Obscene Relations, Interchangeable Bodies

The body of Gellius is the ultimate in impurity, for not only is his mouth sullied by contact with his penis but his self-consuming

body has also lost its differentiation. Aemilius, with his confusion of mouth and anus, provides an obvious comparison, but Egnatius, the Spaniard who cleans his teeth with his own urine (c.39), is similar case. An interesting extension of the body in which pure and impure are confused or fused is provided by the complementary and chiastic bodies of Vibennius and his son:

O furum optime balneariorum
Vibenni pater et cinaede fili
(nam dextra pater inquinatiore,
culo filius est voraciore),
cur non exilium malasque in oras
itis? quandoquidem patris rapinae
notae sunt populo, et natis pilosas,
fili, non potes asse venditare. (c.33)

O best of bathouse thieves,
father Vibennius and pathic son
(for the father has the dirtier right hand,
the son the more voracious asshole),
why don't you go into exile in evil
climes? Since the father's thefts
are known to the populace, and your hairy
buttocks, son, won't sell for a cent.

The father steals and the son sells;^[69] their respective activities are represented by different parts of the anatomy and together they produce a perverse anatomy in which hand and anus exchange qualities, for one might as easily call the thieving hand "insatiable" and the anus, venal or otherwise, "dirty."^[70] To confuse the right hand, pledge of fides (trustworthiness), with the anus is to confuse the pure with the impure, as does the body of Aemilius. But categories are further confused by the pun on natis (buttocks) and nati (son), for we expect the latter after patris in the same metrical position of the previous line: familial position is replaced with body part. In the hierarchy of the body, buttocks and anus are related to the right hand as impure to pure, and, in the hierarchy of the family, son is related to father as powerless to powerful; but this symmetry only accentuates the contamination of the higher category (family) with the lower (body). In the second line of the poem, a similar collapsing of hierarchical systems occurs when the father is hailed as "Vibenni pater" and the son as "cinaede fili": both son and cinaedus (pathic) occupy the negative position of a dyadic relationship. If cinaede replaces the name that is demanded by symmetry with "Vibenni pater,"

and the son remains nameless throughout, it is because the indiscriminacy of the son's sexual subordination contaminates the filial subordination that would give him a name. The father appropriates what is not his own and the son has no sense of what is "proper" to him, though, paradoxically, this appears as a form of voraciousness. Son and father are both complementary and interchangeable; as a unit they are obscene because they produce a confusion of categories and a promiscuous profusion of relations that could also be described as poetic.

Consider by comparison the family unit of Furius and his father and stepmother (c.23), a happy little trio with amazing digestions:^[71]

Furi, cui neque servus est neque arca
nec cimex neque araneus neque ignis,
verum est et pater et noverca, quorum
dentes vel silicem comesse possunt,
est pulcre tibi cum tuo parente
et cum coniuge lignea parentis. (23.1–6)

Furius, who have neither servant nor cashbox
nor bedbug nor spider nor fire,
though you do have a father and stepmother,
whose teeth could eat even flint,
you get on well, you and your parent
and the wooden wife of your parent.

The stepmother is always a sinister figure in the Roman family; she is to familial relationship what stone is to food and what wood is to body.^[72] This anti-family has bodies that are "dryer than bone" (12), a sign of health,^[73] though in this case it results from poverty (14). Catullus, who reveals at the end of the poem that he is refusing Furius' request for a loan, is ironically casting the latter's poverty as happiness. The poem ends with Catullus assuring Furius that he is "satis beatus," which means both "happy enough" and "rich enough."^[74] This paradoxically happy misery is expressed with a particularly graphic account of the fact that Furius is not polluted by his own bodily discharges:

A te sudor abest, abest saliva,
mucusque et mala pituita nasi.
hunc ad munditiem adde mundiorem,
quod culus tibi purior salillo est,
nec toto decies cacas in anno,
atque id durius est faba et lapillis;
quod tu si manibus teras fricesque
non umquam digitum inquinare posses.

You have no sweat and no saliva,
no mucus or nasty snot in your nose.
To this cleanliness add something cleaner,
that your asshole is purer than a saltcellar,
nor do you shit ten times in the whole year,
and that  is harder than beans and pebbles;
if you were to rub it and chafe it in your hands
you would never be able to dirty your hand.

The curious thing about this body is that the anus could not pollute mouth (via saltcellar) or hand;^[75] it is not so much a body without impurities as a body without relations, a body whose parts are interchangeable and not related or complementary to each other through the usual distinctions between purity and pollution. The description of this perverse cleanliness, however, is disgusting in the extreme because what is absent has nevertheless been conjured up quite graphically and with considerable relish. Once again, the obscenity of the body being described is related to some capacity of poetry itself that the reader experiences with mixed sensations.

When Catullus speaks of Furius' family, he tells him "est pulcre tibi cum tuo parente . . .," which means either "you get on well with your father [and stepmother]" or "you're a fortunate fellow, and so is your father [and stepmother]." We might say of the family of Furius that the "good fortune" of its several members—their similarly dry and efficiently digesting bodies—substitutes for a relation between them; in other words, one sense of "est pulcre" competes with another.^[76] The family "body" is as dysfunctional here as in the case of Vibennius and his son, but in the opposite way.

Catullus fobs off the importunate Furius with his "happy" family; it is interesting to see the ironic use of the happy family theme recur with a similar phrasing in Catullus' attack on Caesar:

Pulcre convenit improbis cinaedis
Mamurrae pathicoque Caesarique.
nec mirum: maculae pares utrique,
urbana altera, et illa Formiana,
impressae resident nec eluentur;
morbosi pariter, gemelli utrique,
uno in lecticulo erudituli ambo,
non hic quam ille magis vorax adulter,
rivales socii puellularum.
pulcre convenit improbis cinaedis.

The shameless effeminates agree quite nicely,
Mamurra the pathic and Caesar too.
No wonder: stains, equal in each case,
one from the city, the other from Formiae,
are deep ingrained and can't be scrubbed away.
Equally perverted, twinned and reversible,
both quite learned on the same little bench,
one no less greedy an adulterer than the other,
rival comrades of and for the girls.
The shameless effeminates agree quite nicely.

"Pulcre convenit" (there's a nice agreement) works like "est pulcre" in Poem 23: the "agreement" is both a relationship and a similarity between the two principals. Here, and even more emphatically, one sense interferes with the other, for the implications of sexual relationship in convenit (OLDS.V. 1c) make the fact that Caesar and Mamurra are both cinaedi somewhat inconvenient but, as we shall see, not disastrous.^[77] The poem plays persistently on the notion of the pair, which appears in several, sometimes paradoxical, forms and produces a perverse unit out of the friends.^[78]Rivales socii puellularum translates both as "rival comrades for the girls," meaning that the two men compete for the favors of women, and as "rivals of the girls," meaning that they compete against women for the favors of other men. If, further, the two men are morbosi (perverted) and adulteri in the same bed, then they are participants in a threesome and so rivals in both senses at the same time.^[79]

Calling the two men gemelli , Catullus not only claims that they are twins but also that they are both "double in form."^[80] Suetonius tells us that Caesar was called "the man of all women and the woman of all men,"^[81] so the word may be echoing a common insult, in which case the two men are both identical to each other and different within themselves. The poem creates an endlessly adaptable pair, whose similarity in no way prevents them from a form of intercourse that is usually predicated on difference.

With respect to the body politic, the obscene confusion of the pairing in this poem reflects a political scandal in which the hierarchy and competition that should work to control the behavior of individuals has broken down.^[82] Catullus' invective against Mamurra and Caesar is directed against the "nice little understanding" that closes this pair off from the control of the society on which they prey. The private understandings and arrangements that challenge the power of the collectivity,

as Veyne would put it, are displayed by the public performance of Catullus' language.

In poems 33, 23, and 57, familial and political order, with their rigid hierarchies, positions, and articulations, are reflected and perverted in the order of and between bodies. As we have seen, there are also relations within the society of the poem—poet, poem, and reader—to be expressed through the figure of the obscene body and its functions, charged as it is with notions of domination and subordination, purity and contamination, and focused as it so often is on the mouth as the site of these relations. Although pleasure is seldom a factor in Roman obscenity, when obscenity enters the fluid and often paradoxical world of the textual, as it does in poem 28, pleasure puts in a disruptive appearance that unsettles the rigid positionalities of Roman social relations.