nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est
tell her not to believe my love
is as it was
but blame herself
that it has fallen like a flower
at the far field’s edge
under the plough
He’s up in the dead of night again, with one lamp burning. His eyes sting, his body is stiff with lack of sleep. Even the owls have gone to bed. She’ll be sleeping, he’s sure of it. Arms flung back behind her head, face to one side, breath coming heavily because of the wine the night before. She’ll sleep on steadily until long after the sun is up and then she’ll call for Aemilia. Her skin will be bright and clear. They’ll gossip in the warm sunlight, while Aemilia washes and dresses Clodia’s hair, and neatly dodges a slap when she pulls a lock too tight.
‘Did you have a good evening, my lady?’
‘You were asleep in your chair when I came in. I told you not to wait up for me.’
‘It’s the master’s orders.’
‘Just don’t let me catch you yawning today, that’s all. It’s like having your hair combed by a corpse.’
‘Shall I sing you a song, my lady?’
‘As long as it’s a nice one.’
They both laugh. After a moment’s thought, Aemilia bursts out plangently:
Mother, make a bed with straw
Mother, fill a cup with gall,
For your son has come home
Like a colt from distant pastures
Stumbling to shelter,
Look from your doorway, he’s coming
Over the fields, faltering
Where love has poisoned him,
Lay him on straw and cover him,
Bring gall to his lips
For love has laid death on your child,
False love has murdered your son –
The comb clatters to the floor as Clodia pulls her head away.
‘For pity’s sake, Aemilia, can’t you sing something else?’
And she does, of course: some ditty about Cupid flitting bare-naked around the heads of the gods and getting his little willy tweaked by his mother. But later, Aemilia will hum her own song again as she cleans the combs and brushes:
Love has laid death on your child,
False love has murdered your son –
He’s not guessing, he’s remembering. He listened to that exact scene through the open door, long ago, while Clodia dressed. In happier times, when he lay curled in a drowse of contentment, breathing the smell of sex from the bed linen. Then, the only question in his head was whether he should drift away again into sleep, or reach out for that cup of wine on the little oak bedside table that Manlius’ janitor had dragged in from somewhere.
Happiness calls everything to it, he thinks. Misery drives everything away. Leave it, Catullus! Time to break it off. You make as much of a fool of yourself with your hatred as you did with your love.
Leave Baiae: that’s the first step. There’s nothing for you here. Seaside resorts are intolerable when you can’t share the shrieks of pleasure. The water is calm, the sun is hot, the beautiful people are strolling the promenades after a morning of massages and facials. The Baths are full of steam, gossip, the sharp smell of herbs and the busy self-importance of doctors who have decamped from Rome for the season in pursuit of fatty livers, rheumatism, migraines, bladder inflammations and those more intimate difficulties which respond so well to the stimulating air of Baiae. According to Clodia there’s a new Greek fertility specialist with some very unorthodox theories and a bronze speculum the size of a shoe-horn, who is attracting patients by the dozen. She half-thought of visiting him herself; veiled, of course.
His smile dies. Every thought of her comes back to the same place. He is raw with scratching it.
Leave Baiae. He could go to the hills like everyone else, but perhaps he’ll punish himself, go back to Rome and sweat out the heat there until the city comes to life in autumn. The summer seems endless but even that will pass, and there’ll be a fresh start. Dawn chills, bright days. Savoury patties piled high on food stalls, braziers burning on cold nights, and the ebb and flow of a thousand thousand unknown faces. He’ll be safe in the womb of the city. There’s always something new to talk about. A new scandal as ripe and steaming-hot as a fresh turd on a frosty morning, a catastrophically bad actor in the lead part of a new play, a pretty boy who has hit sixteen and has everybody running after him. There’ll be friends to meet at the Forum, dinner invitations, an abjectly tedious recitation to avoid, or a bright, breathtaking new poem from dear Calvus. Cinna’s never-ending epic will have grown by a verse or two and they’ll tear it to pieces and then put it back together.
Yes, a fresh start. Politicians, orators, arse-lickers, idiots, plotters, poisoners, back-stabbers and buggers from Caesar downwards. All the bastards who make Rome the incomparable fountain of entertainment that it is. As long as you’re not looking for those beggarly old virtues that have to scuttle around the streets without a rag on their backs, there’s everything the human heart could desire. Surely Rome is enough to fill a life, if he can just get free of this obsession that has robbed everything of meaning except itself –
But she’ll always be there. He won’t be able to escape her. Even if he can stop meeting her he’ll never be able to avoid hearing about her. Their circle is too small an island in the sea of Rome. Her name will follow him everywhere.
She’s in his blood. He’s not even sure if this is still love. He needs new words for her. He’d like to drown all the Tullias and Quintias with their flowing hair, white ankles and radiant blushes, so they’d never be able to simper their way into a love poem again. He’s got to seize the subject and shake it until all the lies fall out like insects from winter bedding.
Clodia, I’m talking to you. Listen. Love and hate, that’s what I feel for you, love and hate so fused together that I can’t drag one from the arms of the other. You want to know how that’s possible? You say it doesn’t make sense? You’re right. There is no sense left in me: only sensation. Feeling tears me apart.
Do you remember Crassus’ crucifixions, after the Spartacan revolt? Of course you remember: you’re older than I am. Maybe you went to see them. I was only thirteen, living back home in Verona, but even there we heard about Crassus’ punishment. It made me shiver although I knew it was never going to happen to me. I wasn’t a slave.
A man crucified every fifty paces, the length of the Appian Way. Six thousand slaves hanging there, stinking and rotting in the midday sun.
Blood and crap and piss and sweat and screams until at last, one by one, they had the luck to die. Crassus left them up on those crosses until the worms and vultures had seen to every last ribbon of flesh. A stew of flies and maggots simmered for miles.
That’s what I’m like. Pissing and bleeding and sweating and screaming because I’m being torn apart. You hoisted me up here, Clodia, and no one can get me down. Crucifixion stinks. People couldn’t walk the Appian Way for months.
You won’t walk my way now, will you, mea Lesbia? It stinks and you’re repulsed by it. You have to wrap layers of cloth over your mouth and nose so as not to gag. I’ve been torn apart and I’m hanging here in rags. Love is one arm of the cross, Clodia, and hate is the other.
But let’s cut the long-winded crap. No one wants to listen to a moaner. Let’s set the words on fire, Clodia, until even you can’t shut out what you don’t want to hear. Let’s make your ears burn.
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and I love. Maybe you want to know
how that trick’s done? I know nothing.
I feel crucifixion.
Seven
Back in Rome. Back among familiar comforts, and, just as he hoped, things seem better. He’s getting his balance back. Two quiet months in empty
Rome – empty, that is, apart from a few hundred thousand plebs and slaves – and he’s not happy, but at least he’s calm. All his friends have gone to the hills, where the air is cooler and they can relax in the deep shade of carefully planted groves, or ramble in orchards, or fish in rivers that never dry up like the muddy trickles on the plains around Baiae.
The muggy, tormenting heat of the city rules Catullus’ days. He sleeps best just before dawn, when a faint, cooling breeze cuts through the heavy air. The rumble of carts and wagons in the streets seems to make the nights even hotter. Babies cry for hours, and guard-dogs bark at the end of their chains. The cicadas chirr so loudly that it’s like the filing of metal in his ears.
Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he pulls on a tunic and wanders out into the courtyard. The fountain splashes. He dips his hands in the water then pours it over his head and body until the tunic is soaked. Soon the dawn breeze will blow and the evaporation will cool him. Then, perhaps, he’ll be able to sleep. The household will wake soon. Lucius gets up before anyone, to oversee the slaves’ rising and to take charge of the day as he takes charge of the house. If he finds Catullus sitting out here, he’ll worry.
‘Couldn’t you sleep? Do you feel ill?’
‘I’m all right, Lucius, it’s only the heat.’
‘Tomorrow night you should have a massage before sleeping. It will relax you. You looked very tired yesterday.’
‘You know I never sleep well in summer.’
‘You sleep much better at Sirmio than you do here in Rome.’
He should have gone to Sirmio, that’s what Lucius thinks. It was his duty to go to Sirmio for the summer, back to the family home. But he’s not going, not even for a day.
His father has freed him from paternal authority. You have the right to do as you please, and I must trust to your own judgement.
Whenever Catullus receives a letter from his father, he puts it aside for a while before opening it, to brace himself. To read a letter from his father is like pressing on a bruise.
But at least his father is in Sirmio, and he is in Rome. His father’s cold disappointment, like a cloud, grows smaller when Catullus is at a distance. When he’s in Rome, he can blot it out. He is not the son his father wanted. That ideal son, his infuriating twin, has followed him all his life. His father’s son is high-spirited but pious, writes clean Latin in a decent old-fashioned style, sows his wild oats (none of your cold-hearted, prissy, calculating youths!), but once these are satisfactorily scattered he’s ready to settle down with a girl of our type. ‘A girl like your mother,’ that’s his father’s ideal. His mother, dead, embodies all the virtues, but she no longer laughs.
Catullus remembers a different woman from the figure of his father’s recollections. Less pious, fond of jokes, a woman whose eyes often gleamed with private amusement, and who would creep into her children’s room with a handful of honey-cakes when they had been sent to bed without supper.
His father can make an ideal of her, now that she’s no longer there to tease him out of it. Catullus, however, is all too alive, a flesh-and-blood contradiction of his father’s desires.
The ideal son understands business without having any of the grasping, commercial spirit which is so alien to his father’s standards. Wealth is something to be husbanded. You must not squander, but equally you must not grasp. In their position – not quite patrician, but at the very top of the equestrian tree – they have serious responsibilities. They must lead Veronese society, and negotiate effectively with the powerhouse of Rome (without, of course, becoming seduced by Roman values). They must exploit and if possible extend their landholdings at Sirmio.
The ideal son knows all this. He is modestly eager to learn everything his father has to teach him about the management of the family’s estates and of their trading interests in Bithynia. He understands that his chief purpose in life is to advance the family, protect its interests and defend its name.
(Extraordinary, when you come to think of it, that his father and Julius Caesar are such good friends. Caesar, Rome’s leading adulterer and bumboy, ruthless exploiter of every opportunity that comes his way; Caesar, who could put the whole world on his plate and still be hungry –
– His father doesn’t see it. His Caesar is an ambitious but virtuous man of ancient family, a loyal friend. The image of what a man ought to be physically: Caesar’s tough, tireless body never spares itself. His splendid seat on a horse is often singled out for especial praise. But perhaps what his father most enjoys are their conversations. ‘A man of vision,’ his father comments approvingly, ‘A man of vision who is also a man of action. That’s a rare combination, as you boys will discover.’)
The ideal son, of course, would have sat at Caesar’s feet.
Even his brother, Marcus, who does almost everything else that their father wants, does not like Caesar. Marcus is the favourite son, or at least he’s the son whom their father understands. He has stayed in Sirmio, he’s married to exactly the right kind of girl, he is loyal and thoughtful towards his father, intelligent and hardworking as he takes on more and more of the running of the estates. Sometimes, though, Marcus seems not as happy as he should be. Perhaps even he feels the shadow of the ideal son darkening his own life.
‘Why do you try so hard to please the old bastard? He’s never satisfied,’ Catullus had asked once.
Marcus had been shocked. ‘You shouldn’t speak of Father like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s wrong.’
‘You mean, the gods are going to strike me down with fire from heaven?’
‘Of course I don’t mean that, it’s just – not right. It sounds ugly.’
He had felt ugly for a moment, after Marcus said that.
No, Catullus will put off going to Sirmio for as long as possible, even though he loves it more than anywhere else on earth. His life is in Rome now.
And suddenly, between one day and the next, the nights are cooler. The day’s heat is golden, rather than white-hot and choking with dust. Clodia is back in Rome. She stayed on in Baiae for a few weeks after Catullus left (he has his spies) and then she went up to the hills with her husband.
She’s back in command on the Clivus Victoriae now, no doubt packing in a punishing schedule of dinners, poetry readings, dance classes and musical soirées. He can’t help hearing of her almost every day.
But even the most ardent gossips get bored. Doesn’t Clodia realize that? They still want to know the latest, but ‘It’s all getting a bit same old same old with our Clodia, isn’t it?’ They’ve licked her hands and now they’re getting ready to bite. ‘Great show but we’ve seen it all a hundred times, darling.’
His heart is mean enough to take pleasure in seeing the dogs snap at her ankles and begin to believe that she can be brought down. She’s been arrogant for so long, with her head set at the Clodian angle that she shares with her brother, her power to promise and to punish, and the quick blank stare that shuts offenders out of her magic circle.
So this is what love has brought him to: he sides with her enemies now. At the same time he wants to destroy them as they grin and roll her name on their tongues. Knock them to the ground, make them eat dirt until they choke on it.
He hasn’t seen her. He’d rather walk through the warren of the Subura at night without protection, through filthy streets that swarm with drunks, pimps and muggers, than risk passing her threshold.
The less dramatic truth is that he hasn’t been anywhere because he’s been ill. At first it was the usual autumn cold, but annoyingly, his cough and sore throat refused to go away. He was plagued by a fever that sank down sometimes like the flame in a dying candle, only to leap up again. He was wrung out by nightmares and night sweats until each morning he woke exhausted. In the hopeful hours of daylight he thought he’d be better tomorrow, but the nights went on getting worse until Lucius insisted on sending for a doctor.
Lucius has been with the family since long before Catullus’ birth.
He was given his freedom on the death of Catullus’ grandfather, but he’s so much part of the family that it’s hard to imagine how they would live without him. At one time, Catullus remembers, there was talk of Lucius starting his own timber business with money loaned by the family, but it came to nothing. Lucius didn’t want it, perhaps. He was content to be their steward, rather than to scrabble for riches in the way so many freed slaves did. Lucius never seemed to care about money.
They couldn’t manage without Lucius. He knows everything and everyone. He oils the machinery of the year so deftly that they don’t even notice him doing it. Lucius belonged to the family once, and now they belong to him. They owe him more than they could ever repay.
When Catullus’ mother died, it was Lucius who made life bearable for the boys. They saw him grieve rather than become silent and angry like their father. They remembered how often their mother had laughed with Lucius, and how rarely with her husband.
Their mother had become a shade. She had gone to join their ancestors, those terrifying ancestors whose wax death masks were stored in the atrium. You couldn’t love an ancestor. Your task was to live up to him.
Their mother could not come back, ever. They tried to remember her as she was, but their father talked about a different mother from the one they knew. Only Lucius remembered the small things that brought her to life again.
‘You are like your mother, both of you, you have a taste for salt,’ he would say, removing the jar of pickled capers before they could gobble them all.
Lucius recalled little rhymes that their mother had remembered from her own childhood. He had her knack of telling stories, so that if the story were about a spider you would seem to see the thread spinning from its body.
Their mother had stood between her boys and all the dark shadows that scared them, but then she turned into a shadow herself. Catullus remembered pressing into her skirts, against the swell of her thigh, snuffing her smell through the cloth. He was shy with strangers, and his father hated it.