Such readers in Rome were used to epic and chronicles and meandering excursus on the history that made Rome august. They had the patience to work through manual-like offerings on farming, if not to write them. Prior to Catullus, a cluster of poets, including the little-known Laevius and Valerius Aedituus, had tried to capture the liveliness of the Greek poets in Latin, but their attempts would not generally prove as successful as his; their names are obscure today as a result of the poor survival of their work. Catullus did not shirk sobriety, but framed it unexpectedly and with a finesse of the kind that many of his literary predecessors lacked.
The apparent simplicity of Catullus’ poetry often masks far greater, deeper sentiment and subtlety of thought. He helped to shape the genre of Latin love elegy by writing a sustained series of poems to a lover. Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus: all were influenced by his work. So Ovid, in a book of love elegies, confessed that he had a wandering eye and could not help but feel attracted to many different women: ‘I hate what I am but, though I long to, can’t fail to be what I hate.’2 It is a striking line, but partly because it is a response to one of Catullus’ most remarkable poems which begins: ‘I hate and I love’ (Poem 85). The Latin love-poet Propertius, who was about thirty years younger than Catullus, pledged that his poetry would make the beauty of his mistress Cynthia most famous of all, ‘pace Catullus’.3 Catullus remained a monumental figure of reference for the poets who sprang up over the decades following his death.
In his pithy observations of day-to-day life and bitter polemic against his enemies, Catullus also pre-empted the great satirists of the Roman Empire, particularly the writers Martial and Juvenal. He called his poetry nugae (‘ramblings’, or ‘sweet nothings’) partly out of false modesty, but with the understanding that the word also meant ‘mimes’.4 Many of his poems offer vignettes, at once silent and resounding with the colourful characters he observed.
There are secrets and allusions in Catullus’ Latin which take some teasing out, but once found, throw Catullus’ poetry in a more dazzling light than one could ever have imagined. As soon as I realised this, I decided that I wanted to know Catullus, to read his work with the emotion with which it was written, to get as close as I could to this man who lived more than two thousand years ago. And so I began to write this book, which I hope will inspire others to discover, or rediscover, his exquisite poems.
There are very few surviving sources for Catullus’ life. Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his book of poetry. This may resemble a series of jumbled diary entries, describing episodes from his life, but Catullus wrote it for public consumption, and not necessarily as a faithful account. He addressed love poems to a certain ‘Lesbia’, for example, a woman he gave life to through his verse. Lesbia was a pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, the eldest sister of a wealthy and influential politician in Rome.5
Of the 117 poems which survive in his collection, none bears a title. They are traditionally numbered according to the order in which they appeared in the earliest manuscripts, which is neither chronological nor entirely thematic, but hardly random either. Like a good music album, there is style in the progression and unexpected swing of one story to another, back and forth in time. It might have been a poet who established the poems’ order.
Catullus was much more than a love-poet. His poems to Lesbia form only a fraction of his book. The longest and most accomplished poem that survives, Poem 64, makes no explicit mention of her at all, focusing instead on a luxurious bedspread. I like to call it Catullus’ ‘Bedspread Poem’ because it contains as its centrepiece a long, digressive passage on the myths that adorned the wedding bedspread of one of Jason’s Argonauts. In it, Catullus set the themes of love and war against the backdrop of the myth of the Ages, a sequence of five eras against which writers of ancient Greece and Rome mapped their semi-mythical history.6
The first of these eras was the Golden Age, an idyllic, Garden of Eden-like time when there was no work, no war, no sickness, no travel; the earth gave freely and amply of its own accord, and gods and men lived harmoniously. There followed an inferior Silver Age, which Jupiter, king of the gods, destroyed since its people were criminals who no longer offered sacrifice to the gods. A Bronze Age came about, dominated by warfare and weaponry. Its people destroyed each other. Then followed the Heroic Age, which offered a reprieve from the decline, a time of heroes descended from the gods themselves, warriors who fought in the Trojan War, and Jason and his Argonauts. When they died, an Iron Age arrived. It was the worst of the five eras, an age of anxiety, pain, hard work, and murder. The Iron Age myth was a fitting tribute to the grim realities of late Republican Rome.
The upheavals of the times contributed to the picture of decline that haunts a number of Catullus’ writings, particularly the Bedspread Poem. Matters in Rome had come to a head shortly before Catullus was born, when the optimates, politicians who championed the Senate’s authority, clashed with the populares, individuals who sought a more liberal, reforming approach to policy. Decades earlier, the Romans had established the province of Asia near Pontus, a Hellenised kingdom on the south coast of the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey. Not a little perturbed by the fact that the Romans had proceeded to fill the East with grasping tax-farmers, the king of Pontus, a Hellenised Iranian called Mithridates VI Eupator – who, like many ambitious men, liked to think that he was descended from Alexander the Great – embarked upon a land-grabbing mission.
Six years before Catullus’ birth, the Romans had begun to wage war against Mithridates. To head the campaign, the Senate elected an optimate, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose aristocratic roots, intense eyes, and complexion like a mulberry sprinkled with oatmeal marked him out as a man to be reckoned with.7 His appointment to so prestigious a role proved enough to incense one of the most prominent populares of the day, a plebeian and darling of Rome’s army, Gaius Marius. Though little shy of seventy years old, Marius tried to seize control of the commission himself, but then Sulla marched determinedly on Rome with his forces. He discharged Marius and his men from the city, and hurried off to his war.
Although Catullus makes no explicit mention of such disturbances, his poetry contains echoes of some of the political events which danced upon the periphery of his poetic consciousness. The wars against Mithridates in the East, and conflict between politicians such as Marius and Sulla, cast a terrible shadow over his life. The death toll in these wars was enormous. In seeking victory over Mithridates, the Romans approached the king of Bithynia, a land between Pontus and Asia where hyacinths bowed beneath the breeze. Although they persuaded the Bithynian king to attack Mithridates’ territory, they were in no way equipped for the scale of Mithridates’ retaliation. Over 80,000 Romans and Italians fell in the ensuing conflicts. Mithridates took hold of a string of cities along the Black Sea coast, and soon practically the whole sweep of Black Sea shoreline from Heracleia in the west to Georgia and Lesser Armenia in the east formed part of his sprawling kingdom.8
Shortly before Catullus was born, Sulla returned to Italy. He had made some bold forays in the wars, even sacking Athens, whose people Mithridates had cunningly enticed to his side, but it would be more than twenty years before the struggle was formally concluded.
Back in Rome, a state of emergency was declared as Marius’ embittered forces prepared to make war on Sulla’s returning army. Sulla was declared dictator in the interest of ‘settling the state’, but his solution made Italy less settled than ever before. Catullus grew up in a world where the names of Sulla’s perceived enemies were added to miserable lists in the Forum, their property snatched, their rights destroyed, their lives, too often, cut short. Sulla doubled the number of senators from 300 to 600, and robbed the tribunes, the plebeian politicians at the bottom of the political ladder, of their function.9 The fallout was carried across Catullus’ native Gaul. Sulla gave up his dictatorship after two turbulent years, but then died, leaving Italy in despair and Rome’s business with Mithridates unfinished.
While Catullus was growing up, the three politicians who would come