He laughed, moved by the earthy scenes of the Subura, where the man recently elected Pontifex Maximus had lived before relocating to the Forum to its west. The up-and-coming politician Julius Caesar had lately secured enough money from somewhere to buy a place in the elections for this prestigious post, which would make him head of Rome’s most renowned priestly college. On polling day he had kissed his mother goodbye, and told her that, if he did not return to her as Pontifex Maximus, he would not return at all. When morning passed to afternoon, he appeared again, triumphant.
As Catullus entered the Forum, he passed open-air law courts, inns, market stalls, and temples, including one dedicated to ‘Twin Castor and twin of Castor, Pollux’ – the gods of travel – whom he thanked dutifully for his safe journey from Verona. The building where Caesar was now based lay in the distance, adjacent to the hallowed residence of the Vestal Virgins, who dedicated their lives to chastity and worship of the goddess of the hearth. The goddess’ flame was burning brightly, kept alight by her servants’ diligence and the will of the Romans, who would sooner have seen an ill-omened lightning strike fill the sky than her fire be extinguished and with it, they feared, their own hearths and livelihoods.
Success in life, as Catullus well knew, depended upon the support of the gods, who were in constant need of appeasing. The divinities gave curious signs to voice their approval, or otherwise, of men’s actions. So fearful were mortals of misconstruing divine messages that they filled roles dedicated to their interpretation. Augurs examined the movements of birds. They divined the mood of the gods from the sounds the birds made and direction of their flight, while haruspices searched the livers of sacrificial animals for meaningful abnormalities.
A raven flew south towards the Palatine Hill, at the far end of the Forum. The hill’s large plateau, crosshatched with grey and clay-red masonry, dotted with umbrella pines, housed the very wealthiest Romans. As he drew near it, Catullus was half-minded to join them, but he needed something to eat before he could muster the strength for conversation. Thankfully, the Romans saw little purpose in waiting for evening to fall before retiring to their dining rooms. Darkness rendered even the simplest of walks a fiendish pursuit, during which an unexpected ditch posed almost as much risk as a bandit. The late afternoon was a more sociable hour, and for Catullus, as for the many citizens who began work after dawn, it could not come quickly enough.
Having wolfed down eggs and bread at some miserable inn, he made his way hastily towards the base of the Aventine Hill, where the poor plebeians lived. He passed streets of insulae, ramshackle tenement buildings constructed so high that they often fell down, burned down, or were pulled down for obstructing the view of the augurs as they tried to interpret bird flight.1 Catullus imagined how good life would be with ‘no fears – not fires, not grievous building collapses, not criminal activity, not creeping poison, nor any other threat of danger’.
There were men in this city who made a living from those who had lost their modest homes. The ambitious politician Marcus Licinius Crassus was notorious for it. Determined to recover the riches his family had lost in the civil wars, Crassus had been among the first to benefit from the sale of citizens’ property proscribed under Sulla. Not even his success in quelling Spartacus’ forces and reaching a consulship checked his appetite for wealth. He noted the dilapidated state of Rome’s crowded blocks and developed ravaged sites on the cheap, using slaves with builders’ training.2 Many more apartments could be squashed into the spaces occupied by the older villas, too. The new homeless could do little but accept Crassus’ miserly offers.
Catullus’ father would never have allowed his son to come to such a place had he not already established contacts for him in the heart of the city. Rome’s population exceeded a million, a quarter of whom were slaves. Metellus Celer, former governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had lately returned to Rome and intended to achieve a consulship for 60 BC. Catullus could seek him out, distract him from his campaigning.3 As his father must have told him a thousand times, being associated with a man like Metellus could do wonders for his status. If Metellus had dined at their house in Verona, then he was obliged to invite his son to dine at his in Rome.
Catullus could not have been thrilled at the prospect. He need only have exchanged a few words with Metellus to know that he was far from the most exciting man in Rome. Even Cicero, who had often praised him for his steadfastness to his beliefs, had to admit that there was something inhuman about him: Metellus was ‘not a man but “a seashore and air and utter isolation”’.4 Many of his forebears had been consuls, and though Metellus was not old, by anyone’s standards, he was worthy, bloody-minded and arrogant, falling rather too readily into the category of men Catullus liked to call senes severiores – ‘our elders … dourer than most’ (Poem 5).
Grateful as Catullus had to be for his father’s introductions to the great and the good, he itched to find his own place among the poets.5 He would not need to work as hard to sustain conversation with them as he did with the politicians – though Catullus always stayed well informed, not least because he knew that such diligence would stand him in good stead for city life. Without an acute interest in the minutiae of the law courts or small-scale political intrigues, there was very little to talk about.
This was a perennial problem for those who found themselves at dinner with men directly involved in Roman politics. The idea that business and leisure were entirely distinct was written firmly into the Latin language: negotium, the former, was simply the negative of otium, the latter. Leisure was, quite literally, an absence of business. Clutching for conversation that was both suitable to bridge that gap and sufficient to last the course of a Roman dinner – from eggs to apples – proved a headache. There was no fun to be had with men who thought that ‘salt’ was merely a condiment. For Catullus, sal sooner suggested the kind of verbal wit no dinner guest should be without. Just as salt itself was considered fundamental to human life for its healing and alimentary qualities, so ‘salt’ encapsulated the intelligent mind’s capacity to lay aside its troubles, seek pleasure, and deliver it to others through wit.6 As far as Catullus was concerned, there was no ingredient more necessary for a dinner party, and this included its hosts.
Nonetheless, even if he believed that Metellus was merely paying his father a favour, and had little interest in what he had to say, these were not grounds for declining his hospitality. A fleeting glance at his address would have been enough to pique anyone’s curiosity. Metellus Celer might have been short of sal, but he was evidently not short of money.
Metellus’ house stood on the north-west side of the Palatine Hill, and ‘in sight of almost the whole city’.7 It was close enough to the Forum for the booming of orators and traders to rattle the portico, but high enough up to protect its inhabitants from their germs and diseases. Apart from affording superior views, properties on this higher ground commanded a premium because they promised cleaner air and at least some protection from the commoners’ plagues.
It was said that Romulus, one of the twin sons born to the war god Mars and suckled by a she-wolf in Rome’s foundation myth, chose the Palatine on which to found his city. Where nomads constructed rounded huts to call home, the Palatine Hill grew from frugal beginnings to host the grand residences of the Roman emperors; ‘Palatine’ inspired ‘palace’.8 When Catullus arrived in the city there was a tree on its east façade that residents said was proof of Romulus’ magnanimity. The young twin had allegedly hurled a spear made from cornel wood the impossible distance of nearly a kilometre from his brother Remus’ chosen hill, the Aventine, to the Palatine Hill, and it rooted itself so deeply that no one could retrieve it. It was the sword in the stone, but with roots and soil eager to nurture them: the cornel tree was born.9 The Romans built a wall around it, and it flourished until Julius Caesar later asked for the structure to be repaired. His men dug too close to the tree’s roots, and like so many things under Caesar – as Catullus would have been quick to point out, had he lived long enough to witness his dictatorship – it withered, and died.
As Catullus made his way to the top of the Palatine Hill, he passed countless bundles of shrub and foliage. The air was fragrant with rosemary and mallow, chamomile