1. The art of insult: Greek and Roman invective traditions

Although Catullus is often characterized in both ancient sources and modern scholarship as a love poet, invectives in fact outnumber amatory poems in the Catullan corpus by more than two to one.Footnote ¹ With a few exceptions, these poems have until quite recently attracted far less scholarly attention than the Lesbia poems, the carmina maiora, or even ‘occasional’ pieces such as poems 13 and 31. In addition to the graphic obscenity which characterizes much of Catullus’ invective output – a significant deterrent in the traditionally strait-laced world of Classical scholarshipFootnote ² – nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics were inclined to dismiss these ‘squibs’ and ‘lampoons’ as less serious, less artful, and thus less worthy of study than those that were perceived as more obviously ‘lyrical’.Footnote ³

It was by no means the case in the ancient world, however, that the poetry of insult was considered trivial or non-serious. Archilochus, commonly recognized as the founder of the genre of iambos (a type of poetry characterized not so much by its predominantly iambic metres as by its aggressively abusive manner), was highly regarded, to the extent of being paired regularly with Homer.Footnote ⁴ While iambos was often criticized for its excessive violence and lack of restraint, the works of Archilochus and Hipponax remained central to the literary canon. Conversely, love poets regularly adopted an exaggeratedly modest and self-deprecating manner, pointing to an assumption that erotic verse was less likely to be taken seriously than (literary) invective. If we bear in mind the widespread ancient view that literature – and especially poetry – is, or should be, educational and morally improving, this becomes less surprising: recent work on the iambic tradition has emphasized a generic tendency towards reinforcement of normative and communal values, for all the poets’ propensity to pose as disreputable outsiders.Footnote ⁵

It is increasingly recognized that Catullus self-consciously inserts himself into the tradition of Greek iambic poetry: both generally, through his adoption of an aggressive and abusive manner, and more specifically, by means of verbal echoes. J. K. Newman, David Wray, and Robert Cowan, among others, have emphasized this Archilochean heritage, which has been seen as a kind of counterpoint to the milder manner adopted in the Iambi of Callimachus – Catullus’ dominant stylistic model, as discussed in Chapter 1.Footnote ⁶ The contrast is foregrounded particularly in poem 116, the final poem of the collection as we have it, which is often read as a kind of retrospective programme for the invectives in general or the Gellius cycle specifically (on which see further below).Footnote ⁷

The quarrel between Catullus and Gellius, conducted – we may infer – through the medium of an exchange of invective poems, is troped as armed combat (tela; 4, 7).Footnote ¹¹ The metaphor is a common one, reflecting the supposed derivation of iambos from the Greek verb iaptein, ‘shoot’, ‘hurl a missile’, also implicit at 36.5, where Catullus describes himself as ‘brandishing’ (uibrare) savage iambics. Here, too, an inverse relationship between invectives and the friendship poems discussed in the previous chapter is strongly implied, as hostile exchange substitutes for the element of positive reciprocity inherent in relations between amici: indeed, the ‘betrayal of friendship’ poems can be seen to mediate between these two groups, the rejection or compromise of friendly feelings offering the ground for invective attack.

More direct echoes of Archilochus and Hipponax can be found in poems 40, 56, and 108, which range in tone from perhaps tongue-in-cheek threat to the most disturbingly virulent of verbal assaults.Footnote ¹² Poem 56 begins, somewhat puzzlingly, by insisting at length (four of the poem’s seven lines) on the hilariousness of the off-colour anecdote of sexual vengeance that the poet goes on to relate. The lines are in fact a close imitation of Archilochus fr. 168 West, ‘Charilaos son of Erasmon, I’ll tell you a funny thing, dearest of my companions, and you’ll be delighted to hear it’ (Ἐρασμονίδη Χαρίλαε, / χρῆμά τοι γελοῖον / ἐρέω, πολὺ φίλταθ’ ἑταίρων, / τέρψεαι δ’ ἀκούων). If the Cato addressed in this poem is to be identified with M. Porcius Cato, as some scholars argue, it may be relevant both that he is himself said to have composed invectives against Metellus Scipio in the style of Archilochus and that he was later to become a byword for humourless severity.Footnote ¹³

Poem 40 similarly constitutes a self-reflexive programmatic statement, this time emphasizing the power of iambus to perpetuate a negative image of its victim:

Ravidus’Footnote ¹⁴ ‘mad folly’ in provoking the speaker closely recalls the similar mockery brought to bear by Archilochus on his invective target Lycambes: ‘Papa Lycambes…who has unhinged the wits that you had before? Now indeed you seem a big joke to your fellow-townsmen’ (πάτερ Λʋκάμβα… / τίς σὰς παρήειρε φρένας / ἧις τὸ πρὶν ἠρήρησθα; νῦν δὲ δὴ πολὺς / ἀστοῖσι φαίνεαι γέλως; fr. 172 West); ‘What god, angry with you…?’ (τίς ἆρα δαίμων, καὶ τέοʋ χολούμενος; fr. 210 West).

Hipponax is evoked most clearly in the spectacularly nasty poem 108, a self-fulfilling threat in which the dismemberment of Cominius is symbolically enacted through the cataloguing of his various body parts and the scavenging animals that will consume them. As Cowan argues in detail, the epigram self-consciously recalls Hipponax fr. 128 West, where Eurymedontiades, like Cominius, appears to play the role of pharmakos or scapegoat, whose death at the hands of the people will purify the community.Footnote ¹⁵

Ravidus is perhaps to be seen as a stock figure, calqued on Archilochus’ Lycambes; but Cominius – whose unspecified transgressions are to be punished ‘by the will of the people’ – seems more likely to have been a real contemporary.Footnote ¹⁶ Poem 108 thus constitutes a point of intersection between Greek iambic poetry and a second important framework within which Catullus’ poetry can be situated – that of contemporary Roman oratory and political invective. Personal attacks on one’s opponents were a standard, indeed expected, element in both the political and the forensic oratory of the Roman Republic: as Syme memorably expressed it, ‘in the allegation of disgusting immorality, degrading pursuits and ignoble origin the Roman politician knew no compunction or limit’.Footnote ¹⁷ Legal and political invective typically draws on a set of standardized topoi, including embarrassing origins and family background, lack of self-control in the financial and other spheres, and sexual immorality, which are readily paralleled in Catullus’ attacks both on public figures and on those who have angered or displeased him in the personal arena.Footnote ¹⁸

Particularly noteworthy in this connection is the way in which allegations or insinuations of sexual deviancy tend to cluster – both in Catullus and in rhetorical invectiveFootnote ¹⁹ – around two recurrent ideas: that the target is not a real man but betrays signs of mollitia (softness, effeminacy), and that he has defiled his body and particularly his mouth – ideally, the site of reliable and trustworthy speech – through improper sexual contact with male or female partners. Fundamental in this connection is the ancient, and particularly Roman, conceptualization of the adult male as impenetrable penetrator: as recent scholarship on ancient gender and sexuality has comprehensively demonstrated, ‘sexuality’, in the sense of a fixed preference for sexual partners of a particular type, is far less important (if meaningful at all) in the ancient context than the power hierarchies and active–passive (or, perhaps better, insertive–receptive) polarities involved in sexual acts.Footnote ²⁰ Ideally, the adult citizen male enacts his hierarchical superiority over sexual partners by maintaining his physical intactness (literally, his ‘integrity’) while penetrating the bodies of others, whether male or female.

Sexual behaviours are typically perceived as closely bound up, in turn, with social and moral character: the male who willingly plays the receptive role in homoerotic sex will also betray his mollitia in his actions – his gait, style of dress, and speech – and, crucially, in a lack of self-mastery (intemperantia, incontinentia) that can play out in a variety of ways: uncontrolled spending, greed for food and drink, excessive indulgence in bodily pleasures of all kinds.Footnote ²¹ Paradoxically, at least in terms of modern sexual categories, the mollis man – like Catullus’ Caesar and Mamurra, or Cicero’s Catiline and Marc Antony – may be both a womanizer and a cinaedus or pathicus (that is, a gender deviant, or one who habitually adopts the ‘passive’ role in homoerotic relations).

Conversely, while women are conceived of as ‘naturally’ passive and penetrable, it is incumbent on respectable females to preserve their pudicitia – their sexual purity – by shunning sexual contact with anyone but their legitimate husbands. Cicero’s unforgettable and deeply misogynistic portrayal of Clodia Metelli in the Pro Caelio as no better than a whore is not untypical: Lesbia’s insatiable sexual appetite, embodied in the ‘three hundred adulterers’ of poem 11, belongs to the same stereotype.Footnote ²² The two invectives aimed at Aufillena, 110 and 111, play on similar invective tropes: Aufillena is the antitype of the good matrona (not only does she fall short of the ideal of the univira, the ‘one-man woman’, but she compounds her adulterous relations with incest [111]; her dishonesty makes her worse than a prostitute – she accepts ‘gifts’ but won’t keep her side of the bargain [110] – a notable double-bind).

But while Roman orators and moralists give a strong impression that the mollis man and the woman who fails to maintain her pudicitia are capable of, and indeed likely to engage in, any and every transgressive act, some behaviours are clearly marked as more subject to moral outrage than others. As noted above, the man who is ore inquinatus (‘orally defiled’) is an object of particular disdain, while violation of the incest taboo can be represented as the ultimate sexual transgression. We saw in Chapter 1 that the Lesbius of Catullus 79 is implied to engage both in incestuous relations with his sister (like Cicero’s Clodius – perhaps not coincidentally) and in fellatio: references to bad breath as a supposedly tell-tale sign of the fellator (‘cocksucker’) recur elsewhere in the collection, and the os impurum is found as an invective topos in oratory too.Footnote ²³ But Catullus also exploits the symbolic potential of irrumatio, or forcible oral penetration, as the ultimate humiliation: on the one hand, the poet himself and his friends Veranius and Fabullus are represented as victims of Memmius, the irrumator praetor (‘mouth-fucking governor’; 10.12–13 and 28.9–10), and of Piso, the uerpus Priapus (‘rampant Priapus’; 47.4; cf. 28.12–13);Footnote ²⁴ on the other, irrumatio may be represented as a punitive act inflicted by the poet himself on others.Footnote ²⁵

The notorious poem 16 exemplifies several of the above points.

Furius and Aurelius are represented as having impugned Catullus’ masculinity, accusing him of impudicitia or sexual passivity on the basis of the kiss poems (5 and 7 addressed to Lesbia, and perhaps also 48, to Juventius).Footnote ²⁶ An obsession with kissing – as a non-penetrative and (thus) non-hierarchical form of sexual activity – is evidently regarded as a sign of mollitia. Catullus’ response is twofold: on the one hand, he asserts a strong separation between poet and persona (poetam ipsum versus uersiculos; 5–6); on the other, he threatens Furius and Aurelius with the emasculating acts of pedicatio and irrumatio, anal and oral penetration (1, 14), which will recoup his masculinity while compromising theirs. At the same time, the poem can be seen to reflect in a somewhat paradoxical manner on the reading process and the poet’s control, or lack of control, over his reader: if Furius and Aurelius reject the persona-theory that the speaker advances in lines 5–6 and insist that the ‘I’ of the text is identical with the flesh and blood writer, they must in all consistency understand the threat of lines 1 and 14 to be, literally, accomplished. To put it another way, the poem may be seen, like 108, as a self-fulfilling threat or (in linguistic terms) an illocutionary act: in saying that he will bugger his addressees, Catullus in effect does so.Footnote ²⁷

The second half of the poem, in which the experience of reading neoteric poetry is troped in sexual terms, widens the net to include readers in general, suggesting a partial assimilation to the feminized addressees. The interpretation of lines 10–11 remains controversial; but scholars have noted that mouere lumbos and similar phrases are used elsewhere of the seductive wiggling of the hips or buttocks indicative of a desire to be penetrated (the subject is generally female);Footnote ²⁸ and this may be linked in turn to the ‘pederastic’ model of reading identified by Jesper Svenbro, according to which the writer is assimilated to the erastēs (lover), and the reader to the erōmenos, or (male) erotic object.Footnote ²⁹ By placing his words in Furius’ and Aurelius’ (our) mouths, the poet figuratively penetrates his reader;Footnote ³⁰ moreover, the ‘itch’ that the poetry incites makes us desire such an experience, even if ‘we’ are full-grown men who should be immune to such temptations. The framing threat is thus doubled by the model of reading implied by the intervening lines: again, the poet asserts his own masculinity in denying the reader’s, in what is – as often in invective contexts – a zero-sum game.

The poem’s startlingly graphic language drives the point home, ‘disproving’ the allegation of mollitia in the very act of denying it (the diction and sentiment of this poem are anything but mollis). At the same time, while obscenity is perfectly at home in iambic poetry – if not in the generally more euphemistic rhetorical examples – it may in this instance also point to the poem’s connections with what we might call a vernacular tradition of insult: that of graffiti and popular lampoons. Self-fulfilling threats of the kind identified here – and, notably, the model of reading as penetration – can be paralleled in the graffiti that survive from Pompeii and elsewhere in the Roman world. These, like their modern equivalents, are often repetitive and formulaic: one recurring type plays variations on the theme pedicatur qui leget (sic), ‘whoever reads this is buggered’, compelling the passer-by who reads the graffito aloud to condemn himself as a pathicus, fellator, or similar.Footnote ³¹ It is likely that many ancient readers would have appreciated the familiarity of the sentiment: the earthy and deliberately offensive humour of the graffito underwrites the poem’s aggression, but at the same time becomes a point of departure for the meditation on gender, reading, and control outlined above. As often in Catullus, too, the interplay between elegance of form and crudity of content is crucial to the poem’s effect.Footnote ³²

Still more closely related to surviving graffiti is poem 59, Bononiensis Rufa Rufulum fellat (‘Rufa of Bologna sucks off Rufulus’). The opening line quotes a typical graffito formula, of which numerous examples can be found in the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum.Footnote ³³ In this instance, Catullus goes on to outdo his model in the systematic humiliation of his target. While perhaps lacking the subtler implications of poem 16, poem 59 might nevertheless be described as a masterpiece of poetic economy: every word contributes to the vilification of Rufa, who is not only a fellatrix (‘cocksucker’) but apparently incestuous (the similarity between the names suggests that Rufulus is her brother), adulterous (she is identified as ‘Menenius’ wife’; 2), and a serial offender (saepe, ‘often’; 2) in graveyards (2), which are mentioned elsewhere in Latin literature as a haunt of the lowest class of prostitutes. Here, she openly (uidistis, ‘you have seen her’; 3) steals food offerings from the funeral pyres, suggesting both wretched poverty and impiety, and is meanwhile beaten, or perhaps raped (tunderetur; 5) by the corpse-burner, contact with whom – as a slave, and one who is polluted by his contact with the dead – might be seen as the ultimate degradation. Even Rufa’s name – literally, ‘red-head’ – and place of origin might be understood as contributing to the comprehensive verbal annihilation: the Romans considered red hair unattractive, while the opening toponym stresses her provincial origins and so perhaps distances her from the sophistication of the metropolis.Footnote ³⁴

It will be obvious at this stage that there is considerable overlap between the three contexts – Greek iambic poetry, Roman oratory, and the language of popular abuse – within which I have sought to situate Catullus’ invective poems, particularly in their shared emphasis on sexual transgression. There are apparent references to fellatio, for example, in the surviving fragments of both Archilochus and Hipponax, as well as in Roman graffiti and – by innuendo – in the speeches of Cicero; incest is among the depravities of Hipponax’s Bupalos, as well as of the Clodius and Clodia of both Cicero’s letters and speeches and popular witticisms.Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, as the use of both literary citations and graffito formulae in the poems discussed above suggests, Catullus appears self-conscious in his fusion of the literary forms of insult canonized by tradition with the language of the streets: sophisticated allusivity meets an often startling directness in a blend that can be hard for modern readers to take, but one that packs an undeniable punch.

2. Invective targets

Like the ‘friendship’ poems discussed in the previous chapter, Catullus’ invectives tend to fall into related groups or cycles, defined in this instance primarily by the name of the addressee or invective target. Among the most extensive is the group revolving around Julius Caesar’s prefect of engineers, Mamurra, or – as Catullus derisively calls him – Mentula, ‘The Prick’.Footnote ³⁶ When the poems are read as a connected group, it has been observed that Mamurra/Mentula tends to appear as a kind of anti-Catullus.Footnote ³⁷ Like the speaker, he engages in (an) adulterous affair(s) (poems 29, 57, 94); composes poetry (poem 105); and is perpetually short of money (poems 41, 43,Footnote ³⁸ 114). However, where Catullus (tendentiously) emphasizes his single-minded devotion to Lesbia and portrays her attractions as surpassing those of all other women, Mamurra is characterized by his excess and lack of discrimination. Poem 29 (discussed in Chapter 1) portrays him as a bottomless pit of uncontrolled appetite, who not only plays the Adonis in ‘everyone’s bedrooms’ (6–8) but ‘gobbles up fat fortunes’ (21–2), including the entire profits of Pompey’s campaigns in Pontus and Spain (18–19). Poems 114 and 115 sum up the sequence, playing sententiously on the paradox – a philosophical commonplace – that the rich man who cannot limit his desires is poor, while true wealth consists in contentment with little.Footnote ³⁹ So Mamurra/Mentula, for all his vast estates, still manages to exceed his income (fructus sumptibus exsuperat; 114.4): the pair of epigrams builds to the surreal closing image of Mentula as a huge erect penis (mentula magna minax; 115.8) – desire personified.Footnote ⁴⁰

At times, however, Catullus’ characterization of Mamurra seems uncomfortably close to his self-depiction: the speaker, too, can revel in his own excess, notably in the kiss poems, 5 and 7. The ironic juxtaposition of poems 28 and 29 – in which the speaker first complains about Memmius’ tight-fisted refusal to countenance the financial ambitions of his juniors, and then, with a startling volte-face, lambasts the Triumvirs for their indulgence of Mamurra – was discussed in Chapter 1.Footnote ⁴¹ The modelling of Mamurra on the comic miles gloriosus or ‘braggart soldier’, also noted in Chapter 1, has ironic resonances, too, with the speaker’s own unjustified boasts in poem 10.Footnote ⁴² In this respect, the Mamurra/Mentula cycle presents a particularly clear instantiation of the alternation between ‘Priapic’ and ‘anti-Priapic’ stances on the poet’s part, considered in Chapter 2: the excess that Catullus attributes to his invective target both contrasts with and mirrors his own.

If Mamurra appears as a kind of distorted mirror image of Catullus himself, something rather similar may be said of his bêtes noirs Furius and Aurelius, who can be understood in part as a negative counterpart of the poet’s friends Veranius and Fabullus. The two pairs, or one member of each, recur in the first part of the collection as – in the latter case – objects of the poet’s devotion (poems 9, 12, 13, 28, 47) and – in the former – targets of his derision and, more particularly, erotic rivals (poems 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26).Footnote ⁴³ There is a degree of thematic overlap between the Furius and Aurelius poems and the Mamurra cycle: Furius and Aurelius, too, are characterized by their poverty, hunger, and excess. Furius is mocked particularly for his reduced circumstances: poem 23, like 114, plays on the philosophical idea of contentment with little, harping in grotesque and scatological detail on the ‘blessings’ of Furius’ poverty, though this time the sting in the tail is that Furius has no need of the loan he keeps nagging Catullus for – nam sat es beatus (‘for you’re happy/wealthy enough’).Footnote ⁴⁴ Rivalry for Juventius’ affections is the ground for a further attack in poem 24, where Furius’ poverty makes him unworthy as a lover;Footnote ⁴⁵ meanwhile, 26 turns on a pun on the verb oppono, in the senses ‘expose [to the wind]’ and ‘mortgage’ – while sheltered from the wind, Furius’ estate is unprotected from the ruinous ‘storm’ of debt.Footnote ⁴⁶ Aurelius, on the other hand, resembles Mamurra/Mentula in his unbounded (sexual) appetites: he is the ‘father of all the hungers’, pater esuritionum (21.1), and his penis is ‘a danger to good and bad boys alike’ (tuo…pene/infesto pueris bonis malisque; 15.9–10).Footnote ⁴⁷ Both the witty mock-commendatio, poem 15, and poem 21 conclude, like poem 16, with threats of sexual violence: Catullus’ speaker will ‘satisfy’ Aurelius’ hunger, but not in the way the latter would wish – rather, he will ‘fill’ his rival’s ‘hungry’ orifices by inserting either his own penis into the victim’s mouth (21.13) or radishes and spiny fish into his anus (15.18–19), a traditional ‘self-help’ punishment supposedly inflicted on adulterers.Footnote ⁴⁸

Here, again, Catullus can be seen to draw on formulae popular with the writers of graffiti (esureis et me felas, ‘you’re hungry and you suck me off’, as one version has it);Footnote ⁴⁹ at the same time, the Aurelius poems exemplify a persistent theme of Catullan invective, the confusion of mouth and anus, which has been illuminatingly explored by Amy Richlin.Footnote ⁵⁰ This pattern can be understood as another instantiation of the os impurum: as well as polluting their mouths through sexual contact, Catullus’ invective targets brush their teeth with urine (Egnatius, 37.20, 39.17–21), or have breath so foul that mouth and anus are indistinguishable (Aemilius, poem 97 – another exercise in what we might call ‘gross-out’ invective, comparable to 59, discussed above). The ‘hungry’ anus turns up again in poem 33, where Vibennius senior’s thefts are figuratively equated with his son’s appetite for the receptive role in homoerotic intercourse. Rather less obviously, the food items with which Catullus threatens Aurelius in poem 15, and the comparisons in poem 23 between Furius’ anus and a salt cellar (19) and between his shit and beans (21), can be understood as part of the same symbolic system: paradoxically, Furius is (figuratively) ‘stained’, despite the purity of his body (culus tibi purior salillo est, ‘your arsehole is cleaner than a little salt cellar’; 19), by being depicted as handling his own excrement (22–3).Footnote ⁵¹

The os impurum also has a part to play in a third invective cycle, the seven epigrams addressed to Gellius, the last of which, poem 116, was briefly discussed above. Like Mamurra/Mentula, Gellius can be seen in part as a foil or negative counterpart to the poet’s self-representation, though the focus here is more specifically on transgressive sexuality: as well as fellatio (80), Gellius is taxed with a hair-raising series of incestuous relations, with his aunt (74, 88), sister (88, 89), mother (88, 89, 90), and other unspecified female relatives (89). Several of the poems in the sequence take the form of what Denis Feeney has called the ‘paradox epigram’, in which the speaker presents us with a riddling question which he then resolves, tending in this instance to underline the abnormality of Gellius’ behaviour.Footnote ⁵² Poem 88 raises the stakes even in relation to os impurum poems such as 97, by equating Gellius’ incestuous appetites with auto-fellatio, in a devastating punchline (nam nihil est quicquam sceleris, quo prodeat ultra, / non si demisso se ipse uoret capite, ‘there is no worse crime he could commit, not if he lowered his head and swallowed himself’; 88.7–8).

The sequence is interwoven with the series of Lesbia epigrams in such a way as (perhaps intentionally) to contrast Catullus’ idealized, quasi-familial love (see especially poems 72 and 75, discussed in Chapter 3 above) with Gellius’ comprehensive shattering of the incest taboo. It is notable, too, that the sequence culminates in poem 91 in the revelation that Gellius has betrayed amicitia (‘friendship’) as well as familial pietas (‘duty’, ‘respect’), retrospectively supplying a reason for the violent hostility of the preceding poems. With devastating irony, the poet claims that he had believed himself safe from betrayal because his beloved (presumably Lesbia) was not related to Gellius: as it turns out, however, the transgression against fides proved a sufficient incentive for Gellius, with his taste for ‘every wrong in which there’s a touch of criminality’ (tantum tibi gaudium in omni/culpa est, in quacumque est aliquid sceleris; 91.9–10). This epigram and, in retrospect, the entire Gellius sequence, can thus be seen as a particularly virulent version of the ‘betrayal of friendship’ poems discussed in Chapter 3. At the same time, the insistent emphasis on the incest motif may suggest that Catullus’ hostility has a political dimension: as we saw in the case of Lesbia’s preference for her brother Lesbius in poem 79, incest may serve in part as a metaphor for aristocratic exclusivity.Footnote ⁵³ Again, however, we should not overemphasize the metaphorical dimension of Gellius’ transgressions, particularly given the long history of both incest and the os impurum as topoi within the traditions of both literary and popular invective.

Finally, Lesbia herself is targeted in several poems, notably 11 and 58. Along with Rufa and Aufillena, and female invective targets in general, she is condemned – essentially – for failure to maintain her pudicitia or sexual purity (an inherently paradoxical allegation, given that Catullus’ own relationship with her is explicitly depicted as adulterous; 68.143–6). Like Cicero’s Clodia, Lesbia is portrayed as no better than a whore: in poem 37, she is ‘open for business’ (consedit; 14) in the ‘randy inn’; in poem 58 she has descended to the level of a common streetwalker, ‘bringing off the sons of mighty Remus’ in the backstreets and alleyways. Here, as in poem 11, the impact of the closing line’s graphically sexual language is sharpened by contrast with the lyrical opening, with its insistent, ‘incantatory’ repetition of Lesbia’s name.Footnote ⁵⁴

The persistent tendency to de-emphasize Catullus’ invective output noted at the beginning of this chapter is – I suggested – the result in large part of our continuing propensity to think of him as a love poet (whether a tender or a racy one, according to the reader’s taste and preconceptions). As we are beginning to recognize, this is at best a distortion, which we can to some extent counteract by placing these poems in their literary and historical contexts. The invectives still retain something of their power to shock, and will no doubt continue to be read with a degree of distaste by modern audiences – not least for their unabashed resort to depictions of sexual violence, and the strong streak of misogyny characteristic of those directed against women. But we should recognize that Catullus’ tactics and even his graphic language were by no means exceptional in what Cicero characterizes as the maledica ciuitas (‘abusive city’).Footnote ⁵⁵ As we have seen, allegations of the grossest immorality, including sexual misconduct, were a regular component of the political discourse of the Late Republic, and were liberally employed too by the writers of graffiti. By the same token, placing Catullus in the context of the iambic tradition, in which the poet typically both depicts himself as a disreputable outcast and acts as the defender of communal values, can help to make sense of – which is not to say explain away – some of the contradictions apparent in his decidedly ambiguous self-presentation.