Some of the hill’s residents took care not to be too ostentatious in what they grew: there were many who still associated beautiful, intricate gardens with wanton eastern decadence. The Persians had been among the first to celebrate the art of horticulture, and Rome’s wealthiest residents had been quick to adopt some of the more luxurious features, such as pleasure gardens, ornamental moats and fishponds. It was into these creations that Lucullus, a general whom Pompey had usurped as commander in the battles against Mithridates of Pontus in the East, poured much of his war wealth. The general’s extravagance at a time when so many Romans lived in poverty had been his downfall: a Roman praetor persuaded the people that Lucullus had protracted the war through his love of money and power, which precipitated a vote for his recall.10 At least Lucullus had something to remember it all by: cherry trees now grew in Rome, cultivated from the seeds he had extracted from eastern soils.
Though he could not approve of such flamboyance, it was difficult for Catullus not to smile. Lucullus did things that Romans had never done before. In addition to the grand gardens he arranged in the north of Rome, he had specialist fishponds created near Naples for his own pleasure. One onlooker, bristling in his masculinity, scoffed: these were the deeds of ‘Xerxes in a toga’.11 Like Xerxes, Persia’s most notorious king, Lucullus was made a woman of through his addiction to luxury.
If he was to arrive on time for a dinner with Metellus Celer, Catullus needed to stop idling and keep to the main path. Metellus’ residence was on the Clivus Victoriae (‘Slope of Victory’) which led from the Forum along the west side of the Palatine Hill. The road took its name from the temple consecrated to the goddess Victory that perched there. Nearby stood an enormous further temple, dedicated to an eastern goddess. As Catullus passed these temples he found his eye drawn more by the glinting gilt roof of the ‘holy temple of Greatest Jupiter’, which sat on the Capitoline Hill at the opposing end of the Forum (Poem 55). At the top of the sun-baked plateau, he approached a line of sprawling villas. Here was the magnificent portico and property of the late politician Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Beside it, framed by trees and grand marble columns, was the house of Cicero, ‘most fluent of the grandsons of Romulus’ (Poem 49), who had been collecting villas in and around Rome, and had acquired this one just a year earlier.12 Nearby was the home of another great orator, Hortensius, and on the other side of Catulus’ house with its rambling portico was the home of Metellus Celer.
Inside, Metellus’ property was large, and gave the impression of being larger still. Each wall carried a different vista: a distant shore, a garden with brightly coloured birds, a few of them flittering in through the window and perching on its lavish architrave; and trees laden with fruit; and dense foliage, and grand colonnades of columns which seemed to recede hundreds of paces back into nowhere, but could not, because none of it was real:13 the artists who produced these images were masters of trompe l’oeil. Along the villa’s walls were rows and rows of boxy wooden cabinets containing the death masks of magistrates, long-since deceased. When a woman married, she brought the masks of her ancestors with her to her husband’s home. To look at these walls, one would think Metellus had a dozen wives.
Metellus glided past the rows of unseeing faces, abandoned his cup upon the table, and greeted his guest. How pleased he was that Catullus had made the journey to Rome safely (and at good speed!) and was settling into his new life with such ease. Catullus was to meet his wife, whom, naturally, Catullus had already caught sight of across the room. She was lavishly adorned with jewels, and laughing in their midst.
Clodia Metelli, née Pulchra, of the illustrious Claudius dynasty, was known throughout Rome. Her acquaintances had only to stroll past the Roman Temple of Bellona, the meeting place for councils of war, for her distinguished lineage to be recalled.14 Her distant grandfather, Appius Claudius Caecus, had consecrated the building in 296 BC, and her father filled its walls with shields painted with his ancestors’ faces, and inscriptions bearing their many achievements.15 Between service under Sulla, his time as consul in 79 BC, and expeditions in Macedonia, he had barely been around to tell his children of their bloodline before he died in 76 BC, while still a young man. They had to be grateful for the memory those shields provided of faces they had never known.
Appius Claudius Caecus, Clodia’s ancestor, had been a consul twice, and had sought to challenge the power of the Senate by filling it with the sons of freedmen (former slaves).16 He was also responsible for bold public works, including the first ever aqueduct, built just outside Rome, funded by public money and without senatorial decree. Glorious though it was, like the Appian Way, another of his magnificent creations, it wrung the people dry.17
It was from Appius Claudius Caecus, perhaps, that Clodia and several of her five siblings inherited their egalitarian tastes. She, like her brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher, made the statement of changing the spelling of her name ‘Claudia’ to ‘Clodia’. The original spelling ‘Claudia’ was too upper-crust. ‘Clodia’ gave the old name a fashionable plebeian twist. It was the kind of gesture that drove young Catullus wild.18
Catullus watched her – watched her husband watching her – and almost passed out:
… my tongue freezes, a gentle flame flows down
Under my limbs and my ears ring with their own sound.
Both my eyes are blinded by night.
(Poem 51)
His inspiration was a poem by Sappho, the poet born on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BC. Her blood was blue, like Clodia’s, but had not spared her a difficult life. Lesbos’ aristocratic rulers had been deposed before her birth, and she lived under a series of tyrants, under one of whom she left with her family for exile in Sicily. In spite of her experience, her ties with Lesbos were never broken. She married a man, with whom she had a daughter, Cleïs, but it was the memory of her as Lesbos’ native poet who had feelings for women that preserved the association between her and ‘lesbian’ love.
In her poem Sappho describes a woman whom she desires enjoying the attentions of her male lover. Her tongue is paralysed – a light flame runs under her skin – her vision vanishes – she turns paler than grass. As the girl laughs sweetly in the man’s presence, Sappho feels close to death.
Catullus, who found in Sappho’s lines the unfussiness and raw honesty that he sought in his own work, adopted her Sapphic stanzas, changing only the odd detail. His senses are lost, her heart is aflutter. Clodia is laughing, and her husband is watching.19 Metellus is to the left of the frame, but too prominent to be cut out of it.20 As if to depart from earlier models, Catullus would end his version of Sappho’s poem with an original final stanza, to bring the reverie back to earth.
As Clodia stood there before him for the first time, neither youthful nor particularly noteworthy in her physical stature, she was indefinably captivating. If at first she seemed detached and aloof, there was a passion and volatility that lay beneath her round, dark, darkly shadowed eyes – Cicero called them her ‘oxen eyes’ – that promised that this veil could be lifted.21 A combination of intensity and introspection lent her a gravitas Catullus had never seen in a woman before. She unleashed in him a longing to accomplish something, even if he did not know what it was.
Catullus had probably only been in Rome for a few months when he heard some shocking news: Clodia’s youngest brother was due in court. The Senate had it on good authority that Clodius Pulcher had infiltrated the festival of the Bona Dea – a women-only religious festival, which had been held at Caesar’s residence the previous December – dressed in drag.
To uphold the secrecy of the Bona Dea, Caesar had given his wife, his mother, and sister free use of his property as a secure base from which to perform their duties with other female worshippers. The year that Caesar embarked formally upon his political career, 69 BC, had seen him lose his wife, Cornelia, though their daughter, Julia, survived. He was now married to Pompeia – a curious choice considering that she was the granddaughter of his late