Wiseman ends Part I of his latest opus with a wry and almost apologetic self-reflection: ‘Written by a young man on the make, Catullan Questions has been revisited by an old man in a hurry’ (83). I was unable not to hear an echo of the beginning of Varro's de Rebus Rusticis: ‘If man is a bubble, as the saying goes, still more so an old man. For my eightieth year advises me to gather my belongings …’ (RR 1.1.1). Varro does not say much — openly, at least — about the attendant circumstances of his work, but W. is more forthcoming: his first four chapters were written ‘in immediate reaction’ to Schafer (2020) and Du Quesnay/Woodman (2021), and we are reminded — as if we could forget — that these dates tell their own story: the singularly human story of billions of people sharing only our isolation (‘lockdown’, W. reflects, ‘certainly concentrated the mind’).
W. has made his mark on the field not only by his appreciation for a good story, but through his knack for reading against the grain and revealing — or imaginatively suggesting — stories of people and popular traditions largely lost to us. This book continues this trajectory, beginning with the old question ‘Who Was Lesbia?’ W., like most others, accepts the identification of the poetic figure named Lesbia with a historical woman named Clodia — an identification based solely on a passage of Apuleius’ Apologia (10) — and here seeks to offer a new answer to that question. In the end, he suggests that it is a ‘Better Idea’ (8) that Lesbia is one of the two teenaged daughters of Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul 54 b.c.). If we insist that Lesbia was the poet's nickname for an actual historical figure (a belief that could be profitably questioned), then W. may well be right: if Lesbia must be one of the Clodiae, why not a younger one? However, the claim that a teenaged Lesbia is a ‘Better Idea’ leans heavily on both the unprovable claim that Catullus’ use of puella must always refer to Lesbia and the unquestioned assumption that puella is an age-marker rather than a hypocorism (‘Hey Girl!’). The chapter ends with a typically imaginative act of speculation, in which W. reveals his opinion that a teenaged girl romantically and sexually involved with an older man makes a more attractive story than that of an older woman romantically and sexually involved with a younger one. This might be true for some, but I am not sure how far it has advanced the original question.
Ch. 2 begins with the question ‘How Many Books?’ but then ranges broadly into other, only moderately related, ones. Much of this chapter is excellent, though at the end of it W. veers into a claim that will drive much of the rest of the work: that later in life, shaken by the trauma of his brother's death, Catullus turned to a ‘new and more popular milieu’ (46) and began writing for the stage. The claim is delightfully imaginative (as we have come to expect from W.), but the primary evidence for it — Cicero, Fam. 7.11 (a certain Valerius is described as sodalis noster, taken to be a reference to Catullus as a writer of mimes) and Martial, Ep. 5.30 and 12.83 — is insufficiently convincing.
Chs 3 and 4 focus largely on the venues and circumstances of performance for both the short and long poems. Both are engagingly written and offer some attractive possibilities; however, both tend to sweep us up in W.'s rich imagination and then hurry us along a series of overly certain claims. For example, in ‘Nine Columns from Castor and Pollux’ (poem 37), W. takes taberna to mean ‘pub’, and then — drawing hastily on archaeological evidence for benches outside a small number of ‘bars/taverns’ in Pompeii and Herculaneum — argues that the ‘sitters’ (sessores) of line 8 are sitting at a ‘pub’. He then claims that this ‘pub’ was located in the Roman Forum, one of the tabernae ueteres that lined the south side. The problem here is that taberna cannot be translated as ‘pub’ by any stretch of even the most limber imagination. Rather, the term is always used to designate a shop, or a booth, or a shed, or a hut, or — occasionally — a low-end inn (Plaut., Men. 436 and Truc. 697). Catullus’ sneering reference to the spot as a salax taberna might suggest that this taberna is not a shop at all, but another sort of building — perhaps an elite private house a short stroll up the Palatine; perhaps the home of one of the Clodii — which the poet has laughingly downgraded to a ‘slutty hovel’. But if we stick with ‘shop’ for taberna and get metaliterary with our approach, we might translate salax taberna as ‘slutty shop’ and consider that Catullus is referring not to an elite home on the Palatine, but to one of the many tabernae of the booksellers located on the Argiletum (cf. Hor., Sat. 1.4.71 nulla taberna meos habeat neque pila libellos and Mart., Ep. 1.3.1 Argiletanas mauis habitare/cum tibi, parue liber, scrinia nostra uacent?). Is it here that ‘one or two hundred’ poetasters sit around — on the taberna's shelves, in the form of book-rolls — and fool around with Catullus’ debased puella? We cannot know. But we can know that this taberna was not a ‘pub’.
Chs 5 and 6 do not so much revisit prior Catullan questions as engage new ones (‘How Gallic Were the Transpadanes?’ ‘Why is Ariadne Naked?’); Ch. 7 consists of various thoughts about the reception of Clodia. The chapters do not cohere, nor do they claim to, but each is interesting in its own right. Indeed, there is much that is interesting in W.'s latest work, and much that is frustrating. He warns us that he has written this book in a hurry, and the sense of urgency is apparent throughout. As a longstanding fan of W.'s scholarship, who has benefitted consistently from it throughout my career, I wish that he had slowed down now and then.
