Chapter 8
The Death of a Brother
Displacement and Expression
In the previous chapter, we saw Catullus position his own poetic power in relation to his victimized persona. This chapter finds Catullus in situations where contradictory claims are made on his poetic expression, and in response to these situations he produces some of his most complex and experimental poetry. The contradictory claims made on the poet raise the issues of where he speaks from and of how the poem is produced, questions that provoke him to explore the various displacements through which poetic expression is mediated. Again, a potential weakness becomes an occasion for displaying some of the distinctive capacities of poetic discourse, in this case the layerings and simultaneities through which Catullus handles the divergent demands on his expression. But the problem of where the poet speaks from is not only a generic matter, it also concerns the complex cultural identity of Catullus, the Roman poet from Transpadane Gaul with Alexandrian affiliations. This conflicted cultural identity is raised by Catullus' reaction to the death of his brother, a motif that unites most of the poems I will be dealing with in this chapter.
Apart from the liaison with Lesbia, the main biographical motif in Catullus' poetry is the death of his brother, somewhere in the Troad. Three poems directly refer to this event, if such it is: the poem spoken at his brother's grave and ending with the famous words "hail and farewell" (c.101), and two poems addressed to friends who have asked him for poetry, which he claims he is unable to produce while his mind is occupied with grief (cc.65, 68). In fact, Catullus does send poetry to
these friends, in one case a translation of Callimachus (c.66), and in the other a letter of thanks to a third person who loaned him a house for his rendezvous with Lesbia (c.68.41–160). All of these poems are concerned with displacement, for though his brother's death displaces all other concerns from Catullus' mind, it also prevents direct communication with his brother, so that even the words spoken at the graveside are provisional; the poem produced for his friend Ortalus is a translation that displaces the poet's own expression with the words of another, and the poem for his friend Mallius a letter of thanks to another friend (Allius).[1] In the wake of his brother's death, poetic expression becomes problematic for Catullus insofar as its origin (the poet's mind) is preoccupied and its ideal destination (the brother) is removed. If Catullus can, and must, write from other motives than grief for his brother, then has he not betrayed that grief? Or is there a model of how a poem is produced that will obviate this clash of expressive demands? And if poetic expression does not emanate from a single center, then how can it be sincere? Where does the poet speak from and where (or how) does the poem go?
Clearly, part of the answer to the question of where the poet speaks from involves his cultural identity, and the experience of displacement in these poems extends into the geographical and cultural when Catullus travels to Troy, origin of the Romans' great ancestor, to greet his brother (c.101), and then holes himself up in provincial Verona to mourn him (c.68). Catullus was born and raised in Verona in Transpadane Gaul, a part of Italy anxious to shed its connections to the barbarian world and to be incorporated in the world of Rome, within which its status was rising fast during the late Republic.[2] As an upper-class provincial, he was able to make his name at Rome through literature, a newly, and still partially, respectable calling for a Roman.[3] His professed literary affiliation was with the poets of Alexandrian Greece, and Rome itself, the conqueror of Greece and capital of a growing empire, had for some time been permeated by an Hellenistic cultural influence of which much of its political elite was suspicious.[4] As we shall see, Rome, Verona, and Hellenistic Alexandria are all places from which the poet speaks in the poems dealing with his brother's death, and the relation between these locations, and what they represent, is not always comfortable. But the most famous of these poems (c.101) finds Catullus at Troy, for centuries the most literary of places and now, suddenly, the scene of a personal tragedy.
Trojan Reunion
When Catullus' brother dies at Troy, Catullus writes a poem, spoken from the graveside, that begins with a reference to that great poem of homecoming, the Odyssey , but this new poem is troubled in its sense of place and time:
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias
Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. (c.101)
Transported through many peoples and through many seas
I come, brother, to these unhappy funeral rites,
so that I might present you with the last gift of death
and might address in vain the mute ash.
Because fortune has taken your person from me,
alas, poor brother, taken unjustly from me,
Now, for the meantime, receive what is given as a sad gift
at the funeral in accordance with the ancient custom of
our fathers, wet with a brother's copious weeping,
and forever, brother, hail and farewell.
Reversing the movement of the Odyssey from Troy to home, Catullus arrives "through many peoples and through many seas" (compare Homer, Od. 1.1–4) to perform the final rites for the dead.[5] Odysseus is reunited with his wife, but Catullus' reunion with his brother is at the same time a definitive separation. Odysseus' return to Ithaca inaugurates the resumption of tradition; Catullus, it is true, performs the rites of ancestral tradition in this outlandish place, but these rites are only a substitute for the communion with his brother that death has rendered impossible. The moment and the place of this poem are full of contradictions, condensed into the final "hail and farewell," words that both accompany the ceremony and gesture toward a communication that transcends its inadequate formulae.[6] It is toward these simple gestures
of hailing and bidding farewell that the poem moves, putting behind it the burden of futile and ironic preliminaries. Both gestures assume a presence that death has in fact removed, and yet the placing of this composite and contradictory gesture at the poem's end aligns the moment of Catullus' address to his brother with the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the completed poem, which flashes into presence only to merge with silence. The modern German poet Paul Celan, also deeply concerned with remembering the dead, has remarked that "a poem asserts itself on the edge of itself," a description appropriate to Catullus' displacement of the poem's burden to a point both of arrival and of severance, where the rhythm of the poem touches the time that resumes when it ends.[7] It is at this liminal point that the reader of the poem is most conscious of the gap across which the poem speaks, a gap that for most of its readers includes the poet's own death. To read this poem is to address to Catullus the very greeting he addressed to his brother, as the many poems hailing Catullus as brother attest (see chap. 9). So communication across the grave proves possible, but only if the addressee is displaced by Catullus himself, for it is only the poem as poem that can overcome the futility of the poem's address to the dead. In this connection, Catullus' "meanwhile" (interea, 7) suggests that the poem is provisional in the sense that it will only activate its system of positions once the poet has died. A written poem is a communication in which one or other of the parties is absent—depending on whether you look at it from the poet's or the reader's point of view—and this is what makes Catullus' address to his dead brother reversible.
The fact that Catullus' poem threatens to make him the recipient of the final "hail and farewell" is not the only ambiguity in the poet's position. It is not clear, for instance, whether Catullus is offering his brother what ancient custom has "handed down" (tradita) to him as a "sad duty" (tristi munere) to the dead or what is "handed over" (tradita) as a "sad gift" (tristi munere) to the dead;[8] the ambiguity of the phrasing points to a situation in which Catullus is both active (as gift giver) and passive (as recipient of a duty). This ambiguity applies also to the logic of the reference to the Odyssey , for it is poignantly inappropriate that, reversing the Odyssey , Catullus has gone to Troy to be reunited with his brother, and yet it is entirely appropriate that the Roman should find his brother at the home of Rome's great ancestor. If Catullus the brother experiences a tragic parody of Odyssean homecoming, Catullus the Roman distinguishes himself from the Greek Odysseus by returning to the Troy that is Rome's origin.[9] When he follows the ancient custom of
his ancestors at Troy, the moment is both familial and national, and, if the Odyssean parallel gives a bitter quality to the family reunion, it also overlays that event with the proud cultural claims of Rome to Trojan ancestry, for the speaker of this poem is not only a grieving brother but also a Roman poet. In fact, Catullus finds that, at the moment of severance from his brother (which perhaps signals the end of his family line, c.68.22), he is also the nodal point in the sustaining of a long tradition. The mythical reference inserts the event into a scale that changes its valences, and on this larger scale the words of this poet of a world-historical Rome are themselves handed down (tradita) so that the modern reader can address the poet. The words of the poem, then, are spoken from several positions that tend to displace each other.
In the paired poems poems 65 and 66, a covering letter to Ortalus and the translation of Callimachus sent as a substitute for poems that grief prevent him from writing, Catullus juxtaposes a quintessentially Alexandrian jeu d'esprit against a very Roman poem about obligations and responsibility. As we shall see, these poems are engaged in a complex, and at times disturbing, dialogue about poetic expression and sincerity.
Poetry and Expression
The futile attempt, in poem 101, to communicate with his dead brother displaces Catullus' utterance into larger contexts, so that the intimate gesture on the edge of the poem reaches toward the poem's unknown destinations. In poem 65, the duty to mourn his brother conflicts in the poet's mind with obligation to a friend, each demand threatening to displace the other and producing a poem that attempts to find a model of poetic production that will accommodate this double origin. How can he simultaneously do justice to both of these claims? Can he be mindful both of the words of his friend's request and of the personal grief that demands expression? This all depends on how a poem is produced.
The Latin word from which our "express" is derived actually appears in poem 65:
Etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore
sevocat a doctis, Ortale, virginibus,
nec potis est dulcis Musarum expromere fetus
mens animi, tantis fluctuat ipsa malis—
namque mei nuper Lethaeo gurgite fratris
pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem,
Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus
ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
numquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
aspiciam posthac? at certe semper amabo,
semper maesta tua carmina morte canam,
qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris
Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli—
sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto
haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae,
ne tua dicta vagis nequiquam credita ventis
effluxisse meo forte putes animo,
ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum
procurrit casto virginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatum,
dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur,
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor. (c.65)
Even though I am worn out by incessant suffering
and grief keeps me, Ortalus, from the learned virgins,
nor is my mind able to bring forth the sweet fruit
of the Muses, such are the misfortunes besetting it—
for recently the wave of Lethe's waters, seeping,
lapped my brother's pale foot,
whom the Trojan earth of the shore of Rhoeteum
crushes, snatched from my eyes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
my brother, more dear than life,
will I never see you again? But surely I will always
love you, always sing with sadness of your death,
as the nightingale sings under the densely
shadowed branches, bewailing the fate of murdered Itylus—
but still I send you, Ortalus, in my grief
these translated [expressa] poems of Callimachus
lest you think that your words, entrusted in vain
to the winds, have seeped from my mind,
as the quince sent by the flancé as a secret gift
rolls from the chaste lap of the virgin,
wrapped in the soft clothes of the poor, forgetful girl,
it is shaken out when she rises to greet her mother,
and driven headlong in its downward path,
while a guilty blush spreads across her sad face.
The "translated poems of Callimachus" (expressa . . . carmina Battiadae) that Catullus sends his friend Ortalus are substitutes for the original poem that, preoccupied with grief, he is unable to produce. Translation is figured by the metaphor expressa as a form of stamping: the translation is an impression made by the original poem. But the Latin word might also mean "forced out" and is commonly used of sounds of pain or sorrow that are elicited by extreme situations (Seneca, Benef. 2.5.2). This second meaning is suggested by the wording of the couplet
sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto
haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae . . . (15–16)
but still I send you, Ortalus, in my grief
these expressa poems of Callimachus . . .
The songs "forced out" in such grief might appropriately be expressions of sorrow; in fact they are just the opposite, that is, translations stamped out from the words of another poet and so bypassing the connection between poetry and the poet's turbulent mind. In the triangular relationship between Catullus, his brother, and Ortalus, the role of the translation is conveyed by the interference between the primary sense of the word expressa and its secondary, latent sense. If we put the word in a larger context, a third sense emerges:
Sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto
haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae,
ne tua dicta vagis nequiquam credita ventis
effluxisse meo forte putes animo, (c.15–18)
But still I send you, Ortalus, in my grief
these expressa poems of Callimachus
lest you think that your words, entrusted in vain
to the winds, have seeped from my mind,
Here the word expressa may also be understood in its sense "extorted" (OLDs.v. 4), for the translation Catullus produces in this difficult time is the response to an obligation that he feels toward his friend, who has presumably made a request for poetry. The word expressa , then, concentrates three facets of poetic production: expression (the songs forced out by grief), translation (the imitation of literary models), and com-
mission. What is fascinating about this poem is the way in which it intertwines these notions.
How does a poem emerge? The beginning and the end of poem 65 focus on this emergence: in the first four lines, Catullus declares that he is unable to produce a poem, and in the last six he compares the sending of the poem to Ortalus to the falling of a love-token, sent by her fiancé, from a virgin's lap. What can't Catullus do because of his brother's death and why?
Etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore
sevocat a doctis, Ortale, virginibus,
nec potis est dulcis Musarum expromere fetus
mens animi, tantis fluctuat ipsa malis—
Even though I am worn out by incessant suffering
and grief keeps me, Ortalus, from the learned virgins,
nor is my mind able to bring forth the sweet fruit
of the Muses, such are the misfortunes besetting it,
Writing poetry here seems to be like giving birth; Catullus' mind cannot produce the offspring (fetus) of the Muses because his sadness keeps him away from the learned virgins, and also because his mind is itself turbulent with (fluctuat) suffering. In spite of the suggestion of the usual distribution of sexual roles (male poet, female Muse) in the word virginibus , it is Catullus' mind that is figured as a womb, and a womb that is unable to conceive, both because of the turbulent flux of suffering and because it is already pregnant with grief (and potentially with dirges for the brother).[10] Further intercourse with the Muses would be fruitless. This account of the metaphorical force of the opening lines has to be supplemented, however, with an alternative interpretation of "to bring forth (expromere) the fruit of the Muses," for expromere normally means "to bring from store," and fetus can mean "fruit" as well as "offspring."[11] The storehouse, unlike the womb, is not exclusive about what it can store, and as a metaphor for the mind that produces poetry it has quite different implications. The ambiguity as to how poetry is produced prepares for the anxiety of the word expressa , which represses one metaphor implying self-expression and responsiveness (squeezed out) under another implying craft (stamped).
These alternative models for the poetic mind, storehouse and womb, are fused in the image of the lap of the virgin from which the apple falls in the final simile.[12] On the one hand, the shaking of the apple from the lap in which the lover's gift has been stored is an appropriately undig-
nified version of taking the fruits of the Muses out from storage: the words of Callimachus are "stamped" (expressa) by Catullus' translation, and sent to Ortalus as the gift of the fiancé is shaken (excutitur) from the virgin's lap at the appearance of her mother. Solid objects are passed from one person to another. But the gremium of the virgin is also her womb (OLD , s.v. 3), where she might appropriately keep the "secret gift" (19) of her lover, in which case the unreliability of the gremium is more ominous.
"One should entrust nothing to a woman or a lap" (Nec mulieri nec gremio credi oportet). This Roman proverb is glossed by the epitomizer Festus (second century C.E.) as follows: "The woman's mind is unreliable and flighty, and often what has been put in the lap falls out when one has forgotten about it and rises."[13] The wit of the proverb lies in the zeugma, for one entrusts things to a woman in a different sense than one entrusts things to a lap. But though the connection between the lap and the woman is in one respect metaphorical, there is an obvious metonymical relation between the two. As "lap," gremium provides a satirical analogy with the untrustworthy mind of the woman, but as "womb" it points to the source of male suspicion of a woman's trustworthiness: the fear that the product of a woman's gremium may not be what the man has entrusted to it. In fact, the first, metaphorical reading covers up for the anxiety of the metonymy, putting the male speaker in a relation of casual superiority to the woman he so wittily dehumanizes. Catullus' final picture of the forgetful virgin's dropping of the apple from her gremium hovers between an amusing mishap and a scandal.
But what is the application of this simile? If Catullus sends Ortalus his translation as the girl sends her lover's gift rolling at the arrival of her mother, then Ortalus gets what wasn't really intended for him but happened to be in Catullus' store. The shaking out of the apple, like the pressing out of Callimachus' words in the translation, points to the public, alienable nature of words and poems. But the simile might be applied in a different way: Catullus sends the translation in order to avoid the charge of forgetting the words that have been entrusted to him (credita, 17) by Ortalus, of letting them flow (effluxisse, 18) from his mind as the virgin lets the apple she has forgotten fall from her lap; according to this reading, the simile realizes the metaphor of pregnancy, especially since effluxisse picks up fluctuat (4). The words of Ortalus, it is feared, have not "taken" in Catullus' mind; he has somehow been untrue to his friend, an unreliable recipient of the latter's words. The first reading of the simile covers up for the anxiety of the second, just as the
satirical force of the metaphorical equation between gremium and mulier in the proverb covers up the male anxiety at the metonymical relation between them. In a sense, the translation is itself an illegitimate result of Ortalus' words, to which it has no organic relation, for though it is intended to prove that those words were not entrusted to Catullus in vain, it is in fact a product of fidelity to the words of another (Callimachus). This paradox is reflected in the double application of the simile, both to Catullus' discharging of his obligation and to his (putative) forgetting of Ortalus' words. As an alternative to expression, translation allows Catullus to make good on his obligation to Ortalus without interrupting the pregnancy of his mind with grief for his brother, but the appearance of the apple/translation from where it has been stored also carries the alternative implication that the words of Ortalus have miscarried in Catullus' mind, which has not been faithful to what has been entrusted to it.
So the metaphor of pregnancy makes the demands placed on Catullus by the two men incompatible: either he forgets his brother or he lets the words of Ortalus slip from his mind. However, the rolling of the apple from the virgin's lap is not the last thing that happens in the final simile, which ends:
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor. (23–24)
and [the apple is] driven headlong in its downward path,
while a guilty blush spreads across her sad face.
The virgin's blush is conscius , a product of guilt for her forgetfulness and embarrassment at the exposure of intimacy; she recognizes what has been forgotten by the same act as she recognizes her forgetfulness. In fact, the blush is caused by the crossing of two relationships, for the apple that exposes the intimacy of the lovers is revealed by the daughter's spontaneous reaction to her mother's arrival (dum adventu matris prosilit, 22). The blushing virgin is in the same situation as Catullus, whose every gesture produces an interference between two relationships. Here we should remember the confluence of meanings in the word expressa , which acknowledges that Catullus is not expressing his grief for his brother at the same time as it excuses the fact that he is not producing poetry in response to Ortalus' words. Both the translation and the apple are sites of an interference between two mutually incompatible relationships, namely, Catullus' relationships to his brother and
to Ortalus and the virgin's to her mother and her fiancé (incompatible because marriage means the passage from her mother's protection to her husband's bed).[14] It is the blush, whose liquid spreading is opposed in the last couplet to the bouncing apple, that does justice simultaneously to both relationships. The mindful (conscius) blush compensates for the flux (effluxisse) of Ortalus' words from Catullus' mind as it spreads (manat) over the virgin's face, but it also reverses the association of flowing with death and forgetting in the lines on the dead brother:
namque mei nuper Lethaeo gurgite fratris
pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem, (5–6)
for recently the wave of Lethe's waters, seeping ,
lapped my brother's pale foot,
The virgin's blush is the rushing blood of life and of remembrance.[15]
With the figure of the falling apple, Catullus addresses the question of poetic expression and production that is so problematic in this situation of conflicting claims; as an alternative figure of how the poem comes to appear, the blush, which is not produced but rather spreads across a surface, does justice to the simultaneity of these claims. The blush is the poem's self-consciousness, its hidden connections, its simultaneities and unspoken implications; it is a figure for the poem as it is read rather than as it is produced, a figure for the relations that spread across the poem as it is fixed in that moment of attention represented here by the fall of the apple. With the virginal blush, Catullus retreats from the problematic metaphor of expression as pregnancy and birth into this metaphor of the poem as self-consciousness, a metaphor that allows the poem to acknowledge its multiple origins. In its terminal position, and with its associations radiating throughout the poem, the blush, a reaction that expresses the consciousness of another's attention, is Catullus' representation of the poetical itself, displaced from the poet's mind as expressive origin to the interaction between poem and reader. As in poem 101, so here the death of his brother raises for Catullus the problem of where the poet speaks from, a problem that takes the distinctly Roman form of a conflict of officia (duties) that is resolved by the figurative use of that peculiarly Roman moral act, the blush.[16]
But with the covering letter to Ortalus comes another poem, the translation of Callimachus' "Lock of Berenice." After the virgin, whose
blush is the defenseless revelation of true feeling, we are presented with a scene from the world of the newlywed, described by a sexually sophisticated speaker and permeated with an air of cultivated insincerity.
The Question of Sincerity
Callimachus' "The Lock of Berenice" (fr. 110 Pfeiffer) is a highly polished and artificial piece of court flattery. It consists of the speech of a lock of queen Berenice's hair, vowed to the gods by the queen for the safe return of her husband and cousin, Ptolemy III, who had set out on an invasion of Syria shortly after his wedding to Berenice. On Ptolemy's triumphant return, the lock was dedicated in a temple of Aphrodite from which it subsequently disappeared, only to be conveniently located by the astronomer Conon as a new constellation. It is the translated lock that speaks from its new home in the sky, explaining the circumstances that led to its present status and protesting its grief at being separated from the queen.
Not only is speech in this poem displaced from a human speaker, but that speaker is itself displaced from its natural location. This displacement is appropriate to the function of the translated poem, which is to allow Catullus' poetic production to be diverted through the words of another, and so to avoid displacing the preoccupying grief of bereavement while making good on an obligation to a friend. The confident professionalism with which the episode of the lock is handled by the Alexandrian court poet could not be further removed from the troubled windings of the covering letter, which seeks to negotiate the disparate claims of grief for the brother and obligation to the friend. Like the stanza on the perils of leisure (otium), appended to Catullus' translation of Sappho's famous poem on the symptoms of love (c.50), the covering letter puts the Callimachus poem in a new light, raising the issues of sincerity and obligation in ways that are foreign to the spirit of Callimachus.[17] Not that Callimachus, or rather the lock, doesn't address the question of sincerity: wondering whether the tears of brides are genuine or not, the lock slyly asks Queen Berenice whether it was concern for her brother (Ptolemy was in fact her cousin) that caused her grief at his departure:
et tu non orbum luxti deserta cubile,
sed fratris cari flebile discidium? (21–2)
and did you grieve not, deserted, for your lonely bed,
but for the sad parting of your dear brother?
Coming after the covering letter in which Catullus tells of his bereavement, this winking irony creates an unsettling dialogue between the two texts.[18] What had been intended as a diversion from the poet's preoccupying concerns turns out to engage the very anxieties it was supposed to allay. Vergil, a great reader of Catullus, uses a line from this poem to similar effect in Aeneid 6, where the guilty Aeneas, coming across Dido in the underworld, protests:
invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi ( Aen. 6.460)
Unwillingly, O queen, did I leave your shore
echoing
invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi (c.66.39)
Unwillingly, O queen, did I leave your head
What is the relation between Roman gravitas and Alexandrian courtliness, between Aeneas' painfully stilted expression of repressed grief and the elegant flippancy of the talking lock? Are Aeneas' protestations that he is a reluctant follower of his great destiny as hollow as the protestations of the lock? Perhaps Vergil follows Catullus here in suggesting that words can never completely be controlled by the intentions of their speaker, being so marked with their own history and its diverse contexts that there is never a clear, univocal answer to the question, "Who is speaking?"
The Greek poem haunts the awkward sincerities of the Roman speakers with its cynical insinuations. According to the most common Roman version of the difference between themselves and the Greeks, the speech of the lock would represent the mendacity of the older culture.[19] But Catullus' juxtaposition is not only a contrast, it is also a progression. What makes the flippant irony about grief for a brother's death in poem 66 unsettling is that there is a temporal progression between poem 65, which ends with the blush of a virgin at the discovery of her fiance's love gift, and poem 66, which concerns a newlywed. The cynicism of the lock speaks from a position of experience relative to the innocence of the virgin at the end of poem 65; it is not clear which poem sites which, for priority, the lock insinuates, may simply be inexperience. However, the translator has the power to resituate the original, and the end of poem
65, the virgin's blush, gives us a context in which to see the shining star that rises at the beginning of poem 66:
Omnia qui magni dispexit lumina mundi
qui stellarum ortus comperit atque obitus
flammeus ut rapidi solis nitor obscuretur,
ut cedant certis sidera temporibus
ut Triviam furtim sub saxa relegans
dulcis amor gyro devocet aereo:
idem me ille Conon caelesti in lumine vidit
e Beroniceo vertice caesariem
fulgentem clare . . . (1–9)
He who observed the lights of the great world,
who understood the risings and settings of the stars;
how the brilliance of the swirling sun is eclipsed,
and how the constellations retreat at fixed times;
how a sweet love secretly calls down the moon from her heavenly
round,
banishing her to the rocks of Latmia;
the same great Conon saw me in the heavenly blaze,
a lock from the head of Berenice
shining brightly . . .
In poem 66 we are led from the start to locate the point of radiance, the point from which everything is observed, shining brightly in the sky, where the astronomer whom nothing eludes has pinpointed it. Both the finder and the found emerge out of this long sentence, each supporting the fame of the other, to preside in brilliance over the sentence and to shed the light of fame over the marriage of Berenice and Ptolemy. The agents in this drama are supported by, and support, the sentence's grammatical rise and fall so that the contrast with the previous poem is complete: instead of the almost clumsy attempt to map out the conflicting claims on Catullus in a single sentence, we have the triumphant location of the cast of characters at strategic points in the rise and fall of a sentence spoken from the dominating perspective of the star. The light of the star shines over its world, and the blush, caused by the interference between different relationships, motives, and responsibilities, spreads across its world as a self-consciousness both guilty and mindful.
Although Callimachus' court poem is reproduced by Catullus to obviate the anxiety produced by writing poetry after his brother's death, this poem itself raises the issues of fidelity and sincerity. I have already
drawn attention to the lock's innuendos about the tears of brides and the nature of Berenice's concern for her husband/brother (c.66.21–22). The doubt cast by this sexual innuendo on Berenice's sincerity spreads to infect the severed lock's own protestations that it prefers its previous location to its present exalted home. In its most extravagant form, this protestation recalls the imagery of poem 65:
namque ego non ullo vera timore tegam,
nec si me infestis discerpent sidera dictis,
condita quin veri pectoris evoluam (72–74)
for I will not cover up truth for any fear,
not even if the constellations tear me apart with their carping
will it prevent me from rolling out what's stored in a true heart.
The true heart is here figured as a store (condita) from which the truth that it contains is rolled out (evoluam, a verb that can be used of unrolling a papyrus roll). This recapitulation of the imagery of the previous poem turns the tongue-in-cheek protestations of the lock into a parody of the concerns of that poem. Poem 66 speaks for part of Catullus himself, who was in certain respects an Alexandrian poet; furthermore, his claim in poem 65.12 that he will always sing "sad songs" because of his brother's death is not substantiated by our collection.[20] In fact, when Catullus compares himself to the inconsolable Procne grieving for her son (c.65.13), the simile echoes a passage in the Odyssey (19.520) in which Penelope tells the disguised Odysseus that she is in a quandary as to whether to continue to respect her marriage to Odysseus or to marry the best of the suitors. The Greek poem insinuates that the Roman protests too much.
But if the Roman Catullus, representing a culture that is never quite at home with itself, stands in a difficult relation to the Greeks, the Alexandrian Greeks themselves are not at home either. The studied insincerity of Callimachus' poem, spoken by a severed lock of hair, is the tone of the imperial culture of the Ptolemaic Greeks, a tone of easy superiority that is concomitant with the Greek culture's disdain for, and alienation from, the Egyptian environment.[21]
Severed from its mistress's head and disappearing from the temple in which it had been dedicated, the lock has left its Egyptian location for the "higher" world of Greek mythology and astronomy, from which it sheds light and fame on its mistress. It claims that Zephyr had wafted it to the temple of Arsinoe—the queen of Ptolemy II, now deified and
identified with Aphrodite—and that it had landed in the "chaste lap" (casto . . . gremio, 56) of Venus, a goddess not notable for her marital fidelity.[22] The story of severance, disappearance, and apotheosis is a reflection of the Ptolemaic dynasty's insistence that its heritage is Greek, in spite of its Egyptian home: Alexandria, as Catullus puts it, is "a Greek dweller on the Canopic shore" (Graia Canopitis incola litoribus).[23] It is, of course, perverse to describe the lap of Venus as chaste (casto, 56), and the epithet is particularly dubious in view of the fact that Ptolemy II, appropriating the prerogative of his Egyptian predecessors, the Pharaohs, had married his own sister, scandalizing many of the Greeks. "You are pushing the prod into an unholy fleshpot," commented Sotades.[24] The place from which the lock makes its final ascent to heaven is unreal, a mixture of Egyptian and Greek, or rather a place in which Egypt is transformed into Greece; to call it a "lap" is to draw attention both to its artificiality and, in this case, its unretentiveness. The studied and sophisticated insincerity of tone in Callimachus' poem reflects the displacements that characterize the uprooted and inorganic culture of Greek Alexandria.
In the translation that Catullus sends Ortalus, the unretentive gremium of Venus, the mythological wind that wafts the lock from there to its apotheosis, and the illustrious shining of the new star all recapitulate, in another key, elements of the anxious world of poem 65. In that poem, the gremium of the forgetful virgin produces the shining blush of embarrassment, reflecting Catullus' own concern that his friend may think his words have been entrusted in vain to the winds. As I have argued, the cynical and professional "Lock" not only functions as a contrast to the dutiful covering letter but also speaks for aspects of Catullus' own art that give the lie to his protestations in that poem, a poem that is itself conflicted about the nature of expression.[25] If Alexandria stands for aspects of the poetic enterprise that obviate (self-) expression, and raises sometimes awkward questions about the relation between emotion and artifice in poetry, that is because it also stands for displacement. The confident, virtuosic handling of displacement in Callimachus reflects the cultural confidence of the Hellenistic court in Egypt, but Catullus, both Roman and Transpadane, has a more anxious relation to displacement and to multiple origins, as we shall see.
Looking back at the three poems we have considered so far, we can see how the death of his brother prompts Catullus to explore some of the displacements that are characteristic of poetry. In the case of poem 101, there is a congruity between the frustrated communication be-
tween Catullus and his dead brother and the fact that the (written) poem is a communication from one who is absent, even dead. Poem 65 avoids representing the poem as the fruition of a single expressive need to figure its own emergence as a blush, a radiating self-consciousness in which words, images, and themes respond to each other in a way that presumes the attention of another. The relation between poems 65 and 66 reveals the intertextual character of a poem, permeable to other poems (and to various kinds of otherness, such as the history of language) in such a way as to displace the expressive intentions of its author.
Home, But Which?
In poem 68, Catullus again professes to be unable to accommodate a friend's request for poetry, pleading that his brother's death has ended his youthful indulgence in love and poetry (haec studia atque omnes delicias animi, 26).[26] His brother's death has destroyed all his pleasures and buried his domus ("house" here in the sense of "family," 22.) and therefore it is the requirement of pietas to abstain from poetry. But this reason is displaced by another:
ignosces igitur si, quae mihi luctus ademit
haec tibi non tribuo munera, cum nequeo.
nam, quod scriptorum non magna est copia apud me,
hoc fit, quod Romae vivimus: illa domus,
illa mihi sedes, illic mea carpitur aetas;
huc una ex multis capsula me sequitur. (31–36)
So you will forgive me if I do not present you with gifts
that grief has taken from me, because I can't.
For the fact that I don't have at hand a supply of books,
that is because I live at Rome: that is my home,
that is my dwelling, there my life is consumed;
only one of my many cartons has followed me here.
Catullus now speaks as the learned Alexandrian poet whose domus is not the family home in Verona but Rome, where the books are.[27] So Catullus cannot write because he has lost his domus , but which one? Between the pleas of incapacity caused by grief and of incapacity caused by the lack
of books comes a response to something that Mallius had written in his letter:
quare, quod scribis Veronae turpe Catullo [Catulle, V]
esse, quod hic quisquis de meliore nota
frigida deserto tepefactet [-factat, R] membra cubili,
id, Malli, non est turpe, magis miserum est. (27–30)[28]
So, as for your writing that it is shameful Catullus
is in Verona, because here the better class all
warm their cold limbs in a deserted bed,
that, Mallius, is not shameful but to be pitied.
There is some controversy about these lines, which turns mainly on whether hic (here) refers to Rome and thus quotes Mallius directly, or to Verona, but there are also textual problems. Two possibilities emerge: either Mallius is telling Catullus that, in his absence from Rome, Lesbia is sharing her bed with the better class of people, or he is teasing Catullus because in provincial Verona the better class of people sleep alone, rather than pursuing the delights of love.[29] However we understand Mallius, Catullus' response is to shift the terms of the situation from the turpe (shameful) that conveys the sophisticated urban perspective to the miserum (wretched) that reflects grief for the buried house. Mallius should therefore (igitur, 31) forgive Catullus because he cannot provide what grief has taken away. But this shift of perspective is reversed by Catullus' second excuse for not being able to write, which follows immediately. Catullus now sees his presence at Verona in terms of a cultural lack, emphasizing that Rome is his domus .[30]
Catullus' inability to write is implicated in the problem of home, which proves to be a complicated one for the Transpadane who has acquired literary fame in Rome at least partially by virtue of his commitment to Greek literature. In poem 101, this issue features in the relation between Catullus' journey to Troy and the Odyssean homecoming: the ironic reversal of Odysseus' reunion with his wife is paradoxically a homecoming for the representative of a race that claimed descent from the Trojans; in poem 68, there is a conflict between Catullus' provincial, Transpadane origins and the site of his literary activity, Rome. It is no coincidence that the poem that precedes this and follows the Callimachus translation is a poem about provincial gossip in Transpadane Italy, in which a speaking door protests its fidelity to its owner much as does Callimachus' lock (c.67). In fact, poem 67 is in many ways a parody of the Callimachean poem, for the world
of newlyweds is here clouded with muttered gossip rather than illuminated by mythological fantasy. The translated lock and the door accused of failing to protect its owner's marriage are both in their different ways representatives of problematic homes; they also represent two different kinds of problematic speech—court flattery and small-town gossip—that reflect anxiously on Catullus' complex cultural makeup. These poems are flanked by the two in which Catullus professes inability to write the poetry requested of him by a friend, and together they form a group (cc.65–68) in which anxieties about the origins and destinations of poetic speech are intertwined with concerns about cultural affiliations. But before returning to this group, and particularly poem 67 with its Transpadane setting, let us look briefly at some of the other poems in which Catullus raises his Transpadane origins.
Catullus Transpadane
For Catullus the relation between the originally Gallic Transpadana and Rome is not only a personal question about his life and career but also a question of cultural legitimacy. The Roman Catullus may feel both embarrassed by his provincial and inurbane connections and proud of his home's rising fortunes and status in the Roman world. The Transpadane centers had recently (in 89 B.C.E. ) been given the ius Latii , a halfway stage to full Roman citizenship making them equivalent in status to Latin colonies. As Wiseman points out, "Brixia and Verona were no longer oppida of the Cenomani and Euganei. . . . The tribal names are not used again: from now on the amalgam of native Gauls and immigrant Romans and Italians call themselves Transpadani ."[31] The first attested use of the word Transpadanus is in Catullus' poem 39, where he pillories the Celtiberian Egnatius, whose habit of smiling constantly to show off his white teeth is particularly obnoxious in view of the fact that Spaniards use urine as toothpaste:
si urbanus esses aut Sabinus aut Tiburs
aut pinguis Umber aut obesus Etruscus
aut Lanuvinus ater atque dentatus
aut Transpadanus, ut meos quoque attingam,
aut quilubet, qui puriter lavit dentes,
tamen renidere usque quaque te nollem. (10–15)
If you were a city man, or Sabine, or from Tibur,
or a well-fed Umbrian or a fat Etruscan
or a Lanuvinan, dark and toothy,
or a Transpadane (to get to my own people),
or anyone who cleans his teeth in decent fashion,
still I would not have you always smiling.
Removed from the world of barbarians, the Transpadani are put on a par with the urbani , perhaps even proudly contrasted with them. But the new pretensions and anxieties of the Transpadani are reflected most clearly in poem 17, where the poet addresses Verona on the occasion of an impending festival in which the citizens will perform ritual dances on a rickety wooden bridge whose stability they mistrust. Catullus joins in the prayers of the citizens for a new bridge, asking in return that they provide him with a welcome spectacle by throwing off the bridge a certain old man who fails to appreciate his young wife.[32] The request of Catullus has long been connected with a Latin phrase, "sexagenarios de ponte deicere" (to throw the sexagenarians off the bridge), which would seem to refer to the ancient and mysterious Roman ritual of the Argei in which straw puppets were thrown off a bridge into the Tiber. The significance of the ritual is debated, but in alluding to it Catullus is claiming a common cultural tradition for Rome and Verona, a claim that would be underlined by his addressing Verona as Colonia .[33] During the first century B.C.E. , as a result of political unification with Rome and of sharing in the increasing benefits of empire, Italy was undergoing a rapid urbanization that involved a great deal of public building. The hope for the new bridge in this poem would reflect that process, and it places the whole poem in the light of the aspirations of a semibarbarian town to Roman citizenship, finally granted by Caesar in 49 B.C.E. But the condition Catullus places on the fulfilling of the town's wish for a new bridge is that the husband who is unconscious of his wife's charms should be tossed into the muddy lake and leave behind his supine stupor. The husband is called "most tasteless" (insulsissimus, 12), the bridge's rickety limbs "awkward" (inepta, 2), and the young wife "more frisky (delicatior) than a young goat" (15); in other words, Catullus is using the language of urbanitas to separate the old Verona from the Verona of its own aspirations, or, alternatively, to express the cultural anxiety of this upstart member of the Roman world. At the same time as this poem lays claim to a cultural community with Rome, by referring to an ancient Roman ritual, it also expresses an anxiety about Verona's perceived lack of metropolitan urbanitas .
Alexandria and Verona
Poem 67, then, needs to be seen in the context of Veronese aspirations and of Catullus' own anxiety about his origins. In many respects, this poem is a Veronese version of "The Lock of Berenice," finding a parodic equivalent of court gallantry in provincial gossip. A door is taken to task by an unidentified interlocutor for its failure to serve its master, whose new wife has evidently been the subject of scandal; the door defends itself and in the process lets us in on further gossip. The apotheosized lock and the door, each professing faithfulness to its owner, could hardly be better symbols of their respective worlds. Their speeches also provide a delicious contrast, for the lock's elaborate and cryptic explanation of its disappearance (c.66.51–70) is answered by the crude directness of the door's protestation that its master's new wife was no virgin when she arrived at the house (c.67.19–36). Further, in the midst of the door's lurid account of the goings-on in its mistress's old home, it pauses to indulge in a bit of mythologizing geography that reminds us of the lock's account of its transportation from the Pantheon to the temple of Arsinoe Aphrodite (c.66.53–68):
"Atqui non solum hoc dicit se cognitum habere
Brixia Cycneae supposita speculae,
flavus quam molli praecurrit flumine Mella,
Brixia Veronae mater amata meae,
sed de Postumio et Corneli narrat amore,
cum quibus illa malum fecit adulterium." (c.67.31–36)[34]
"But Brixia says that this is not all she knows,
Brixia lying beneath the watchtower of Cycnus,
past whom the golden Mella flows with gentle stream,
Brixia, the beloved mother of my Verona,
but she tells of the lovers Postumius and Cornelius,
with whom my mistress committed adultery."
Wiseman 1987, 331, argues that the reference to Cycnus here involves some foundation legend of the newly romanized Transpadane settlements, which needed a respectable mythological pedigree now that they were part of the civilized world. Brixia is called mother of Verona because foundation legends typically expressed the relationship of eponymous heroes as the relationship between the cities themselves. These "myth-
ological fantasies" served the purpose of providing "an acceptable past for towns whose real history was short and uncivilised" (326). Wiseman's comment is particularly interesting because in this poem relations of paternity have gone awry: for instance, though the previous husband of the new mistress of the house was impotent, his father obligingly took his place, ensuring that she did not arrive at her new home a virgin. The door's interlocutor comments:
Egregium narras mira pietate parentem,
qui ipse sui gnati minxerit in gremium. (29–30)
That's an excellent father you describe; how
dutiful to piss in his own son's lap!
There is talk of other amours in Brixia, and the door has heard his mistress mention a man whose name he dares not mention, though he gives us a clue:
praeterea addebat quendam quem dicere nolo
nomine, ne tollat rubra supercilia.
longus homo est, magnas cui lites intulit olim
falsum mendaci ventre puerperium. (45–48)
Besides she also mentioned someone I don't dare
to name, or he'll raise his red eyebrows.
He's a tall man, involved once in a lawsuit
about pregnancy and childbirth (all concocted).
The mythological aside inserting the upstart colonies into the respectable family of Greek heroes is sandwiched between stories of dubious paternity, and this reflects the dubiousness of the colonies' claims to a respectable mythological past. The closed world of the provinces conjured up by the speech of the door itself, which excuses its own failed stewardship by muttering about what happened in the neighboring town, contradicts the pretensions of the province to participate in the integrated mythological system of the Greco-Roman world. By contrast, the knowing sexual innuendo and courtly flattery of the lock reflect a cultural milieu that is comfortable with its own artificiality, for the pseudo-problem of the disappearance of the lock is there manipulated with great confidence as an excuse for celebrating the mythological and astronomical arts that flourish under royal patronage at Alexandria. In poem 67, the transference of the bride from Brixia to Verona is a parodic counterpart to the translation of the lock in poem 66, and the doubts
cast by provincial gossip on the integrity of this transfer reflect on the cultural pretensions of the upstart colonies.
Whatever the correct reading of the end of poem 66, and whoever is speaking, the poem ends with an exclamation that glories in extravagant verbal gestures:
sidera corruerint [cur iterent, V] utinam! coma regia fiam,
proximus Hydrochoi fulgeret Oarion! (93–94)
Let the constellations collapse! May I be a queen's tress again,
and let Orion shine next to Aquarius.[35]
By contrast, the end of poem 67 has the door telling that it has heard its mistress speak in a secretive voice (furtiva voce, 41) of a certain man it can't name for fear of reprisals. Obscure provincial mutterings take place in a world far removed from the brilliantly artificial society of Alexandria.
The Layered Poem
In the next poem (68), speaking from Verona, Catullus ends by taking an urbane, permissive attitude to Lesbia's infidelities, reminding himself that she did not come to him on the arm of her father (as a bride), and that he must put up with her peccadilloes. His pose stands at the opposite pole to that of the scandalmongering provincial door and its suspicious questioner; Catullus, the urban exile in Verona, accepts the fact that the erotic gifts brought to him by the married Lesbia are "taken from the very lap [gremio, 146] of her husband." As in the three preceding poems, the gremium is a site of displacement (compare cc.65.20, 66.56, 67.30). In this case, displacement associates Catullus the lover with the addressee of this poem, Mallius, who also receives what has been diverted from another—a poem of thanks addressed to Allius in place of the poetry he requested.
In fact this poem, whose speaker is himself doubly displaced from his home, is pervaded by displacements, as a brief synopsis will reveal: Mallius has written to Catullus asking him to send gifts of the Muses and Venus to comfort him in his loveless state. Catullus replies that the death of his brother has rendered him unable to fulfill this request, so the fact that Lesbia is being unfaithful while he is away from Rome at Verona
cannot concern him; further, the lack of books at Verona make it impossible for him to write the poetry that has been requested (1–36). Catullus then writes a letter of thanks to a certain Allius, who made a house available to him and his mistress (Lesbia?). Lesbia stepped on the threshold of this house like Laodamia coming to the house of Protesilaus as a new bride (37–74). But Protesilaus had to join the expedition to Troy immediately after his wedding, and died there. Troy brings to mind Catullus' own brother, buried far from home; after expressing his grief, Catullus turns to Laodamia, swept into a pit of love deeper than the pit dug by Hercules at Pheneus; Lesbia enters the borrowed house with a passion similar to Laodamia's (75–134). Even though Lesbia is not faithful to him, Catullus reminds himself that he has no right to be jealous, seeing that they are not married and that he enjoys nights that have been stolen from her husband. He ends by saying that he has done what he could to requite Allius for his favor, and he wishes happiness on Allius and his girlfriend and on himself and Lesbia (135–60).
At the center of this poem is the memory of the beautiful but ill-omened moment in which Lesbia stood on the threshold of the house borrowed from Allius:
quo mea se molli candida diva pede
intulit et trito fulgentem in limine plantam
innixa arguta constituit solea, (70–72)
where my bright goddess, walking softly,
entered, placed her shining foot on the worn threshold
and leaned on her creaking sandal
In the Roman wedding ceremony, the bride must be carried across the sacred limen so that she doesn't tread on it;[36] here the detail lavished on the transgressive but divinized foot of Lesbia makes of her arrival a problematic transference that recalls the delivery of the poem in poem 65, the disappearance of the lock from the temple in poem 66, and the arrival of the bride in poem 67. In this case, the ceremonial passage of the bride to her new home, the ultimate form of legitimate and orderly communication between self and other, is ominously and beautifully suspended from line 72 to line 132, where Lesbia crosses the threshold and conveys herself into Catullus' gremium (132) with her gifts stolen from the gremium (146) of her husband.
In the myth that is recounted during this suspension of linear progression, the threshold on which Lesbia has stepped becomes a grave or
pit (89, 108), and layers of different material are uncovered in the suspension of her transference. The story of Protesilaus and Laodamia brings up the name of Troy, and suddenly this mythological digression becomes an intensely personal lament for Catullus' brother. Ironically, Catullus finds his brother again in the learned myth that divinizes the moment when Lesbia steps on the threshold of Catullus' borrowed house; that to which he compares his relationship with Lesbia turns out to contain a relationship even more proper to him, an irony that confuses our sense of where the poet is speaking from, of what is near and what is far. An outburst of grief for his brother is triggered by the reference to Troy as the communal sepulcrum (grave, 89) of Europe and Asia, and the poem at this point turns into a lament for the brother's death, returning to the myth of Protesilaus and Laodamia at the point where Protesilaus leaves for Troy, sweeping her into an abyss (barathrum) of love:
. . . tanto te absorbens vertice amoris
aestus in abruptum detulerat barathrum,
quale ferunt Grai Pheneum prope Cyllenacum
siccare emulsa pingue palude solum,
quod quondam caesis montis fodisse medullis
audit falsiparens Amphitryoniades,
tempore quo certa Stymphalia monstra sagitta
perculit imperio deterioris eri,
pluribus ut caeli tereretur ianua divis,
Hebe nec longa virginitate foret. (68.107–16)
. . . the current sucking you into so deep a
vortex of love had plunged you into an abyss,
steep as the one the Greeks say, near Cyllenean Pheneus,
drains the rich soil of a swamp,
which once that hero (falsely called the son of Amphitryon)
is famed to have dug through the mountain's stabbed heart,
when his unerring arrows struck the Stymphalian birds
at the bidding of a master less than he,
so that the doorway of heaven might be trod by more,
and Hebe not remain a virgin long.
This facetious piece of learned mythological geography is studiedly inappropriate in tone to the pathetic lines that introduce it (105–8), and it inverts the affective direction of the turn at the word sepulcrum .[37] The grave and the pit might both be metaphors for the plunging of the poem itself at these points into another level of subject matter and style; by
turning into drainage channels, albeit Herculean, this abyss of love unsettles the identification of depth with emotional intensity that it initiated. Whatever the exact literary provenance of the pit to which Catullus alludes, the spirit of Alexandria clearly haunts this passage, reminding us that the poet had pleaded lack of books in the opening letter to Mallius.[38] The pit, like the blush in poem 65, is both a figure and an example of the nonlinear capacities of poetry, drawing attention to the way that subject matter in this poem is stacked to produce a stratified rather than a linear form.
Both the pit and the grave open up in the ill-omened suspension of Lesbia's illegitimate conveyance to the gremium of Catullus. If the fact that Catullus will never be married to Lesbia means that, now that his brother is dead, the family is buried (c.68.22) and will not continue, then the poem's accumulative layering may reflect the severing of linear time in the family.
I have read poems 65 through 68 as an interconnected group related not only by common themes but also by a dialogue between aspects of Catullus' cultural identity and the different kinds of expression that are associated with them. The outer pair, spoken in the first person, are experiments with new conceptions of poetic form that will be adequate to the heterogeneous origins and components of poetic expression. The two inner poems present contrasting speakers, both inanimate objects, whose characteristic forms of speech reflect their respective cultural milieux. These poems relate not only to each other, but also to the outer poems, particularly through the amatory or sexual themes that permeate the whole group. The recurring image of the gremium , unreliable, unretentive, robbed, and violated, reflects in sexual terms an anxiety about authenticity that ramifies both into the question of how a poem is conceived and delivered and into problems of cultural filiation.
We might conclude by outlining the issues raised by the death of Catullus' brother in these poems. First, if the poet cannot communicate with his brother across the grave, then where does the poem go and who is it for? This issue is reflected in the problems of transference and delivery that permeate these poems in which people are constantly receiving what has been diverted from another. It is an issue that is a problem for any poem insofar as it goes to destinations that are unknown and will perhaps continue to be spoken long after the poet is dead. Secondly, if the death of his brother occupies the faithful poet's mind completely, then how can he write of other subjects and from other motives? We have seen how this problem both raises the anxiety, of displacement and at the same time
generates experimental models of poetic form and expression; the question of where the poet speaks from is explored with dazzling virtuosity. Finally, the fact that his brother dies at Troy, most ancient and prestigious of places in Roman history, and then sends the poet to the place of his origin, provincial Verona, precipitates an anxious exploration of the poet's complicated cultural affiliations.