Irrumation and the Silent Victim

Richlin 1983, in the most comprehensive treatment of Roman sexual humor, takes the god Priapus as the model for the persona of the author who uses sexual material. Statues of Priapus, an ithyphallic god of fertility, were set up in gardens both to promote fruitfulness and to guard against theft; the god's massive, erect penis performed both functions, the latter by threatening to assault the thief sexually. A poetic genre developed around these statues in the Hellenistic period; in the Roman form of this genre, the statue of the god frequently threatens the potential thief with the attention of his prominent member.^[26] Priapus' threats reflect a type of revenge that was in fact taken by aggrieved males in the ancient world, and Catullus' threat at the beginning of poem 16 had some basis in reality: according to Cicero, Clodia herself had a certain Vettius raped by a couple of her henchmen because he had insulted her.^[27] The priapic stance is manifested by the most characteristic word in the Roman sexual vocabulary, which is also the most common obscenity in Catullus, the verb irrumare .^[28] Although we know the meaning and etymology of this word, it is quite literally untranslatable.

Commonly used as a threat or insult, the word denotes an action that is not specifiable in English except by extension of other terms ("fuck the mouth," "oral rape").^[29] The fact that the nearest English slang equivalent to a threat of irrumatio would be "Eat it!" shows that in English the action, even when degrading to the person who performs it, is all on the side of the fellator; the Latin word reflects the importance of the "priapic" model of phallic aggression. Naturally, the currency of this word as threat or insult may have blunted its literal force over time—as with the modern "Fuck you!"—but it is characteristic of poetry to revive literal meanings and play on them.^[30] How, then does irrumatio figure in Catullus?

The original meaning of irrumare would have been "to put in the teat" (ruma/rumis). Adams 1982, 126, comments that this etymology "reflects the popular obsession among Latin speakers with a similarity felt between feeding and certain sexual practices." But in the light of his copious examples of the standard joke by which irrumatio was spoken of as a means of silencing someone, we might draw a further implication from the etymology. Irrumatio is, after all, the means by which the mother silences the noisy baby, and in its metaphorical sense as sexual threat it is intended to reduce the victim to a status comparable to that of the baby (infans , i.e., not speaking) in relation to the all-powerful adult who silences it.^[31] What is originally an expression of love and concern becomes an expression of contempt, not satisfying the recipient but rather forestalling him (the victim is nearly always male). In poem 21, Catullus casts Aurelius, who is continually making advances towards Catullus' boy, as "the father of hungers" (pater esuritionum). But Catullus will forestall Aurelius at the same time as he "satisfies" his hunger:

nam insidias mihi instruentem
tangam te prior irrumatione. (7–8)

for as you plot mischief against me
I will assault you with an  irrumatio .

Aurelius' hunger stands both for his appetite for the boy and for his poverty, and because Aurelius is poor Catullus is in a position to mock (irrumare in the weak sense) his rival; if Aurelius were not poor, the boot would be on the other foot and it would be Catullus who would be silenced (irrumatus): "But if you did that when you were full, I would be silent" (atque id si faceres satur, tacerem, 9). What pains him, Catullus claims, is that his boy might learn from Aurelius to hunger and to thirst

(10–11); so the fear that the boy might learn to reciprocate Aurelius' lust is phrased as concern that he might have to share Aurelius' poverty.^[32] Catullus' strategy, namely, to make the hunger that constitutes Aurelius' threat a metonymy for the poverty that enables his own preemptive strike, is itself a form of irrumatio , and one peculiarly appropriate to a poet: irrumatio becomes a figure for the poet's power to assign his own meanings to those who, perforce, are silent while he speaks.

In poem 37, Catullus launches himself at the inmates of a certain tavern who seem to think that they are the only ones with pricks:

solis putatis esse mentulas vobis,
solis licere, quidquid est puellarum,
confutuere et putare ceteros hircos. (3–5)

you think you are the only ones with pricks,
that you alone are allowed to fuck all the girls
and to think of the others as goats.

To this he answers:

an, continenter quod sedetis insulsi
centum an ducenti, non putatis ausurum
me una ducentos irrumare sessores?
atqui putate: namque totius vobis
frontem tabernae sopionibus scribam. (6–10)

Because you boors sit all in a row,
a hundred or two hundred, do you think that I
won't dare to irrumate two hundred sitters all at once?
Think it over: for I'll cover the front
of your whole tavern with penises.

The marshalled ranks of the boors become waiting prostitutes (sedetis , 6),^[33] lined up for Catullus to service. The poet's irrumatio of the rivals (11–16) consists in giving his own interpretation to the self-satisfied comradeship of the ensconced gathering, a way of silencing the rivals who now no longer express their own meanings. He follows this up with a threat to scrawl penises all over the front of the tavern: the irrumated victims, unable to speak for themselves, now bear written on their collective front the expression of Catullus' masculinity, rather than their own. Covering the "brow" of the whole tavern with penises, Catullus figuratively makes good on his threat to irrumate all two hundred in one sitting.

The aggression of this priapic threat is poetic. It plays on the fact that the poet takes his silent victims in his own sense; that they appear in his

poems as he chooses to understand them, and that their own words, gestures, and intentions may be alienated from them through his words. To put it graphically, the mouths that should express their owners' meanings and appetites now serve the poet's will and pleasure.^[34]

In Catullus' most elaborate play on irrumo , the victim is silenced because to speak out against the perpetrator would be to acknowledge his own humiliation:

Gellius audierat patruum obiurgare solere
     si quis delicias diceret aut faceret.
Hoc ne ipsi accideret, patrui perdepsuit ipsam
     uxorem et patruum reddidit Arpocratem.
Quod voluit fecit: nam quamvis irrumet ipsum
     nunc patruum, verbum non faciet patruus. (c.74)

Gellius had heard that the uncle was usually censorious
     if one did or said anything naughty.
Lest this should happen to him he worked over
     his uncle's wife and rendered the uncle an Harpocrates.
He did what he wished, for even if [or however much] he should
                                   irrumate
     his own uncle now, his uncle won't say a word.

Thanks to Gellius' precautions, his uncle cannot play the traditionally censorious avuncular role without also playing the cuckold, and this leaves him frozen in the posture of statues of the outlandish Egyptian god Harpocrates, his finger on his lips.^[35] Because Harpocrates is represented as a boy, the generational status of the two characters has been reversed. Gellius has turned the stock figure of the uncle into a statue, stock still and ridiculous; like the inmates of the salacious tavern, who are both silenced and made to bear Catullus' meanings, the uncle is displayed in a gesture of silence that nevertheless signifies Gellius' irrumatio . The last four lines produce a rich play on the distinction, casually introduced in line 2, between saying and doing, for we cannot be sure whether the irrumation of the uncle is constituted (in a manner of speaking) by the adultery, or whether it is an additional (and literal) indulgence that Gellius allows himself now that he has secured his uncle's compliance. No matter how much the nephew expresses his contempt for the uncle (irrumet in the weakened sense), the latter won't say a word, because silence is the usual concomitant of a literal irrumatio . The nephew is a poet in action, turning the uncle's potential censoriousness into an advertisement of his cuckoldry and triumphing over him by playing with the literal and the figurative.

Catullus' most graphic scene of irrumatio , surprisingly enough, features himself as the victim. The perpetrator in this case is the praetor Memmius, with whom Catullus had served in Bithynia, and who has appeared in poem 10 as the irrumator praetor who had prevented his staff from enriching themselves in the customary way. In poem 28 Catullus addresses his friends Veranius and Fabullus, who seem to have had as lean a time of it with their Piso as Catullus did with his Memmius:

Pisonis comites, cohors inanis,
aptis sarcinulis et expeditis,
Verani optime tuque mi Fabulle,
quid rerum geritis? satisne cum isto
vappa frigoraque et famem tulistis?
ecquidnam in tabulis patet lucelli
expensum, ut mihi, qui meum secutus
praetorem refero datum lucello?
O Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum
tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti. (c.28, 1–10)

Retinue of Piso, empty-handed cohort,
with your convenient and lightweight baggage,
excellent Veranius and you, my Fabullus,
what are you up to? Have you endured enough
cold and famine with that good-for-nothing?
Do your accounts show any profits under your
expenses, as do mine, for with my praetor
I entered on the profit side what I paid out.
O Memmius, how thoroughly and lengthily, how leisurely
you irrumated supine me with all that beam of yours.

"Despite the graphic detail . . . Catullus does not mean that a sexual act took place." Adams includes lines 9–10 in his examples of the metaphorical and weakened use of irrumare , implying simply "ill treatment."^[36] But this passage need not be describing a real sexual act for irrumasti to retain something of its literal force. The graphic detail in these lines cannot simply be reduced to emphasis ("I've really been abused"); rather, it takes its force from the context of the previous three lines. Catullus has just told his friends that he enters his losses in Bithynia as gain, whether because he has no more room on the expense side of the ledger and no profit to enter, or because he has in some way made the best of a bad job—chalked it up to experience, for instance. In the opening lines of the poem, Catullus greets his friends as the empty-handed staff (cohors) of Piso, and then teasingly refers to their light and

comfortable baggage; for the soldiers (cohors in its military sense), light packs would, of course, be welcome.^[37] This double perspective characterizes the description of Memmius' irrumatio of Catullus, for the thoroughness of Memmius and the leisurely detail that postpones the word irrumasti recover the pleasurable aspects of this sexual act. This is not to say that the "graphic detail" is not, in the social code of the metaphor, a mark of Memmius' complete unconcern for his subordinates; what has happened is that the excess of the social abomination has had to appear as gain on the literal, sexual side of the verbal ledger. But gain for whom? The question is moot, for though ancient thought about sexuality tended to attribute pleasure only to the active participant in a sexual act, it is the mouth of the speaker that enjoys the assonance and alliteration of lines 9 and 10, and that recalls and stretches the name of Memmius in the words "bene me ac diu" (9). Although there are Latin poems in which the sexual mistreatment intended as a threat or punishment is actually welcomed by the victim, either a fellator or a pathicus , the distribution of roles remains stable because the victim has been doubly insulted.^[38] In this case, the speaker is himself the victim and, paradoxically, the victim of this silencing act is the speaker. More radically, Catullus' thorough description of the leisurely irrumatio causes the language of aggression to teeter over into the language of pleasure, so that the usual distribution of roles is smudged as the poet speaks the aggressor's pleasure.

Catullus goes on to comment that his friends have evidently been stuffed with quite as large a prick as he has (nihilo minore verpa / farti estis, 12–13), a sarcastic reference to the hunger they had to endure with their abusive praetor. Because stuffing is a form of feeding whose excess bypasses the satisfaction of the eaters in the interests of the feeder, the distribution of the usual feeder/eater roles is here sarcastically reversed.^[39] If the poem begins and ends with sarcasm, a stable form of verbal play in which the negative is expressed as a positive (aptis, expeditis, farti), the center is more labile: Catullus accuses Memmius, and by the very intensity of his accusation comes to speak the language of pleasure. Irrumatio , as I have been arguing, is elsewhere used by Catullus to figure an interference in the self-expression of another, an imposition by the perpetrator of his meanings onto the victim. But when the poet represents himself as the object of irrumatio , the aggressive intentions of the perpetrator may themselves be preempted. In this case, it is hard to detach the language of pleasure from the language of outrage. What exactly do the detail, the assonance, and the alliteration

of lines 9–10 express? In what way does the thoroughness of Catullus' description relate to the thoroughness of Memmius' irrumatio ? Has the speaker humiliated himself by this confession of his degradation or dazzled us with his virtuosity? Does lentus (leisurely) express Memmius' pleasure or Catullus' outrage, and how do these expressions relate to the speaker/reader's pleasure in dwelling on the sounds and rhythms of these lines? Does it, in fact, make any sense to ask in what tone these lines are spoken? The bookkeeping metaphor of line 8 raises the question of the stability of the notions of profit and loss, and therefore of perspective, in the context of writing. One interpretation of line 8 is that Catullus, having run out of space on the loss side of his ledger, simply continues to enter his losses on the other side, under gain; the alternative is that Catullus actually considers his loss to be, from another perspective, gain. I have suggested above that in lines 9–10 the extreme expression of Catullus' humiliation turns into, or becomes indistinguishable from, the description of pleasure—a free-floating, textual pleasure that is hard to attribute definitively and exclusively to Memmius or to Catullus and the reader who dwells on his words. The bookkeeping metaphor suggests a standard of determinacy against which the mysterious fluidity of the textual can be measured.

In this poem, the poet, who is the victim of irrumatio , escapes the role to which this act would assign him by taking it in a different sense. Speaking the language of Memmius' contempt, Catullus foregrounds the pleasurable materiality of his own poetry, and the intensified language of social contempt tips over into the language of sexual pleasure, producing a more ambiguous distribution of roles than Memmius' sarcastic "stuffing" of his underlings Fabullus and Veranius. As so often in Catullus, the peculiar properties of poetry are realized in the context of a sexual transaction that upsets the standard cultural model.

In poem 28, Catullus flirts with the position of the fellator, that is, not the irrumator's victim but the man who enjoys and actively seeks to perform fellatio, but elsewhere the fellator is cast as silent and secretive. As Veyne 1983 has argued, Roman invective is often an exercise of the power of the collectivity, which increasingly finds itself flouted by those who withdraw from its surveillance into privacy. In the poetry of Martial, the revelation of sexual secrets becomes one of the most common activities of the invective poet; one might argue, in Foucaultian fashion, that the category of secret and deviant sexual proclivity is constituted by the Roman poet as an arena for staging the power of the collectivity against the private and the individual.^[40]

In 12.3 5, Martial accuses an apparently candid Callistratus of being a fellator:

Tamquam simpliciter mecum, Callistrate, vivas,
     dicere percisum te mihi saepe soles.
Non es tam simplex quam vis, Callistrate, credi.
     nam quisquis narrat talia plura tacet.
Callistratus, you're in the habit of telling me that you've been
                                   buggered,
     to give the impression that you're candid with me.
You're not as candid, Callistratus, as you want to be thought.
     For whoever tells such things is silent about more.

Tacet (is silent) here alludes to the fellatio of Callistratus at the same time as it accuses him of secrecy and duplicity about his proclivities.^[41] The same association is made in Catullus' poem 80:

Quid dicam, Gelli, quare rosea ista labella
     hiberna fiant candidiora nive,
mane domo cum exis et cum te octava quiete
     e molli longo suscitat hora die?
Nescioquid certe est: an vere fama susurrat
     grandia te medii tenta vorare viri?
Sic certest; clamant Victoris rupta miselli
     ilia et emulso labra notata sero.

Gellius, what reason should I give why those rosy lips
     become whiter than winter's snow,
In the morning when you leave home and when the eighth hour
     stirs you from your nap when the days are long?
Something is certainly up: does rumor whisper truly
     that you devour the great erection of a man's mid part?
It must be so; the broken loins of lovesick Victor shout it,
     and so do your lips marked by the whey you've milked.

Emerging from his home in the morning and after the midday siesta, Gellius carries a secret on his lips, which speak what they keep silent. His lips carry the mark of the censor, the nota (see OLD s.v. 4), placed in the census against the name of a citizen who had disgraced himself and was no longer considered fit to be enrolled among the knights.^[42] In this case, the innocent white lips of the victim become candid in spite of themselves, speaking what they hide, namely, the irrumatio that the poet is simultaneously revealing and performing.^[43] Catullus in fact appropriates the role of the irrumator from Victor, an ironic name because his

loins "shout" only insofar as they betray the signs of having been "broken" by the ministrations of Gellius.^[44] The victorious shout of the irrumator is mentioned only to be transferred from Victor to the poet who wields the pen.

Irrumatio in Catullus draws attention to a potentially aggressive aspect of poetry itself, which puts words into people's mouths; it speaks for everybody and everything while all else is silent (or mouthing its words), and it makes its subject matter take on the meanings of a single voice.^[45] But even when the poet is himself the object of irrumatio , he may, so to speak, enter it on the side of profit, for poetry allows him to speak from several positions at the same time.