Understanding Catullus

If the author is first of all a position within a pantheon whose layout accommodates certain agendas, the author also categorizes a position or perhaps a role to be adopted by the reader/critic. How has the Catullan scholar positioned him- or herself in relation to Catullus? For the most part, this position can be understood in terms of a narrative of love and betrayal that has been elaborated from the collection: Catullus' betrayal by a woman who failed to understand the nature of his love, and by a society that gave him no context in which to pursue this love, is compensated by the understanding of the modern scholar.

The founding act of modern scholarship on Catullus is the identification of the woman behind the name Lesbia, the beloved who features in a number of poems, scattered throughout the collection, that together imply a love affair rich in vicissitude and emotional drama. Catullus' Lesbia was identified by the founder of modern criticism of Catullus, Ludwig Schwabe, with the infamous Clodia, scion of one of the most distinguished Roman families, sister of the rabble-rousing tribune Clodius and wife of the consul of 60 B.C.E. , Metellus.^[10] We know of Clodia almost exclusively from hostile male sources, mainly Cicero, the antagonist of her brother Clodius. With this identification, the scholarly project of reconstructing a chronology of Catullus' poetry is inaugurated, and with it the critical project of elaborating the archetypal story of a love affair, told, of course, from the point of view of the disappointed and betrayed Catullus. The identification of Lesbia with Clodia Metelli has become the orthodoxy at least partly due to the overwhelming power of Cicero's vitriolic portrayal of Clodia in the Pro Caelio . In that speech, Cicero claims that the charges against his client, Clodia's erstwhile lover

Caelius, have been trumped up by Clodia as revenge for his rejection of her, and he spends a great deal of the speech defaming Clodia with a scurrilous, heavy-handed wit.

In a very real sense, Cicero has been made into the first reader and critic of Catullus.^[11] The recognition of the Lesbia of Catullus in the Clodia of Cicero's Pro Caelio comes with the adoption of a certain rhetoric about Lesbia. It also provides an analogy for the position of the critic with respect to Catullus in Cicero's advocacy of Caelius, the spurned lover of Clodia. Just as Cicero cleverly detached his client Caelius from the moral opprobrium he heaped on Caelius' mistress Clodia, so the Catullan critic has spoken with stern morality about one member of an adulterous liaison (Lesbia) and deep understanding about the other (Catullus).^[12] The critic's job, like the advocate's, would seem to be to make the best possible case for his client's point of view.

The critic who is advocate of Catullus and antagonist of Lesbia is also, potentially, a substitute for Lesbia. In "The Scholars," Yeats milks the irony of bald scholars toiling over their Catullus:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.^[13]

As any of the respectable bald heads could have told Yeats, Catullus' Lesbia was anything but ignorant, hence the pseudonym that associates her with Sappho.^[14] But Yeats, like so many poets, has found in Catullus a soulmate, and in doing so he has destroyed his own irony, for if beauty's ear is ignorant then it is entirely appropriate that bald heads should edit and annotate the lines that their intended audience failed to appreciate. Although no modern scholar would cast Lesbia as a philistine, it is a commonplace of Catullan criticism that Lesbia was unable to comprehend Catullus' conception of love, a conception that it is the critic's task to explicate. So the understanding that the critic extends to Catullus compensates for Lesbia's failure, which in turn situates the critic's labor.

A recent study of Catullus, Eve Adler's Catullan Self-Revelation , explicitly adopts this model of the relation between poet and reader that underlies so much work on Catullus.^[15] " According to Adler, the poems are a systematic self-revelation whose aim is "the perfection of others' ability to know him rightly, and thus the disavowal of false friends and

the education of true ones. In this way it could come about that the reader of Catullus' poems becomes his pupil and even, possibly, his friend" (41). In Lesbia Catullus "has created for himself in her, by the relationship he assumes with her, the one woman who is loved both as man and woman. This is the unique woman to whom his love poems are poems of self-revelation, as are his poems to friends, and whose betrayal of him, like his friends' betrayals, can be understood as . . . her failure to know him as he knows himself" (163). Lesbia's betrayal of Catullus here stands for all betrayals that must be rectified by the critic, who understands Catullus better; paving the way for the work of the critic, Lesbia's betrayal situates the reader in a triangular relation between poet, lover, and reader.

Adler understands the relation between poet and reader or critic as personal, but others would have us understand Catullus better than those who betrayed him by virtue of our historical perspective. "Catullus" in this case is the name of a relation to the past, a voice that we recognize calling to us from its Roman prison, a yearning to which we can give a name better than he could. What Catullus feels for Lesbia, according to the most common understanding, is something for which there is no language in Latin, a feeling that will have to await Christianity, Romanticism, and modern conceptions of marriage to find an adequate linguistic and institutional expression.^[16] Catullus, according to one of his most recent interpreters, is the frustrated prophet of "whole love," a position first espoused by Copley in 1949.^[17] Commenting on poem 85 ("I hate and I love"), Copley diagnoses the torment of Catullus:

At the risk of oversimplifying and importing into an ancient author concepts strictly modern, one might say that it is not so much his heart as his conscience that is putting him on the rack. . . . Well might his contemporaries ask "quare id facis?" ["Why do you do this?" i.e., hate and love] for they could have had no conception of his feelings. For that matter, Catullus himself does not know why he suffers so—witness the despairing nescio ["I don't know"] which he offers in reply. . . . The modern, backed by his tradition of romantic love, can understand Catullus better than could the poet himself, for it is now commonly accepted . . . that desire is right only when it is accompanied by love. . . . To be conscious of doing wrong, but not to know why the wrong is wrong—this is indeed excruciari [to be tortured].^[18]

Victim of his own historical moment, this Catullus allows us both to experience the past as the birth-pangs of the present and to rescue his suffering soul from its own confusion and from the incomprehension of his beloved. In Catullus we are supposed to witness the Roman wanting to become modern, and in this respect reception of Catullus is similar

to that of Vergil as the "naturally Christian soul." The historical novels that locate an alienated and, to his fellows, enigmatic Catullus in the exciting but decadent world of the last decades of the Republic use the figure of Catullus to project into the ancient world a sensibility that is potentially modern. It is the modern reader who claims to possess the key to this contradictory and complex character, hence the title of the most recent of the Catullan novels, Benita Kay Jaro's The Key .^[19] My point here is that the theme of betrayal and incomprehension in Catullus' poetry has been elaborated by criticism so as to position the reader/critic as someone who can supply what the text and its author need and at the same time to give an affective content to the labor of intepretation.