The Poems

by Catullus

Wine stains the verse; the curse of time obliterates the arrogant line.

His father was a citizen of Verona and apparently of sufficient eminence to entertain Julius Caesar in his house.

He constantly complains of being short of money, although he never seems wholly serious about this.

He displays an aversion – again, less than completely serious – for Caesar and various members of his faction.

It is based solely on the assumption that his love for Clodia was of the conventional type of romantic – i.e. ‘fatal’ – passion.

However, in a volume devoted to the interpretation of his poetry, such findings should not be allowed to assume too great an importance: their true position is that of footnotes for the archaeologically curious.

Perhaps from Cicero’s point of view she was ridiculous. He was certainly ill-equipped, temperamentally and as a man, to understand a woman of her sort.

Whether or not he succeeded in destroying her, he certainly seems to have silenced her, for it is curious that after the trial she is to all intents and purposes never heard of again.

Cicero’s Clodia leaves us with little sympathy for anyone who should be so foolish – or tasteless – as to fall in love with her.

Catullus may wish his experience at an end; he never regrets having had it.

Nor is it necessary to admit to a conventionally ‘romantic’ relationship to recognise that he speaks to her in an altogether different and more disturbing tone from that in which he addresses the other women in his poems. When I come to discuss the Attis (poem 63), I shall try to show that it was precisely her forceful and sexually dominating character that attracted him. Which was exactly what repelled Cicero.

The answer, I believe, lies in the peculiar and not uncommon vice of the well-born, the rich and the secure: the desire for low-life, poverty and insecurity.

She would not be the first well-brought-up young, or not so young, woman who has gone and stood on the street corners for kicks, not quite knowing herself how serious she was.

We gather that the followers of the old-fashioned tradition of Roman epic were not popular with the ‘new poets’; that long-windedness was to be avoided, and anything pompous, stilted or affected.

Life, we feel, is more haphazard than most biographers or historians would like it to appear.

And yet one of the strongest impressions left from a reading of the dozen or so poems mentioned above is that Catullus, and the other writers with whom he mixed, felt themselves united, in an almost arrogant manner, for certain things in poetry, and against others, and this seems to me stronger evidence than Cicero’s.

The exact nature of his debt to each is a matter of dispute. In general terms, however, it is safe to say that he drew his ability to convey grandeur (the Aegeus passage in poem 64) from the language of epic and tragedy; that he guessed at the uses to which colloquialism and realism might be put from the comico-satiric tradition; and that it was in the last, the somewhat precious form of the love epigram, that he saw the opportunity for original development. But a poet’s greatness rests largely on the extent to which he is able to effect a synthesis of preceding traditions while producing something that has not been achieved before.

In his poetry, for the first time, grandeur is heightened by unexpected realism.

As for his own epigrams, he confined these, for the most part, to elegiacs and, in so doing, made the brittleness of the epigrammatic technique, once a limitation of the poetic sensibility, an end in itself, so that his most vitriolic fantasies become disembodied and intellectualised:

But the most important thing Catullus does for the Alexandrian Greek epigram is to make it personal.

But the ‘new poets’ applied these Alexandrian principles and techniques to a very un-Alexandrian situation.

Nothing – or little – is accidental in Catullus, least of all the subject matter of a translated poem.

As though this were not enough, Catullus also manages to tell us what the golden age once meant in terms of human happiness and what the future held in terms of human distress.

In the last three lines, Catullus prays to Cybele to protect him from such desires; ‘goad others to rabid madness; keep your fury from my house’. The lines are spoken as though he has woken from a nightmare (the preceding ninety lines) and recognised, with horror, himself in the figure of the unfortunate Attis.

The absence of ‘guilt’ is matched by a similar absence of ‘spirituality’ – of anything that is not a straightforward satisfaction of desire.

In No, 72 he even compares his feelings for her with those of a father for his daughter: an attitude unique in Roman poetry.

His male drives found their outlet here, and the more disagreeable the news they could report, the more justification they provided for his invert fantasies.

It has nothing to do with the antipathy of discordant elements, but arises from the repulsion from which attraction draws its strength, each succeeding the other in the love-hate see-saw. The experience is, of course, that of the manic depressive. And the Attis, as is now generally accepted, is a document of that state.

There is immediacy and vitality and pathos and nobility. He riddles away with words, juggling them about, a dozen times in half as many lines:

The primitive is sometimes surprisingly near the surface. He has made his own mirror, not of life but of himself, and in this of course he is a Romantic.

may the Muse herself turn as tolerant an eye upon these songs in days to come.

you are invited to nip her finger you are coaxed into pecking sharply, if I could play with you her sparrow lifting like that my sorrow I should be eased

as the girl was of her virginity when the miniature apple, gold/undid her girl’s girdle – too long tied.

Who loves beauty veil her statues veil Venus her attendant Cupids

before you were a yacht you stood part of some wooded slope where the leaves speak continuously in sibilants together.

You are wrapped up with a whore to end all whores and ashamed to confess it.

Without more discretion your silence is pointless.

then was the time of love’s insouciance, your lust as her will matching.

Enough. Break. Catullus. Against the past.

In return, the distillation of Love’s essence take from me, or whatever’s more attractive or seductive than Love’s essence.

Parasites of our generation. Poets I blush for.

The devoted poet remains in his own fashion chaste his poems not necessarily so:

he responds precisely as though no woman were anywhere near him.

The fool hears nothing sees nothing apparently knows nothing (of himself included).

but when whom I love as honey, tastes your hunger your thirst – preserve yourself.

The envy of wits becomes at the touch of the Muses a bundle of gaucheries.…

and he likes nothing better fancies himself in the role of a poet…

whose strong teeth make short work of whatever you give them:

you’ve more than enough as it is – if you knew it.

Release my belongings from your glutinous clutches or those fleshy thighs those slug fingers may carry the acute inscriptions of the ‘cat’,