Catullus was not interested in panegyric, so it came as no surprise that he wrote nothing to mark the occasion, in September 61 BC, when on his forty-fifth birthday Pompey finally celebrated his third triumph for his achievements against the pirates and King Mithridates of Pontus. Had Catullus chosen to do so, the imagery would have been palpable: crowds packing Rome’s streets; placards proclaiming Pompey’s conquests – Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Media, Colchis, Iberia, Albania, Syria, Cilicia, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Palestine, Judaea, Arabia, ‘and everything the pirates had on land and sea that had now been overthrown’.37 Hostages, among them the chief pirates Pompey had scourged from the seas, were paraded among the trophies and pearl crowns.
One particularly large golden statue tottered on its stand. Pompey had chosen to display the statue, rather than the slain body of the king, because the embalmer had done such a bad job.38 The issue was not the gore, it was more that it would have prompted doubts as to whom Pompey had really vanquished. The youngsters of Rome jostled to catch a glimpse of the statue and, still more pressingly, of Pompey, the man who had succeeded where so many Romans had not. Within four years of being entrusted with the command, he had claimed the final defeat of King Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, and reduced him to a glitzy showpiece.
Wearing a cloak he claimed was once owned by Alexander the Great, Pompey made it known that the majority of the prisoners on show would be sent home straight after the occasion.39 As Catullus must have realised, this was meant as a great show of clemency towards the defeated. Few displays could have endeared him more to the Roman people, who loved to hate eastern luxury, but could not help but be fascinated by it.
Though Catullus was not seduced by the event, he could not close his eyes to what it signified. The pitiful appearance of so many foreign faces poignantly asserted the authority Rome had regained over Asia, as well as its proud ownership of Bithynia, which stood now larger than ever on the Black Sea coast. It was as though the Romans had regained a shattered crown, and acquired extra jewels in the process. The victory at once made viable the prospect of freely walking on its soil. Catullus’ elder brother ventured to Asia, possibly to assist in the war effort or gain grounding for a political career. But Catullus, for his part, had too much to detain him in Rome to contemplate Bithynia just yet.
That blinding, tongue-freezing moment with Clodia Metelli had left its mark. But the wine had been free-flowing that night and put some of his memories to flight. It had been difficult for a Gaul like him to gauge his new limits when he realised that the Romans drank their wine with water, and frowned upon those who did not.40 The idea of drinking wine, especially a fine Falernian,41 anything but straight had long struck Catullus as anathema: ‘… water, spoiler of wine … off you pop to the dour kind’, he sang, after a few (Poem 27).
Heroes, born in the moment most admired
Beyond measure of all Ages, godly race,
Offspring of a noble mother,
Again and again I beseech you.
I shall commemorate you often in my poem
(Poem 64, lines 23–4)
EVENINGS WERE FOR WRITING POEMS, as much as for drinking wine. Catullus could not explain why, but when he sat down to write he found himself picturing Cornelius Nepos, a historian and poet from Gaul. Inquisitive, not to say obsessive, about the figures who had shaped the world around him, Cornelius had written On Famous Men and Outstanding Generals of Foreign Peoples, and composed a recondite history of the Greeks and Romans in three volumes, the Chronica (sadly now lost).1 Cornelius also had a weakness for learned and elegant poetry – a fact which did not elude Catullus who decided that if there was anyone worth impressing while also challenging with the directness and erudition of his verse, it was he.
Rather than trouble himself with acquiring a patron – whose persistent requests and inability to be satisfied with fine lines might have proved an inconvenient distraction – Catullus decided to make Cornelius the dedicatee of his poetry collection. Poetry was a painful enough profession as it was, in which days of intense thought seldom resulted in anything other than frustration and a wax tablet stamped under foot. By the end of each day, it was less a case of finding a line he liked than one he could tolerate; and even if Catullus could do that, he would have struggled to satisfy a patron. It was finished articles they wanted, not salvaged syllables. The very notion of writing on demand was a distinctly unpoetic one. No, he would be independent, not an unusual situation for the times, but one for which he needed private means and public prominence.
Catullus possessed the means: his family had acquired riches enough to carry him through, and Rome’s foreign conquests had gilded his world in luxuries. The poor reached out to taste them, but like Tantalus forever striving to savour a drink in the Underworld, few ever reached their fruits. While landowners suffered as more and more produce was imported from the new provinces, many an equestrian exulted in the new trade. Catullus, however, was never much interested in the trappings of new money, and was at pains to play down his wealth. ‘The wallet of your Catullus is full of cobwebs,’ he once told a friend, as if he had slipped his hand into the fold of his toga and found not emptiness, but the deception of emptiness, a web that proved to have fallen short of its purpose through possessing too many holes (Poem 13).2 It was too easy for a young dandy to complain about a lack of money when his accounts ran dry, or when his father replenished them to an extent he considered pitiful.
As for public prominence, Metellus Celer could introduce him to Cornelius Nepos, in the first instance. Metellus knew the man well enough to tell him a curious tale of how the king of the Suebi, a Germanic tribe, once gave him certain Indians who had come ashore in Gaul following a storm at sea.3 He said little more on the matter, which put him at risk of sounding like a self-aggrandising fantasist. Whether the story was true or not, Cornelius Nepos believed it enough to repeat it. He was a lofty figure for Catullus to dedicate his self-confessed ‘ramblings’ to, but the elder poet did recognise their worth: twenty years after Catullus’ death, Cornelius would remember him as one of the finest poets of the age.4
Catullus pictured the ‘elegant new little book’ he would give him, a handsome papyrus scroll prepared from strips of sedge plant. A specialist craftsman pressed the strips and laid them out in the sun to fuse together. Then he used a dry pumice stone to polish the edges of the papyrus, which would otherwise prove perilous to the delicate fingertips of the learned.5 In a gruelling exercise in self-criticism, Catullus would fill the book with his best work, for not even the largest scroll in Rome was big enough to hold all the poems he had ever written.6 He hoped that his poetry would be just as well polished as his scroll and therefore survive for ‘over a hundred years’, a saeculum, the longest span a Roman supposed a man could live (Poem 1).7
Waking from his reverie, he decided to concentrate for the moment on publishing what he had by word of mouth, and in draft form among friends and more public groups before considering any amendments and overseeing the production of further copies on papyrus. Latin poetry did not rhyme, but could be written in many different metres, to which the ancient ear was well attuned. Catullus was ever promiscuous in his choice. The first fifty-nine poems in his collection as it survives vary in metre (the ‘polymetrics’); the last fifty are epigrams, written in the elegiac metre. In between are eight poems, which rely upon a variety of different rhythms and beats.
No sooner had he begun to circulate his first drafts in Rome, than a ‘filthy slut’ told him he was a ‘joke’, and promptly made off with several of his wax tablets. He watched her, ‘strutting