Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

This William Collins paperback edition published in 2017

Copyright © Daisy Dunn 2016

Cover photograph © akg-images/Rainer Hackenberg

Maps by John Gilkes

Daisy Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007554324

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007554348

Version: 2016-11-28

Praise for Catullus’ Bedspread:

‘A lively, finely crafted biography. Weaving well-researched social history with a compelling account of political machinations in Rome, the picture here is not just of a libertine prone to writing of his obscene desires, but a soulful man at the heart of a remarkable age’

Observer

‘For all those of us who love counting stars, none burns brighter in the literary firmament than that of Gaius Valerius Catullus – Dunn’s brilliant new biography of the Roman master will shine beams of light on his darkly passionate poetry’

Professor Paul Cartledge

‘The task of piecing together a biography from verse alone is one that Dunn performs with creativity and diligence’

The Times

‘Hugely enjoyable … Daisy Dunn lifts the lid on an era and world that remains engrossing two millennia on’

Catholic Herald

‘Dunn writes beautifully and clearly adores her subject. She deserves plaudits for bringing this fine poet and his tumultuous times so vividly to life’

Daily Mail

‘This is a rewarding, idiosyncratic book … Catullus would certainly applaud’

Country Life

‘Not since Nicola Shulman’s Graven with Diamonds has literary criticism seemed so thrilling. An imaginative, enriching and quick-witted book reminds us that Catullus is a poet for all time’

Standpoint

‘Lyrical, playful and startlingly original … Breathes extraordinary new life into the classical world. An unforgettable journey into the high art and low life of ancient Rome’

Dan Jones

‘Young classicist and art historian Daisy Dunn imaginatively revive[s] this most accessible of Roman poets … an intelligent and often original interpreter of the poetry [she] provides clear, direct and readable translations’

Financial Times

‘Enjoyable and diligently researched … Dunn is a sure-footed and elegant literary critic, particularly when it comes to poem 64, the scintillating mini-epic (Dunn’s own deft version is included as an appendix; and she has translated, with bright-eyed intelligence, all the poems in another volume.) … Catullus’ Bedspread is richly woven, and Dunn’s deep passion for her subject is patent’

Spectator

‘Any reader of Catullus will want to have this book’

Literary Review

Dedication

For my parents and my sister, Alice

Epigraph

This bedspread,

Embroidered with the shapes of men

Who lived long ago, unveils the virtues of heroes

Through the miracle of art

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Author’s Note

Timeline

Prologue

I: In search of Catullus

II: The house on the Palatine Hill

III: An elegant new little book

IV: Sparrow

V: The rumours of our elders

VI: The power of three

VII: I hate and I love

VIII: Farewell

IX: A sea of mackerel

X: Canvas

XI: The boxwood Argo

XII: Godly rumbling

XIII: The Roman stage

XIV: A flower on the edge of the meadow

Epilogue

Picture Section

Appendix: Poem 64 – Catullus’ Bedspread Poem

Note on Currency and Measures

Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

MAPS

Map of Italy and North Africa

Map of Greece and the East

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Political System in Rome

Politicians in Rome followed an established ladder of power. At the top sat two chief magistrates, known as consuls. Male citizens of Rome (aged seventeen and above) elected the two consuls each year, and the Senate guided them, while also managing the civic purse and foreign relations. The first consuls had been plucked from the richest families; the first senators’ descendants were the patricians, or aristocrats, of Catullus’ Rome.

Before a man could even think about becoming a consul, he needed to gain some experience. As he approached the age of thirty, a budding patrician politician would strive first to be elected as a quaestor, whose tedious responsibilities involved supervising the treasury. At the end of the year, funds permitting, quaestors became life members of the Senate, and the more appealing prospect of running for the senior magistracies, aedile, praetor, then consul, suddenly became feasible. Beyond the consulship, men could become censors, who routinely examined the membership of the Senate.

The Senatorial magistrates

Before they could run for the senior magistracies, plebeian candidates, by contrast, could achieve the tribunate. Every year Catullus spent in Rome he would see ten tribunes of the people elected from the plebeian class, scurry off to their own assemblies to consider legislation, and veto measures, and each other, at will.

While the four aediles (two plebeian, two patrician) took charge of public works and entertainment, the eight praetors were as though deputies to the consuls, and oversaw legal matters, such as trials and disputes arising in the provinces. Few could wait until the end of the year, when they had the chance to proceed to a command overseas. The two consuls tended to progress to more senior foreign commands at the end of their year, too.

Men did not belong to political parties: they could change their allegiances at will. Some politicians aligned themselves with the optimates (‘best men’) who championed the Senate’s authority and sought to work with it; others with the populares, who sought a more liberal, reforming approach to policy by appealing to the tribunes to make their voice heard. Populares were often self-interested men who, cunningly veiling their personal ambitions, used the tribunes to propose legislation that would buy them the favour of the common man. The excessive ambition of individual tribunes would contribute to the fall of the Republic, a catastrophe that began less than a decade after Catullus died. A miserable period of civil war and dictatorship would take hold, at the end of which the Romans would bow their heads again to a sole ruler: the future Emperor Augustus.

TIMELINE

753 BC: Rome is founded

509 BC: Overthrow of Rome’s last king

218 BC: Hannibal the Carthaginian invades Italy

204 BC: Cybele, the Great Mother, is carried to Rome

133 BC: Tiberius Gracchus becomes tribune

91–89 BC: The Social War (Italian allies demand Roman citizenship); Verona becomes a Roman colony

88 BC: Sulla becomes consul. Beginning of the wars with Mithridates, King of Pontus

80s BC: Civil war between Sulla and Marius

c.82 BC: Birth of Gaius Valerius Catullus

81 BC: Sulla is proclaimed dictator

78 BC: Death of Sulla

70s BC: Ongoing conflict between Rome and Mithridates

73 BC: Spartacus leads a slave revolt

71 BC: Crassus defeats Spartacus, Pompey pursues the stragglers

70 BC: Consulship of Pompey and Crassus

67 BC: Pompey vanquishes pirates at sea

66 BC: Pompey succeeds the general Lucullus in spearheading the wars against Mithridates

63: Suicide of Mithridates. Cicero becomes consul. Conspiracy of Catiline

62: Clodius infiltrates the Bona Dea festival

c.61 BC: Catullus moves to Rome

61 BC: Trial of Clodius. Caesar governorship in Further Spain. Pompey, now returned from the East, receives his third triumph

60 BC: Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius become consuls. Caesar returns from Spain

59 BC: Caesar, now part of a coalition (‘The First Triumvirate’) with Pompey and Crassus, becomes consul alongside Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. Death of Metellus Celer

58 BC: Start of Caesar’s Gallic War. Clodius is tribune. Cicero goes into exile. Ptolemy XII Auletes is driven from his throne

57 BC: Catullus goes to Bithynia. After a considerable battle for his recall, Cicero returns to Rome

56 BC: Catullus returns from Bithynia and visits Lake Garda. Trial of Caelius Rufus. The triumvirs hold summits to repair their coalition

55 BC: Pompey and Crassus become consuls again. Opening of the Theatre of Pompey. Caesar’s first invasion of Britain

54 BC: Cato becomes praetor. Crassus leaves for Syria. Caesar’s second invasion of Britain. Death of Pompey’s wife (Caesar’s daughter) Julia

53 BC: The Battle of Carrhae and death of Crassus

c.53 BC: Death of Gaius Valerius Catullus

52 BC: Death of Clodius

49 BC: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, sparking civil war

48 BC: Death of Pompey

44 BC: Death of Caesar

PROLOGUE

GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS had endured a difficult night in Rome: ‘Undone by passion I tossed and turned all over the bed.’ He had spent the evening drinking wine and composing poetry, and was far too stimulated to rest. He longed only to taste daylight and swap stanzas once more with his friend and fellow poet, a small man named Calvus. Poetry remains the insomniac’s gift.

Catullus was as familiar with what it was like to have another warm ‘his chilly limbs in the bed you left behind’, as he was with the bedchamber that bore the remnants of lust:

Steeped in flowers and the oil of Syrian olive,

Knackered and tattered, pillows everywhere,

Creaking and shaking,

The trembling bedstead shattered

(Poem 6)

He also knew what it was like to obsess over a bedspread. Even when he didn’t have the stirrings of passion and unfinished lines circling his mind, the poet was seldom at rest. Born in Verona around 82 BC, Catullus moved to Rome, and travelled the south border of the Black Sea, where men waded with fine fishing nets and built boats shaped like beans. He made his way to Rome’s countryside, and to his family’s second home on a peninsula of Lake Garda. The hundreds of poems he wrote across the course of his short life were as varied as the landscapes he wandered.¹

Catullus was Rome’s first lyric poet. He was also a conflicted man. At any one time he could hate and love, curse and censure, consider himself rich but call himself poor. While lending themselves perfectly to poetry, such extremes of emotion at times made his life unbearable. He wrote not only of the feelings that plagued his own mind, but of the way he felt about others, not least Julius Caesar, a man his father called a friend: in one particularly scabrous poem he described the politician and future dictator as little more than ‘a shameless, grasping gambler’.

One may ask why a collection of Latin poems from over two thousand years ago matters so much today. Catullus’ book is the earliest surviving poetry collection of its kind in Latin. Full of emotion, wit, and lurid insight into some of the key Roman personalities, it provides a rare and highly personal portrait of a life during one of the most critical moments in world history.

Catullus lived in some of the most uncertain and turbulent times Rome had ever known: the late Republic, before the emperors came to rule. Centuries earlier, kings had governed Rome until, as legend had it, the son of the haughty seventh ruler raped a woman named Lucretia, and her husband and his friend waged a war to destroy the monarchy forever. Its legacy lived on into the Republic, which was founded after the kings on the very principle that no one man should rule Rome again. Every year, the male citizens elected magistrates to govern their city under the guidance of the Senate. The political system was carefully calibrated to prevent power from falling into the hands of any one man, but the balance of power between Senate and individual magistrates had begun to swing increasingly in the magistrates’ favour, and they knew it.

So Catullus found himself surrounded by towering politicians: Pompey the Great, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Julius Caesar, who vied desperately for power over Rome and her empire, which was larger than it had ever been, and growing larger still. By the time Catullus was born, the Romans had made provinces of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; Spain, which they divided into two provinces, Nearer and Further; Transalpine Gaul, stretching across the south of France and north-east into Switzerland; Cisalpine Gaul, which encompassed northern Italy, including Catullus’ Verona; Macedonia; Asia (western Turkey), and extended their global rule through numerous allied states.

Ever inquisitive, Catullus cast his eye across this tremendous world map as well as the more insular world of Roman politics. One moment he would find himself recounting adventures at sea in breathless syllables; the next, describing a private dinner with friends; the next, weeping that his lover did not feel things as intensely as he.

Perhaps it is because our ideas about ancient poetry are so coloured by the awe-inspiring epics of Homer and their lofty themes of humanity that many of Catullus’ poems seem so surprising and immediate. While some of his poems are highly learned and erudite, others are mischievous, goatish, direct. With characteristic boldness, he requests a woman he loves to:

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred

Then another thousand, then a second hundred.

Then – don’t stop – another thousand, then a hundred …

(Poem 5)

In Latin these lines begin so abruptly – da, dein, deinde – it is as if we hear them with Catullus’ quickening heartbeat. I was seventeen when I first discovered them, and they made Catullus feel more alive to me than any other poet I knew. I have read them hundreds of times since, and they still have the same effect.

One of the reasons Catullus’ poems are still so readable I think is that they show that the people of his world were not always so very different from us. The characters he encounters and describes in the streets and bawdy inns of Italy call to mind the stock cast of a Roman comedy – or even a scene in late-night Soho – teeming with heartbroken lovers, drunken cavorting youths, old men pining for women a fraction of their age, money-grabbing brothel-keepers, mercenary meretrices (prostitutes), slaves who know too much.

Catullus’ immense skill as a poet lay in his ability to combine many literary genres in the Latin tongue, not just elements of comedy, but the clarity of Sappho, the celebrated female poet, the compact and erudite style of Hellenistic poets, and the wit of lewd graffiti in Rome, with themes as various as love, the writer’s life, and the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. The Roman province of Macedonia incorporated much of mainland Greece, and in Catullus’ day Greek culture had well and truly permeated Rome’s own.

While never enslaved to his Greek predecessors, when he wanted to be particularly learned, Catullus adapted their poetic ideas to convey them with new feeling. He forged new Latin words and was partial to diminutives (miselle passer – poor little sparrow; scortillum – little tart). He feverishly combined elegantly phrased sentiment with colloquialism and obscenity, unnerving the more serious Romans who believed that a jibe at one man’s sexual inadequacy was what high-spirited youths scribbled on walls and brandished in tense moments, not what educated writers preserved in fine papyrus scrolls. His work would therefore prove unsettling for some of the older generation, as well as important public figures such as Cicero, the great orator, who had rather conservative tastes.

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 to be most prominent in Rome in his adult life, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, were steadily emerging out of this fraught scene. Crassus was one of Sulla’s former adherents. He came from a respectable family, but had lost several of his relatives and estates to Marius’ forces. He had everything to fight for, which might have explained why, when Catullus arrived in Rome, he found him desperate to become the richest man in all of Italy. He was charming, unscrupulous, incredibly well connected, and owed his name to his quelling of a slave revolt spearheaded by a gladiator named Spartacus. No sooner had the Senate appointed him to stem the sudden uprising than Crassus had crucified thousands of Spartacus’ men along the Appian Way – the now-blood-drenched road leading from Rome to Naples. Crassus proceeded thence to Rome’s top political office, the consulship, in 70 BC.

Elected alongside him that year was the son of a wealthy senator, a tough, rugged soldier; a man who thrived on ambition and conquest. His forehead was deeply furrowed and his face was fleshy, but his gaze was unmistakably determined. His name was Pompey, and thanks to his early successes in battle, he had earned the sobriquet ‘Magnus’ (‘the Great’).¹⁰ Crassus knew precisely who he was: Pompey, another of Sulla’s subordinates, had fought on his side in the civil wars against Marius, then put down the stragglers from Spartacus’ revolt.

Although Catullus wrote about Pompey in a couple of poems, he did not capture him from Crassus’ perspective. Crassus could not help but look askance at the man who had won plaudits that he could only dream of. The greatest accolade a Roman could win for victories overseas was a triumph, and Pompey had by now won two. For all his efforts in the slave revolt, Crassus received merely an ovation, the next best thing. Nevertheless, Catullus was looking on as the two men proceeded to their shared consulship, during which they reinstated the powers of the tribunes, which Sulla had so shamefully diminished.

Succeeding Sulla in the wars against Mithridates of Pontus was the splendidly named Lucius Licinius Lucullus, who scored a number of impressive victories, but was dismissed before he could bring the wars to an absolute conclusion.¹¹ Enter Pompey, still high from his successes under Sulla and against Spartacus. He was singled out to succeed Lucullus in tackling the chief problems that plagued the world to Rome’s east. Mithridates was the obvious target, but to confront him, Pompey had first to rid the seas of pirates, who had already hindered Italy’s corn supply and kidnapped a number of her citizens, including Julius Caesar.

Caesar was a patrician from one of the older families. Unlike Pompey and Crassus, his seniors by six and fifteen years respectively, Caesar had found himself on the opposing end of Sulla’s regime. By marriage, he was the nephew of Gaius Marius, the popular politician against whom Sulla had engaged in civil war. Not only that, but he was married to the daughter of Marius’ colleague and successor, Cornelia. Wisely, given his patent allegiance, Caesar lay low during Sulla’s dictatorship, and completed part of his military service in Bithynia. He was then kidnapped by pirates, not far from Rhodes. When he was eventually released, he crucified his captors.¹²

Having put the pirates to flight, Pompey skilfully led the Roman army in obliterating Mithridates’ forces. It was a difficult war and required great manpower, but Pompey saw the hostile king flee towards Colchis, a region that lay between the Black Sea and Caucasus mountains (in the territory of modern Georgia). Finally, in 63 BC, abandoned by his allies, usurped by his own son, Mithridates settled on suicide.¹³

His kingdom, Pontus, fell to Rome. Catullus subsequently evoked it in his poetry. Pompey conquered a good number of Mithridates’ territories, and reduced his former ally, Armenia, to a state of dependency on Rome. Syria was among the places which slipped into Roman control.¹⁴ It happened that in the midst of the wars, the king of Bithynia, Nicomedes IV, had bequeathed by agreement his land to Rome, too. Pompey’s eyes sparkled at the possibilities. Intent now on lining the south coast of the Black Sea with Roman provinces, he decided to join Pontus and Bithynia together to form one enormous new province.¹⁵

In his mid-twenties, Catullus boarded a ship with a cohort of other young men in order to escape Rome for this very place. One needed to be a Roman citizen to join the prestigious cohort he did, which is a strong indication that Catullus’ father was a local governor or magistrate in Verona.¹⁶ For while the Veronese remained eager to acquire Roman citizenship, for as long as Catullus lived, their magistrates could secure the honour for themselves and their families. Bithynia lay south of the Black Sea, which Jason and his Argonauts were said to have sailed over on their Heroic Age mission to steal the Golden Fleece. The map of Rome’s new provinces, I discovered, overlapped with that which inspired the imagery of Catullus’ verse.

In the pages that follow I retrace this journey and the life Catullus described in his poems, from Verona to Rome, from Bithynia to Lake Garda. I have worked from the ancient sources that survive to draw out the story Catullus described in his ‘little book’ – his libellus.

Catullus’ Bedspread, then, is my little book about Catullus and his life. It is, as far as possible, a life in the poet’s own words: Catullus’ journey as told through his carmina, his poems or ‘songs’, which I have translated from the Latin. I see this very much as a joint venture: Catullus provides the poetry; I offer something of the world that informed it. I use extracts from his Bedspread Poem as epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, in the manner of his poetry book – neither chronologically nor entirely haphazardly. If together he and I can bridge the distance that lies between us, then even the most labyrinthine of his poems should sing.

IN SEARCH OF CATULLUS

Since my fate and your determined virtue snatch you

Away from me against my will, though my tired eyes are

Not yet drunk with the dear shape of my son,

I shall not send you rejoicing with a happy heart

Or allow you to carry the signs of good fortune,

But first I shall free my heart of countless laments

(Poem 64, lines 218–24)

CATULLUS COULD HEAR his father in the dining room, conversing with Julius Caesar on the peculiarities of the world. He was used by now to travel-weary men arriving at his home, seeking soft cushions, pickled fish, and pork fattened on the acorns of Verona’s oak trees. As this one tucked into the feast laid out before him, he talked about the wonders of the Black Sea, savage Gauls, and Britons lining the chalk-white cliffs, remote and terrifying giants.

Catullus, who took more pleasure between the sheets than talking at the table with his father’s friends, stepped outside.¹ The rain was pounding the streets which streamed and steamed with sewage. The Adige river was flowing quickly on the lap-like curve that held the town. As a boy, Catullus had often crossed its waters and felt the chill they bore from the Alps. He remembered the evening he first witnessed a locked-out lover, sitting in a doorway here on a lowly street. The youth had been crying, trying in vain to write a poem to voice his lament. For some time, Catullus had stood there, watching. Poor boy, his buttocks aching with the damp cold of the doorstep. Would not the door have more to say than the inconsolable youth? The door belonged to the house of a love-poet called Caecilius. Catullus transcribed its words:

It’s not my fault (I hope to impress Caecilius, I am now in

His charge), although they say it is my fault

No one can honestly say I’ve done anything wrong.

It’s true what people tell you – blame the door … [line partly corrupt]

Whenever some crime is discovered

Everyone shouts at me: ‘Door, it’s your fault!’

(Poem 67)

The door was not weeping but lamenting, slammed shut and berated with every misfortune that had passed through it. Catullus captured in the pace of its speech all the urgency and forcefulness a man would expect from one whose words had been stifled for most of its lifetime. With its ear for gossip, the door went on to reveal that, before Caecilius was resident in the house, a ‘virgin’ had moved in and confided in her female slaves. ‘Virgin’, because it transpired that the scamp had a former father-in-law, who lay with her when she discovered his son’s ‘little sword dangling more flaccid than a delicate beet’. In Catullus’ poem, one image was layered upon another, contorting what was masculine, if small, into an effeminate and unedifying vegetable.

The so-called virgin came from fertile Brixia (Brescia), to Verona’s west. ‘Brixia beloved mother of my Verona,’ Catullus exclaimed, reflecting on the Gauls who had travelled between it and his home.² The Gauls and their many tribes were inclined like geese to migrate whenever the desire took them.³ Lately, Gallic tribes had been flying through Transalpine Gaul, to Verona’s north, endangering Rome’s control over its provinces. So Caesar rested here, at Catullus’ father’s home, wearied by the Gallic War he was now waging. It was 55 BC.

Catullus had come back to Verona, where he reflected nostalgically upon his roots. It was a Roman colony now, but remained in his mind a place of Gauls and Etruscans.⁴ While the sleeping fields of Brescia evoked his Gallic line, the summers he spent in his family villa on nearby Sirmio (Sirmione), an attractive peninsula on Lake Garda, tended to carry him back into the arms of his ancient ancestors. Whenever its waves shivered in the breeze, he would dream of the Etruscans, the great lords of Italy before the rise of the Romans, and their curious origins in faraway lands.

They had come to Italy to escape a famine that had struck their home in ancient Lydia (near Sart, Turkey). In around 1200 BC, their king had divided the surviving people into two groups, and drawn lots. The more fortunate ones followed his son Tyrrhenus out of Lydia to Smyrna (Izmir), and onwards for distant coasts. In the north and the centre of Italy they scattered, and called themselves ‘tyrrhenians’ after their prince, or ‘tusci’, ‘Etruscans’. Their descendants preferred ‘Umbrians’ and ‘Tuscans’.⁵

Part Gaul, part Etruscan, Catullus never doubted that he had Asiatic blood, however Italian he looked. His hair was light brown, and he styled it like a man who was afraid of losing it. Combed forward, it formed the beginnings of a fashionable fringe, which tickled the deep olive skin of his forehead. He had a round, boyish characterful face, which a well-meaning woman might tell him was sweet or endearing, but then immediately regret saying anything at all. He was, in sum, shapely, especially about the arms. His waist was thick (Catullus being no stranger to the odd hors d’oeuvre) but his nose was delicate, and gently curving brows met at its arch. He had full lips and a sincere smile, but his most distinctive features had to be his eyes. They were large and brown, though the left one drooped slightly beneath a heavy lid, giving the impression that it was half closed. The portrait, discovered at the site of his family home on Sirmio, had no title to identify it as the poet Catullus, only the clues that lay in the painted plaster. The young man looked contemplative and refined as he grasped a scroll in his left hand, while he drew the fingers of his right with pride across its edges, edges he perhaps ‘polished off not a moment ago with dry pumice stone’ (Poem 1). The distinctive lazy eye was meant to make him recognisable, even years later. He wore the toga of the late Republic with tunic, fringed with a narrow purple band.

Dirt tended to splash against this strip of purple, which proclaimed his status – ‘equestrian’ – to passers-by. They were descended from the cavalry, the equestrians, but less likely by now to be seen on a horse than in a forum, ensuring that they still satisfied the 400,000-sesterce wealth qualification that bought them membership of the elite order. Senators wore thicker purple stripes on their togas, and had at least a million sesterces each, but Catullus knew that his stripe made him more important than ordinary plebeians, who had no purple at all.

Catullus had put on the adult toga at the age of sixteen and indulged in so much sex, and so much poetry – ‘joys which your sweet love encouraged’ he once reminded his brother – that he remained forever nostalgic for those happy, carefree days. He never wrote of their mother, as he did of the mothers of friends:⁶ she might have died some years before her son enjoyed this ‘pleasant spring’:

From the time the pure toga was first put upon me,

When the bloom of my youth enjoyed its pleasant spring,

I sported hard enough. I was no stranger to the goddess

Who mixes sweet bitterness with love’s woe

(Poem 68)

As he pottered around his old home to the sound of slaves clattering plates – a sign that his father’s dinner was coming to an end – Catullus looked back on his youngest days. He remembered his first experiences of love and verse, his life’s spring, as well as the moment that presaged the change in season, the moment he decided to leave Verona to pursue a career as a poet in Rome.

In 62 BC a carriage had pulled into Cisalpine Gaul from which there disembarked a man in his early forties – a brother-in-law of Pompey the Great, Metellus Celer. He had recently completed a senior magistracy at Rome, the praetorship, and been intent on achieving the consulship before the decade was out. His appointment to a new post, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had come about in return for his help in quelling a terrifying conspiracy in Rome.

A disaffected young patrician politician, Catiline, a former ally of the erstwhile dictator Sulla, had planned with his supporters to murder the most senior members of the Roman Senate, ravage the city with fire, and fling open Rome’s gates to an army of several thousand that had gathered in the north.⁷ Catiline’s campaign for the consulship of 63 BC had been unsuccessful. Cicero, who had been elected to one of the two seats, foiled his conspiracy and took charge of a full-scale security operation. Determined to save his beloved Republic from extinction, he rounded up some of the chief conspirators – who included rogue senators – and the Senate agreed to put them to death without trial as enemies of the state. Metellus Celer helped Cicero by blocking the plotters’ rampage.

Cicero had hoped to win praise for his swift response. Instead, Metellus Celer’s brother, a feisty tribune in Rome, vetoed him from delivering his parting address from his consulship, saying that he should not have had the conspirators executed without trial. Technically, he was right.⁸ The incident was still haunting Cicero to this day.

Catullus moved to Rome probably soon after the conspiracy. Whether it was in Verona that he had first met Metellus Celer, or in the great city itself, that moment had proved a turning point. For little though Catullus could have anticipated it upon their first meeting, Metellus Celer would become something of an obstacle for him. In recent years Catullus had fallen passionately in love with his wife.

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