THE POEMS OF CATULLUS
by Derek Adams
Historical facts about this first century B.C. poet are scarce. Gaius Valerius Catullus has been described by some as Rome's greatest lyric poet, sensitive and elegant, by others as crude and obscene. I believe he wrote some of the best love poems the world has ever seen.
Now, where to start the story of this Roman poet. Thirteenth century Verona seems an unlikely place, but that is where we begin, in the wine cellar of a rich merchant.
A rolled-up manuscript was found in an old measuring jug, where it had lain forgotten and unread for over a thousand years. Almost 120 poems, from 2-line epigrams to 400 line mini-epics survived this journey through time, which is quite remarkable when you realise that of the work of his contemporaries, Biblicus, Cinna, Calvus and others, put together, barely three pages have remained intact. Unfortunately the original manuscript disappeared a few years after it was found, but not before at least three copies had been made.
The book itself is believed to have been edited and put together around 50 years after the death of Catullus. It has been suggested that the first 60 poems were originally published as one book - each of the long poems would have been published separately - and that the rest are a miscellaneous collection.
One of the main problems with getting to grips with Catullus is that everything gets to you secondhand, through translations and even if you can read Latin fluently, there are discrepancies between the five oldest copies of the poems. Yet despite all this Catullus thoughts and feelings hit home with amazing accuracy time after time.
Many writers have tried their hand at translating Catullus - Byron, Swift and Pound to name but three. Each writer injects a little of his own style into the translation, but the essential Catullus always shines through. This is because, in his poems, form is always the servant of emotion.
Perhaps I should point out here that Roman poetry did not rhyme, but was based on meter, the number of syllables in each line was strictly adhered to and the pattern formed by long and short syllables was all-important. Unfortunately, this skill of the poet is lost to us in translation to English and the translator has to try to compensate by putting the poem into rhyme or free verse as he sees fit.
At the time Catullus was writing, the popular form of poetry was long historical or mythological epics, on a par with Homer's Odessey or Illiad. Catullus however belonged to a movement that Cicero disparagingly called the Neoteri, the New Poets or Modernist Movement.
The New Poets were lead by a Veronese teacher and poet called Valerius Cato and were heavily influenced by an earlier Greek school of poetry known as the Alexandrians, especially the poems of Callimachus. Callimachus believed, "The quality of a poet should be judged not by the length or weightiness of a poem, but by the skill that went into making it". These sentiments are echoed by Catullus in his poems.
22. Suffenus known to us both as
a man of elegance, charming and witty
is also a poet who turns out
Lines by the million, such a pity
the well-known wit disappears, a goatherd
a rusty rustic stands in his place.
36. Discontinue launching these trucacious
squibs -
burn script, blase paper into the fire
you rigmarole verse, uncouth, banal
Volusian sheets, shit-sodden chronicle.
Volusius of Padua wrote in the old epic style despised by the New Poets. He was famous for his history of Rome in verse.
95. Cinna's Smyrna shall be read by white
haired generations.
The Annals of Volusius will wilt by the banks of the Padua,
occasionally a limp wrapping for mackerel.
Cinna's lapidary relics are to Catullus taste:
let the public plump for the fustian of Antimachus.
Antimachus was a 6th century B.C. Greek, whose work in his own time was rated second only to that of Homer. The poet Cinna was a close friend of Catullus and is the same one that appears in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. He was killed, as in the play, when he was mistaken for one of the conspirators in the assassination of Caesar. Helvius Cinna, like Catullus and Cato came from the north of Italy or cisalpine Gaul as it was then known. Although they were living and writing in Rome nearly all the New Poets had this northern provincial background.
Another of the New Poets was Licinus Calvus, the orator and college of Cicero. Catullus writes:
50. The other day we spent Calvus,at a loose
end
flexing our poetics.
Delectable twin poets, swapping verses,
testing form and cadence, fishing
for images in wine and wit.
I left you late, came home still burning with
your brilliance, your invention.
Another of the New Poets, Cornificus, who was a friend of both Catullus and Cicero, was evidently highly regarded as a poet by Catullus.
38. Ah, Cornificus, a word from you would cure
everything,
though more full of tears than a line from Simonides.
Simonides was a 6th century B.C. Greek lyric poet perhaps best known for his epitaph for the Spartan dead at Thermopylai, although most of his poetry seems to have been of an equally unhappy nature, for example:
As she lay dying in her dear-mother' arms,
Gorgo wept and whispered her last words
"Stay with my father,
and on a better day bear him a second daughter
who will care for you when you are old".
Now having looked at the literary climate in which Catullus was writing, let us take a look at the man himself. As I said earlier, solid historical facts are few and far between, so we have to piece his story together as best we can with internal evidence from his poems.
According to the Chronicle of St. Jerome, Catullus was born in 87 B.C. and died at the age of thirty, but as Catullus mentions Caesar s invasion of Britain in two of his poems, this puts the date of his death as late as 54 B.C. He was born in Verona, where his father was an important and influential man, important enough for Caesar to stay with them whenever he visited Verona. The family also owned a villa at Sirmio on Lake Garda, which Catullus describes in poem 31:
So, Sirmio, with a woman s loveliness,gladly
echoing Garda's rippling lake laughter,
and laughing there, Catullus' house catching the brilliant
echoes.
Catullus had an older brother, who died presumably in civil or military service as he was buried somewhere in the Troad, which is the area around Troy. Catullus mourns his death in poems 65 and 68.
68. I have lost you, my brother
and your death has ended the spring season
of my happiness, our house is buried with you
and buried the laughter that you taught me.
There are no thoughts of love nor of poems in my head
since you died.
Poem 68 was written from Verona, where Catullus had returned to his family home on the news of his brother's death. In it he goes on to talk of Rome as his home where he has lived for many years. In poem 101 Catullus describes a visit to his brother's grave.
101. Through many foreign lands and over many
seas
I have travelled
arriving at this unhappy place, brother
to pay my last respects at your grave.
At last I honour you
bestowing offerings and futile words
upon your ashes.
Alas, fate has separated you and I
poor brother, stolen from life.
And now here am I
sadly leaving offerings
in the age-old custom of our parents.
Accept these gifts of mine
along with a brother's tears
which will flow for all time.
Hail and farewell, brother.
This poem was almost certainly written when Catullus and his friend Cinna accompanied C. Memmius Gemellus to Bithynia, where Gemellus was the Governor in
57 B.C. Bithynia was a Roman province on the south west shores of the Black Sea. Gemellus was a patron of Catullus and was also one of the New Poets, although Catullus claims not to have made any money out of this trip.
10. Neither locals, praetors, nor their aides
make money,
that palm-greasings out,that Memmius our praetor,
greased his aides elsewhere.
Catullus had, however, enough money to buy his own boat to return home in.
4. My bean pod boat you see here
in your waters, you saw the new oar-blades first flash,
thence through the impetuous seas, carrying her owner.
Catullus returned to Rome via the villa at Sirmio.
31. Apple of islands, Sirmio,and bright
peninsulas,set
in our soft-flowing lakes or in the folds of ocean,
with what delight delivered, safe and sound,
from Thynia, from Bithynia
you flash incredibly upon the darling eye.
What happier thought than to dissolve the mind cares
the limbs from sojourning,
and to accept the down from one's own bed
under one's own roof,held so long at heart...
that one moment paying for all the rest.
To sail to Sirmio, Catullus would have had to have his boat transported over land to Lake Garda. Yet in poem 28 he still insists, Catullus when, a praetor's aide,his cash-books showed successive losses never gain..
In this last poem and in poem 10, Catullus speaks of a homosexual relationship with Memmius Gemellus. Now although the Romans would look on such a relationship as no different to a heterosexual one, I think these two poems were written with Catullus' tongue firmly in his cheek, as these poems would be performed before Rome's in-crowd, probably in front of Memmius himself (much to his embarassment). The fact that Catullus and Memmius may have been lovers is not improbable as Catullus had other homosexual affairs, such as with Juventias to whom he wrote several poems.
48. If continuously I could kiss your honeyed
eye, Juventius,
To kiss continuous three hundred thousand times or more
and see a future filled with a bountiful harvest.
A cornfield, each grain an eager kiss.
Poems 24, 81 and 99 tell of this love affair. In poem 15 he warns Aurelius, an old friend from Verona, to keep away from his love - this boy of mine A warning obviously ignored, for in poem 21 Catullus writes somewhat jokingly:
21. Aurelius would openly stuff whom I love,
always with him
laughing with him 'attached'' to his flanks
putting various tricks there to the test.
Again this would have been performed to the amusement of the fashionable circle of Roman society, to whom all three would have been known, but in both poems you can feel a certain underlying seriousness. Catullus was very much a performance poet 'singing for his supper , as is evident in poem 13:
I Catullus, promise you
wine and wit
and all the laughter of the table
should you provide
whatever food you're able.
Catullus would be a popular guest at dinner parties where he would regail his audience with risque anecdotes such as poem 56:
A matter for mirth, Cato and a smile
Just now I found a young boy stuffing his girl,
I rose, naturally, and (with a nod to Venus)
fell and transfixed him there
with a good stiff prick, like his own.
Or comment on daily life and common gossip in Rome:
106. When an auctioneer and a pretty boy are
seen, alone
It is perfectly clear who is selling and who is buying.
59. Meneius wife, Bolonese bred
the red head who sucks the red head
forever found at meal times
round the cemetery,
feasting off the funeral pyre
catching red hot bread
that rolls from the fire
and sooner or later
catching blows to the head
from the outraged, half-shaved cremator.
And of course, just like today, politicians were fair game for satire.
52. Drop dead, Catullus, lie right down where
you are and die.
That blister Nonnius occupies a magistrate's chair;
Vatinius commits perjury - and collects a consulate.
Drop dead, Catullus, just drop right down (and die).
Even Caesar found he was not beyond the reach of catullus' sharp tongue.
93. Utter indifference to your welfare, Caesar,
is matched only by ignorance of who you are.
Caesar s chief engineer during his campaign in Gaul was Mamurra, who was also a close friend and adviser. Cicero in his letters suggests that much of Mamurra's wealth was dishonestly obtained. Catullus seems to have delighted in lampooning him, sometimes using the nickname Formianus as he originated from Formia, other times he calls him 'Mentula , which probably best translates as John Thomas .
95. Stuffing John Thomas naturally stuffs with
his John Thomas;
the proverb says, the meat stews in its own gravy.
57. Caesar Mamurra
A peerless pair of brazen buggers,
both tarred with the same brush
Suetonius writes, After Caesar had said that Catullus had fixed such a stain on his character in the verses on Mamurra as could never be wiped out , he wrote to Catullus begged his pardon and invited him to supper the same day, and continued to take up lodging with Catullus father occasionally, as he had been accustomed to do.
43. Oh elegant whore-
you are I believe the mistress of the hellrake Formianus.
And the province calls you beautiful;
they set you beside my Lesbia.
O generation witless and uncouth.
This last poem brings us to Lesbia. Lesbia weaves her way through the works of Catullus, inspiring his best love poems and his most bitter.
85. I hate and I love. And if you ask me how,
I do not know: I only feel it, and I'm torn in two.
Lesbia's influence on the New Poets can not be under-rated. Firstly Catullus loved her, loved her as would love no other during his lifetime.
87. No woman could be so much loved
or loved as truly, as my darling Lesbia.
Nor ever a bond so faithful or love
in everyway as great, be found
as mine in you.
The love elegy was known in Roman literature before Catullus wrote of Lesbia. He took the dour, mournful elegies of the Greeks and fused them with the immediacy and strength of his feelings for Lesbia, to produce a new form of verse. These lyrical love poems were so original and exciting at the time that a second wave of New Poets, during the Augustan period took to using them almost exclusively.
Propertius first book was filled with poems about his mistress Cynthia, Tibullus wrote of Delia and of the prostitute Nemesis, Ovid succumbed to Catullus influence and produced a book entitled Amores . All three acknowledge Catullus the scholar poet' in their poems. Propertius wrote, These are the themes on which Catullus wrote. Whose Lesbia won more fame than Helen.. Helen, of course, being Helen of Troy. Who could not be inspired by poems such as this about the death of Lesbia's pet sparrow.
3. Who loves beauty, veil her statues
veil Venus, her attendant cupids
Lesbia's plaything
Lesbia's sparrow is dead
dearer to her than her own two eyes
sweeter than honey.
Lesbia s other influence on the New Poets was perhaps more important at the time. Although you would not guess from the last poem, the 'young girl' who has lost her sparrow was a powerful woman in Rome. Lesbia was really Clodia Metteli, wife of Metellus Celer, an eminent politician in the Senatorial party and at one time Governor of Northern Italy.
In poem 79 Catullus mentions Lesbia's brother P. Clodius Pulcher, who was a close associate of Caesar. To be in Clodia's social circle was to be someone in fashionable Rome and the New Poets found their way into Clodia s circle. In fact, Catullus was not the only one of them to find his way into Clodia's bed. This was something that Catullus had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with, as this extract from poem 11 shows:
11. I send Lesbia this valediction, succinctly
discourteous:
live with your three hundred lovers,
open your legs to them all (simultaneously)
- and that you, tart, wantonly crushed
as the passing plough-blade slashes the flower
at the field s edge.
Catullus relationships with Clodia seem to have been a stormy affair to say the least, the emotions expressed in his poems go up and down like a roller-coaster.
75. Reason blinded by sin, Lesbia,
Mind drowned in its own devotion-
Sink to what acts you dare
I can never cut this love.
107. Lesbia desired, restore yourself, longed
for, unlooked for
brought yourself back to me.
White day in the calendar, who happier than I?
92. Lesbia loads me night and day with her
curses
Catullus always on her lips
Yet I know that she loves me.
7. Curious to know how many kisses of your lips
might satisfy my lust for you, Lesbia
as many as the sky has stars at night
shining in quiet upon the furtive loves of mortal men.
37. Nine posts, five doors up the Clivus
Victoriae,
stands an unsavoury resort-
for she whom I once loved as no other
girl has been loved lives there-
respectable men swap places with dregs from the back streets.
She is open to all.
The Clavus Victoriae was one of the most exclusive, expensive streets in Rome and just happens to be where Clodia lived, a few doors from the great orator and lawyer Cicero, who gives us a very unflattering portrait of Clodia in his Pro Calio speech, in which he defended his protege Marcus Caelius, who was a friend of Catullus, against a charge of being an accomplice to murder in the Cataline conspiracy and of seducing Clodia Metelli, brought by her brother pulcher.
Cicero describes Clodia not only as a woman of loose morals and the host of wild and bawdy parties, but accuses her of incest with her brother and of being a public prostitute. Caelius was acquitted and Clodia disappeared from Roman society.
It has been suggested that in poem 49, Catullus thanks Cicero for his part in the acquittal of Marcus Caelius, though it seems unlikely to me that he would have thanked him for such a vicious onslaught on Clodia and her circle of friends.
49. Silver tongued among the sons of Rome-
Catullus worst of poets
sends Marcus Tullius his warmest thanks:
as much the least of poets
as he a prince of lawyers.
To me that reads like a disguised insult. The modesty of The worst of poets does not ring true with the style of the other poems, whereas the idea of "if you re a good lawyer then I m a bad poets does.
I have carefully avoided the longer poems of Catullus, because I think to touch on extracts would not do them justice. m ese poems need to be read in full as Catullus cleverly juggles plots and sub-plots. He weaves the narratives with techniques such as flashbacks, juxtapositions past, present and future.
In poem 68 for instance, he takes the death of Manlius wife, his friendship with Manlius when they were young, the death of his own brother, his affair with Lesbia and the story of the Trojan War and weaves them in and out of the poem until it seems that they merge into one story of love and loss.
Poem 66, sometimes referred to as The Lock of Berenice., is a translation from Callimachus and is the poem that inspired Pope to write The Rape of the Lock. But perhaps his masterpiece is poem 64, which in the space of 400 lines tells the story of Peleus (one of the Argonauts), his love and subsequent happy marriage to Thetis the mermaid. The poem also tells of the beginning of the golden age of Greece, with the story of Thesus and the Minotaur, and Ariadne s subsequent fatally unhappy marriage to Thesus. It also tells the story of Achilles and the Trojan Wars which signalled the end of the golden age. These three stories are brought together by the use of an embroidered coverlet on the marriage bed of Peleus and Thetis.
As I said at the beginning, this is a brief look at Catullus through his poems, whether it provides a true picture I cannot say, so I will leave the last word to Catullus, from poem 16.
16. You have dared deduce me from my poems
which are wanton and lack modesty...
The devoted poet remains in his own fashion chaste
his poems not necessarily so:
You read of those thousand kisses.
You deduced an effeminacy there.
You were wrong.
Copyright © Derek Adams