[In the following essay, Fitzgerald develops "an erotics of Catullus's poetry, and especially the polymetrics, because of the fact that these poems are performances that take place in the context of a still self-conscious and developing conception of sophisticated, urban social behavior."]

When Lucretius says that the purpose of his poetry is to sweeten the bitter draught of a difficult but beneficial philosophy we tend to take him at his word, and have often set ourselves and others the task of showing how Lucretius goes about his purpose. Catullus' statement that his verses are successful (have sal and lepor) only if they can sexually arouse hairy men has not generated much in the way of research. Of the various possible reasons for this, one that we can eliminate is that the poem from which this statement comes has not been taken seriously as Catullan poetics. On the contrary, this poem ("16") has been used (I think wrongly) to show that Catullus distinguishes between his life and his poems, and that though the latter are molliculi ac parum pudici (8), he himself is not. Even if we do take Catullus to be making a distinction between what is proper (decet, 5) for the poet and what is proper for his versiculi, we should give some attention to the substance, as well as the fact, of the distinction. This means that we should consider the sense in which sexual provocation might be a factor in Catullan poetics, and it means first of all that we must look at the relation of poet to audience.

Of course, poem "16" is not a reflection on poetry that stands outside the practice itself, and what it says about the relation between poet and reader needs to be considered in the context of the poetic game that it is playing. In what follows I will be examining a group of poems ("1," "2," "15" and "16") that are connected insofar as, directly or indirectly, they put into play the relation between poet and reader in a sexual context. These are particularly important poems because they take us to the heart of that combination of social performance, risque sexuality and aesthetic sophistication that is the essence of Catullan poetics. To see these poems in relation to each other is to see a peculiarly Roman articulation of spheres that are to us distinct; one of the most intriguing aspects of the Catullan corpus is the way that Catullus explores the situation of being a poet as a new kind of social performance, and in these particular poems we can examine what we might call the erotics of that performance.

The first two poems present us with two delightful objects, almost toys: the lepidum novum libellum ("smart new little book," "1".1), with its smooth surfaces and the sparrow that is the deliciae of its mistress. Not only are these both, as I shall argue, erotic objects, but they are also part of a game that the poet is playing with his audience. Just as there is something ambiguous about the book in "1" (physical object or poetic work?) so there is an ambiguity about the sparrow, which may be an innocent pet or the vehicle of a sexual metaphor. There is in both poems a play with surface and depth that eroticizes our relation to these objects which are both offered and withdrawn, which both hide and reveal: the nugae might, after all, be something ("1".3-4) and Lesbia's play with the sparrow might be part of the narrative of a love affair; the poems take their character from the gesture with which these objects are presented to us. It is Catullus' focus on the dynamics of the relation between poet and audience, his exploration of the possibilities of this new kind of relation in the context of the Questionable, which is the category under which any performance falls in Roman culture, it is this that constitutes the distinctiveness of his poetics, and for which there is no equivalent among the Alexandrians.

My second pair of poems also consists of one that is explicitly about the relation between poet and readers ("16") and one that appears to be an episode from the erotic life of Catullus ("15"). In the former Furius and Aurelius are attacked for concluding that Catullus is effeminate from the evidence of all those kisses they have read about in his poetry. It is here that he retorts that his poetry only has the requisite charm (sal and lepor, "16".7) if it can excite hairy men. In poem "15" Catullus simultaneously commends the boy that is the object of his affections to Aurelius and warns him to keep his hands off. The violent phallic threats with which 15 ends and with which 16 both begins and ends reflect the Roman obsession with relations of dominance and subordination, an obsession that is amply attested by Catullus' poetry. In both cases Catullus has made himself vulnerable by virtue of what he has entrusted to Furius and Aurelius; the combination of entrusting and withholding in "15" recapitulates, as I shall argue, the giving and withholding that characterizes poem "1", but in a much more aggressive context. These poems raise the question of the relation between poet and reader from the standpoint of the poet's vulnerability, his lack of control over the transaction, and so provide the counterpart to poems "1" and "2", which speak from a position of confidence. That the vulnerability of the poet is expressed in relation to a phallic threat from other men has to do with the provocative performance that he stages as poet and with the culture's determination of the particular form of pleasure that he purveys as effeminate. Both here and in the case of poems "1" and "2" I will be considering the Aesthetic as a function of the positionality of agents in a transaction, for the aesthetic sphere is characterized by Catullus as one in which the positionality of agents is more ambiguous, more manipulable than it is in other spheres of the culture.

Poem "1" is the logical place to begin, for it must in some way be programmatic. To call this poem a dedication would be to smother the complexity of its gesture, for what Catullus does in this poem is to put the book into circulation, to give it to its readership, and the nature of the object is to a great extent constituted by the form of this gesture. The giving of the freshly completed book to Nepos is a complicated act because it stands at a nodal point between Nepos' earlier approval of Catullus' nugae and the reception of posterity:

quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
qualecumque; quod, (o) patrona virgo,
plus uno maneat perenne saeclo.

So have this little book for what
it's worth, and, O patron and virgin,
May it stay fresh for more than one
   generation.

The phrase habe tibi is, as Fordyce points out, "a regular phrase of Roman law in reference to the disposal of property," but both in the legal sense and in the colloquial sense which implies, as Fordyce puts it, "a certain indifference," there is often a contrast between what is given and what is retained. In this case, it is the same thing that is both given and retained (habe tibi … quod maneat), though maneat perenne means that it will not be Catullus who will keep what he has so casually given, but rather a posterity that transcends them both. There is a real connection between the lightness of Catullus' relation to his nugae and their continued freshness as aesthetic objects. Catullus keeps nothing, for the book goes on the one hand to anyone who can find something in these trifles and on the other to a posterity that continues to find them fresh. Nepos gets this attractive little book because he made something of the nugae, but then he can't get satisfaction because the virgin sees to it that it will remain fresh for future generations. The erotic aspect of the transaction becomes clear if we turn to the opening lines of the poem, where the newly completed book is described as arida modo pumice expolitum ("just smoothed with the dry pumice," "2"). The pumex has two uses in the literary sphere: to smooth the ends of the scroll in the final stages of the book's preparation and to erase and correct the work prior to publication. The first use of the pumex draws attention to the book's attractions and availability; the book becomes an erotic object, as Horace indicates when he berates his book of epistles for its eagerness to prostitute itself to the public:

Vertumnum lanumque, liber, spectare videris,
scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus
odisti clavis et grata sigilla pudico;

You seem, book, to look towards Janus and
   Vertumaus [bookseller's area],
Wanting to offer yourself smooth with the
   pumice of the Sosii [booksellers],
You shun keys and seals, which are welcome
   to the chaste.

Horace's pumice mundus plays on the fact that pumice was used as a depilatory and Catullus' pumice expolitum also associates the book's smart and appealing exterior with sexual attractiveness and availability. But this aspect of the book, its immediate appeal and, so to speak, consumability, is conveyed by the same words that also convey the labor of composition and the literary perfectionism implied by liberal use of the eraser, features of the book that ensure its continued life beyond this generation.

Modern commentators have tended to concentrate on showing how this poem is an Alexandrian or Neoteric literary manifesto: the lightness and modesty with which Catullus offers his book is all part of a display of allegiance to Alexandrian principles. This approach usually generates a language of surface and depth which says as much about modern scholarship as it does about the poem: this apparently light and unprepossessing poem conceals references to Alexandrian watchwords and aesthetic attitudes, and once these have been identified by the scholar, the poem reveals itself as a serious work of high art. The work of the scholar protects us from the poem's trivial surface. The conception of this poem as a coded and concealed masterpiece posing a riddle for the learned reader is compatible with much of what we know of the Alexandrians. But there is another dimension to the poem, which is more distinctively Roman, and that is its social gesture. The associations of words likepumex and expolitum in Latin are not only Alexandrian; smoothness and polish are connected in a literary context by the elder Seneca, who, when he says, Ite nunc et in istis vulsis atque expolitis et nusquam nisi in libidinibus viris quaerite oratores ("Go ahead, look for orators among those plucked exquisites, only men in their lust"), reminds us that these qualities have a dubious sexual connotation at Rome. Catullus' book has a teasing sexuality that is provocatively effeminate. What I am suggesting here is that Catullus is playing with the particularly complex relation between poet and reader(s) through the way he relates the giving of the book and the withholding of the book as a kind of teasing. The aesthetics of this poem is not one of surface and depth (Catullus professes an urbane indifference to the trivialities he offers Nepos, but finally reveals his sense of their true worth) or even of paradox (it takes the harsh application of dry pumice to make something that never dries up: perenne, 10), but rather of teasing.

Catullus teases Nepos with his book rather as Lesbia teases her sparrow with her finger in the next poem ("2".3-4), or perhaps as Catullus teases his readers with intimations of sex, only to turn the tables on them in the final lines, where once again virginity intervenes:

tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas
tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae
pernici aureolum fuisse malum
quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.

If I could play with you as she does
and lighten the gloomy troubles of my mind—
that is as pleasing to me as they say
was the golden apple to the swift-footed girl
which loosened her girdle, so long tied.

We are now told that the game with the passer is itself the consummation to be desired; it would be as pleasing to Catullus as the apple that brought the end of virginity to Atalanta, and in being as pleasing it denies us the untying of the knot, for the game that suggested sex now becomes its alternative or substitute. Like that "something" which Nepos saw in Catullus' nugae, but which immediately fades into the suave surface of the urbane tone, the sexuality of the passer, or those who play with it, never comes into focus. Catullus brings up the subject of intercourse only to hold it at a distance, leaving the game with the passer suggestive but ambiguous. The sexual innuendo is now transferred to Atalanta, whose virginal mind is no doubt incapable of understanding what we know about her reaction to the apple; so the impenetrable and teasing sophistication of Catullus offers us its own supplement, the penetrable, half-innocent mind of Atalanta, whose ambiguity we are in a position to observe knowingly. Of course, the poem I am describing is to be found in none of the modern texts of Catullus, for if we detach the puzzlingly "inappropriate" simile of Atalanta and the apple with which the poem ends in the manuscripts (and call it, say, "2b") then we have a poem that falls into line with one of the most common ways of thinking about Catullus: the trivial Lesbia plays with her sparrow and so assuages her desire for Catullus, which he wishes he could do himself, but being a man and a great poet, he feels more deeply than she. This truncated version of the poem provides a neat parallel to the usual interpretation of the dedication: just as Catullus writes nugae, but by virtue of the care he lavishes on them proves himself a dedicated and serious Alexandrian poet, so the intensity of his love for Lesbia transcends its rather trivial object. I doubt that editors would have been so impressed with the problems of the manuscript text of the end of poem "2" were they not so satisfied by the kind of reading made possible by detaching the last three lines.

If the reconstituted poem "2" ends not with a cri de coeur anticipating the serious Catullus of the later love poems ("8", "11" and the elegiacs), but with a teasing of the audience that exploits rather than transcends female sexuality, then how should we understand the relation between poems "1" and "2"? My interpretation of poem "1" has stressed its gesture, the interplay between giving and withholding, rather than its putative statement (a coded commitment to Alexandrian poetics), and the play with surface and depth rather than the layering of one on the other (an urbane pose on a proud claim to poetic achievement). Similarly, I see poem "2" as a teasing of the audience with intimations of sex and hints of a psychological and biographical background to Catullus' interest in Lesbia's play with the passer. The truncating of the poem by the editors provides a clear layering of surface and depth, so that the different relations of the characters to the game with the passer gives us a reassuring sense of what it is that allows us to say that the trivial is trivial.

In the same way that the gesture of poem "1" teases us with the notion that the nugae are something, without allowing us a clear separation between what is nugatory and what is something, so the address to the passer in 2 suggests that there is something behind this game only to leave us with suggestiveness. The nugatory is not a matter of a particular kind of content or even style; it is a form of game with the audience.

The detachment of Catullus from his booklnugae in relation to his audience has two sides: one which makes the book accessible and another which withdraws it; similarly, the teasing sexuality of the game with the passer ends up by splitting into the impenetrable mind of Catullus and the penetrable mind of Atalanta. It is the determination of Catullus to remain on the level of the suggestive, and not to resolve the literary and sexual foreplay with the passer, that maintains the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience; the male observer who shows us Lesbia at her play does not interpose his desire, instead he teases us to enter his mind (tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae) which eludes us as it offers us in exchange the virgin Atalanta. Catullus' non-consummatory desire with respect to Lesbia is the prerequisite for his flirtation with his readership. This is as true of the two basia poems that incur the suspicions of Furius and Aurelius as it is of poem "2".

As a transition to my next pair of Catullan poems, where the relation between reader and poet is embedded in the more anxious and violent context of sexual relations between men, I would like to consider a passage from one of Pliny's letters. Pliny was a great admirer of Catullus and published, evidently with considerable success, nugae in the Catullan style. Writing to Pontius, he explains how a serious man such as himself came to write hendecasyllabics. It happened that one summer morning he had read to him the work of Asinius Gallus in which the latter compares his father to Cicero. In this work there is an epigram of the great man to his slave Tiro in which Cicero complains that Tiro had reneged on his promise of some kisses. This sticks in Pliny's mind and when he retires for his midday nap and finds that he can't sleep he reflects on the fact that great orators enjoyed and respected this kind of poetry; not one to be left behind, Pliny tries his now unpracticed hand at writing verse himself and quickly sketches out an account of what it was that had inspired him to write (id ipsum, quod me ad scribendum sollicitaverat, his versibus exaravi). In these verses he describes how he came across the epigram of Cicero, notable for the same genius with which Cicero wrote his serious works and for showing that the minds of great men rejoice in humanis salibus multo varioque lepore. He then describes Cicero's epigram and concludes:

"cur post haec" inquam, "nostros celamus
   amores
nullumque in medium timidi damus atque
   fatemur
Tironisque dolos, Tironis nosse fugaces
blanditias et furta novas addentia flammas."

"After this," I said, "why should I conceal my
   loves
and be afraid to make my contribution and
   confess
that I know the tricks of Tiro and the teasing
flirtation and the cheats that add new flames."

This account of the beginning of the path that led Pliny to Catullan hendecasyllabics is itself clearly influenced by Catullus "50," which also describes how the poet came to be writing the present poem in a fit of insomnia brought on by his excitement with a day spent with his friend Calvus. The spirit of friendly competition in the writing of verse is common to both poems, for Catullus describes how he and Calvus, having agreed to be delicati, spent the day swapping verses, which caused Catullus to become inflamed with Calvus' lepor. The poems also share a homosexual theme, with Catullus describing his excitement in the language of love and Pliny confessing to his own homosexual experience. There is more to the homosexual element in these poems than the desire to appear sophisticated in the Greek fashion. When Pliny decides to jump on the bandwagon, he asks why he should conceal his love (or love poetry) and timidly avoid making his contribution (nullumque in medium timidi damus); he confesses that he too knows the tricks of a Tiro, the flirtation (fugaces blanditias) that causes new flames. The logic of the parallel with Cicero's epigram requires that Pliny be saying that he too has been tormented by a provocative and flirtatious boy, but the event that Pliny is describing in this poem, his decision to join in Cicero's lascivum … lusum, allows us to understand Pliny's statement that he knows Tiro's tricks as a statement of his own flirtatious abilities. To publish erotic poetry is to play a provocative game with one's audience which means adopting the position of the flirtatious Tiro. Pliny's response to Cicero is a kind of blow up of the game that Catullus and Calvus played, a quasi-erotic game of mutual provocation, with Catullus' tabellae for a bed (Hesterno, Licini, die otiosil multum lusimus in meis tabellis, "50". 1-2); Catullus says that he and Calvus had agreed to be delicatos, an adjective that spans the erotic and the aesthetic, but always implies effeminacy. In a sense it is the mark of the great man to feel himself superior enough to the attitudes of common society to be able to play at being the delicatus; Pliny here links himself with Cicero by joining in the game, and the game, like the playing of Catullus and Calvus, has to be questionable, risque; look at the extraordinary phrase he uses of the way his literary activity snowballs from the incident he has just described:

transii ad elegos; hos quoque non minus
   celeriter
explicui, addidi alios facilitate corruptus.

I moved on to elegies; these too I finished off
   quite as
swiftly; I added others, seduced by my own
   fluency/ease.

In poems "15" and "16" Catullus addresses directly the sexual connotations of his poetic teasing as they determine the power relations between poet and reader. These poems explore the poet's vulnerability: the homosexual content of the poems and the phallic nature of the threat presented by the reader indicate that the issue here is the positionality of reader and poet, an issue raised by the provocative role of the poet already explored in poems "1" and "2," and this provocation or teasing casts the poet in the role of the effeminate or subordinate.

The first of these poems concerns the threat posed by the penis of the addressee to whom the poet's boy is commended; it plays with the very Roman institution of commendation in the same kind of way that poem "1" played with legal language (habe tibi). To commend someone to somebody is both to draw attention to the commendee's qualities and to entrust that person to the would-be patron. A potential conflict arises when the commendee is an object of desire. Catullus commends himself and his love (meos amores, "15". 1) to Aurelius, but begs him to keep his hands off the boy. The twist in the commendation is that the boy is to be protected not from the usual external corrupting influences but from the voracious and indiscriminate penis of Aurelius himself. The basic gesture of this poem then is similar to that of poem "1," not only in the combination of giving and withholding, but also in the twist given to a Roman social ritual (the book is dedicated to Nepos, but the Muse is the patrona; the boy is commended to Aurelius, but it is Aurelius from whom the boy must be protected). When we consider that the fragment that precedes this poem is addressed to the readers of Catullus' verses, if any should address themselves to his ineptiae and not shrink from laying their hands on his work ("14b"), and that the poem that follows it, addressed to Furius and Aurelius, is directed against those who have misinterpreted his more risky verses, it appears that the problematic act of entrusting in this poem might also be about publication. Not only are the addressees of "15" and "16" the same, but the issue of pudicitia and castitas is also common, for in both cases Catullus is concerned to withhold from Aurelius (along with Furius in "15") some core of purity from what has been entrusted to them (compare castum and pudice in "15".4-5 to parum pudicum and castum in "16".4-5).

Catullus' use of an erotic framework to explore the anxieties and ironies of publication in "15" goes back to Theognis, who complains that although he has given Kyrnos wings of fame so that he will be present at all banquets, where he will lie on the lips of men, the boy deceives him with words (237-254 W). Theognis has made Kyrnos available to all except himself and is deceived by the very medium that he has so effectively used on Kyrnos' behalf. The same kind of paradox occurs in Callimachus' famous epigram which begins with his programmatic statement "I hate the cyclic poem," goes on to list other forms of the public (ta demosia) that he hates and then concludes: "Lysanie, you are beautiful, yes beautiful—but before the echo has spoken this clearly, someone says 'Another has you'. Here the erotic relation provides the same kind of ironic reflection on the poet's alienation from his own words and intentions as it does in Theognis' lines. The pun between kalos (beautiful) and allos (another) and the association of the echo with the words of another puts Callimachus' words, like his desires, in the public realm, contradicting the literary principles based on exclusivity; as soon as Callimachus moves from hate to love, from criticism to celebration, he finds himself in the world of ta demosia, where he cannot have what he wants: the beautiful boy belongs to another just as certain forms of literary beauty have already been claimed by other authors. Callimachus' sophisticated irony works through juxtaposition and parataxis. We do not know exactly how the final erotic couplet reflects on the foregoing; the two voices, the split between desire and power, the mocking echo, all suggest that these lines stand in an ironic relation to the definitive pronouncements that make up the rest of the poem, and that the poet's relation to ta demosia is complex: is it sour grapes or a realistic sense of the possible that prompts Callimachus' renunciation of the Public, in view of the fact that what he finds beautiful belongs to another? As in Theognis and Catullus the erotic relation dramatizes the alienation that comes with entering the public world of literature. Callimachus assumes that we don't need things spelled out for us, that this deadpan juxtaposition says it all to those who know, and so he includes us in that Olympian perspective of his so well described by Veyne (1988.18-19). For Catullus, the relation between poet and reader is the issue; in late republican Rome literature has not yet become the institution that it was for the librarians of Alexandria, and to write poetry is still a questionable social activity, so Catullus focuses not on his relation to tradition and to other poets, but to the reader. Catullus embeds his anxious irony in a particular social transaction, for he is interested in the peculiar nature of the contract between reader and poet.

Although the literary issues in these two poems are different, my comparison is warranted by the fact that Catullus recalls Callimachus' poem in his own. Callimachus equates his hatred of the cyclic poem to his dislike of the path that "bears the crowd this way and that" (hode kai hode, 2); Catullus tells Aurelius that he is not worried about the threat to his boy from the populace ("15".7-8):

istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati.

those who pass by on the street now this way
and now that, engaged in their own affairs.

Callimachus' path, the way of a debased literary convention that accommodates the masses, now contains the workaday Romans who present no threat to Catullus' boy, and the boy himself is derived from the flighty beloved (periphoiton eromenon) who features next in Callimachus' list of what he hates, another metaphor for the literary world he rejects. Catullus has changed the issue from the poet's relation to a public tradition to the poet's relation to the audience to whom a poem is entrusted, and he has cast this issue in terms of the very Roman institution of the commendatio. The drama or irony of the poem, though still a matter of the poet's paradoxical relation to the Public, is quite different from that of Callimachus' epigram because it is located in the peculiar dynamics of this act of (re)commendation or entrusting, where the usual distribution of roles has been turned upside down. The potential threat coming from others in the usual situation where an older man takes on the care of a boy is no longer operative, because the outsiders are here scornfully dismissed as those who mind their own business; it is instead Aurelius who, by virtue of his interest in what is being entrusted to him, is the potential threat.

But what is this threat in terms of the literary situation? In the following poem Catullus is defending his own pudicitia and castitas against imputations of effeminacy by Furius and Aurelius, who have drawn the wrong conclusions from the milia multa basiorum ("many thousands of kisses," "16".12) they have read of in his poetry. This pair features in one other poem of Catullus ("11"), where their long-winded protestations of friendship are answered with a request to take a short and unpleasant message to Lesbia. In "16" the duo appear as readers who have judged Catullus from his versiculi ("16".3), and again a problem arises from the fact that Catullus must entrust his words to them. Here Catullus is concerned with the power relations between poet and reader, beginning with the phallic threat that reverses the positions that Furius and Aurelius, as readers of Catullus' titillating verse, have adopted in relation to the poet, whom they have fixed as one who speaks in the style of a mollis. But Catullus, as performer, sees himself as one who turns his audience, however manly they might think themselves, into excitable pathics. His verses have sal and lepor only (8-11),

si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.

If they're a little soft and not quite straight,
and can incite a tingling, not in boys,
I say, but in these hairy types,
whose stiff flanks don't know how to
   undulate.

Catullus has cleverly given durus a meaning ("stiff/clumsy") that upsets the paradigm implied by Furius and Aurelius when they call Catullus mollis: the hairy types are not flexible enough for the undulations of the pathic, but Catullus, verse will still get them twitching. This puts his readers in rather a different position from that assumed by Furius and Aurelius, who conclude Catullus' effeminacy from his verses ("16".3-4).

Martial, Catullus' greatest imitator, plays a similar game with the relationship between poet and reader in a poem addressed to a certain Chrestillus ("11".90). Chrestillus wants Martial to imitate the rough style of the old poets, and he disapproves of poems molli quae limite currunt ("which move on a soft track," 1). Martial turns the tables on his critic's implication by concluding, after a review of the kind of poetry that Chrestillus likes, with the words dispeream nisi scis mentula quid sapiat ("damn me if you don't know the flavor of prick," 8). Depending on whether we take sapiat (tastes) as literal or metaphorical we will interpret Chrestillus' approval of the virility of the ancient poets in different ways, and this brings up the interesting question of how the reader is situated in relation to the poet and the poem. Furius and Aurelius are like Chrestillus in that they understand the words of Catullus as revealing an effeminacy that puts him in the feminine position with respect to his male readership; in an analogous way, Chrestillus adopts the masculine position in relation to Martial by comparing his poetry unfavorably to the "manly" kind that he, Chrestillus, admires. The two poets make a similar kind of move in response, which is to emphasize the need that the poetry serves for the reader: Chrestillus is turned on by the rough masculinity of ancient verse, and Catullus' risque verse titillates his readers, who find themselves reacting like pathics. It is not that the two poets hereby reveal the true nature of the poet-reader relationship, but rather that the fluid, sometimes metaphorical nature of the relationship allows them to play with positionality.

This kind of maneuvering reflects a general phenomenon in Roman social life, which is the obsessive concern with the position of one person relative to another in terms of power and obligation in any social transaction. The poetry of both Martial and Catullus is a particularly good example of this, for it emphasizes the transactional character of the poem, and of course in the case of Martial this is related to the fact that he is a dependent whose poetry is his means of livelihood. In Catullus the question of the relation between poet and reader is not colored so much by the complexities of dependency as by the new forms of urbanitas with its provocative social persona. It may be that the sophistication to which the members of Catullus' circle aspired acquired its cachet from being Greek, but the form it takes in Rome is determined by the fact that in its new home it is questionable. The Olympian assumption by Callimachus of a shared sophistication that need never itself become an issue is quite impossible at Rome, where the poet must negotiate the complicated implications of a word like delicatus. The juxtaposition of poems "15" and "16" in Catullus suggests that the issue of "16" is not Catullus' morals per se, but the kind of relationship that pertains between reader and poet in the context of this questionable sophistication.

But what is the role of the erotic in this poetics? In what sense does Catullus think of his basia poems as prurient, and what is the threat of Aurelius' penis? To address the latter question first, the problem with Aurelius' penis is that it is infesto pueris bonis malisque ("15". 10); Aurelius, voraciousness makes no distinctions, which is as bad a quality in a reader as in a lover. If we turn to poem "6," in many ways the reverse of "15," we can see the same situation with the roles reversed and the poet firmly in control. Here we find the secretive Flavius challenged by Catullus to reveal his new deliciae (lover and lovemaking, "6".1). Taunting Flavius that his silence can only mean that this new love of his betrays his lack of sophistication ("6".2;14), Catullus urges him to entrust his secret to the poet (15-17):

quare, quidquid habes boni malique,
dic nobis. volo te ac tuos amores
ad caelum lepido vocare versu.

So, whatever you have, good or bad,
tell me. I want to summon to divinity
you and your love with an elegant poem.

Here the nature of Flavius' love is immaterial to the elegant poet, who can produce lepor even out of the silence that betrays the ineptia of his friend. Just as the silence of Flavius has not protected him from being pilloried by his sophisticated friend, so his speech would have no control over the poet even if he were to reveal his love. In "15" we have the reverse of this situation, for it is the love of the poet that is threatened by the friend to whom it is entrusted. Between them these two poems reveal the two sides of the poem's isolation from real speech: on the one hand, the poet is all powerful because he speaks for others who are not allowed to speak for themselves, but on the other hand he must entrust his words to others, who may find it as much grist to their mill as he does the "material" that comes from the speech of others.

The omnivorous penis of Aurelius that threatens Catullus' boy is a symbol of the reader's power to use the poet as he will, to make what he wants of what the poet has entrusted to him. The phallic threats that end poem "15" and that enclose poem 16 are intended as retaliation, restoration of the balance of phallic power, which of course was the purpose of the punishment for adultery, rhaphanidosis, alluded to by the end of poem "15." In poem "16" Furius and Aurelius present a potential phallic threat to Catullus in that they have taken his versiculi molliculi as the speech of a mollis, just as they would in everyday speech, a failure of discrimination rather like Aurelius' sexual appetite. Catullus' reply that the poems only have sal and lepor if they excite the hairy types shifts the issue by giving a determination to the distinction boy/man that has to do with literary ambition rather than the poet's sexuality (7-11):

qui [sc. versiculi] tum denique habent salem
   ac leporem,
si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos.

The mollitia of Catullus' verses has to do with the fact that it is more difficult to excite men than boys, and therefore becomes an assertion of his poetic ambition rather than a revelation of his effeminacy. A comparison with the corresponding gesture in poem "15" will help to bring these lines into focus. When Catullus asks Aurelius to protect his boy he says (5-10):

conserves puerum mihi pudice,
non dico a populo-nihil veremur
istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati—
verum a te metuo tuoque pene
infesto pueris bonis malisque.

Preserve my boy modestly for me,
I don't mean from the crowd—I have no fear
of those on the street who pass this way and
   that
intent on their own affairs—
but from you (that's my fear) and your prick
gunning for boys good or bad.

The words non dico a populo (6) perform the same function as non dico pueris in the previous poem ("16".10), for the people who go back and forth on the highway are associated, via Callimachus, with the kind of literary enterprise Catullus rejects. The dismissal of these two groups (boys and the occupati) is a concomitant of Catullus' literary ambition and of the risk that he is undertaking with respect to Furius and Aurelius, his readers. Catullus' poetry involves playing with social positions and stances in a provocative way, and it is of the essence of the poetic in this connection that the relations between the agents are ambiguous.

The question we have to address now is that of the substance of the accusations of effeminacy made by Furius and Aurelius (male me marem putatis? "16".13). Evidently these accusations were provoked by reading poems "5" and "7." Poem "5" would seem to be the natural referent of milia multa basiorum ("16".12). It is a poem that has much in common with poem "2", in that the erotic is here associated with foreplay rather than consummation, for the thousands of kisses that constitute Catullus' demand on Lesbia and that seem to be leading to a climax ("and then … and then … and then …") take us only to a final confusion of kisses that slyly provokes the voyeur/reader ("5". 10-13),

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

then, when we've put together thousands,
we'll mix them up, so as not to know,
or so no evil man might envy us,
when he learns there are so many kisses.

Furius and Aurelius read Catullus' apparent lack of interest in "taking" Lesbia as a sign of effeminacy which puts them in a dominant position with respect to Catullus; his thousands of kisses have that non-purposive and playfully exquisite character associated with the delicatus.

The eroticism of "5" and "7," in which a non-climactic foreplay is connected with a teasing provocation of the audience is in sharp contrast to the deliciae of Flavius in the intervening poem; his silence leads Catullus to conclude that he loves some feverish whore (nescio quid febriculosil scorti diligis: hoc pudet fateri, "6".4-5). In fact, Flavius' silence hides nothing (13-14):

  non tam latera ecfututa pandas
ni tu quid facias ineptiarum.

  you wouldn't display such fucked-out loins
if you weren't up to something foolish.

The crudeness of Flavius' lovemaking (ecfututa) is associated with the obviousness of what is going on (pandas); everything about Flavius is blatant, even the squeaking of the bed. which sounds like an ineffective orator (10-11):

  tremulique quassa lecti
argutatio inambulatioque.

  the broken squeaking of the bed
and its pacing back and forth.

This poem that unmasks and speaks for Flavius, whose crude sexuality consigns him to a silence that is itself blatant (nequiquam tacitum cubile clamat, "the vainly silent couch cries out,"), is sandwiched between two poems in which extended foreplay is connected with a provocation of the audience that is a mixture of hiding and revealing. By contrast with Flavius in the central poem of this group, Catullus is telling his deliciae ("pleasures," "whims") to us, and unlike the blatantly phallic activity of Flavius, which would not admit of a very interesting telling anyway, they are both lepidae and elegantes (cf. "6".2). But this telling is erotic and provocative because, again by contrast with Flavius, Catullus is teasing.

In poem "7" Catullus responds to Lesbia's supposed question, apropos "5," of how many kisses will suffice him. The rather precious and very learned variant on the "numberless as the sands" topos with which he responds is an encore performance for those who want a reprise of poem "5"; it is a riddle that withholds its referent … while indulging us in exotic and witty periphrasis ("7".3-6):

quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum lovis inter aestuosi
et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum:

as many as the sands of Libya that lie
in silphium-bearing Cyrene
between the oracle of blazing Jupiter
and the sacred grave of Battus:

The poem plays with the desire of the audience to hear it again, as the lengthened and neologistic abstract form basiationes indicates. The innumerability topos is as much an expression of the fact that the audience can never quite be satisfied as it is of the boundlessness of Catullus' love for Lesbia. After the sands come the stars (8-9):

aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtivos hominum vident amores:

or as many as the constellations in the silent
   night
that watch the furtive loves of humans:

These stars, watching the lovers in the silent night, are of course the audience listening with bated breath to Catullus telling of his erotic life, and they find themselves representing the very impossibility of ever hearing the whole thing. Instead, they have the satisfaction of knowing what the four lines on the sands add up to: Callimachus (a native of Cyrene, who claimed descent from Battus).

In this group Catullus the poet remains firmly in control, whether he is frustrating the jealous and the curious whose interest he has piqued, as at the end of poems "5" and "7," or offering to make an elegant poem of Flavius' inelegant love (which is what he has already done). In poems "15" and "16" this command breaks down when the relation between reader and poet is seen from a different angle: Catullus entrusts his amores to the indiscriminate and rapacious sensibilities of Furius and Aurelius, who have no respect for the nature of the game that is being played and see Catullus as the performing cinaedus sexually subject to his audience. Of course, Catullus needs Furius and Aurelius to establish the riskiness of his performance, which depends on its being questionable. This poem is not a defense of poems "5" and "7," or of the aesthetic qualities they exhibit; still less is it a defense of the poet's morals based on a separation between art and life; rather it is a continuation and a filling in of the game between reader and poet.

To return to my opening question about the role of sexual stimulation in Catullus' poetics: to take this seriously we do not necessarily have to explain the relation between Catullus' verse and certain physical symptoms. As I have argued, poem "16" needs to be seen as part of a game opened up by the ambiguous and kaleidoscopic potential of the relation between poet, poem and reader. Both this concern with social transactions and positionality and the fact that the activity of the poet of versiculi falls in the category of the Questionable, a category which relies heavily on sexual metaphors, are peculiarly Roman aspects of Catullus' poetics. The ambiguities of the relations, gestures and transactions of the aesthetic sphere upset any secure sense of positionality, and it is positionality that is at stake in ancient sexuality. I have spoken several times of the need to develop an erotics of Catullus' poetry, and especially the polymetrics, because of the fact that these poems are performances that take place in the context of a still self-conscious and developing conception of sophisticated, urban social behavior. The language that conveys the values of the group of poets that is implied by Catullus' book reflects a concern for social attractiveness; it is language that often blurs the boundary between social and sexual attractiveness, and it is often language that in the Roman context is provocative, another category that is both social and sexual. We need to think more about what this poetry is doing and less about what it is expressing.