submitted by Duchan Caudill
|
Attentive readers of the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus must conclude that his personality was as diverse as his legacy in writing. Experience--often a strict and ruthless lecturer--shapes our perspective on life, casts the mold that makes or breaks an individual. Experience provided Catullus with a range of emotions and insights that made him a leading poet of antiquity, though a reader must not repress the somber notion that the lecturer nearly broke him.
He was born in Verona, the suggested year of his birth is marked at 84 BC. Thirty years later, he would die in Rome, but wedged in between those turbulent years of his presence he wrote poems that mirror his shifting moods. The era into which he was born was one of apprehension, the disputes between two dictatorships marred the political climate and arrested the social realm in a sphere of uncertainty.
Following his extensive education, Catullus left for Rome, where he joined a coterie of like-minded poets know as the neoretics, that is, newcomers. The ideal in achievement of a neoretic was to become a poeta doctus, a universally erudite author. Neoretics strived to attain a modernization of Hellenistic poetry reflected in Latin literature, to create "art for art’s sake," and to avoid the crafting of propagandistic and epic poetry. The topics contained within their verses revolved around themes from outdated mythology, and emphasized the sorrow of romantic disenchantment.
And, such sorrow was bestowed upon Catullus. Long before Catullus was hailed as a master of the Latin epigram, he met a woman named Clodia, who, although married, had very liberal opinions regarding fidelity. Clodia, who has been described as an incarnation of beauty, was ten years older than Catullus, and the sophisticated but voluptuous femme fatale toyed with him before answering his pleas of passion. They experienced a mutual bliss that may have lasted for two years, but following that amorous epoch Clodia bid Catullus an abrupt and decisive farewell (put into American idiom: she dumped him).
In order to deal with an event of such tragic magnitude, Catullus resorted to creating verse. The poems which focus on Clodia--whom, in reverence of the Greek poetess Sappho, he hails as Lesbia--consist of the following segments, each segment will be accompanied by a poem, for which the Latin definition in the singular is carmen and carmina in the plural:
1. Gaining Lesbia’s favor and mutual bliss
- carmina 83, 92: Catullus as Lesbia’s favorite
- carmina 5, 7 : the kiss poems
Carmen 92 (credit to Vlad Daoud)
Lesbia always talks bad to me nor is she ever silent
About me: Lesbia is loving me, if not, I may be destroyed.
By what sign? Because they are the same signs: I am showing her
Disapproval constantly, I am lost if I do not love.
2. Torment segment
- carmina 2, 3 : poems dedicated to Lesbia’s sparrow
- carmen 60: a lover’s complaintCarmen 2 (credit to Caitlin Rawlins)
Sparrow, my girl’s delight,
With whom she plays,
Whom she holds dear,
To whose bite
She gives into after provoking
You to pick at her fingertips,
When in pleases my darling
To play with something
To her so dear
And find some solace for her pain,
So that, I believe, she then quiets
Her passionate fire:
I wish I could play with
You as she does
To ease the pain of my torturous desire!
3. Reactions toward Lesbia’s unfaithfulness:
- carmen 8: first of Catullus’ attempts at thwarting residual love for Lesbia
- carmen 76: Catullus asks gods to liberate him from love-related torment
- carmen 85: Catullus becomes aware that his feelings for Lesbia are a blend of love and hate.Carmen 85 (credit to Justin Neill)
I hate and I love. Wherefore would I do this, perhaps you ask?
I do not know. But I feel that I am tortured.
His experience with Clodia was a lecture he would never forget; it accompanied him through his remaining years. It should be added that the Catullus-Clodia story left Catullus in the throes of self-pity, which, in my opinion, must not render him less sympathetic to the reader.
Some of his verse may strike a reader as border-line vulgar, while other stanzas display a touching sensitivity. One will also discover that he can be self-ironic and sometimes points the mea culpa finger at himself, but he doesn't shun disparaging those who have least-favorite status with him. Though never politically active, he wrote some political verse, most notably a playful attack against Caesar, who, in a magnanimous mood, forgave the young poet and invited him to dinner.
Catullus may have been a very complex figure, but this complexity makes him appear very real to the reader. His 116 available poems are worth reading; literary greats such as Ovid and Horace were inspired by him; the composer Carl Orff drew musical impulses from Catullus’ poems; and Thornton Wilder commemorated him in The Ides of March. An interest in wanting to understand Catullus is an enjoyable endeavor, I encourage you to visit Randy Negenborn’s Web site at http://Catullus.isCool.net
