Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet. Daisy Dunn

Cicero croaked. He knew that incest jokes were crass, but when Clodia was so meddlesome, so unworthy of her husband, he felt that they were justified. Time and again he called her ‘ox-eyes’, a sobriquet that emphasised her tempestuousness more than her beauty. In Homer’s great epics, it was Zeus’ feisty wife Hera whose eyes were ‘ox-like’.

      Although Clodia seemed to be making headway on behalf of her brother and his quest for plebeian status, for all her arguments she soon found there was nothing she could do to prevent Metellus from blocking the measure in a ‘most distinguished opposition’.¹⁶ Her brother and her husband were at loggerheads, and for the moment, there was no way to resolve the stalemate.

      Whether it was this that drove her into Catullus’ arms – if she was not already there – or the simple fact that the intensity of her husband’s new position as consul provided the opportunity for temptation, there were practicalities to be addressed before an affair could become fully fledged. It could not be conducted under Metellus’ own roof on the Palatine Hill, for it would be impossible to elude the eyes of so many neighbours, visitors, and slaves. Catullus was also keen to keep any prospective activity away from his own door. A woman was entitled to dine with men, own property, and move fairly freely through the city, but her movements were hampered by her male ‘guardian’ – ordinarily her husband. So Ovid later complained of his mistress Corinna, ‘whom her husband, whom her guardian, whom the hard door (so many enemies!) were guarding, so she could not be taken by any deception’.¹⁷ Even if she managed it, Clodia might easily have been caught.

      Catullus was undeterred. He calmly turned to one of many acquaintances he had made during his first months in Rome, a certain Allius, who had offered him his house to use as he desired. The opportunity arose just as Catullus was ‘burning like Etna’. In retrospect, and with marvellous poetic litotes, he later wrote that the girl, for her part, ‘was not unwilling’ (Poem 8). Not without a flattering dose of hyberbole – litotes’ happy inverse – he likened his relief at finding such a spot in which to exercise his passion to a favouring breeze arriving suddenly and assisting sailors ‘caught in a black hurricane’ (Poem 68).

      As Catullus’ beloved approached the threshold for the very first time she looked like a ‘shining goddess’. Ordinarily, a woman would cross the threshold in this way when she became a man’s bride, and then carried in his arms. (Few remembered why: the ancient biographer Plutarch made this number twenty-nine of his Roman Questions and proposed that it was perhaps a memory of the forceful manner in which the first Romans had taken the Sabine women, who lived on their borders, to be their wives, or through female shyness, or to illustrate that she was now tied to that household.) In usurping the role of the bride and entering alone, Lesbia sounded an ill note; she faltered on the threshold that was already well worn, just as the Trojan Horse famously faltered as it crossed into the ancient city, an evil gift from the Greeks which heralded the collapse of Troy.¹⁸