The sight antagonised him, as did the slattern’s words. Rich men could write leisurely while other men were plying more physically exhausting trades, but it was certainly no ‘joke’. When spent wisely, leisure – otium – could produce magnificent results. He documented the process earnestly, but with heightened fervour, in a poem to another poet, Licinius:
Yesterday, Licinius, on a lazy day,
We messed around for ages in my writing tablets
Risqué as agreed,
Scribbling short verses, you then me,
Playing now with this metre and now with that,
Swapping them between us over laughter and wine.
(Poem 50)
He went on to describe the sleepless night that followed, worked up as he was in admiration for this man’s great wit and the passion they had made in metres and refrains. When their professional lives were so tied up together, it felt only natural for Catullus to feature the man in his lines. The poem was a gift to him – ocelle (an affectionate diminutive that literally meant ‘little eye’) – so that there could be no doubt about the depth of his affection.
Catullus was no stranger to what it meant to feel an intense or passing attraction to another man. All around him, adolescent boys from good families were enjoying sexual liaisons with other boys. Some kept a concubinus at home, a man of lower social standing with whom he could while away the years of youth before proceeding to marriage with an eligible girl. Sex between the two boys could be perfunctory, but a concubinus could form a lasting emotional attachment to his partner and begrudge the day he left him behind: ‘miserable, miserable concubine’ (Poem 61). As Romans talked freely about each other’s sex lives, an adult man of respectable status could be quite open about the penetration of a male slave or subordinate. To be penetrated himself, and therefore give another man pleasure, was, on the other hand, deeply shameful. There was no word for homosexuality in Catullus’ day, but the poet was fond of using language then considered risqué to describe a man who took on the receptive role with another man.
Catullus decided to pursue Licinius – full name Gaius Licinius Calvus Macer – not as a lover, but as close enough a friend for later poets to recall them often as a pair.8 On further acquaintance, Catullus discovered that the fellow preferred to go by the name Calvus, an unpretentious two syllables which he hoped would put distance between him and his father’s shadow. Poor Calvus had barely to sit down to dinner before someone would ask him if he was related to Gaius Licinius Macer, an influential historian and political adviser: a wunderkind descended from 300 years of political gold. The father had committed suicide upon being indicted for extortion, but people had not forgotten the high esteem in which he had been held. And here was his son, Calvus, trying to make his way in the world, a short man with very little hair – if he lived up to his preferred name which meant ‘bald’.9
At least he had the example of Julius Caesar to heed. The tall and well-built commander was developing a bald patch as he aged. He tended to remove excess body hair with tweezers, but was so anxious to maintain the semblance of a full mane that he fashioned a comb-over and relished the opportunity to wear a laurel wreath when this honour was bestowed upon him.10
Others wrestled with the same problem. Several hundred years later, Synesius of Cyrene, a Neoplatonist who became a bishop, wrote an essay In Praise of Baldness (in response to one historian’s In Praise of Hair). There was no shame in the head being bald, he insisted, provided that the mind was hirsute, or ruffled with ideas. Sheep, after all, were hairy but stupid. Not satisfied with explaining how many of the most intelligent figures in the ancient world had been hairless – most famously of all, Socrates – he proceeded to argue that even the heroes of myth, such as Achilles, shed their hair at an early age. If that did not stop them from achieving eternal recognition, why should it stop anyone else?
Calvus was trying to rise above his appearance and become a respectable lawyer, for which poetry would prove an excellent grounding and distraction. He needed only to look at Cicero, the greatest lawyer of the age, who had spent his younger years composing a poem about a fisherman from Boeotia who ate a herb and turned into a prophetic sea god. The crown of Calvus’ poetic achievements, as fortune would have it, would also involve an element of metamorphosis. He wrote about Io, a young girl whom Jupiter, king of the gods, turned into a heifer, and raped: ‘Oh unfortunate virgin, you feed on bitter grass.’11
Catullus and Calvus struck up a friendship with another poet, Gaius Helvius Cinna, who probably came from Brescia, ‘mother’ of Catullus’ Verona. The proximity of Cisalpine Gaul to Rome and its varied landscapes proved a fertile combination, and Cinna, for one, did not hesitate to proclaim his provincial roots: ‘But now a swift chariot pulled by two little horses rushes me through the willow trees of the Cenomani [Gauls].’12 As a man who rendered even a talented poet a mere ‘goose’ among ‘melodious swans’, Cinna had plenty to teach Catullus and Calvus.13 If only he was not so slow at composition. He was still hard at work on a poem he had begun perhaps five years earlier about an incestuous affair of a princess called Zmyrna.
Into and out of their circle, less salon than fluid coterie, wandered several other poets, including Furius Bibaculus, whom Catullus came to know exceptionally well, and, at their helm, a poet and grammar teacher from Gaul, Publius Valerius Cato. Catullus addressed him in a few lines which made light of their closeness in name and nature, as he described the moment he punished a precocious young boy:14
A ridiculous scenario, Cato, hilarious,
Well worth your attention and laughter.
Laugh as much as you love Catullus, Cato!
The scenario is ridiculous and too funny.
Just now I caught my girlfriend’s little boy
Wanking; If Dione approves, I took him
With my hard-straining cock.
(Poem 56)
Determined to wind Cato up, Catullus left the identity of the boy he assaulted in his poem unclear; if he were an innocent slave, at worst Catullus would have had to compensate his owner for property damage. In a clever pun, Valerius Catullus sits side by side with Valerius Cato, ‘Catullus, Cato!’ As Catullus knew, his name was little more than a diminutive that meant ‘little Cato’.15 Joking with his older and wiser namesake, he made it his mission to laugh all the more heartily to make up for the best-known Cato of his day, the optimate politician Cato the Younger, who was famous for never laughing at all.16 Even Cicero, who was very fond of young Cato, had to confess that he spoke in the Senate ‘as if he were in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ cesspit’.17
There was nothing Catullus and his poet circle liked more than picking apart the work of inferior authors. In a similarly jocular tone, Catullus wrote a poem to a friend, Varus, about the poetry of a certain Suffenus:18 a likeable man, but a terrible poet. Not satisfied with composing ten thousand or more verses on wax tablets, ‘this Suffenus’ had them copied out on luxurious rolls of papyrus, wound up on new scroll knobs with red tie-thongs, lead-ruled, their edges smoothed. Suffenus the man and Suffenus’ poems did not go hand in hand:19
When you read them, that smart and sophisticated
Suffenus suddenly seems like any old goat-milker
Or digger, such is the transformation and discrepancy.
(Poem 22)
As far as Catullus was concerned, good poetry was characterised by urbanitas, which was determined less by a poet’s background and current surroundings than it was by an aptitude for incisiveness, sophistication and wit. Many a man from the city had failed in that test, and many a provincial flourished.