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

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.

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

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.