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

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It’s true what people tell you – blame the door … [line partly corrupt]

Whenever some crime is discovered

Everyone shouts at me: ‘Door, it’s your fault!’

(Poem 67)

The door was not weeping but lamenting, slammed shut and berated with every misfortune that had passed through it. Catullus captured in the pace of its speech all the urgency and forcefulness a man would expect from one whose words had been stifled for most of its lifetime. With its ear for gossip, the door went on to reveal that, before Caecilius was resident in the house, a ‘virgin’ had moved in and confided in her female slaves. ‘Virgin’, because it transpired that the scamp had a former father-in-law, who lay with her when she discovered his son’s ‘little sword dangling more flaccid than a delicate beet’. In Catullus’ poem, one image was layered upon another, contorting what was masculine, if small, into an effeminate and unedifying vegetable.

The so-called virgin came from fertile Brixia (Brescia), to Verona’s west. ‘Brixia beloved mother of my Verona,’ Catullus exclaimed, reflecting on the Gauls who had travelled between it and his home.

The Gauls and their many tribes were inclined like geese to migrate whenever the desire took them.

Lately, Gallic tribes had been flying through Transalpine Gaul, to Verona’s north, endangering Rome’s control over its provinces. So Caesar rested here, at Catullus’ father’s home, wearied by the Gallic War he was now waging. It was 55 BC.

Catullus had come back to Verona, where he reflected nostalgically upon his roots. It was a Roman colony now, but remained in his mind a place of Gauls and Etruscans.

While the sleeping fields of Brescia evoked his Gallic line, the summers he spent in his family villa on nearby Sirmio (Sirmione), an attractive peninsula on Lake Garda, tended to carry him back into the arms of his ancient ancestors. Whenever its waves shivered in the breeze, he would dream of the Etruscans, the great lords of Italy before the rise of the Romans, and their curious origins in faraway lands.

They had come to Italy to escape a famine that had struck their home in ancient Lydia (near Sart, Turkey). In around 1200 BC, their king had divided the surviving people into two groups, and drawn lots. The more fortunate ones followed his son Tyrrhenus out of Lydia to Smyrna (Izmir), and onwards for distant coasts. In the north and the centre of Italy they scattered, and called themselves ‘tyrrhenians’ after their prince, or ‘tusci’, ‘Etruscans’. Their descendants preferred ‘Umbrians’ and ‘Tuscans’.

Part Gaul, part Etruscan, Catullus never doubted that he had Asiatic blood, however Italian he looked. His hair was light brown, and he styled it like a man who was afraid of losing it. Combed forward, it formed the beginnings of a fashionable fringe, which tickled the deep olive skin of his forehead. He had a round, boyish characterful face, which a well-meaning woman might tell him was sweet or endearing, but then immediately regret saying anything at all. He was, in sum, shapely, especially about the arms. His waist was thick (Catullus being no stranger to the odd hors d’oeuvre) but his nose was delicate, and gently curving brows met at its arch. He had full lips and a sincere smile, but his most distinctive features had to be his eyes. They were large and brown, though the left one drooped slightly beneath a heavy lid, giving the impression that it was half closed. The portrait, discovered at the site of his family home on Sirmio, had no title to identify it as the poet Catullus, only the clues that lay in the painted plaster. The young man looked contemplative and refined as he grasped a scroll in his left hand, while he drew the fingers of his right with pride across its edges, edges he perhaps ‘polished off not a moment ago with dry pumice stone’ (Poem 1). The distinctive lazy eye was meant to make him recognisable, even years later. He wore the toga of the late Republic with tunic, fringed with a narrow purple band.

Dirt tended to splash against this strip of purple, which proclaimed his status – ‘equestrian’ – to passers-by. They were descended from the cavalry, the equestrians, but less likely by now to be seen on a horse than in a forum, ensuring that they still satisfied the 400,000-sesterce wealth qualification that bought them membership of the elite order. Senators wore thicker purple stripes on their togas, and had at least a million sesterces each, but Catullus knew that his stripe made him more important than ordinary plebeians, who had no purple at all.

Catullus had put on the adult toga at the age of sixteen and indulged in so much sex, and so much poetry – ‘joys which your sweet love encouraged’ he once reminded his brother – that he remained forever nostalgic for those happy, carefree days. He never wrote of their mother, as he did of the mothers of friends:

she might have died some years before her son enjoyed this ‘pleasant spring’:

From the time the pure toga was first put upon me,

When the bloom of my youth enjoyed its pleasant spring,

I sported hard enough. I was no stranger to the goddess

Who mixes sweet bitterness with love’s woe

(Poem 68)

As he pottered around his old home to the sound of slaves clattering plates – a sign that his father’s dinner was coming to an end – Catullus looked back on his youngest days. He remembered his first experiences of love and verse, his life’s spring, as well as the moment that presaged the change in season, the moment he decided to leave Verona to pursue a career as a poet in Rome.

In 62 BC a carriage had pulled into Cisalpine Gaul from which there disembarked a man in his early forties – a brother-in-law of Pompey the Great, Metellus Celer. He had recently completed a senior magistracy at Rome, the praetorship, and been intent on achieving the consulship before the decade was out. His appointment to a new post, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had come about in return for his help in quelling a terrifying conspiracy in Rome.

A disaffected young patrician politician, Catiline, a former ally of the erstwhile dictator Sulla, had planned with his supporters to murder the most senior members of the Roman Senate, ravage the city with fire, and fling open Rome’s gates to an army of several thousand that had gathered in the north.

Catiline’s campaign for the consulship of 63 BC had been unsuccessful. Cicero, who had been elected to one of the two seats, foiled his conspiracy and took charge of a full-scale security operation. Determined to save his beloved Republic from extinction, he rounded up some of the chief conspirators – who included rogue senators – and the Senate agreed to put them to death without trial as enemies of the state. Metellus Celer helped Cicero by blocking the plotters’ rampage.

Cicero had hoped to win praise for his swift response. Instead, Metellus Celer’s brother, a feisty tribune in Rome, vetoed him from delivering his parting address from his consulship, saying that he should not have had the conspirators executed without trial. Technically, he was right.

The incident was still haunting Cicero to this day.

Catullus moved to Rome probably soon after the conspiracy. Whether it was in Verona that he had first met Metellus Celer, or in the great city itself, that moment had proved a turning point. For little though Catullus could have anticipated it upon their first meeting, Metellus Celer would become something of an obstacle for him. In recent years Catullus had fallen passionately in love with his wife.