Chapter 2
Catullus and the Reader
The Erotics of Poetry

Catullus tells us in one of his most famous poems that the success of his poetry can be measured by whether it sexually excites hairy old men (c.16, 7–11). Scholars have not been quick to hail this as the key to Catullan poetics, though they have made a great deal of the same poem's supposed distinction between the poet's verse, which may be indecent, and the poet's life, which need not.^[1] So Catullus' most provocative statement has been buried beneath a reassurance of his personal purity. But in what sense might sexual provocation be a factor in Catullan poetics, and how might this affect our understanding of the position of poet or audience in relation to the poet?^[2]

In this chapter, I describe the context of Catullus' statement, focusing on a group of poems (cc.1, 2, 15, 16) that, directly or indirectly, casts the relation between poet and reader in sexual terms. I begin by considering some of the aesthetic terms that Catullus uses of his poetry and their provocative relation to Roman cultural norms, and then I describe how this provocation functions in the constitution of the aesthetic object. Catullus' dedication poem situates the book's recipient (and consumer) in a particular relation to the book that defines its aesthetic status; the gesture with which he offers his book, I argue, is a form of teasing that is duplicated in some of his love poetry, poetry that concerns the relation between poet and reader as much as that between poet and beloved. In the rest of the chapter, I describe how Catullus explores, unsettles, and manipulates the power relations between poet and reader, the shifting of vulnerability and control. I argue that Catullus is exploring an aesthetic relation that unsettles the rigid framework of Roman con-

ceptions of power and position as they are metaphorized by sex and gender.

We begin at the beginning, the dedication of the book to Cornelius Nepos (c.1) and the first of the two poems about the pet sparrow of Catullus' mistress (c.2). Although these are juxtaposed in the book as we now have it, they are usually treated in two different contexts, the first being read as a literary manifesto and the second as the beginning of a "Lesbia cycle" in which Catullus unfolds the drama of his turbulent love affair. But both poems offer something to their audience, whether it is the book itself, in which Catullus' "trifles" (nugas, 1.4) are collected, or a titillating glimpse of the erotic world of the poet and his mistress, and it is this relation between poet and audience that provides the framework in which I compare them.

Catullan Aesthetic Language: Pets Toys, and Toying

What immediately strikes the reader about the much imitated poems on the death of the mistress's pet sparrow (cc.2, 3) is their insistent triviality, and I emphasize the word because this triviality is intended to provoke;^[3] combined with a delicate eroticism, this insistent triviality culminates in the final lines of poem 3, where Catullus berates the dead sparrow, whose dirge he has sung, for spoiling his mistress's eyes with weeping:

o factum male! o miselle passer!
tua nunc opera meae puellae
flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli. (3.16–18)^[4]

What a pity! Wretched sparrow!
Because of you my girlfriend's eyes
Are red and swollen from weeping.

The bathos, with its knowing eroticism, winks at the audience, addressed specifically in the second line of this poem as the "men of elegance" (hominum venustiorum) who are invited to join in the dirge for the dead sparrow. Venustus , the adjective with which the audience of this poem is summoned, is a particularly important word for Catullus because it spans what we would call the erotic and the aesthetic spheres.^[5] The bird that the venusti of poem 3 are called on to mourn is described as the deliciae of Catullus' mistress (3.4, compare 2.1), a word that is also of

crucial importance to Catullan aesthetics. Deliciae is not unlike our word "pet" in its range of associations. "Pet" can be a noun or a verb: the verb conveys a way of indulging a being referred to by the noun, an indulging that is at the same time self-indulgence. Deliciae also refers both to a pleasurable form of activity (lovemaking, most notably) and to a person or thing that serves our pleasure or is indulged by us for our own pleasure (compare the word "toy"). In both languages, the words also signify a form of behavior that results from excessive self-indulgence; the now obsolete English expressions "to pet" or "to take the pet," meaning "to sulk" or "to take offense," seem to derive from the primary sense just as the Latin word deliciae can mean "airs" or "caprices." The negative associations of the word in Latin are extensive: most significantly, they include the implication of effeminacy that to the Roman mind goes with any form of nonpurposive or nonessential activity.^[6]Deliciae , then, is a complex word, denoting at the same time an object or being, a status (favorite, darling), and a form of behavior; to call something or somebody your deliciae is to point in two opposite directions, to the object and to oneself, and it is also to mark one's behavior, quite self-consciously, as questionable.

Deliciae is the word for Lesbia's pet, for the games she plays with it, and for the game Catullus is himself playing in these poems, for deliciae and the closely related adjective delicatus^[7] are words with which Catullus sometimes represents his own poetic activity.^[8] As "delicious" and "delicate," these words have entered our own aesthetic vocabulary, but though they are still associated with the trivial (the culinary and the ornamental arts respectively), they have been severed from the language of behavior and attitude in which their Latin counterparts are embedded. It is significant that the word Catullus uses to refer to his poetry in the first poem of the book, nugae (trifles, triflings), seems to have meant, among other things, "mime"; in other words, it too may refer to performance as well as product.^[9]

When Catullus describes the game in which he and his friend Calvus improvise responses to each other's compositions, he portrays them as delicati engaged in an erotically tinged performance (c. 50):

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, facetiisque,
ut nec me miserum cibus iuvaret . . . (50.1–9)

Yesterday, Licinius, a day of leisure,
we fooled around a lot in my tablets,
since we'd agreed to be a little precious:
writing little verses each of us
played around in this meter and that,
giving and taking while we joked and drank.
I went away from there inflamed
by your suave, sophisticated humor;
even dinner couldn't interest me . . .

The mutual provocation of the two poets may remind us of Lesbia teasing the sparrow with her finger (c. 2.3–4); certainly, the variation of meters reminds us of the kissing in the famous poem (c.5) in which Catullus and Lesbia play with different rhythms and numbers ("Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred," etc). Poem 50's erotic language aligns the games of the two poets with the thousands of kisses that Aurelius and Furius read about in poem 5 and find "a bit soft and not quite straight" (molliculi ac parum pudici, c.16.8)—in other words, characteristic of the delicatus . Swapping verses back and forth in an analog of foreplay leaves Catullus in a state of frustrated excitement (50.7–13); like the endless kissing of poems 5 and 7, the deliciae of Catullus and Calvus are a deliberate indulgence in the inessential and a refusal to get to the point, which in Rome is taken as a sign of effeminacy.^[10] Catullus claims and performs the position to which this kind of language would assign him, but in doing so he puts at question some of the assumptions that underlie it. Because poetry concerns relations, and not just objects, it is in terms of the behavioral and relational associations of an ambivalent word like deliciae that Catullus explores the drama of poetic positionality.

The first two poems of Catullus' little book present us with two delightful objects, almost toys: the "smart new little book" (lepidum novum libellum, 1.1) itself, with its smooth surfaces, and the sparrow that is the deliciae of its mistress. Not only are these both eroticized objects, as we shall see, but they are also components of a game that the poet is playing with his audience. Just as there is something ambiguous about the book that Catullus offers its dedicatee in poem 1 (physical object or poetic work?), so there is an ambiguity about the sparrow, which may be an innocent pet or the vehicle of a sexual metaphor. In these poems, Catullus plays with surface and depth to eroticize our relation to the objects, which are both offered and withdrawn, and which

both hide and reveal: the poetic trifles (nugae) might, after all, be something (1.3–4), and Lesbia's play with the sparrow might be part of the narrative of a love affair. So the two poems take their character from the gesture with which these objects are offered to us.

But the one who offers is both powerful and vulnerable, and my second pair of poems (cc. 15, 16) are spoken from the potentially vulnerable position of the poet whose words are entrusted to readers who may take them as they will. Of these poems, one is explicitly about the relation between poet and readers (c. 16), and the other appears to be an episode from the erotic life of Catullus (c. 15). In the former, Furius and Aurelius are attacked for concluding, from all those kisses they have read about in his poetry, that Catullus is effeminate, and it is here that he retorts that his poetry only has the requisite charm (sal and lepor , 16.7) if it can excite hairy men. In poem 15 Catullus simultaneously commends to Aurelius a beloved boy and warns him to keep his hands off. The violent phallic threats with which poem 15 ends, and which frame poem 16, reflect the Roman obsession with relations of dominance and subordination, an obsession that is amply attested by Catullus' poetry.^[11] In both cases, Catullus has made himself vulnerable by virtue of what he has entrusted to Furius and Aurelius; the combination of entrusting and withholding in poem 15 recapitulates the giving and withholding that characterizes poem 1, but in a much more aggressive context. By raising the question of the relation between poet and reader from the standpoint of the poet's vulnerability, his lack of control over the transaction, these poems provide the counterpart to poems 1 and 2, which speak from a position of confidence. That the vulnerability of the poet is expressed in relation to a phallic threat from other men has to do with the provocative performance that Catullus stages, and with the culture's determination of the particular form of pleasure that he purveys as effeminate. For Catullus, the aesthetic is a function of the positionality of agents in a transaction and, more particularly, in the case of these poems, of a play with positionality that upsets what has been described as the Roman puritanism of virility.^[12]

Teasing: The Aesthetic Relation

The first poem in Catullus' book is not simply an act of dedication, for what Catullus does in this poem is to put the book into

circulation, to give it to its readership, and the nature of the object is to some extent constituted by the form of this gesture.^[13] The dedicatee, Cornelius Nepos, stands at a nodal point between the production of Catullus' nugae and their reception by posterity: because he approved them, or saw something in them, they have now been published and committed to the care of time.^[14] Once his trifles have been given value by a reader, they cease to belong to the poet, but publication also removes them from any other individual's appropriation:

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi; namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas
iam tum, cum ausus es unus Italorum
omne aevum tribus explicare cartis
doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis.
quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
qualecumque; quod, <o> patrona virgo,
plus uno maneat perenne saeclo. (c.1)

To whom do I give this chic new little book
freshly smoothed by the dry pumice?
Cornelius, to you; for it was you
who used to think my trifles  were  something
when you yourself had dared, alone
of the Italians, to expound all history
in three most learned and laborious volumes.
So have this little book for what
it's worth, and, O my virgin patron,
may it remain fresh for more than one generation.

The modest detachment of "have this little book for what it's worth" acknowledges that Nepos, by seeing something in Catullus' bits and pieces, is responsible for their publication; but it also recognizes the fact that what this book is depends on how its future readership receives it. So the object that Catullus is giving to Nepos is both a delightful physical object and a polished work of art that is not confined to any one of its instantiations, and this duality is what complicates the gesture of giving, because the book as work of art cannot actually be given. Paradoxically, then, the approval of Nepos, which earned him this book, is what removes the "trifles" to another time.

Catullus is publishing his trifles; every reader of Catullus knows that "now you have it, now you don't" feeling produced by a combination

of casual spontaneity and high finish;^[15] at the end of poem 1, the book is given to Nepos with a gesture that dramatizes this relation between poet and reader. The phrase "habe tibi" (have it, 8) is, as Fordyce (1961 ad loc) points out, "a regular phrase of Roman law in reference to the disposal of property." Both in the legal and colloquial senses (the latter implies, as Fordyce puts it, "a certain indifference"), there is often a contrast between what is given and what is retained. But in this case it is the same thing that is both given and retained ("have this little book . . . may it remain"; habe tibi . . . quod maneat, 8–10), and there is a real connection between the lightness of Catullus' relation to his nugae and their continued freshness as aesthetic objects.^[16] The poet himself keeps nothing, for the book goes on the one hand to anyone who now finds something in these trifles, and on the other to a posterity that continues to find them fresh. Nepos, though he gets this attractive little book because he made something of Catullus' nugae , can't really have it because the virgin sees to it that the book will remain fresh for future generations.

This virgin is the poet's Muse, addressed here as patron (patrona virgo, 9) instead of Nepos. As a virgin the Muse plays her part in the erotic figuration introduced when the newly completed book appears "freshly smoothed by the dry pumice" (2). Pumice has two uses in the literary sphere: to smooth the ends of the scroll in the final stages of the book's preparation, and to erase and correct the work prior to publication. The first use draws attention to the book's attractions and availability, as Horace shows us when he berates his book of epistles for its eagerness to prostitute itself to the public:^[17]

Vertumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare videris,
scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus
odisti clavis et grata sigilla pudico. ( Ep. 1.20.1–3)

You seem, book, to look towards Janus and Vertumnus
[booksellers' area],
Wanting to offer yourself smooth from the pumice of the Sosii
[booksellers],
You shun keys and seals, which are welcome to the chaste.

Horace's "smooth from the pumice" plays on the fact that pumice was used as a depilatory, and Catullus' phrase also associates the book's appealing exterior with sexual attractiveness and availability. But this aspect of the book, its immediate appeal and consumability, so to speak, is conveyed by the same words that also express the labor of composition

and literary perfectionism implied by liberal use of the eraser, features of the book that ensure its continued life beyond this generation.

For the most part, modern commentators have concentrated on showing how the poem functions as an Alexandrian or neoteric literary manifesto: the lightness and modesty with which Catullus offers his book is all part of a display of allegiance to Alexandrian principles.^[18] This approach usually generates a contrast between surface and depth that says as much about modern scholarship as it does about the poem: this apparently light and unprepossessing poem conceals references to Alexandrian watchwords and aesthetic attitudes, and once these have been identified by the scholar, the poem reveals itself as a serious work of high art.^[19] The work of the scholar, then, protects us from the poem's trivial surface. Although the interpretation of this poem as a coded and concealed masterpiece posing a riddle for the learned reader is compatible with much of what we know of the Alexandrians, the poem has another dimension that is more distinctively Roman, and that is its social gesture. The associations of words like pumex and expolitum (smoothed, polished) in Latin are not only Alexandrian: smoothness and polish in a literary context tend to be given dubious sexual connotations by Roman writers who play on the coincidence of the language of the toilette with that of literary polish; so Catullus' book has a teasing sexuality that is provocatively effeminate.^[20]

What I am arguing here is that Catullus is playing with the particularly complex relation between poet and reader when he both gives and withholds the book in a kind of teasing.^[21] The poetics implied by this poem is neither one of surface and depth (Catullus professes an urbane indifference to the trivialities he offers Nepos, but finally reveals his sense of their true worth) nor paradox (it takes the harsh application of dry pumice to make something that never dries up: perenne, 1O). In fact, it is Nepos' own work that exemplifies the deceptive or paradoxical results of "artistry": he has managed to unfold (explicare, 6) the whole of time in a mere three volumes.^[22] By contrast, Catullus focuses the temporal paradox concerning his own book on the act of giving: Nepos is welcome to the book (this attractive, smooth little volume), which becomes his as Catullus utters the formula "habe tibi"; but, as the poet prays for the same book that the Muse may preserve it fresh throughout posterity, he withdraws it from its dedicatee (maneat).^[23] The same pumice that gives the book its sexy air of availability also gives its content the kind of polished definitiveness that takes it out of the field of consumption and consigns it to the care of posterity and the virgin Muse. Standing in for

any reader who sees something in these trifles, Nepos is the figure through whom we experience the studied carelessness of these poems as a relation both to the poet and to posterity. Catullus' contradictory act of giving offers us the bifurcated sensation of participating in two different time-scales: we acquiesce in our frustrated possession of these trifles in order to participate in the eternal freshness of the work. What exactly it is that gives these trifles substance (esse aliquid, 3) we forbear to explore in order to leave them fresh for posterity. Here an aesthetic drama of loss and compensation takes on an imperial character, for this delicate moment now spreads its influence into the future with an imperialism more sure than Nepos' unfolding of the whole of time in three volumes. Any reader who is able to see something in these poems can have them, for their survival depends on this, but, in the interest of participating in the power and scope of their fascination, each reader must forbear to possess them. It is this position that the reader enjoys.

Catullus teases Nepos with his book, and in the next poem he teases his readers with intimations of sex, only to turn the tables on them in the final lines, where once again virginity intervenes:^[24]

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescioquid lubet iocari,
et solaciolum sui doloris,
credo, ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas,
tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae
pernici aureolum fuisse malum,
quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.

Sparrow, plaything of my mistress,
who plays with you, and holds you in her lap,
who offers you her fingertip to peck at
and then provokes sharp bites from you,
when the shining object of my desire
is pleased to play some charming game,
a solace for her suffering, I think,
to moderate the flames of passion:
If I could play with you as she does
and lighten the gloomy troubles of my mind—

that is as pleasing to me as they say
was the golden apple to the swift-footed girl
which loosened her girdle, so long tied.

At the end of this poem, we are told that Lesbia's game with the sparrow is itself the consummation to be desired: it would be as pleasing to Catullus as the apple that brought the end of virginity to Atalanta, and in being as pleasing it denies us the untying of the knot, for the game that suggested sex now becomes its alternative or substitute. Like that "something" which Nepos saw in Catullus' "trifles," but which immediately fades into the suave surface of the urbane tone, the sexuality of those who play with the sparrow never comes into focus.^[25] The suggestive ambiguity of Catullus' interest in playing with the sparrow is compared to the ambiguous interest of the virgin Atalanta in the apple: was it a girlish delight in bright things; a desire that fully comprehended the erotic symbolism of the apple; a confused, virginal combination of both?^[26] Sexual innuendo is now transferred to Atalanta, whose virginal mind is no doubt incapable of understanding what we know about her reaction to the apple; so the impenetrable and teasing sophistication of Catullus offers us its own compensatory supplement, the penetrable, half-innocent mind of Atalanta, whose confusion we are in a position to observe knowingly.

Like the contradictory gesture with which Nepos is offered the book, the final simile of poem 2 both offers and withholds. These contradictions have to do with the relation between poem and audience, for both the fact that Nepos cannot really have the book that is his and the fact that Catullus does not express a desire to have Lesbia dramatize the continuing availability of the aesthetic object to its audience, present and future. Neither Catullus himself nor any particular reader has privileged or preemptive access to the poetry, and this is constitutive of its aesthetic character as well as a guarantee of its persistent freshness. In poem 2, the desire of Catullus is a performing desire which, rather than interposing itself between the audience and its object, suffuses that object with a suggestive sexuality that does not exclude its audience; and yet, at the same time, it provokes and teases us with its elusiveness, its nugatoriness, and, if there is anything of Furius and Aurelius in us, its effeminacy. As in poem 1, the aesthetic object is here constituted as aesthetic by virtue of the peculiar drama of desire and possession between the agents that it assembles.

But the poem I have been describing is to be found in none of the modern texts of Catullus, for editors have detached what they regard as

the puzzlingly "inappropriate" simile with which the poem ends in the manuscripts (lines 11–13, now called 2b) to produce a poem that falls into line with one of the most common ways of thinking about Catullus: the superficial Lesbia plays with her sparrow and so assuages her desire for Catullus, who wishes he could do the same himself, but being a man and a great poet he feels too deeply to be so easily satisfied.^[27] The truncating of the poem by the editors provides a clear layering of surface and depth, so that the different relations of the characters to the game with the sparrow gives us a reassuring sense of what it is that allows us to say that the trivial is trivial. This truncated version of the poem provides a neat parallel to the usual interpretation of the dedication poem: just as Catullus writes what his culture defines as "trifles," but by virtue of the care he lavishes on them proves himself a dedicated and serious Alexandrian poet, so the intensity of his love for Lesbia transcends its rather trivial object. I doubt that editors would have been so impressed with the problems of the manuscript text at the end of poem 2 were they not so satisfied by the kind of reading made possible by detaching the last three lines.^[28] This editorial tradition clarifies one of the roles of Catullus the canonical author, namely, to confirm the distinction between surface and depth, triviality and art, that he seems to put at question. The canonical Catullus is a poet who confronts the prejudices of his own age and culture, unable to appreciate the intrinsic value of art, and affirms or proves what we now know to be its true value. The Catullus that I am describing works with the troubled and suspicious fascination of his culture with what, for want of a better word, we can call deliciae to produce a positional drama that has much to tell us about the constitution of what we now call the aesthetic.

The Anxieties of Publication

As a transition to my next pair of poems, where the relation between reader and poet is framed in the more anxious and violent terms of sexual relations between men, let us consider a passage from one of Pliny's letters (Ep. 7.4). Pliny was a great admirer of Catullus and published, evidently with considerable success, "trifles" (nugae) in the Catullan style. Writing to Pontius, he explains how a serious man such as himself came to write hendecasyllabics. It happened that one summer morning he had read to him the work of Asinius Gallus in which the latter

compares his father to Cicero. In this work, there is an epigram of the great man to his slave Tiro in which Cicero complains that Tiro had reneged on his promise of some kisses. This sticks in Pliny's mind and, when he retires for his midday nap and finds that he can't sleep, he reflects on the fact that great orators enjoyed and respected this kind of poetry; not one to be left behind, Pliny tries his now unpracticed hand at writing verse and quickly sketches out an account of what it was that had inspired him to write (id ipsum, quod me ad scribendum sollicitaverat, his versibus exaravi). In these verses, he describes how he came across the epigram of Cicero, notable for the same genius that Cicero displayed in his serious works and for showing that the minds of great men rejoice in wit and playfulness. He then describes Cicero's epigram and concludes:

"cur post haec" inquam "nostros celamus amores
nullumque in medium timidi damus atque fatemur
Tironisque dolos, Tironis nosse fugaces
blanditias et furta novas addentia flammas."

"After this," I said, "why should I conceal my loves
and be afraid to make my contribution and confess
that I know the tricks of Tiro and the teasing
flirtation and the cheats that add new flames."

This account of the beginning of the path that led him to Catullan hendecasyllabics is itself clearly influenced by Catullus poem 50, which also describes how the poet came to be writing the present poem in a fit of insomnia. The spirit of friendly competition in the writing of verse is common to both poems, for Catullus describes how he and Calvus, having agreed to be delicati , spent the day swapping verses, which caused Catullus to become inflamed with Calvus' lepor . The poems also share a homosexual theme, with Catullus describing his excitement in the language of love and Pliny confessing to his own homosexual experience.^[29] Later in the same letter, Pliny says that his erotic poems have inspired the Greeks to learn Latin, but it would be wrong to dismiss the homosexual element in these poems as literary convention.^[30] When Pliny decides to jump on the bandwagon, he asks why he should conceal his amores (love, love poetry) and timidly avoid making his contribution (nullumque in medium timidi damus); he confesses that he too knows the tricks of a Tiro, the flirtation (fugaces blanditias) that causes new flames. The logic of the parallel with Cicero's epigram requires Pliny to be saying that he too has been tormented by a provocative and flirtatious

boy, but the event that Pliny is describing in this poem, namely, his decision to join in Cicero's "playful game," allows us to understand Pliny's statement that he knows Tiro's tricks as a confession of his own flirtatious abilities. To publish erotic poetry is to play a provocative game with one's audience, adopting the position of the flirtatious Tiro. Pliny's response to Cicero is a kind of blowup of the game that Catullus and Calvus played, a quasi-erotic game of mutual provocation, in which Catullus' tablets function as the bed (c.50.1–2). At Rome it may have been a mark of the great man to feel himself superior enough to the attitudes of common society to be able to play at being the delicatus , and Pliny here links himself with Cicero by joining in the game,^[31] but the game, like the playing of Catullus and Calvus, has to be questionable, risqué; consider the extraordinary phrase he uses of the way his literary activity snowballs from the incident he has just decribed:

transii ad elegos; hos quoque non minus celeriter
explicui, addidi alios  facilitate corruptus .

I moved on to elegies; these too I finished off
quite as swiftly; I added others,  seduced by my own fluency/ease .

The sexual model of the relation between poet and audience can take on a more anxious character, and in poems 15 and 16 Catullus addresses directly the sexual connotations of his poetic teasing as they frame the power relations between poet and reader. These poems explore the poet's vulnerability; the homosexual content of the poems and the phallic nature of the threat presented by the reader indicate that the issue here is the positionality of reader and poet, and that the poet's teasing casts him in the role of the effeminate or subordinate.

The first of these poems consists, like poem 1, in an act of giving, and it plays with the very Roman institution of commendation in the same way that poem 1 played with legal language (habe tibi, 1.8). To commend someone to another is both to draw attention to the commendee's qualities and to entrust that person to the would-be patron, so a potential conflict of interest arises when the commendee is an object of desire.^[32] In poem 15 Catullus commends himself and his love to Aurelius, but then begs him to keep his hands off the boy. The twist in the commendation is that the boy is to be protected not from the usual external corrupting influences but from the voracious and indiscriminate penis of Aurelius himself!

Commendo tibi me ac meos amores,
Aureli. veniam peto pudentem,

ut si quicquam animo tuo cupisti,
quod castum expeteres et integellum,
conserves puerum mihi pudice,
non dico a populo—nihil veremur
istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati,—
verum a te metuo tuoque pene
infesto pueris bonis malisque. (c.15. 1–10)

Aurelius, commending to you both myself
and my love, I ask a modest favor:
if your heart has ever longed for something
that you wanted chaste and undefiled,
preserve my boy for me with modesty,
I don't mean from the crowd—I have no fear
of those on the street who pass this way and that
intent on their own affairs—
but from you (that's my fear) and your prick
gunning for boys good or bad.

The basic gesture of this poem is similar to that of poem 1, not only in the combination of giving and withholding, but also in the twist given to a Roman social ritual: the book is dedicated to Nepos, but it is the Muse who is the patrona ; the boy is commanded to Aurelius, but it is Aurelius from whom the boy must be protected. Preceding this poem in the collection is a fragment (14b) addressed to the readers of Catullus' verses, if any should address themselves to his "foolishness" (ineptiae) and not shrink from laying their hands on his work; the poem that follows, addressed to Furius and Aurelius, is directed against those who have misinterpreted his more risky verses. In this context, the problematic act of entrusting in poem 15 looks as if it might be a metaphor for publication: not only do poems 15 and 16 have a common addressee, but the theme of purity or chastity is also shared, for in both cases Catullus is concerned to withhold from Aurelius some core of purity from what has been entrusted to him.^[33]

The first ancient writer to use an erotic framework to explore the anxieties and ironies of publication is the archaic Greek poet Theognis. Theognis complains that, although he has given his beloved Kyrnos wings of fame so that the boy will always be present at banquets, lying on the lips of men, Kyrnos deceives him with words (237–54 W). The poet has made his beloved available to all except himself and is deceived by the very medium that he has so effectively used on Kyrnos' behalf. A similar paradox occurs in Callimachus' famous epigram beginning

with his programmatic statement "I hate the cyclic [i.e., epic] poem." Callimachus goes on to list other forms of the public (ta demosia^[*] ) that he hates and then concludes: "Lysanie, you are beautiful, yes beautiful—but before the echo has spoken this clearly, someone says, 'Another has you'" (Ep. 28). Here the erotic relation provides the same kind of ironic reflection on the poet's alienation from his own words and intentions as it does in Theognis' lines. The pun on kalos (beautiful) and allos (another), and the association of the echo with the words of another, put Callimachus' words, like his desires, in the public realm, contradicting the literary principles based on exclusivity. As soon as Callimachus moves from hate to love, from criticism to celebration, he finds himself in the world of "ta demosia^[*] ," where he cannot have what he wants: the beautiful boy belongs to another just as certain forms of literary beauty have already been claimed by other authors. Callimachus' sophisticated irony works through juxtaposition and parataxis. We do not know exactly how the final erotic couplet reflects on the foregoing: the two voices, the split between desire and power, the mocking echo, all suggest that these lines stand in an ironic relation to the definitive pronouncements that make up the rest of the poem, and that the poet's relation to "ta demosia^[*] " is complex. Is it sour grapes or a realistic sense of the possible that prompts Callimachus' renunciation of what is public, in view of the fact that what he finds beautiful belongs to another? As with Theognis and Catullus, the erotic relation in Callimachus' epigram dramatizes the alienation that comes with entering the public world of literature. Callimachus assumes that we don't need everything spelled out for us, that this deadpan juxtaposition says it all to those who know, and so he includes us in his Olympian perspective.^[34] For Catullus the relation between poet and reader is more problematic; in late Republican Rome, literature has not yet become the institution it was for the librarians of Alexandria, and to write poetry is still a questionable social activity, so Catullus focuses on his relation not to tradition and to other poets but to the reader. The anxious irony of Catullus is framed in terms of a particular social transaction (commendation), for what concerns him is the peculiar nature of the contract between reader and poet.

Although the literary issues in Callimachus' epigram 28 and Catullus' poem 16 are different, comparison is warranted by the fact that Catullus recalls Callimachus' poem in his own. Callimachus equates his hatred of the cyclic poem to his dislike of the path that "bears the crowd this way

and that" (hode^[*] kai hode^[*] , 2); Catullus tells Aurelius that he is not worried about the threat to his boy from the populace:

istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati. (15.7–8)

those who pass by on the street now this way
and now that, engaged on their own affairs.

Callimachus' rejected path, the way of a debased literary convention that accommodates the masses, now contains the workaday Romans who present no threat to Catullus' boy; the boy himself is derived from the flighty beloved (periphoiton eromenon^[*] , 3) who features next in Callimachus' list of what he hates, providing another metaphor for the literary world he rejects. For Catullus the issue is not the poet's relation to a public tradition, but rather his relation to the audience to whom a poem is entrusted, and he has therefore cast the issue in terms of the very Roman institution of the commendatio . The usual threat against which the older man must protect the entrusted boy is not a source of concern here. Instead, it is Aurelius himself who, by virtue of his interest in what is being entrusted to him, provides the potential threat.

But what is this threat in terms of the literary situation? To answer this question, we must consider the following poem, in which Catullus is defending his own sexual purity against imputations of effeminacy by Furius and Aurelius, who have drawn the wrong conclusions from the "many thousands of kisses" (c.16.12) they have read of in his poetry.^[35] Here Catullus is concerned with the power relations between poet and reader, and he begins with a phallic threat that reverses the position that Furius and Aurelius, as readers of Catullus' titillating verse, have adopted in relation to the poet who speaks in the style of an effeminate:

Pedicabo ego vos et irrrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.

I'll bugger you and make you eat it,
Aurelius you queer and Furius you pansy,
who read my verses and concluded,
because they're soft, that I'm not straight. (16.1–4)

Catullus claims that his performance turns his audience into excitable pathics. His verses have charm and bite only

si sunt molliculi ac parum pudici,
et quod pruriat incitare possunt,
non dico pueris, sed his pilosis
qui duros nequeunt movere lumbos. (8–11)

if they're a little soft and not quite straight,
and can incite a tingling, not in boys,
I say, but in these hairy types,
whose stiff flanks don't know how to undulate.

The word durus (hard, 11) is cunningly given a meaning (stiff/clumsy) that upsets the paradigm implied by Furius and Aurelius when they insinuate that Catullus is a pathic: the hairy types are not flexible enough for the undulations of the pathic, but the poet's verse can still set them twitching.^[36] This puts his readers in rather a different position from that assumed by Furius and Aurelius.

The identification of the reader with the pathic in this poem has its precedents. There is a type of ancient graffito of which the following is the most elaborate form:

amat qui scribit, pedicatur qui legit,
qui auscultat prurit, pathicus est qui praeterit.
ursi me comedant et ego verpa<m> qui lego.

The writer loves, the reader is buggered,
the hearer itches, the passerby is a pathic.
May bears eat me and I who read eat a penis.^[37]

It seems that Catullus' poem reflects a model already present in Roman popular culture. An even closer parallel to Catullus' play with the ambiguous relation between poet and reader is provided by his greatest imitator, Martial (11.90). In Martial's poem, a certain Chrestillus wants Martial to imitate the rough style of the old poets. Chrestillus disapproves of poems "that move on a soft track" (molli quae limite currunt, 1), but Martial turns the tables on his critic's implication by concluding, after he has reviewed the manly kind of poetry that Chrestillus likes, "damn me if you don't know the flavor of prick" (dispeream nisi scis mentula quid sapiat, 8). Depending on whether we take sapiat (tastes) literally or metaphorically, we will interpret Chrestillus' approval of the ancient poets' virility in rather different ways, and this raises the important question of how the reader is situated in relation to the poet and

the poem. Furius and Aurelius, like Chrestillus, understand the poetry of Catullus to be revealing an effeminacy that puts him in the subordinate position with respect to his male readership; Chrestillus himself adopts the masculine position in relation to Martial by comparing his poetry unfavorably to the "manly" kind that he, Chrestillus, admires. The two poets make a similar kind of move in response, which is to remind the reader that he is the recipient of the poetry. Chrestillus, according to Martial, relishes (as fellator) the prick of the poetry he calls virile, and Furius and Aurelius, as readers, realize the softness of Catullus' poetry, which he as author forces them to adopt; the subjectivity of the poetry is in some sense assumed by the reader, whose pathic excitement puts the author in the dominant position.^[38] A more recent example of the same play with the position of the reader is the punning title of Bert Lahr's biography of Joe Orton: Prick Up Your Ears!

This maneuvering reflects a general phenomenon in Roman social life, namely, the obsessive concern with the position of one person relative to another in terms of power and obligation. The poetry of both Martial and Catullus, who repeatedly emphasize the transactional character of the poem, are particularly good examples of this phenomenon. In the case of Martial, this is related to the fact that he is a dependent whose poetry is his means of livelihood, which is not the case for Catullus, who came from a wealthy family. In Catullus the question of the relation between poet and reader is colored not so much by the complexities of dependency as by the new forms of urbanity and sophistication that were being prized in Roman social life. It may be that the sophistication to which the members of Catullus' circle aspired acquired its cachet from being Greek, but the form it takes in Rome is determined by the fact that in its new home it is questionable.^[39] The Olympian assumption by Callimachus of a shared sophistication that need never itself become an issue is quite impossible at Rome, where the poet must negotiate the complicated implications of a word like delicatus .

Reading poems 15 and 16 in relation to each other reveals that the issue of 16 is not Catullus' sexual morality per se but the position of the reader in relation to the poet's questionable sophistication. Entrusting his amores (love, love poetry) to Aurelius, Catullus replays the giving of the book to Nepos with a more anxious tone, for the poet is to some extent in the power of the reader, who, like Furius and Aurelius, is in a position to take the poet at his word. The act of entrusting is paradoxical, then, for the reader must both give the poems their life and maintain

their "chastity"; in other words, the poetry needs the provocative relation to the audience that is the essence of its charm, but it also needs a certain sophistication, on the part of the audience, about the nature of the game that is being played. The situation is comparable to that in poem 1, where the smooth and attractive little book whose nugatory nature makes it so available is at the same time the polished literary work that is under the protection of the patron Muse. These two aspects of the poet's detachment from his work are contradictory in respect of the audience: Nepos is offered the book that is then removed from his grasp to the care of the virgin Muse, and Aurelius is begged to keep his hands off what has been entrusted to him.

What is so disturbing about Aurelius for the poet is that he, or rather his penis, is indiscriminate (c.15.10); Aurelius' voraciousness makes no distinctions, which is as bad a quality in a reader as in a lover. If we turn to poem 6, in many ways the reverse of poem 15, we find the same situation with the roles reversed and the poet firmly in control. Here the secretive Flavius is challenged by Catullus to reveal his new deliciae (lover, lovemaking, 6.1). Taunting Flavius that his silence can only mean that this new love of his betrays his lack of sophistication (6.2;14), Catullus urges him to entrust his secret to the poet:

quare, quidquid habes  boni malique ,
dic nobis. volo te ac tuos amores
ad caelum lepido vocare versu. (15–17)

So, whatever you have,  good or bad ,
tell me. I want to summon to divinity
you and your love with an elegant poem.

The nature of Flavius' love is immaterial to the poet, who can produce elegance even out of the silence that betrays the inelegance of his friend. Just as the silence of Flavius has not protected him from being pilloried by his sophisticated friend, so his speech would have no control over the poet even if he were to reveal his love. In poem 15, we have the reverse of this situation, for in that poem it is the love of the poet that is threatened by the friend to whom it is entrusted. Between them these poems reveal the two sides of the poem's isolation from the verbal interchange of everyday life: on the one hand, the poet is all-powerful because he speaks for others who are not allowed to speak for themselves, but on the other hand he must entrust his words to others, who may find it as much grist for their mill as he does the "material" that comes from the speech (or silence) of others.

The question we have to address now is that of the substance of the accusations of effeminacy made by Furius and Aurelius (c.16.13). Evidently, these accusations were provoked by reading Poems 5 and 7: poem 5 would seem to be the natural referent of "many thousands of kisses" (16.12).^[40] It is a poem that has much in common with poem 2 in that the erotic is here associated with foreplay rather than consummation, for the thousands of kisses that Catullus demands of Lesbia, and that seem to be leading to a climax ("and then . . . and then . . . and then . . ."), take us only to a final confusion of kisses that slyly provokes the voyeur/reader:

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum. (5.10–13)

then, when we've put together thousands, we'll mix them up, so as not to know,
or so no evil man might envy us,
when he learns there are so many kisses.

Furius and Aurelius read Catullus' apparent lack of interest in "taking" Lesbia as a sign of effeminacy that puts them in a dominant position; his thousands of kisses have that nonpurposive and playfully exquisite character associated with the delicatus , or even the impotent.^[41]

The eroticism of poems 5 and 7, in which a nonclimactic foreplay is connected with a teasing provocation of the audience, is in sharp contrast to the deliciae of Flavius in the intervening poem; Flavius' silence leads Catullus to conclude that he loves some feverish whore (c.6.4–5), and in fact his silence hides nothing:

non tam latera ecfututa pandas
ni tu quid facias ineptiarum. (13–14)

you wouldn't display such fucked-out loins
if you weren't up to something foolish.

The crudeness of Flavius' lovemaking is associated with the obviousness of what is going on; everything about Flavius is blatant, even the squeaking of the bed, which sounds like an ineffective orator:

tremulique quassa lecti
argutatio inambulatioque. (10–11)^[42]

the broken squeaking of the bed
and its pacing back and forth.

This poem that unmasks and speaks for Flavius, whose crude sexuality consigns him to a silence that is itself blatant (nequiquam tacitum cubile clamat , "the vainly silent couch cries out ," 7), is sandwiched between two poems in which extended foreplay is connected with a provocation of the audience that is a mixture of hiding and revealing. By contrast with Flavius in the central poem of this group, Catullus is telling his deliciae (pleasures, whims) to us, and unlike the blatantly phallic activity of Flavius they are both lepidae and elegantes (compare 6.2). But this telling is erotic and provocative because, again by contrast with Flavius, Catullus is teasing.

In poem 7, where Catullus himself is asked by Lesbia, a propos poem 5, how many kisses will suffice him, he teases his addressee and audience with an archly learned variant on the "numberless as the sands" topos. This is an encore performance, for those who want a reprise of Poem 5, in the form of a riddle that withholds its referent (Callimachus, see below) while indulging us in exotic and witty periphrasis:

quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum lovis inter aestuosi
et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum: (7.3–6)

as many as the sands of Libya that lie
in silphium-bearing Cyrene
between the oracle of blazing Jupiter
and the sacred grave of Battus:

The poem plays with the desire of the audience to hear it again, as the lengthened and neologistic abstract form basiatones ("kissifications," 1) indicates. The innumerability topos is as much an expression of the fact that the audience can never quite be satisfied as it is of the boundlessness of Catullus' love for Lesbia. After the sands come the stars:

aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtivos hominum vident amores: (8–9)

or as many as the constellations in the silent night
that watch the furtive loves of humans:

These stars, watching the lovers in the silent night, are the audience listening with bated breath to Catullus telling of his erotic life, and they

find themselves representing the very impossibility of ever hearing the whole thing. Instead, they may have the dubious satisfaction of knowing what the four lines about the sands add up to: Callimachus, native of Cyrene and descendant of its mythical founder, Battus. Hidden learning is substituted for sexual secrets.

In this group, the poet remains firmly in control, whether he is frustrating the jealous and the curious whose interest he has piqued, as at the end of poems 5 and 7, or offering to make an elegant poem of Flavius' inelegant love, which is what he has already done, in poem 6. Poems 15 and 16 show us how this command might break down when the relation between reader and poet is seen from a different angle: Catullus entrusts his amores to the indiscriminate and rapacious sensibilities of Furius and Aurelius, who have no respect for the nature of the game that is being played and see Catullus as the performer who is subject to his audience.^[43] Of course, Catullus needs Furius and Aurelius to establish the riskiness of his performance, which depends for its effectiveness on being questionable. Poem 16 is not a defense of poems 5 and 7, nor of the aesthetic qualities they exhibit; still less is it a defense of the poet's morals based on a separation between art and life; rather, it is another move in the game between reader and poet in which the reader finds that the tables have been turned.

I began this chapter by raising the question of the role of sexual stimulation in Catullus' poetics. To take this issue seriously, we do not necessarily have to explain the relation between Catullus' verse and certain physical symptoms. As I have argued, poem 16 needs to be seen as part of a game made possible by the ambiguous and kaleidoscopic potential of the relations between poet, poem, and reader. Both this concern with social transactions and positionality and the fact that the activity of the poet of versiculi falls in the category of the questionable, a category that relies heavily on sexual metaphors, are distinctly Roman aspects of Catullus' poetics.^[44] The ambiguities of the relations, gestures, and transactions of the aesthetic sphere upset any secure sense of the positionality that is such an important concern of ancient social and sexual life. At the same time, this sensitivity of the Roman context to certain social aspects of the poetic transaction, and the overlapping of Roman aesthetic language with the language of social and sexual relations, allow us to bring into focus aspects of poetry and of the aesthetic relation that have been obscured by modern emphases on the textuality, figurativeness, and even expressivity of poetic discourse.

Excursus: Poet, Audience, and Slave in Plautus' Pseudolus

One of the earliest and most interesting interchanges between poet and audience is the possibly apocryphal story of Naevius and the Metelli. Naevius had written of the consulship of a member of this powerful family

Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules

Either: By destiny the Metelli are consuls at Rome. Or: To the ruin of Rome the Metelli are consuls.

The Metelli responded without ambiguity:

Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae

The Metelli will give the poet Naevius a beating.^[45]

The interchange recalls many scenes in Roman comedy in which the clever slave is reminded that he cannot get away with his impudence and trickery forever. Normal power relations, suspended by the license of art and the cunning of the textual, are eventually restored, and in the early days of Roman literature many of the writers (and most of the actors) were slaves, or otherwise of low social status. So the anecdote about Naevius and the Metelli points to some realities about the relation between poet and audience in the early Republic.

In Plautus' Pseudolus , the eponymous hero and slave bets his master Simo that he will be able trick the latter into providing the money to free his son's inamorata , a prostitute now in the hands of an unscrupulous pimp. Callipho, a friend of Simo who witnesses this scene, marvels at the slave's breathtaking audacity, commenting that he's a real "work of art" (graphicum, 519) if he can bring off this trick; he resolves to postpone his visit to the country so as to be able to watch Pseudolus' show (ludos, 552). Simo suspects that the self-confident Pseudolus is in league with the pimp to defraud him, but Pseudolus denies this:

aut si de istac re umquam inter nos convenimus,
quasi in libro quom scribuntur calamo litterae,
stilis me totum usque ulmeis conscribito. (544–45)

or if we have ever come to an agreement about this matter
you can write all over me up to the shoulders
just like you write letters in a book with a pen.

This is one of many elaborate references to the whipping of slaves in this play, but it takes on a particular significance in the light of Callipho's graphicum , a Greek loan-word meaning "worthy to be drawn" (or "written," graphikos ).^[46] In this scene, writing is used to figure both the fascination that Pseudolus' prospective "show" holds for his master's friend and the ultimate power that the master holds over his slave.

The persistent analogy in this play between the project of the slave and that of the playwright and/or actor relates this passage to the ambiguous position of the writer in relation to his audience that I have been describing in this chapter. Having promised both the audience and his master that he will dupe the latter, Pseudolus, who as yet has no plan, compares himself to a poet who has to conjure up what does not yet exist (401–5). Later, he reassures the audience that he is going to deliver on his promises, which he did not make just to keep them amused while the play was going on, and he compares himself to an actor who has to bring on some new device when he comes onstage (562–69). So the scheming slave who undertakes to concoct a plan by which to defraud his master, whom he has warned of his intentions, resembles both the playwright and the actor, who must similarly dazzle the expectant audience. The low status of both actor and playwright is itself reflected in the precarious position of the clever slave who controls the usual Plautine plot. Actors at Rome, as members of an "infamous" (famosus) profession, were subject to certain legal disabilities; even if they were citizens, they were liable to corporal punishment, from which other citizens were protected, and magistrates could summarily have them flogged.^[47] This may partially account for the assimilation of the Plautine slave to the actor/playwright.

At the end of the Plautus' play, Pseudolus bribes his master with half of the money he has won from his bet to join him for a drink. Simo suggests that Pseudolus invite the audience as well, but Pseudolus replies, in the last words of the play: "By Hercules, they're hardly in the habit of inviting me, nor I them. (To the audience) But if you want to applaud and show your approval of the cast and the play, I'll invite you for tomorrow" (1332–34). Of course, the audience and the actors belong to different orders of society, but then so do Pseudolus and Simo, and just as the slave and his master go off for a drink together through the manipulation of the slave, so the actor can "invite" the audience for

tomorrow's play on a basis of equality. Plautine drama engages the ambiguous relation of actor/playwright to audience through the theme of the clever slave and his improvisational plotting, which manages to defer the beating that the master threatens but must suspend as long as we, like Callipho, have suspended our own business out of curiosity for the "show" we have been promised.^[48]

Both the central role of the clever slave and the metatheatrical references to drama in the plays are thought to be Plautus' own contribution to the plays he has adapted from the Greek.^[49] It seems that the Romans were particularly conscious of the manipulative or seductive power of art and of its ability to destabilize hierarchical social relations. One might say that the suspicion and fear of art's effect on its audience itself becomes a source of dramatic structures that the Roman audience enjoys in the art it consumes.