In Our Time - Catullus

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catullus (c84-c54 BC) who wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene. He found a new way to write about love, in poems to the mysterious Lesbia, married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his explicit poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years. Once the one surviving manuscript was discovered in the Middle Ages, though, anecdotally as a plug in a wine butt, he inspired Petrarch and the Elizabethan poets, as he continues to inspire many today.The image above is of Lesbia and her Sparrow, 1860, artist unknownWithGail Trimble Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of OxfordSimon Smith Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, poet and translator of CatullusandMaria Wyke Professor of Latin at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Catullus 84 to 54 BC wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene. He found a new way to write about love in poems to the mysterious lesbian,

married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his scatological poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years. Once the single surviving manuscript were discovered in the Renaissance, though anecdotally as a plug-in-a-wine-butt, he inspired Petrach and the Elizabethan poets as he continues to inspire many today. With me to discuss Catullesar, Gail Trimble, Brown Fellow and Tudor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford.

Simon Smith, reader in creative writing at the University of Kent, poet and translator of Catulles and Maria Weike, Professor of Latin at University College London. Maria Weike, what do we know about Catullus? Well, we have to be careful about what we think we know about Catullis. He writes many poems in the first person

very passionately about his circumstances, but this is poetry designed to be consumed by the public as poetry and what you say in poetry is not necessarily who you are. But what do we know about him? But we have a few things. that we do know about him, one of which is that he was born in Verona, which is quite significant,

because Verona then was not part of Italy, it's a province. We know that his father was probably a magistrate because he was a friend of Julius Caesar. They owned a country villa by Lake Garda. So he probably passed on to his son, Roman citizenship. We know that he took the first step on the career ladder of elite Romans by going to Bethinia, which is sort of northern Turkey. as part of a governor's administrative team. We know that his brother died near there in Western Turkey, by which he was devastated. We are told that the woman that he calls lesbian in his poetry was a pseudonym, that that was a pseudonym for an aristocrat called Clodia.

And we know that he was good friends with many poets in Rome and with many key players in Rome, such as Cicero and Caesar. Do we know why his life is so short, 30 years? Well, we don't seem to have any poetry much beyond 54 that we can date. And there's speculation that he died of 304 years. Yes, yes. And there's speculation that he may have died young, but sometimes people think we speculate like that

because we want our love poets to die young. And it may just be that he gave up writing poetry because he says he was devastated by his brother's death. So we've given his dates authoritatively on this programme as 84 to 54 BC, but we may be wrong, but we'll battle on nonetheless Maria. Thank you very much. What was the state of the Roman Republic when he was writing? Well, it was approaching absolute disaster because within a few years of his death or of the time that he ceased to write, we're going to have Julius Caesar crossing the River Rubicon, the start of civil war, battle between Caesar and Pompey, the collapse of the republic. So all this is about to happen.

Is this hindsight on your part, Maria, did they know it was about to happen? Did they know who was going to cross the rubic and did they know that he was going to be assassinated? Was this hindsight? I mean, that's just getting on with being the Roman Republic at the time when he's alive and you're pushing all this back into it as significant. Did they know it was going to be significant? We look at some of the poetry that Catullus writes because he famously slanders Julius Caesar in several poems. But he slanders him and calls him a pervert, he calls him shameless and voracious, because he allowed someone on his military campaigns to accrue disgusting amounts of money.

And some critics think that the reason that he writes like that about Caesar is because it's indicative of a real concern about the way power is now being focused, concentrated on these great generals who are going to wage battles, earn money and honour abroad in order to exert power back in Rome. So he sees this as too much wealth and inevitable decay

of the principles. Well so he seems disgusted by that and it's quite clear that in his poetry he doesn't write directly about waging war, politics, the state Roman history. He writes about Greek myth and love and loss and

betrayal and you get the sense that perhaps he's doing that because these other subjects are ones too terrible to contemplate. But yes, but get that again, we're not quite sure of them. No, no, we're just making this up as we go along. But this is an innocent. You spend a lifetime making it up as you go along, so you're probably better make a rup of you three

than anybody else around, so we'll go with you three. Not with me. Simon Smith, can you give us some idea of the range of a color of poetry, please? Well, he packs a lot in to quite a small herb of poetry. We only have one volume of this. don't we have there's one volume but I would argue in three parts but we might

come back to that later but there's 116 poems and over a wide range so everything from sort of two-line epigrams to 400 line sort of mini epics such as the poem 64 and then we have a whole range of metrics from iambics

to gallianbics to all sorts of different metrics and then forms as well there are marriage here There are short lyric poems, the love poetry that we are very familiar with, or most familiar with, and the satirical poems about particular individuals, and also the scatological poems as well. And he covers a whole range of topics as well, friendship, love between man and woman, but also between man and man and politics, as Maria has just been talking about. And then there are various challenges that come from that, if you're trying to translate it,

particularly around ideas, around tone getting, because the tone can shift within a very short space of time within poems, from real sort of tenderness to vicious kind of hatred, really. You find that in poem 11, for instance. Not everybody who will be familiar with poem 11. Give us an indication. Poem 11 is the one where he's basically asking his friends Furus and Aurelius to take a message to lesbian, his lover.

and he starts out talking about actually Caesar's, well, various things, but Caesar's conquest of Britain, but also the range of the territory that the Romans have conquered all the way across to Syria. So there's all those kinds of things going on. But it comes down to a focus upon the way he feels wronged by lesbian and her infidelities. And it ends with this fantastic image of his love being like a flower being touched by the plow. So that huge range of tone and subject there. What are the challenges facing you when you were translating him and obviously particular language,

but you've given us some idea of the range of the metrics, the different techniques he used, the different forms he used. So you went across a lot of forms in comparatively with few poems, 116, isn't all that many. After all, people have volumes and volumes of that. What about your, did you have a problem with the language or did you have fun with the language? What happened? Well, all of those things. It did feel like you had to kind of reinvent translating him every time you approach any of the poems

because the challenges are so different. If you take some of the shorter scatological poems or the kind of satirical poems, you're dealing with languages which is pretty direct and seemingly straightforward. Without saying something that could not be repeated on Radio 4, can you give us an example of these short poems? Well, if we take poem 85, which is a two-line poem, it's the famous odious ammo poem, which is I love and I hate. I mean, it's pretty powerful, isn't it? Do you want to read it? It's more than that. I loathe and I love. You may want to ask why. I can't tell it's under my skin and I'm wrecked. Curiously powerful, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, it's almost, I mean, Ezra Pound is a modernist poet who takes up Catulles. as being an example of one of the great poets of the past. And it's because of that concision that is why Pound's so interested in him. But you as a translator prepared to use very modernish language. I mean, Bimbo appears in one. This goes to the Bimbo. Yeah, yeah. I just wanted something that was going to be,

what I would see to be a contemporary equivalent to the kind of quickness that you're getting in the Latin. That's really what I was trying to get to. I mean, just come back to the ODSMO poem, just very briefly. My love and I hate. The thing is that Odie actually, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it notes much more than just hate. There's a kind of physical revulsion about it, about that word, which is kind of beyond the word hate, which is why I use the word loathe, because it's kind of like a physical reaction to...

No, it's a good... It's very strong, there's two lines of very strong. And it also has the word oath in it. So there's a kind of in the background, there's a thing about promises being broken, which I think is very important. important to Catullus. It's not only he's dealing with lesbian, but it's also with friends. Thank you very much. Gail Trimble, he was

called a neoteric in his lifetime. What was that? Was it a compliment? Well, it wasn't a compliment from the person who used it, who was Cicero, and we think he was using it about poets like Catullus. This is in a letter of Cicero. And he comes up

with a very highfalutin hexameter epic line, which he says to his friend, you can sell that to a neoteric. And that's sort of all the evidence we have for neoterics, although Cic O'Sys also refer to new poets in a similarly disparaging way in another letter. But we've always thought it meant Cotullus, because that hexameter line sounds like it could have come straight out of Cotullus mythological epic poem 64. And there's evidence, too, that Cotullus had friends, poetic contemporaries, who were also writing similar kinds of stuff to what he writes,

well, only fragments of their poetry survives. And they are both his friends. They turn up in his poetry. He compliments their poetry like the Smyrna of Sinner, the poet. Or he talks about writing a kind of quick, easy, jocular poetry with his friend Calvus, the other poet, over drinks. But also, as I say, fragments of their poetry survives. And they also seem to have written miniature epics,

to have written love poetry, to have written marriage hymns, to have written rather scurrilous poetry alluding to political figures of the time. So it sort of fits to think about Catullus as part of a group. Part of a group, yeah. And again, we have, I mean, the wonderful thing about this period, and it keeps cropping up now and then is that it's a mixture of jigsopozles and archaeology, isn't it, really? And that's good. That's what you do.

It's terrific. That's why I'm interested in what you say. Many of his love poems were addressed to lesbian, as has been mentioned. Can you say a little bit more about her? Well, she's a character in Catullus poetry, first of all, and she's often referred to by this name, Lesbia, but also there are other poems in which he just talks about my girl, my woman, even on one occasion, my goddess.

And most readers identify that person with lesbian as well, because there's enough of a sense of this one woman throughout the corpus that it makes sense for my girl to be lesbian. That word, of course, just means a woman from Lesbos. Is there any a further connotation in that? Not lesbian in the modern sense necessarily, certainly not Cotullus's lesbian, although of course it's all very relevant to Sappho.

The lesbian poet. Exactly, the lesbian poet. And who he translated? Quite. So Cotolus translates one of her poems in particular. And in Sappho's original, which is about how she's looking over to a woman she admires talking to a man,

There's no name for the woman she's looking at desiring. But when Cotullis translates the poem, he puts the name Lesbia in. And some people think this might be the first poem that went to Lesbia. But as has been mentioned already, Lesbia seems to be a pseudonym. We have a later writer, Apuleus from the second century AD, who says that Catullus used it for Clodia. And we have a likely suspect for a Clodia in a speech of Cicero, who presents a woman who sounds like the sort of dominating woman

that Catullis might have been in love with, but we're not sure. I find it the less we really know, the more intriguing it is, really. Absolutely. Maria, Maria Wai. Is there anything fresh in the way that Catullus wrote about love? And if so, what was it? I think there's plenty that's quite extraordinary about how he writes about love. He has a poem that starts,

liveamos me a lesbian which means let's live and let's love and what's extraordinary about that is that he's implying that the entirety the totality of your life should be spent in love

and this is in a world where elite Romans are expected to spend the entirety of their time on business, on politics, on war but absolutely if they have any devotion it should be a devotion to their family and to the state, but not to love. So that in itself is quite extraordinary. And he also then excavates

that love and examines closely from many directions what it feels like to be betrayed, what it feels like to be, to disintegrate when you realize that your beloved is not in love with you. Is this new then? To do it from so many angles, to do it consistently about an individual insofar as when we his poems one after and the other, we pick out the sense of a story. It's a story not told in order, which is interesting, but we feel that we can gather together this sense of many aspects of love. So he also, for example, in a long poem, describes lesbian, and he names her as lesbian, as a bride coming to the house in which they conduct their affair, as a goddess, as a mythic heroine. And there what's fresh and extraordinary about what he does is he, he,

prepares and tells a parallel in this mythic heroine for lesbia, but as he unfolds it, it starts to become apparent that lesbian's not like that at all, because she's not a bride, she's an adulteress, she has a husband. If she's his mistress, he uses the word domina, knew this metaphor to mean a mistress in love, it means he's her slave, and therefore he should be grateful for any moment he can have with her. And this language of goddess, of the slavery of love, this is all part of what's going to become a new romantic tradition in poetry.

There's also an excessive, which takes us right forward to the earlier and essence, and later on, excessive and up to pop songs, really. We have a thousand kisses, then we pause it, and then we have another thousand kisses and that. Absolutely. So not only is the language, the imagery that he uses, ones that he used later, including how can I hate and love the same? the same person at the same time. He also, I think, very interestingly, takes the language of

male-to-male relations from Rome and applies them to his ideal of how love should be. So he takes the language of reciprocity, contracts, sacred friendship, and he uses all those, and he says, this is what I want from love. And it's a kind of mutuality that you haven't had in the ancient world before, except perhaps with Odysseus and Penelope. Thank you very much, Simon, Samus Smith. Catello's translated Sappho. Yeah. That's been mentioned.

Can you tell us more about that and more about her influence on his writing? Okay, well, poem 51 is the poem we're talking about. And it's, I don't, I mean, I don't really think of it as being a translation. It's more an adaptation. And one of the ways that you can read the poem is that it's a form of, of masculineization of femininity. And that's one of its purposes.

Can you just spell that out a bit more? Yeah. I mean... Well, okay, what he's doing is, is that he's romanizing what is seen as the feminine Greek. That's one of the things that he's doing. So he changes the perspective

from a female perspective to a male perspective. That's the first thing he does. And then he also, as Gail was saying earlier, he introduces the word lesbian, which is not in the original. In the original, the poem is much more general, or seems to be.

It's not specifically at a particular person, so it would seem. And then, most revolutionary of all, is he changes the fourth stanza. Now, some scholars believe that it's a kind of cut-and-shut poem. So the last stanza is actually from another poem that's just been added on to the bottom of the translation. My view is, though, is that this probably isn't the case. Sappho also writes the poem in four stanzas.

Catullus's version, you could see, if you take out his fourth stanza, could be seen as a kind of condensation of Sappho's poem. If I'd ask what specifically, and most importantly, he got from Sappho, what would you say? The idea of intimacy and the intimate voice is probably the most important thing there. And this idea of, coming back to what you touched on, earlier about the idea of popular song and also what we get in contemporary lyric poetry, I suppose, is that idea about falling in love with somebody, you know, in a situation like at a dinner party or something like that for the very first time, you know, it sets a kind of,

a kind of norm for how you might want to think about that and write about it. Love at first sight? That kind of thing. It is very much about a love at first side, absolutely. And the description of the way... And very hotly described in that far. Yes, and it's about... Not scatological.

Not at all scatological. And, well, it's very tender. You see, this is the tender catalus. Until we get to the last stanza, which then becomes about leisure. Or Oteum is the word that he uses, but I translate it as leisure. And the idea that suddenly it's about

the falling of empires and cities. Yes. We can leave the fall of empire and cities, if you don't mind for the moment. Can you, Gail, let's come to a poem 64. It's one of his finest. It's one of his longest.

poem. It's a mini epic. People think it's one of the finest of his time. Can you find a way to tell us about that? Thank you. Well, it's, as you say, short for an epic but long for a poem by Catullus. And it shows the extremely sort of highly wrought, effortful side of Catullus. Yet it's also very emotional and sort of gorgeously, visually appealing at the same time. What's it about? Let me tell you what it's about. It's two stories, one inside the other, at least two stories. It starts off by sounding as if it's going to be about Jason and the Argonauts. And then it turns out that it's actually about Pilius, who is one of the Argonauts, falling in love with Thetis, who's a sea nymph, and they're going to get married, and suddenly we're inside their house, which is like a

grand Roman decorated house at their wedding feast. And following a Roman custom, the marriage bed is displayed. And on the marriage bed, Catullus tells us, he starts describing it. There is, on the coverlet, a picture of Ariadne, abandoned on the island by Theseus on the way home from killing the mine at all. Catullus gives us a flashback, telling us all about her backstory, how she came to fall in love with Theseus, and then suddenly she's making a speech, cursing Theseus, lamenting her situation and all the rest of it, by which point it's not even clear if we remember that she's meant to be in the description of a picture on a marriage bed, etc. At the very end...

Was that taken up by Virgil in India? Well, yes, his... Anyway, that's interesting, it's fine, yeah, is more traditional, but anyway, he was certainly interested in Ariadne. Catullus eventually ends this ectresis, this description, by saying, oh, and by the way, in another part of the picture, the God Bacchus was arriving to rescue Ariadne. Now, where are we now?

Well, you might well ask, almost, because he suddenly then reminds us, and this is what all the guests at Pia Stethys and Thetis wedding enjoyed looking at, and you sort of think that they didn't hear her making a speech, surely, and then we're back in the wedding, but it's not over yet. So what makes it so good? Well, if you like formal complexity, and why on earth you might tell two stories, one apparently sort of quite happy, the other one apparently quite miserable, except with this sudden deus ex-X-Machina happy ending.

You might wonder, well, what are these two stories meant to be saying to each other? As I say, you can appreciate the extremely beautiful sort of individual Latin lines and the rhetoric of Ariadne's speech, for instance. And eventually you have to come to terms with the ending, which relates to some of the things Maria was saying earlier about the times in the Roman Republic, because suddenly the narrator of this poem who's already chosen a very strange order to tell this story in, two stories at least,

steps forward and says, and all this goes to show how gods used to visit humans, but now they don't because we've committed all these terrible crimes of incest and violence and we're totally divorced from the divine realm. At which point you think, how has this poem shown that exactly? So it's very mysterious too.

Well, thank you very much. That was a noble effort. Maria, We've talked about Catullis identifying with women in the love poems, more sometimes than with the traditional male role, which is interesting. Can you develop that? Sure, it's been touched on already in a number of ways, because in poem 64, as Gail was mentioning,

Katala spends for a long time taking on the voice of Ariane, describing what it feels like to be left desolate on a sea, you're having lost absolutely everything, including the person you'd left your family for. So he's taken on this female perspective. In the poem of Sappho that he translates, he's taking on her description of the physical sensations you have when you look at someone that you desire so much. So your tongue is paralysed. There's fire through your limbs. Your ears ring and darkness covers your eyes. That's a description he's borrowed from Sappho's. love for another woman. But he does this in a number of other places as well in an extraordinary

way. Again, the reference to his description of his love for lesbian as a flower on the edge of a meadow that's been cut down by a passing plow. That's amazing because the flower is a sapphic metaphor for a woman's beauty and also for her fragility in societies where once you've had sex with a woman, she has no value at all except as as wife and mother. So women are really vulnerable, and he's taken that metaphor,

and he's used that for his love. So that makes him the woman and lesbian, the plow, that has destroyed him and hasn't even noticed because it's a passing plow. So that's quite a really interesting metaphor, which resurfaces,

again, in an amazing way, in a poem that's about a wedding. And just to mention that very briefly, in this wedding poem, there's a competition between boys and girls. The boys have to win, otherwise there is no wedding. And the girls say that marriage,

that maiden at her marriage, is like a flower that should be kept protected because if she's taken, she'll be destroyed. And the boys say, oh no, the virgin is like a vine which needs to be supported by an elm to reproduce. So you have this contrast between the plant that's productive, as the boys see it, and the beautiful flower that's going to be destroyed by marriage.

And at the end of the poem, the boys do win. But you're left with that vision of the withering flower, the vulnerability of women in ancient society. Thank you very much. That was great. Simon Smith. Can you find a way to tell the listeners, how does he write in a different way about his love from men than from women?

If so, can you tell us about that? Well, he does, but he also employs some metaphors and some lines that are almost the same, particularly when he's writing about Juventius. Juventus being? He's, well, he's a young man. That's really about all we know about him and that Catullus loved him. And there are four poems, poems 24, 48, 81 and 99.

And poem 48 can be seen as the equivalent of poem 7. They're both kiss poems and he employs the same metaphor writing about kissing Juventius as he does about lesbian. So there's a kind of equivalence in terms of how he loves the boy with how he loves lesbian. Are you suggesting there's no difference then? I don't think there is much difference really in that particular case. I mean, the way he writes about other men is a completely different thing, I think. And he talks about the idea of...

He takes further the idea of the kiss in terms of a kind of the kiss of death, really, in poem 99, because Juventis, he rejects him in the end. And there's a description of the boy wiping his mouth. of Catullus' kiss and how sort of hurtful this is, which comes on to the idea, well, the Os Impurum, the idea of the dirty mouth. It's related to that concept as well. But he doesn't employ that as a metaphor with lesbian.

Gail, what would have impressed, what would have impressed Catullus' contemporaries, like Ovid and Virgil? Well, I think one crucial thing, as Maria was already implying, is this idea that sort of ongoing romantic relationship with one particular woman primarily can become the subject of sort of connected poems. And that gets very much sort of solidified into a genre of love elegy by Perchis and Tobolus and Ovid. But also, I think, coming back to some of the themes from the longer poems, especially 64, this idea that you can tell a mythological story in quite such a sort of, subjective way that you as the poet can sort of step forward and address your characters and also tell the story in a very contentious way, emphasising some bits to the exclusion of others.

This is very influential on Virgil and also on Ovid in so far as he's an epic writer in the Metamorphoses, also telling one story inside another, telling short mythical stories, which the Metamorphosis is basically a tissue of. Also, specifically Ariadne, as we were mentioning, and having that kind of sympathy for a heroine. This has a huge. This has a huge impact on Virgil's portrayal of Dido in the Aeneid. And of course, that creates great ethical complexity for Virgil's poem, because as far as we can see in Cotellus 64, Ariadne has just been abandoned by Theseus because he is a nasty piece of work. But of course, Dido has been abandoned by Aeneas because he needs to go off and found Rome.

Destiny. Exactly. And for Virgil, he's normally on Aeneas' side. And for him to be quite as much on Dido's side as he suddenly seems to be, shows the great influence that Cotellis' way of doing epic had on what followed. Thank you. Maria, Maria Weik, then we have these scholarly poems. They've been called quite rightly, eschatological and obscene poems. Now we can't mention them, we can't repeat them. And I don't think it's any great loss, actually. I think they'll be pure, but what do you think?

Well, I think they're rather interesting in some respects in that, I'm thinking of how to be careful here. There is, for example, a short poem in which Catullus talks about the past with lesbia and he says once I loved you alone I loved you more than I loved myself I loved you more than I love my nearest and dearest but now you can be found

down the alleyways and at the crossroads which for a Roman means prostitution and you and she and he said so he talks about her and he says she gloobit all the descendants of Romulus and Remus so scholars have been greatly perplexed right what does gloobie

Buree mean. We know it is from agriculture to mean stripping the bark off a tree, skinning a sheep. Clearly here it has a profoundly vulgar meaning, but we don't know exactly what it is. And that's kind of ironic because the way the poem has been structured is precisely to invite the reader to imagine and to think what is lesbian doing right now. And that's part of the invitation of Catullus' poems, not just to. be concerned about love and betrayal and loss, but to think in a quite pure and salacious way. Simon Smith, when I said the word puerile,

I saw a distinct shaking of your head. Now, these poems, we were told, were recited at Roman dinner parties, and he thought fit to collect them. So what do you think is their value? It's their rhetorical value and their poetic value. I mean, he talks about things, I mean, again, if we go to the sort of the dirtiest poem which is poem 97 which I will not in any way

you would be cut if you did so don't we're friends okay well I won't do that basically what it comes back to this idea of the os impure and the dirty mouth and and the way that that poem through its unfolding as you read it it connects the mouth with the anus basically and what you end up doing as you read it or if you were part of the audience hearing it, you start to be implicated in that sullying, I suppose, is one way of putting it. Why do you give that value, though? Because it has, because on the face of it, yes, the subject matter seems to be,

basically he's taken a subject matter that is unpoetic and made it into something that actually, through the use of elegite couplet that has an aesthetic value. And also he then counterpoints that with the way that the images unfold too. So it starts out as something that seems to be completely sort of outrageous, and that's it. And then it turns into something that's grotesque, and right at the end it becomes something that's almost like a surrealist fantasy, really. So it progresses through hyperbole. So he's building a kind of artistic value into it, even though what he's talking about

is something that obviously has no artistic value at all. And I think you've got people rushing to read it in the moment after I tell you the truth. Well, I hope so. Gail Trimble, do we have a single image of Catullus, this young man from his poetry? Is there a single Catullus? Well, interestingly, I think a lot of people,

despite the range of his poetry would say that there is. I mean, Catullis is very interested in himself. A lot of Roman poets are, but he presents himself quite a lot. He uses his own name, I think about 25 times. And we very much get the impression of what he values, both among his friends and sort of in society and in poetry. And those two things are really quite similar. They're about being sort of refined and putting the effort in, I suppose, because I wanted to say sort of effortlessly cool, but it's not, it's being effortfully cool, that everything is sort of, as it should be, that you don't break the rules of what he expects, how he expects his friends to behave towards each other. And similarly, the poetry that you write is not sort of long and careless and sort of churned

out. It's small, it's elegant, very much in the Alexandria Greek tradition of Kilimachus, and therefore it has value and can be celebrated by his friends as a group. And Catalyst himself, then is sort of somebody who tries to live up to all these expectations on one level. On the other hand, he writes about his own emotions and how he sort of feels when he feels betrayed in any of these values, I think, either aesthetically or socially. Maria, do we learn much about Roman society from his work? Well, I think there's two things that strike me about reading his poetry.

One is that it's a culture of empire in the sense that his poetry shows that Rome is so thoroughly bilingual in its literature and in its society. This is a world in which people are completely engaged with Greek literature and Greek language and that they use it as part of their strategies of playing, as Gail said, these games of sophistication and a vanity at their dinner parties. But I think the other thing that strikes me is how, I suppose you could say, homosocial the world was. It's a world of male-male relations, highly competitive, often abusive. And we see that it's a world where to be a man is supposed to be being a soldier or a husband, a politician. But when political life is moving away from you, because it's accruing in different quarters,

masculinity becomes in crisis, it's fragile. You can't perform being a proper man. So you get this amazing poetry about the crisis of masculinity, about challenging what it is to be male. Simon, why is it that it took his manuscript that long, 13, 1,400 years, 5,000, 600 years, to come to the attention of, well, let's call it the Western Western Renaissance. When Ovid, who learned from him,

and Virgil who learned from him, and Perthius, who learned from him, were sailing away, in the intervening time. Why did it take him so long? Well, probably the obscenity has a lot to do with it. And he certainly, as I understand,

really after Marshall, he's mentioned by Marshall to 100 years later, but then he seemed to sort of slip away. But we don't really know why that happens. But they survive very often because, well, for a start, somebody like Marshall,

you know, wrote 12 books, 13 books of epigrams. So it's because the body of work is small to begin with. But it is also because of this business over the way that much of the work is obscene. And you can't use it to teach Latin. Well, you could use the book and just cut those poems out, couldn't you? It isn't beyond the wit of manner. There's only about five or six of them anyway.

There are a few more than that. Father, all right, seven and eight. There's quite a few more than that. I'd have 116. How many other? Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's a sizable minority. Let's say there are 20. You could cut 20 out and you still got 86 poems. And why didn't they publish 8 to 6 poems? I don't know is the honest answer to that.

There's also the form in which it's produced. So he's, you know, the poems are written on papyrus rolls. And that doesn't, in later time, that is not the way that things. are transmitted. But what seemed to happen that when he did get rediscovered or discovered, that he rolled into the Renaissance poet's minds

and rolled through Elizabethan poetry and rolled on from that quite effortlessly and importantly. Well... No, I'm wrong about that. What he does, but it's very, very small number of poems.

So we're talking about the Kiss poems and the Sparrow poems, the lesbian poems, the major ones, are translated again and again and again. mainly as a way, well, he becomes a way of proving yourself as a kind of courtier, particularly in the Elizabethan court in places or in such places as that.

Sorry, again, we're coming to the end now. Gell's from, what did people, at that time, we've talked to, Sam, certainly about courtier and Elizabethan, Edge, what, what appealed to them? Why did they, there were fewer poems than they were from, well, fewer lions,

certainly, than they were from Virgil and Orvid and so on. But what appealed to them about Cotellus? I suppose a kind of directness that also, I think, appeals to us very much today with some of his short and accessible poems. That includes in the Latin. They're more colloquial, and some of them are sort of seem less bound by the kind of rules of genre. But to Jessica Tullis saying something like, to a fellow poet, I can't believe you sent me a book of horrible poetry as a joke satinalia present. Tomorrow when the bookshop's open, I'm going to buy one for you. So it's simple with, I mean, Simon mentioned the poems about kissing lesbian many times, poems on the death of her pet sparrow. Those are the ones that immediately become popular because I think they seem more accessible than even the love poems of other poets.

Yes, and there's also something about they can present, he's then presented as a heterosexual poet as well. I think that's really important that the poems about young boys just are just a no-go era. You can't do that. And that's out. Exactly. So that excludes those. Homosexuality becomes a crime. So that's doubly out.

Exactly. So that category of poetry can't come into the canon either. So you do limit, or he is limited to the love poems for women. Then he seems to be heterosexual, which he's not. And he suffers from that for a long time. When I was studying Latin, when I was 1415 in a convent school, we had selections of Catullus, so there was a lot less. left out. We had poems that we were told what the translation was of certain words,

and they were just not true. So we were told that scortilum meant little cabbage, and it means little whore, but you couldn't have had that in the conference school. And then we were also told, oh, when men kiss each other, as they seem to be doing in this particular poem, that's because Romans are just like Italians today. They're much more outward-looking and friendly than us, Brits. And you realise it's a completely false education. You're not really learning about the Catullus that was there, but at least it gives you a taste of what you could find out

if you were able to access the totality of his work. That's personal. I mean, Catullis' role in education is just so interesting because he's such a good introduction to Roman poetry, isn't he? Because you've got sort of tasters of so many different genres and so many different levels of Latin, some of which are quite simple, and then you can work up to sort of very intense epic language. And yet, there's this obscenity.

But because it's such a varied set of poetry, because it doesn't present the lesbian story, if it is a story in any kind of order, he's just so suited for anthologising that, as you say, you can just create selections from Catullus fairly easily and put them on syllabuses. And that still happens today, your average GCSE or A-level syllabus,

will just have this list of numbers, which is sort of sum of Catullus's greatest hits that its thought should be read that year. Finally, what would you say was his chief legacy, Maria? I think a kind of intensity, his capacity to investigate what it feels like to love and be betrayed. I mean, Odi at Amel really does it for me because he also says that to experience that

to be loving and loathing someone at the same time is excruciating, but it's precisely how he feels. And that's what happened to see a generaliser. I've only read what the two lines that must be... Well, this issue of loving and being portrayed

it comes up in all shapes and forms in all sorts of places including at the level of myth so it's a thread that runs through his poetry the sense of how people can say one thing and do another how they can have behaved

so lovingly towards you at one point and then move away from you the next those sorts of things can seem really immediate even though they're They're described in a world that's so alien to us. So it's an extreme version of things that we feel today. Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed that.

I hope everybody else did. Thank you, Mary Waik, Gail Trimble and Simon Smith. Next week, it's the siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War and the commune that followed. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Here we go.

What did we miss out that you would like to pull? in? Yeah, I mean, it's variety that I think is really important. It's also why so many modern and contemporary poets have translated Catullis. I mean, there are so many different types of translation now.

Can you give us some idea? Well, some of the more extreme ideas would be an American poet called Brandon Brown. He doesn't actually translate the poems. He gives you instructions on how you might want to translate the poems, each one of them. So, poem 51, for instance.

has a series of what he might do to translate it. And number 12 is to leave it to a poet called Benedet Mayer to do because she can do it better than he can. You know, it's this kind of thing. But what other of these transits? Anybody that listeners would know? Well, there's Anne Carson who put together a fantastic, it's called Knox.

And it's a translation of just one poem, One, which is the poem about the death of his brother. And it's a memory box about the death of her brother. brother. And so it's, it takes you through, I mean, it's a short epigram poem, but what she does with it is she talks about the death of her brother in the same terms as Catullus does, but she uses it as a, she uses the box as a kind of memory box of postcards that she was sent over decades by her brother and all this kind of thing. So it's a, it kind of enacts the process of mourning, I suppose. So, so Catullis, you know, he offers up so many different ways that you can rethink, and you know, you can rethink, and you know, you know, reimagine. Isn't that a great example of the way that what engages people with Catullus is that sense

that he can touch upon things that you feel and the variety of feelings that you can do that to is also I think quite extraordinary because I was always really taken by a poem where he talks about hanging about in the forum and his mate takes him off

to see the little whore that I mentioned earlier and he's asked, so when you went off on your trip to the province, you know, what good East did you bring back with you? And he says in this poem, and I just completely lied, and I

said, you know, eight litter bearers, which is the number you would expect an eastern potentate to have. So she, the little whore, says, oh great, can I borrow them? And he has to say he completely made it up. And so on the one hand, it's a poem

about a completely different world. You know, this world of the forum of the empire of litter bearers. And on the other hand, it's about what it feels like when you get caught out lying in order to seem more attractive than you really are. And he turns that into a poem, of course, which is so strange. He tells this whole story to present himself in this ridiculous way. And so that's relevant to what we were thinking about sort of the Catullus who emerges from the poetry, because once you sort of realise that he's doing that, you can see some of his really quite emotional poems as putting himself forward as behaving in quite a strange way. And yet, of

course he's written a poem about it that, as you said, Melvin, has been put into his collection, has been circulated, is to be shared and that we're still reading today. And so you can sort of infer there's another Catullus behind that Catullus, sort of presenting the ridiculous version. And she's also caught him out intellectually. That's quite important that he puts a woman in a position that he wouldn't normally do that with, that she actually has outwitted him. And, you know, wit, Sal is the kind of really important thing. By asking for it to borrow his bearers? Well, no. What was the fact that he then had to lie? Oh, I see, yeah. But how did she out with him? I don't remember the film. Anything I look for the movie.

What happens is, is that although it is written in META, the lines break up in the way that he can't come back at her, basically. He just said, oh, yeah, yeah, I kind of remember that it was actually... It belonged to somebody else. Yeah, they belong to a friend of mine, you know. Oh, yeah. And I don't happen to have them right now. Yeah.

So, you know, she's caught him. She's caught him out. Brilliant poem. But there are many brilliant poems. Zukovsky. We didn't talk about Louis Zukovsky. I wondered if you were going to mention him as a strange translator. Well, he, well, it's a very interesting translation.

It goes kind of beyond Catullus this as well. So it's a homophonic translation. So it's, which is kind of... Can you fill the listeners in on the essential details of Zovsky? Okay, Zukovsky 1902 to 1978 wrote a long poem called A, wrote a whole series of short poems that were collected called All. And he, what did you do with? And he translated Catullus. Or rather, and the important thing about this is that he co-translated it with his wife. She created a very literal version of the poems.

and then he took that at the basis to then create a sound translation. And what's interesting about it is that what ends up, if you read the Latin against his English, you start to see where the English falls directly onto the Latin. And then you can also see where it doesn't, because he has to just give you sounds in the place of a literal meaning. So it just echoes all the sounds of the Latin, and then if it means any of the same thing,

that's an added bonus. Exactly. Well, yes, but what's important about it is there's an argument you could have that it's more faithful. Because a lot of translators are kind of covering the cracks half the time because things don't quite fit. And then they don't fit at all sometimes as well. So translation can fail. And so he's showing where the failure is. So it's a kind of more honest translation in a way.

Well, it's particularly difficult, isn't it? It's one thing to talk about mythical poetry. that when we're sort of saying, this is a poem about meeting my friend's girlfriend in the forum, this is a poem about a joke, Saturnalia, present. Summing up the content, of course, leaves us with the problem that that doesn't show why it's poetry at all. But a large part of what's making it so witty and controlled and elegant and aesthetically satisfying is Catullus using that very everyday material and even everyday language, but turning it into a beautifully controlled poem.

And that's very difficult to get across, obviously one we're just summarising, but I imagine even for a translator as well. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the evolution of Catullus translation is far ahead of other poets, I would say, certainly classical poets. So he's kind of become, if you think about Catullus' poetry as being about occasions, because they are about, they do speak to occasions, and that all they become occasions in themselves. He has now become an occasion for a translator to create a new kind of group of poet. poems as kind of improvisations off Catullus' work, because the scholarship is so good.

There are plenty of good literal translations now. So what do you do with Catullus? You know, you can start to, as I say, start to use him as a kind of platform for improvising what you do. I was just thinking that Latin, I mean, Latin poetry like his is also incredibly challenging, I'd imagine, for translators because it contains things like words that are completely made up. So how do you translate that? Like his basiartione's is you'd have to try.

It's a made-up word. So it's like kissings or kissations or kisslings or something like that. You have to bring out the fact that it's not a real word. And that makes it more forceful in its circumstances. And then he has lots of words that would sound to a Roman thoroughly Greek. and the Greekness of the matters to the poems. So how do you translate that? And then you have the slang, which do you translate that literally into slang,

which might not work for our modern slang? Or do you, as Simon has done, have to find a modern word that's going to give the force of what's in the original? So there's some really interesting issues there. And of course, Latin itself is always difficult because it's an inflected language. It doesn't need all these prepositions, the ofs and the us and the ars and the ars.

article, so you can have these really concise lines that contain so much in them, and English has to sort of drag it out a bit, you know, through force of circumstance. That's so relevant to the other end of his style as well, to the formal style, because one of the things he does to the hexameter is to become terribly fond of creating these five-word lines, you know, like a dry stone wall with no water in at all, that just elegantly sit there and then there's another one, and then there's another one. And that's gorgeous and hugely influential, and a large part of the appeal. But exactly, English can't do that because we need the little words, just as we couldn't do. So you have to take certain paths. So if you look at translation from the 1950s,

of Catullus from the 1950s onwards, Horace Gregory does a kind of Ezra Pound version. Peter Wiggum, the Penguin translation, he does a William Carr's version. Zukovsky does his homophonic version. And then you've got Ross Cavani. Have you seen that translation recently? Her translation. What she's done is she's turned most of the short lyric poems into sonnets. So it's kind of like a reading back into Petrarch, which I think is really interesting. You know, the tradition of the reception of Catalyst into English has gone full circle with that.

I think we're about to be offered, given an offer you can't refuse from our producer, Simon. Tea or your coffee, anyone? I've gone and I have another tea, if that's okay. Tea, please. Coffee for me. I'll have tea, please. Thank you. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

Henry Akeley disappeared from his home on the edge of Rendlesham Forest somewhere around the end of June 2019. What we uncovered is a mystery that has sent us deep into England's past, to an area steeped in witchcraft, the occult, secret government operations. Now we have multiple sites of five lights with a similar shape of orbit. And something that might indeed be altogether. otherworldly. This is the whisperer in darkness. Available now on BBC Sounds.