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

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.7 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.8

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.9 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’).10 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.11 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.12

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.13

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.14 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.15

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.16 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

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.1 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.

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.2 The Gauls and their many tribes were inclined like geese to migrate whenever the desire took them.3 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.4 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’.5

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:6 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.7 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.8 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.

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