Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

                                                WHY CATULLUS IS NOT FOR ME 

 

I’m very sorry to say this, but I never warmed to the poetry of Catullus. At secondary school I was a good little boy and I studied Latin among other things – and of course we did not study, in class, any erotic Roman poetry. In my last year I won the prize for Latin, which might sound impressive… except that I was the only boy in the senior year to study Latin. The language was being faded out and of course it is now extinct in New Zealand schools. I think I was given the prize out of pity. The very tarnished cup awarded me still sits on my shelf. The fact is, my Latin was (and is) terrible and very, very limited; but I was still intrigued by ancient Latin poetry and prose. So every so often over the years I have settled down to read the works of  both the Golden Age and the Silver Age of Roman poetry. Remember, I was to read them only with the help of cribs, especially Loeb and other bilingual editions.

I ended up deciding that the two poets I most admired were Vergil (or if you prefer Virgil) and Juvenal. They were complete opposites.

Here is Vergil in the very first years of the Caesars with his idyllic Eclogues and Georgics, really creating a fantasy land for farmers and toilers; and then there is his Aeneid, a genuine epic. Forget the carp-ers who say he was just toadying up to the Emperor Augustus in writing such a patriotic origin-story of Rome. On the evidence only of Book 2 of the Aeneid [the taking of Troy]; Book 4 [Aeneas’s affair with Queen Dido] ; and Book 6  [Aeneas in the underworld] we have a great work, even if the latter half of the Aeneid is rather duller. And please remember, despite the Iliad and Odyssey, it is from the Aeneid that we get the story of the wooden horse.

As for Juvenal, coming many decades after Vergil and in a different context, we have a genuine satirist who has the skill to throw darts in every direction. Yes, some of his satires are now disgusting to many – his satire against women is the height of misogyny – but when he’s on the right path  he really hits the spot – his satire about the horrors of living in a filthy city like Rome; his satire against idiots who think they are important because their ancestors were aristocrats; his pessimistic – but truthful – vanity of human wishes; his disgust at lavish parties thrown by the decadent. Juvenal is an angry man, but with good reason like a Rabelais or a Swift. Doing your block is cathartic.

And what of the other Roman poets? Ovid is necessary for  embellishments of folklore. Horace (pompous old fellow) has his moments in his Epodes and Odes. Sextus Propertius – forget it.

Which at last brings me to Catullus. He is often praised as the best and most lyrical of Roman poets. There is some [limited] truth to this. The two poems about Lesbia’s sparrow are charming and vaguely erotic, in a teasing sort of way. There is his delightful poem about the joys of coming home to his house in Sirmio. His Epithalamium for a friend’s wedding is one of the best. There are other good things too. But Catullus’s achievement is undercut by the bum-bum and poo-poo semi-porno insult quips he throws out to his enemies. For sure Odi et amo comes when he lets rip in describing Lesbia as a whore when she’s out of favour, and he is always ready to find some amusing way to belittle former friends, regarding the size of his enemy’s penis and ridiculing the impotent. This is basically Fifth Form humour which would work best daubed on a dunny door. Okay, Martial was even worse at this game (one scholar referred to Martial as “the pornographer for the idle”) but Catullus has somehow become a cult. Oh how clever of him to make his naughty barbs!! And oh how puerile. Catullus’s work was lost for almost a thousand years. One wonders sometimes if some of his smutty stuff was not meant to be presented to the public at all.

Let me nastily point out another problem for those who idolise Catullus. How many (like me) are not fluent in the Latin language? And this being the case, how many of Catullus’s modern admirers cannot really appreciate the man’s poetry? To get the full blast of a poem, you have to feel the sounds, the metres, the language itself. Remember, if you are reading a poem translated from a foreign language, then you are not reading the original poem. At best, I suggest many admirers of Catullus are faking it. A bit like me. Fie upon the fellow.