By the end of the 1st century BC, the civil strife that had characterized the Roman world in previous decades had come to an end. Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, had quelled the chaos and destruction and brought about a peace, even if an imperfect one, to a people that were tired of so much suffering and bloodshed. It was a world that looked in many ways much different than the one which opened that same century — and the beginning years of Gaius Valerius Catullus’ life, who is the subject of this engrossing book by Daisy Dunn.
Catullus, whose years are estimated 82 – 53 BC, was born in Verona, in Cisalpine Gaul, where his father held a high position and even hosted Julius Caesar. Catullus, an eager man with ambitions to pursue poetry, would eschew the political life and eventually make his way to the megacity of Rome. There he would come to produce a varied corpus of poetry: erudite and rich, but also immediate, cognizant of the everyday, and perhaps just a bit scandalous and raunchy. In a book that’s both a personal reflection on a favorite poet from adolescence, and a classicist’s desire to impart knowledge, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet carries a smart and frolicking feel throughout its pages.
Our sources for Catullus’ life are very limited, and we know far less about him than we do for someone such as Horace. At the outset, then, this poses a serious challenge in constructing an intimate portrait of Catullus’ life. But this does not stop Dunn. By closely mining Catullus’ poetry and pairing it with a lucid picture of the cultural and political world of late republican Rome, Dunn is able to present an intriguing profile of a poet whose heart was never at rest.
It was Catullus who gave us the emotionally fraught line “I love and I hate,” a sentiment expressing his horribly vexed feelings toward his dear Lesbia. It was a love that would infatuate, beguile, and haunt him for nearly his entire life. There is a possibility (scholars have long disagreed on the matter) that this woman was Clodia Metelli — born from the famed bloodline of the Claudius dynasty, and wife to a high ranking politician. In Catullus’ poetry, however, she would be “Lesbia.” The pseudonym was an homage to one of Catullus’s many influences, Sappho of Lesbos. Importantly, the two names “also had the same number of syllables,” each possessing the “one heavy and two short beats.”
Clodia would be a pivotal figure throughout much of Catullus’s poetry, just as she centers heavily in the many strands of narrative which Dunn weaves together in painting a picture of 1st-century BC Rome. Though it sometimes feels like slight overkill (with so much information and so many names), the reader does end up receiving a kind of initiation into the turbulent political scene of the time.
Catullus himself never entered this scene, but neither did he entirely ignore it. When a player or event in the hotbed political climate of his time riled him up, he could pull his punches. Occasionally these were direct assaults, but often they were done in an oblique manner. Mamurra, a chief engineer of Julius Caesar, received the brunt of a few attacks, in what Dunn characterizes as partly “veiled criticism[s]” of Caesar.
Several of the poems in which Catullus does hit on political matters are in the first 60 of his poems, those designated as his polymetrics. As with his long poems and epigrams, 61-68 and 69-116, respectively, they encompass a wide range of subjects. Dunn touches in one way or another on nearly all of Catullus’ poems; but it’s one in particular which forms the guiding focus of this book — Poem 64.
At the center of this epyllion (mini-epic) is the wedding bedspread of an Argonaut, Peleus, and his goddess wife, Thetis. Through an ekphrasis of this bedspread the poem explores in an exuberant and highly creative way ancient heroes of time past. It is a fun, and challenging, work to read. Indeed it’s not for nothing that Poem 64 is considered one of Catullus’ most complex poems.
But Dunn (who provides her own translation of the poem at the end of the book), serves as an enlightening guide as she hits upon various parts of the poem. A central insight put forward by her is that Catullus can be seen in the figure of Ariadne (one of the characters featured in Poem 64). Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos after they took flight together from King Minos’ palace. Devastation and anger ensued in her heart after being left. It’s through this guise of Ariadne that Dunn suggests we might view Catullus himself. I think there is indeed something very apt — as well as deeply poignant — about considering Catullus in this way. We envisage the typically wily and rambunctious poet being reduced to a state of great forlornness, suffering the emotions that inevitably would result from his persisting infatuations with Clodia — the woman whom he would ultimately not possess. So, like Ariadne, alone and abandoned, so also Catullus. It’s a very sympathizing picture.
Dunn also points out some interesting aspects of Catullus’ poetic formation. Along with the aforementioned Sappho, Catullus was influenced by Callimachus, the highly learned scholar-poet of the third century. Like Callimachus, Catullus avoided writing epic, which was a very popular form. In fact even one of Catullus’ friends and fellow poets, Cinna, would spend years writing one. But Catullus was set on forging his own path and following his own inclinations, though he undoubtedly learned a great deal from his poetic forebears.
Readers of Dunn’s fine book will learn much themselves: about Catullus, about Catullus’ world, and how our own emotional terrain in the 21st century — our desires, regrets, frustrations, and ideas about love and loss — are not so very different from those of one of ancient Rome’s finest, and most enduring, poets.
Spectatio 