Theft and Reclamation

The Catullan collection situates the poet as the arbiter of elegance of his circle, in which capacity he is more often than not exposing those who fail to meet his standards.^[16] Cicero gives us a sense of the watchful censoriousness of the connoisseurs of appropriate and sophisticated behavior at Rome when he speaks of the need to be constantly on guard against committing trivial faults of demeanor, unnoticed by the many, but detected by the observant, just as the slightest faults in tone are heard by the truly musical (De Off . 1.40–41). Here is Catullus playing the censor in poem 12:

Marrucine Asini, manu sinistra
non belle uteris: in ioco atque vino
tollis lintea neglegentiorum.
hoc salsum esse putas? fugit te inepte:
quamvis sordida res et invenusta est.
non credis mihi? crede Pollioni
fratri, qui tua furta vel talento
mutari velit . . . est enim leporum
differtus puer ac facetiarum.
quare ant hendecasyllabos trecentos
exspecta , aut mihi linteum remitte,
quod me non movet aestimatione,
verum est mnemosynum mei sodalis.
nam sudaria Saetaba ex Hiberis
miserunt mihi muneri Fabullus
et Veranius; haec amem necesse est
ut Veraniolum meum et Fabullum. (c.12)

Asinius Marrucinus, your left hand
you put to no good use, in wine and joking

you steal the napkins of your careless friends.
You call this wit? Deluded dolt:
The trick is sordid, tasteless as can be.
You don't believe me? Trust your brother
Pollio, who'd wish your thefts undone
at any price . . . for that's a boy stuffed full
of charms and witticisms.
So then, expect three hundred angry verses,
or give me back my napkin, not
that it concerns me for its value,
it's a souvenir of friends of mine.
Fabullus and Veranius sent as a gift
from Spain napkins of Saetabis;
these napkins I must hold as dear
as my Veranius and Fabullus too.

Like many of Catullus' squibs, this is a performance exhibiting the very qualities that the unfortunate victim is pilloried for lacking. Asinius' ineptia , the bad timing that makes this exhibition of wit out of place, is the occasion for Catullus' adroit compliment to Asinius' brother and for his neat acknowledgment of the gift from his friends. The poet's opportunism makes a silk purse out of the sow's ear of Asinius' inopportune joke.^[17] Of course, the clumsiness of Asinius is a matter of context: to filch people's napkins when they are off their guard and at their ease (neglegentiores) is to misread the situation. Catullus neatly creates this misreading by describing the circumstances of Asinius' theft as "in wine and joking"; Asinius thinks that it is he who is making the joke, but Catullus has the word ioco refer to the very conviviality that Asinius has violated.

It is Asinius' own brother who provides the evidence that there is a right and a wrong way to play the fool.^[18] But if Asinius' brother stands as evidence that it can be done correctly, Catullus himself provides the example, for in describing Pollio as "a boy stuffed full of charms and witticisms" he sets the crude colloquialism "stuffed full" (differtus, 9) in the midst of the language of urbanity and gets away with it.^[19] Catullus has himself performed the trick that Asinius could not pull off, exemplifying the wit that consists in the piquant interruption of a context (see Quintilian above) with his grossly physical word.^[20]

To reveal only at the end of the poem that the napkin that Asinius stole has a sentimental value is a sneaky move, but Catullus' timing in this poem has a purpose, and that is to raise and deflect the charge of ineptia (tastelessness) from his own complaint. It is hardly urbane to

make such a fuss about a napkin, and Catullus even encourages us to think that it may be a little materialistic (12). The urbanity of the poet's performance here lies in the graceful turn with which he avoids ineptia , whose spectre he has himself raised, just as the urbanity of the poem as a whole depends on the elegant exploitation of Asinius' ineptitude. In fact, the end of the poem is a clever and devastating theft of the napkin from Asinius himself, in the sense that the napkin has now come to represent the circle from which Asinius is excluded. Catullus has deffly turned the tables on the thief

Poem 12 is one of a number of poems in the polymetrics in which the poet sets himself up as an arbiter of elegance, including and excluding people from the circle of the urbani with sovereign confidence. In general, this aspect of the collection has been seen as the Roman contribution to Catullus' basically Alexandrian literary program, expanding the aesthetic values of the Alexandrians—particularly their concern with the careful cultivation of small-scale forms—into the social sphere, and laying claim to a new set of values instantiated by the lifestyle of the neoteric poets. Marilyn Skinner puts this view well:

His concern with standards of propriety ventures beyond the domain of literature to embrace a wide range of social usages. Here the artist's instinct for what is right and fitting becomes a touchstone for true refinement. The fastidious, cultured poet-critic is pressed into service as an arbiter elegantiae and a censor of conduct. His profession therefore takes on a new social importance, rivaling the ancient stature of the vates [poet-prophet] as spokesman for the now-moribund ancestral value system. In the ironic jargon of Catullus' circle, poems may be nugae and the craft of letters a ludus ; but, beneath the surface frivolity, the discipline of art inculcates abiding principles of good taste which can be developed into a general code of behavior.^[21]

Poem 12 becomes something like an Alexandrian literary manifesto translated into social terms, "another in the series of pieces preoccupied with lepor [charm], attempting to define what is and is not cultivated behavior" (59). But it is hard to see how this poem could be seen as an attempt to define anything. In fact, I would argue that the essential in definability of lepor is what makes Catullus' brilliant little performance possible. Asinius thinks that his behavior is witty, and by the end of the poem we are none the wiser as to why it isn't, nor as to what distinguishes it from his brother's lepores and facetiae , or the company's ioci (2); instead, we have witnessed a dazzling series of maneuvers that have shut

Asinius out of the elegant world it has created. There could be no "abiding principles of good taste" or "general code of behavior" for this society because improvisation and competition are the essence of its style of intercourse. The stability of the terms of approval and disapproval that are used by Catullus' circle misleads commentators into supposing that there are essences to be discovered "beneath the surface frivolity," though these terms are essentially about surfaces. When Skinner says that, at the end of poem 12, Catullus reveals that Asinius' "theft was loutish—because it unknowingly violated the intimate private relationship between Catullus and his sodales " (6O), she bypasses the strategic function of the revelation within the poem, which is to make the theft loutish. Catullus' explanation of why he cares about the napkin, and the role this explanation plays in the discomfiture of Asinius, are manifestations of lepor , but it is surely digging too deep to say that "the social ideals of lepor and venustas [grace, attractiveness] are now given a broader dimension by indirect association with a relationship marked by thoughtful recollection and deep mutual sympathy" (6O). Why "deep mutual sympathy" and "thoughtful recollection"? The diminutive form of Veranius' name in the last line brings out the fact that Fabullus' name is already a diminutive, of faba (bean);^[22] the companions are affectionately assimilated to the status of things, like the napkins that Catullus must love as much as their donors. Venustas attaches to this kind of superficial effect as much as to the relationship that it reflects.

I am suggesting that we restore its surface to Catullus' urbanitas and that we cease believing in him, in order to understand how the poem creates the impression of a "loutish transgression of intimacy" on Asinins' part. Skinner's treatment of poem 12 exemplifies a common tendency of scholarly discourse on Catullus, in which to write about Catullus is to confirm the gold reserves that guarantee the value of these "trifles" (nugae ). In this view, the napkin mediates between surface and depth: trivial yet important, it is the site where the deft instinct for what is right, manifested in the poem's aesthetic polish, is made to resonate with deeper moral issues of thoughtfulness and "deep mutual sympathy" in the circle of Catullus' friends. But suppose we see this napkin, alienable and yet not alienable, as the focal point of a struggle for the ownership of discourse; the issue, then, is not what the napkin signifies but who makes it signify and how. Catullus takes the napkin back by substituting his own meanings for those of Asinius. The piquant social opportunism of Asinius' theft is outbidded by Catullus' own counterperformance, which leaves Asinius deprived of the meaning that he wanted to give the

napkin, now endowed with meanings that he has made possible, but which exclude him. "You can't handle this stuff," the poem seems to say.

At this point it is worth looking at a comparable situation in one of Cicero's letters (ad Fam. 7. 32) in which the issue is the ownership of wit. Volumnius has informed Cicero that, in his absence from the city, the bons mots of all and sundry, even the appalling Sestius (who reappears in Catullus c.44), are being attributed to him. Cicero replies that Volumnius is not discharging his duty as superintendent of Cicero's salt mines (the source of his sales , "witticisms"). The city, he goes on to say, is so full of dregs that there is nothing so banal (akutheron^[*] ) that someone won't think it charming (venustum). Volumnius is begged to see that nothing save the cleverest witticisms are allowed to pass for Cicero's. The whole passage is itself an example of what Cicero calls eutrapelia (badinage),^[23] the quality in Volumnius' letter that identified it as coming from Volumnius Eutrapelus, and not another Volumnius with whom Cicero was in correspondence (7.32.1). As in Catullus' poem, the question of true wit is tied to the issue of ownership: if Sestius' witticisms can pass as Cicero's, then his ownership of his sales is at stake, and if the city cannot distinguish between the banal and the witty, then Cicero's own personality may be eroded in his absence. Cicero's witty—if rather labored—performance establishes the grounds of mutual recognition between himself and Volumnius, the grounds of a sure sense of self, and this recognition of identity depends on the exclusion of others. Like Catullus, Cicero uses the depredations of another on what is his own to establish the circle of the likeminded.

Catullus and Cicero lived during a period in which individuality and individual style were becoming increasingly important.^[24] Poem 12 of Catullus, like the letter of Cicero, reflects the competitive context in which personal style is established or vindicated. The true progeny of Catullus' poem are not Martial's attacks on napkin stealers (8.59, 12.29) but his many poems against plagiarists, especially 1.38, where he tells the unfortunate Fidentinus, who is reciting Martial's poems as his own, that he recites them so badly that they have truly become his.^[25] Though Catullus' poem is not specifically about plagiarism, it is similar in that Asinius is lambasted for poaching on what Catullus now proves to be his own preserve. Rather than reflecting or exemplifying values, this poem establishes them by means of a manuever that cannot then be eliminated to reveal a pure ethical residue.

Let me broaden the context by comparing the napkin of poem 12 with the perfume of poem 13. Both of these poems are about dinners

and what people bring to them.^[26] Figuratively, the napkin that the Roman guest brings to a dinner links the society that is created by the occasion to the other worlds of the guest who owns it. Poem 12 has Catullus reclaiming what he brought to the gathering by creating another society from which the thieving dinner companion is excluded. In the next poem, Catullus invites Fabullus to dinner and describes their respective contributions to this potluck:

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
cenam non sine candida puella
et vino et sale et omnibus cacchinnis.
haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli
plenus sacculus est aranearum.
sed contra accipies meros amores
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est:
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque,
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis,
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.

You will dine well, my Fabullus, at my place
in a few days, if the gods favor you,
if you bring with you a good and a large
meal, not forgetting a lovely girl
with wine and salt [or wit] and all kinds of laughter.
If, as I say, you bring all this, my charming friend,
you will dine well; for your Catullus'
purse is full of cobwebs.
But in return you will receive pure love,
or anything more pleasant and more elegant:
for I will give you perfume, which the Venuses
and Cupids gave to my girl,
and when you smell that you will ask the gods,
Fabullus, to make you into one big nose.

Instead of taking back what has been appropriated by another diner, Catullus is here giving what belongs to another (Lesbia) to his own dinner guest. I described Catullus' napkin in c. 12 as the site of a struggle over the control of discourse, but what of Lesbia's perfume? First of all, the perfume acquires its aroma from the preposterous balance of contributions to the impending dinner: Fabullus, the guest, is to bring all

the usual ingredients of a good party and Catullus, the host, will provide the costly but inessential garnish. On Catullus' home turf, the concepts of hospitality and of successful entertainment are open to redefinition: Fabullus will trade in all his other senses to boost his sense of smell.^[27] Catullus' invitation transforms giving into taking as the host strips his guest down to his nose, dramatizing a specialization of the senses that is part of any aesthetic transaction.

The dinner is the site of urbanity par excellence, a place both of sharing and of competition, as these poems make abundantly clear.^[28] In the case of Catullus' impending dinner, the items that will be enjoyed by the participants stand in a competitive relation to each other: the chaotic list of things that Fabullus must bring is answered by the distillations that Catullus has to offer: "pure love" (meros amores, 9) and perfume.^[29] Fabullus will bring a beautiful girl, but Catullus will provide the essence of the relation of his girl to the Venuses and Cupids. The perfume is generously overdetermined: a commodity that has a real, though nonculinary function for the dinner, it also suggests a substitute food—the gods, after all, consume the aroma of our sacrifices—as well as the essence of sex appeal.^[30]

There has been much discussion about the perfume that the Venuses and Cupids have given to Lesbia (if indeed she is the puella ). Is there a sexual double entendre here (vaginal secretions)?^[31] Is this simply an elegant way of referring to "the alluring fragrance of [Lesbia's] person"?^[32] Or are we to understand it as perfume and no more? That the Venuses and Cupids should have given the perfume to Lesbia does seem to associate it with her allure. If there is a sexual allusion in the perfume, then there is also a possibility of double entendre in Fabullus' predicted response, for the nose and the penis are related in Roman culture as they are in others.^[33] I am not suggesting that Catullus is offering Lesbia sexually to his guest; rather, I would put it like this: smelling the perfume is to enjoying Lesbia as smelling the aroma of food is to eating—if you are human you are tantalized, but if you are a god you are satisfied. Fabullus will be both tantalized and apotheosized by his experience.

The ambiguous status of the perfume. which has so provoked the curiosity of commentators, is consistent with the unorthodox character of the invitation, which subverts the usual relationship between host and guest; neither guest nor reader gets quite what he or she wants, though both are seduced into accepting Catullus' terms. Catullus' provocative invitation raises the issue of what can and what can't be shared: Fabullus' "lovely girl" (candida puella) takes her place in a list of conventional

requisites against which the perfume is pitted, and the perfume is the mode of Fabullus' indirect enjoyment of Lesbia, of her mediated availability. On the one hand, the perfume is a particularly personal and intimate offering to the guest, but, on the other hand, it distinguishes the mode of Lesbia's availability to Fabullus from that of the girl that he will provide. Like the napkin of poem 12, then, the perfume is the instrument both of inclusion and exclusion; what is more, Fabullus, an insider to the world of the napkin from which Asinius is excluded (c.12), finds himself in the next poem a guest who is regaled with an essence that is an absence. Where Asinius the prankster thief has and yet doesn't have what belongs to Catullus, Fabullus the guest is and yet isn't invited to share in the host's most intimate world. In this respect, Fabullus is like the reader, whose satisfaction is defined in relation to the exchange he or she has been persuaded to make, an exchange whose inequality must be compensated by a shift in value and a specialization of the senses.

In general, Catullus' urbanity is better understood as something more like a game than "a disposition, a way of thinking, almost an aura."^[34] As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, urbanitas is essentially undefinable, so that the urbane speaker can only lay claim to it through acts of inclusion and exclusion. Catullus' poetry is created in a society that is defining itself in terms of new kinds of social games, and the poetry itself plays a role in the development of this new form of self-definition; this accounts for the fact that the poems explore aspects of the relational dynamics of the lyric genre analogous to the dynamics of certain social games. So poem 12 reminds us that the poem takes language back from other potential users to prove that it belongs here and always did ("You can't handle this stuff").^[35] Poem 13 tells us about the curious, and somewhat competitive, relation between host and guest—that is, poet and reader—constituted by a poem: we are invited in only to be shown that we will gladly accept any terms the poet cares to impose, even, perhaps especially, if he persuades us to trade what we do have for what we can't have, our own world for a whiff of his.^[36]

Besides poem 12, Catullus wrote two other poems reclaiming his property from a thief, poems 25 and 42. In poem 42, he summons his iambics to assail the woman who has stolen his writing tablets, denouncing her publicly and repeatedly as a "filthy whore" (putida moecha, 11, 12, 19, 20). Because the woman has no shame, Catullus is eventually forced to change his tack and address her as "modest and upright" (pudica et proba, 24). Clearly the theft is here implicated with a struggle for the control of discourse, and in this poem the poet appears

to lose the struggle, for the target of invective who does not recognize the rules of the game escapes his power. In poem 25, a conciliatory tone is adopted from the beginning, but it is sarcastic; the singsong meter and the mimicking effect of the diminutives indicate that the language is parodic:^[37]

Cinaede Thalle, mollior cuniculi capillo
vel anseris medullula vel imula oricilla
vel pene languido senis situque araneoso,
idemque, Thalle, turbida rapacior procella,
cum diva +mulier aries+ ostendit oscitantes,
remitte pallium mihi meum quod involasti,
sudariumque Saetabum catagraphosque Thynos,
inepte, quae palam soles habere tamque avita.
quae nunc tuis ab unguibus reglutina et remitte,
ne laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas
inusta turpiter tibi flagella conscribillent,
et insolenter aestues, velut minuta magno
deprensa navis in mari, vesaniente vento. (c.25)

Thallus, you queer, softer than the down of rabbits
or goose's marrow or the teeny earlobe,
or an old man's languid penis, or a cobweb,
Thallus, sometimes more grasping than a violent storm,
when the goddess . . . shows them yawning,
return that cloak of mine you pounced on,
and my Spanish napkin and Bithynian cloths,
which foolishly you tout as family heirlooms.
Unglue them from your hands and send them back,
or whips will brand you, scribbled with your shame
across your fleecy little flanks and softest hands,
until you seethe and toss just like a tiny ship
caught in a blustering sea, not with your usual pleasure.

Thallus is a paradoxical mixture of limp passivity and voraciousness, and Catullus' response to his theft is a kind of chant in which the tones of threat and endearment are mingled.^[38] The wit of the poem lies in the appropriation of the tone of Thallus, or of a cooing lover of the same. As in the case of the unfortunate Asinius, Catullus' performance is itself a form of theft, because Thallus' language is stolen and turned against him. But Thallus' crime is not just theft, for he has brazenly displayed Catullus' property as though it were part of his heirloom, rather as Asinius tried to involve Catullus' property in a display of his own sal . In response, Catullus threatens to set the delicate body of Thallus on fire

in a novel way; the phrase "insolenter aestues" (you will burn/seethe unwontedly, 12) announces that he has turned the tables on the thief, whose characteristic writhings will take on an unaccustomed form at his hands in recompense for the fact that he displays as his own what he stole from Catullus. The word aestues combines the senses of sexual excitement, burning pain, and turbulent motion; not only does it give Thallus' customary (solitus) but immoderate (insolens) desire an unaccustomed sense, but it also makes him both a manifestation and a victim of the storm that figures his own rapacity (procella, 4). The aggressive turbulence of Thallus' rapacity is turned against him as his seething (aestues, 12) comes to signify the bobbing of a boat on a turbulent sea, which in turn describes his writhings under Catullus' lash.

Thallus' name is Greek (young shoot, branch), which probably means that he is to be thought of as a freedman. Certainly, freedman status would make his display of (stolen) ancestral property appropriately out of place (inepte, 8). "Thallus" may also suggest "phallus," both aurally and semantically, and this gives an extra bite to the comparison of Thallus' softness with the languid penis of an old man (3).^[39] Furthermore, the name features the "I" characteristic of diminutive formations, a letter that was thought to signify softness.^[40] Characteristically, Catullus here plays with words that look as if they might be diminutives in a context rife with them.^[41] The fact that some of the very words that convey violence and aggression in this poem have the look of diminutives (procella, 4; flagella, conscribillent, II) is part of the poem's strategy of using Thallus' tone against him. Thallus' storm of rapacity is neutralized by the assimilation of the word for "storm" (procella) to the language of pathic softness, and the punishment described in line II seems to be generated by Thallus' own proclivities; in fact, the word flagellum (whip) is commonly and figuratively used in Latin for the young shoot of a vine or other plant—in other words, it means the same as the Greek thallos .^[42]

As in poem 12, Catullus here perpetrates a form of theft against the accused thief; in this case, it is Thallus' display of the stolen items "as heirlooms" that provokes him to appropriate the language of Thallus' softness and make it serve his own purposes. But there may be a closer parallel to poem 12, for the diminutives that belong to the style of the pathic are also an important component of the language of the urbani ;^[43] Thallus' language, like Asinius' would-be sal , has been stolen from the urbani , or so the poems would have us believe. By mimicking the language of the pathic—holding it in suspension—Catullus becomes the urbane speaker who gets away with what Thallus can't, and again

the ineptus is cast as a thief in order to reflect the urbanus ' control of language.

Combining preciosity with violence, Catullus threatens to cover Thallus' body with scribbles (conscribillent, II), a form of writing that reflects both the anger of Catullus and the sinuous softness of Thallus.^[44] Conscribillent , a compound of the intensive cum and a diminutive form of scribo , echoes the Greek word catagraphos (figured cloths) in line 7, a word similarly formed from a preposition (kata) and the verb "to write" (graphein). Thallus' body, then, is to become a "written" artifact that parodies the patterned material from Bithynia that he has stolen from Catullus, and this artifact can only be displayed to Thallus' shame (II). What has been stolen from Catullus is an aesthetic object with "graphic" associations;^[45] in claiming it back, Catullus makes of the very body of the thief a display of his own writing by robbing Thallus of his language. The napkin of poem 12, the perfume of poem 13, and the catagraphi of poem 25 (with their parodic substitute, Thallus' body) are all objects implicated in a struggle for control and ownership, whether through the relation of thief to victim, joker to dupe, or host to guest. In each case, Catullus redefines the ground of the relationship in the process of constituting these objects as aesthetic, giving them an aura that derives from their stubborn resistance to appropriation. The situations in these poems figure the inherently aggressive relation toward language's other potential users on the part of the poet who claims the power to manipulate language and to make of it an aesthetic object.

Catullus' greeting of Ameana, the girlfriend of Mamurra whom the province (Gallia Cisalpina) unaccountably considers a rival to Lesbia, is another case of the poet taking back something that has been stolen, in this case the very primacy of Lesbia:

Salve, nec minimo puella naso
nec bello pede nec nigris ocellis
nec longis digitis nec ore sicco
nec sane nimis elegante lingua,
decoctoris amica Formiani.
ten provincia narrat esse bellum?
tecum Lesbia nostra comparatur?
o saeclum insapiens et infacetum! (c.43)

Hail, girl with a nose none too neat,
nor a pretty foot, nor jet-black eyes,
nor tapering fingers, nor a dry mouth,
nor indeed too elegant a tongue,

girlfriend of the Formian bankrupt.
Does the province call you beautiful?
Is our Lesbia compared to you?
O tasteless, witless age!

Taking the opinion of the province at face value, the poem lists the attributes that this paragon of beauty must possess, but only to find each of them lacking.^[46] What might have been a succession of insults becomes instead a withholding of the standard litany of praise. But a mere list of attractive attributes cannot account for the allure that transcends its components, or for the piquancy (sal) that attracts the truly sophisticated (compare c. 86); those intangibles are lacking in Ameana as surely as the tangibles that are listed. It is the sly tone of Catullus' greeting, a wry puzzlement resisting the pull of the standard litany of beauty, that itself provides the something else which is lacking from the list of what Ameana lacks. As Catullus cancels out each attribute that would warrant the province's opinion of Ameana, he mimics the squandering of the spendthrift Mamurra, Ameana's lover. But this squandering (decoctio) becomes in Catullus' mouth a decoction of elegance, and in the process he himself exemplifies the elegant tongue that Ameana lacks.^[47]