Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet. Daisy Dunn

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Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet - Daisy  Dunn


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when for the first time I put my tablet

      On my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me:

      ‘… poet, feed the sacrificial animal to be as fat

      As possible, but, dear fellow, the Muse to be slender.

      And I instruct you as follows, do not tread the path

      Which carriages pass over or drive your chariot

      Over others’ paths or a wide track, but along unworn

      Roads, even if you drive a narrower path.’

      (Prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia, Fragment 1.22–8)

      Catullus heeded his advice for brevity, ingenuity, variety, and polished erudition. In paying homage to Callimachus he risked treading his path, but determined to move away from translating his poetry and begin adapting merely its precepts to his own particular tongue. That way he would prove himself capable of walking outside the existing tramlines of Latin literature. He echoed Callimachus’ criticism of a poet called Antimachus, whose work was notoriously verbose.27 ‘Let the plebs rejoice in puffed-up Antimachus,’ Catullus wrote (Poem 95b), while the more concise works of Cinna and Callimachus were to be savoured by those who were learned enough to appreciate the tune of the cicadas over the braying of the ass.28

      When Catullus later attempted to write in a grand style reminiscent of epic, he would do so in the Callimachean manner of reducing greatness to a small compass, and making every word count. And so Poem 64, his Bedspread Poem, would both feature and become a rich tapestry of allusions to other poets’ works and traditions of myth, but woven to a pattern of his own invention. He would choose to use hexameters, a heavier metre than he used for many of his other poems, which gave longer works such as this a grand tone.

      Still, Cicero was just too aloof to appreciate his poetry. In another respect, he was too close to him. It was not just the urbanity or ‘Greekness’ of Catullus’ verse that offended him, but the provincial twang that he imposed upon it. Cicero was a new man from Arpinum, to Rome’s south; Catullus, though also nouveau riche in the eyes of the patricians, was a Gaul; both were outsiders. To Cicero’s ears, the northern tongue was abhorrent.29 It was normal for a writer to disguise his origins by sticking to standard forms, but Catullus’ voice was clearly transposed into some of his poems.

      The Gauls tended to keep their mouths open more often than the Romans as they spoke, causing one word to leak into another like a loudly dripping tap. Gaping vowels gave rise to strange inflections and distinctive dialogue, which was exceedingly difficult to lose.30 And Catullus was not minded to do so. The sheer languidness of the elided vowel lent itself perfectly to love. One of his most famous Latin lines, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus – ‘We should live … we should love’ (Poem 5) benefited from his dialect. In reading it, no one pronounced the ‘ia’ and ‘at’ or the ‘que’ and ‘ame’, but ran them together like this: ‘Lesbiatquamemus’. It sounded like a lover’s drawl.

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      Observe the couch at the heart of the palace,

      A fine seat for a goddess,

      Finished with ivory from India

      And spread with purple tinged with the rose-pink

      Dye of the murex fish.

      (Poem 64, lines 47–9)

      LANGUID SPEECH PROVED particularly helpful when Catullus was writing to woo, and he used it repeatedly in his poetry. He had learned early on that poetry had the potential both to incite and to restrain the act of love. Reading it tended to do the former, writing it the latter; but the outcome depended upon the quality of the verse. Write a good poem, and it might have been enough not to have followed his feelings through to fruition. Write too good a poem, and he risked driving himself mad with desire. It proved a lot harder to write a poem to remedy frustration than to write one for a lover. Amid the difficulties of sourcing solace in poetry, Catullus discovered increasingly that poems intended to satisfy his lust slipped easily into poems that incited him to act on it. In the hands of the person he loved, he always hoped that they might have the same effect.

      He decided to put this to the test. Clodia Metelli had been clouding his thoughts, making it impossible for him to think of anything else. Taking in his hands the poem he had written about watching her from under her husband’s nose, he made her a copy. He addressed it not to ‘Clodia’, but to ‘Lesbia’, establishing there and then an intellectual code for her real name. While ‘Lesbia’ meant ‘woman of Lesbos’, where Sappho was born, it also had the same number of syllables as ‘Clodia’. Both names provided him with one heavy and two short beats The Borough Press1

      Clodia must have been pleased, for she was more than just a muse waiting to be flattered with a Sapphic pseudonym, she was an ‘experienced poet of very many plays’.2 Cicero smirked when he called her that in court one day, hoping he could shift blame away from the man he was defending by characterising her as someone who was capable enough of composing charades to incriminate him. Clodia and his client, as time would tell, had history. But Cicero’s prejudice against her ready wit need not have reduced what he said to a fallacy. The poems Catullus composed for Lesbia might well have been touched by subtle reminiscences of what she once wrote, ghosts of Clodia the poet, of whom nothing else survives.

      Catullus had no issue with welcoming women poets into his circle, including one Cornificia whose ‘distinguished epigrams’ were still being read 400 years after she lived.3 An aristocratic female poet named Sulpicia wrote romantic verses some years later about her relationship with a lover, Cerinthus. She lamented the prospect of spending her birthday without him, and described the fever that coursed her veins. She wrote of her despair when her lover took her for granted, and told him that he would do better to turn his attentions to a whore than take liberties with her affections. While some of her poems survived, bundled together with those of a male poet, Tibullus, other female poets’ work did not. Had it not been for her name and marital status, or even for Catullus himself, Clodia Metelli might have erupted with just as much force on the literary scene. But there could never have been room for both Clodia and Lesbia.

      Even from the very start, there was a problem. Sappho had won eternal renown for her intellect, but Clodia was already married. She was not about to earn anything more than notoriety as the object of a non-aristocratic, indeed non-Roman, poet’s affections. As it was, her illustrious ancestor Appius Claudius had helped to oversee a law against marriage between blue-blood patricians and commoner plebeians. The ruling came under the Twelve Tables legislation, which magistrates drew up in the 450s BC after Greek examples. Though the intermarriage law had since been annulled, the lasting stigma that arose when one married someone who lacked an illustrious family tree was not always lost on their descendants.

      Catullus could not even quite decide what it was he liked about Clodia. He tried to define his reasons, but could only do so by comparing her with another woman, Quintia, who was something of a beauty:

      Quintia is beautiful by popular repute. To my mind she is

      Pale, tall, poised: these individual qualities I readily concede.

      But I deny her total beauty, for there is no charm,

      No grain of salt in so large a frame.

      Lesbia is beautiful since her beauty is total,

      And she has stolen every Venus from every woman.

      (Poem 86)

      He


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