Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn - review

The bard who got away with calling Julius Caesar a filthy catamite
Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn
Peter Jones29 January 2016

Catullus’s most famous poem examines his feelings for his “Lesbia”:

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do this.

I don’t know, but I feel it happening and am tortured.’

Catullus’s language is as plain as my translation but his analysis is acute: he knows exactly what he is doing but can explain it only in passive terms — feeling that it is happening to him. So he is helpless. Result — torment.

It is Catullus’s struggle to analyse the nature of his relationship with Lesbia as it was and is, and make sense of his feelings about her, that gives him his fame and distinguishes his love-poetry from that of his Greek predecessors. It is also possible to group the scattered Lesbia poems into a sequence: first love, true love, disillusionment, the end.

And what an end. Lesbia in real life may have been Clodia, wife of Metellus Celer. Consul in 60 BC, Metellus died suddenly in 59 BC. Rumour had it he was murdered by his wife. It did Catullus little good. If you believe the poet, his friend Caelius Rufus, together with most of Rome, was soon hard at it with her “in the crossroads and back-alleys”; and while Lesbia “was bursting men’s balls”, his love lay “fallen at the meadow’s edge, like a flower touched by a passing plough”.

But in terms of a faintly biographical story-line, that is it. To Catullus’s 117 poems, arranged in roughly metrical groupings, there is no discernible chronological or thematic logic. Very few can be pinned down historically. Nearly 90 feature vicious invective or gross obscenity directed at politicians such as Caesar, Pompey and Cicero, personal enemies and rival poets. “Tenderest of Roman poets”? Up to a point, Lord Tennyson. Other poems pick up on random incidents from his daily life — a stolen napkin here, a good poetry session there, a quick shag, a court visit, the death of his brother, and so on. Even Catullus’s dates are unconfirmed: born about 84 BC, died about 54 BC?

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At one level, then, the poems give us a very powerful sense of Catullus as a personality. But the prognosis for the biographer whose job is to create a life-story out of that material is not encouraging. One has to ask whether it really is worth the effort.

Where there is some, even minimal, historical fit between Catullus’s poetry and other sources, Dunn makes the most of it. There was, for example, much talk in Rome of the gigantic fortune Caesar made in his conquest of Gaul. In one poem Catullus accuses both Caesar and Mamurra, chief engineer in Gaul (“Big Dick”, a favourite target), of being filthy, rapacious, adulterous catamites. Caesar, we learn from another source, forgave him and invited him to dinner. Three poems refer to Catullus’s service as an administrator in a province in northern Turkey under one Memmius, probably 57-56 BC.

But there are very thin pickings here. To bulk up the story, Dunn empties on to it filing-cabinets full of information about Rome’s political situation, most of it only marginally relevant to Catullus, or simply invents scenarios — Catullus’s first sight of Clodia, for example. That said, for all the padding, Catullus the poet and the scabrous, witty, ironic, sophisticated, competitive poetic world he inhabited does emerge.

That is what counts. Since Dunn has also published a new translation of The Poems of Catullus in paperback, her “biography” and his poems between them could well prove stimulating companions.

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