Happy though he was to call the poems of Suffenus and other men ‘tortures’ (Poem 14), and even to contemplate gathering all their ‘poison’ to give Calvus his comeuppance for making him a present of it, Catullus more than once referred to himself as ‘the very worst’ poet (Poems 36 and 49). As time would tell, he meant these words sarcastically, but not even sarcasm could disguise his self-knowledge. While he saw these inferior poets as ‘unsuited to our times’, he was not blind to the fact that his own work was untimely, only in a different sense. A fragment of a draft introduction preserved in his collection classed his poetry as ineptia – not just ‘ramblings’ but ‘unsuited’ or ‘untimely’ ramblings: utterings which did not quite fit.
While he frowned upon some other poets’ work, not everyone around him approved of his own. Lending them epithets neither of praise nor entirely of criticism, Cicero branded his set neoteroi, ‘too new’, or poetae novi, ‘new poets’.20 Ever the stickler for tradition, Cicero saw them as young, subversive, inferior to the great masters who preceded them.
The older elite families had grown up on a diet of epic and historic chronicle, with a smattering of comedy. In the texts of Homer lay praise for the valiant warriors of ancient times, luxurious palaces and perfect islands. The first Roman authors had written in Greek. Others proudly translated the Odyssey into Latin, and a man named Ennius then boldly claimed that Homer had entered his soul and inspired him to write. His Annales, chronicles of Rome’s august history, were precisely the kind of work Catullus despised for their weight and severity. Other Romans savoured them nonetheless, as they did dull agricultural treatises and staid comedies based upon Greek plays. Catullus might have despaired: there was a clutch of poets who had turned their hands in recent decades to translating and adapting Greek poems into Latin, and he was familiar with their efforts.21 But the civil wars of Sulla and Marius appeared to have resulted in something of a drought of truly elegant literature. Catullus resolved to play the situation to his advantage.
Rebelling against the dry tomes of Ennius and others, seizing the new day after the tragedies of the previous decades, Catullus and his friends relished the corporeal and the earthy: not just a boy indulging himself sexually, but a man airing his buttocks at the baths, or subjecting a crowd to his terrible body odour. Catullus wrote lines that were impish and scatological:
For your anus is cleaner than a salt-cellar
And doesn’t shit ten times a full year
(Poem 23)
His first editors in Renaissance Italy reproduced such fruity poems and commented upon them freely. When it came to disseminating them in England, however, prudishness often got in the way. Some scholars omitted the rude poems or fractions of them from their editions to make them suitable for both schoolchildren and adults to read.22 Even in the twentieth century, famous scholars, including C. J. Fordyce, have deemed up to a third of Catullus’ poems unfit for comment.23
Cleverly concealing the fact that he was incredibly doctus (‘learned’) by writing Latin that looked diurnal – mundane – Catullus turned his hand also to composing smart elegiac couplets loaded with sentiment.24 He had four acquaintances in Verona who were ‘double-dating’. When they began to read the poem he wrote about them, they might have thought that he was mocking them:
Caelius is crazy for Aufillenus, Quintius for Aufillena,
The flowers of Verona’s youth,
The brother one, his sister the other.
Which is what they call a truly sweet fraternity.
But then he unexpectedly brought the poem round to form a heartfelt tribute to an old friend:
Whom am I to back of the two? Caelius, you.
For your friendship alone saw me through the fire
When the mad flames of passion burned me to the marrow.
May you be happy, Caelius, and a master of love.
(Poem 100)
His poem fell comfortably into two halves, but hinged not merely upon themes of love and friendship, but on the line between life and death. This man’s friendship was not to be taken lightly, for it saved Catullus’ life.
Charming as such verses were, for people more accustomed to didactics – the kind of poetry that actually taught them something – it was initially difficult to see that Catullus’ personal refrains and observations of humdrum life contained lessons of their own. Cicero, in particular, loved grandiloquence. The epics were more his style, not the colloquialisms and newly turned words of Rome’s youth. He could not appreciate strings of expletives embedded in otherwise elegant lines, and jilty rhythms, and thousands of diminutives – it was ‘little’ this, ‘little’ that – littering self-obsessed and self-obsessing ramblings on love and heartbreak. He got Catullus’ references, but not the point of them.
While writing poems like these, Catullus and his friends longed also to capture the sophisticated verve of celebrated Hellenistic poets, men such as Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus, whose poetry might imbue their Latin lines with all the learnedness and erudition of the Greek East. Catullus’ interest in writing in this poised and intellectual style, as well as in the more colloquial manner favoured by the man in the street, made him a particularly bold and interesting poet.
Callimachus originally came from Cyrene, a Greek foundation on the coast of North Africa (close to modern Shahat in Libya), but now capital of one of Rome’s newer provinces, Cyrenaica.25 He traced his lineage all the way back to its founder, King Battus, and Catullus perpetuated his claims to royal ancestry.
When Callimachus was born, shortly before the third century BC, Alexandria was still a new city. It was at its great Library that he and Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the most famous epic on Jason and the Argonauts, made scholarly erudition fashionable. Quite taken with their cleverness, and with some of the Greek poems they discovered in recent anthologies, Catullus and his friends set about establishing themselves as their Latin heirs. As they did so, they also looked at the work of Meleager, a poet who lived on the island of Cos in the eastern Aegean, who over the last quarter century had gathered together a selection of Greek epigrams spanning the period of history through to the early first century BC. Other poets were producing similar compilations. Catullus was not the first to pick up these works at Rome and respond to them in Latin, but he was among the first to do so successfully.26
He perceived early on the ways in which the works of his predecessors could intersect, the Greek with the Latin, the past with the present; Callimachus and his descent from a king who claimed kinship with one of the Argonauts whom Apollonius was celebrating in verse. And there Catullus stood at the far end of their tangled lineage, embracing it as the fount, but just the fount, of the best Roman poetry of all, his own. Apollonius’ Argonautica would form a starting point for Catullus’ Bedspread Poem, a work whose form would be pointedly Callimachean.
People like Cicero ought to have admired the scholarship that Catullus absorbed from these poets. It was said that Callimachus wrote more than 800 papyrus rolls on wide-ranging topics: treatises on the rivers of Europe and the names of fish, collections of tragedies, dramas; a poem about Io, the girl Jupiter turned into a heifer and raped, which must have influenced Calvus as he sat down to write on the same theme; and a poem about Theseus entitled Hecale. Catullus was looking particularly at his Aetia, a four-book poem on the origins of ancient customs, written in elegiacs, a metre normally reserved for short pieces. It was choppy, but meticulously structured. In its prologue Callimachus explained that his critics despised work that was not written as one continuous long poem on epic themes such as warfare. He disagreed, and argued moreover that sacrificial sheep should be fattened,