I cannot drown with you, because I have one thing left to do. I can still insult this universe which insults us. I can insult it by making a beautiful thing. That I shall do; and then put an end to the long crucifixion of the mind.
Claudilla, Claudilla, you are drowning. Oh that I were deaf; oh that I were not here to know that struggle, to hear those cries.
XIII-A
Clodia to Catullus.
[By return messenger, the same day.]
[In Greek.]
Little-Stag – true, all true – how can I do other than be cruel to you? – Endure it, suffer it, but do not leave me.
I will tell you all – it is my last resource – Prepare yourself for this horror: my uncle violated me at the age of twelve – on what, on whom can I avenge that? That? In an orchard, at noon. Under a blazing sun. Now I have told you all.
Nothing can help me. I do not ask help. I ask companionship in hatred. I could not endure it in you that you did not hate enough.
Come to me. Come to me, Little-Stag.
But what is there to say?
Come.
XIII-B
Catullus.
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
‘I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask how that is possible.
I do not know; but that is what I feel and I hang upon a cross.’
XIV
Asinius Pollio, at Naples, to Caesar in Rome.
[September 18.]
[Asinius Pollio, traveling as Caesar’s confidential agent, answers twenty questions forwarded to him by the Dictator.]
My General:
[Here follow several thousand words concerning certain highly technical procedures employed by the great banking houses situated near Naples; an equally long reply concerning some administrative problems in Mauretania; then some information about the wild beasts that were being shipped from Africa to take part in the festival games at Rome.]
Question 20: The reason for Gaius Valerius Catullus’s ill-will against the Dictator and an account of the poet’s love affair with the Lady Clodia Pulcher.
I have attempted many times, my General, to obtain from the poet a clear statement of his antagonism against you. My General should know that Valerius is an extremely complicated and contradictory nature. For the most part he is judicious, patient, and even-tempered. Although he is only slightly older than the majority of the members of our [Aemilian Draughts and Swimming] Club, he has long held the position there of being councilor and peace maker. He is, as we say, ‘head of the table.’ Nevertheless, there are three subjects which he cannot discuss or hear discussed without being thrown into a violent rage. He changes colour; his voice alters, and his eyes flash. I have frequently observed him to be trembling. These subjects are bad poets, loose behavior in women, and yourself and certain of your associates. I have had occasion to tell my General already that the majority of the members of that Club affect the Republicans. This is even more true of the two other clubs whose membership is restricted to the young patricians, the Tiburtine Rowing Club, and the Red Sails. It is not true of the Forty Steps which remains exceedingly proud of having been founded by my General. The Republican opinions held by the former clubs, however, do not pass beyond the degree of table talk. The young men are extremely ill-informed on affairs of state, and they are not sufficiently interested to listen to an extended discussion of them; nor will Valerius. His objections veer from position to position; at one moment he is inveighing against the private character of certain officials, the next he is invoking certain principles of political theory, the next he is rendering you responsible for some burglaries that were reported in the suburbs.
I cannot help feeling that his irrational irritability on these three subjects is a reflection of the unhappy situation he is in respecting Clodia Pulcher. It is extremely unfortunate that of all the women in Rome he should have fallen in love with her. When he first came to the city eight years ago she was already the laughingstock of the Club, though at that time her husband was still living. She was the laughingstock not because of the number of her lovers, but because of the unvarying course followed by any amatory relationship with her. She exerts her fascination over a man in order to learn his weaknesses and in order finally to insult him with the greatest possible thoroughness and precision. Unfortunately for her, she does not do this very well. She is in such haste to arrive at the phase wherein she is to humiliate her lover that the fascination is quickly dispelled. Certain Club members who had promised themselves at least six months of enchantment have returned to the Club in the middle of the first night and without their cloaks.
That Valerius should love this woman with such intensity and for so long a time has caused consternation in all who know him. My brother – who is a much closer friend of the poet than I can claim to be – says that when he talks of her he seems to be talking of someone we have never known. It is generally conceded that, next to Volumnia, she is the handsomest woman on the Hill, that she is easily the wittiest and the most intelligent, and that the diversions, country parties, and dinners which she gives are not equaled by any others in Rome; but Valerius tells my brother of her wisdom, her kindness to the unfortunate, the delicacy of her sympathy, her greatness of soul. I have known her for many years; I enjoy her company; but I am never unaware that she hates the air she breathes and everything and everyone about her. It is generally thought that there is one exception, her brother Publius. Cornelius Nepos laid before me his theory that her campaign of vengeance against men is possibly a consequence of the incestuous relations she may have had with her brother. It may be, though I do not think so. Her attitude to him is that of an exasperated and relatively indifferent mother. Passion or the revulsion from passion would have rendered it more exasperated and more possessive.
My admiration – indeed, my love – for the poet is very great. Few things could make me happier than to see him recover from the infatuation which is torturing him and to see him shed the childish and incoherent prejudices which he holds against my General.
The Lady Clodia Pulcher has invited me to a dinner to which she tells me she has invited both my General and that poet. At first the prospect seemed to me unpleasing, but on second thought it seems to offer a peculiarly fitting occasion for dispelling certain misunderstandings. I could well understand that my General would not wish to attend that dinner, however; in that case, I hope that I may be permitted to arrange a meeting with the poet at a later time.
XIV-A
Cornelius Nepos: Commonplace Book
Met Asinius Pollio in the Baths. As we sat in the steam we discussed again the reasons for Catullus’s hatred of our master.
‘There is no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘It has to do with Clodia Pulcher. Now to my knowledge Caesar has never shown any interest in her. Do you know of any?’
I replied that I knew of none, but was not likely to know.
‘I think there has been none. She was a mere child in the years when he was fluttering the boudoirs. There has certainly been nothing between them; but for some reason, Catullus (I feel certain of it) associates them. The epigrams against the Dictator are violent, are savage, but they have very little point. Have you remarked that they are all, without exception, couched in obscene terms? To denounce Caesar for immorality and for enriching a few high officials, believe me, that is like – throwing sand against a strong wind. There is something childish about them; the only thing that is not childish about them is that they are unforgettable.’
Here he brought his mouth close to my ear: ‘You know my admiration for our master. Nevertheless, I say to you: a man who cannot formulate a more pointed, a more piquant case against him has not yet begun to reflect. . . . No, no, I think there is no doubt about it: Catullus has conjured up some grounds for sexual jealousy.’
Here he waved his hands in the air: ‘Catullus is both a man and a child. It must be seen to be believed. You heard what Cicero
said when he first read the love poems? No? ‘This Catullus is the only man in Rome who takes passion seriously; he will probably be the last.’
XV
Catullus to Clodia.
[September 20.]
My soul, soul of my soul, life of my life, I have slept all day.
Oh, to be able to sleep until [Friday]. It is torture to be awake and not beside you; it is starvation to be asleep and not beside you. At dark I went out with Attius – another torture, to be thinking only of you and yet not to talk of you. It is midnight. I have written and written and torn up what I have written. Oh, the sweetness, the wildness of love, what tongue can tell it? Why must I attempt it; why was I born to be hunted by demons to tell of it?
Forget, oh forget the cutting things we have said to one another. The passion which is our joy is also our furious enemy. It is the vengeance of the Gods that we cannot be forever one and totally one. It is the rage of the soul that there is a body and the rage of the body that there is a soul. But oh! let us succeed where so few have succeeded. Let us burn the two into one; and oh, Claudillina, let us efface whatever the past held; let us stamp it out. Believe me, it no longer exists. Be proud; refuse to remember it; it is within your power to ignore it. Resolve every morning to be each morning’s new Claudilla.
I kiss you to hide my eyes from you. I hold you. I kiss you. I kiss you. I kiss you.
XVI
Pompeia to Clodia.
[September 21.]
Here’s a letter from him to you. It’s a perfectly horrible letter and I’m ashamed to forward it.
Anyway! So you see I can come. But don’t thank me. Why didn’t you tell him from the beginning that that poet would be there? Sometimes I think that all my husband thinks about is poetry. Almost every night he reads it aloud to me in bed. Last night it was Lucretius. All about atoms, atoms, atoms. He doesn’t read it; he knows it by heart. Oh, dear, he’s such a strange man. This week I simply adore him, but he’s such a strange man. Clodiola, I’ve just heard Cicero’s nickname for him. Isn’t that simply death-defying! I’ve never laughed so in my life. [It is hard to know which of Cicero’s soubriquets for Caesar so convulsed the Dictator’s wife. It may have been simply The Dominie, or it may have been one of several complicated compound Greek epithets: The Autophidias, or The Man who lived as though he were shaping his own honorific sepulchral monument; the Benevolent Strangler – which reflects his contemporaries’ bewilderment at Caesar’s wholesale pardon of his enemies and his deeply disturbing failure to display the least resentment against them; or ‘No-body-here-but-smoke’ a phrase from Aristophanes’s The Wasps, where a man imprisoned in his house by his son gives this answer when he is discovered trying to escape by the chimney.]
I tried on the dress. It’s marvelous. I’m going to wear the Etruscan tiara and I’m having gold beads sewn on the skirt, very thick at the bottom and gradually thinning out until there are none at the waist. I don’t know whether the sumptuary laws permit it and I’m not going to ask.
Did you see me give you the sign during the Foundation Day ballet? When I pull the lobe of my right ear that’s a message to you. Of course, I don’t dare turn my head to right or left. Even though he’s two miles away, doing all that marching up and down and shouting gibberish I know that he’s got his eyes glued on me.
I’m learning my piece for the you-know-what [the Mysteries of the Good Goddess]. Darling, I have simply no memory. All that oldfashioned language. He helps me with it. Madam President said that since he’s Supreme Pontiff he’s allowed to know certain parts of it. The awful parts, of course not; do you suppose any wife has ever told her husband about them? I suppose not.
I hear that Aunt Julia’s coming to your dinner, too. She’s going to stay with us. This time I’ll make her tell me about the days of those earlier civil wars when they had to eat snakes and toads and when she and my grandmother killed lots of men. It must be a very odd feeling to kill a man!
Hugs.
XVI-A
[Enclosure] Caesar to Clodia.
The Dictator’s respects to the Most Noble Lady. The Dictator has deferred the engagement that prevented his presence and accepts the invitation of the Most Noble Publius Claudius Pulcher and the Most Noble Lady. He also requests their permission to invite the Spanish Commissioner and the Deputation of Twelve to her house following the dinner.
The Dictator understands that the Greek mime Eros is performing before the Most Noble Lady’s guests. The performance of this mime is of the highest artistry. It is reported, however, that it is accompanied by a considerable degree of obscenity, particularly in the composition called ‘Aphrodite and Hephaestus.’ It is unsuitable that the generals and administrators from Spain and the remoter districts of the Republic carry back to their posts the impression that the diversions of the capital are of such a character. The Dictator requests that the Most Noble Lady call the attention of the artist to this observation of the Dictator.
The Dictator sends his thanks to the Most Noble Lady and requests that during the earlier part of the evening she waive the protocol which it is customary to observe in his presence.
XVII
Cicero from his villa at Tusculum to Atticus in Greece.
[September 26.]
Only the Muses, my Pomponius, can console us for the loss of all the things we have valued. We have become slaves, but even a slave can sing. I have reversed the procedure of Odysseus: to save himself and his associates from destruction he deafened his ears to the sirens; I, however, have given all my attention to the Muses in order to drown out the death rattle of the Republic and the expiring groans of liberty.
I do not agree with you: I lay the general suffocation to the charge of one man.
The patient at the point of death called in this doctor who restored in him every faculty but the will and promptly bound him to himself as his personal slave. I entertained for a time the hope that the doctor would rejoice in his patient’s restoration and release him to the full exercise of his independence. That hope has dwindled.
So let us cultivate the muses; that is one freedom no man can take from us.
The doctor himself takes an interest in the melodies that arise from this universal jail. He has sent me a sheaf of verses by this Catullus you speak of. I have known the young man for some time and am even addressed in one of the poems. I have known this poem for a year, but by the Gods, I am not certain as to whether it is addressed to me in admiration or in derision. I am sufficiently grateful that he does not call me pander nor pickpocket – playful attributions which few of his friends escape.
I do not share Caesar’s unbounded enthusiasm. For some of these poems I have not so much an admiration as a weakness. Those which are based upon Greek models we may call the most brilliant translations we have yet seen; when they depart from Greek prototypes we are confronted with some strange matter.
These poems are in Latin but they are not Roman. Catullus comes from over the border and prepares us for that adulteration of our language and our forms of thought which must inevitably overwhelm us. The poems to Clodia, and particularly those commemorating the death of her sparrow, are not without grace, but they have their comical side. I am told that they are already scrawled across the walls of the Baths and that there is no Syrian sausage vendor who has not committed them to memory. The sparrow! We are told that it often perched in Clodia’s bosom – a much-traveled thoroughfare, only occasionally available to birds. Well, let us have Anacreontic threnodies on this bird and impassioned exhortations to kisses beyond counting – but what do I find? A rapid transition, or rather no transition, and we are talking about death; and by Hercules, the commonplaces of stoic philosophy are richly marshaled.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
Nobis cum semel brevis lux occisus est
Nox est perpetua et una dormienda.
[A translation is given in II-B.]
That is high and mournful music. I am having it cut into the wall of the pergola th
at looks toward the setting sun; – but where is the sparrow and where are the kisses? An indefensible disproportion joins the beginnings and the ends of those poems. That is neither Greek nor Roman. A secret train of thought, an association of ideas beneath the surface of the lines, is operating in the poet’s mind. It is Clodia’s death, it is his own, that is figured in that of the sparrow.
If we are to be condemned to a poetry based on buried trains of thought, my dear Pomponius, we shall soon be at the mercy of the unintelligible parading about among us as a superior mode of sensibility. It is true that our minds are a market place in which the slave brushes against the sage, or an untended garden where the weed springs beside the rose. At any moment a trivial thought may leap and associate itself with the sublime which in turn may be illustrated or interrupted by the homeliest detail of daily life. This is incoherence; this is the barbarian within us all and from which Homer and the great writers of six hundred years have worked to free us.
I am to meet this poet at a dinner which Clodia is giving in a few days. Caesar will be there. I intend so to direct the conversation that this truth will be made clear to them. The maintenance of categories is the health not only of literature, but of the State.
XVIII
Report from the Dictator’s Secret Police: concerning Gaius Valerius Catullus.
[September 22.]
[These reports were submitted daily. They included intercepted letters, conversations engaged in or overheard, and accounts of persons or the activities of persons whose names were often forwarded to the police by the Dictator.]
Subject 642: Gaius Valerius Catullus, son of Gaius, grandson of Titus; gentleman from the region of Verona. Age: 29. Resides at the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club. Frequents: Ficinius Mela; the brothers Pollio; Cornelius Nepos; Lucius Calco; Mamilius Torquatus; Horbatius Cinna; the Lady Clodia Pulcher.