Women's Voices and Catullus' Poetry

Author(s): Judith P. Hallett

Source: The Classical World, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Summer, 2002), pp. 421-424
Published by: Classical Association of the Atlantic States
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4352681
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 PAEDAGOGUS 421

WOMEN'S VOICES AND CATULLUS' POETRY

When attempting to recover the textures and tones of a precious classi-

cal artifact, John Keats observed, immortally, that "Heard melodies are
sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." His maxim informs my gaze on
our Roman literary equivalent of his Grecian urn, and accounts for my
interest in recovering some previously "unheard" women's voices in Catullus'
poetry. First, however, we need to distinguish them from the "heard" voices
of women in the Catullan text, voices ordinarily indicated by quotation
marks in our textbooks, or by references to their Sapphic originals in our
commentaries and learned explications.
In the first, quotation-mark, category of "heard" female voices I would
place the annoying remarks of the scortillum at Cat. 10.14-16 and 25-27;
the hymnic chanting of the puellae who honor the goddess Diana in 34;
the reciprocal, mutual outpouring of amor by Acme to Septimius at 45.13-
16; the provocative one-liner by the femella at 55.12; the competitive,
ritualistic banter by the puellae performing the marriage hymn at 62.6-
10, 20-25, 32, and 39-48; the speeches of the goddess Cybele in 63.12-
26 and 78-83; the lament of the abandoned Ariadne and the song of the
Parcae at 64.132-201 and 323-381; and the aetiological recitative of the
coma Berenices in 66. In the second category of "heard" women's voices
I would put the echoes of Sappho fr. 105cL-P at Cat. 11.21-24; Sappho
fr. 31L-P at 51.1-12; and Sappho fr. 1O5cL-P at 62.39-47.'
The substantial number of lines-nearly 300 in total-which Catullus
assigns to these women speakers warrants our close attention as one good
reason to listen more carefully for female voices elsewhere in his poetry.
Yet another reason is Catullus' evocation of Sappho. Not only does he
recall her spellbinding words and, through the phrase Sapphica puella /
Musa doctior, associate her with the poetic sensibilities of one particular
docta puella at 35.16-17. He also adopts her distinctive meter, and uses
the name of her native island when choosing a metrically equivalent pseudonym,
Lesbia, for the woman that his poetry represents him as loving.2
A further reason is Catullus' own influence on the themes and lan-
guage of the Augustan elegist Sulpicia, the one Roman female poet whose
work survives in any quantity. Her use, for example, of the phrase lux
mea at 3.9.15 and 3.18.1 echoes Catullus' own repeated use of the phrase

I As pointed out, for example, in the commentary in K. Quinn, ed., Catullus:

The Poems, with introduction, revised text, and commentary (New York 1970) 129,
241-46, and 280, and discussed in greater detail by T. P. Wiseman, (Catullus and
His World: A Reappraisal [Cambridge 1985] 119-21, 144-46, and 152-54). If we
were to count the words of the newly feminized Attis at 63.50-73 and of the ianua-
characterized as a devoted female attendant-at 67.9-14, 17, and 19-28, the number
of lines assigned to female characters in the Catullan corpus would rise to approxi-
mately 350. To be sure, there are differences of social class between, e.g., the scortillum
of poem 10 and presumably Acme in 45 on the one hand, and the well-born puellae
of 34 and 62 on the other. Goddesses, such as the Parcae and Cybele, would also
seem to belong to a totally different category from mortal women. But a poem such
as 66, which exploits the shared gender as it stresses the other affinities between the
historical queen Berenice and a lock of her hair, is instructive in this regard. It sug-
gests that Catullus embraced a fairly fluid and inclusive notion of "the feminine,"
one that might also accommodate another female-gendered inanimate object such as
the ianua of 67, and even the literally transgendered Attis.
2 Wiseman (above, n.I) 115-116, 135, 138, and 148.
422 CLASSICAL WORLD

in 68: first at 132 and then at 160. By voicing her wish that her passion
for Cerinthus be mutuus, reciprocated,-at 3.11.6-7 (nobis mutuus ignis
adest / mutuus adsit amor) and 3.12.8 (sed iuveni quaeso mutua vincla
para)-Sulpicia evokes Catullus' description of Acme and Septimius at
45.20, mutuis animis amant amantur. The characterization of her lover's
cura, passion, as pia in 3.17.1 calls to mind Catullus' use of the same
adjective and the noun pietas, for his erotic devotion at 76.2 and 26.3
As the passages from Sulpicia's elegies that I have just cited imply, I
would argue for a larger surviving quantity of Sulpicia than do most schol-
ars nowadays.4 I would include poems eight through twelve as well as thir-
teen through eighteen in her poetic corpus, in part because passages in
both the first five and the last six similarly call to mind Catullus' poetry. It
is worth noting, too, that Sulpicia's mother was a Valeria, sister of Marcus
Valerius Messalla Corvinus (whom Sulpicia addresses in 3.14.5, employing
the same adjective-studiosus-that she uses for her mother in 3.12.15). A
1993 article by T. P. Wiseman ingeniously establishes Sulpicia's kinship
with Gaius Valerius Catullus, providing a further, extraliterary, explanation
for their literary affinities.5 The putative family relationship and obvious
literary affinities that both Sulpicia and Catullus can claim with the earlier
Valerius Aedituus-one of whose surviving elegies resembles Catullus 51 in
its echoes of Sappho fr. 31L-P-are suggestive as well.6
But the most important reason for listening more closely for previously
unheard female voices in Catullus' poetry is the number of times-seven-
that he represents his puella, often though not always referred to in these
contexts by the name of Lesbia, as a speaker. As Micaela Janan has ob-
served, "Catullus sets himself up as 'reader' of Lesbia-as-text, in his ob-
sessive attention (peculiar to the epigrams) to decoding her speech: he
obsessively investigates her 'true' meaning and her true desire."7 Address-

3 See also 3.8.12-13, first describing her candida veste and then likening her to
the divinity Vertumnus, which calls to mind Cat. 68.70, referring to Lesbia as can-
dida diva. Her repeated characterization as digna at 3.8.15 (sola puellarum digna
est) and 24 (dignior est vestro nulla puella choro), 3.12.10 (servire aut cuiquam dignior
il/a viro), and 3.13.10 (cum digno digna fuisse ferar) may also evoke Cat. 68.131-
132 (aut nihil aut paulo cui tum concedere digna / lux mea). So, too, docta puella at
3.12.2 echoes Catullus 35.16-17 (Sapphica puella / Musa doctior); the repeated, al-
beit literal, use of morbus in 3.17.3 and 5, in which Sulpicia applies the adjective
pius to her lover's cura, may recall morbum at Cat. 76.25, which uses both pius and
pietas for erotic devotion.
I For the current practice of ascribing Tibullus 3.8-12 to the so-called amicus
Sulpiciae and 13-18 to Sulpicia herself, and the various arguments-among them ar-
guments involving both Catullan and Vergilian intertextualities-undermining this practice,
see J. P. Hallett, "Sulpicia," forthcoming in L. Churchill, ed., Women Writing in Latin,
vol. I (New York and London 2002). Of further interest in this regard is N. Holzberg,
"Four Poets and a Poetess or Portrait of a Poet As a Young Man? Thoughts on Book
3 of the Corpus Tibullianum," CJ 94.2 (1999) 172-73. He also maintains that a single
author is responsible for all eleven poems, not an Augustan aristocratic woman named
Suipicia but a man he calls "Pseudo-Tibullus" from the Tiberian era.
Wiseman, "Sirmio, Sir Ronald, and the Gens Valeria," CJ 88.3 (1993) 223-29.
6 For the affinities between Catullus 51 and Valerius Aedituus, two of whose el-
egiac epigrams are quoted by Aulus Gellius at 19.9.11-12, see D. Ross, Style and Tradition
in Catullus (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); as Ross emphasizes on 150, "Catullus kept the
original meter, but Aedituus recast his original in two pentameter couplets" (150).
7 M. Janan, "When the Lamp is Shattered": Desire and Narrative in Catullus
(Carbondale, Ill., 1994) 78.
 PAEDAGOGUS 423

ing Lesbia at 7.1, 72. 1, and 109. 1, he depicts her in the second person-
with quaeris, dicebas, and proponis respectively-as asking, asserting, and
proposing. He describes her in the third person as having vowed (vovit) at
36.4; as stating (dicit) at 70.1 and 3; as in turn uttering, snarling, insist-
ing, and chattering (dicit, gannit, obloquitur, and loquitur) at 83.1, 4, and
6; and repeatedly saying (dicit semper) at 92.1.
Why does Catullus assign so many lines to female speakers, identify
with an earlier female poet, influence a later female poet, and often tes-
tify to the speaking activity of his female beloved-but never assign his
female beloved any words of her own? Strikingly, William S. Anderson
has even claimed that a central clue to the failure of the relationship in
which Catullus represents himself as engaged with Lesbia is "Lesbia's
silence and the lover's inability to imagine what she feels and why she
does what she does." To Anderson, Catullan love poetry offers a "superb
example of why it is not enough in love to focus exclusively on one's
own feelings."8
Or does Catullus assign Lesbia some words, some lines of her own,
and thus focus on her feelings as well as his own? I would like to suggest
that two problematic passages in the Catullan corpus might profitably be
read as words assigned to Lesbia herself. First there is 2a, the three lines
tagged on to the first of the two poems dealing with the passer of Catullus'
puella:
Tam gratumst mihi quam ferunt puellae
pernici aureolum fuisse malum,
quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.
This is as pleasurable to me as they say the golden
apple was to the swift-footed girl, the apple which
loosened her girdle long-bound.
In this so-called fragment, the speaker, of unspecified gender, lik-
ens-obscurely and allusively-some similarly unspecified pleasure to that
which a golden apple, aureolum malum, is said to have afforded the leg-
endary Atalanta, inasmuch as it led to the unbinding of her "maidenly
precinct." The ten lines of the preceding poem, 2 (which do not, strictly
speaking, refer to the woman in question as Lesbia), represent the poet's
puella as playing with the passer, and thereby finding relief from her
passion, ardor, and some comfort for her pain, dolor. 2a, therefore, may
well represent the puella as merely testifying in her own, learned person
to the pleasure that she herself obtains from interacting with this winged
creature, whatever species it may or may not be.9
But 2a could also be favorably commenting upon 2, Catullus' poem
about the passer, as a source of literary pleasure. Strikingly, Catullus also
uses a malum as part of a complex literary analogy at 65.17-24. Indeed,
he does so in a simile describing the Callimachean poem that he is fi-

8 W. S. Anderson, "Aspects of Love in Ovid's Metamorphoses," CJ 90.3 (1995)

266.
9 For the thirty-one Phalaecian verses in the ancestor of the extant fourteenth-
century Catullan codices now subdivided into 2, 2a, and 3, see H. D. Jocelyn, "On
Some Unnecessarily Indecent Interpretations of Catullus 2 and 3," AJPh (1980) 421-
41. Although Jocelyn takes strong issue with the long-standing interpretation of the
passer in these poems as a euphemistic double entendre for the male organ, he does
chronicle the history of this interpretation and provide much of the evidence on which
it is based.
424 CLASSICAL WORLD

nally sending to his addressee Hortalus. Here Catullus likens this apple to
Hortalus' words that might seem, wrongly, to have slipped from his own
mind. He also likens himself to a maiden forgetful of her lover's secret
gift (ne tua dicta vagis nequiquam credita ventis / effluxisse meo forte
putes animo / ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum / procurrit casto
virginis e gremio, 17-20).
The second problematic passage that I would like to interpret as a
woman's unheard voice is the final stanza of poem 51:
otium, Catulle, tibi molestumst:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis.
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes. (13-16)
Idleness, Catullus, is troublesome to you: you revel
in idleness and desire it too much. Idleness has
earlier destroyed both kings and wealthy cities.
In fact, assigning this stanza to Lesbia helps to explain why Catullus, and
not Lesbia, is the second-person addressee in these four lines, since the
poet addresses Lesbia in the second person in two of the preceding three
stanzas. I would contend that Lesbia also delivers these lines as a literary
reaction to the poetry Catullus has presented-in this case a Latin rendi-
tion of Sappho's poem aVeTrai stol-in the first three stanzas. Yet if this
is so, hers are decisively not words of praise. Rather, she is critiquing his
literary effort as evidence that he, and his work, are harmed by otium-
the condition that Catullus, with the word otiosi, has just identified in
poem 50 (Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi, 50.1) as crucial to his endeavors at
playful poetic composition.
Finally, assigning the last words of poem 51 to Lesbia may help clarify
the phrase that Catullus uses for the puella beloved of Caecilius and his
literary endeavors in 35.16-17: "more learned than the Sapphic Muse"
(Sapphica puella / Musa doctior). For the words Sapphica Musa may re-
fer to Lesbia as well as to Sappho. If so, they would characterize Lesbia
as a learned literary critic: a characterization that fits well in poem 51,
inasmuch as it echoes, and attempts to rewrite, Sappho's own verses. We
should not, moreover, forget the evidence Cicero furnishes at Pro Caelio
64 on the literary endeavors of the historical Clodia Metella, whom schol-
ars-following Apuleius, Apologia 10-have regarded as the woman Catullus
immortalized as Lesbia. Such evidence, after all, includes referring to this
Clodia with a noun, poetria, also applied by Ovid and others to Sappho
herself.)0 And it may well be that at 36.3-8, when speaking of his puella's
vows to burn the writings of the worst poet if Catullus ceased his cruel
iambics, Catullus is also alluding to Lesbia's own literary endeavors. Per-
haps he even quotes them at 11-17, in the learned address to Venus as
recorder of these vows, and assesses them favorably in line 17 as non
illepidum neque invenustum ("not without charm or sensual pleasure").
University of Maryland, College Park JUDITH P. HALLETT
Classical World 95.4 (2002) jh l O@umail.umd.edu

0? This evidence also includes Cicero, Pro Sestio 116 and its statement about
the balletic interludes composed by Clodius' sister, qui omnia sororis embolia novit.
For the use of the Greek poetria-used to describe Clodia at Pro Caelio 64 as vetus
et plurimarum fabularum poetria-to describe Sappho, see Ovid, Heroides 15.183;
and Galen 4.771.