Latin Love Poetry Read online

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  ‌II

  ‌Author and Ego

  Believe me, my life habits differ from my verse;

  my life is chaste, my Muse is playful.

  Ovid, Tristia 2.353–354

  ANY ENCOUNTER with Roman love poetry requires close scrutiny of the relationship between the author writing the poetry and the ‘I’ or ego whose feelings and experiences inhabit the work. Thus, when Catullus professes ‘I hate and I love’, we need to query what the actual relationship is between the Catullus who wrote that line and the ego who ostensibly speaks and feels it within the poetry. Are the two entities the same? Or is there a space that opens between author and ego, as what seem like very private thoughts are translated into publicly circulated literary expressions? In the passage above, Ovid explicitly cautions his reader that his life outside the poetry is quite different from what he presents within it. Likewise, in an earlier poem – one whose sexually graphic vocabulary long made editors and translators avoid it – Catullus is even more aggressive when trying to distinguish the activities of his poetic persona from his own, warning two male critics that he will sexually assault them in multiple ways if they continue to assume that his ‘soft’ poetry with its uncontrolled passion for Lesbia means that he is less of a man outside the work (16). Using a formulation that Ovid and other later Roman writers would echo, Catullus calmly explains that while a virtuous poet might be chaste, there is no need for his verses to be (16.5–6).1

  We should, of course, be cautious in taking such clarifications at face value, given that both Catullus and Ovid pointedly use the authority of the ego to ‘correct’ the deceptive nature of that very voice, urging, in effect, ‘believe me when I say I am not who I said I was’ – an injunction that, when followed too closely, threatens to lead one down a rabbit hole. Yet, such passages show well the love poets’ own awareness of the assumptions generated by use of the first person, including readers’ frequent tendency to conflate author and ego.2 In more modern eras, the love poets’ use of the first person has led classical scholars to treat love poetry as testimony of the poets’ real lives, a practice often called ‘biographical criticism’. This approach to love poetry, however, has been strongly challenged in recent years. In this chapter, then, we want to explore how the distinct narrative voice of Latin love poetry has both encouraged and defied a range of critical approaches. We shall then examine a provocative form of first person narration in love poetry, that of the female ego.

  ‘False Confidences’3

  In the second century CE, the Roman author Apuleius identified the ‘real’ names of the women featured in most of the major works of Roman love poetry; it is from Apuleius that we learn Catullus used the pseudonym ‘Lesbia’ to mask Clodia Metelli, while Tibullus used ‘Delia’ as pseudonym for a real woman named Plania, and Propertius ‘Cynthia’ for a woman named Hostia (Apologia 10). Such identification undoubtedly helped foster the biographical reading of love poetry, for what could be a better explanation of the striking subjectivity of Roman love poetry than its reliance on the experiences of real lovers? Catullus’ poetry in particular, given its overtly confessional nature, has often been viewed as transparently recording the vagaries of Catullus’ daily life and his tortuously unstable affair with Clodia Metelli. Any attempt to reconstruct the ‘real life’ of Catullus from his poetry, however, eventually encounters significant barriers.

  Reading the Catullan Ego

  2.1 ‌Catullus at Lesbia’s (1865) by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema.

  Catullus’ poems about Lesbia have tended to attract the greatest attention, yet his poetry actually portrays a number of other kinds of relationships, including lively and often hostile exchanges with various friends and enemies – poems that convey a strong impression of real frustration or anger behind the work. As we have seen in poem 16, Catullus threatens to assert his ‘manliness’ through various sexual acts unless his critics stop presuming that his masculinity has been compromised by his poetry. In equally obscene terms, Catullus accuses Lesbia of engaging in sexual acts with other Roman men in poem 58. Such poems can seem shocking to an unsuspecting reader,4 and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they often have been perceived as ‘a scandal and an embarrassment’ to later critics.5

  Catullus forges a perhaps more sympathetic connection with his reader when he tries to articulate his tortured feelings for Lesbia. In his famous poem 85, the poet fiercely states, ‘I hate and I love’. He then ruminates: ‘You sometimes ask why I do that. I do not know, but I feel it happening and I suffer’ (1–2). While this short poem begins with a blunt expression of opposing emotions, Catullus thus immediately records the presumed reaction of an interlocutor, who ostensibly asks him about the source of such feelings; Catullus answers only that he experiences such suffering, not that he can explain it in any way. Earlier, in poem 75, also written in elegiac couplet, Catullus explicitly diagnoses Lesbia’s behaviour as the cause of his fractured mental state and describes the paradox it creates:

  Lesbia, my mind had been reduced to this because of your crime,

  and by its own devotion it destroyed itself.

  It is not able to like you any longer, even if you are on your best behaviour,

  nor is it able to cease loving, even if you do your worst.

  (1–4)

  In both poems, as if looking in from the outside, Catullus exhibits clear insight into his condition, even though he considers a remedy hopelessly out of reach.

  Poems 5 and 7, two of the most famous poems in Catullus’ corpus, are also written in the ‘confessional’ vein and express great excitement and good tidings for his love, beginning with the exhortation to Lesbia that they ‘live and love each other’ (5.1). Urging her to disregard the opinion of ‘severe old men’, Catullus requests that she give him a thousand kisses, then immediately demands more and still more – so many, he finally says, that they themselves will lose count (5.7–13). Shortly after, Catullus mocks his own greedy exuberance, coyly beginning poem 7 with Lesbia’s alleged retort to such a request: ‘You ask, Lesbia, how many kisses are enough for me and more than enough?’ (7.1–2), then responding that only a number equal to the amount of sand on a beach or stars in the sky will satisfy ‘mad Catullus’ (3–10).

  Taken together, these poems portray a Catullus who gleefully lacks self-control. In the very next poem, however, Catullus responds to his prior zeal: rather than indulge in countless kisses, Catullus orders himself to ‘stop the foolishness’, to ‘buck up’, as it were – emphatically using a form of the verb obduro (‘to harden’ or ‘persist’) three separate times – and accept the demise of his love (8). Noteworthy is Catullus’ change from the second person to the third (12) and then back again (19), reiterating the kind of self-consciousness and split perspective we saw above by once again adopting a narrative voice that is constantly both self-aware and trying on new guises.

  In seeking to elucidate the workings of Catullus’ ego, modern scholars have placed his poetry firmly within the lyric tradition,6 a mode that, as we have seen, originated in ancient Greece. For Miller, Catullus’ work is ‘the first extant example of a true lyric collection’, since Catullus’ production of a written collection of poems (as opposed to the oral performance of Greek lyric) elicits a very specific ‘responsive understanding’ from his audience, one that Miller finds critical to lyric consciousness.7 It is thus the reader’s task, in Miller’s view, to build a Catullan ego in the course of his or her reading – one that can accommodate all sorts of turns, contradictions and possibilities of ambiguity (even a change of opinion in a later reading) – rather than Catullus’ task to present ‘himself’ as a single coherent narrating subject.8 Micaela Janan, going even further, sees the Catullan ego not as an entity or an identity per se, but ‘as a site through which social, cultural, institutional and unconscious forces move’.9

  While perceptions of Catullus’ ‘immediacy’ tend to dominate reactions to his work, another way to challenge the presumption that the Cat
ullan ego grants unmediated access to the author’s ‘real’ self is to recognize the ways in which, on closer inspection, Catullus’ poetry divulges his considerable literary skill. Catullus’ famous sparrow (passer) poems present a good example of where we might find deeper artistry at work (poems 2 and 3). In poem 2, Catullus portrays the sparrow as a beloved and envied plaything of his mistress, while in poem 3 he presents an elaborate poem of mourning, marking the sparrow’s death. As Richard Thomas writes, both poems can be read as responses to literary forms found elsewhere, poem 2 a seeming parody of the ancient hymn, and poem 3 ‘working within […] a tradition of epigrams to dead pets’.10 Even more since the Renaissance, scholars have debated whether the activities ascribed to the bird, including its preference for its mistress’s lap, indicate a kind of mischievous double entendre, that is that Catullus is using the sparrow as a stand-in for the male penis.11

  In poem 11, Catullus seems to make a more self-consciously literary gesture when he appropriates a poignant image reminiscent of Sappho, one of a flower struck down by a plough.12 This scenario is at times used to illustrate male penetration of a young girl or bride and so often appears in wedding poetry.13 Here, however, Catullus provocatively employs the image to describe the end of his love for Lesbia, which, ‘by her fault’, has fallen ‘just like the most remote flower after it has been touched by a passing plough’ (21–24). Such appropriation of Sapphic imagery opens many possible interpretations, not least that, consistent with other strategies in love poetry, the Catullan ego is pointedly adopting a feminine perspective in documenting his painful loss; however, any embracement of femininity cannot be evaluated without considering the broader context, including the fact that the poem opens with Catullus’ plans to depart the city with his male friends as well as his quite graphic wish that Lesbia subsequently indulge her sexual appetite with hundreds of other men.14 Catullus’ entry into Sappho’s emotional terrain at the end of the poem is surely signalled by his use of the sapphic metre throughout, and the only other poem in sapphic metre in Catullus’ collection is poem 51, an even richer conversation with Sappho’s lyrics, which we shall examine later in the chapter.

  For now, it is time to turn to the Augustan elegists who have been subjected to their own versions of biographical criticism.15

  ‘Sincerity’ and the Augustan Elegists

  The basic aim of biographical criticism is to reconstruct the real events and real people ostensibly residing behind the artifice of ancient poetry. Armed with Apuleius’ identification of the ‘real’ Cynthia, scholars beginning with F.G. Barth in the eighteenth century thus sought to reconstruct from Propertius’ poetry a chronological account of his actual, if convoluted, romance.16 Despite concerted efforts by such scholars, Propertius’ work persistently defies any attempt to produce a single or coherent romantic narrative, for contradictions and inconsistencies in his account of life with Cynthia abound. To take just one example, Propertius claims that he was faithful to Cynthia for five years in one poem (3.25.3), but in another poem extols the advantage of having two mistresses at the same time (2.22b). Such hurdles, however, did not seem initially to faze the adherents of biographical criticism, who adopted creative methods for making Propertius’ poetry conform to biography, even, at times, simply omitting the poems that could not be made to fit.17 That ‘Propertius did not intend his elegies should be read as a story’ was generally not considered.18

  Ovid has traditionally garnered the most scepticism when it comes to asserting a connection between ‘real’ life and poetic persona. In the words of one nineteenth century critic, ‘His [Ovid’s] calm surface is most rarely disturbed by genuine feeling. With Tibullus and Propertius love was at any rate a passion. With Ovid it was une affaire de cœur.’19 This recourse to ‘genuine feeling’ in ‘diagnosing’ Latin love poetry demonstrates well that any attempt to draw the line between ‘real life’ and ‘literary invention’ frequently relies on quite subjective judgement, requiring the reader to determine which feelings are ‘authentic’ and which are ‘merely’ feigned or exaggerated for effect. In the mid-twentieth century, Archibald Allen thus dealt perhaps the first major blow to biographical criticism by seeking to unpack the meaning of ‘subjectivity’ itself, focusing his attention on what had previously seemed a straightforward criterion for evaluating the elegiac ego: ‘sincerity’.

  Insisting that we distinguish between ancient and modern perceptions of sincerity, Allen argued that although in modern times ‘the real personality of the artist is an essential factor in the concept of sincerity’,20 in ancient poetry no such construct existed. Turning to ancient rhetorical theory, Allen proposed that an ancient orator was required to make people believe in his arguments. The word fides (from which we derive our word ‘confidence’) in Latin therefore combines in itself the ideas of both ‘sincerity’ and ‘persuasiveness’, so that the ‘fides of an orator depends on the conviction which he arouses that he possesses the qualities which he claims’.21 Sincerity, in short, was not viewed in antiquity as a passive quality of the orator’s character or personality (his innate possession of certain traits), but rather an impression or conviction about his character, created by his own skill and performance. So what we regard today as ‘sincerity’ in Roman love poetry is not, in fact, the author’s ‘real’ personality coming through, but rather the effects of his literary style: we view Propertius as ‘sincere’ not because of who he is (or was), but rather how he presents himself in the poetry. Allen explains further: ‘The question we should ask is not “Did the elegists really feel this?” but rather “Is it reasonable that the lover whose character appears in the elegies should speak in this manner?”’22

  In the decades following, classical scholars continued to probe the line between life and art in Roman love poetry, with some still insisting that the virtue of Latin love poetry derived from its expression of genuine experiences and emotions23 and others contending that the Roman love poets seek to construct the very idea of ‘romantic experience’ in their writing. Marking the growing domination during the 1980s of a more literary approach to Roman elegy – one that saw love poetry as highly sophisticated in terms of both generic conventions and the reading practices it required – Paul Veyne’s influential Roman Erotic Elegy unveiled the reader of elegy and the author’s ego as supremely literary constructs.24 Since that time, critics of love poetry have increasingly shifted their focus from the role of Roman love poets as lovers to their role as writers or poets;‌25 love poetry’s puella has similarly been interpreted as a supremely literary invention rather than a mask for any ‘real’ flesh-and-blood lover.26

  In delving further into the literary rather than biographical dimensions of the ego or ‘I’, we want to explore next a revealing phenomenon: the incorporation of a female ego in love poetry, a topic that brings us first to the tantalizing figure of Sulpicia, a scribens puella or a puella who writes.

  Sulpicia: Scribens Puella?

  Given the overwhelming bias towards male authorship in our surviving sources, the women of Rome seem mostly silent today, a silence that derives in large part from their relative absence from public life.27 Yet Propertius’ Cynthia is referred to as writing her own poetry (2.3.21–22), suggesting that female authorship was, if not common, at least not unheard of. And, indeed, we know about a number of female poets in Rome, such as Cornificia, who wrote epigrams, and Perilla, a woman to whom Ovid addresses some of his exile poems.28 There is also evidence for other kinds of women’s writing in the Roman era, such as the letters of the virtuous Cornelia (the mother of the Gracchi brothers) and the memoirs of Agrippina the Younger.29 Unfortunately, none of this writing survives. Given such a meagre record of female authorship, Sulpicia’s love poetry seems to offer unprecedented access to a female writer of the Roman period.

  Still, the critical reception of Sulpicia’s work has been divided; given that it is preserved as part of Tibullus’ corpus, serious questions have been raised about both Sulpicia’s actual authorship and
the relation of her writing to Tibullus’ work as a whole. Until the end of the eighteenth century it was believed that Tibullus’ manuscripts – the two most important of which are the Ambrosianus and the Vaticanus, dated to the fourteenth century – contained only poems by Tibullus; in more recent times, however, scholars have come to believe that some of the poems in the third book were actually written by Tibullus’ contemporaries. Among the contested poems are six short elegies that have been attributed to a young woman named Sulpicia (3.13–18).

  Much uncertainty surrounds the identity of this Sulpicia. One of the elegies that names her also refers to her as the ‘daughter of Servius’ (3.16). Another elegy addressed to Messalla (3.14) alludes to the fact that Messalla is seemingly in charge of the young woman. Basing their conjecture on these two poems, scholars have concluded that Sulpicia’s father was most likely Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a prominent jurist who served as consul in 51 BCE and died eight years later. The later author Jerome (dated to the fourth and early fifth century CE) suggests that Servius Sulpicus was married to Valeria, Messalla’s sister, thus making Messalla Sulpicia’s uncle and guardian after her father’s untimely death; indeed, Sulpicia’s kinship with Messalla might help explain why this collection of poems would include her elegies.

  The mystery of Sulpicia’s identity is further compounded by two epigrams of the later Roman poet Martial (40–c.104 CE) that praise a contemporary of his named Sulpicia for her conjugal devotion as well as for her explicitly erotic poetry.30 To one classical scholar, that ‘the only two Roman poetesses we know much about should be named “Sulpicia” is too much a coincidence to be accidental’; he proposes that in later times the name Sulpicia was employed precisely because the earlier Sulpicia ‘seemed to provide a precedent for Latin verse in a feminine persona’.‌31 This could mean that the name Sulpicia connoted not a specific woman, but rather a tradition of composition in the female voice, a convention that may already have been in use during Tibullus’ era.