Catullus 17 is a vivid, lively piece which appears, on the face of it, to consist of two thematically disparate parts. The first seven lines, marked by an abundance of circumstantial detail, concern an upcoming dance festival on the bridge of an unidentified colonia and the locals’ anxiety that the bridge may prove insufficiently sound to withstand the ‘jumping around’ (salire) upon it which is integral to the festivities, so that it collapses into the marsh beneath (1–4). The speaker of the poem would have the colonia get a new bridge,Footnote ² strong enough, unlike the existing one, to sustain dancing of the most uninhibited kind (uel Salisubsali sacra), on condition that the colonia provides him with ‘the gift of maximum laughter’ (5–7). In lines 1–4 the whole emphasis falls upon the ricketiness of the ‘poor old bridge’ (ponticuli),Footnote ³ the decrepitude of its structure, ‘standing [as it does] on recycled planks’ (axulis stantis in rediuiuis) and the vigorousness of the dancing thereon (ludere, salire), which risk the bridge falling flat and sinking into the marsh, there to be enveloped by the mud (ne supinus eat cauaque in palude recumbat 4). Lines 5–7 maintain the focus upon the unstable condition of the pons, with their emphasis on the desirability of providing the colonia with a bridge of unshakeable robustness, unlike, it is implied, the existing one. Up to this point, a modern reader might be forgiven for thinking that he or she was dealing with a poem not dissimilar in theme to the celebrated piece of doggerel by William McGonagall on the collapse of the Tay Bridge in nineteenth-century Scotland, and the fatal structural weakness of the bridge which supposedly led to the disaster.Footnote ⁴

The remaining nineteen lines however take the poem in an apparently quite different direction. After a transitional section stipulating the price for the replacement or restoration of the bridge, the pitching of a fellow townsman of the speaker (municipem meum) head over heels into the bog beneath the pons (8–11), we arrive at the real subject of the piece; the crass insensitivity of the unidentified (quendam) municeps to his wife's youthful charms and sensual needs, his insouciant attitude as she seeks erotic release elsewhere, his sexual torpor and unawareness of what is going on around him, and finally, resuming the theme of 8–11, the proposed remedy for the situation, a ducking in the marsh in the hope of bringing him to his senses. In this second section of the poem, in marked contrast to the first, the focus is firmly on the erotic mismatch between husband and wife. There is on the one hand the youthful perfection of her physical attributes and the need to keep her rampant sexual impulses under proper control, on the other the – to the poet inexplicable – unresponsiveness of the maritus to his bride's loveliness (nec se subleuat ex sua parte) and his blindness to her carnal needs and freewheeling pursuit of alternative sexual outlets in the absence of the expected conjugal attentions.Footnote ⁵

Poem 17 has provoked nearly as many questions as it has lines. What is the identity of the anonymous colonia addressed in the opening verses? Is it Catullus’ natal Verona?Footnote ⁶ Or another town in the vicinity of Verona?Footnote ⁷ If 17 is set in Verona (or an adjacent municipality), should it be classed, along with c. 67 on another sexual imbroglio likewise set in Gallia Cisalpina, as one of Catullus’ earliest poems?Footnote ⁸ Is the lackadaisical maritus of the poem an invention of the poet, imaginatively modelled perhaps on the pseudo-Homeric fool Margites, who through congenital stupidity would not have sex with his wife?Footnote ⁹ Alternatively, is the maritus not a fictional creation, but a real person and, if so, who?Footnote ¹⁰ Is c. 17 perhaps only fully comprehensible to an inner circle of Catullus’ intimates, fellow-Transpadanes who were au fait with its dramatis personae?Footnote ¹¹ Is there a connection between the cure proposed for the neglectful maritus, precipitation from the colonia's bridge, and the tag sexagenarios de ponte, which adverts to the Roman practice of tossing ‘sixty year old men off a bridge’,Footnote ¹² as well as with the annual rite of the Argei (Ov. Fast. 5.621–62), whereby rush effigies of old men – perhaps in a relic of an original human sacrifice – were thrown into the Tiber from the Pons Sublicius?Footnote ¹³ In other words, does c. 17 represent the translocation of a Roman ritual to a Transpadane setting?Footnote ¹⁴ Or is it instead inspired by an indigenous Cisalpine ceremony involving a bridge and dancing?Footnote ¹⁵ Is the offending husband really a senex, as in the supposedly parallel Roman rites? What exactly is the nature of his sexual problem?Footnote ¹⁶

The list of questions traditionally prompted by c. 17 is not yet exhausted. In making a bridge central to the mise en scène of a piece involving the jesting humiliation of a husband, is Catullus alluding, in a kind of Alexandrian footnote, to Greek γɛφυρισμός, derived from γέφυρα ‘bridge’, in its transferred sense of ‘subjecting someone to mockery and abuse’?Footnote ¹⁷ If, with most editors, we emend the sali subsili (two words) of the manuscripts at line 6Footnote ¹⁸ to a single proper noun Salisubsali or Salisubsili, supposedly the name of an otherwise unknown deity, Salisubsalus or Salisubsalius, how do this putative god and the allusions in 2–3 and 6 to ritual dancing, salire, on the bridge connect with the priests of Mars known as the Salii, who engaged in a similarly lively tripudium (dance), but in a quite different venue, the Roman forum?Footnote ¹⁹ Was there such a figure as Salisubsalus (ius) – a cult title of Mars perhaps? – or is he just a convenient fiction, an extemporisation, to suit the poem's theme?Footnote ²⁰ Does the treatment prescribed for the husband at the close of the poem, immersion in the smelly mud beneath the bridge (putidaeque paludis, 10), echo the prescription of the medical writer Celsus and Pliny the Elder for rousing lethargic patients (cf. ueternum, 24) from their condition by subjecting them to offensive smells and sudden cold showers?Footnote ²¹ What does the comparison of the husband to a two-year old sleeping in the rocking/trembling arms of his father signify for the characterisation of the maritus?Footnote ²²

If I have lingered over the various questions which students of c. 17 have posed down the years, it is for a very particular reason: almost all of these – no matter how valid and intriguing per se – do not, in view of their markedly autobiographical tenor, their ethnographic colour, their pursuit of literary allusion, or even just their focus on particularities in the text, contribute materially to the understanding of Catullus 17 as a totality. In order to address the poem in the round, as it were, it is necessary to concentrate attention, I submit, on two particular aspects of it. The first is the awkward isssue of its thematic coherence, the second an aspect of the poem which until quite recently was mostly ignored,Footnote ²³ Catullus’ use of the rare priapean metre, in particular the attendant expropriation of the literary conceptualisation of the god who gave his name to the metre and the implications for our understanding of carmen 17 of the multiple resemblances which emerge between the Priapus of poetic texts and the delinquent maritus of the Catullan poem.

As was noted at the outset, Catullus 17 consists of two themes which cannot easily be integrated, the material unsoundness of the bridge, and the conjugal inertness of the maritus. Let us deal first with the issue of poetic structure.Footnote ²⁴ The difficulty comes most sharply into focus if we formulate the matter this way: what has the ricketiness of the bridge, upon which Catullus dilates at such length, got to do with the real concern of the poem, the husband's doltishness and sexual crassness, and the supposed desirabilty of remedying this state of affairs?Footnote ²⁵ How can the two things be connected? The dilapidated and unstable condition of the bridge is prima facie irrelevant to the suggested cure. A person can be thrown off a bridge whether unsound or, for that matter, stable.Footnote ²⁶ In that sense, the additional factor of the bridge's dilapidation makes the alleged connection with the sexagenarii de ponte and the Argei incomplete at best, so even these otherwise inviting parallels cannot be said to give the poem a compelling unity. Nor will it help much here to invoke the old standby of poetic ‘indirection’,Footnote ²⁷ which is a mere fudge.Footnote ²⁸

One approach to the problem, adopted by Heine and Khan, has been effectively to sidestep it and propose that the piece is glued together by a tessellation of sexually charged words and double entendres.Footnote ²⁹ Certainly cupis, ludere, salire and Salisubsali, supinus, recumbat, libidine, sacra and munus in lines 1–7, to name no more, are susceptible of a secondary, risqué interpretation which comports with the core sexual thematic of the poem, and is mirrored in the continued deployment in 12–26 of terms or expressions with implicit sexual overtones, such as delicatior haedo, nec se subleuat ex sua parte, iacet, pronum and mula.Footnote ³⁰ It may also be argued that the two parts of the poem are held together by the theme of the bog, which awaits the collapse of the bridge, as it does the immersion of the maritus. Footnote ³¹ Addressing the structural issue more directly than do the proponents of a suggestive verbal glue that unites the whole, an important step forward was made by Rudd, who, observing that crura in line 3 is only here applied to an inanimate object, suggested that the dilapidation of the bridge functions as a symbol for the erotic dysfunction of the husband.Footnote ³² A refinement of this proposes that the colonia, with its desire to ludere and salire, personifies the sexual playfulness of the wife (ludere hanc sinit ut lubet 17), the bridge her sexually decrepit maritus. Footnote ³³

On balance, Rudd's approach seems the most persuasive: it goes a considerable way to resolving the apparent thematic incoherence between lines 1–7 and 8–26 by vesting bridge and maritus alike with some form of physical impairment. This brings me to the second aspect of the poem capable of lending to it a degree of unity, an aspect which, with a very few exceptions, has not received the attention which it deserves; Catullus’ choice for c. 17 of what was, to the best of our knowledge, a highly unusual metre, the priapean.Footnote ³⁴ What might the choice of such a distinctive metre have signified? The rest of this article will address itself to that question.

Some illumination is cast on the matter by what ancient metricians have to say about the priapean metrical system, a lively stichic mixture of glyconics and pherecrateans.Footnote ³⁵ It was best known for being used from Hellenistic times onwards in hymns to Priapus:Footnote ³⁶ Catull. fr. 1 Mynors is one instance.Footnote ³⁷ It was, formally speaking, like the epic hexameter in its use of dactyls and spondees,Footnote ³⁸ but disqualified from heroic status by the marked break at position 8 of the line.Footnote ³⁹ Further, ‘its very sound shows that it is suited to lighthearted, playful subject matter’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In addition, many thought it suited to poetry on rustic or bucolic subjects.Footnote ⁴¹

These definitions sit very well with the ludic, mocking ethos of poem 17, in which the inattentive husband is pilloried as a man-child, a sexual senescent, and a blockhead. The bucolic colour of the priapean scheme is duly reflected in c. 17's free deployment of imagery from the countryside (the girl is in the most verdant flower of youth, more skittish/naughty than a kid, to be watched more carefully than the ripest grapes, the husband lies like an alderFootnote ⁴² in a ditch hamstrung by an axe of the Ligurians, famous woodsmen). There is even a nod to epic in the comparison of the husband to a felled tree in 18–19, a parodic take on Homeric similes where warriors cut down in battle are likened to chopped down trees.Footnote ⁴³ Most important, in keeping with the overriding preoccupation of the god who gave his name to the metre, both the language and the subject matter of 17 are highly sexual in character.Footnote ⁴⁴

Any poem deploying the priapean metre must naturally conjure thoughts of the deity himself. It is reasonable to suppose that Priapus is an important, if unstated, presence in the poem. Kloss in fact went further and suggested that Priapus himself, and not Catullus,Footnote ⁴⁵ is the speaker of the poem, Morgan that the maritus is a kind of anti-Priapus,Footnote ⁴⁶ the god being best known for his rapacious sexual appetite and phallocentrism, characteristics in which the husband is conspicuously deficient. Morgan's well-argued case has its attractions, but I would like to approach the matter from an alternative angle, while still keeping the god firmly in view. I propose that the underperforming husband shows conspicuous similarities in at least four respects to Priapus as portrayed in literary representations of the deity – whose sex-obsessed instantiation as both living personage and statue erected to watch over gardens had crystallised well before CatullusFootnote ⁴⁷ – so that the former is a very real sense the god's alter ego.

This suggestion might on the face of it seem counter-intuitive, but – and here is my first point – let us recall that, as Butrica put it, Priapus is a conspicuous sexual under-achiever, something that might be seen as one of the ambivalences that were intrinsic to this god.Footnote ⁴⁸ From his very first appearance as a speaking statue in Hellenistic epigram, the god shows a greater propensity for talk than action, usually in the shape of loudly trumpeted threats to punish with rape thieves proposing to steal the fruit and vegetables which he is charged with protecting – threats which do not however come to fruition, but remain solely at the level of threats. Anth. Plan. 261 (Gow-Page, HE 2486–90), by the third-century-BCE Leonidas of Tarentum, gives a good sample of the manner: ‘I, Priapus, stand watch by the twin roads, stretching straight out from my thighs my erect “club” / … but, thief, keep far off, otherwise you will feel sorry after receiving my swollen organ’. In the same vein are Anth. Plan. 236, also by Leonidas (Gow-Page, HE 2482–5) and 241 (Marcus Argentarius, Gow-Page, GP 1503–8), where a traveller is warned by Priapus against stealing his figs, otherwise he will suffer figs of another kind i.e., anal fissures,Footnote ⁴⁹ as a result of the sexual quid pro quo demanded by the god. There are numerous poems on the same theme in the first-century-CE collection of Latin poems known as the Priapea or Carmina Priapea (CP),Footnote ⁵⁰ not to mention a host of over-the-top boasts of penile size and sexual prowess. But in reality Priapus, and especially the Priapus of the Carmina Priapea, voiced by the deity in his traditional role as a wooden statue protecting orchards from intruders, is characterised by a phallic braggadocio which does not translate into deeds, and on the rare occasions when the god does achieve erotic release, it is almost invariably of an unwanted type, taking the form either of sexual predation by desiccated and superannuated females of unparalleled repulsiveness (CP 12, 32, 46, 57), or even fellation by the local dogs (CP 70). In fact, as Holzberg has noted, towards the end of the eighty poems in the Carmina Priapea, the eponymous god struggles with his famed potency, suffers a sexual drought, or even succumbs to temporary impotence.Footnote ⁵¹

Nor are the god's difficulties with sex concluded with the Carmina Priapea. Particularly drastic in nature are the sexual debacles that overtake Priapus in two parallel narratives of Ovid's Fasti (1.391–440, 6.319–48), where attempts by the god to rape respectively the nymph Lotis and Vesta are aborted by the braying of an ass, which wakes the intended victims. So, Priapus, despite his ithyphallicism, his lecherous eye for the female form and the apparent availability of targets for his lust (Fasti 1.415–20, 6.333–6, Mart. 7.91, and Erucius Anth. Plan. 242.3 (Gow-Page, GP 2284): ‘you are athirst for women’) suffers a very public sexual humiliation – a humiliation risibly enhanced in the second Fasti passage by his having to flee in haste from the clutches of an angry turba.Footnote ⁵² In Ovid's words (1.437–8), ‘the god, his obscene part very much at the ready, was laughed at by all in the moonlight’. Nor do his sexual humiliations end here. In another instance, Mart. 10.92.12, the goddess Flora successfully escapes his lustful attentions by fleeing into her laurel grove. In short, it appears that the god far more often pursues than catches his intended prey;Footnote ⁵³ or as Frazel (Reference Frazel2003) 64 puts it, ‘ancient religious thought imagined Priapus as the embodiment of constant and unfulfilled [my emphasis] male sexual desire’. Worst of all, in Priapea 2 of the Appendix Vergiliana (85 Bücheler), after the garden god has threatened a would-be thief that he will sodomise him with his wooden mentula, his erect organ is violently ripped (ualente … reuulsa bracchio) from his groin by a brawny uilicus who repurposes it as a cudgel (claua) – thereby giving a risible literalness to Martial's figurative expression Gallo turpius est nihil Priapo, ‘there is nothing more shameful than an emasculated Priapus’ (1.35.15).Footnote ⁵⁴

To summarise the upshot of the last two paragraphs, there is a conspicuous gap between Priapus’ crude, locker-room language, the frequently voiced urgency of his desires, his aggressive ithyphallicism, the accessibility of erotic targets and the actuality of his lived erotic experience. He is a deity characterised by verbalised hypersexuality, not by carnal deeds in the flesh – almost, one might say, an ἀλαζών of the sexual vaunt. In this regard he is not so different from the maritus of Catullus 17. This individual has before him a readily available and highly attractive sexual outlet: he is married to a girl in the freshest flower of youth, who is more frisky than a tender young kid – a species proverbial for amorousness. Furthermore, his puella has arrived at the very peak of erotic ripenessFootnote ⁵⁵ and, in testimony to this, needs be watched over with the utmost care, lest she give free rein with friends and neighbours to her rampant erotic urges – as indeed she does, with the husband's unwitting, insensate connivance (17, 20–22). In sum, the husband, confronted with a wealth of irresistible sexual charms, fails conspicuously, just like Priapus elsewhere, to capitalise erotically on these, omitting to bestir himself erotically, but instead lying torpid like a felled tree (18–19). In both maritus and god, then, the erotic promise of the subject of desire, or simply the potential for sexual intercourse, fail to translate into concrete reality. Both are emblems of the sexual fiasco or non-event.

We have just noted the amused reaction of the bystanders to Priapus’ humiliation in the Lotis episode of the Fasti. Equally of note is Ovid's preface to the Vesta scene (Fast. 6.319–20), ‘shall I pass over or tell of your disgrace, rubicund Priapus? It is a short tale, but a most amusing one’. This brings me to the second point of convergence between the husband of Catullus 17 and Priapus. Both are the the subject of mockery, figures of fun. The pitching of the municeps into the bog will be for Catullus the occasion of ‘maximum laughter’, and the risibility of the plunge is reinforced not only by the particularity of the amusingly colourful details about the maritus’ fate in 10–12 (‘but let it be where in the whole pool and stinking marsh the abyss is at its most discoloured and deepest. The fellow's an utter clod…’), but also by a stark visual counterpoint between the repellent nature of the bog and the appealing winsomeness of the neglected puella (14–16); a contrast deliberately highlighted by the use in lines 10–13 and 14–16 of a similar register, a cluster of superlatives and diminutives, to conjure up images that, in a neat effect of irony, are morphologically comparable but semantically antithetical. In a final touch of humour, the poem is rounded off by a concluding barb against the ‘supine spirit’ of the husband, who is likened to a mule, an animal proverbial for stupidity and sterility – and, insultingly, a female one at that.

In the same way as the maritus here, the figure of Priapus is regularly made the butt of laughter in the literary tradition, on account of his uncouth appearance and outsize organ, e.g., Anth. Plan. 86 on a statue of Priapus, ‘made of fig-wood, not worked by a file, nor painted with red, but fashioned by a shepherd's self-taught chisel. Laugh pointlessly at me if you will…’; ibid. 243 (Antistius, Gow-Page, GP 1119–24), CP 10 ‘why are you laughing, you very stupid girl? I was not made by Praxiteles or Scopas, nor was I polished by Phidias’ hand; I'm a simple lump of wood hewed into shape by a farm-overseer who said to me “be Priapus”. Still, you look at me and repeatedly laugh. I expect you find the “column” standing erect in my groin an amusing matter’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But there are many other scenarios in which the Priapus of literary texts is the target of humour. To name only a few, he is outdone in penile size by humans,Footnote ⁵⁷ even though his enormous organ is his most distinctive feature (CP 9, 36.11); if there are no vegetables worth stealing in the garden over which he watches, thieves make off with his statue instead;Footnote ⁵⁸ failing all else, he can always be recycled as firewood;Footnote ⁵⁹ he is a downmarket Paris, judging a beauty contest of hetairai, not goddesses;Footnote ⁶⁰ he self-identifies as the lowest divinity, among all the gods, ‘the wooden guardian of pumpkins’ (cucurbitarum ligneus … custos);Footnote ⁶¹ his misshapen genitals and ugly appearance so disgusted his mother Aphrodite that she rejected him.Footnote ⁶² In the same way, in the artistic tradition, Priapus is ‘a god who regularly provokes laughter’.Footnote ⁶³ The comic dimension of Priapus weighing his hypertrophied penis in the well known Pompeian painting speaks for itself, as do a couple of Attic rhyta, in the first of which the figure of a bearded Priapus ends in a phallus, not in feet, while in the second Priapus’ features take the form of a glans penis.Footnote ⁶⁴ These wittily conceived figures clearly anticipate the later humorous treatment of Priapus in literary texts. In sum, Priapus was a farcical figure, whose appearance in rites, Diod. Sic. 4.6.4 significantly tells us, was marked by ‘laughter and sporting’.Footnote ⁶⁵ All in all, both maritus and Priapus are good for little more than a laugh.

A third point of resemblance between Priapus and the maritus turns on the axis of urbanitas and its inverse, rusticitas. That Priapus is literally rusticus is self-evident.Footnote ⁶⁶ But he is likewise rusticus in a transferred sense: his speech is peppered with obscenities, he has a crassa Minerva, an uncouth intellect (CP 3.10), and he feels the need to apologise rusticus indocte si quid dixisse uidebor, / da ueniam: libros non lego, poma lego, ‘if I, rustic as I am, seem to have said anything uncouth, pardon me. I don't peruse books but pick fruits’, CP 68.1–2. But over and above this, to be rusticus also carries with it a deal of attitudinal baggage, not least in the sexual arena, an idea with which the poet of CP 10 revealingly plays. Here Priapus is made to condemn as insulsissima, ‘very crass’, a girl who regards as a res salsa, ‘an amusing thing’, the quasi-columnar erection that pokes out from his groin. But the sophisticated reader of the Carmina Priapea is undoubtedly expected to align himself or herself with the puella's point of view, rather than the god's. It is not the girl, as he claims, but Priapus himself who is insulsissimus, someone not au fait with refined city manners and the attendant protocols of urbane wit. After all, the gigantic red phallus of the deity which the girl finds so amusing was regarded as intrinsically ridiculous, as both poetic and artistic tradition confirm.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, as Uden (Reference Uden2007) has intriguingly argued in connection with Catullus and in particular the much debated poem 16, the aggressive phallocentrism of Priapus, a feature of his literary profile since the third century BCE, his loudly voiced (if not actualised) threats of anal and oral rape, make him an ‘archetype of farcical hypersexuality’ which is profoundly at odds with Catullus’ more nuanced, more urbane view of human sexual relations. But Priapus is much too rusticus to be sensitive to the sexual mores of the more polished society represented by Catullus and fellow urbanites.Footnote ⁶⁸

Now as is well known, urbanitas, literally ‘citified sophistication’, is a cardinal concept in Catullus’ poetological world, one in which the boundaries of acceptable behaviour are formulated and policed by Catullus himself.Footnote ⁶⁹ It encompasses such diverse phenomena as how to behave in homosocial intercourse,Footnote ⁷⁰ what sort of poetry to write, and, not least, how to comport oneself in a sexual setting. One of the bedrocks of Catullan urbanitas is sal and its adjectival cognate salsus, a sort of conceptual je ne sais quoi which appears to encompass ideas such as wit, sparkle, verve, an attractiveness that goes beyond the merely physical, and a self-ironising awareness that allows one to see through to the realities of a situation.Footnote ⁷¹ Its antonyms are insulsus and non salsus. Thus in poem 10 Varus’ girlfriend, initially described – in approbatory language which draws on the specialised idiolect of urbanitas – as a scortillum … non sane illepidum neque inuenustum, ‘a little tart by no means without charm or sexual attractions’, is by the end of the poem damned as insulsa male, ‘thoroughly tasteless’, for not having the wit and sophistication to appreciate that an injudicious boast made by the poet to an attractive girl is not to be taken literally. In poem 37 Egnatius and the barflies who congregate at a salax taberna, ‘jumping shop’, are branded insulsi, ‘foolishly unaware’ of how things actually stand sexually, on account of their misconceived arrogation to themselves alone of hyperphallic potency.Footnote ⁷² Cicero notes that anything done insulse is inimical to amor (Att. 9.10.2), while Martial uses the same adjective as Catullus in poem 17, insulsissimus, to berate as ignorant of the niceties of sexual barter a man who expects puellae, prostitutes, to provide their favours for free (12.55.2).

All the above serves as useful background to Catullus’ labelling the neglectful husband of c. 17 an insulsissimus homo (12). Specifically, it means that the adjective here comes charged with a whole battery of pejorative, specifically inurbane nuances,Footnote ⁷³ most particularly in the sexual arena. One is that the municeps is foolishly blind to the realities of his marital situation, another that he cannot see how ridiculous a figure he cuts, another again that he neglects to behave precisely as Catullus, more attuned to erotic niceties, would do, were he gifted a puella as attractive as the husband's. All in all, the maritus is a sexual rusticus,Footnote ⁷⁴ a dolt, a mulus, like Lesbia's uir in c. 83, who is so labelled because, like the maritus here, he cannot see what is going on in front of his nose. And the idea of the municeps’ sexual rusticity is further underscored in two ways: first, by attaching to his neglected puella the strongly contrastive term delicata, a term signifying ‘naughty, sexually frisky’, which has a strongly approbative flavour in the lexicon of Catullan urbanitas;Footnote ⁷⁵ second, by bedding around the maritus a host of images which literally belong to the countryside (and are also at home in the world of Priapus). In addition to the just mentioned mula gibe, there is the striking assimilation in 18–19 of the maritus to a tree ‘hamstrung’ – i.e., felled – by a Ligurian axe, a simile which combines in a single picture a reference to woodcraft with a rare participle drawn from the terminology of pig-breeding. Most important here are 14–16, with comparisons drawn respectively from horticulture (the girl is ‘in the freshest flower of youth’), animal husbandry, and viticulture, in particular the observation in 16 that the puella must be ‘watched over (adseruanda) more carefully than the ripest of grapes’. Priapus was a guardian god (Mart 7.91.4) charged with protecting a garden or crop from thieves and predators – a task which he by no means always executes successfully. In the same way, the imagery of line 16 seems to suggest, the maritus fails in his Priapic duty of safeguarding the marital hortus.Footnote ⁷⁶ To summarise, rusticitas in both a literal and a figurative sense, and the attendant condition of being insulsissimus represent the third respect in which Priapus and the municeps closely resemble one another.

Now for the fourth and final regard in which the husband of c. 17 and Priapus are aligned. It is a feature of Priapus’ literary persona that he transcends transactional boundaries, that is to say he is at once a speaking entity who constantly looks forward to various forms of sexual commerce, and at the same time an inert lump of wood, a truncus … inutile lignum, ‘a trunk, a useless lump of timber’ (Hor. Sat. 1.8.1), a lignum rude [quod] uilicus dolauit, ‘a formless piece of wood hewed into shape by a farm overseer’ (CP 10.4).Footnote ⁷⁷ It is in this latter, ligneous, torpid aspect that the maritus resembles Priapus. For, as we have just seen, he is elaborately compared to a fallen tree, with a particular emphasis on his insensate condition (sed uelut alnus / in fossa Liguri iacet suppernata secure / tantundem omnia sentiens quam si nulla sit usquam, 18–20). This, in combination with the following lines (talis iste meus stupor nil uidet, nihil audit, / ipse qui sit, utrum sit an non sit, id quoque nescit) must surely call to mind the language of Roman insults, in which stupid, impercipient, and inert types, like the maritus here, are compared to a block of wood.Footnote ⁷⁸ Among the more notable examples are Plaut. Truc. 674 iam non sum truncus lentus, ‘I am no longer a dull trunk’, Ter. Haut. 876–7 in me quiduis harum rerum conuenit / quae sunt dicta in stulto: caudex, stipes, asinus, ‘any of these things applies to me which are said of a stupid person – “lump of wood, blockhead, ass.”’ Other instances include Cic. Pis. 19 h<ic> maiali<s> … tamquam truncus atque stipes, ‘this hog … like a trunk and a stock’, and Nat. D. 1.84 qui potest esse in eiusmodi trunco sapientia?, ‘what wisdom could possibly be found a trunk of that kind?’Footnote ⁷⁹ In other words, Priapus and the maritus are, in their respective ways, both blocks of wood.Footnote ⁸⁰

It remains to discuss one possible objection to the interpretation proposed here, namely that the god, despite the multiple characteristics which he shares with the maritus of c. 17, deviates from him in one respect, namely that the Priapus of literary texts is aggressively vocal about his phallic prowess, whereas the husband is erotically retiring to the point of insensateness (and moreover contrasted by implication with the arrant penile assertiveness of the Catullan speaker in the flanking poems 16 and 21).Footnote ⁸¹ Such braggadocio on the god's part is however limited to those priapic poems where he speaks in the first person (as he does most notably in the CP). It is not, so far as we can see, a feature of poems merely composed, as is Catullus 17, in the priapean metre. The small number of surviving poems written in priapeans are of surprisingly varied character, hymnodic (Euphronius ap. Powell (Reference Powell1925) 176–7, SEG 7.14 to Apollo, Bergk PLG 3 p.1312 possibly addressed to Hygieia, Catull. fr. 1 Mynors to Priapus), sympotic (Anacreon 373 Page), and coarsely and provocatively insouciant about the fear of death (Maecenas fr. 4 Courtn.).Footnote ⁸² But they may also be, as one would expect, graphically sexual in character: instances are the truncated Catull. fr. 2 Mynors de meo ligurrire libido est, ‘there is a desire to lick from my …’Footnote ⁸³ and a verse attributed to Virgil by the grammarian Diomedes (Keil, Gramm. Lat. 1.512.28) incidi patulum in specum procumbente Priapo, ‘I fell into a gaping cave as (my?) Priapus tumbled forward’. Here specus is likely an insulting term for the vagina, as it is in the Appendix Vergiliana Priapeum ‘Quid hoc noui est?’ 28 and 35,Footnote ⁸⁴ and similar to Martial's femineum barathrum, ‘woman's abyss’ (3.81.1); Priapo is perhaps used metonymically of the mentula.Footnote ⁸⁵ In sum, while we may expect poems written in priapeans to be awash with sexual material, as are Catullus 17, Catull. fr. 2, and the pseudo-Vergilian line just quoted,Footnote ⁸⁶ the presence of a speaking Priapus who loudly proclaims his erotic appetites and capacities is by no means de rigueur in verse which utilises the eponymous metre.

To conclude: I have argued that Catullus’ choice of the priapean system has prompted not just the humorous, eroticised tone of c. 17, but has opened on four fronts the possibility of viewing the maritus as a kind of Priapus in miniature. If I am correct, it follows that the resultant integration of metre and theme gives the poem an overarching unity of both ethos and content which to a large degree transcends the structural problems identified at the beginning of this paper.