The Ancients - Catullus: Rome's Most Erotic Poet

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

If you're looking for a raunchy Roman poet, look no further than Catullus. Born into one of the most exciting periods in Roman history, in the early 1st century BC as the Roman Republic started to sing its swansong, Catullus was an aristocrat who moved in powerful circles. He was known to Cicero; he dined with Julius Caesar even after he’d mocked the great leader in verse. Catullus was well-connected, but it was his abiding love for a woman he called Lesbia (probably Clodia Metelli, a powerful woman herself) that inspired much of his poetry, which survived in a single manuscript of 116 verses.Catullus was revolutionary, bringing a new type of poetry to the fore in ancient Rome. Often his poems were deeply personal, filled to the brim with emotion. Rarely did the young man hold back when pouring his heart out into his verses. Friends and enemies were targeted in sexy and scurrilous poems that continue to shock readers to this day. Nevertheless Catullus' legacy was far-reaching. From Ovid to Byron, Catullus has inspired many of those famous romantic poets that followed him.To talk through the life of Ancient Rome's 'bad boy poet' (to quote our current Prime Minister Boris Johnson), it was an honour to interview Daisy Dunn, a leading classicist and Catullus' 21st century biographer. In this podcast Daisy brilliantly talks through the life of Catullus and his remarkable legacy. This was a brilliant chat and I hope you enjoy as much as Daisy and I did recording it.Daisy is the author of Catullus: Rome's Most Erotic Poet.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today I've got a real, real treat for you because I am joined by one of the greatest classicists of our time, Daisy Dunn. She has recently written a book all about 79 AD,

the eruption of Vesuvius and the younger Pliny. But before that, she also wrote a book about one of the most extraordinary figures in ancient Roman history, a man called Catullus, known as Rome's most erotic poet, Rome's bad boy poet, Rome's sex mad poet, and a pretty hopeless romantic. And it is Catullus who is the subject of our podcast today. Daisy, she's a brilliant communicator in this podcast. She talks through the relatively short life of Catullus, what we know about him, where he went, his legacy and so much more. This was an absolutely brilliant chat and I've no doubt that you are going to absolutely love this one. Enjoy. Daisy, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on.

Oh, it's my pleasure too. Thank you. Now, I have been very much looking forward to this topic. Catullus, Rome's bad boy poet, Rome's most erotic poet. What really astonished me when reading your book was how much we know about him and his extraordinary life through his own writing. He didn't hold back. He was very emotional. He was unusually emotional for a Roman. I think you think of the Romans as being such stoic characters, and he seems the complete opposite to that. He's writing so much about his feelings and his emotions. You don't really find people doing that in Rome until he was doing so in the late years of the

Republic. So it is really refreshing, I think, when you're used to reading this kind of didactic poetry, Ennius' and Nale's, these quite heavy going pieces of Roman literature, and then you come across these quite sexy and scurrilous poems. It's quite exciting, I think. Does he feel like, in regards to poetry and ancient poetry, he's really at the start of a new era, as it were, of poetry? I think very much so, yeah. I mean, I think he left us this one book of poems, there are 117 of them in there, and it's the earliest surviving poetry collection of its kind written in Latin. And so many of the great poets who came

afterwards were really really heavily inspired by it so you think of Ovid, Propatius, Horace, Verdo to a lesser extent all these people were looking back to Catullus and what he did and you find little nods here and there and people sort of referencing him and playing with what he did so it's new at the time and I think you kind of have to look at him more in terms of his Greek predecessors, really. He's taking a lot of influence from them and doing something quite different with their work in the Latin tongue. The Godfather. Fantastic. So what time period are we talking about here? What kind of world is Catullus born into?

He's born into, I'd say, sort of the most exciting time, really, in terms of Roman history. His dates aren't set in stone. They're roughly, I'd put them at 82 to 53 BC. We're told by Jerome that he died in his 30th year. He puts his birth at 87, but that would mean that he died before quite a lot of the events he actually describes in his poetry took place.

So I had to put those dates slightly later. And I think the latest reference in his poems are about sort of 53 BC so he probably died around there and this is really the time where Caesar is coming to his own he's the rise of Julius Caesar it's his partnership with Pompey the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus his very sort of ruthless money lender and they form the first triumvirate, this alliance for power, and really come to dominate Rome. You've got the Gallic Wars taking place, you've got Julius Caesar's expeditions to Britain, and the Republic really crumbling before people's eyes.

And Catullus is a witness to that. People don't really know what's going to happen next. What I found really interesting about that was, you said that he dies in his 30th year. That seems really, really young for a very famous Roman poet. Incredibly young. And I think that's sort of what's helped sort of perpetuate this idea of him in this romantic tradition. You know, you think of these great romantic poets dying young. And his life seems to be cut short.

And we sort of read of there being public mourning at his passing in Rome. So he'd obviously achieved some kind of greatness or sort of recognition by that time. He seems to have achieved quite a lot within his relatively short life. And whereabouts in the late Roman Republican Empire does he come from? Catullus comes from Verona and Verona was part of Cisalpine Gaul. So the Romans in this period, they have two Gauls. There's Cisalpine Gaul, which the Romans in this period, they have two Gauls. There's Cisalpine Gaul, which is the Gaul which is closest to Italy.

And there's Transalpine Gaul, sort of the other side of the mountains, as it were. So he's part of Cisalpine Gaul. Verona is established as a Roman colony. And most of them don't really have Roman citizenship. But it's been suggested that Catullus' father might have been a senior magistrate of some kind in the city, and he was definitely a friend of Julius Caesar, because Catullus actually joins a retinue to travel east, and that kind of position was only really available to Roman citizens. And I think what's really interesting about his Verona birth, I mean, we talk about the Latin poets, the Roman poets, we talk about Virgil and Horace and Propertus and everyone else.

Very few of them actually came from Rome. They more or less all came from elsewhere and gravitated to Rome. Catullus did the same, so he left Verona for Rome, but at the same time he really clung on to his northern roots and see this reflected in his language and his poetry, and I think he was quite proud of his slightly different dialect, which you don't actually find in the other poets so much. It's very interesting what you were saying there.

And you basically just said it right there. He's not from Rome itself. He's from quite far north in the Roman sphere of influence. And he may not have had citizenship. Verona, it was a colony. But as you say, this doesn't seem unusual for many of the poets that we know of from Roman times today.

No, and it's fascinating just to think of these people coming from elsewhere. You find influences of where they're coming from, but they're all making their way to Rome at quite an early stage. And I think with Catullus, he definitely sees Rome as the big city of the excitement. But at the same time, you find him drawn back. He visits not only Verona, but a peninsula of Lake Garda called Sirmia or Sirmione, as it's known today, where his family seemed to have had a villa. So he's not sort of stuck in Rome once he goes there, he's still sort of going back to where he came from. Apart from the excitement of being the centre of the empire and the city of Rome,

why do we think that Catullus decides to embark on this career as a poet in Rome? Why do we think that Catullus decides to embark on this career as a poet in Rome? I think he speaks about an elder brother encouraging him to write poetry. So you see maybe some influence there. This elder brother sadly died. He travelled east and he was buried somewhere near Troy. So we think maybe there's some sort of family influence there. And I just think he wanted to do something different. And as a poet, he wants to go to Rome.

He wants to almost purposely sort of rub everyone up the wrong way. And he speaks a lot in his poems of these senes severiores, these rather severe older men, these very conservative figures. And he's a real liberty and he wants to rebel against that. And he's almost a real kind of show-off rebel. You kind of get the impression that he presents himself as a bigger rebel than he really was in reality. And he's doing this partly in his poetry and things he writes about and the way that he writes it in these very sort of quite sexually explicit ways sometimes. You know, the kind of thing that you find in graffiti in Rome today rather than sort of in fine poetry that was published in these lovely polished papyrus scrolls.

But how does he go about then writing this poetry when he's in Rome? Does he first need to find a sponsor, a patron? Luckily for him, he comes from quite a wealthy family. So we know he's of equestrian stock, which means he's technically of the kind of second social stratum. He's not a senatorial class, but he's from quite a wealthy equestrian family. So he doesn't actually have to find a patron. What he does when he gathers his poems together is that he addresses and gifts them to another man, another poet called Cornelius Nepos, who also came from the same area. So he has a patron figure in mind,

but he has no one that he has to really satisfy. He doesn't have to write anything slimy or kind of panegyric or anything like that. He's got no one he has to please. So that gives him a certain amount of freedom. Absolutely. And with this freedom, and when you look at his poetry,

what kind of poetry did he consider good poetry? He was really inspired by the Alexandrians and sort of the Greeks. He's looking particularly at people like Callimachus. And Callimachus, he was a poet who came from Cyrene, which is in North Africa. He was a third century BC. And Callimachus was writing really very, very erudite, polished verse.

And famously, he advised poets to fatten up their sheep, but to keep their verse skinny. And this is something that Catullus really takes on board. He doesn't want to write volumes and volumes of epic poetry, heavy stuff. He wants quite concise work, which looks quite breezy, but has loads of very, very clever references woven into it. So concise, witty, and sometimes crude. He's not afraid to hold back. He's definitely not afraid to hold back. And I was so sort of goatish on these poems, the language is very, very explicit. And I think people's first reaction when they pick up Catarsis and certainly mine I first started reading some

Catarsis poetry when I was 17. I looked at it and thought is this really poetry because it seems so different from anything that I'd studied in terms of English poetry. There's very little sort of nicety, it seems to be less elegance than kind of conversational pieces and I think it's only when you really start to read it slowly that you realise how much there is going on beneath the surface. Things can seem very crude, they can be full of innuendo and very very explicit rude jibes at people, very famous people as well. Julius Caesar among them even though he's a friend of his father. But then you look beneath the surface and you find actually there's just so much clever stuff going on here it's very very the word you use in latin doctus it's very learned as well as being witty and kind of scatological although of course reading

the poetry in english today important interesting do we really get a sense of catullus's poetry and how clever it was when looking at it in the lat. You do, yes. I translated the poems as well, and that kind of presents its own challenge because you realise how difficult it is because there are so many varied words in Latin. So a word for a kiss, for example, a standard Latin word for a kiss would be osculum, so oscular kisses.

And Catullus uses the word basia, or even better, basiationes, which literally means something like really big mega kisses. I mean, people don't know how to translate this. It's like an impossible word to translate. So how do you put that in English? That you can't, that sounds ridiculous on the page. I ended up putting it into French

because I kind of had a Gallic root, this Barsia word. So things like that, which are kind of subtleties which you get in the Latin, which are quite difficult to convey accurately in English, because he's really fond, that's one of the hallmarks of his poetry, really. He embeds all these neologisms, all these new words that he's coined himself, and he fills it with diminutives, so little words. So if you come across misere, passer, my poor little sparrow,

or scortillum, which is a little tart. It's not to do with size necessarily, it's to do with pathos, it's to do with other things like that. So you get these kind of very characteristic things in the Latin, which are quite difficult to put across in English and convey their charm. And when Catillus is writing these new words and creating this new style of poetry, when he reaches Rome, is he doing it on his own or does he have, shall we say, a poet circle? He has a very kind of loose poet circle. So in one of his poems, he describes sitting around in the evening with his friends and swapping verses over wine and laughter, he said. And so

we know of two men in particular who were part of this. There's one called Kinner and there's another one called Calvus, who also became a a lawyer and we only have fragments of their work really but they seem to have been writing in a similar style so Kinner spent years and years and years working on something called the Shmirna and Catullus is like I know it's taking ages but it will last forever when it's finally finished but sadly it didn't so it's kind of a social thing as much as anything you get a sense of this not being an entirely serious pursuit for them it is but at the same time it's kind of a social thing as much as anything. You get a sense of this not being an entirely serious pursuit for them. It is, but at the same time, it's something they do to while away their time in Rome. They don't want a political career, which Catullus does not seem to have had any interest in whatsoever.

It's something that he does with his friends and they share drafts and things on their wax tablets before actually working them up into final finished copies. From what you mentioned there, does that mean that he also wrote about his friends in his poetry? He did yeah we find references to Calvus and to Kinner and also to enemies probably frenemies I think would be a better word in the Catalan spirit we find a lot written about these two chaps in particular called Furius and Aurelius. And Furious at least seems to have been a poet that we know a little bit about. But these poems that Catullus directs to them are so rude. And one of them is the most notoriously rude in the collection. It's poem 16, where he threatens them with various kinds of rape, quite unpleasant.

But it's hard to say enough. In a Roman humour, that was humour. You know, it's a different kind of thing. It's not a serious threat. It's jokey. It's a laddish banter if you will at that time, so you have to try and read it in that spirit even though it's abhorrent to us in the same way he threatens Aurelius with a radish up his bottom

if he goes near a boy that he likes and that we find in the Greek sources this is a mode of punishment in Greece for adulterers. So it's at moments like that where you feel there's a gap between us and Catullus and his time. But that was part of the badinage of that age, really. Absolutely. Is it crucial when reading is quite extraordinary, as I said, he doesn't hold back poetry, to recognise in Roman times this would have been received very differently to how we might consider it today? Absolutely, yes. I think because it is so different on the surface.

A good person to look at at this time is Cicero, for example. And Cicero is quite a serious character in many ways. He doesn't seem to have been very fond of Catullus and his set. He called them the neoterics, as we call it in English, English which means they're new but almost they're too new he recognizes them as being subversive which would have actually I think delighted Catullus he wants to be seen as subversive he wants to be seen to be doing something very very different but it had a shock factor and it was just something that hadn't really been done before and I think some of the poems that Catullus wrote about Caesar and his colleagues, apparently they did actually cause offence at the time, and Catullus had to issue an apology

to Caesar for having written it. So that gives you an indication it's not something that people could just naturally take in their stride. It is astonishing for the time. You mentioned earlier how Catullus, he has this free Rome. He sometimes does go a bit close to the wire, perhaps, in the Roman political sphere with what his poems talk about but it also seems pretty unique for the time that he is not held back by having a patron or a sponsor absolutely he feels like he's got complete free reign really and i think what's kind of funny at the same time as this he doesn't flout the fact that he doesn't have to have a patron he's obviously quite wealthy but he likes to play down the fact that he has any money at all.

So you read of him having a wallet full of cobwebs, and he sort of begs a friend to bring a dinner and all the kind of accoutrements and entertainments because he can't afford to put them up. And you read this and you think, really, is that true? I think, you know, he has this kind of persona that he's trying to put across at this time. It is very much of this revolutionary poet, you know, more of a man on the street figure than he actually was. Well, one aspect of this revolutionary poet that I would like to talk about now

is his use of poetry to woo, shall we say. There seems to be a figure who he is completely lovestruck by in Rome. Indeed, yes. So you'll be talking about the great Lesbia. And this is probably what Catullus' poems are best known for, really. There's a whole sequence addressed to a woman called Lesbia, who he falls absolutely head over heels in love with. And she is apparently married when they met. And we get the impression from the poems that she's a bit older than him. And unfortunately, this relationship very quickly turns sour.

than him and unfortunately this relationship very quickly turns sour and he accuses her in a whole load more of the poems of being adulterous and having an affair with one of his friends and so you get a whole stream of poems which are calling her a harlot and being so very very vicious towards her and then you also get another series coming off this of his heartbreak so it tells a story of a relationship, the beginning, the duration, and the end. And Lesbia herself is a fascinating figure. I'd say that people are split mainly into two camps. There are those who say Lesbia was a total figment of Catullus's imagination, she's a literary persona, there's no reality behind her. And then there are the other people, and I'm definitely among this group,

who would say that she was inspired to some extent by a real woman. And the vast majority of people would recognise that woman as being Clodia Metelli or Clodia Porcra, which is the wife of a senator, an incredibly wealthy aristocratic woman in Rome. And what else do we know about this Clodia? Do we know much about her in the sources? We do. That's the fantastic thing. I mean, this is partly what makes the identification with

Lesbia so tempting, really. One of the poems that suggests that there is something to this is a poem in the collection called Poem 79. And Catullus writes, Lesbius is handsome, Polcaire. How couldn't he be? Lesbia prefers him to you and to all of your people, Catullus. And the first line, Lesbius est Polcaire, is, we think, a reference to her brother, who was quite a famous politician and demagogue at this time, called Clodius Polcaire. Polcaire meant beautiful or handsome. And Cicero used to call Claudius Pulcher pretty boy. And one of the rumours that spread around Rome was that Claudius actually committed incest with his sisters, including Claudia. So Catullus' poem seems to be saying that Lesbius S. Pulcher, and then so Lesbia, the female form, would be the sister because she's preferring her own brother to Catullus or anyone else.

So she's quite a notorious woman, partly by virtue of her brother and partly by virtue of her other male relatives. So she's descended from a huge, very, very influential line of powerful people. So she can trace her family tree back to one of the men who was twice consul of Rome, Appius Claudius Caicus, and he was responsible for lots of major public works in Rome. So the first aqueduct, the Via Appia, the Appian Way. And the brother partly carries on this tradition, but he is really the thorn in the side of a lot of the politicians, not least of all Cicero in this period. So she's notorious partly through him, partly through her husband, who was Metellus Keller, who was a senator

and actually sent to be governor of Cisalpine Gaul, the Gaul that Catullus was actually from. And they lived up on the Palatine Hill, the most exclusive address in Rome, near Cicero, near Hortensius, another orator, overlooking it all. So they're very much at the centre of public life. We know a little bit about Clodia physically. Cicero describes her as having these wonderful oxen eyes. And he doesn't mean that as a compliment, I should say. We can picture these sort of large brown eyes, like the ones that Hera is said to have had in Homer. Homer describes Hera as having these eyes eyes and it's meant to be an indication of someone being quite tempestuous and wild. And she, according to Cicero, is also an experienced poet who wrote a number of plays. And I find that reference really, really interesting. In the context in which he wrote it, he was actually trying to denigrate her in court. He was trying

to say, well, she's a very, very good liar because she's used to writing fiction. She's used to writing plays. But I think actually there's probably likely to be some truth in it when you read the cycle of lesbian poems that Catullus wrote to her. They've clearly written for someone who is very, very educated and learned and adept at knowing and perceiving references to other poets and things like that. So it really wouldn't surprise me if she really did write her own poetry. And the other thing to say is probably she seems to be considerably older than Catullus. She seems to have been at least 35 when their affair began. She was a mother to a daughter.

So a fascinating woman, really, and she just captures Catullus' heart. Absolutely. And it sounds like, Catullus, you fell in love with someone who was really at the high line of Roman society in the capital. Absolutely, yes. A very dangerous character, really, in many ways for him to fall for, because through her connections, Catullus then finds himself in the middle, very much, of this political world of Rome, partly of her husband's a senator.

He's also the brother-in-law of Pompey the Great. You've got Caesar on the other side. You've got all these people who he's one degree of separation from via his relationship with her. And I think one of the interesting things you find there's a slight class difference between them which he tries to bring out in his poems she's this very very patrician aristocratic woman and he is one class beneath her but they have in common this preference for being more déclassé her name would mean Claudia same with her brother Claudius, but they both contract it so that she's Claudia just with an O and he's Claudius. And that seemed to be a more plebeian

spelling of the name. So it's more like she's almost trying to be more of a woman of the people just as Catullus is trying to be by sort of playing down his wealth. So you can see them as well matched on that ground. Yeah, I love one of these comparisons in your book. You mentioned this at the time of the triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Caesar. But at the same time, you have this love triangle triumvirate between Claudia, or possibly Claudia, Catullus and Metellus. Absolutely, yeah, you do. That's the one thing you find when you recritise his poems.

I mean, they're not, as a collection, highly political. You do find political references, but he seems to have had much more interest in his own life and what's going on immediately around him than in the major plays in Rome. So you find that parallel being drawn out and him being in the middle of this obviously doomed relationship. You mentioned just now how Clodia could have been a poet. Do we have cases of women being poets in the late Republican period around this time? We do we know that there were some female poets and we even think that one or two of them might have been wandering in and out of Catullus's set but the really sad thing is as often we don't have any of their poetry surviving today. I think Catullus would have been definitely

very receptive to female poets the fact that he usesho, the great poet from 7th century BC, Lesbos, as a major source of influence. He actually sort of creates free translations of some of her poems. One of them is poem 51, describing the feelings of jealousy at watching a woman that he loves and her husband together. You find evidence of women within the poetry itself without actually having very much preserved. You mentioned how the affair between Clodia and Catillus seemed doomed to fail. Daisy, talk me through the breakup. I'm guessing Catillus, he doesn't take it well. He takes it very, very, very badly indeed.

So Lesbia seems to let him down in a major way. He accuses her of having an affair with one of his friends and we think this might have been Cardius Rufus because it's said in some of the sources that Cardius Rufus had an affair with Clodia and so he writes a lot of very jealous, embittered poems about her in that respect but not just him. He imagines her sitting in the streets and welcoming loads and loads and loads and loads of men like a prostitute and it's actually quite difficult to read when he completely turns on her through his pain and at the same time he reads these very very vicious poems but then he also reads a whole cycle of poems where he's trying to strengthen himself

because he's crumbling beneath this breakup and he's trying to find some kind of inner strength but he's repeatedly failing and some of them are just incredibly poignant and one of the poems the most famous ones poem 85 which is odiet amo quere facium fortasse requieris nescio sed fieri sentio excrucio which means I hate and I love. Why do I do so? Perhaps you ask. I don't know, but I feel it and I'm crucified. And I think that encapsulates so many feelings that people have upon a breakup. It's not just hatred towards that person, it's a still feeling of love. And he's caught on this crucified, literally he's on a cross between these two feelings. And he just doesn't know where to go from that point. It feels like he's pouring out his varied emotions into his poetry. He is so much. You feel it and I think that's why they're so timeless because he's talking of just

a fundamental human feelings and beliefs and disappointments and this inability to carry on after his world's fallen apart and you get the impression that he took absolutely ages to try and get over this woman. And obviously, there's no way of knowing the reality of what happened, but he is completely crestfallen. Are these poems good examples at the emotional factor of Catullus' work, how he seems to be starting this new age in poetry in ancient Rome? Yes, I'd say so. I think when you look at some of the later poets, you look particularly at Ovid, Ovid's talking a lot to a mistress and about a mistress,

and you get a lot of Roman poets suddenly addressing poems to a beloved in the same sort of vein. And very often they pick up lines of Catullus and they take them in their own direction. And they very much see themselves as living and loving in the wake of this great poet who lived before their time so that in itself really helps to shape poetry in the early empire and Catullus is obviously doing so before all of this before Caesar's dictatorship before the republic has finally come to an end so it's an important moment poetically he's a man pouring out his heart into this poetry, which influences Roman poetry for hundreds of years in the future. That's absolutely astonishing when you look at the origins of that. Catullus, this heartbroken figure,

does he remain in Rome? He works in Rome for a significant period of time we think and then we know that in 57 BC he goes off to Bithynia and Bithynia Pontus was a great big new Roman province and it lay just south of the Black Sea in the north of what's now Turkey and there's a long history of these Mithridatic wars which had happened which all these very very influential figures of Sulla and Marius and all these big names sort of politically had taken part in Pompey the Great. It's an important province historically and it seems to be in a state of disrepair when Catullus is dispatched there and he joins this cohort and he's part of a group of young men who included his friend Kinner, his fellow poet, and it was headed up by a man called Gaius Memmius. Memmius was quite an influential figure

at this time he seems to have been a poet in his own right and he seems to have been a patron to other poets to some extent and we find his name cropping up in Lucretius's De Rerum Natura on the nature of things for example. So he's quite a big figure at this time but Catullus Clee doesn't think very much of him. So he travels off east. It's a long voyage, a long way to Bithynia, in this retinue. And they're headquartered at the second city of the place called Nicaea. And Catullus describes the udder-rich plains that he passed through to get here. And he says very little about what he was actually doing here in terms of the work. I think by all accounts it would have been quite dull, especially for a poet. And he seems to be inspecting people's

logbooks, looking at taxes which were owed to Rome, people's debts, lists of imports and exports and things like that. And what he's really hoping is that he might try and profit from this province in some way. And he's really angry that Memmius prevents him from doing so from pocketing any of the money and coming back with his pockets full not of cobwebs but of cash so he fails on that front and he's there for a while and I think he doesn't find it the most inspiring place or the most inspiring time so he comes back within the year So he's returning to Italy in about 56 BC. And he goes off, not to Rome, actually. He goes to Sirmio, where his family have this beautiful villa.

I know he only spends a small amount of time in Asia Minor, in that Greek central part of the Aegean. But of course, you've got Troy, you've got the Trojan War. Well, you've got the remains of that. That must have been such an influence. Do we see Greek mythology influencing Catillus's work at all yes we do absolutely so i'd say that out of this year abroad as it were is that he's actually managed to visit and pass many of the landscapes which helped to inspire many of the greek myths and when he's there he seems to bid farewell to his brother who dies before his time, around the Troy area.

But he's also, you've got to bear in mind, the Black Sea is the sea that's crossed by Jason and his Argonauts. And this is a place that's been written about by great poets like Apollonius of Rhodes. And Catullus is incredibly inspired by this voyage of the Argo. And it actually inspires, I'd say, probably the greatest of his poems, Poem 64, which I like to call the bedspread poem. And what is the bedspread poem? The bedspread poem is the longest of Catullus' surviving works.

It sits in the middle of his poetry book, and it extends to just over 400 lines. It's written in hexameters, so it's sort of the epic metre, which makes it a bit grander than all these other shorter love poems that he's written. And essentially it's a story within a story. So it's a description of the meeting of one of the Argonauts who travelled with Jason, a guy called Peleus, who spots in the sea this beautiful nymph, bare-breasted, rising from the water in a firstly undressed kind of way and he falls in love with her and this poem is a story

of their wedding and the birth of their future son Achilles the great hero of Homeric epic and in the middle of the poem there's this great digression we call it an ekphrasis a speaking out it's a long long digression describing the story that's embroidered on their wedding bedspread. And that story in itself is another Greek myth which features the wine god Bacchus going to the rescue of Ariadne, daughter of Minos of Crete, and she's the one who helped the great hero Theseus to kill her minotaur half-brother and navigate the great labyrinth. So there's a network of myths which go into this poem and a lot of these landscapes are the ones

which Catars would actually have passed on his way to and from the province. So I think the journey, the year out is important from this respect. I think it possibly helps to fuel this great work of art which is so different from all the other poems in his collection. It is astonishing how this work seems to be one of the most extraordinary and it's also very different to most other poems that he made. It seems almost like a different poet wrote it. You read it, it just seems a more serious vein, it's a more mature poem in many ways and I love it because I just think that it's full of all these allusions to other

Greek poets, to other Latin poets, to poetry which has gone before for generations, but it seems very new at the same time in a kind of true Catalan style. It's this kind of box within a box, story within a story. And it's very, very visual. And I think there are elements where you detect something of the dynamic of the other poems, of the Catullus' Lesbia poems, for example, the fact that Ariadne is actually abandoned by Theseus, her lover, the very man that she helped to perform his great deeds of heroism. He just leaves her. She wakes up on the shore of Naxos, the Greek island, and his ship is going off. And she's weeping. And then she has this great soliloquy where she's saying, you know, may no woman ever trust a man again.

Men are fine. They're very kind when they're wanting to get something. But once they've got it, they'll just leave you. That feels very modern. But I think you can't help when you've read the other poems, but see Catullus within Ariadne. And Lesbia is a heartless traitor that Theseus became. Okay, watch it. Yeah, no, it is extraordinary. And I do love that link to the

Greek myth. As you say, he doesn't seem to spend that much time in the central Mediterranean, the Aegean and within that part of the world. But it does seem to influence one of his most remarkable works that survives to us. Absolutely. Yeah, it's true. And I think without that poem, the collection wouldn't be as influential as it has been, just because he's shown himself to be incredibly versatile he's not just someone who writes poems about misery and love he can just operate in very very many different varieties of poetic language and schemes and I think it's exciting I read that poem and there's another one that came before it which also seems to have a slight eastern influence it talks about

a man who castrates himself to join an eastern cult, essentially. And it's written in this very, very unusual metre and it picks up on some of the eastern rites and things which are more typical of that part of the world. Absolutely, because it seems like a time, the late Roman Republican period, before these eastern cults have really started to make a real big mark in Rome itself.

In many ways, I think. I mean, we're going back with this poem, this cult that this guy joins is the cult of the Great Mother. and cults have really started to make a real big mark in Rome itself? In many ways, I think. I mean, we're going back with this poem, this cult that this guy joins is the cult of the great mother Cybele. And her cult has actually been welcomed to Rome at this date. She was actually welcomed in, I think it was in the middle of the Hannibalic Wars. So it was against Hannibal and Rome was doing really, really badly. And an oracle told them that if Rome was to turn the tide against an impossible enemy the best thing would be to try and welcome their mother into Rome so they welcomed it was kind of

a stone or a meteor to represent the goddess into Rome and so the cult was established and there was a temple to her near the forum but at the same time it remained kind of foreign and strange and I think Catullus perceived that. He continued to see that this was very much a different, it was very un-Roman. No one shows that fanatical worship of an earth goddess in that way. It doesn't seem the Roman thing to do, to go around banging a tambourine and cutting off your genitals. Castrating yourself, yes, definitely not. So Catullus returns from the Aegean, he returns to Italy.

But from what you were saying earlier, he doesn't return to Rome. He goes instead to Sirmio, which is absolutely beautiful. It's very, very worth visiting. It's just off Lake Garda, it's a beautiful peninsula, and it's quite a narrow peninsula, and when you visit you realise there couldn't have been very much room for much property here. But at the very end of the peninsula, so you're surrounded by water, is a huge Roman villa and since the 15th century people have called this the house of Catullus thinking

this is the very house that he went back to after coming home from Bithynia. Realistically archaeologists have looked at this and this villa has been extended over several periods and at one stage it was three stories high it's enormous has this great sort of cryptoporticus it's lovely covered walkway these bedrooms and workshops and bars and all kinds of things but the earliest parts of it actually date to the augustan period so about 40 years after catalus lived having said that near the entrance of the current villa there are some archaeological remains of an older villa which seems to have been in the footprint of the later one but significantly smaller and it had cobbled walls and brick pillars and the remains of some wall paintings and things here which might date to that period so

we think that this is an earlier late republican villa and who knows maybe this was the very house that Catullus came back to. I think I'd say of itself and the house is less important than the actual environment and the one thing less important than the actual environment, and the one thing he actually writes about when he gets here, he's standing on Siumi and he's just talking about how wonderful it is to come home, to lay aside your burden after such a long travel and time away, and just to find rest here in your own bed.

And it's just beautiful. He called it an almost island. Again, another of his phrases, which is almost impossible to translate in English because it's a peninsula but it's surrounded by water on three sides. So he felt like he was kind of half on an island and half not on an island. And you sort of find various people trying to translate this down the ages, like Lord Tennyson and all these people really were inspired by this poem

of this great homecoming and the kind of comfort. And the whole idea that travel is really only fun when you've actually come home and you can reflect on it and you're back and you're settled. And Catullus gets there first, and I think it's really nice that he goes there rather than back into the hustle and bustle in Rome. You kind of find him rediscovering himself after this period of disruption in his life.

I can imagine that amazing change of scenery going from Rome, then you said you got the ship, the voyage must have taken so long to then go to somewhere as beautiful, as picturesque as this peninsula. For a poet as well, to go somewhere like that, it must have been rejuvenating, I guess. I think so, absolutely. I think particularly because the Rome that he's left behind

and that he's about to come back to is an utter turmoil. It's a complete mess. While he's been away, for example, Cicero has been exiled for a start, and this is largely to do with Clodius' own brother. So if he wanted to try and escape Clodius slash Lesbia, he saw me as the place to go rather than going back to Rome. Clodius had this ludicrous ambition of trying to become a tribune of the people. And this was really a plebeian post.

As an aristocrat, he didn't have to do that job at all. He could work his way up the senatorial ladder a lot more easily. But he had the idea of trying to align himself with the poorer members of society. So he managed to sort of marry into a plebeian family, albeit a wealthy one, and have himself demoted. And once he was there, he achieved this post, and he used it to introduce some legislation

which would outlaw from Rome anyone who put to death people without trial. And one of the things, the great triumphs that Cicero was very, very proud of was quelling something called the Catalan-Arian Conspiracy. It was a great conspiracy which happened probably shortly before Catullus moved to Rome in 63 BC. And he foiled this conspiracy, and he rounded up conspirators, and he put them to death, but he did so without trial. So Clodius was really trying to get rid of Cicero, and Cicero left, and he prevailed on Caesar and Pompey for help, but they didn't rescue him. And this is partly because Rome's become incredibly violent while Catarsis has been away. I mean, Clodius has now

reinstated guilds, so the politicians can surround themselves by all these supporters, and there's sort of a rise in gangs, there's a rise in violence. Rome's just really very, very turbulent at this time. So I think if Catullus wants to come home and find a little bit of peace before he returns into that, going to Sirmio is probably a jolly good idea. Absolutely. Rome in turmoil. But let's talk about Caesar. He's not in Rome at the moment. Caesar has been all over the place.

Caesar's really trying to build himself up here. In the 50s BC, the point where Catilus is writing his poems, this is really the making of Caesar. He has been away as a governor in further Spain to try and get a triumph, to try and really put himself onto the political map. He's formed this triumvirate, this alliance with Pompey and Crassus.

And he has then filled the shoes of Clodia's husband, Metellus Calair, who dies and he passes away in 59 BC. Cicero says it's suspicious circumstances, Clodia must have poisoned him, sheer nonsense, but he leaves his seat empty. So Caesar manages to fill it, so he ends up having immense control over Gaul at this time. And this is really the beginning of his Gallic Wars. He's really paving the way to war over Gaul. And this obviously threads right past Catarsis' doorway, in a sense. You know, Verona's part of Gaul, and Caesar's there,

and he's exercising these ambitions to try and dominate Gaul, to try and get as much money as possible. Because one thing to say about Caesar, he's not the wealthy man that Crassus is. For example, Crassus has historically been his great money lender. He's the one who helped to finance his trip to Spain. He's lent him money in the past, quite an unscrupulous man. Caesar has had to build up money and property. He's had to work that bit harder to do so.

And while he's in Gaul, he seems to be taking whatever he can get. Well you mentioned how Caesar's thread seems to go right past Catullus's doorway. What do we know about Catullus and his view on Caesar's activity in Gaul? Well Catullus is very opposed to the whole idea of the wars. Particularly, he takes as his victim Caesar's chief military engineer, a guy called Mamura. Catullus doesn't call him Mamura in his poems, he calls him Mentula. Mentula is a Latin word which, let's translate as cock, says a lot of poems about him. And he is absolutely incensed that this man should be in Gaul and taking all of his money and that Caesar should allow this to happen. He talks about this Mencius trying to be a poet. He says he's a terrible poet.

Muses have sort of thrown him headlong from the cliffs with their pitchforks. He's so bad. And he's just a greedy, greedy man. He's trying to take all of the money from Gaul. And actually, historically, Caesar did take a lot and actually there was so much gold from him that actually sort of flooded the market in Rome that had a catastrophic effect on the finances so Catullus had a point about this but with Mencius is also an indirect way of him criticizing Caesar himself because he actually sort of says to Caesar who but a, grasping gambler would allow his

subordinate to get away with this, who would tolerate it. And he extends this criticism even to Caesar's travels across the Channel to Britain. He says, is it for Mencius, is it for his sake that you've come over to Britain? It was the furthest island in the West with terrible, scary, horrifying, far-off Britons. Why would you bother going there? Is it all to satisfy this man who's beneath you? And you might say, well, compared to some of the other poems, especially the poems in which Catullus writes so negatively to his friends, his rape poems and threatening poems,

these poems aren't so bad. But we know that Caesar was offended by them. We're told that they left a permanent stain on his record, these poems about Mencius and that Catullus had to issue an apology to Caesar and Caesar forgave him and actually invited him to dine with him. So they made off and I think as a reader today you can't help but wonder how did this relationship work if Catullus's father is a friend of Caesar and Catullus is writing this kind of poem how did this come about and I think there's a part of me that's slightly cynical about it and

thinks could this be some kind of plot I mean was Caesar primed to expect Catullus to write something terrible about him and you know as a way of helping Catullus to gain notoriety and then Caesar if he could be seen to take these poems in his stride and forgive him that would be a great display of magnanimity and show him to be sort of the bigger man an act of clemency later on you certainly find emperors trying to show off their clemency maybe this is an earlier instance of this just possibly absolutely and I might be backing up the wrong tree here but it also sounds like someone like Caesar someone right at the top or who's rising to the top if you can get someone like Catullus on your side,

he sounds like a very powerful propaganda weapon, let's say, to attack possible political enemies. I think he potentially is. I think we look at Catullus and we think, oh, he's just a poet. It's too easy to say that. But I think looking at his world and looking at the people he's connected to, his poems are obviously being read by a wide proportion of people a cross-section of society so to have Caesar feature in them and then Caesar make comment on them I think that they are quite integral to life at the time and then they do actually have the potential to help shape opinion and all this before Catullus is 30 years old. Astonishing, isn't it? It makes me feel, yeah, a bit, I was kind of conscious when I was writing that I wrote this book a while ago,

and when I was writing about him, I was the same age as he was when he was travelling off to the east. And I was aware of all the stuff he had written already, and I was thinking, gosh, I feel so behind. I know, you just don't think about it too much. Regarding Catullus reaching his 30th birthday, do we know much about his end, what happens to him? We don't. It's just one of those horrible things. This is not uncommon for ancient figures where we just don't hear any more. We don't hear of him in other sources, really. And I'd say that sometimes with the ancient sources, if there'd been some dramatic death, if he'd been killed, say, in one of these very violent brawls in Rome we might

have heard about that his friend Kinner certainly mistakenly killed in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination like we hear about his death maybe Catullus just died of something quite like a flu or something that we can't really guess what happened to him and that's a really sad thing it's a real pity we'd like to place him and know what he was doing or what he's going to do next. Maybe just stop being a poet and do something else and just didn't find his name. Repeated in the sources, pursued some other career and just wasn't any good at it. It's impossible to say, we can speculate all we like but I think he'd done enough by then to ensure that he would be remembered forever. Going on to that legacy thing now, do you think it's a fact that because he dies quite young,

he maintains this hopeless romantic young figure? Just thinking of someone like Alexander the Great who dies young, but ultimately that contributes to why he is immortalised today in some narratives as a slightly romantic figure because he dies young. Could it be a similar thing with Catullus? Does his early death actually aid his legacy? I think definitely, because particularly if you look at some of the people who were early on in translating him, for example,

you see Lord Byron and Shelley, and also that group of poets taking him on and trying to render his verse. And I think they see him as their kind of man, if you know what I mean. And he's kept alive through that. And I think the idea of a young lover, a young love affair, and someone who dies heartbroken is incredibly attractive. It's poetic. It's something which has led people just to keep on reading him.

I think if we did have a conclusion, it would kind of ruin the whole atmosphere. It's very human, isn't it? Not everything has a happy ending. No, but I mean, I'd say it's very fortuitous that we have his poems. I think even though we'd know a lot about him had those poems not survived, purely because they inspired so many other poets and they're quoted widely. But in terms of a collection, only one poem actually survived, the period from antiquity to the Middle Ages. And that was one of the poems that really isn't one of the popular ones.

It was a wedding hymn. And the others were all, it was a complete chance survival, really. There was a single manuscript containing all of the other poems that we have today. And it was found under a bushel in Verona, so his own birthplace, in around 1300. And we don't really know how it got there. I mean, we think that there was a bishop of Verona seems to have seen this in the 10th century. And then it seems to go missing. Maybe he's so shocked he actually hides it again. Like, who knows? But had it not been for that manuscript then being discovered, we wouldn't actually have so much of this man. So in itself, I mean, that whole kind

of story of his rediscovery in itself is, again, quite a romantic one, I think. Absolutely. So just to recap on that the sole surviving copy of most of Catullus's plays were discovered in a bushel in Verona in the Middle Ages. Yes exactly and there's some weird riddle which again is found also it records saying that this manuscript had been carried back by someone and mentioned some reeds and some it says that this manuscript is carried back from faraway lands to Verona we don't know what to make of this it's very difficult to understand what's real what's not real what's going on in this period but the fact is that these poems are preserved in this manuscript the original goes

missing but presumably other people have made copies by then and then the humanists really get to work and kind of tidying it all up and making it publishable and then you find it printed fairly early on in the 1400s at venice and from then on you mentioned byron earlier and tennyson it seems like his works inspire some of the great poets of the last few hundred years oh so many yeah. People constantly picking them up. Even when I sat down to try and turn my hand to translating all of the poems, I thought I'd do that

because I've been working from them to write this book about Catullus. I sat down and I borrowed from the library as many translations of Catullus as possible just to see what people have been doing. And there are dozens, absolute dozens. And every year I'd say people are publishing new ones and people are often trying to put their own life into them and you could get some very very modern very loose translations of Catarsis

poems and then you get others which are a lot closer to the text and I wanted to stay quite close to the text really just to try and put across some of the feeling of the Latin in it but he goes on he goes on and on inspiring Fantastic. The legacy of Rome's most erotic poet continues to this day. Brilliant. Daisy, this was an absolutely amazing chat. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Your book is called? It's called Catullus's Bedspread,

The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet. Wow, amazing. Daisy, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is great fun. Thank you very much. Thank you.