1. Amor, amicitia, and homosocial relations

Catullus 50 takes the form of a verse-letter – almost, a love letterFootnote ¹ – addressed to friend and fellow-poet Licinius Calvus. Catullus begins by reminiscing about the delightful hours spent in Calvus’ company the previous day, drinking, laughing, and extemporizing poetry, or ‘playing around in my writing-tablets’ (multum lusimus in meis tabellis; 50.2), as the poet puts it. So fired was he by this experience, he writes, and by Calvus’ charm and wit (tuo lepore / incensus…facetiisque; 7–8) that he has lain awake all night longing for the dawn and the opportunity for reunion with the object of his desires.Footnote ² The result is a poem (either poem 50 itself, or – for some scholars – the Sappho translation, 51, considered in the previous chapterFootnote ³).

The poem’s highly sexualized language has sometimes led critics to suppose that Catullus and Calvus were, quite literally, lovers as well as fellow-poets; but – whatever the historical reality of the situation – our current understanding of Roman sexual mores and norms suggests that an open declaration of desire between adult, citizen males would have courted scandal and disgrace.Footnote ⁴ By the same token, Catullus’ framing of the relationship as (quasi-)sexual is provocative, to say the least; but it is certainly possible to understand the speaker’s flirtatious manner as aimed as much at a broader readership as at the named addressee. Catullus teases us with the possibility that the desired reunion with Calvus (ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem, ‘that I might speak with you and be together with you’; 13) might be sexual as well as literary in nature; but the phrasing remains ambiguous throughout.Footnote ⁵

In this sense, poem 50 acts as a focal point where a number of themes prominent throughout the collection converge. The previous chapter explored the overlap in the Lesbia poems between poetics and erotics, literary and interpersonal urbanitas (‘smartness’, ‘sophistication’, or ‘wit’): in this poem, we can observe a similar intersection. Calvus’ lepos and facetiae (50.7–8) are both personal and literary attributes, manifesting themselves equally in conversation and in poetry: Catullus’ terminology of approbation makes no distinction between the sexual, social, and literary spheres.Footnote ⁶

To look at it another way, this poem might be construed as a kind of mirror image of the sequence of Lesbia epigrams considered in the previous chapter, in which Catullus exploits the vocabulary of male–male amicitia (‘friendship’ or ‘alliance’, especially between men) in framing the relationship. If heterosexual amor can be conceptualized in terms of the reciprocal bonds of duty and obligation that obtain between male amici, the language of erotic desire may conversely be applied to interpersonal but non-sexual (or not necessarily sexual) relations between men. The terminology of fides (‘loyalty’), beneuolentia (‘goodwill’), and passionate desire aptly characterizes the affective ties that bind both lovers and amici, and the sense of mutual commitment that, for Catullus, belongs ideally to both kinds of relationship.Footnote ⁷

Mutuality is itself thematized in poem 50, in a way that points to further connections with the culture of reciprocal exchange, and more specifically literary exchange, discussed above in relation to poem 1.Footnote ⁸ Amicitiae were formed and maintained among the Late Republican elite primarily through the exchange of ‘favours’, beneficia. Generally of a non-material kind, such beneficia might include the dedication of literary works, which placed the dedicatee in turn under an obligation to reciprocate. Against this background, the language of erotic desire in poem 50 can be understood as troping a specifically literary give-and-take – the more formal embodiment of the exchange of apparently improvised verses that Catullus recalls in the poem’s opening lines:Footnote ⁹

The unspecified ‘plea’ (preces; 18) to which the speaker urges his addressee to respond, on pain of offending Nemesis, may be understood as a request for a poem in response to the one we are reading, as much as for a further meeting between the poets. Catullus’ own replies to analogous requests – whether real or fictive – can be found in poems 65 and 68a, both of which are framed as polite admissions of inability to comply with the addressee’s request for a poem, in the wake of the death of the poet’s brother (see further below). Together with poems 1 and 38 (Catullus’ [?mock-]angry response to Cornificius’ failure to offer him consolation in his miseryFootnote ¹⁰), these poems testify to, and – in a sense – create a community of amici operating within a culture of literary exchange, in which writing is as much a social mechanism as a vehicle for self-expression or for engagement with literary tradition.Footnote ¹¹

The connection between reciprocity and amicitia is thematized in a negative way in a short sequence of poems (30, 73, and 77) in which the speaker represents himself as the wronged victim of malignant or thoughtless betrayal by disloyal amici. Poem 30 dwells almost obsessively on the hallowed Roman ideal of fides or loyalty,Footnote ¹² and its inverse, deceit (fallacia): the addressee, Alfenus, is alleged to have proffered friendship only to fail the speaker in his hour of need (me miserum deseris in malis; 5). Poem 77 (discussed in Chapter 2Footnote ¹³) similarly represents Rufus as having wormed his way into the speaker’s confidences (subrepsti, ‘you crept up on me’; 77.3), only to turn against him. In poem 73, the language of reciprocal officium is still more explicit:

Though the vocabulary of this poem is strikingly direct, even prosaic, and would be quite at home in Cicero’s letters or in his theoretical discussions of friendship in the De officiis and De amicitia,Footnote ¹⁵ the overall effect is wildly histrionic.Footnote ¹⁶ The melodramatic generalizations of lines 1–4, underlined by verbal repetition (quoquam quicquam…/…aliquem; taedet, taedet) and alliteration, are complemented by the ‘stammering and sobbing’ sound of the final line, with its extraordinary sequence of five elisions.Footnote ¹⁷

Again, the extravagantly emotional tone of all three poems tends to blur the boundaries between male–male amicitia and heterosexual amor. We saw in Chapter 2 that the imagery of poem 77 closely resembles that of the Lesbia poem 76; and the language of 73 points in a similar direction. Erotic devotion, too, is represented as ingratus (76.6; compare ingratae…credita menti; 9), and brings no due return (76.7–9; compare also 73.2: pium with 76.2; and 73.1: bene…mereri with the complementary bene uelle at 72.8, 75.3). The speaker of poem 30, still more startlingly, resembles the seduced and abandoned Ariadne of poem 64: the addressee, Alfenus, is thoughtless (immemor; 30.1) and perfidious (perfide; 3), like his counterpart Theseus, and has thrown his empty promises to the winds (30.10; cf. 64.142).Footnote ¹⁸ In these poems, the speaker is effectively disempowered and effeminized by the betrayal of amicitia, just as he is by Lesbia’s failure to reciprocate his devotion in the erotic sphere.

Other poems, notably the sequences 12–13–14 and 35–36, and the tribute to Cinna’s recently published epyllion, Smyrna, in 95, more closely resemble poem 50 in their celebration of interpersonal and literary urbanitas. Typically, as we saw in Chapter 1, these poems operate though patterns of contrast: Pollio’s charm and wit in poem 12, and Catullus’ affection for Fabullus and Veranius in 9, 12, and 13, entitle them to a place in the poet’s sophisticated clique, whereas Asinius’ klutzy behaviour rules him out (poem 12). Similarly, the literary shortcomings of Caesius, Aquinus, Suffenus, and VolusiusFootnote ¹⁹ serve as a foil to the poetic and social finesse of Calvus (poem 14, esp. 16: salse),Footnote ²⁰ Caecilius (poem 35, esp. 17–18: uenuste/Magna Caecilio incohata Mater, ‘the Great Mother, charmingly begun by Caecilius’), and Cinna (poem 95).Footnote ²¹ This last poem epitomizes Catullus’ technique, both in the precision of the opposition between Cinna’s output and that of Volusius, and in its own stylistic elegance, which embodies the very qualities for which Cinna is praised:

Much could be said about the composition of this poem,Footnote ²⁶ but particularly noteworthy for our purposes are the neatness and symmetry of the sequence of contrasts between Cinna and Volusius: Smyrna is the product of agonizingly slow (and so, by implication, careful and highly polished) composition, in contrast to Volusius’ logorrhoea (1–4); Smyrna will find readers for years to come, and as far away as the River Satrachus in Cyprus (probably an allusion to the river’s role in Cinna’s narrative), while the Annales will get no further than the Padua (i.e. where they were written, in Volusius’ home town of Hatria?Footnote ²⁷) and will soon be used only as baking parchment (5–8). This short life coexists, paradoxically, with broad (short-term) appeal, assuming that ‘Antimachus’ in the final line is a kind of nickname for Volusius.Footnote ²⁸ Cinna’s – notoriously obscure – poem is valued in contrast by a coterie of cognoscenti, implicitly equated, if the supplement sodalis in 9 is accepted, with the circle of the poet’s friends (9–10).

A literary triangle of a somewhat different kind is the subject of poem 35, another verse-letter addressed (in the first instance) to the papyrus on which it is written, but indirectly to another poet-friend, Caecilius. The letter is to summon Caecilius to Verona, where its author is eager to consult with his friend on the latter’s unfinished poem Magna Mater (presumably an epyllion, like the Smyrna or Catullus’ own poem 64). The spanner in the works is Caecilius’ girl, who is rumoured to have fallen madly in love with the poet after reading his work-in-progress and now (ironically) appears to be distracting him from his literary endeavours and preventing the poem’s completion.Footnote ²⁹ Catullus’ handling of the girl is ambiguous: though her sensitivity to the power of Caecilius’ work is treated with sympathy and even admiration (she is complimented in the poem’s closing lines as ‘more erudite than Sappho’s Muse’, Sapphica…/musa doctior; 35.16–17), she also figures as an obstacle to the creative and social partnership between the two men.

Recent studies of Catullus’ poetry, under the influence of feminist scholarship on what has been termed ‘homosocial [in contradistinction to homosexual] desire’,Footnote ³⁰ have emphasized the element of rivalry in this poem, whereby the girl is not so much an object of competition between males as an obstruction to the male–male relationship itself. A similar pattern can be traced in several other poems, often coexisting (strikingly) with a metapoetic element. Poem 6, for example, is an expansion of a familiar epigram type, in which the speaker draws attention to a friend’s haggard and dishevelled appearance, and deduces that he must be in love, and/or needles him to reveal the object of his affections.Footnote ³¹ Catullus wittily transfers the symptoms from the lover, Flavius, to his bedroom (the bed, rather than its occupant, is ‘worn’, attritus, and unsteady on its feet, quassa; 9–11). But the crux of the poem from our point of view is its handling of Flavius’ girl:

Catullus’ deployment of the vocabulary of urbanitas in this poem is pointed: the flagrantly disingenuous observations that the girl ‘must be’ a common slutFootnote ³⁴ and the affair in some way ‘dodgy’Footnote ³⁵ are clearly on one level an attempt to provoke Flavius into giving up his secret, but also offer a means for the poet to display his literary and social superiority. The contrast between illepidae atque inelegantes (2, of the girl) and lepido…uersu (17) hints that it is for Catullus to give or withhold the accolade of stylishness as he sees fit: his own stylish poetry will immortalize the girl one way or the other, either making her the object of derision or praising her to the skies (ad caelum uocare; 17). The anonymous female is both an obstacle to and an enabling mechanism within the homosocial relationship between the two men: she provides the occasion for competitive display and – paradoxically – reinforces the bond between Catullus and Flavius by temporarily coming between them.Footnote ³⁶

At the same time, David Wray and others have noted a striking irony in the juxtaposition of poem 6 with the celebrated ‘kiss poems’, 5 and 7.Footnote ³⁷ The exhortation to erotic abandon culminates in both cases in an apotropaic gesture: the infinite number of kisses that Catullus desires of Lesbia will be too many for malicious gossips to count, and the lovers will in this way become immune to the power of the ‘evil eye’ (ne quis malus inuidere possit, ‘so that no malicious person may put the evil eye on us’; 5.12; cf. 7.11–12: nec…curiosi/possint…fascinare, ‘nor prying gossips cast spells [on us]’).Footnote ³⁸ Here, the power relations of poem 6 are precisely inverted: Catullus represents himself as potentially vulnerable to just the kind of gossip to which he himself subjects Flavius, however jocularly. In combination with the very theme of kissing, which (as poem 16 explicitly indicatesFootnote ³⁹) may be perceived as effeminizing, this can be seen as another instantiation of the contrasting Priapic and anti-Priapic personae discussed in the previous chapter.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, the alternating stances of social connoisseur and injured victim adopted by Catullus in the friendship poems generally tend to conform to a similar pattern.

Similar ironies and slippages in the depiction of power relations have been detected in the closely related poem 10.Footnote ⁴¹ Here, Catullus relates in a rather chatty, informal style an anecdote revolving again around the triad of speaker–male friend–friend’s girl. In this instance, the girl is more of a presence: not only are her words quoted in direct speech but she is represented according to one interpretation as gaining the upper hand over Catullus, catching him out in a dishonest boast. The context is Catullus’ recent return from provincial service in Bithynia: in conversation with Varus and the latter’s girlfriend, he claims (while admitting the reader into his confidence as to the untruth of his own words) to have profited sufficiently from his position to have brought home a team of slaves to carry his litter. The girl calls his bluff, asking to borrow the litter-bearers for a ride to the Temple of Serapis, and Catullus is forced to climb down, confessing that the slaves are in fact the property of Gaius Cinna (the friend whose poetic genius is celebrated in 95) rather than his own. The poem ends with a sour put-down, revising the speaker’s initially positive impression of the girl:

Again here, though in a rather different way, the girl obtrudes herself as a disruptive force, impeding harmonious social interaction between the men. Again, too, the poet has the last word, ostentatiously passing judgement on his own character: initially charming, the girl soon shows herself to be socially inept, effectively excluding herself through her tactless faux pas from the urbane circle of male amici. The poem’s opening parades its unconventionality, as Varus leads his ‘leisured’ (otiosum; 2) friend away from the forum: symbolically, the move away from the central locus of public life and political negotium into the private world of love and friendship points to a rejection of the traditional Roman valorization of the public over the private sphere.Footnote ⁴² Yet the closing lines strikingly reassert conventional hierarchies, as the lower-class, non-citizenFootnote ⁴³ female is put back decisively in her proper place. It is not clear, however, to what extent the reader is expected to accept this revised judgement, particularly in a poem which represents the speaker himself as disempowered and effeminized by the tyrannical high-handedness of his commanding officer.Footnote ⁴⁴ How successful, we might ask ourselves, is the speaker’s attempt to regain his poise after being wrong-footed by the girl?Footnote ⁴⁵

2. Fraternum dulce sodalicium: friends and brothers

If it is difficult to reach a definitive assessment of the disruptive role played by the female in poem 10, the tone of the address to male amici (or apparent amici) in two further poems has proved equally troublesome to critics. Poems 11 and 100 both – though in slightly different ways – juxtapose male solidarity with erotic desire. In 11 (briefly discussed in Chapter 2Footnote ⁴⁶), Furius’ and Aurelius’ protestations of loyalty are set against the speaker’s thwarted devotion to Lesbia; in 100, Catullus muses on his relations with Caelius and Quintius in their amatory pursuit of the brother and sister Aufillenus and Aufillena. In both cases, the difficulty (or, for some critics, the key to interpretation) lies in intratextual connections with other poems: notably, Furius and Aurelius and perhaps also Quintius and Caelius appear elsewhere in the collection as rivals for the affections of Juventius or Lesbia; and Aufillena, too, crops up again in 110 and 111, in a less than attractive light.

We may, accordingly, choose to read the apparently friendly tone of 11 and 100 ironically, and the protestations of devotion as disingenuous.Footnote ⁴⁷ Quintius, for example, is implored in poem 82 (a variant on the ‘betrayal of friendship’ theme discussed above) not to try to take from the speaker ‘what is much dearer to him than his own eyes, or whatever is dearer than the eyes’ (multo quod carius illi / est oculis seu quid carius est oculis; 82.3–4). Given that the phrase carior oculis is used at 104.2 of the beloved (meae vitae, ‘my life’, a common term of endearment; 104.1), it is tempting here – as in poem 77 – to see a reference to rivalry for Lesbia and her affections. Caelius, too, is the addressee of a Lesbia poem, 58, where the reference to Lesbia nostra (‘our Lesbia’; 1) has led some critics to the conclusion that he is also to be regarded as a former erotic rival.Footnote ⁴⁸ Aufillena, finally, is depicted in poem 110 as worse than a common prostitute (she accepts gifts, but refuses to put out) and in 111 as both adulterous and incestuous.Footnote ⁴⁹ Against this background, we might interpret poem 100 as drawing a contrast between true and false friendship: Catullus wishes for erotic success for the loyal CaeliusFootnote ⁵⁰ while dismissing the deceitful Aufillena and the treacherous Quintius – though some critics see covert hostility to Caelius, too, as a former rival, reading the reference to his unica amicitia, ‘unique friendship’, as savagely ironic.Footnote ⁵¹

At the same time, poem 100 also plays on the brother–sister relationship of Aufillenus and Aufillena and the metaphorical ‘brotherhood’ of male amici:

In these opening lines of the poem, the emphasis lies on the friendship between Caelius and Quintius (rather than either’s friendship with Catullus). The striking balance of the opening five-word hexameter is underlined by the metre (the spondaic fifth foot is unusual in the elegiacs, and almost always associated with Greek proper names or otherwise Hellenizing contexts),Footnote ⁵² and reinforced by hic…ille (‘the one…the other’) in line 3; in line 2, the pair are subsumed under the shared designation ‘flower of Veronese youth’. Line 4 constitutes a kind of internal punchline: citing an apparently proverbial phrase, Catullus jokes that Caelius and Quintius have taken ‘brotherly love’ to extremes by setting their sights on siblings.Footnote ⁵³

The notion of ‘brotherly love’ is, indeed, a suggestive one in the context of Catullus’ collection, though this is the only time that the phrase is used with reference to friendship. Fraternal devotion of a more literal variety is prominent, however, in three poems, 65, 68 (a and b), and 101, the last being among Catullus’ most famous and oft-quoted works:Footnote ⁵⁴

Here, the familial relationship between Catullus and his brother is very strongly emphasized by the thrice-repeated frater (‘brother’; 2, 6, 10), perhaps recalling the conclamatio or ritual invocation of the deceased which formed part of the funeral ceremony.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet recent readings of the poem point to a structural similarity between Catullus’ lament and the ‘betrayal of friendship’ poems: 101 transposes into a (still) more sombre key the rupture of reciprocal relations bemoaned in the sequence of poems considered above. The irrevocable severance of communication suggested by the stark juxtaposition mutam…alloquerer Footnote ⁵⁶ cinerem (‘to speak to dumb ashes’; 4) is poignantly underlined by the speaker’s apparent doubts as to the efficacy of the ancestral rites he has come so far to perform. Feldherr (2000) argues persuasively that the tension between communication and isolation so strikingly embodied here reflects ambiguities inherent in Roman funerary ritual itself, which ultimately sought to re-establish the boundary between the living and the dead, even while perpetuating the memory of the deceased. But the insertion of the plaintive nequiquam between mutam and alloquerer might appear nevertheless to call the adequacy of the ritual into question, even as the speaker carries it out;Footnote ⁵⁷ and some scholars have detected a note of provisionality in line 7, nunc…interea (‘now, at any rate’): in default of anything better, the ritual will have to do.Footnote ⁵⁸

When 101 is set alongside the other poems in which the brother’s death is mentioned, there emerge further connections with some of the central concerns of Catullus’ poetry, discussed in this and previous chapters: as well as exchange and reciprocity, this group of poems interlocks with the Catullan themes of poetry and poetics, gender roles, and the interplay between amor and amicitia.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both 65 and 68a are epistolary in form, and offer graceful apologies to a friend for an inability to fulfil his request for a poem: Catullus is too overwhelmed by grief to ‘bring forth the delightful offspring of the Muses’ (dulcis Musarum expromere fetus; 65.3; cf. 68.25–6). Once again, emotion (here grief rather than amor) constitutes a barrier to the fulfilment of officia and disrupts the bonds of (homo)social reciprocity – a disruption underlined by the fact that the brother is never named by Catullus, here or elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁰ Again, too, as in the Lesbia poems, excessive and uncontrolled emotion is gendered feminine.Footnote ⁶¹ Tellingly, Catullus self-identifies in this context with a series of female models: ‘the Daulian bird’ – that is, the metamorphosed Aedon or Procne, who was transformed into a nightingale after killing her own child Itys/Itylus (65.13–14); the Homeric Penelope, who uses the same simile in reference to her own interminable weeping at Od. 19.518–23; the forgetful fiancée in the simile at the end of poem 65, whose carelessness in allowing her lover’s gift to fall from her lap tropes the embarrassment that the poet feels in the all-consuming grief that prevents him from fulfilling his addressee’s commission; and Laodamia and Helen at 68.73–8 and 101–30, both of whom, as we saw in Chapter 2, bear strong if implicit resemblance to the poem’s speaker.Footnote ⁶²

Intertextual links with the Odyssey are still more prominent in the opening of 101, however – and this time it is the male hero Odysseus to whom Catullus implicitly likens himself. The directionality of Catullus’ journey, from Italy to the Troad (identified as the site of the brother’s tomb at 65.7–8 and 68.97–100), reverses that of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca; and the anaphoric multas per gentes et multa per aequora (1) strikingly echoes Od. 1.3–4:

G. B. Conte, who first noted this allusion, suggests that the epic intertext sheds a heroic glamour on the memory of the deceased; equally, we could see the speaker himself as recouping his masculinity by modelling himself on the Homeric hero.Footnote ⁶³ But the contrasts between Odysseus and Catullus – who travels away from, not towards home; enjoys no happy reunion with his family; and (unlike the Homeric hero in Book 11 of the Odyssey) cannot communicate successfully with the dead – can be seen as equally important, both generically (as often, Catullus implicitly contrasts his poetics of the nugatory and ‘slender’ with the high style of epicFootnote ⁶⁴) and in terms of self-fashioning. As we saw in the case of the Lesbia poems, even in these poems of mourning, Catullus wavers between two identities,Footnote ⁶⁵ constantly undercutting his performance of a fully masculine role by adopting a feminized voice, yet repeatedly reasserting his masculinity in the face of the effeminizing force of strong emotion.

The imagery of childbirth noted above in relation to poem 65 points to a further dimension of the brother poems which has been seen as crucial to the interpretation of the collection by two recent critics, Skinner and Schafer.Footnote ⁶⁶ Skinner’s sequential reading of the elegiac libellus (as she terms poems 65–116) culminates in the suggestion that Catullus implicitly represents himself as abandoning both love and poetry in favour of familial responsibilities – another properly masculine role, according to the dictates of the Roman elite code of values. The reiterated phrase tecum una tota est nostra sepulta domus (‘with you our whole house lies buried’; 68.22 = 68.94) may be taken to imply that familial continuity now rests with Catullus alone, as the sole surviving son and heir; and that his rejection of legitimate marriage in favour of his adulterous relationship with Lesbia would entail the end of the family line. Thus, Catullus can only fulfil his familial officium by both surrendering his quasi-marital relationship with Lesbia and forgoing the ‘offspring of the Muses’ in favour of a more prosaic and literal biological progeny. Like the comic hero, the Catullan speaker is finally assimilated into the conventional cultural framework against which he initially rebels. Schafer, similarly, contrasts the celebration of legitimate marriage in the carmina maiora, especially the epithalamia 61 and 62, with the extra-marital relations in which the poet depicts himself as engaged. On Schafer’s sequential analysis of the collection, like that of Skinner, the social conventions of marriage and the production of legitimate children are ultimately reaffirmed: for all the lover’s wilful blindness and determination to persist in his adulterous affair – as suggested especially by poems 68b, 107, and 109 – Catullus the poet has already made it clear that the relationship is both antisocial and doomed to failure. Whether or not we accept this interpretation of the marriage and childbirth themes, however, we can nevertheless add the ‘vertical’ male line to the ‘horizontal’ links between male amici as a further dimension of the bond between masculine subjects that is both enabled and disrupted by the female.Footnote ⁶⁷

In its depiction of friendship and familial relationships, as in other ways, Catullus’ collection can be seen both to challenge and to reinforce traditional gender roles. Assimilating heterosexual amor to male–male amicitia, and vice versa, the poet comes close to collapsing the clearly demarcated social and sexual norms that prevailed among the contemporary Roman elite; at the same time, the recurrent motif of the disruptive female who must be (symbolically or actually) excluded in order to facilitate the smooth operation of homosocial relations serves to reinscribe the lines of demarcation that Catullus has himself blurred.