Chapter 3
Obscenity Figures

Catullus, whose name one can't utter without experiencing horror at his obscenities .
Fénelon

A few poems which do not lend themselves to comment in English have been omitted .
Fordyce

As we turn from the erotic to the obscene, many of the issues remain the same because the same ancient model of sexual relations frames the drama of poetic positionality. Though ancient eroticism is often both aggressive and hierarchical, obscenity, both ancient and modern, may involve titillation as well as assault. Because obscene language can be as volatile to handle as the language of eroticism, it provides the poet with a similarly rich opportunity to display his mastery. So some of the poems dealt with in this chapter might also have been considered in the previous one and vice versa. But, in general, obscenity is less concerned with invitation, temptation, and teasing than with usurpation; less with issues of enjoyment and consumption than with the threat of pollution; less with the play of surface and depth than with the violation of boundaries.

In the reception of Catullus, obscenity has always been an important issue. The now infamous words from the preface to Fordyce's commentary of 1961 (the second of my epigraphs) are the last echo of centuries of embarrassment, swelling frequently to outrage, at Catullan

obscenity. "A few" turned out to mean thirty-two, which in such a small oeuvre is quite a lot. But Fordyce was out of step with his times and his decision was greeted with universal protest.^[1] By 1966 a translation of all of the poems into an English that pulled no punches had appeared in the Penguin Classics.^[2] Now Catullus' obscenity is for the most part positively relished, even occasionally enhanced.^[3]

Though attitudes to Catullus' obscenity have not always been as extreme as those of Fénelon and Fordyce, it has been customary even for devotees to adopt an exculpatory tone. For Landor, as for many moderns, Catullus' obscenity was a stumbling block and had to be explained. In 1853 Landor is sanguine:

          Tell me not what too well I know
About the bard of Sirmio . . .
Yes, in Thalia's son
Such stains there are . . . as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
With nectar, and runs on.

But in 1863 ("Written in a Catullus") the problem is more disturbing:

Among these treasures there are some
That floated past the wreck of Rome;
But others, for their place unfit,
Are sullied by uncleanly wit.
So in its shell the pearl is found
With rank putridity around.^[4]

It is hard to believe that Landor could really have found his blithe fantasy of Hellenic gaiety an adequate representation of the obscenity in Catullus' oeuvre and his second attempt betrays itself by its awkwardness. More recently, rather than downplaying the obscenity in Catullus, scholars have tended to represent it as a manifestation of some of his more admirable qualities, if perhaps in a less admirable form.^[5] A more comfortable variant of Landor's pearl simile is to be found in the dedication poem of Whigham's Penguin translation of Catullus, where Catullus' manuscript, discovered in the bunghole of a barrel of wine, springs from the wine-bung "as from the dung / — the rose" (11).^[6] Clearly, Whigham's image is intended to say something about the two sides of Catullus' poetry, the obscene and the tender, to suggest that they are organically connected and so to avoid Landor's embarrassed pleading. In fact, it is a commonplace of Catullan criticism that the beauty and

innocence of Catullus' betrayed love is shown up against the obscenity of Lesbia's desecration of that love, especially in poems like 11 and 58, which use obscene language to great strategic effect. Whigham describes the first event in the history of Catullus' manuscript as symbolic of the oeuvre itself, and for him there is a fruitful symbiosis of dung and rose. It may be, as some have argued, that obscenity is simply the concomitant of Catullus' youthful vitality, the flip side of his passionate ardor, or it may be that it expresses his righteous anger at a world that is itself obscene;^[7] either way, the main concern of interpreters has been that Catullus should not be stained by his own obscenity.

Obscenity at Rome

Obscenity is a distinctive feature of Roman culture, not something that is peculiar to Catullus. In both Greece and Rome, obscenity had ritual uses; it appeared, along with the display of phalli , as an integral part of various ceremonies performing an apotropaic function, promoting fertility, or both.^[8] At Rome the triumph was the occasion for the singing of ribald songs, directed against the victorious general, by the troops; weddings included the "fescennina iocatio" (Catullus 61.120), crude mockery that, like the song of the troops at the triumph, served both to confound the power of the evil eye and to bring the lucky person down to a level where he would not be exposed to what Pliny calls "Fortune the butcher of glory."^[9] Both triumph and wedding combine the primal power of obscenity to deflect the emanations of the evil eye with a mockery that is intended to make its object less enviable.^[10] Humor is also part of the efficacy of these practices, for humor serves to confound jealousy by deflecting attention. This association of obscenity with mockery and humor in Roman ritual makes it difficult to isolate the function of obscenity itself in these songs: obscene humorous mockery had a complex purpose and its components both complemented each other and overlapped. At this point, it is worth noting that Catullus' obscenity is almost always used in invective, though not all of it is humorous.^[11]

Roman authors frequently cite the licit use of obscenity in Roman ritual and ceremony in order to claim for the circumscribed world of their own book or genre a similar license.^[12] Theater, belonging to both the world of literature and that of religion (through the festivals), is a

particularly useful analogy for obscene poets like Martial, who refers to his poetry as "my theater."^[13] Martial himself cites a famous story about Cato that illustrates this attitude to obscenity as something both scandalous and yet licit within its proper context: Cato was attending a theatrical production at the Ludi Florales, a festival in honor of Flora that culminated with prostitutes stripping onstage; on being told that his presence was inhibiting the people from demanding that the actors/prostitutes strip in the customary fashion, Cato left the theater, to great applause,in order that the ancient custom might go on.^[14] Obscenity and gravitas were at odds, but in this optimistic little anecdote each recognizes and defers to the other in a community that understands what kind of behavior belongs where. The reality was not so tidy: Suetonius (Iul. 49.4, 51) refers to the ritual abuse of the general by his troops in passages where he describes the sexual scandals surrounding Caesar, who was abused in very similar terms by his peers. Rome, the "city of abuse" (maledica civitas),^[15] was rife with sexual slander even at the highest level of politics, and obscene language was routinely directed at political opponents in epigrams and pamphlets or chanted by mobs of supporters.^[16] Suetonius quotes an epigram of Catullus' friend Licinius Calvus, in which Nicomedes of Bithynia is called the "pedicator Caesaris" (buggerer of Caesar); another friend of Catullus, Licinius Calvus, wrote an epigram on Pompey accusing him of being a pathic (FPL 18). In extenuation of his own obscenities, Martial (11.20) quotes an extremely obscene epigram against Antony by Augustus. This kind of invective was what Veyne calls the senatorial version of a popular genre in which the intention was to throw the adversary into confusion with a volley of insults.^[17] We can read a literary version of this popular genre of public insult called convicium or flagitatio in Catullus poem 42, where the poet, trying to reclaim some of his writing tablets from an unnamed woman, parodies the insulting chant that might be used to shame a suspected thief into returning stolen property. Several of Catullus' poems contain repeated lines or phrases that recall this insulting chant, and in some form or other popular forms lie behind much of his invective.^[18] Roman graffiti, folk customs, and even epitaphs reflect a culture in which the collectivity still feels that it has the right to pass judgment on the behavior of the individual.^[19] Furthermore, the Romans prided themselves on a native tradition of dicacitas , caustic raillery, of which that great icon of Romanness, Cato the Elder, was a famed exponent.^[20]

Our concept of the obscene derives from the Latin word obscaenus (or obscenus ); the Greeks had no special term for this kind of language.^[21]

Cicero and others attest to the existence of words that were normally avoided in polite society because of their obscenity, and they use a range of words besides obscenus to refer to them.^[22] But Pliny, excusing his own obscene poems, cites a long list of distinguished Romans who, like him, wrote "little poems none too grave" (versiculos severos parum, Ep. 5.3.2); included in this list are several contemporaries of Catullus, a number of predecessors, and an impressive array of emperors. Both here and in 4.14 (in which he cites Catullus 16), Pliny presents the writing of risqué verse as an appropriate activity of the well-rounded gentleman, who naturally enough has been to comedies and mimes, and occasionally relaxes and lets his hair down (5.3.2). The welter of precedents suggests that the writing of obscene verse was an activity in which the upper-class Roman might legitimately indulge.

It is unlikely, therefore, that Catullus' use of obscene language would have had the intention or effect of scandalizing the bourgeois, nor does it demand explanations of a psychological nature.^[23] And yet obscenity in Catullus is a distinctive kind of diction that establishes particular relations between poet and reader. What's more, in the context of poetry it is particularly significant that Roman obscenity was predominantly concerned with the impure mouth. The mouth in Roman culture was the most important site of purity or contamination: eating, speaking, and kissing—the latter as much a social as a sexual activity—all required a pure mouth, but above all speaking, for the Roman's word was sacred.^[24] Whether it was used as a threat or as an accusation, obscene language frequently concerned itself with this crucial bodily site of contact with the social world, of the traffic between inferiority and exteriority, and of the exchange between what is taken in and what is given out. This preoccupation of Roman obscenity with the mouth makes it a particularly rich source of figuration for poetry and especially for a poetry such as Catullus' that is so concerned with the relations and positions implied by the poetic act. In this chapter, I describe how obscenity figures in these poems, first of all by exploring the implications of an obscene figure (irrumation) for the agency of the poet and then by considering some of the special complications that arise for the speaker who handles obscene language and for the reader who responds to it. The poet who must stain without being stained, and the reader whose response to obscenity is bifurcated between disgust and prurience, are both realizing something about the volatile nature of obscene language that poetry is best able to illuminate; conversely, these problematic aspects of obscenity enable the poet to play with the ambiguous nature of poetic positionality.

I end this chapter by examining another issue in Roman obscenity, distinct from the concern with the impure mouth and yet related to it, namely, the concern with the proper hierarchies, articulations, and relations within and between bodies. Here Catullus articulates the Roman use of obscenity to enforce social conformity with an exploration of the nature of poetry itself, which is constructed out of an obscene and promiscuous nexus of relations between words. The poems that I cite here pillory familial or amical associations and understandings that result in obscene relations. Ironically, though, the audience that mocks these friends and relations is committed, as readers of poetry, to the enjoyment of the very anatomies they are mocking. The interference between the reader's relation to the poem as the fictional utterance of a speaker and as a set of formal structures produces contradictory relations to its obscenity.

In the course of the chapter, I also examine some of the ways in which the obscene poems position the activity of the scholar (who is also a reader), and in which the scholar's project and strategies may overlap with those of the obscene speaker.^[25]

Irrumation and the Silent Victim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To this he answers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staining Without Being Stained

It is, I think, misguided to eliminate the sheer aggression from Catullus' obscene invective by trying to justify it as a measured response to immorality and deficiencies of character. When Catullus complains, in poem 41, that Ameana is asking him a preposterous sum to sleep with her and doesn't seem to have consulted her mirror, he is insulting both Ameana and her lover Mamurra; to turn this poem, as have several of its commentators, into a moral tale about self-knowledge, in which the strength of Catullus' language (Ameana is called "fucked out") reflects the fact that he hates self-delusion, is taking the desire to endorse everything this poet says too far.^[46] However, it may be part of the strategy of a poem to separate the obscenity of the victim from the speaker who points it out. Take a poem like poem 98, which implicitly raises, and plays with, the problem of staining another with obscenity without being stained oneself; this poem, a vitriolic attack against the foulmouthed Victius, motivates its own obscenity by attacking the speech of another:

In te, si in quemquam, dici pote, putide Victi,
     id quod verbosis dicitur et fatuis.
ista cum lingua, si usus veniat tibi, possis
     culos et crepidas lingere carpatinas.
si nos omnino vis omnes perdere, Victi,
     hiscas: omnino quod cupis efficias.

Of you, if of anyone, could be said, stinking Victius,
     what is said of windbags and idiots.

With that tongue you could, if need arose,
     lick assholes and rough rustic boots.
If you're altogether set on destroying us all, Victius,
     gape: you'd accomplish all that you desire.

The tongue of Victius, chatterbox extraordinaire, is obscenely indiscriminate, but Catullus goes further and courts the danger of losing his metaphorical superiority, or the superiority of metaphor. Playing on the double meaning of putidus , "stinking" or "tiresome/affected in speech," the poet establishes his own speech as figurative by contrast to the gushing of the foul-smelling Victius, who only has to gape to destroy us all.^[47] The repetition "omnino . . . omnes . . . omnino" reflects the verbosity of Victius without duplicating it, for in the poem the verse and the sound patterning serve to place these words wittily. This distinction between speakers whose respective styles are reflected in the same words allows Catullus to court the irony of using culos (assholes) while talking of another's foul mouth, and to court this irony and get away with it is a large part of the poem's wit. It is all a question of who is controlling metaphor.

This poem was the subject of controversy during the early history of our text of Catullus, a period thick with the atmosphere of odium philologicum .^[48] It is worth pausing to examine this controversy because it provides us with a good example of the way in which the poetry and its strategies may be duplicated by the scholarship that serves it. Scholarly invective, even where it is not obscene, harnesses aggression in the cause of objectivity and therefore runs into a problem structurally analogous to that of staining without being stained. But the early editors of Catullus were not squeamish about their language. The cause in the name of which these editors exercised their own powers of vituperation was the cause of purity and wholeness, for an uncontaminated text had to be retrieved from the corruption of the manuscript.^[49] Of course, the content of some of the poems in the manuscript was anything but pure, and in those cases the scholars working on the text were spurred on to particularly inventive insults. The second of Poliziano's Miscellanea , published in 1489, is a fascinating case of the interplay between poem and scholarship. The issue of Miscellanea 2 is the meaning of the word carpatinas (c.98.40), in fact the transliteration of a rare Greek word for a peasant shoe made of undressed hide. Parthenius, evidently ignorant of this word, had emended to the neologistic coprotinas formed from the Greek kopros , "shit." Poliziano explicated carpatinas and then castigated the benighted scholars (tenebriones) who replaced it with cercopythas

(from kerkos , "prick") or coprotinas , nonexistent words "drawn from the pigsty, not the school";^[50] he himself, by contrast, brings authorities from Greek literature "as though from a storehouse."^[51]

Poem and commentary become continuous in Poliziano's invective, which assails Parthenius as an empty windbag, like Victius, and associates him similarly, if a little less closely, with rustic squalor. The fact that the early editions of Catullus had the name of the victim as Vectios, whom they may have identified as the grammarian Vectios Philocomus,^[52] makes Poliziano's doubling of Catullus' invective quite appropriate. But superimposed on this Catullan vituperation is a claim to have vindicated the purity of Catullus' language, and in fact this is the issue over which Poliziano identifies himself with the vituperative speaker of the poem! The scatological animus of Catullus' poem is now motivated as a protest at the filthy mouth of Parthenius and his ilk, who, by virtue of their deficient scholarship, are deprived of access to a higher language. In Catullus' poem, the alien Greek phrase stands for the world of a pure language—the object of scholarship—which allows those who command it to descend, in its defense, into vituperation without compromising the purity of their tongues. Unfortunately, there are parallels to Poliziano's polemics in the scholarship that deals with Roman sexual material today.^[53]

Poliziano is himself the object of a wittier and more obscene attack for his rejection of the reading cercolipas , a neologism printed by Muretus in 1554. The latter is compounded from the Greek words for "tail" and "fat," and is evidently supposed to mean "prick," as does the uncompounded kerkos (tail) in some passages; Muretus reads "trepidas . . . cercolipas" or "trembling pricks." This reading turns up in an epigram by Marullus attacking Poliziano (identified as Ecnomus):^[54]

Lingere carpatinas vult Vection Ecnomus, ipse
     ut possit trepidas lingere cercolipas.

Ecnomus wants Vectios to lick peasant boots, so
     he himself can lick trembling pricks.

Poliziano is given a double motivation for avoiding the more obscene reading: literally, he wants the trembling pricks to himself, so he fobs off Vectios with the peasant boots; metaphorically, he wants to humiliate ("irrumate") himself, so he adopts an inferior reading. Behind the metaphorical meaning lurks the more sinister, literal meaning! The speaker who can handle double meanings in this way is able to suggest

that nothing is what it seems, even Poliziano's motive for avoiding the obscene reading. Marullus' epigram, like so many of Martial's, recruits the lyric's potential for ambiguous utterance to penetrate the private and secret motivations of those who are not what they seem; the victim who has been skewered by an ambiguity as satisfying as this has nowhere to hide, for language itself speaks his duplicitous being.

Compromising Positions, Bifurcated Sensations

Obscenity is a volatile phenomenon that stirs mixed emotions, and the disgust that it is intended to evoke is often mingled with fascination. Marullus' epigram takes us into the murky world of the scholar's relation to the obscenities that scholarship is often called upon to explicate. But Marullus himself takes his cue from the speaker of Catullus' poem, whose obscene invective he duplicates; the issue raised by that poem, the problem of staining without being stained, is an issue that is played out again in the scholarly invective whose vituperative animus supposedly serves the objective investigation of a higher language. But what of Marullus'insinuations about the scholar's potentially prurient interest in obscene material? I will turn now to two poems that deliberately put the addressee and reader (and, implicitly, the investigating scholar) in a compromising position, beginning with the poem that contains Catullus' most mysterious and cherished obscenity, which even Fordyce couldn't bring himself to omit, glubit in poem 58.^[55] Catullus' most striking use of obscenity is also his most frustrating; the meaning of glubit is still as disputed as the reading at poem 98.4 used to be, but curiosity is that much more intense because the poem is about Lesbia and because the obscenity, if such it is, is very deliberately featured by the poem's structure of suspense:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,
nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes.

Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia,
Lesbia herself, whom alone Catullus
loved more than himself and all his dear ones,

now, at the crossroads and alleyways,
peels the descendants of greathearted Remus.

The whole poem depends on the word glubit , which has to balance the weight of the repetition of Lesbia's name and to deliver on the expectation of the enormity that Caelius is called on to witness. Unfortunately, we do not know what glubit means. One obscene use of this agricultural word, meaning originally "to strip the bark," has survived (Ausonius Epigr. 79.7), and a considerable bibliography has grown up around Catullus' meaning. Suggestions run from "fleeces (of their money)" and "strips (of their clothes)" to various sexual acts, specific (masturbates, fellates) or general (retracts the foreskin).^[56] Not to know precisely what it is that Lesbia is doing in the traditional haunts of prostitutes is to be deprived of the resolution that the poem's form demands. By carefully embedding glubit between polysyllabic compounds, Catullus emphasizes its bare semantic force;^[57] by making it the focal point of a poem that stutters with expressive incapacity, he invests it with authenticity. Whatever the slang connotations of the term, the primary meaning, "peel," implies both revelation and, especially in the context of this poem's suspense, release. But what is being revealed and what kind of release are we to experience?

That so much ink has been spilled on this single word is not surprising. Friedrich Lenz has asked, a propos Weinreich's reference to the "ambiguous" (schillernde) meaning of the word, "Is Catullus supposed to content himself with ambiguity in crying out his utter disgust?"^[58] For Lenz, recovery of the obscene force of this word is recovery of the truest voice of Catullus, wrung from him by Lesbia's betrayal. But Lenz goes on to say that the word must refer to a very precise event that triggers Catullus' desperate outburst in the first place. The word does double duty, then, both expressing Catullus' feelings and describing the behavior of Lesbia that has justified those feelings. Glubit is the perfectly motivated obscenity: it accuses at the same time as it reveals. Our prurient interest can be satisfied by the same word that expresses our outrage, and we can recover the essence of Catullus' hurt at the same time as we peer into Lesbia's sex life.^[59] Lenz's argument that the word must have a specific obscene meaning is overdetermined, but so is the poem's structural suspense, which postpones Catullus' outburst as it arouses our curiosity about Lesbia.

Poems 58 is usually read as an expression of anguish, a key point in the novel of Catullus' relationship with Lesbia.^[60] But this is to ignore

the communicative rhetoric of the poem: glubit satisfies an aroused curiosity as much as it releases a postponed cry of pain. Structurally and rhetorically, poem 58 has much in common with one of Catullus' most playful poems, 56, which also buttonholes its addressee and promises to set him on his ears:

O rem ridiculam, Cato, et iocosam,
dignamque auribus et tuo cachinno!
ride quidquid amas, Cato, Catullum:
res est ridicula et nimis iocosa.
deprendi modo pupulum puellae
trusantem; hunc ego, si placet Dionae,
protelo rigida mea cecidi.

Cato, what an amusing and laughable matter,
worthy of your ears and laughter!
Laugh as much as you love Catullus, Cato:
the matter is amusing and just too funny.
Just now I caught a little boy banging his girl [or, "the boy
of my girl, masturbating"]
Immediately [or "in tandem"], so please Dione [Venus' mother],
I beat him with my own stiff weapon.

It is ironic that two poems that so emphatically have something to tell should generate so much argument as to what it is they are telling. Is puellae a dative of direction or a genitive of possession? Is the boy humping his girl or is the boy of Catullus' girl masturbating?^[61] Inquiring minds want to know! Obscenity in poems 56 and 58 is intended to provoke the reactions of laughter and outrage respectively, but our distance from ancient Latin turns us into inquiring minds, peering hard to descry the sexual escapades of our subjects. The accidents of history and of the transmission of knowledge have served to intensify the complexity of response that these poems solicit.

The structures of poems 56 and 58 are remarkably similar: in each case, the punch line releases a tension that is built up by the repetition of proper names. In poem 58 Lesbia, the name that Catullus has given to his beloved, and therefore a name that makes a claim as much as it refers, is placed between the names of speaker and addressee and held there to prepare the maximum contrast with the obscenity. The obscenity acquires its metaphorical meaning by common currency and not, like "Lesbia," by Catullus' fiat. So the speech habits of others invade Catullus' diction at the same time as Lesbia's promiscuity is revealed. If the obscenity of Poem 58 defiles the name and the naming that post-

pones it, the obscenity of poem 56 is intended to infect the insistently named addressee with laughter; the repeated naming that establishes a relation between the names of the principals—as though Catullus were a diminutive of Cato —both reflects the infectiousness that is promised and suggests the resistance that has to be overcome.^[62] Even if the Cato addressed here is the poet, critic, and neoteric guru Valerius Cato, and not the severe Stoic suicide M. Porcius, the very name has a life of its own and in itself connotes censoriousness; the collocation "Cato Catullum" is comically improbable if sonically effective.^[63] So the obscene anecdote that concludes is a story both of sexual misdemeanor punished and of its opposite, the infectiousness of sexual desire. We laugh because the story of infectious desire triumphs over the story of punishment, because protelo ('in tandem, straightaway') absorbs "pro telo" (instead of a weapon), and in the process the oxymoronic "Cato Catullum" becomes a ripple of shared laughter.^[64]

Poem 56 is not confessional, and we would be inclined to distinguish it from poem 58, in spite of the similarities, for that reason. The sexual anecdote in 56 is part of a transaction between addressee and speaker, and the infectiousness of laughter that Catullus solicits from Cato is both reflected and caused by the infectiousness of sexual desire in the anecdote. In poem 58, Catullus is expressing his outrage and suffering, but isn't there a relation between the sexual relief that Lesbia provides the sons of greathearted Remus and the revelation promised by the first line and delivered by the last? The vocative Caeli is the beginning of a long suspension that stresses the exclusive relationship between Catullus and his Lesbia; the revelation of Lesbia's sexual availability coincides with the release of the structural tension for both reader and addressee.^[65] Paradoxically, the suspension expressing the speaker's outrage at Lesbia's sexuality also introduces a rhythm of tension and resolution that determines the curious reader's relation to Lesbia's sexuality quite differently. In the last line, the speaker releases Lesbia from the grip of his stuttering incomprehension to show her servicing all and sundry; the reader's outrage at Lesbia's fault is effected by a structural resolution that also makes the reader complicit with the "sons of greathearted Remus." If Catullus did order the poems as they appear in the manuscript, then he may have intended to establish a relation between these two obscene revelations, the one so pleased with itself and the other so tortured. The sexual content of the anecdote in poem 56, which stresses the irresistible mimetic infectiousness of desire, reinforces the communication oflaughter that is the point of the telling. Resistance, implied by the name Cato,

is swept aside just as the punitive, censorious model is absorbed by the mimetic. In poem 58, however, Lesbia's "peeling" of the sons of Remus subverts the outrage that is being communicated, for it reinforces and sexualizes the structure of the reader/addressee's experience of the poem's revelation, of its rhythm of tension and release. In this respect, poem 58 is like poem 56. Obscenity in both of these poems figures in the creation of a bifurcated response to the poem's communicative insistence: outrage is compromised by the satisfaction of a prurient curiosity and by the infectiousness of desire. As in poem 98, the form of the poem's utterance contaminates the position of the inquiring scholar, who finds it hard to separate the objective search for truth from less reputable motivations that the poem brings to the surface, in this case prurient curiosity, and in the case of poem 98 odium philologicum .

Obscenity and Closure

Poems 56 and 58 are good examples of the power of obscenity to produce closure; the extremity of obscene diction is emphasized in both cases by contrast to dignified mythological names (Remi , 58.5; Dionae , mother of Aphrodite, 56.6). The shock of the contrast effectively closes poems that have promised us something big from the start. Poem 97 starts with obscenity and works its way to a hair-raising climax:

Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi,
     utrum os an culum olfacerem Aemilio.
nilo mundius hoc, niloque immundius illud,
     verum etiam culus mundior et melior:
nam sine dentibus est. hoc dentis sesquipedalis,
     gingivas vero ploxeni habet veteris,
praeterea rictum qualem diffissus in aestu
     meientis mulae cunnus habere solet.
hic futuit multas et se facit esse venustum,
     et non pistrino traditur atque asino?
quem siqua attingit, non illam posse putemus
     aegroti culum lingere carnificis?

So help me God, I thought it made no difference
     whether I smell the mouth or asshole of Aemilius.
The one is no cleaner, the other no dirtier,
     in fact the asshole's cleaner and better,

for it has no teeth. The mouth has feet half a yard long,
     and gums like an old wagon-box.
What's more it gapes like the cunt of a pissing
     mule split open in the heat.
This guy fucks lots of women and thinks he's charming,
     and he's not consigned to the mill and the ass?
If any woman touches him, wouldn't you think she could
     lick the asshole of a sickly executioner?

This is one of three consecutive poems dealing with one of the most common themes of obscene Roman literature, the impure mouth.^[66] Commentators cite Greek epigrams in which addressees are told that their anuses and mouths are interchangeable, but the citations only serve to contrast Catullus' opening with these "parallels."^[67] The confusion between the two orifices is here emphasized by the insouciant indifference with which Catullus contemplates the prospect of smelling them, and this has no parallel in the Greek poems. But if Aemilius' two ends are indistinguishable, those of the poem are not: the opening's entertaining of alternatives contrasts with the accumulation of disgust in the final line, where each of the four words conveys some revolting aspect of the depths to which Aemilius' hypothetical girlfriend would sink. The formal difference between the beginning of a poem, where anything is possible, and the end, where there is nowhere else to go, is thematized by the relation of the speaker to Aemilius' body: casually indifferent at first, horrified at the end. But it is a third person who finally takes over the job of approaching Aemilius' body: the woman who can bring herself to touch Aemilius brings mouth and anus—confusingly equivalent smells to begin with—into intimate and polluting contact with each other. This is a particularly compelling version of ring composition and poetic closure; as we pronounce the final line, filling our mouths with obscenity, we duplicate the behavior of the hypothetical girlfriend of Aemilius. In the figure of the girlfriend, the poet transfers the stain of obscenity onto the mouth of another, who is contrasted with the insouciant persona of the poet at the beginning of the poem; this figure in turn stands for the reader, whose tongue lingers over the end of the poem, its anus in fact.

Poetic closure coincides again with an obscene act in poem 88, where Catullus addresses one of his favorite victims, the incestuous Gellius:

Quid facit is, Gelli, qui cum matre atque sorore
     prurit et abiectis pervigilat tunicis?

quid facit is, patruum qui non sinit esse maritum?
     ecquid scis quantum suscipiat sceleris?
suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Tethys
     nec genitor nympharum abluit Oceanus:
nam nihil est quicqum sceleris, quo prodeat ultra,
     non si demisso se ipse voret capite.

Gellius, what is the man who gets the itch with his mother
     and sister, and stays up with them all night naked?
What is the man who doesn't allow his uncle to be married?
     Do you know what enormity he undertakes?
He undertakes, Gellius, a crime such as remotest Tethys
     does not purify, nor Oceanus, father of the nymphs:
for there is nowhere beyond this for crime to go,
     not if he were to suck himself with his head bent.

As in poem 97, this poem ends with a breathtaking obscenity that provides an extremely powerful sense of closure. But the formal tightness of the ending depends on a paradox, namely, that Gellius' crime cannot go any further even if he were to fellate himself. The extreme limit of crime is this reflexive act that produces a sexually self-contained body, and, as the poem closes with the ultimate enormity, it produces an image of its own self-containment. Gellius' crime of incest is such that the ocean itself will not wash it away;^[68] but Oceanus and Tethys, the parents of the nymphs, were themselves brother and sister: extremity, again, is replication. As the speaker gropes for something different, something extreme by which to measure the enormity of Gellius' crime, the poem turns in on itself; even the question in line 4 repeats obsessively the same sounds while preparing us for something other. Poetry being a highly self-reflexive mode of discourse, the obscenity that closes this poem could be read as a figure for poetic discourse itself. But the fact that poetic textuality is figured by an obscenity produces a bifurcated sensation in its readers: as readers of poetry, we are committed to this body that excites itself, and we desire the closure that sends us back to the beginning again; but, as witnesses of Catullus' denunciation of Gellius, we are expected to turn away in disgust from this limit of monstrosity.

Obscene Relations, Interchangeable Bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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