Obscenity at Rome

Obscenity is a distinctive feature of Roman culture, not something that is peculiar to Catullus. In both Greece and Rome, obscenity had ritual uses; it appeared, along with the display of phalli , as an integral part of various ceremonies performing an apotropaic function, promoting fertility, or both.^[8] At Rome the triumph was the occasion for the singing of ribald songs, directed against the victorious general, by the troops; weddings included the "fescennina iocatio" (Catullus 61.120), crude mockery that, like the song of the troops at the triumph, served both to confound the power of the evil eye and to bring the lucky person down to a level where he would not be exposed to what Pliny calls "Fortune the butcher of glory."^[9] Both triumph and wedding combine the primal power of obscenity to deflect the emanations of the evil eye with a mockery that is intended to make its object less enviable.^[10] Humor is also part of the efficacy of these practices, for humor serves to confound jealousy by deflecting attention. This association of obscenity with mockery and humor in Roman ritual makes it difficult to isolate the function of obscenity itself in these songs: obscene humorous mockery had a complex purpose and its components both complemented each other and overlapped. At this point, it is worth noting that Catullus' obscenity is almost always used in invective, though not all of it is humorous.^[11]

Roman authors frequently cite the licit use of obscenity in Roman ritual and ceremony in order to claim for the circumscribed world of their own book or genre a similar license.^[12] Theater, belonging to both the world of literature and that of religion (through the festivals), is a

particularly useful analogy for obscene poets like Martial, who refers to his poetry as "my theater."^[13] Martial himself cites a famous story about Cato that illustrates this attitude to obscenity as something both scandalous and yet licit within its proper context: Cato was attending a theatrical production at the Ludi Florales, a festival in honor of Flora that culminated with prostitutes stripping onstage; on being told that his presence was inhibiting the people from demanding that the actors/prostitutes strip in the customary fashion, Cato left the theater, to great applause,in order that the ancient custom might go on.^[14] Obscenity and gravitas were at odds, but in this optimistic little anecdote each recognizes and defers to the other in a community that understands what kind of behavior belongs where. The reality was not so tidy: Suetonius (Iul. 49.4, 51) refers to the ritual abuse of the general by his troops in passages where he describes the sexual scandals surrounding Caesar, who was abused in very similar terms by his peers. Rome, the "city of abuse" (maledica civitas),^[15] was rife with sexual slander even at the highest level of politics, and obscene language was routinely directed at political opponents in epigrams and pamphlets or chanted by mobs of supporters.^[16] Suetonius quotes an epigram of Catullus' friend Licinius Calvus, in which Nicomedes of Bithynia is called the "pedicator Caesaris" (buggerer of Caesar); another friend of Catullus, Licinius Calvus, wrote an epigram on Pompey accusing him of being a pathic (FPL 18). In extenuation of his own obscenities, Martial (11.20) quotes an extremely obscene epigram against Antony by Augustus. This kind of invective was what Veyne calls the senatorial version of a popular genre in which the intention was to throw the adversary into confusion with a volley of insults.^[17] We can read a literary version of this popular genre of public insult called convicium or flagitatio in Catullus poem 42, where the poet, trying to reclaim some of his writing tablets from an unnamed woman, parodies the insulting chant that might be used to shame a suspected thief into returning stolen property. Several of Catullus' poems contain repeated lines or phrases that recall this insulting chant, and in some form or other popular forms lie behind much of his invective.^[18] Roman graffiti, folk customs, and even epitaphs reflect a culture in which the collectivity still feels that it has the right to pass judgment on the behavior of the individual.^[19] Furthermore, the Romans prided themselves on a native tradition of dicacitas , caustic raillery, of which that great icon of Romanness, Cato the Elder, was a famed exponent.^[20]

Our concept of the obscene derives from the Latin word obscaenus (or obscenus ); the Greeks had no special term for this kind of language.^[21]

Cicero and others attest to the existence of words that were normally avoided in polite society because of their obscenity, and they use a range of words besides obscenus to refer to them.^[22] But Pliny, excusing his own obscene poems, cites a long list of distinguished Romans who, like him, wrote "little poems none too grave" (versiculos severos parum, Ep. 5.3.2); included in this list are several contemporaries of Catullus, a number of predecessors, and an impressive array of emperors. Both here and in 4.14 (in which he cites Catullus 16), Pliny presents the writing of risqué verse as an appropriate activity of the well-rounded gentleman, who naturally enough has been to comedies and mimes, and occasionally relaxes and lets his hair down (5.3.2). The welter of precedents suggests that the writing of obscene verse was an activity in which the upper-class Roman might legitimately indulge.

It is unlikely, therefore, that Catullus' use of obscene language would have had the intention or effect of scandalizing the bourgeois, nor does it demand explanations of a psychological nature.^[23] And yet obscenity in Catullus is a distinctive kind of diction that establishes particular relations between poet and reader. What's more, in the context of poetry it is particularly significant that Roman obscenity was predominantly concerned with the impure mouth. The mouth in Roman culture was the most important site of purity or contamination: eating, speaking, and kissing—the latter as much a social as a sexual activity—all required a pure mouth, but above all speaking, for the Roman's word was sacred.^[24] Whether it was used as a threat or as an accusation, obscene language frequently concerned itself with this crucial bodily site of contact with the social world, of the traffic between inferiority and exteriority, and of the exchange between what is taken in and what is given out. This preoccupation of Roman obscenity with the mouth makes it a particularly rich source of figuration for poetry and especially for a poetry such as Catullus' that is so concerned with the relations and positions implied by the poetic act. In this chapter, I describe how obscenity figures in these poems, first of all by exploring the implications of an obscene figure (irrumation) for the agency of the poet and then by considering some of the special complications that arise for the speaker who handles obscene language and for the reader who responds to it. The poet who must stain without being stained, and the reader whose response to obscenity is bifurcated between disgust and prurience, are both realizing something about the volatile nature of obscene language that poetry is best able to illuminate; conversely, these problematic aspects of obscenity enable the poet to play with the ambiguous nature of poetic positionality.

I end this chapter by examining another issue in Roman obscenity, distinct from the concern with the impure mouth and yet related to it, namely, the concern with the proper hierarchies, articulations, and relations within and between bodies. Here Catullus articulates the Roman use of obscenity to enforce social conformity with an exploration of the nature of poetry itself, which is constructed out of an obscene and promiscuous nexus of relations between words. The poems that I cite here pillory familial or amical associations and understandings that result in obscene relations. Ironically, though, the audience that mocks these friends and relations is committed, as readers of poetry, to the enjoyment of the very anatomies they are mocking. The interference between the reader's relation to the poem as the fictional utterance of a speaker and as a set of formal structures produces contradictory relations to its obscenity.

In the course of the chapter, I also examine some of the ways in which the obscene poems position the activity of the scholar (who is also a reader), and in which the scholar's project and strategies may overlap with those of the obscene speaker.^[25]