Chapter 4
Urbanity
The Poetry of Exclusion

In Chapter 2, I described the overlap between the erotic and the poetic in terms like venustas and deliciae , an overlap that allows Catullus to explore an important dimension of the relation between poet and reader. This chapter is concerned with urbanitas and the overlap between social style or manners and poetics. The concepts of social style and manners function essentially as a means of separating outsiders from insiders, of excluding and including, so here too Catullus adopts a relational or positional model for his poetry. But scholarship has generally taken a different direction with Catullus' urbanity, trying to elicit an ethical component from the poetry by elaborating the principles of urbane behavior and their derivation from aesthetic principles: good poetry is like proper behavior, and we can read off the principles of one from the other. Speaking from the position of the urbane Catullus, scholars have shown themselves to be members of Catullus' circle by virtue of their ability to grasp the ethical implications of the Catullan poetic style, which is something that has to be tested on the pulse: to expound the values of this style, one has to adopt it imaginatively and describe how it functions.

I pursue a different critical project in relation to Catullus' urbanity, one that requires us, first of all, to stop believing in the poet. My question is not "What is Catullan urbanity?" but "How does Catullus lay claim to urbanity?" In his urbane performances, Catullus positions himself in relation to those he excludes. The urbane style appears as it condemns the inurbane; it is appropriated. Because the terms that convey correct social style or manner are indefinable, a person who is authorized to

assign or exemplify them stands, like the poet, in a unique relation to the common language, and must vindicate the right to this position by continually proving that he or she can outperform others. The strategies of the arbiter of urbanity are very much those of the poet. But before turning to the strategies of urbanity in Catullus' poetry, let us briefly consider the status of the concept of urbanitas in Catullus' time and in its modern afterlife.

The Power of the Indefinable

The English word "urbanity" belongs to a set of concepts involved in the aestheticizing of social life whose ideology has recently been described by Terry Eagleton. When Eagleton speaks of the Earl of Shaftesbury's aristocratic conflation of the moral with the aesthetic, it is hard not to think of Catullus: "To live 'aesthetically' for Shaftesbury is to flourish in the well-proportioned exercise of one's powers, conforming to the law of one's free personality in the casual, affable, taken-for-granted style of the stereotypical aristocrat."^[1] This thought seems familiar to the reader of Catullus, partially because the Earl of Shaftesbury knew Catullus and partially because Catullus' modern critics have, consciously or not, absorbed the ideas of Shaftesbury. What Eagleton reminds us is that this conflation of the aesthetic and the moral has had an important ideological role to play in the naturalization of political order, the diffusion of power through the unconscious textures of everyday life. Shaftesbury's conflation of ethics with aesthetics revolves around the concept of manners, through which, as Eagleton puts it, "the human subject introjects the codes which govern it as the very source of its free autonomy" (41). The indefinability of Catullan urbanity and related concepts corresponds to the necessarily irreducible character of their modern offspring; as Eagleton points out, the aestheticizing of morality ensures that the law that guarantees the cohesion of society is "beyond all reason, as gloriously pointless as a poem," which renders it immune not only to rational analysis but also to rational criticism.^[2] As long as the poem is taken to exemplify the style whose beauty is an index of its ethical rightness, it remains beyond rational analysis or criticism, for all we can do is taste it and find it good. But Catullus' poetry never simply exemplifies style; rather, it claims its stylishness against others who might lay similar claim, and it is only through this relation that the style

appears. If the danger of an aesthetic morality is that it renders social relations beyond questioning, then it is important for us to understand aesthetic qualities in relation to the social dynamics that create them.

Scholars who set out to describe or define the Latin word urbanitas often find themselves invoking indefinables from modern cultures, not necessarily their own; the locus classicus is Austin's note on Pro Caelio , 6.25:

An adequate translation of urbanitas is impossible. It is not only an abstract idea, but an attitude of mind; it represents all that seemed to a Roman gentleman to constitute "good form" in manners, ton , the opposite of the boorish clumsiness of those rustici who had not the advantage of living in the urbs ; it was something instinctively and naturally Roman (cf. ad Att. vii.2.3 "est, quam facile diligas, autochthon^[*] in homine urbanitas"). P. de Labriolle, Les Satires de Juvenal , p. 351, compares it to the conception of politesse in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "le produit exquis, la fleur de leur civilization". The essence of such "good form" was sparkle, subtlety, wit, elegance: the unforgivable sin was to be clumsy, stupid, dull.^[3]

Austin is right to say that an adequate translation of urbanitas is impossible, for urbanitas is acquired from mixing with the right people and living in the right places, and it is a concept whose purpose is as much to exclude as to define, hence the importance of negatives in Austin's treatment of this word ("the opposite of . . .," "the unforgivable sin . . ."). Like "gentleman" and politesse, urbanitas is a concept on which a particular culture prides itself and which therefore needs to be untranslatable.^[4] As we shall see, this concept was also indefinable for the Romans who used it. A German scholar describing the sophistication of Catullus' circle finds himself invoking a number of untranslatable, and sometimes naturalized, foreign words:

Hier war man wie er elegant, charmant, witzig und frech; hier pflegte man wie er in einem laessigen "understatement" seine ganze Ueberlegenheit ueber allen als toelpelhaft empfundenen Ernst kundzutun.

Here [sc. Rome] one was, like him [Catullus] elegant, charming, witty and impudent; here the custom was to announce, like him, in a careless "understatement" one's complete superiority to all that one saw as cloddish seriousness.^[5]

One begins to get the idea. Syndikus's polyglot description reminds us that the existence of a composite European sophistication derives from the common Latin culture of educated westerners. But the familiarity and

the deeply ingrained authority of these terms makes Catullus' Roman urbanity seem a little too entrenched; one must remember that urbanitas was itself a term that was undergoing changes in meaning at the time, and that urbanity as a style of behavior and a social value was still somewhat experimental.^[6] What these passages suggest is that both the term and the behavior it denotes are intended to create an excluded and despised opposite, and that any examination of the concept of urbanitas must consider it functionally rather than as a bundle of qualities.

Ancient attempts to define urbanitas often echo the embarrassment that overtakes Cicero when pressed on this word by Brutus in his dialogue of that name (Brut. , 170ff.). But perhaps embarrassment is the wrong description, because Cicero uses urbanitas in the first place to pinpoint what is lacking in the Italian orators, and the very vagueness of the term serves to emphasize the absolute nature of the gulf between metropolis and province. If urbanitas could be defined, then the authority of the Roman to pronounce on such matters would be diminished. So the Italian orators, Cicero states, have everything one could ask for in a speaker except that their speech "is not, as it were, tinged with a certain urbanity." And what is this urbanity? Cicero replies that he doesn't know, but he knows that it exists (171); it is "a more urbane resonance" (resonat urbanius) that rings in the words of "our" orators, and it is the "native flavor" (sapor vernaculus) by which Granius prevailed over the provincial Tinca, even though the latter had a ready wit. But Granius was himself of municipal origin, and it might seem paradoxical that some of the figures who prided themselves most on their urbanitas , and chided its lack in others, were provincials like Cicero and Catullus. No doubt the process of acculturation and of acceptance into Roman aristocratic society for these outsiders was oiled by their championship of this quintessentially aristocratic quality.^[7] Compare the rather awkward performance of Cicero to the following poem of Catullus, in which the aristocratic Lesbia is championed against the claims of a certain Quintia, who may have come from Catullus' native Verona:^[8]

Quintia formosa est multis. mihi candida, longa,
     recta est: haec ego sic singula confiteor.
totum illud formosa nego: nam nulla venustas,
     nulla in tam magno est corpore mica salis.
Lesbia formosa est, quae cum pulcerrima tota est,
     tum omnibus una omnis surripuit Veneres. (c.86)

Quintia is beautiful to many. To me she is fair, tall,
     straight: these particulars I readily concede.

But the whole that is beauty I withhold; she has no charm,
     no grain of salt in all that body.
Lesbia is beautiful, and, loveliest in all respects,
     alone she's robbed all others of their charms.

Catullus concedes to Quintia all the identifiable qualities one might desire in a beautiful woman, but withholds two of those indefinable ingredients of urbanitas: venustas (charm) and sal ("salt," i.e., wit).^[9] The latter term, as Quintilian observes, means "funny" (ridiculum) in common parlance, but Quintilian goes on to say that Catullus can't be complaining that there's nothing funny in Quintia's body, and he concludes

Salsum erit igitur quod non erit insulsum, velut quoddam simplex orationis condimentum, quod sentitur latente iudicio velut palato, excitatque et a taedio defendit orationem (6.3.18).

So that will be witty (salsum) which is not dull (insulsum), like some simple seasoning of the speech, which is detected by the private judgment as though by the palate, and stimulates the speech and protects it from tedium.

All this is part of a discussion of urbanitas , which is identified, rather unhelpfully, as speech that displays a taste of the city (gustum urbis) and, more helpfully, as "a discreet culture acquired from association with the learned" (sumptam ex conversatione doctorum tacitam eruditionem). What these examples reveal is that urbanitas and related words are not just difficult to define, but essentially indefinable because of the kind of work they do.^[10]

In the time of Catullus and Cicero, the application of the word urbanitas is undergoing an expansion; its earlier applications to, literally, life at Rome or to a certain crude Roman humor are being joined by a more general reference to a person's metropolitan sophistication. Rome is becoming self-conscious, especially in the persons of the provincials who have come to Rome to display and exploit their own cultivation in the center of culture. Cicero's use of the word shows that it is at the center of developments in ideals of behavior and attitude in the second half of the first century. In some passages, Cicero regrets the disappearance of an ancient urbanitas , harking back to a native Roman tradition of caustic wit that hardly opposed itself to rusticitas ;^[11] when Tacitus refers to a crude practical joke as vernacula (home-bred) urbanitas (Hist. 2.88), he recalls that tradition.^[12] In the Pro Caelio, urbanitas is introduced in order to distinguish different kinds of abuse: "if it is hurled

more insolently, it is called insult; if more wittily, urbanity" (si petulantius iactatur, convicium; si facetius, urbanitas nominatur; Cael . 6). Here it retains the older association with Roman causticity, though it now serves the purpose of making a distinction between crude and sophisticated.^[13] But later in the same speech (14.33), Cicero asks of Clodius whether he would have Cicero deal with him with old-style severity (severiter et graviter et prisce) or more indulgently (remisse et leniter et urbane). The word is now used in opposition to the older tradition, whose characteristic wit it denotes in the passages cited above; it now implies some relaxation of a more traditional severity, a deflection from the straight and narrow Roman path.^[14]

In a letter to Appius Pulcher (ad Fam . 3.8), the ex-governor of Cicero's new province, Cicero specifically alludes to new developments in the meaning of urbanitas . Appius has evidently taken Cicero to task for not showing him the proper deference, and Cicero writes to exculpate himself. Among Appius' grievances is the fact that Cicero failed to send the usual deputation to the Senate praising the administration of the ex-governor. Cicero responds that he had not wished to put the provincials to unnecessary expense, and furthermore that he did not believe Appius to be the sort of person to be concerned about such deputations:

Primum te, hominem non solum sapientem verum etiam, ut nunc loquimur, urbanum, non arbitrabar genere isto legationum delectari, (3.8.3)

First, I did not think that you, a man not only wise but, as we now say, urbane, would take pleasure in that kind of deputation,

For Appius not to be concerned about the outward tokens of respect that were the bread and butter of the Roman politician, and to which Cicero himself was greatly attached, he would have to be exhibiting a new, more ironical sense of self; and for Cicero to get away with his excuse, he would have to be offering Appius a new and desirable kind of self-image.

With Cicero's letter to Appius, we come close to the mechanism of Catullus' urbanitas as I describe it in this chapter. Cicero is using the word in a sense that appears to be new (he is writing in 51 B.C.E. ) to maneuver himself out of an awkward situation. Not only has his behavior, as he claims, been elegans ("correct" and perhaps "graceful") in its reconciliation of the demands of the provincials with those of Appius' dignitas ,^[15] but he has left Appius looking clumsy in his recriminations against Cicero, and this at least partially by virtue of the finesse with

which he sidesteps Appius' complaint. In other words, Cicero's appeal to the standards of urbanitas is itself a maneuver that displays his elegance. I argue that urbanitas in Catullus' work is best understood as a performance, and a performance that always involves some kind of aggressive, or at least competitive, relation with another. Urbanity, then, is a position, for the urbane speaker claims his possession of that quality by drawing a line that shows, as it excludes , in what respect he has this je ne sais quoi .

Theft and Reclamation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Language Perform

The urbanity that I have been describing is competitive, establishing the position of the urbane speaker against others, even, in the case of Fabullus, those who have been invited into the poet's world. As a je ne sais quoi that is defined as much by those who lack it as by those who possess it, urbanitas is often displayed in the context of a struggle for power. In poem 25, we have heard Catullus adopt the tone of another as part of a claim to mastery; in poem 4, the speaker purports to mediate the autobiography of a yacht, reporting its speech in a tone that is best described as patronizing and at the same time the height of urbanity. Clearly, there can be no struggle for power transpiring between the yacht and the speaker of this poem, but it is the amused and playful sovreignty of the speaker in relation to the speech he reports that distinguishes the tone of the poem:

Phaselus ille, quem videtis, hospites,
air fuisse navium celerrimus,

neque ullius natantis impetum trabis
nequisse praeterire, sive palmulis
opus foret volare sive linteo.
et hoc negat minacis Hadriatici
negare litus insulasve Cycladas
Rhodumque nobilem horridamque Thraciam
Propontida trucemve Ponticum sinum,
ubi iste post phaselus antea fuit
comata silva; nam Cytorio in iugo
loquente saepe sibilum edidit coma. (1–12)

That yacht, which you are looking at, my friends, says that it was the fastest of ships,
and that the speed of no "swimming timber"
could surpass it, whether oars
were the medium of its flight or sails.
And it denies that the threatening Adriatic
shore denies this or the Cyclades,
or noble Rhodes, or bristling Thrace,
or Propontis, or the vicious Pontic Bay,
where that soon-to-be-yacht was once
a long-haired wood; for on Mount Cytorus
its speaking hair would often whisper.

The double negatives (3–4, 6–7) and the epicisms (impetum trabis, 3) have a somewhat pompous and comic effect, but whose speech do they reflect? Wilamowitz heard the patter of a professional cicerone in the verse,^[48] but I think the anonymous poet of Catalepton 10 understood something important about the social dimensions of the poem when he wrote his parody.^[49] In that parody, the yacht is replaced by a mule driver who is displayed at the end of the poem sitting in his retirement on a magistrate's curule chair. The parody is a satire mocking the pretensions of an upstart who has attained high office and whose past looks ridiculous in the trappings of high culture; displaying the muleteer to the guests, the speaker also displays his own superiority in the exquisite fit between the Catullan original and the sordid details of the muleteer's career. The effect of the reported speech is familiar to anyone who has heard some wit report what was said by a social inferior by translating the latter's vulgarisms into the language of high culture.^[50] In Catullus' poem, the social dynamics are not explicit, but the play with literary circumlocution depends on a gap between the (supposed) speaker of the direct speech and the speaker who reports it.

It has been argued that the yacht is characterized as the running slave so popular in comedy:^[51]

et inde tot per impotentia freta
erum tulisse, laeva sive dextera
vocaret aura, sive utrumque Iuppiter
simul secundus incidisset in pedem. (18–21)

and thence through many violent seas
it bore its master, whether the wind
came from the left or right, or whether Jove
fell following on both the sheets [lit., "feet"] at once.

If the running slave is behind these lines, then the effect is comic, and the relation of the speaker to the yacht for which he speaks one of condescending amusement, even victimization. The urbanity of the poem lies in its indirection, in the lightness with which the speaker guides garrulity into amusing channels much as adults sometimes incorporate the babbling of a child, or the antics of a dog, into some scenario that it is incapable of understanding.^[52] Catullus gives us only half of the scene; whatever it is that is being glossed, rephrased, commented on, and reported has to be imagined by the reader, so that the elegance of the language is always the elegance with which the speaker handles the speech of an inferior. The garrulous boasting of the yacht falls into a perfect circle that takes us from the present back to its origin in a wood and then forward again to its present retirement, and this elegance of structure is like the itinerary that the clever sailor realizes out of the random bluster of the wind. Sailing is in fact the perfect metaphor for the skillful harnessing of the speech of another by the poem's speaker.^[53]

The classic interpretations of poem 4 have downplayed the gap between the positions of speaker and yacht. Copley 1958 makes of the poem a parable of the New Criticism. Reacting against the treatment of this poem as a set of problems about the yacht (real or not? how big? whose? etc.), about its precise itinerary and the possible autobiographical elements of the poem, Copley (12–13) urges us to focus on the world of the poem itself:

[Catullus'] phaselus is very much alive, and in a curious and subtle way, her life is made more real to the reader by the poet's device of having her tell her story not in person—but through a narrator, thus suggesting that her language was not one to be heard and understood by everyone but only by those who had lived on and with her.

In Copley's hands the intermediary speaker becomes the lover who speaks the "poetry" of his mistress, and this privileged, intimate, and respectful relationship becomes the model for our own hearing of the poem, which must eschew speculations about the realities behind the poem that bedeviled earlier scholarship:

It is for this [the "poetry" of the ship] that [Catullus] created the world of his poem; and only if we accept that world, seeing and hearing exactly what the poet's words require us to see and hear, adding nothing to it, inferring nothing from it, will we grasp the meaning of the poem and know its delights.(13)

Copley doesn't seem to hear the garrulity that, according to Wilamowitz, interposes itself between sightseers and sight, still less the patronizing amusement with which the yacht's story is "reported." For Copley, the intermediary who makes available to us the poetry of the ship is transparent, or perhaps I should say inaudible.

After Copley's New Critical warnings, the biographical interpretation of poem 4 was reintroduced in more respectable terms by Putnam 1962, who read the poem, together with poems 31 and 46, as an indirect expression of Catullus' own feelings on returning to his home from service in Bithynia. According to Putnam, Catullus has created a speaking yacht in order to symbolize "the speed of desire" (14), and the guests "suspend disbelief—in order to become willingly involved in the strength of the poet's emotion" (14). Again, the relationship between poet (or speaker) and yacht, which is the essence of this interpretation, is direct: the yacht "is [its master's] emotion" and the hospites (guests) are to visualize the yacht "not as the poet's pawn but as the possessor, through the poet, of a life all its own" (14). But if the hospites are expected to suspend their disbelief in the speaking yacht, then the witty and parenthetical use of the poetic cliché of whispering foliage in lines 11 and 12 will be lost on them. The interpretations of Putnam and Copley are parables of reading that depend on the yacht being an object of absorption: the poet speaks the poetry that he has absorbed from the yacht and that we, in turn, activate by our exclusive absorption in the world of the poem (Copley); or, the yacht absorbs the emotion and desire of the master, so that we can become absorbed in that emotion as we suspend our disbelief in the yacht's power of speech (Putnam). For Putnam and Copley, the fusion of speaker and yacht, and the generous self-effacement that makes it possible for one to be projected onto the other, are a function of the symbolic nature of poetry, which demands

an absorbed reader. These readings elide the difference between speaker and yacht, and therefore the difference within the language of this poem.

The poem ends with a vocative that is set, paradoxically, into the reported speech of the yacht:

          nunc recondite
senet quiete seque dedicat tibi,
Gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris. (25–27)

          now it's growing old
in quiet retirement and it dedicates itself
to you, twin Castor, and to Castor's twin.

In the final line, the doubling of speakers is accompanied by a play on twinness, sameness in difference, and a singular (tibi , not vobis ) plurality. By using the second person, the speaker performs the speech act that he reports, and this doubling coincides with a periphrasis for the name Pollux ("Castor's twin") that emphasizes the fact that language allows the same thing to be said in different ways. At the beginning of the poem, our attention is drawn to two double negatives that also associate the redundancy of language—the fact that a positive can be expressed by a double negative—with a form of linguistic doubling, namely, indirect speech:

neque ullius natantis impetum trabis
nequisse practerire, sive palmulis
opus foret volare sive linteo.
et hoc negat minacis Hadriatici
negare litus . . . (3–7)

and that the speed of no "swimming timber"
could surpass it, whether oars
were the medium of its flight or sails.
And it denies that the threatening Adriatic
shore denies this . . .

Because the reported speech is not actually the speech of either yacht or speaker, language is held at arm's length, so to speak, and "performs." But what enables this performance is the patronizing relation of one speaker to another.

As most commentators have noted, the places that the yacht cites to verify its boast are the stops on the journey from Bithynia to Italy in reverse sequence (6–12), ending with the Pro pontis and the Pontus. What is not usually remarked is that this reversed geographical sequence

is followed by the reversed temporal sequence that takes us from the "after" of the yacht as human artifact to the "before" of the longhaired tree. This in turn is followed by a logical "before" in the form of nam (for), which introduces the whispering foliage. One could say that the propulsion carrying us from one point to the next in this passage is neither sail nor oar but metaphor, creating a sequence of different categories of priority (Pro-pontis, antea, nam) leading to the central metaphor that endows the yacht with the power to speak. At this point in the poem (10–12), the yacht's speech is no longer being reported, and its nature as a human artifact, both poetic (in the metaphor of whispering foliage) and vehicular, becomes the focus. The yacht is, pace Putnam, very much the pawn of the poet, and, as a product of the human power to transform nature into the servant of human purposes, it is endowed with speech in order to facilitate a certain game with language.

To whom do we attribute the linguistic play in the following lines?

          ultima ex origine
tuo imbuisse dicit in cacumine,
tuo imbuisse palmulas in aequore
et inde tot per impotentia freta
crum tulisse, (15–19)

          from its first origin
it says it stood upon your peak,
and dipped its palms into your sea
and thence through many violent seas
it bore its master,

Imbuisse (dipped) and palmulas (palms) may both be taken literally or metaphorically: the yacht "dips its palms" or "initiates its oars" in the sea. Because of the relation between speaker and yacht, wordplay is here associated with the superior knowledge of one speaker to that of another: the yacht says more than it knows, allowing the speaker to wink at us as he reports what it says.

If we think of the relation between speaker and yacht in this poem as facilitating a particular kind of detached urbanity of speech, we can see the similarity between this poem and Catullus' attack on Thallus, in which the poet holds Thallus' own language in suspension, both putting it in quotation marks and speaking it himself. In both cases the urbanity of the speaker has to do with the easy power with which he treats the (putative) speech of the other, reminding us of Horace's characterization of the urbanus :

          urbani, parcentis viribus atque
extenuantis eas consulto. (Serm.  1.10.13–14)

          the urbane man, sparing his strength
and contracting it on purpose.

Poem 4 is the sound of the urbane speaker rationing his strength, a sound that can best be heard against another speaker.

In Chapter 2, we saw how the overlap between Roman aesthetic language and the language of social or sexual attractiveness allows Catullus to dramatize dimensions of the poetic act or relation that might otherwise be invisible; this overlap helps us to understand the position of the poet within the larger society of speakers and the continuity between the relations established by the poem and those that pertain in other activities. Similarly, in this chapter, we have seen that we can understand much about the society created by a poem if we think in terms of activities like stealing, reclaiming, inviting, and reporting, activities around which Catullus' performance has revolved in these poems.

Play and Frustration

Throughout this chapter, I have been citing examples of the tendency in modern Catullan criticism to search for depth beneath the urbane surface of the poems. Poem 50 has been a crucial poem for this project because it has been read as a narrative of the same transformation of superficial urbanity into profound seriousness that criticism has itself performed on Catullus:^[54]

Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi
multum lusimus in meis tabellis,
ut convenerat esse delicatos:
scribens versiculos uterque nostrum
ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,
reddens mutua per iocum atque vinum.
atque illinc abii tuo lepore
incensus, Licini, facctiisque,
ut nec me miserum cibus iuvaret
nec somnus tegeret quiete ocellos,
sed toto indomitus furore lecto
versarer, cupiens videre lucem,
ut tecum loquerer simulque ut essem.

at defessa labore membra postquam
semimortua lectulo iacebant,
hoc iucunde, tibi poema feci,
ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem.
nunc audax cave sis, precesque nostras,
oramus, cave despuas, ocelle,
ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te.
est vemens dea: laedere hanc caveto.

Yesterday, Licinius, at our ease
we played a lot in my notebooks,
as we had agreed to be frivolous:
playing in this meter, then in that,
swapping verses, joking, drinking.
And I left you, Licinius, inflamed
with your charm and witticisms,
so that I could not eat (poor me!)
but tossed all over the bed, my passion
uncontrolled, longing to see the light of day,
so that I could speak and be with you.
But when my limbs, worn out with toil
were lying on the bed, half-dead,
I made this poem for you, my friend,
that you might understand my suffering.
Now see you don't get bold, I beg you,
dear, not to reject my prayers
lest Nemesis exact a penalty from you.
She's an imperious goddess, don't provoke her!

The structure of the poem has been taken to distinguish two levels of poetic activity: on the one hand, the play of the delicati producing their "little verses," and on the other the solitary pain of the "author" Catullus from which "this poem" (16) emerges. Skinner interprets the poem as a description of the creative process in which emotion recollected in tranquillity transforms the ephemeral into the enduring:

It is a process which begins . . . in the raffish, bohemian atmosphere of the otiosi and the free-wheeling activity of the ludus poeticus . As the operation continues, however, the author is compelled to withdraw within himself and undergo no little effort in order to transform the afternoon's ephemeral versiculi into an enduring poema which will stand as the public profession of his sensibility.^[55]

Skinner's narrative is the story of the poetic process, but it contains another story about the reader's access to the circle of the urbani: initially

excluded from the "free-wheeling" activity of the poetic game, the reader finally gains access to the fruition of that game in the "enduring poema " that makes a public profession of the poet's sensibility; the versiculi (little verses) are not only ephemeral, they are also inaccessible. An implicit hierarchy of poema and versiculi gives the audience that has witnessed Catullus' distress the privileged feeling of having access to what Quinn calls the "point at which playing with verse ceased to be just an amusing pastime."^[56] Paradoxically, we would gain entrance to the poem precisely where the poet "withdraw[s] within himself," because that is when the poet waxes both confessional and professional. But what the poet confesses is frustration, a frustration that dovetails nicely with that of the reader who has been denied access to the versiculi that cause the excitement. What he professes is a desire (preces nostras, 18), but a desire that is never specified. We can no more articulate the "public profession" that Catullus is making than Catullus can articulate what he wants of Calvus.

What is the cause of Catullus' frustration? Away from Calvus and the exchange of verses, he is plagued by an excess of energy that has nowhere to go: the turning of the versiculi (from vertor , "I turn") swapped by the poets becomes the insomniac twisting of Catullus in his bed (versarer, II). But when the friends were together the back and forth in which their agreement found its expression was ambiguous, both erotic and artistic. Because of the ambiguity of the word delicatus , there is something of a paradox in the expression "as we had agreed to be delicati " (3), but that is the point: the agreement of the friends could manifest itself only in a game. Away from the game, Catullus finds himself "inflamed" (incensus, 7) by Calvus' lepor , and plagued by a desire to which he can give no name, by an ambiguity that was both generated and absorbed by the responsive play. Separated from the responsive game that had inflamed him, the confessional Catullus longs to be with Calvus again (simulque ut essem, 13) and begs him not to spurn his entreaties (18). But was he ever with Calvus? The emphasis in the description of their day together is on alternation and responsiveness, anything but simultaneity. Catullus' desire mirrors that of the interpreter, for it is the desire to stop the play and fix its meaning, to say what lies beneath it. But can the object of this desire be articulated? Only Calvus' response could satisfy our curiosity about Catullus' entreaties, and that response, which might in any case simply continue the ambiguous game of the delicati , and so displace Catullus' desire, is closed to us. So the poema through which the ephemeral versiculi of the friends

are supposed to be translated into something more lasting and public contains within it the request that returns it to the back and forth of the poetic game; we know that a tacit agreement is in place because we have been excluded, and, like Fabullus in poem 13, we are invited only to be reminded that all we can have is the flavor of what we can't have.

In the poems I have cited in this chapter, Catullus dramatizes the fact that poetry takes language back from other users (real or potential), as William Carlos Williams reminds us in "This is Just to Say." I have been arguing that the stylistic quality that goes under the general rubric of urbanitas cannot be detached from the strategies by which it is claimed, that it is more like a game than a substance. In poem 50, Catullus' own frustration and desire, in the suspension of the game between the two poets, mimics the feelings of the reader who wants to ask something of the urbane text that will elicit a pronouncement. The appropriation of the reader's own questioning of lepor , and the insertion of that questioning into the game of the delicati , is the ultimate theft of language.