship was in 70 B.C.; he was made consul for the second time in January 55 B.C. (the elections were late). Maecilia was still going strong, it appears.

Aufillena seems more typical of the rest who are left unnamed. She occurs herself in three different epigrams. In 'Poem 110' she is perhaps on the threshold of her career as a demi-mondaine and has to be told she can't have it both ways ('Poem 110'):

Aufillena, bonae semper laudantur amicae:
accipinnt pretium quae facere instituunt.
tu, quod promisti mihi quod mentita inimica
   es,
quod nec das et fers saepe, facis facinus.
aut facere ingenuae est, aut non promisse
   pudicae,
Aufillena, fuit: sed data corripere
fraudando officiis, plus quam meretricis auarae est.
quae sese toto corpore prostituit.

It's the good girl friends, Aufillena, who're
   always praised,
the ones who collect the cash and deliver the
   goods. You
promised me, and broke your promise, so
  you're no friend of mine. Always collecting,
   never giving—it's against the rules.
Decent girls do what they promise, respectable
   girls don't
make promises, Aufillena. But collecting and
   then breaking
the bargain, even a greedy whore who stops at
   nothing
where whoring is concerned doesn't do that.

Catullus' moral instruction is hardly disinterested, and perhaps all that has occurred is that he has failed to persuade Aufillena to exercise her woman's right to change her lover. For in 'Poem 100' it is Quintius (Catullus' devoted friend of 'Poem 82') who is passionately in love with Aufillena. But then Aufillena reappears in 'Poem 111' as the woman who will stop at nothing, not even incest with an uncle.

These poems are full of riddles. Is Rufus' rival in 'Poem 71' perhaps that disgusting Don Juan, Aemilius, of 'Poem 97'? Or did Catullus not intend us to recall Poems '69' and '71' when we come to stinker Aemilius in 'Poem 97'? I suspect he did hope we would remember the fastidiousness the puellae displayed towards Rufus and compare it with their lack of fastidiousness when faced with the charms of Aemilius. We must know when to stop, however. Anybody who feels that, by putting two and two together, he can discover who has been sleeping with whom is almost certainly wasting his time.

Take Aufillena. We learn from 'Poem 111' that she is a married woman and a mother (even if her children are not her husband's). Whether the uncle is her uncle or her children's uncle (as well as their father) is not clear. He might in the latter case be the brother of that Aufillena to whom (as we learn from 'Poem 100') Caelius is passionately devoted, while Quintius is madly in love with the sister. Are we to connect all this with the Gellius poems? For we learn from Poems '74' and '88' that Gellius is cuckolding an uncle. Is Gellius' uncle's wife the lepidissima coniunx of 'Poem 78'? Apparently not, since her lover should be called Gallus, not Gellius (he is the lepidus filius of Gallus' brother). The answer, plainly, to questions such as these is that there aren't answers, or aren't answers any more. Catullus and his friends usually knew, no doubt, even if there were occasions when one friend chose to leave another to speculate, as Caelius leaves Cicero to speculate about who had recently been taken in flagrante delicto with whom, 'in the last place I could have wished'. It is not the poet's purpose, however, to arouse the curiosity of his more permanent audience about details. We are being presented with a picture of a society in which such goings on went on. Catullus' object is satire, not gossip.

'Poems 74' (Gellius audierat patruum obiurgare solere.…), or '78' (Gallus habet fratres …), or even '90' (Nascatur magus…), taken individually, might suggest Catullus was on the side of the uncle-cuckolders. Set against these the savage condemnation of Gellius in Poems '88', '89' and '91' and that impression is quickly dispelled; the final condemnation is the stronger if Catullus has not pointed the moral at every turn. Set against all these the Lesbia poems in '69-116', which run like a deep current of personal anguish through the superficial, perverted antics of those around Catullus and his mistress. That the background picture is intended to be that of a society in which relationships had become hopelessly depraved becomes hard to doubt.

IV. The Homosexual Poems

From the poems about the urbani and their mistresses it is only natural that we should turn to the homosexual poems, though I shall argue caution in assessing their contribution to the picture of contemporary society. Their role seems to me rather as light relief. For two reasons.

The first is that the things talked of or threatened so casually, if not exactly beyond accomplishment or belief, are sufficiently so to constitute a warning against taking what is talked of and threatened au pied de la lettre. As Michael Holroyd remarked of Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes:

The frankness which Lytton and Keynes exchanged in their letters from this time onwards seems, at a first reading, to uncover a state of affairs within Cambridge which would have produced curiosity in Gomorrah and caused the inhabitants of Sodom to sit up and take note.

The second is the evident tone of these poems, as it seems to me, and the assumptions that tone invites, or inhibits.

First, let us take stock. The homosexual poems are easily identified. There are eleven of them (nine in '1-60', two in '69-116')—not counting the insinuations thrown out in passing in Poems '25', '28', '33', '47' and '57'. Seven are built round the character of Juventius, an arrogant youth in whom Catullus proclaims a passionate, unrequited interest. Three of these, Poems '16' (Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo…), '48' (Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuuenti …) and '99' (Surripui tibi, dum ludis, mellite Iuuentu …) deal with nothing more wicked than kisses, though it is true that 'Poem 16', which is a follow-up of 'Poem 48', might cause some to blink if there were any real indication that the strong words in the opening and closing lines were meant to be taken at their face value. Poems '24' (O quiflosculus es Iuuentiorum….) and '81' (Nemone in tanto potuit populo esse, Iuuenti … ?) form a pair, both addressed to Juventius: the theme of the former is 'I wish you'd have nothing more to do with that beggar Furius'; the theme of the latter is 'I wish you'd have nothing more to do with that so and so from Pisaurum'. 'Poem 81' is a little less light-hearted perhaps in tone than the rest of the Juventius poems. The four which remain are a mixed bag. 'Poem 56' (Orem ridiculam, Cato, et iocosam…) is a frankly outrageous fantasy, which ranks only technically as a homosexual poem: the joke announced to Cato seems to lie in boasting that the youngster who is so anxious to prove he is a man receives in his turn from Catullus an appropriately virile and witty equivalent of the traditional punishment meted out to those caught in flagrante delicto (described in some detail at the end of 'Poem 15'). 'Poem 106' is an amusing trifle:

cum puero bello praeconem qui uidet esse,
quid credat, nisi se uendere discupere?

If one sees a pretty boy with an auctioneer in
   tow,
one can only suppose the boy is very keen to
   sell himself.

'Poem 100' involves Caelius in this world of the wittily outrageous, along with Aufillena's brother (100. 1-4):

Caelius Aufillenum et Quintius Aufillenam
flos Veronensum depereunt iuuenum,
hic fratrem, ille sororem. hoc est, quod dicitur,
  
   illud
fraternum uere dulce sodalicium.…

My story is of Caelius and Quintius, cream of
   Verona's
youth: the one's madly in love with
   Aufillenus, the
other with Aufillenus' sister. That's what they
   mean
when they talk of true, sweet brotherly
   solidarity.…

The eleventh, 'Poem 80' (Quid dicam, Gelli, quare rosea ista labella … ?), is a lampoon directed at Gellius in which Catullus reports rumours accounting for Gellius' unwonted pallor, and proceeds to fling out an accusation and to name names.

These eleven poems raise two major problems of interpretation. One is the problem of obscenity, the other is the problem involved in fixing the level of intent. The two are related of course.

The problem of obscenity isn't confined to the homosexual poems. It arises also in connexion with something like half a dozen other poems: certainly Poems '32' (Ipsitilla) and '97' (Aemilius); probably Poems '33' (Vibennius pere et fils) and '71' (Rufus), if not 'Poem 25' (Thallus); also, I suppose, Poems '6' (Flavius and his girl friend) and '37' (the salax taberna); perhaps, if one is to be very squeamish, Poems '23' (the peculiarities of Furius' alimentary system in lines 18-23) and '39' (Egnatius' peculiar habits of oral hygiene). Poems '11' (the final dismissal of Lesbia) and '58' (Caeli, Lesbia nostra …) are clearly a different case, but it can't be denied that the theme of 'Poem 58' is obscene, or that one passage of 'Poem 11' (lines 17-20) can reasonably be held to be obscene. Altogether, quite a lot.

The conventional standards of the time did not differ greatly from ours in the matter of obscene words. The question is discussed by Cicero in a letter to his friend L. Papirius Paetus, a learned and witty Epicurean (as well as a wealthy man). He acknowledges that the Stoics held one should call a spade a spade (placet Stoicis, suo quamque rem nomine appellare). This isn't Cicero's view, however, and he proceeds to discuss a large number of particular words and expressions. Again in the De Officiis he draws the line at words which are admittedly obscene: he had no objection to innuendo—indeed the point of a witty remark (including many of Cicero's own sallies) often turns on what one can succeed in implying, while avoiding actual uerborum obscoenitas. Here intention comes into the matter: to be witty without being offensive, while it is first of all a matter of style (one has to be elegant, urbane, ingenious, clever) is also a matter of attitude; one has to make the sally with detachment (remisso animo)—one mustn't, for example, be activated by anger or malice. Cicero had made the same point more than ten years before in his defence of Caelius Rufus, while answering allegations that Caelius had been involved in homosexual attachments. On that occasion Cicero affected to be tolerant: he had in mind to give as good as he received—before the trial is over he will have the court rocking with laughter at Clodia's expense, her more than sisterly affection for her brother included. Innuendoes of the kind which the prosecution are making such a fuss about, said Cicero, are not to be taken literally; it isn't as if a formal charge had been laid in court.

Our own permissive age is less disturbed either by plain speaking or by outrageous innuendo than Victorian England. Today only the very mealy-mouthed indeed would want to complain of obscenity when pressure of emotion causes Catullus to hurl out the isolated plain word or phrase in a poem whose intent is plainly serious, as in '11'. 17-20:

cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans uere, sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.…

Tell her to live with her lovers and be good
   riddance—
those three hundred lechers that share the
   embraces
of one who loves no man truly, but lets all
   time and again
screw themselves to bits.…

or 58.4-5:

nunc in quadriuiis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.

now on street corners and in back alleys
she peels Remus' generous descendants bare.

even though modern translators often miss or obscure the point, turning Catullus' plain, curt directness into the explicitly crude, often to produce something far more obscene than the original. Poems '56' and '97' go a good deal further, however. They are calculated provocations of those who let themselves be scandalized. The object is to achieve what Cicero in the De Officiis was to hold unforgivable—talking about the unmentionable in so many words (si rerum turpitudini adhibetur uerborum obscoenitas)—and get away with it by sheer exuberance (an irrepressible sense of fun), or elegance of form, or both.

We need not doubt that the persons talked about or addressed in the homosexual poems exist: if not all historically identifiable, they are too tightly enmeshed in the known facts of Catullus' life to be fictitious. To that extent, at least, the poems can't be dismissed as literary exercises in the Hellenistic manner. What then of the assertions, expressed or implied? To answer what Cicero answered in respect of Caelius—that this is the sort of thing that's always said about any young man who isn't positively repulsive to look at—seems to me to be dealing with the matter a little unsubtly. Cicero, being in court, could afford nothing short of categorical denial. Catullus' poems move in a world where clear-cut denials and outright rejections aren't called for in the same way. It may even be fun to lay oneself open to accusation—and then jump severely on those who are too simple-minded or too heavy-handed.

That at any rate seems the way to read Catullus' disclaimer in 'Poem 16':

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex uersiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.
nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est;
qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possum,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt mouere lumbos.
uos, quod milia multa basiorum
legistis, male me marem putatis?
pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo.

I'll bugger the pair of you, one way or
   another,
Aurelius you queer, you pansy Furius,
for jumping to the conclusion, just because
   my verses
are on the suggestive side, that I'm not quite
   nice.
A decent poet must himself be pure,
his verse is free from such an obligation.
In fact, it really can't have wit or charm,
unless it's on the suggestive side and not
   quite nice—
the sort in short that can raise an itch,
not just in boys, but in those shaggy types
whose loins are stiffened up, no action in
   them left.
Just because you read about kisses by the
   thousand,
do you suppose I haven't the makings of a
   man?
I'll bugger the pair of you, one way or
   another.

The poems on homosexual themes, Catullus argues in effect, display characteristic qualities of urbanitas, namely sal and lepos: they are inherently witty (they have sal) and witty also in the presentation of their ideas (they have lepos). Admittedly, they are a shade suggestive, verging on the indecent even (8 molliculi ac parum pudici) but the poet's confessions mustn't be taken as true confessions. Whatever their effect on those with dirty minds, they are essentially jeux d'esprit, poems that toy with things which border on fantasy. Ovid, Pliny and Martial were to make similar disclaimers—Pliny rather self-consciously, Martial disingenuously (he has no objection really to pandering to dirty minds), Ovid in accordance with his usual practice of special pleading. Catullus' disclaimer is more impressive: the key words and phrases are repeated with patient precision, in a way that reminds us of those elegiac epigrams in which he tries to put on record what went wrong: between him and Lesbia.

I don't think all the same we can dismiss the homosexual poems as just jeux d'esprit. Moreover, the common tendency to treat these poems as a few odd pieces that happened to get included in the collection along with other waifs and strays is inadmissible once we assume a planned collection. It is clear the homosexual poems have been grouped together with some care: seven of them (the Juventius poems) form a sequence as coherent as the Lesbia poems; four of these stand close together in the collection (Poems '15', '16', '21' and '24'), and these four are linked by a common name with two more poems (Poems '23' and '26'). There are too many of them, in short, and they hang together too closely, for them to be swept aside.

In this connexion, three elegies of Tibullus, all in the first book (I. 4, 1. 8 and 1. 9), are interesting. All are confessions, in different circumstances, of a homosexual attachment to a young man whom Tibullus calls Marathus. Along with the Juventius poems of Catullus, they form the main corpus of poems on homosexual themes in Latin. In the first, Tibullus poses to prospective lovers of boys as an authority on the subject—a variation on the familiar theme of the elegiac poet as an authority on love (praeceptor amoris). Indeed, Tibullus claims to have been instructed in the subject by Priapus himself, the scarecrow son of Bacchus and Venus (represented by Tibullus as the paederast par excellence)—and then wrily confesses that Titius, with whom in mind he underwent this course of instruction, is in love with … his wife. One might think that Tibullus might have learnt the fickleness of boyish love, but, no, he is as hopelessly infatuated as ever, this time with Marathus (I. 4. 81-2):

heu, heu, quam Marathus lento me torques
   amore!
deficiunt artes, deficiuntque doli.…

Alas! the slow torture of love which Marathus
   subjects me to:
my skill deserts me, guile deserts me too.…

In Elegy 1. 8 it appears that Marathus in his turn, if not' contemplating marriage, is at any rate taking an active interest in the opposite sex. On his behalf Tibullus urges a lady named Pholoe, with whom Marathus is represented as passionately in love, not to show herself uncooperative—a young lover (Marathus isn't yet bearded) is worth his weight in gold (1. 8. 31-2):

carior est auro iuuenis cui leuia fulgent
ora nec amplexus aspera barba terit …

Pholoe will regret it if she lets such an opportunity slip, and then it will be too late. In the third elegy (1. 9), Marathus is apparently making progress with Pholoe (assuming, as seems natural, that she is the mistress referred to in lines 3950), but Tibullus now regrets the help he gave Marathus, because he has lost the boy—not to the girl, but to another man, a wealthy admirer (the homosexual counterpart of the diues amator of Elegy I. 5), whose wife and sister, Tibullus hopes (comforting himself with the thought), will vie with one another in shameless living.

The three elegies appear to tell a connected story, the hypothesis of which can be fairly easily pieced together. We don't have to take the story very seriously. The poems seem to me to offer more than a hint of the way the elegiac tradition will be reshaped in Ovid's hands, into the kind of love poetry whose object is to entertain us and to scandalize us at the same time. It is part of the charm of these three elegies that we feel none of the usual embarrassment about Tibullus' sincerity; they are much better constructed, moreover, than Tibullus can usually manage. And yet a number of verbal echoes reinforce the feeling that we are surprisingly close to Catullus.

Tibullus invites us to take for granted, as something that calls for no special explanation, that a young man (Marathus is described as a puer in 1. 8. 27 and as a iuuenis in 1. 8. 31) can have a mistress and still be (or perhaps in the case of Titius, who is now married, very recently have ceased to be) the puer delicatus of a male lover. This can hardly be pure fantasy. If the notion were completely outlandish, or one that his contemporaries would have found completely repulsive, Tibullus would scarcely have written these confessions, or mock confessions. True, Tibullus represents his passion for Marathus as relatively innocent, if too intense for us to describe it as purely Platonic, but he is comparing himself with the man who has stolen Marathus from him, and in such cases, if your rival's motives are ex hypothesi suspect, your own are above suspicion.

These three elegies of Tibullus seem to me to be of considerable help in interpreting the homosexual poems of Catullus. They suggest the appropriate gloss to add to Catullus' molliculi ac parum pudici—themes that challenge conventional morality, without damning the man who writes about them in the eyes of those who are at all broadminded. More than that, the elegies suggest that the homosexual poems of Catullus and Tibullus correspond to attitudes in real life that are somewhat different from our own. They help too in making sense of 'Poem 63'. Attis had obviously been a puer delicatus (or would have been so regarded if his home had been Rome)—and one much courted at that (63.64-7):

ego gymnast fui flos; ego eram decus olei;
mihi ianuae frequentes, mihi limina tepida,
mihi floridis corollis redimita domus erat,
linquendum ubi esset orto mihi sole cubiculum.…

I was the flower of the gymnasium, the glory
   of the oil;
there were always crowds at the door, the step
   was still warm,
the house was encircled with garlands of
   flowers
when the sun rose and it was time for me to
   quit my bed.…

He reminds us of those young Athenians whose company Socrates in the dialogues of Plato finds so congenial. Attis' tragedy is that he is no Alcibiades. The poem seems to me really only to make sense if we take it as a study of a young man who, along with others, had found (to their horror, or their shame) that they could not make the transition society demanded from the role of puer delicatus to that of husband, or Don Juan (moechus) and who abandon civilized life for the wilds of Phrygia and there 'unman themselves through too great hatred of the goddess of love' (17 corpus euirastis Veneris nimio odio). Observe the references to Attis' appearance: he has 'snow white hands' (8 niueis manibus), 'slender fingers' (10 teneris digitis), 'rosy lips' (74 roseis labellis). They might be intended to suggest some miraculous change in Attis' appearance following his self-emasculation. But isn't it more likely they point to the sort of young man Attis was?

Catullus, in other words, offers us an ironic reinterpretation of the Attis legend, in line both with his technique of bringing legend up to date (as in the 'realistic' treatment of Ariadne on the beach in 'Poem 64') and with the role of 'Poem 63' in a collection of poems about love and contemporary society. In both cases we can easily suppose Catullus' insight into and his interest in the legend were sharpened by personal experience. Indeed it is tempting to regard Attis' flight to Phrygia as the symbol of Catullus' own expedition to Bithynia, to 'get away from it all'. We can imagine if we like that Attis' 'hatred of sex' (for that is what Veneris nimio odio really amounts to) was the result of a disastrous affair with a woman older and more experienced than himself, so long as we remember that this kind of package interpretation of a work of literature in terms of the writer's known (or supposed) personal experience isn't to be taken very seriously, and that the pursuit of correspondences between biographical fact and poetic fiction quickly leads us far away from literary criticism.

If we can grant, however, that 'Poem 63' makes sense as a poem about a young man who could not make the kind of transition from boy to man which Tibullus' Marathus was able to accomplish so easily, the banter of the Fescennina iocatio in the first marriage hymn also starts to make rather more sense (61. 119-43):

ne diu taceat procax
Fescennina iocatio,
nec nuces pueris neget
desertum domini audiens
  concubinus amorem.

'da nuces pueris, iners
concubine! satis diu
lusisti nucibus: lubes
iam seruire Talasio.
  concubine, nuces da.

sordebant tibi uilicae,
concubine, hodie atque heri:
nunc tuum cinerarius
tondet os. miser a miser
  concubine, nuces da.

diceris male te a tuis
unguentate glabris marite
abstinere, sed abstine.
io Hymen Hymenaee io,
  io Hymen Hymenaee.

scimus haec tibi quae licent
sola cognita, sed marito
ista non eadem licent,
io Hymen Hymenaee io,
  io Hymen Hymenaee'.…

No more holding back the teasing
Fescennine jesting, concubinus can't
refuse the boys their walnuts
now he hears his love for his
master has been rejected.

'Give the boys the nuts, you lazy
concubinus! You've played with nuts
for long enough: now it's fun
to be slave to the Marriage God.
Hand over the nuts, concubinus.

Farm-stewards' wives weren't good enough
for you, concubinus, yesterday and today.
Now the barber comes to shave
your cheeks. Poor, unhappy
concubinus, hand over the nuts.

O groom, all sleek with unguent, they'll say
you don't want to be separated from your
darling, but separated you must be.
Lo! Hymen Hymenaeus, lo!
Lo! Hymen Hymenaeus.

We know your secrets, nothing wrong
in what you did, but you're a husband now
and the same things would be wrong.
Lo! Hymen Hymenaeus, lo!
Lo! Hymen Hymenaeus'.…

First the concubinus is made the recipient of ribald banter (lines 12-33), then the groom (lines 134-43). The concubinus is a slave (122 domini, 127 seruire), a youngster to whom the groom has been devoted. The scattering of walnuts (used as playthings in children's games) during the wedding procession, like the ritual shaving of the concubinus' cheeks (lines 131-2) are symbols indicating the time has come to put childish things aside. The arch innuendoes addressed to the groom about his relationship with the boy were no doubt also part of the tradition of the Fescennina iocatio, though the origins of the form are ancient and obscure. We are not obliged to take the innuendoes very seriously: it is easy to think of innocent and practical reasons why a Roman bachelor of good family might keep a handsome young male slave as his personal servant; nor is it hard to imagine that the slave might occupy the same room as his master—as some kind of body-guard, for example. And if it was the custom, it is natural enough that the custom should be made the subject of more or less good natured speculation; natural enough, too, that the youngster should preen himself on his privileged position—and that he should be teased for behaving as though 'farm-stewards' wives were not good enough for the likes of him' (129 sordebant tibi uilicae); and no less natural that such a slave should be dismissed on his master's marriage. Equally the thing may have become by Catullus' time no more than a traditional part of the marriage procession, a symbolic renunciation of one way of life for another: there was perhaps a slave actually present to whom the role of concubinus was assigned for the duration of the ceremony.

If the insinuations didn't deal with things that were common and accepted, or which one could pretend were common and accepted, in a spirit of ironical make-believe and in a context where that spirit was felt to be called for and not liable, therefore, to be misinterpreted, they would surely have no place in a marriage hymn. The relationship between groom and concubinus seems to me, in short, instructively close to that Catullus boasts of between himself and Juventius—or affects to fear between Furius, or Aurelius, and Juventius. With the Juventius poems we come of course to a different literary tradition. But in neither case is it so very important to disentangle tradition and reality, to separate fantasy from fact: what is important is to recognize that elements of both are present.

A passionate attachment to a puer delicatus wasn't exactly something to boast about in all seriousness. The Juventius poems move in an area where confession easily expands into fantasy, in order to inhibit credulity, and in order to make it clear that the reader is being offered a demonstration of urbanitas, rather than true confession. The parallel with 'Poem 32' (Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla…) and Catullus' cool announcement of the feat of prowess he is contemplating is close. For the reader to suppose, in either case, that Catullus means exactly what he says is to betray a lack of urbanitas.

If one puts fantasy and make-believe aside, the Romans (like the Greeks, or rather more than the Greeks) clearly felt little sympathy for the dirty old man. It was the stock smear of politicians. Clearly too it was held shameful for young men to surrender to their importunities. But passionate relationships, so long as they remained relatively innocent, seem to have been extended something approaching tolerant approval. One feels a flirtation with an attractive boy was looked at in much the same light as flirtation with another man's wife: both involved the pursuit of forbidden fruit, and had therefore to be disapproved of, however indulgently in a society where both were common; as Ovid knew well, the fun of a seduction, or at any rate the part to boast about in verse, lies more in the pursuit than in the capture. Where the two cases differed was in the view taken of the man who went too far. Adultery was naturally disapproved of by husbands; stern penalties were provided by law, and presumably sometimes exacted. Society, however, was inclined to be on the side of the adulterer. One gets the impression that considerably less glamour attached to the role of the successful paederast.

Once a youngster passed from the age where he could be described as puer to the age where he is described as iuuenis or adolescens, it seems to have been understood that (as Catullus tells the young slave in the first marriage hymn) the time when he could expect to be the recipient of such attentions was over. It is of course an obvious stage in adolescence, and one often remarked on by the Romans, even if the word puer is occasionally applied (like puella and our 'boy' and 'girl') to those rather older. The risk then disappeared: once the youngster had assumed the toga uirilis he was reckoned a 'man among men'; Cicero insists on the point in defending Caelius, to disprove insinuations about his client's relationship with Catiline. He might have added, if the circumstances had been different (had he not been defending Caelius in court as a young man of unimpeachable character) that Caelius was old enough to start taking an interest in youngsters himself.

Professor Gordon Williams has put the problem of the level of intent in the Juventius poems in an interesting form:

Three famous poems of Catullus in the same metre are all about the arithmetic of lovers' kisses: two are to Lesbia ('5' and '7') and the third is to the boy Juventius ('48'). Each poem is epigrammatic in form and '48' is structurally the simplest, but it is impossible to give an account of the three poems by which '48' can be separated artistically from the other two. If the important fact about the Lesbia-poems in general is that Catullus' passion for her was so real, how could he write a poem like '48' without its appearing totally artificial?

Williams' question seems to me to be answered by 'Poem 16' (Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo…). The disclaimer is a poetic structure in its own right, a conceit built round the key words pedicabo and irrumabo. Indignant refutation of the innuendo of being a practicing paederast is expressed in the form of a threat of homosexual attack: the words pedicabo et irrumabo, that is to say, if used primarily in their colloquial sense (something like 'you can go to hell'), are put in a context in which the original meaning is drawn to the surface and exploited, even if the threat the words now express is hardly a practical possibility. Catullus' disclaimer underpins, I suggest, what should be our natural reaction to 'Poem 48' (and 'Poem 99'). The very brilliance and verve with which passion is flaunted demonstrates that what is being talked about is not passion deeply felt. It is not necessary (and, I think, not right) to seek to excuse these poems as exercises in Greek themes. They are exercises rather in urbanitas, all the wittier for being outrageous and because they baffle the pilosi. 'Poem 48' is an elegantly frivolous demonstration of the contrapuntal possibilities of soberly measured syntax and wildly passionate statement; 'Poem 99' (after 'Poem 76', the longest and most elegantly worded of the elegiac pieces in '69-16') is a little like an English sixteenth-century lyric such as Wyatt's 'Alas! madame, for stelyug of a kysse':

Alas madame for stelyng of a kysse,
Have I somuch your mynd then offended?
Have I then done so grevously amysse,
That by no means it may be amended?
Then revenge you: and the next way is this:
An othr kysse shall have my lyffe endid.
For to my mowth the first my hert did suck,
The next shall clene oute of my brest it pluck.

It is true some of the things one wants to say about the Juventius poems apply with equal force to Poems '5' and '8'. They too are marked by an urbane, bantering irony. There is much in them too that is little more than wishful thinking. But the tone and attitude of Poems '5' and '7' are surely quite dissimilar. If emotion is held throughout under firm intellectual control, the emotion is real and unmistakable, it provides a justification for the wit: in Poems '48' and '99' wit is its own justification.

Poems '48' and '99' are to be lined up with poems such as Poems '6' (Flaui, delicias tuas Catullo…) or '32' (Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla…). Poems '5' and '7' show the same form at a level of intent that was, I think, quite unprecedented in Roman poetry. We are dealing no longer with ideas Catullus found it fun to toy with: we are dealing with things which were carried to their proper, logical conclusion—the possession of Lesbia as his mistress. There is a new earnestness: sentiment, pathos almost, take the place of flippant bravura. To fail to distinguish between Poems '5' and '7' and Poems '48' and '99' is carrying open-mindedness too far. We might as soon refuse to distinguish between Catullus and Ovid.