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204 BC: Cybele, the Great Mother, is carried to Rome
133 BC: Tiberius Gracchus becomes tribune
91–89 BC: The Social War (Italian allies demand Roman citizenship); Verona becomes a Roman colony
88 BC: Sulla becomes consul. Beginning of the wars with Mithridates, King of Pontus
80s BC: Civil war between Sulla and Marius
c.82 BC: Birth of Gaius Valerius Catullus
81 BC: Sulla is proclaimed dictator
78 BC: Death of Sulla
70s BC: Ongoing conflict between Rome and Mithridates
73 BC: Spartacus leads a slave revolt
71 BC: Crassus defeats Spartacus, Pompey pursues the stragglers
70 BC: Consulship of Pompey and Crassus
67 BC: Pompey vanquishes pirates at sea
66 BC: Pompey succeeds the general Lucullus in spearheading the wars against Mithridates
63: Suicide of Mithridates. Cicero becomes consul. Conspiracy of Catiline
62: Clodius infiltrates the Bona Dea festival
c.61 BC: Catullus moves to Rome
61 BC: Trial of Clodius. Caesar governorship in Further Spain. Pompey, now returned from the East, receives his third triumph
60 BC: Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius become consuls. Caesar returns from Spain
59 BC: Caesar, now part of a coalition (‘The First Triumvirate’) with Pompey and Crassus, becomes consul alongside Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. Death of Metellus Celer
58 BC: Start of Caesar’s Gallic War. Clodius is tribune. Cicero goes into exile. Ptolemy XII Auletes is driven from his throne
57 BC: Catullus goes to Bithynia. After a considerable battle for his recall, Cicero returns to Rome
56 BC: Catullus returns from Bithynia and visits Lake Garda. Trial of Caelius Rufus. The triumvirs hold summits to repair their coalition
55 BC: Pompey and Crassus become consuls again. Opening of the Theatre of Pompey. Caesar’s first invasion of Britain
54 BC: Cato becomes praetor. Crassus leaves for Syria. Caesar’s second invasion of Britain. Death of Pompey’s wife (Caesar’s daughter) Julia
53 BC: The Battle of Carrhae and death of Crassus
c.53 BC: Death of Gaius Valerius Catullus
52 BC: Death of Clodius
49 BC: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, sparking civil war
48 BC: Death of Pompey
44 BC: Death of Caesar
PROLOGUE (#ulink_4bf721f5-1d2e-5206-bab7-7ead61d627cc)
GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS had endured a difficult night in Rome: ‘Undone by passion I tossed and turned all over the bed.’ He had spent the evening drinking wine and composing poetry, and was far too stimulated to rest. He longed only to taste daylight and swap stanzas once more with his friend and fellow poet, a small man named Calvus. Poetry remains the insomniac’s gift.
Catullus was as familiar with what it was like to have another warm ‘his chilly limbs in the bed you left behind’, as he was with the bedchamber that bore the remnants of lust:
Steeped in flowers and the oil of Syrian olive,
Knackered and tattered, pillows everywhere,
Creaking and shaking,
The trembling bedstead shattered
(Poem 6)
He also knew what it was like to obsess over a bedspread. Even when he didn’t have the stirrings of passion and unfinished lines circling his mind, the poet was seldom at rest. Born in Verona around 82 BC, Catullus moved to Rome, and travelled the south border of the Black Sea, where men waded with fine fishing nets and built boats shaped like beans. He made his way to Rome’s countryside, and to his family’s second home on a peninsula of Lake Garda. The hundreds of poems he wrote across the course of his short life were as varied as the landscapes he wandered.
Catullus was Rome’s first lyric poet. He was also a conflicted man. At any one time he could hate and love, curse and censure, consider himself rich but call himself poor. While lending themselves perfectly to poetry, such extremes of emotion at times made his life unbearable. He wrote not only of the feelings that plagued his own mind, but of the way he felt about others, not least Julius Caesar, a man his father called a friend: in one particularly scabrous poem he described the politician and future dictator as little more than ‘a shameless, grasping gambler’.
One may ask why a collection of Latin poems from over two thousand years ago matters so much today. Catullus’ book is the earliest surviving poetry collection of its kind in Latin. Full of emotion, wit, and lurid insight into some of the key Roman personalities, it provides a rare and highly personal portrait of a life during one of the most critical moments in world history.
Catullus lived in some of the most uncertain and turbulent times Rome had ever known: the late Republic, before the emperors came to rule. Centuries earlier, kings had governed Rome until, as legend had it, the son of the haughty seventh ruler raped a woman named Lucretia, and her husband and his friend waged a war to destroy the monarchy forever. Its legacy lived on into the Republic, which was founded after the kings on the very principle that no one man should rule Rome again. Every year, the male citizens elected magistrates to govern their city under the guidance of the Senate. The political system was carefully calibrated to prevent power from falling into the hands of any one man, but the balance of power between Senate and individual magistrates had begun to swing increasingly in the magistrates’ favour, and they knew it.
So Catullus found himself surrounded by towering politicians: Pompey the Great, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Julius Caesar, who vied desperately for power over Rome and her empire, which was larger than it had ever been, and growing larger still. By the time Catullus was born, the Romans had made provinces of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; Spain, which they divided into two provinces, Nearer and Further; Transalpine Gaul, stretching across the south of France and north-east into Switzerland; Cisalpine Gaul, which encompassed northern Italy, including Catullus’ Verona; Macedonia; Asia (western Turkey), and extended their global rule through numerous allied states.
Ever inquisitive, Catullus cast his eye across this tremendous world map as well as the more insular world of Roman politics. One moment he would find himself recounting adventures at sea in breathless syllables; the next, describing a private dinner with friends; the next, weeping that his lover did not feel things as intensely as he.
Perhaps it is because our ideas about ancient poetry are so coloured by the awe-inspiring epics of Homer and their lofty themes of humanity that many of Catullus’ poems seem so surprising and immediate. While some of his poems are highly learned and erudite, others are mischievous, goatish, direct. With characteristic boldness, he requests a woman he loves to:
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred
Then another thousand, then a second hundred.
Then – don’t stop – another thousand, then a hundred …
(Poem 5)
In Latin these lines begin so abruptly – da, dein, deinde – it is as if we hear them with Catullus’ quickening heartbeat. I was seventeen when I first discovered them, and they made Catullus feel more alive to me than any other poet I knew. I have read them hundreds of times since, and they still have the same effect.
One of the reasons Catullus’ poems are still so readable I think is that they show that the people of his world were not always so very different from us. The characters he encounters and describes in the streets and bawdy inns of Italy call to mind the stock cast of a Roman comedy – or even a scene in late-night Soho – teeming with heartbroken lovers, drunken cavorting youths, old men pining for women a fraction of their age, money-grabbing brothel-keepers, mercenary meretrices (prostitutes), slaves who know too much.
Catullus’ immense skill as a poet lay in his ability to combine many literary genres in the Latin tongue, not just elements of comedy, but the clarity of Sappho, the celebrated female poet, the compact and erudite style of Hellenistic poets, and the wit of lewd graffiti in Rome, with themes as various as love, the writer’s life, and the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. The Roman province of Macedonia incorporated much of mainland Greece, and in Catullus’ day Greek culture had well and truly permeated Rome’s own.
While never enslaved to his Greek predecessors, when he wanted to be particularly learned, Catullus adapted their poetic ideas to convey them with new feeling. He forged new Latin words and was partial to diminutives (miselle passer – poor little sparrow; scortillum – little tart). He feverishly combined elegantly phrased sentiment with colloquialism and obscenity, unnerving the more serious Romans who believed that a jibe at one man’s sexual inadequacy was what high-spirited youths scribbled on walls and brandished in tense moments, not what educated writers preserved in fine papyrus scrolls. His work would therefore prove unsettling for some of the older generation, as well as important public figures such as Cicero, the great orator, who had rather conservative tastes.
Such readers in Rome were used to epic and chronicles and meandering excursus on the history that made Rome august. They had the patience to work through manual-like offerings on farming, if not to write them. Prior to Catullus, a cluster of poets, including the little-known Laevius and Valerius Aedituus, had tried to capture the liveliness of the Greek poets in Latin, but their attempts would not generally prove as successful as his; their names are obscure today as a result of the poor survival of their work. Catullus did not shirk sobriety, but framed it unexpectedly and with a finesse of the kind that many of his literary predecessors lacked.
The apparent simplicity of Catullus’ poetry often masks far greater, deeper sentiment and subtlety of thought. He helped to shape the genre of Latin love elegy by writing a sustained series of poems to a lover. Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus: all were influenced by his work. So Ovid, in a book of love elegies, confessed that he had a wandering eye and could not help but feel attracted to many different women: ‘I hate what I am but, though I long to, can’t fail to be what I hate.’
It is a striking line, but partly because it is a response to one of Catullus’ most remarkable poems which begins: ‘I hate and I love’ (Poem 85). The Latin love-poet Propertius, who was about thirty years younger than Catullus, pledged that his poetry would make the beauty of his mistress Cynthia most famous of all, ‘pace Catullus’.
Catullus remained a monumental figure of reference for the poets who sprang up over the decades following his death.
In his pithy observations of day-to-day life and bitter polemic against his enemies, Catullus also pre-empted the great satirists of the Roman Empire, particularly the writers Martial and Juvenal. He called his poetry nugae (‘ramblings’, or ‘sweet nothings’) partly out of false modesty, but with the understanding that the word also meant ‘mimes’.
Many of his poems offer vignettes, at once silent and resounding with the colourful characters he observed.
There are secrets and allusions in Catullus’ Latin which take some teasing out, but once found, throw Catullus’ poetry in a more dazzling light than one could ever have imagined. As soon as I realised this, I decided that I wanted to know Catullus, to read his work with the emotion with which it was written, to get as close as I could to this man who lived more than two thousand years ago. And so I began to write this book, which I hope will inspire others to discover, or rediscover, his exquisite poems.
There are very few surviving sources for Catullus’ life. Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his book of poetry. This may resemble a series of jumbled diary entries, describing episodes from his life, but Catullus wrote it for public consumption, and not necessarily as a faithful account. He addressed love poems to a certain ‘Lesbia’, for example, a woman he gave life to through his verse. Lesbia was a pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, the eldest sister of a wealthy and influential politician in Rome.
Of the 117 poems which survive in his collection, none bears a title. They are traditionally numbered according to the order in which they appeared in the earliest manuscripts, which is neither chronological nor entirely thematic, but hardly random either. Like a good music album, there is style in the progression and unexpected swing of one story to another, back and forth in time. It might have been a poet who established the poems’ order.
Catullus was much more than a love-poet. His poems to Lesbia form only a fraction of his book. The longest and most accomplished poem that survives, Poem 64, makes no explicit mention of her at all, focusing instead on a luxurious bedspread. I like to call it Catullus’ ‘Bedspread Poem’ because it contains as its centrepiece a long, digressive passage on the myths that adorned the wedding bedspread of one of Jason’s Argonauts. In it, Catullus set the themes of love and war against the backdrop of the myth of the Ages, a sequence of five eras against which writers of ancient Greece and Rome mapped their semi-mythical history.
The first of these eras was the Golden Age, an idyllic, Garden of Eden-like time when there was no work, no war, no sickness, no travel; the earth gave freely and amply of its own accord, and gods and men lived harmoniously. There followed an inferior Silver Age, which Jupiter, king of the gods, destroyed since its people were criminals who no longer offered sacrifice to the gods. A Bronze Age came about, dominated by warfare and weaponry. Its people destroyed each other. Then followed the Heroic Age, which offered a reprieve from the decline, a time of heroes descended from the gods themselves, warriors who fought in the Trojan War, and Jason and his Argonauts. When they died, an Iron Age arrived. It was the worst of the five eras, an age of anxiety, pain, hard work, and murder. The Iron Age myth was a fitting tribute to the grim realities of late Republican Rome.
The upheavals of the times contributed to the picture of decline that haunts a number of Catullus’ writings, particularly the Bedspread Poem. Matters in Rome had come to a head shortly before Catullus was born, when the optimates, politicians who championed the Senate’s authority, clashed with the populares, individuals who sought a more liberal, reforming approach to policy. Decades earlier, the Romans had established the province of Asia near Pontus, a Hellenised kingdom on the south coast of the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey. Not a little perturbed by the fact that the Romans had proceeded to fill the East with grasping tax-farmers, the king of Pontus, a Hellenised Iranian called Mithridates VI Eupator – who, like many ambitious men, liked to think that he was descended from Alexander the Great – embarked upon a land-grabbing mission.
Six years before Catullus’ birth, the Romans had begun to wage war against Mithridates. To head the campaign, the Senate elected an optimate, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose aristocratic roots, intense eyes, and complexion like a mulberry sprinkled with oatmeal marked him out as a man to be reckoned with.
His appointment to so prestigious a role proved enough to incense one of the most prominent populares of the day, a plebeian and darling of Rome’s army, Gaius Marius. Though little shy of seventy years old, Marius tried to seize control of the commission himself, but then Sulla marched determinedly on Rome with his forces. He discharged Marius and his men from the city, and hurried off to his war.
Although Catullus makes no explicit mention of such disturbances, his poetry contains echoes of some of the political events which danced upon the periphery of his poetic consciousness. The wars against Mithridates in the East, and conflict between politicians such as Marius and Sulla, cast a terrible shadow over his life. The death toll in these wars was enormous. In seeking victory over Mithridates, the Romans approached the king of Bithynia, a land between Pontus and Asia where hyacinths bowed beneath the breeze. Although they persuaded the Bithynian king to attack Mithridates’ territory, they were in no way equipped for the scale of Mithridates’ retaliation. Over 80,000 Romans and Italians fell in the ensuing conflicts. Mithridates took hold of a string of cities along the Black Sea coast, and soon practically the whole sweep of Black Sea shoreline from Heracleia in the west to Georgia and Lesser Armenia in the east formed part of his sprawling kingdom.
Shortly before Catullus was born, Sulla returned to Italy. He had made some bold forays in the wars, even sacking Athens, whose people Mithridates had cunningly enticed to his side, but it would be more than twenty years before the struggle was formally concluded.
Back in Rome, a state of emergency was declared as Marius’ embittered forces prepared to make war on Sulla’s returning army. Sulla was declared dictator in the interest of ‘settling the state’, but his solution made Italy less settled than ever before. Catullus grew up in a world where the names of Sulla’s perceived enemies were added to miserable lists in the Forum, their property snatched, their rights destroyed, their lives, too often, cut short. Sulla doubled the number of senators from 300 to 600, and robbed the tribunes, the plebeian politicians at the bottom of the political ladder, of their function.
The fallout was carried across Catullus’ native Gaul. Sulla gave up his dictatorship after two turbulent years, but then died, leaving Italy in despair and Rome’s business with Mithridates unfinished.
While Catullus was growing up, the three politicians who would come to be most prominent in Rome in his adult life, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, were steadily emerging out of this fraught scene. Crassus was one of Sulla’s former adherents. He came from a respectable family, but had lost several of his relatives and estates to Marius’ forces. He had everything to fight for, which might have explained why, when Catullus arrived in Rome, he found him desperate to become the richest man in all of Italy. He was charming, unscrupulous, incredibly well connected, and owed his name to his quelling of a slave revolt spearheaded by a gladiator named Spartacus. No sooner had the Senate appointed him to stem the sudden uprising than Crassus had crucified thousands of Spartacus’ men along the Appian Way – the now-blood-drenched road leading from Rome to Naples. Crassus proceeded thence to Rome’s top political office, the consulship, in 70 BC.
Elected alongside him that year was the son of a wealthy senator, a tough, rugged soldier; a man who thrived on ambition and conquest. His forehead was deeply furrowed and his face was fleshy, but his gaze was unmistakably determined. His name was Pompey, and thanks to his early successes in battle, he had earned the sobriquet ‘Magnus’ (‘the Great’).
Crassus knew precisely who he was: Pompey, another of Sulla’s subordinates, had fought on his side in the civil wars against Marius, then put down the stragglers from Spartacus’ revolt.
Although Catullus wrote about Pompey in a couple of poems, he did not capture him from Crassus’ perspective. Crassus could not help but look askance at the man who had won plaudits that he could only dream of. The greatest accolade a Roman could win for victories overseas was a triumph, and Pompey had by now won two. For all his efforts in the slave revolt, Crassus received merely an ovation, the next best thing. Nevertheless, Catullus was looking on as the two men proceeded to their shared consulship, during which they reinstated the powers of the tribunes, which Sulla had so shamefully diminished.
Succeeding Sulla in the wars against Mithridates of Pontus was the splendidly named Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who scored a number of impressive victories, but was dismissed before he could bring the wars to an absolute conclusion.
Enter Pompey, still high from his successes under Sulla and against Spartacus. He was singled out to succeed Lucullus in tackling the chief problems that plagued the world to Rome’s east. Mithridates was the obvious target, but to confront him, Pompey had first to rid the seas of pirates, who had already hindered Italy’s corn supply and kidnapped a number of her citizens, including Julius Caesar.
Caesar was a patrician from one of the older families. Unlike Pompey and Crassus, his seniors by six and fifteen years respectively, Caesar had found himself on the opposing end of Sulla’s regime. By marriage, he was the nephew of Gaius Marius, the popular politician against whom Sulla had engaged in civil war. Not only that, but he was married to the daughter of Marius’ colleague and successor, Cornelia. Wisely, given his patent allegiance, Caesar lay low during Sulla’s dictatorship, and completed part of his military service in Bithynia. He was then kidnapped by pirates, not far from Rhodes. When he was eventually released, he crucified his captors.
Having put the pirates to flight, Pompey skilfully led the Roman army in obliterating Mithridates’ forces. It was a difficult war and required great manpower, but Pompey saw the hostile king flee towards Colchis, a region that lay between the Black Sea and Caucasus mountains (in the territory of modern Georgia). Finally, in 63 BC, abandoned by his allies, usurped by his own son, Mithridates settled on suicide.
His kingdom, Pontus, fell to Rome. Catullus subsequently evoked it in his poetry. Pompey conquered a good number of Mithridates’ territories, and reduced his former ally, Armenia, to a state of dependency on Rome. Syria was among the places which slipped into Roman control.
It happened that in the midst of the wars, the king of Bithynia, Nicomedes IV, had bequeathed by agreement his land to Rome, too. Pompey’s eyes sparkled at the possibilities. Intent now on lining the south coast of the Black Sea with Roman provinces, he decided to join Pontus and Bithynia together to form one enormous new province.
In his mid-twenties, Catullus boarded a ship with a cohort of other young men in order to escape Rome for this very place. One needed to be a Roman citizen to join the prestigious cohort he did, which is a strong indication that Catullus’ father was a local governor or magistrate in Verona.
For while the Veronese remained eager to acquire Roman citizenship, for as long as Catullus lived, their magistrates could secure the honour for themselves and their families. Bithynia lay south of the Black Sea, which Jason and his Argonauts were said to have sailed over on their Heroic Age mission to steal the Golden Fleece. The map of Rome’s new provinces, I discovered, overlapped with that which inspired the imagery of Catullus’ verse.
In the pages that follow I retrace this journey and the life Catullus described in his poems, from Verona to Rome, from Bithynia to Lake Garda. I have worked from the ancient sources that survive to draw out the story Catullus described in his ‘little book’ – his libellus.
Catullus’ Bedspread, then, is my little book about Catullus and his life. It is, as far as possible, a life in the poet’s own words: Catullus’ journey as told through his carmina, his poems or ‘songs’, which I have translated from the Latin. I see this very much as a joint venture: Catullus provides the poetry; I offer something of the world that informed it. I use extracts from his Bedspread Poem as epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, in the manner of his poetry book – neither chronologically nor entirely haphazardly. If together he and I can bridge the distance that lies between us, then even the most labyrinthine of his poems should sing.
IN SEARCH OF CATULLUS (#ulink_ff094ce5-9d5c-500b-9bb2-7633e67c6485)
Since my fate and your determined virtue snatch you
Away from me against my will, though my tired eyes are
Not yet drunk with the dear shape of my son,
I shall not send you rejoicing with a happy heart
Or allow you to carry the signs of good fortune,
But first I shall free my heart of countless laments
(Poem 64, lines 218–24)
CATULLUS COULD HEAR his father in the dining room, conversing with Julius Caesar on the peculiarities of the world. He was used by now to travel-weary men arriving at his home, seeking soft cushions, pickled fish, and pork fattened on the acorns of Verona’s oak trees. As this one tucked into the feast laid out before him, he talked about the wonders of the Black Sea, savage Gauls, and Britons lining the chalk-white cliffs, remote and terrifying giants.
Catullus, who took more pleasure between the sheets than talking at the table with his father’s friends, stepped outside.
The rain was pounding the streets which streamed and steamed with sewage. The Adige river was flowing quickly on the lap-like curve that held the town. As a boy, Catullus had often crossed its waters and felt the chill they bore from the Alps. He remembered the evening he first witnessed a locked-out lover, sitting in a doorway here on a lowly street. The youth had been crying, trying in vain to write a poem to voice his lament. For some time, Catullus had stood there, watching. Poor boy, his buttocks aching with the damp cold of the doorstep. Would not the door have more to say than the inconsolable youth? The door belonged to the house of a love-poet called Caecilius. Catullus transcribed its words:
It’s not my fault (I hope to impress Caecilius, I am now in
His charge), although they say it is my fault
No one can honestly say I’ve done anything wrong.
