The University of Chicago Press

The Poetics of Manhood?
Nonverbal Behavior in Catullus 51

Author(s): Christina A. Clark
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 103, No. 3 (July 2008), pp. 257-281
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596517 .
Accessed: 01/03/2012 16:06
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Classical Philology.
http://www.jstor.org
THE POETICS OF MANHOOD?
NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR IN CATULLUS 51
christina a. clark
n her important article “Ego mulier: The Construction of Male
I Sexuality in Catullus,” Marilyn Skinner argues that Catullus’ poetic

speakers often adopt female personae as psychic safety valves to relieve
the almost unbearable pressure of the zero-sum game of Roman elite mas-
culinity. In particular, while closely examining Catullus 63 (in which the
Greek youth Attis emasculates himself ) and looking generally at Catullus’
Lesbia poems, she argues that “programmatically for the Lesbia cycle, the
speaker of poem 51 adopts a female literary persona, inscribing his private
declaration of passion into three renowned stanzas by Sappho.” 1 While
I agree that Catullus’ poetic speakers “play the other” emotionally, I will
argue that they do not do so with their bodies. 2 In a discussion informed by
Catullus’ use of gendered nonverbal behaviors in a variety of poems, I will
concentrate on Poem 51, showing how Catullus as a character in this poem
maintains rigid control of his external appearance even as he is violently
affected internally. In particular, I will look at Catullus’ suppression of the
external affect displays that Sappho’s speaker manifests and compare and con-
trast this with poems by Valerius Aedituus and Horace that are thematically
related to Sappho 31. Table 1 below summarizes the internal reactions to
emotion and the affect displays manifested by the speakers in these poems.
As the table reveals, Catullus as a character in Poem 51 exhibits no affect
display that would signal to others a loss of the controlled bodily behavior
expected of elite men.
Nonverbal Behaviors in Ancient Literature
Nonverbal behaviors communicate meaning without words. Categories of
nonverbal behavior include gestures, facial expressions, paralinguistics (vocal
qualities such as pitch, pace, tone, and volume), proxemics (“the human use,
perception, and manipulation of space” 3), and affect displays (autonomic
I would like to thank Geoff Bakewell, Greg Bucher, Jennifer Larson, Marilyn Skinner, and the anony-
mous referees for their kindness in reading the manuscript at various stages and for suggesting improve-
ments. All remaining flaws are my own. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
1. Skinner 1997, 131.
2. For Catullus’ poetic speakers in general adopting female personae, see especially Skinner 1997,
145–46. For the phrase “playing the other,” see Zeitlin 1996.
3. Lateiner 1995, xix.
Classical Philology 103 (2008): 257–81

[ç 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved] 0009-837X/08/10303-0003$10.00
257
258 Christina A. Clark
Table 1: Comparison of Internal Reactions and External Signs of

Emotion in Poems Discussed Below.
Sappho Lucretius Catullus Aedituus Horace
Internal reactions Internal reactions Internal reactions Internal reactions Internal reactions
Heart pounds Mind disturbed, Senses snatched Feels desire Mind unfixed;
soul feels fear away liver swells
Tongue breaks Tongue breaks; Tongue torpid Cannot speak
voice disappears
Internal heat Internal heat Internal heat (im- Internal fire
(flame) (flame) plied by sweat) steeps deeply
Eyes black out Eyes black out Eyes black out
Ears roar Ears ring Ears ring
Feels as if dying Feels as if dying Feels as if dying
External signs of External signs of External signs of External signs of External signs of
emotion emotion emotion emotion emotion
Sweat Sweat Sweat Moisture trickles
down cheeks
Trembling Limbs give way
Pallor Pallor Skin color
changes
responses of the nervous system such as sweating, pallor or trembling, and

“types of impulsive but not entirely uncontrollable emotional responses,
such as weeping” 4), among others. Ancient authors include all categories of
nonverbal behavior in their works, and modern readers cannot fully under-
stand these texts without an awareness of both verbal and nonverbal codes
and conventions.
From birth, we all learn to use our bodies within our own cultural and socio-
economic contexts and to interpret the bodily behavior of others. This is an
idea upon which much modern research has been focused, but was also
present in ancient cultures. For example, Roman boys learned Romanitas
and the mos maiorum from watching and emulating their fathers’ bodies and
behavior as well as listening to their words (Plin. Ep. 8.14.4–6). Bodies,
both real and fictional, participate in and reveal cultural ideologies such as
gender, status, and ethnicity. In 1935, Marcel Mauss, arguing that society
strongly inscribes itself on the bodies of its members, first put forth the idea
of habitus. Pierre Bourdieu defined and developed this notion of habitus,
which he described as habitual states of being, especially of the body. These
states are cultivated through interaction with the symbolically structured
environment. Habitus, in Bourdieu’s conception, entails a theory of embodi-
ment in which the body is the locus for the coordination of all levels of ex-
perience (bodily, social, and cosmological). The symbolic structures of the
4. Lateiner 1992, 257.

Catullus 51 259
outside environment are reflected in the way in which the body is conceived,
used, and experienced. 5
Thus, nonverbal behaviors participate in and reveal cultural codes.
Because ancient Rome was a contest society, every Roman was both a
member and an object of a “forest of eyes.” 6 Romans were highly attuned
to bodily messages—their own and those of others. “The Roman sense of
embodiment was not only keen but brittle.” 7 We can see this lying behind the
mime writer Publilius Syrus’ moral maxim ruborem amico excutere amicum
est perdere (“to wrest a blush from a friend is to lose a friend,” 634). Carlin
Barton’s work on blushing compares the insignificance of the blush in modern
American culture with the importance of the blush to Roman honor. In the
highwire act of Roman embodiment, “the blush was the totter, the tremor,
the disequilibrium at the center.” 8 Blushing, like all affect displays, is dis-
cerned by sight; Barton observes that “in the risky oscillation of exhibition
and inhibition, one created and was created through the gaze. . . . The Romans
were aware of themselves as fragile, naked creatures, clothed only in the
majesty of mutual and self-regard. Both they and their social world could be
animated or shattered with a look.” 9 In other words, a Roman’s manage-
ment of his nonverbal behavior could make or break him. In analyzing both
Sappho 31 and Catullus 51, it is especially important to understand the cul-
tural meaning(s) of affect displays. 10
Sappho 31 and the Female Body of Desire
Composed around the late seventh century b.c.e., Sappho 31 is a poem famous
for its depiction of erotic desire, in which a female speaker recounts, in the
form of a direct address to a beloved woman, a succession of alarming
physical reactions triggered by the sight and sound of this woman and a man
interacting:
FaÇnetaÇ moi khÅnoÍ ≥soÍ qevoisin
eßmmen∆ wß nhr, oßttiÍ ejnavntiovÍ toi
√sdavnei kaµ plavsion a® du fwneÇ-
saÍ uj pakouv ei
kaµ gelaÇsaÍ √mevroen, tov m∆ h® ma;n
kardÇan ejn sthvqesin ejptovaisen:
wj Í ga;r <eßÍ> s∆ ≥dw brovce∆ wß Í me f∫nh-
s∆ ouj de;n eßt∆ e≥kei,
a˚lla; †kam† me;n glΩssa †eßage†, levpton
d∆ auß tika crΩi puÅr uj padedrovmaken,
5. Bourdieu 1977, 72–95; 1990, 52–79.

6. For a discussion of Rome as a contest society, see Barton 2001 passim. Gleason (1990, 389) uses
the phrase “forest of eyes.”
7. Barton 2001, 75.
8. Barton 1999, 212.
9. Barton 2002, 227.
10. Lateiner (1992 and 1998) discusses the use and effect of affect displays in epic and other genres,
while Wees (1998) traces gender difference in expressing grief by crying in Archaic Greek literature and
art. For the use of affect displays in the Greek lyric poets in general and particularly in Sappho 31, see
Clark 2001.
ojppavtessi d∆ ouj de;n oßrhmm∆, ejpibrov-

meisi d∆ aßkouai,
†eßkade† m∆ ≥drwÍ kakcevetai, trovmoÍ de;

pa∂san aßgrei, clwrotevra de; poÇaÍ
eßmmi, teqnavkhn d∆ ojlÇgw ∆pideuv hÍ
faÇnom∆ eßm∆ außt[ai.
a˚lla; pa;n tovlmaton, ejpeµ †kaµ pevnhta† (Voigt)
He seems to me to be equal to the gods, that man, whoever sits opposite you and listens
to you speaking so sweetly and close to him, and hears too your tempting laughter.
Truly that makes the heart in my breast pound, for when for a moment I look at you,
I cannot speak at all; my tongue breaks, and a subtle flame runs immediately beneath
my skin. My eyes see nothing at all and a roaring fills my ears. Sweat pours down me,
and shaking seizes me all, paler than grass I am, and little short of dead I seem to me.
But all must be endured since . . .
Sappho carefully constructs these lines around affect displays. 11 First,

Sappho’s speaker focuses on her internal reactions to emotion (her flutter-
ing heart, speechlessness, 12 heat, loss of vision, and roaring in the ears) that
would be evident only to herself. Immediately thereafter, however, the ex-
ternal signs of great emotion manifest themselves: sweat, trembling, and
pallor. It is this unusual number and combination of affect displays, rather
than any one occurrence, that makes Sappho’s poem so unique. Longinus
(Subl. 10.1), although not speaking only of the affect displays here, notes that
Sappho’s arete is shown “in her skill in selecting the outstanding details
and making a unity of them.” 13 Donald Lateiner observes that involuntary
behaviors such as these characterize the powerless. 14 Reworking the con-
ventional affect displays of epic, which describe how men’s bodies reacted
to fear in battle or in the face of the gods, 15 Sappho makes them express
11. Clark 2001.

12. O’Higgins (1996) explores the imagery of speechlessness in both Sappho 31 and Catullus 51.
13. Trans. Russell.
14. Lateiner 1995, 183.
15. See Rissman 1983, 72–90, for a discussion of Sappho’s adaptation here of epic affect displays con-
noting fear. See also Svenbro 1984, 66–72. Lucretius’ portrait of the fearful man (3.152–59), contemporary
with Catullus’ poems, works with Sappho 31, especially in lines 154–56: verum ubi vementi magis est
commota metu mens, / consentire animam totam per membra videmus / sudoresque ita pallorem exsistere
toto / corpore et infringi linguam vocemque aboriri, / caligare oculos, sonere auris, succidere artus, / denique
concidere ex animi terrore videmus / saepe homines; facile ut quivis hinc noscere possit / esse animam cum
animo coniunctam . . . (“But when the mind is disturbed by a more violent fear, we see that the whole soul
feels it throughout the limbs: sweating and pallor break out all over the body and the tongue breaks and
voice disappears, eyes black out, ears ring, limbs give way; in fact we often see people fall down from fear
in the mind; so that anyone easily may learn that the soul is joined with the mind . . .”). Fowler (2000, 148)
examines the echoes of Sappho 31 in this passage, remarking, “the poem shows itself perfectly aware of
the way in which its own meaning is constituted. Nothing is created out of nothing, or destroyed into nothing,
but all earlier material can be reused and recontextualized.” Lucretius translates Sappho 31 more faithfully
than Catullus, even as he strips it of its erotic context and brings it back to its original Greek epic context
of the body’s reactions to fear. Such reactions were common in epic and Near Eastern prayers by people
confronting divinities; for descriptions of nonverbal behavior in ancient Near Eastern literature, see Gruber
1980 and Pham 1999. Lucretius’ appropriation of them to prove the unity of mind, body, and soul reinforces
his overall purpose in writing the De rerum natura—to explain the nature of reality and thus to free people
from fear (of death and of the gods, in particular). Once his readers embrace Epicureanism, they need not fear,
One Line Short

Catullus 51 261
eros rather than fear. She incorporates Greek stereotypes about women’s
physical susceptibility to eros only to subvert them playfully, when she
portrays the speaker’s mind as unaffected by desire and when the speaker
declares that while she feels as if she is dying, in fact, all must be endured.
Sappho’s use of kardia as the internal organ affected by eros is extraordinary,
for this is her only use of the word in her extant poetry. When she wants to
portray her speaker as affected by eros, the internal organ normally involved
is the phren. 16 Sappho’s diction and concentration on “womanly” affect dis-
plays contribute to the power of this poem playing with Greek ideologies of
femininity.
Centuries later, in the different contexts of late republican and early imperial
Rome, we can see poets from Valerius Aedituus (working c. 100 b.c.e.) to
Lucretius (c. 65–55), Catullus (c. 64–54), and Horace (c. 40–48) responding
to Sappho 31. All these poets except Lucretius use elements of Sappho 31 in
their own amatory poems, whereas Lucretius, who translates her most faith-
fully, changes the context of the affect displays back to epic fear. Lucretius
gives his fearful man all of the affect displays seen in Sappho 31, while
Aedituus and Horace allow their male speakers at least one affect display.
In contrast, Catullus suppresses them all. In the following sections, I will
analyze Catullus 51 before contrasting Catullus’ poem with those of Aedituus
and Horace that also “intertext” with Sappho 31. Lastly, I will discuss the
cultural context of Catullus’ poem and further address the reasons for his
suppression of all affect displays.
Catullus’ Desiring Male Lover
Catullus plays with Sappho 31, as many have observed, changing it in a
number of vital ways that reflect his own time, class, and poetic purposes. 17
The first four and a half lines of Poem 51 reflect a narrative situation similar
to that in Sappho’s poem:
and so need not manifest such affect displays as we see in this description. It is interesting that Lucretius
leaves out Sappho’s pounding heart, since that is a vital part of our “fight or flight” response to fear trig-
gered by the release of adrenaline. All the other symptoms logically follow. Lucretius describes them in
order as the mind’s fear affects the soul, and so the body. It is possible that Lucretius leaves the heart out of
his description because he wants to concentrate on the connection between the mind (mens, animus) and
the soul (anima).
16. See Clark 2001, 17–20, for a more detailed discussion of this. Characteristic examples of the use of
phren in Archaic Greek poetry are Sappho 47, 48, and 96 LP, and Anacreon PMG 346.11–12, where a
beautiful-faced boy causes the phrenes of citizens to flutter; in Sappho 31, it is the kardia that flutters.
17. Scholars often present these changes as minor, if they address them at all (e.g., Fordyce [1961]
1978, 219; and Quinn 1970, 241). See Wray 2001, 91–99, for a convincing analysis of Catullus 50 and 51
as a pair of poems that are structurally similar to Theocritus Idyll 11. The pair also, as Wray demonstrates,
shares a similar description of erotic distress “elaborated in physical and almost clinical terms. Both poems’
speakers portray the pleasure of merely conversing with the beloved (Calvus in Poem 50, Lesbia in Poem 51)
as a blissful attainment, and their deprivation of that pleasure as the root cause of their symptoms. More
specific, and still more striking, is the fact that Poem 50’s speaker begins the enumeration of symptoms,
the revelation of his illness, by calling himself miserum (‘wretched,’ 50.9). Poem 51’s speaker describes
himself with the same word (misero, 51.5), and the epithet there is a purely Catullan addition to the poem,
reflecting nothing in Sappho’s original. The announcement that he is ‘miserable’ thus stands in each poem
as the first indication of its speaker’s erotic suffering” ( p. 98). Wray also notes ( p. 97) the appearance of
the word otiosi (at leisure) in the first line of 50 and the play on otium in the last lines of 51.
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,

ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
<vocis in ore>
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus 18

flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte. 19
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:

otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes. 20
That man seems to me equal to a god,

that man, if it is proper to say it, seems to surpass
the gods, who, sitting facing you, again and again
gazes upon you and hears you
laughing sweetly, which snatches all my senses

away from wretched me: for at the same time as
I have looked at you, Lesbia, there is nothing left
of voice in my mouth,
But my tongue is numb, a subtle flame

flows down under my limbs,
my ears ring with their own sound,
my eyes are covered with double night.
Lack of action, Catullus, is troublesome to you;

in inactivity you exult and you desire it excessively; 21
lack of action has before killed both kings
and blessed cities.
A scene of a man and a woman provokes an immediate physical reaction

in the speaker. The man, sitting opposite the woman, looking at her and
hearing her erotically enticing laughter is in an enviable situation—indeed
18. Vine (1992, 254) argues that sub artus is “suggested by Sappho’s trovmoÍ de; / pa∂san aßgrei . . . a
variant of the Homeric cliché uÒpo; trovmoÍ eßllabe gu∂a” (Il. 14.506; see Vine for more references).
19. Ferrari (1938) and Bickel (1940) both analyze this stanza, the former arguing that the poet reflects
Hellenistic “precious” usages in everything, including word choice, sound play, and arrangement, while
the latter insists that the same features may spring from Roman literary traditions as well as Greek. Vine
(1992) asserts that the entire poem exhibits a mix of both elements as characteristic of neoteric poetry in
general.
20. The text is Mynors’ OCT (1958).
21. For a similar expression describing the slave to passion, see Cic. Tusc. 5.6.16: exsultans et temere
gestiens. Here Cicero discusses the disturbed states of mind ( perturbationes: metus, aegritudo, libido, and
laetitia gestiens) that prevent peace of mind and thus a happy life, according to Stoic philosophy.
One Line Short

Catullus 51 263
a godlike one. 22 The status of “that man” has shifted from the Sapphic
“equal to the gods” to a surprising elevation beyond them. Ellen Greene has
argued recently that the speaker competes (unsuccessfully) with that rival
man “who can gaze at Lesbia without any disruptive effects.” 23 However, I
do not think that we can make such assumptions about that man’s reactions,
disruptive or not. The poet does not give us any information about that man’s
inner emotional experience, or any outward manifestation of emotion. That
man is beyond godlike because of his physical proximity to and ability to
gaze upon and listen to the alluring Lesbia, and thus serves as a foil for the
speaker. 24
We learn in the second stanza that the speaker is male—the most important
change from Sappho’s song. Catullus departs from his Greek model in two
other ways as well: by calling his speaker miser, the usual Latin epithet for
an unhappy lover, 25 and by naming both the woman in the poem (Lesbia)
and the speaker (Catullus). 26 More importantly to my argument, the poet also
omits Sappho’s descriptions of her speaker’s disempowering affect displays.
He gives us no sweat, no trembling, no pallor, no pounding heart. 27 “Catullus”
tells us only that Lesbia’s erotic laughter “snatches all his senses away”
(lines 5–6). 28 Given the poet’s fairly close rendering of Sappho’s poem thus
far, one expects to learn next of the affect displays that betray the strong
emotion creating this unusual state. However, instead of following Sappho’s
lead, Catullus shares with us only his speaker’s internal symptoms: his torpid
22. Furley (2000) discusses Sappho’s use of “that man” as a foil to her speaker in respect to his ability
to sit close to and interact with the alluring girl while the speaker is overwhelmed even by the sight and
sound of the girl from afar.
23. Greene 1999, 4.
24. Unlike the situation in Sappho 31, “that man” in Catullus does not converse with the erotically
enticing woman.
25. Catullus, for example, uses it thirty-one times.
26. Some scholars, such as Wilkinson (1956), have argued that this is Catullus’ first poem to Lesbia,
sent to her to find out if she returned his feelings, although others such as Skinner (1992) and Wiseman
(1985) argue that it is meant to be where it is, when the relationship with Lesbia has become troubled.
Wray (2001, 88–109) argues that Poem 51 is meant to be read in conjunction with 50, and is in fact the
poem alluded to in 50. The two poems form an epistolary offering in a competition between male poets.
27. Vine asserts that Catullus’ third stanza is “a partial compression of Sappho’s third stanza together
with certain elements of her fourth stanza” (1992, 254; italics original). Wormell speculates as to why
Catullus omits Sappho’s rapidly beating heart: “cor micat or salit would have suggested alarm rather than
passion to a Roman” (1966, 192), and notes Lucretius’ use of Sappho 31 in his description of a frightened
man. Still, because Catullus’ readers would have known Sappho’s poem and that Catullus was working
with it, they would have correctly interpreted the heart’s action as indicating desire in this context; Catullus’
omission must arise from something other than cultural difference regarding the description of the heart’s
response to emotion.
28. Syndikus (1984, 1: 255) observes that this assertion functions as a title for the subsequent account
of symptoms. It is interesting to compare the Catullan narrative situation with Lucretius 4.1101–4, where
the poet observes that sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis / nec satiare queunt spectando corpora
coram / nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris / possunt errantes incerti corpore toto (“thus in
love Venus mocks lovers with images, nor can they sate their bodies by looking face-to-face nor can they
with their hands scrape off anything from tender limbs, wandering aimlessly on the whole body”). Bailey
(ad loc.) notes the poet’s clever wordplay here: “corpora: is the object both of spectando and of satiare,
but has a different reference with each verb: [the lovers cannot] ‘satiate their (own) bodies by gazing on
the bodies (of the others).’ ”
tongue, 29 internal heat, ear ringing, and visual blackout. 30 Someone looking
at the speaker would have no idea that he was experiencing amor. D. E. W.
Wormell argued that Catullus omitted Sappho’s fourth stanza because “it is
essentially feminine,” and thus inappropriate for the male speaker. 31 I want
to examine that idea more closely, looking at the vocabulary with which
Catullus describes both men and women in the throes of erotic passion.
The “fire” of sexual passion is a well-established trope in classical poetry. 32
Catullus uses ardor/ardeo, flamma, and ignis to express it, although it is in-
teresting that while both men and women feel flammae (51.10 [male], 61.171
[male and female], 64.92 [female], 100.7 [male]), in Catullus, only women
feel amatory ignes (45.16 and 35.15). The fire of amor affects the innermost
part of the body—the marrow (medullum). It can blaze in the marrow (ignis
mollibus ardet in medullis, 45.16), or consume the marrow (ex eo misellae /
ignes interiorem edunt medullam, 35.14–15). 33 Erotic fire affects both sexes,
although in 45.15–16 Acme tells her lover Septimius that she suffers from
love’s consuming fire more than he does: her fire is maior acriorque.
29. The heaviness, or numbness, of the speaker’s tongue (lingua torpet) apparently spreads throughout
his body by the end of the relationship. In 76.20–22, the speaker (miser still) asks the gods to “tear from
within me this devouring cancer, this heavy dullness wasting the joints of my body, completely driving every
joy from my spirit!” (trans. Martin): eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi, / quae mihi subrepens imos ut
torpor in artus / expulit ex omni pectore laetitias. O’Higgins compares Catullus’ expression with Sappho’s
glΩssa eßage, which, she argues, “achieves roughly the same sense . . . but lacks the hiatus, the violence
and the military connotations of Sappho’s expression” (1996, 164). See also Vine 1993.
30. Pardini (2001, 112–13) argues convincingly that Catullus here inverts the order of Sappho’s physical
effects of eros, making the ears ring before the eyes black out, because he is combining Sappho’s model
with a Homeric formula that occurs at Il. 5.310 and 11.356: a˚mfµ de; oßsse kelainh; nu; x ejkavluye. He con-
cludes that Catullus mixes his models here for a specific purpose: “Catullus seems to speak of blindness,
like Sappho, and actually uses a euphemism for death, like Homer.” He does this so that he can allude to the
end of Sappho’s fourth stanza, without translating it. I cannot agree with Pardini, however, that by “allud-
ing to different lines of Sappho (31.11–12 and 15–16) with one intentionally ambiguous sentence, the poet
implicitly summarizes all they contain. In other words, he has entirely rendered, by translation or by allusion,
Sappho’s list” ( p. 114). He thus agrees with Vine 1992. When Pardini asserts (115 n. 28) that the affect
displays Sappho includes “are not unlikely to be used of or by a man,” relying on Longus’ description of
Daphnis at 1.17.1 as “paler than grass,” he does not consider the different cultural context of late republican
Rome as well as the different generic conventions. In terms of the belief that love enters the body through
the eyes, and here makes the lover’s sight “black out,” Lucretius’ remark (4.1141–44) atque in amore mala
haec proprio summeque secundo / inveniuntur; in adverso vero atque inopi sunt, / prendere quae possis
oculorum lumine operto, / innumerabilia (“And these ills are found in love that is true and fully prosper-
ous; but when love is crossed and hopeless there are ills which you might detect even with closed eyes, ills
without number”; trans. Bailey) resonates ironically.
31. Wormell 1966, 192; see also Bickel 1940, 196; Schnelle 1933, 21; and Friedrich 1908, 236.
32. In addition to Sappho 31, see 47 and 130; Archil. 191, 193, 196; see Verg. Aen. 1.660 for the fire of
amor in Dido’s bones as well as 7.354–55 for Amata’s amatory fire. For further discussion of Vergil’s pre-
sentation of sexual desire in Aeneid 7, see Clark 1993. Fantham (1972, 7–8) shows that in republican Latin
texts, metaphors based on fire are common. For example, the verb ardere is especially used to denote passion
in Plautus ( pectus ardens, Epid. 555; pectus ardet, Merc. 600) and in Cicero (in amore fuerit ardentius,
Fam. 9.14.4). She notes that in the surviving works of New Comedy, such fire imagery is not employed in
amatory contexts, and concludes that this category of metaphor was not inherited from the Greek texts, but
rather was already a natural idiom in Latin (11).
33. In Catullus, medulla appear eight times, five of which refer to amor’s effect (35.15, 45.16, 64.93,
66.23, 100.7). In contrast, in Roman comedy amor affects the pectus and the cor, as in Plaut. Merc. 590–
91. Here the Athenian youth Charinus talks to himself about his current plight: ita mi in pectore atque in
corde facit amor incendium / ni ex oculis lacrimae defendant, iam ardeat credo caput (“Love makes such
a fire in my breast and in my heart that if the tears from my eyes weren’t protecting me, I think my head
would already be aflame”).
Catullus 51 265
Catullus presents the experience of erotic heat in a semantic nexus with

other key terms. An example of this is his description of Ariadne’s “love at
first sight” (hunc simul ac cupido conspexit lumine virgo, 86) and her violent
physical reactions upon seeing Theseus in the great ekphrasis in Poem 64
(91–102; words referring to fiery and other physical reactions in the text are
in bold):
non prius ex illo flagrantia declinavit
lumina, quam cuncto concepit corpore flammam
funditus atque imis exarsit tota medullis.
heu misere exagitans immiti corde furores
sancte puer, curis hominum qui gaudia misces,
quaeque regis Golgos quaeque Idalium frondosum,
qualibus incensam iactastis mente puellam
fluctibus, in flavo saepe hospite suspirantem!
quantos illa tulit languenti corde timores!
quanto saepe magis fulgore expalluit auri!
cum saevum cupiens contra contendere monstrum
aut mortem appeteret Theseus aut praemia laudis . . . 34
no sooner did she turn her burning eyes away from him,
than she took a flame deeply into her whole body
and burst into flame in her deepest marrow.
Ah, with hard heart, divine boy, wretchedly driving men mad,
you who blend men’s cares and their joys,
and you who rule Golgos and leafy Idalium,
with what waves you have tossed the girl, inflamed in her mind,
sighing often for the golden-haired stranger!
What fears she bore in her swooning heart!
How often then did she grow paler than gold’s gleam!
When craving to contend against the savage monster,
Theseus sought either death or the prize of praise.
Unlike the speaker in Sappho 31, whose mind is unaffected by eros, Ariadne
is described as “inflamed in her mind, sighing for love of the yellow-haired
stranger” (incensam mente, in flavo hospite suspirantem, lines 97–98).
Catullus uses suspiro only here. Ariadne’s violent erotic emotion is ex-
pressed externally by means of one nonverbal sign: her lovesick sighs, which
she makes often (saepe). 35 These are immediately followed by a change in
complexion that reflects a change in emotion: when it is clear that Theseus
intends to take on the Minotaur, out of fear Ariadne grows paler than gold’s
gleam (lines 99–100). 36 While characters commonly pale in response to fear
34. Quinn (1962, 52–60) provides a close reading of this poem; he sees in these lines “an image of
astonishing precision” (53).
35. For suspiro in this sense, cf. Tib. 1.6.35; Hor. Carm. 3.7.10; Ov. Fast. 1.417. Cf. also Lucr. 4.1192–94,
where the poet cynically remarks nec mulier semper ficto suspirat amore / quae complexa viri corpus cum
corpore iungit / et tenet assuctis umectans oscula labris (“nor does a woman always sigh with feigned love,
who, embracing the body of her man joins with body and holds him, wetting kisses with sucking lips”).
36. Other poetic women grow pale from fear, described in less pretty terms, such as Philomela in
Ov. Met. 6.602, who horruit infelix totoque expalluit ore.
in classical literature from Homer on, pallor expressing emotion appears in

Catullus’ corpus only here and is an obvious echo of Sappho 31. 37 Later, in
elegy, the solitary speaker of Propertius 1.18 asks his beloved Cynthia quid
tantum merui? quae te mihi carmina mutant? (“why have I deserved such
a great punishment? What songs turn you against me?” 9–10). He goes on to
speculate: an quia parva damus mutato signa colore, / et non ulla meo clamat
in ore fides? (“or is it that I give too little signs [of amor] by changing color,
and fidelity doesn’t shout in my mouth?” 17–18). 38 Here we have a situation
in which the beloved woman expects her lover to manifest his emotions on
his body, in a way that the speaker in Catullus 51 fails to do. Cynthia’s ex-
pectation is in keeping with the elegiac pose of the enslaved lover who has
abandoned conventional codes of masculinity as a form of social protest. 39
Although it is this internal fire that generates the sweat that betrays erotic
emotion to an external observer, Catullus refers to sweat only three times,
and nowhere in an amatory context. 40 However, one of those times may have
an amatory association worth noting. In Poem 68.61, the speaker likens Allius’
help to a stream relieving a sweaty traveler (dulce viatori lasso in sudore
levamen). One might see an echo of the sweat caused by the onslaught of
amor here, since in poem 63.72 we learn that Allius had helped the speaker
find a meeting place for him and his lover. Earlier in 68, in lines 51–56, the
speaker describes his body’s reaction to amor in terms followed later by
Propertius (me dolor et lacrimae merito fecere peritum, 1.9.7).
nam, mihi quam dederit duplex Amathusia curam,
scitis, et in quo me torruerit genere,
cum tantum arderem quantum Trinacria rupes
lymphaque in Oetaeis Malia Thermopylis,
maesta neque assiduo tabescere lumina fletu
cessarent tristique imbre madere genae.
For you know the pain that two-faced Venus gave

to me, and in what manner she scorched me
when I was as hot as the Sicilian crag 41 or the
Malian springs in Oetaean Thermopylae,
my melancholy eyes, with constant weeping, do not stop
dimming, nor do my cheeks stop wetting with sad rain.
Love’s cura causes the body to be hot (the heat of sexual excitement is here
expressed figuratively), but the speaker does not mention any sweat that
37. Other instances of pallor in Catullus: 65.6, his brother’s pale ( pallidulum) foot sank into the river
Lethe, 81.4, Juventius’ new male lover is paler ( pallidior) than a gilded statue.
38. The text here is disputed. Camps (1969) and Richardson (1976) retain the reading mutato . . . colore
while others, such as Baker (2000), prefer the variant reading mutato . . . calore.
39. For which see, e.g., Lyne 1980, 65–81; Propertius references his “slavery,” for example, in 2.20.19–
20 and 3.11.1–2.
40. In Poem 23, the narrator comforts Furius for his “poverty” with the observation that his frugal life-
style promotes physical health: “you’re free from sweat and free from spit; the nose’s snot and ugly slime”
(a te sudor abest, abest saliva, / mucusque et mala pituita nasi; 23.16–17). Sudanti appears in 64.106
modifying cortice as part of a nature simile: “sap-stemmed.”
41. For other comparisons of emotional flames to Aetna’s fires, see Hor. Epod. 17.30: ardeo quantum . . .
nec Sicana fervida virens in Aetna flamma; Ov. Epist. Sapph. 12: me calor Aetnaeo non minor igne tenet.
Catullus 51 267
might visually manifest that volcanic heat; 42 instead, the eyes dim from
weeping, and the cheeks display those tears. Of these symptoms, only one
is manifest to observers: the tears. These tears of the frustrated lover, and
those of the speaker in 99.5, whose kiss the beloved Juventius has wiped
off, are the only tears in Catullus connected with amor at all. Otherwise, all
those who weep in Catullus do so out of grief or fear for loved ones. 43
There is no erotic trembling in Catullus. Rather, words such as tremulus and
tremor refer to the weakness of old age, or are used figuratively to describe
aspects of nature. 44 There is one occurrence of trembling that may bear on
my argument. After the castration, Attis shakes a tambourine with delicate
fingers and sings in a high-pitched, trembling voice (quatiensque terga tauri
teneris cava digitis / canere haec suis adorta est tremebunda comitibus,
63.10–11). One could argue that Attis’ voice is trembling from bodily shock,
or from ecstatic excitement, but Attis’ voice could also reflect his emasculated
state. If trembling does betray femininity, Catullus could have eliminated it
from Poem 51 to prevent his male speaker’s body from being feminized by
amor in a way that others could see.
Catullus may have been influenced not to attribute trembling and pallor
to his male speaker not only by those affect displays coded as feminine in
Sappho 31 but also by Apollonius’ Hellenistic epic, the Argonautica. In
Book 3, Medea, struck by eros, becomes speechless and grows pale (283–98).
What is interesting about Apollonius’ description, however, is that he, like
Ovid after him, combines both pallor and blushing to describe the physically
and mentally enflamed Medea (298). 45 Blushing girls do appear in Latin lit-
erature, of course. Readers of the Aeneid will remember Lavinia’s famous
blush as she hears her mother beg her former fiancé, Turnus, not to fight in
single combat with Aeneas. Here Vergil, like Apollonius, makes use of the
contrast between a maiden’s white and flushed skin as a nonverbal sign of
erotic emotion. 46 A maiden’s blush appears as well in Catullus 65.24. Here
a girl blushes when her lover’s gift of an apple, which she had hidden under
her gown, bounces and rolls into view when she rises to greet her mother:
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor (“while a self-conscious blush flows
over her somber face”). Rubor is the last word not just of this line but of the
42. Vine (1992, 255) argues that amor-induced sweat is latent in Catullus’ word choice demanat, which
compresses the ideas of heat emanating and sweat manifesting. Still, Vine does not adequately explain
why Catullus conflates flame and heat so subtly here, where his predecessors did not. In addition, why
compress the external affect displays, when he follows Sappho’s lead with the internal emotions?
43. Other instances of weeping (forms of fleo): 3.18 ( puella weeps over her dead sparrow), 39.3 and 5
(Egnatius laughs when someone weeps in response to an orator’s speech or a mother weeps at the funeral
of her only son), 61.81–82 (a bride weeps at leaving her childhood behind), 64.242 (Aegeus weeps out of
fear for Theseus on his way home from Crete), 66.22 (Berenice’s lock weeps when set up in the sky), 96.4
(male friends weep for lost friendships with the dead), 101.9 (presents left for the speaker’s dead brother
are wet with tears).
44. Trembling old age: 61.51 and 154–56, 64.307, 68.142; figurative trembling: 6.10, 64.128.
45. Unlike Sappho’s narrator in 31, Medea’s qumovÍ (284), kradÇh (287), khÅr (446), novoÍ (447), prapÇdeÍ
(765), and yuchv (1016) are affected by eros. Her love-struck state is revealed externally by her facial ex-
pression (a˚maruv gmata) as well as her labored breathing, pallor, and blush. Lateiner (1998, 169–83) discusses
blushes from Homeric epic to the ancient novels.
46. See Lyne’s discussion (1983).
poem, its placement giving it emphasis. Further, although Ovid in his Ars
amatoria exhorts “let every lover be pale,” 47 in his epic poem, the Meta-
morphoses, he often makes his characters reveal their amorous emotions not
with pallor, but with blushes. Lateiner lists at least twelve, including Nar-
cissus’ admiration of “his face so fine, his ivory neck, his cheeks smooth,
and the snowy pallor and the blush . . . and love he kindles while with love
he burns.” 48 Vergil and Ovid, of course, write in a different political and
social context than Catullus. 49
There has been much discussion of the final stanza of Catullus 51, which,
while it seems different from the final stanza of Sappho in terms of content, is
similar in that it breaks the mood the poet has created in the previous stanzas. 50
Whereas Sappho’s ending (fragmentary as it is) overturns a Greek stereo-
type of femininity, Catullus’ ending throws cold water on the reader, abruptly
diffusing the erotic tension of the previous stanzas. Most scholars argue that
Catullus is playing with the polysemous nature of the word otium, and I
would agree. 51 It is true that otium and negotium are words that denote an
elite man’s engagement, or lack thereof, in the public duties expected of his
class. No doubt this is one meaning of otium here, as it is in other poems,
such as 10 (otiosum, line 2). But it is possible that in this stanza Catullus is
bringing another meaning of otium to the forefront, by following in Aedituus’
footsteps. At the very end of fragment 1 (which I discuss in greater detail
below), Aedituus’ speaker declares, dum pudeo, pereo. Catullus, perhaps, uses
perdidit expressly to refer back to Aedituus fragment 1: Aedituus’ speaker
is destroyed by chastity, and likewise, Catullus’ speaker is (by implication)
destroyed by lack of (sexual) action (otium; imagining another man with
Lesbia rather than physically, sexually interacting with her himself ). 52 Not
47. 1.729–30: palleat omnis amans; hic est color aptus amanti; / hoc decet. In a similar vein, the speaker
in Propertius 1.5 acts as praeceptor amoris for the addressee, Gallus, detailing the experiences lovers have
when in thrall to a cruel mistress, making him understand the speaker’s condition: et tremulus maestis orietur
fletibus horror, / et timor informem ducet in ore notam, / et quaecumque voles fugient tibi verba querenti, /
nec poteris, qui sis aut ubi, nosse miser! . . . nec iam pallorem totiens mirabere nostrum, / aut cur sim toto
corpore nullus ego (15–18, 21–22). For more pallor as an indication of love in Propertius, see 1.1.22,
1.9.17, 1.13.7.
48. impubes genas et eburnea colla decusque / oris et in niveo mixtum candore ruborem . . . / dumque
petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet (3.422–23, 426; trans. Melville). Lateiner (1992, 261) notes
blushes caused by amor: 1.484, 1.755, 2.450, 3.423, 4.268, 4.330, 5.584, 6.46, 7.78, 9.471, 10.594, 13.581
(Daphne, Phaethon, Diana’s pregnant companion [Callisto], Narcissus, Clytie, Hermaphroditus, Arethusa,
Arachne, Medea, Byblis, Atalanta, and Aurora). Pallor caused by fear: 2.180, 6.522, 7.136, 13.582, 14.734,
14.755 (Phaethon, Philomela, Medea, Aurora [an adynaton], Iphis, and Anaxarete).
49. Habinek 1997 has an interesting discussion of Ovid’s poetry, in which the poet “disembeds” sex
from contexts of honor and shame. Following this reading, it would then be no problem for a lover to
manifest his emotions on his skin.
50. This is not the place to tackle the longstanding debate about whether this stanza belongs with the
rest, or comprises a different poem. Given the similarity of effect between it and Sappho’s last fragmentary
stanza, as well as the resonances with the first epigram of Aedituus, I think the poem works well as we
have it.
51. See Laidlaw 1968 for otium in Latin literature; for differing interpretations of otium here, see
Fowler 2000, Woodman 1966, Itzkowitz 1983, O’Higgins 1996, and Lattimore 1944. For a discussion of
the related adjective otiosus, consult Segal 1970.
52. Thanks to Greg Bucher for suggesting to me that Catullus’ otium here could also be interpreted as
sexual inactivity.
Catullus 51 269
being physically involved with Lesbia (as well as not being involved in the
negotium of Roman politics) gives the poet the time to produce this poem.
Watching Lesbia sitting and laughing across from “that man” causes an emo-
tional reaction in the speaker that makes him feel as if he is dying, although
he manages to control his outward affect displays and thus not “unman”
himself in front of the “forest of eyes.” It is suggestive that pereo is the last
word of Aedituus 1, and perdidit the penultimate word in Catullus 51. In the
final stanza of 51, the verbs exsultare and gestire—found only here in the
extant Catullan corpus—are noteworthy as well. Robinson Ellis notes that
“both exultas [sic] and gestis are physical words” and translates line 14 as
“idleness makes the veins throb with wantonness beyond measure.” 53 Fordyce
says that “both verbs primarily refer to physical restlessness and both imply
riotous emotion,” noting that Cicero combines them as well in Tusculanae
disputationes 4.13 and 5.16. 54
Catullus uses perdo a second time in reference to the result of his relation-
ship with Lesbia in Poem 75. Here Catullus again addresses Lesbia, telling
her that his mind has been destroyed ( perdidit) by doing its duty to her:
huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa
atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo,
ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,
nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.
To this my mind has been led/dragged down by your fault, Lesbia

and thus destroyed itself by its devotion,
so that now it couldn’t be fond of you, if you did the best,
nor could it stop loving, if you should do everything [bad].
If 51 marks the start of the speaker’s interest in or involvement with Lesbia

and bemoans his otium or lack of sexual activity with her, Poem 78 makes
the ironic point that it is through the speaker’s officium—his dutifulness in his
sexual relationship with Lesbia—that his mens has been destroyed, just like
51’s cities and kings. The Catullan speaker failed to heed his own warning,
and suffers the foretold consequences. However, although the speaker reveals
his internal emotions to the scrutiny of others, thus making a spectacle of
them, he avoids making a spectacle of his body. 55 Here, as in 51, there is no
mention of any external, bodily manifestation of strong or excessive emo-
tions. The speaker thus “dies” like a traditional Roman man, as physically
unrevealing as the legendary Mucius Scaevola, whom I discuss below.
Affect Displays and Roman Manhood
To appreciate the control Catullus as speaker in Poem 51 maintains over
any outward display of his emotions, I will bring to bear poems by Valerius
Aedituus and Horace that involve similar situations. As I will demonstrate,
53. Ellis 1876, 141.

54. Fordyce [1961] 1978, ad loc. See Fraenkel 1957, 213, for another discussion of otium in this stanza.
55. See Braund 2002, chap. 6, for more on the degradation of the body as spectacle in Roman elite
ideology.
while all three Roman poets restrict their male speakers’ affect displays
compared to Sappho’s female speaker, neither of the male speakers in
Aedituus or Horace’s poems controls his nonverbal behavior to the extent
that Catullus does. In fact, Catullus’ character asserts exceptional control
over his body’s outward displays of emotion, in keeping with the extraor-
dinarily harsh physical codes required of men in late republican Rome. 56
An elite Roman male was expected to exert potestas over himself and others; 57
being unable to control one’s emotions, or their bodily display, was a sign
of effeminacy. 58 We might seek the reason for Catullus’ severe repression in
the poet’s particular context: his literary microcommunity of neoteric poets.
As David Wray has recently argued, Poem 51, like many of the Lesbia
poems, is directed at or against men and constitutes an aggressive perfor-
mance of manhood. 59 Indeed, Catullus’ poetry circulated within both the
microcommunity of poets and the macrocommunity of the Roman elite
during the last years of the Republic, at a time when the performance of
masculinity both remained extremely important and became increasingly at
risk, a situation I will return to at the end of this paper. Both Aedituus and
Horace lived and worked in different times and social contexts: Aedituus
was among the first wave of Roman poets producing Latin epigrams using
Hellenistic Greek models, and Horace worked for patrons in the new world
of Augustan Rome. With the death of the Republic, some have argued, the
performance of Roman masculinity, as it had been conceived previously,
was problematic, for only the emperor had true potestas. 60
56. Such nonverbal behavioral codes have been well explored by scholars such as Gleason (1990,
1995); Corbeill (1991, 2004); Barton (1994, 1999, 2002); and Gunderson (2000).
57. See, for example, Sen. Ben. 5.7.5 (se habere in potestate).
58. Recent excellent explorations of Roman constructions of masculinity include Keith 2000 (chap. 2),
Braund 2002, especially chaps. 5 and 6, and Walters, who discusses Roman manhood within “the context
of a wider conceptual pattern that characterized those of higher social status as being able to defend the bound-
aries of their bodies from invasive assaults of all kinds” (1997, 30)—this idea of corporeal inviolability is
the likely cause of the unwillingness of the speaker in Catullus 51 to let his body display his “womanish”
emotional state. Williams methodically sets out Roman ideologies of masculinity, which were “predicated
on the assumption that a real man must not only achieve but also constantly display and perform his status
as a dominant male, in control of himself and others” (1999, 124). Chap. 4 looks especially at how charges
of effeminacy were leveled.
59. See Wray 2001, 88–99.
60. Fredrick, in discussing Alan Cameron’s claim that the Hellenistic poet’s “problem was how to de-
epicize elegy,” notes that this was “connected to the ‘de-epicization’ of the citizen through his increased
distance from warfare, a citizen for whom the epic battlefield has faded into text that no longer intersects
with lived experience. The self-definition of the Roman male elite was similarly dependent on political
competition and military accomplishment, and similarly disturbed when Republican institutions crumbled”
(1997, 179). Skinner argues that in Catullus 63, the gender inversion of Cybele and the emasculated Attis
“reflects elite despair over real decreases in personal autonomy and diminished capacity for meaningful
public action during the agonized final years of the Roman Republic.” In fact, Skinner postulates that Attis
“becomes a surrogate for Catullus’ own intended readers—enterprising young men born, like the poet himself,
to influential Italian and Transpadane families, highly educated, talented, groomed for success at Rome, yet
abruptly marginalized by social disruption. . . . Thus in Catullus 63 a contemporary narrative of political
impotence is retold mythically as a tale of self-destructive estrangement from the male body” (1997, 117–
18). Alston examines conceptions of masculinity and the relationship between the military and masculinity
during the transition between Republic and Empire. He too discusses the problem posed by the new autocracy
to elite male potestas (1997, 214–16). Likewise, Joshel studies the intersection between gender and empire,
when emperors exercised absolute power and the male elites complied even as they maintained the fiction of
political autonomy. In her examination of Tacitus’ account of Messalina, Joshel concludes that Messalina
Catullus 51 271
Catullus directly addresses the problem of the performance of masculinity

and the hostile “forest of eyes” constantly judging it, when he asks, vos, quod
milia multa basiorum / legistis, me male marem putatis? (“Do you, because
you read ‘many thousands of kisses,’ think me insufficiently masculine?,”
16.12–13). He then emasculates the two who impugn him, basically saying,
“screw you, effeminate Aurelius and Furius” (1–4). Around the same time,
Cicero commented on the men of his day, who, far from emulating the leg-
endary physical self-control of Mucius Scaevola when he expressionlessly
held his hand in the flame, having declared Romanus sum . . . civis . . . et
facere et pati fortia Romanum est (“I am a Roman citizen, it is the Roman
way to do and to suffer bravely”), 61 are dominated by an effeminate mental
attitude (opinio . . . effeminata) rendering them unable to endure the pain of
a bee sting without a cry (Tusc. 2.52). Cicero’s stoicism, in keeping with the
ideologies of republican Roman masculinity, made reason, not emotion, the
ruler of a man’s soul (Tusc. 2.47–48). Although the examples above dem-
onstrate control over the physical expression of pain, I think that they work as
well for the expectation that elite Roman men control the physical expression
of strong emotions (or emotional pain) or restrict their display to socially
acceptable times and places. As I have shown, Catullus’ speaker in 51 shares
such an “effeminate mental attitude” with us even as he allows no sign of
it to manifest on his body, combining an emotional “playing the other” with
traditional Roman physical stoicism.
Comparanda in Roman Poetry
Valerius Aedituus’s Bashful Lover

As part of a circle of poets adapting Hellenistic Greek poetry to Latin, Valerius
Aedituus wrote two extant epigrams, one of which reflects Sappho’s poem
in both vocabulary and imagery. 62 Preserved in Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae
(19.9), 63 Aedituus’ poems are used by the rhetorician Antonius Julianus at
a banquet to answer the question of certain Greeks, who, after singers and
lyre players had performed songs of Sappho and Anacreon, asked him if
any Latin poets other than Catullus and Calvus had produced such smooth-
flowing and delightful poems (tam fluentes carminum delicias fecisset;
19.9.7). Julianus (indignabundus) replies that there were several earlier
poets who had done so, such as Aedituus, whose poem he recites: 64
functions as a sign; she signals “the growth of the emperor’s power and the development of an imperial
state . . . Messalina figures in a story of an accumulation of power determining Tacitus’ present, in which
the emperor orders the senators to be free” (1997, 245). See also Barton 1994 and Fowler 2002, 148–51.
61. Livy 2.12–13.
62. Citroni (OCD 3 1577) takes it for granted that Aedituus intertexts with Sappho 31; Courtney states
that the poem “is strongly reminiscent” of Sappho 31 (1993, 72). See Ross 1969, 144–50, for a detailed
discussion of Aedituus’ use of Sappho 31 in this epigram.
63. For a discussion of the dates of Valerius Aedituus, Porcius Licinus, Catulus, et al., see Holford-
Strevens 1977.
64. Examining this scene, Wray remarks: “I can point to no moment of self-performance more Catullan
than this in Latin literature after Catullus” (2001, 213). Like Catullus, Julianus was of provincial origin and
steeped in both Hellenistic and Roman culture. He thus expresses the same “standard anxieties and defensive
aggressions of Roman manhood” (215).
dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis,

quid mi abs te quaeram, verba labris abeunt,
per pectus manat subito <subido> mihi sudor;
sic tacitus, subidus, dum pudeo, 65 pereo. (frag. 1) 66
When I try to speak the love of my heart to you, Pamphila,

What shall I ask for myself from you? The words go away from my lips.
Suddenly all over my breast sweat pours forth from <horny> me;
Thus silent, turned on, while I’m chaste, I perish.
The words Aedituus employs in this poem are quite striking. The narrative
situation here differs from that of Sappho 31, in that the speaker sees no
tableau of beloved and another man, but the emotion portrayed is similar.
The male speaker addresses his beloved, named Pamphila, confiding to her
that when he tries to tell her of his cura cordis, and by doing so perhaps ini-
tiate some desired sexual activity, verba labris abeunt. This is, in outcome
if not in exact description, the same thing that happens to Sappho’s speaker;
when she sees the man and woman conversing, her tongue “breaks.” Imme-
diately after, Aedituus’ speaker reveals his emotion nonverbally by means
of his sudden and violent affect display: the sweat that pours forth all over
his breast. Unlike Sappho’s speaker, the speaker here does not reference a
trembling heart, but the reason for the sweat is given in the identification of
the speaker’s emotion (cura cordis) and the adjective he applies to himself
(subidus), and is implied by the use of the word pectus. The adrenaline rush
of desire causes his heart to pound and sweat to flow. The adjective subidus,
a hapax legomenon, is related to the verb subare, which is used to describe
female animals in heat (as in Lucr. 4.1199) or sexually aroused women (Hor.
Epod. 12.11 and Festus P. 310M; see OLD, s.v. subo). Given this, one wonders
at the resonance it would have had for a Roman audience, applied to a male
speaker. Would it emasculate him? Render his desire bestial? In any event, the
combination of extreme arousal yet lack of sexual activity makes the speaker
assert that he is dying. By observing and correctly interpreting the speaker’s
nonverbal behavior, Pamphila could ascertain his desire and potentially act to
alleviate his suffering. But to an observer, the speaker’s silence is a multi-
valent sign. He could be choosing not to speak, in which case he could be
fighting to control his desire in a manly fashion, or he could be unable to
speak, as the verb abeunt certainly implies. Being unable to speak could
mark one as unmanly, given the high value put on speech in Roman male
elite culture. The speaker in Aedituus 1, in sharing with us his devastating
physical response to his beloved, could be seen as deconstructing his own
masculinity—his body’s betrayal leaves him unable to act or speak to get what
he wants. This is a death, not of the body itself, but of the body’s manliness.
Why does Aedituus feel able to present his male speaker in this way? Perhaps
65. Courtney (1993, 72) suggests that dum pudeo might allude to Sappho 137, in which one speaker,
Alcaeus, addresses another, Sappho: qevlw tÇ t∆ e≥phn, a˚llav me kwluv ei / a≥dwÍ, after which Sappho replies
that “shame would not be restraining him if his desire were honourable.”
66. The text of Aedituus is vexed; see Morel 1927 and Courtney 1993. I follow Courtney’s text.
Catullus 51 273
he does so because the speaker is not identified as “Aedituus.” Or perhaps

it is because the poem is modeled to a high degree on Hellenistic poetry,
making the speaker work with those conventions of masculinity, rather than
Roman ones.
Julianus goes on to recite a second epigram of Aedituus, which asserts
the power of amor using the type of amatory fire imagery seen in Archaic
Greek lyric poetry as well as the Hellenistic poetry Aedituus and his peers
were imitating: 67
Quid faculam praefers, Phileros, qua nil opus nobis?
ibimus sic, lucet pectore flamma satis.
istanc <aut> potis est vis saeva extinguere venti
aut imber caelo candidus praecipitans;
at contra hunc ignem Veneris, nisi si Venus ipsa
nulla est quae possit vis alia opprimere.
Why do you carry the torch, Phileros, which we don’t need?

We will go thus, the flame in our heart/chest shines enough.
For the savage force of the wind is able to extinguish that (torch),
or shining rain falling down from the sky;
but on the other hand, there is no other force but Venus herself
which can quench this fire of desire.
This poem, as Courtney observes, shares many features with the poem by
Porcius Licinus (frag. 7) that Julianus performs next, in which the speaker,
aflame with erotic desire (ignis homost), warns the shepherds that everything
he touches and sees will burst into flame as well: si digito attigero, incendam
silvam simul omnem, omne pecus; flammast omnia qua video. It also shares
features with two maxims of Publilius Syrus. In 38, the mime writer declares,
amans ita ut fax agitando ardescit magis (“the lover is thus like a torch: he
blazes the more he is moved”). The fire imagery used to express amatory
emotion shifts somewhat between the two poets, in that for Aedituus, the
fire of love is stronger than that of a torch, whereas for Publilius Syrus, the
lover is like a torch (or, as Licinus puts it more directly, the man is fire).
In 39, he observes: amor ut lacrima ab oculo oritur in pectus cadit (“love,
like a tear, is born from the eye and falls on the pectus”). As I discussed
above, Sappho takes care to signal that her speaker’s mind is unaffected by
desire, when she uses kardia instead of phren as the organ affected; in
Latin, pectus is a word commonly favored to express both the breast as well
as the emotional and intellectual faculty residing in it. 68 Therefore, when the
flame of love affects the pectus, it is affecting one’s mind as well as one’s
emotions. 69
67. For example, it is similar in expression to the “Fragmentum Grenfellianum” (Powell 1925, 177, from
a second-century b.c.e. papyrus) 11–16; lines 15–16 are particularly close, as the speaker, led by Kypris to
his beloved, says: sunodhgo;n eßcw to; polu; puÅ r / touj n t¬Å yuc¬Å mou kaiovmenon.
68. See Pichon 1966, 228–29, for more on the use of pectus in amatory poetry; I thank Jim McKeown
for this reference.
69. See OLD, s.v. pectus; other poetic examples include Plaut. Epid. 135; Lucr. 1.19; Catull. 61.169–
71, where the chorus assures the bride that illi non minus ac tibi / pectore uritur intimo / flamma, and
64.138, where Ariadne laments Theseus’ immite pectus.
Horace’s Jealous Lover

In 23 b.c.e. Horace published his three books of Odes. In 1.13 we can see
Horace playing with Sappho 31 and the conventions of Hellenistic epigram,
as well as the poems of Aedituus and Catullus: 70
Cum tu, Lydia, Telephi
cervicem roseam, cerea Telephi
laudas bracchia, vae meum
fervens difficili bile tumet iecur.
tum nec mens mihi nec color
certa sede manent, umor et in genas
furtim labitur, arguens
quam lentis penitus macerer ignibus.
When you, Lydia, praise Telephos’

rosy neck, the waxy-white arms of Telephos,
burning, my liver swells with uncontrollable bile
[of frustrated desire]. Then neither my mind
nor color remain in sure seat, and moisture
slips furtively onto my cheeks, revealing
how I am distressed by fires deep [within me].
The speaker directly addresses his beloved girl, Lydia, telling her of his
jealous reactions to her praise of another man’s body. Thus, he reacts to
her words rather than to a visual tableau. The narrative situation is different
from Sappho 31 and Catullus 51, but is similar to that in Aedituus 1.
Whereas Aedituus’ speaker confesses that he has alarming physical reactions
when he tries to communicate his desire for his girl, the speaker in Ode 1.13
describes his alarming physical reactions in response to her appreciation
of another man’s sexual attractiveness. The introduction of a third party,
not present in the poem but part of the emotional situation as an object of
the beloved’s desire, changes the speaker’s emotion from sexual desire to
sexual jealousy. Nevertheless, the effect on the body is just as violent as in
the earlier poems. The speaker portrays his mind as affected, as well as
his liver (a seat of the passions); his inner turmoil is revealed externally by
two affect displays—his change of color and his tears (or facial sweat). 71
Lines 5–7 are especially interesting because they expressly note that these
affect displays betray his internal state (to the eyes of others, obviously). The
umor here may recall the tears of the frustrated lover in Catullus 68.51–56.
By including two affect displays that feminize his speaker’s body, Horace
hews closer to Sappho 31 than either of his predecessors, Aedituus and
Catullus. 72 Perhaps he feels able to have his speaker do so not only because
of the new imperial political reality (and hence the problematization of the
performance of masculinity) but also because Horace himself was the son
70. Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) list parallels in earlier Greek and Roman poetry.
71. See Keyser 1989 for a medical (humoral) interpretation of the two symptoms in lines 5–6.
72. Sutherland 2005 has an interesting discussion of this poem and how Horace feminizes both Telephos’
and his speaker’s bodies.
Catullus 51 275
of a freedman, less constrained by (or able to participate in) the elite con-
struction of Roman masculinity.
“The Forest of Eyes”:
The Poetae Novi and a Renaissance Parallel
Why Catullus avoids compromising his speaker’s bodily masculinity is an
interesting question, and one that may be answered by looking at the context
of his poetry (the microcommunity of poetae novi) and his social class (the
macrocommunity of the Roman elite), following Wray’s argument. A frag-
ment of Ennius’ Annales (131) gives us the words of one of the Horatii
brothers, who confesses that ingens cura mis cum concordibus aequiperare
(“a great anxiety is mine to do equal deeds with my comrades”). Thus, from
a very early moment in Roman literature, we hear about intense competition
among Roman men, arising perhaps out of the militaristic nature of Roman
society and identity. 73 The poetae novi were men committed to cultivating
in Latin Callimachean elegance in word choice, word order, metrics, and
narrative form. They did so in a highly competitive social climate in which
men competed for honor in their chosen arena, be it literature, politics, or
the military. Hailing from Verona, Catullus was at a social disadvantage in
Roman elite circles. Verona had a multicultural history, long influenced by
the Greeks and more recently by the Romans. 74 Most likely bilingual from
an early age, Catullus exhibits mastery of the Greek poetic tradition as well
as standard Roman Latin. In Poem 84, he attacks Arrius; the unfortunate man
has not been as successful as he in suppressing his native dialect. Arrius’
misuse of aspirates gives away his rustic origins even as he tries to speak
like, and thus pass as, a native urbanus. This poem, taken together with the
poet’s protestations about how tedious it is to be away from Rome, stuck in
Verona (68.27 and 68.30), enables us to perceive the anxiety of an Italian
competing in Rome. 75 The competition revolved around the social perfor-
mance of manhood. As Wray puts it,
There is no reason to think that any elite Roman male was exempted from observations
on his social performance, and conclusions about his manhood, of the type that Catullus
claims in Poem 16 to have received from Furius and Aurelius. . . . Attention to the ex-
ternal performance of manliness operated at a level of intensity that, in a modern context,
would likely be attributed to a given individual’s obsessional pathology. In Catullus’
Rome it was rather the norm of social interaction among men. . . . Keen competition for
distinction necessitated constant and conspicuous public social performance. At the same
73. See Braund’s (2002) chapter “Making Roman Identity: Multiculturalism, Militarism, and Masculinity”
for a discussion of this.
74. For a discussion of Greek influence in central Italy, see Coarelli 1983 and Zanker 1983; for Italy’s
Romanization, see Torelli 1995.
75. Fitzgerald analyzes Catullus’ “conflicted cultural identity” as it is raised by his reaction to his brother’s
death (1995, 185–211). Consult Wray 2001, 42–45, for a discussion of Catullus’ “paradoxical status within
his culture and society” in that he possesses prestigious cultural capital yet exhibits a sense of inferiority
stemming from his partial outsider status in Rome (45). For more on the Hellenization of Italian cities
as well as Catullus’ Transpadane background, see Wiseman 1985, 92–129. Tatum 1997 has an interesting
discussion of Catullan amicitia, especially the poet’s position as the amicus inferior to Roman men of con-
sular rank. Skinner (2005, 217–18) places Catullan sexual polemic in its wider public context.
time, every semiotic element of that performance, in dress, comportment and speech, was
subject at every moment to ideological evaluation along the binary spectrum of virility/
effeminacy, an evaluation whose vigilance made no allowances or exceptions. 76
In the circle of the poetae novi, part of the performance of manhood con-
sisted of aggressively outrageous poetic claims that revolved around the
bodies of the poems’ speakers or addressees. 77 Catullus’ poems privilege
“the performative over the ethical, so that “there is less focus on ‘being a
good man’ than on ‘being good at being a man.’ A Catullan poem . . . is
above all a captatio (a ‘play’ for approbation), a lacessatio (‘challenge’), a
performance of excellence.” 78 In this high-stakes game of manly excellence,
Catullus strictly policed his speakers’ affect displays to preempt any attacks
from his male competitors even as he circulated poetic attacks on the manhood
of others (e.g., Poem 33, the Vibennii; Poem 57, Julius Caesar, and so on). 79
We can see the minute bodily scrutiny of other elite men in Catullus’ attack
on Gellius in Poem 80, which focuses on the white color of Gellius’ lips.
This color screams out, along with Victor’s rupta ilia, their secret, shameful
oral sex acts. As Thomas Habinek notes, Catullus describes sexual relation-
ships or experiences as embedded in other elite male networks (political,
social, and economic) in which the performance of masculinity was part. 80
For example, in Poem 28, Catullus’ speaker tells us how his political service
under the praetor Memmius made him feel emasculated (o Memmi, bene me
ac diu supinum / tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti, 9–10).
The microcommunity of Early Renaissance humanists offers an intriguing
parallel. In his book The Lost Italian Renaissance, Christopher Celenza argues
that within their small, predominantly male, intellectual communities, the
humanists measured their prestige both by the professional positions they
achieved as well as the opinions of their fellow humanists. In the course of
seeking honor from their fellows, “humanists use gendered categories in an
oppositional way, so that a thinker, in order to emphasize the right kind of
behavior or action, will deploy its opposite in vilifying an opponent.” 81 In
particular, humanists working in the curial courts competed with one another
for status and honor: their lives at court were antagonistic, fraught with pos-
sibilities for promotion and dangers of mistakes that could ruin reputations
and thus careers. Zero-sum battles were fought, for example, over Latinity:
“We cannot properly understand these seemingly exaggerated, immensely
vitriolic Renaissance polemics between cultivated individuals as anything
other than frivolities of merely antiquarian interest unless we situate the
debates where they belong: in the social, public context of the acquisition,
protection, and maintenance of masculine honor.” 82 Such hostile engage-
76. Wray 2001, 60.

77. Ibid., 64–65.
78. Ibid., 67.
79. Wray (2001, 113–60) examines a “Mediterranean poetics of aggression” in which one had to guard
oneself from the hostility and hostile attacks of friends in particular.
80. See especially Habinek 1997, 27–28.
81. Celenza 2004, 121.
82. Ibid., 130.
Catullus 51 277
ments were inevitable because “the public marketplace was the only way
to win acclaim, however distasteful and dangerous it might be.” 83 In par-
ticular, Celenza discusses the life and career of Lapo da Castiglionchio the
Younger, from an old Florentine family, who died of the plague when he
was thirty-three years old. Skilled at translating from Greek into Latin, Lapo
nevertheless needed to compete for patronage to fulfill his literary ambitions.
As an outsider seeking entry into the courts, his writings reflect his anxieties,
desires, and thoughts on his environment and social milieu. In his presen-
tations of honor and honorable behavior, Lapo deploys “a few key mascu-
linizing ideas,” one of which is the idea of gendered opposites. Those of
whom he disapproves or against whom he argues are characterized as acting
effeminately. Often, this effeminate behavior is linked to sexuality and
sexual morality. On display in the merciless face-to-face microcommunity
of the papal court, humanists vied with words and bodies for honor and rep-
utation, which were “singularly important, public commodities that could be
acquired only in small communities of like-minded individuals.” 84 Aggres-
sive, public performances of manhood were the name of the game, a game
in which Catullus had long before been a master player.
Conclusion
In the end, the picture of the love-inflamed male speaker in Catullus 51 is
very much in keeping with the picture Catullus presents of the expectant
bridegroom in Poem 61 (lines 164–73). The speaker addresses the bride,
calling her attention to the groom’s posture and position:
aspice unus ut accubans
vir tuus Tyrio in toro
totus immineat tibi.
io Hymen Hymenaee io,
io Hymen Hymenaee.
As the groom reclines on a purple couch, he is totally intent on his bride.

The speaker then decodes the groom’s body language for her:
illi non minus ac tibi
pectore uritur intimo
flamma, sed penite magis.
83. Ibid., 132.

84. Ibid., 133. Earlier, Celenza provides an example of bodily struggle: “In a number of fierce outward
polemics in which humanists engaged, it was a standard strategy to heap reprobation on the sexual morality
of one’s adversary. . . . In May 1452, George of Trebizond, for example, has a physical altercation in the
environs of the papal court with Poggio Bracciolini, spurred on by an old literary grudge. During their
fight, George would later write bitterly to Poggio, “Rightly I could have bitten off the fingers you stuck in
my mouth; I did not . . . I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands . . . I did not do it.” George
requests a sword from a bystander to scare Poggio away, and it does the trick: Poggio, “like a Florentine
woman” (ut florentina femina) flees in fright” (125). We do not know if Catullus likewise physically scuffled
with rivals in his microcommunity, but he certainly wrote poems attacking the masculinity of a number of
them (see, e.g., 16, 21, 25, 29, 33, 57). The Furius attacked in 16 and other poems may have been the poet
Furius Bibaculus, one of the poetae novi and from northern Italy, as was Catullus. For general discussions
of the poetae novi and Catullus, see Wiseman 1974, 44–58; Traglia 1974; and Conte 1994, 140–54.
The flame burns in that man’s

inmost breast no less
than in you, but more secretly.
That is, the man feels the same violent erotic emotions as women do, but main-
tains control over his body’s outward appearance, even his affect displays. 85
The speaker’s lack of affect displays that elsewhere (in literature and life)
reveal to external viewers “drastic, internal emotional shifts” does not mean
that he does not feel them—rather, he suppresses their revelation to others
in keeping with the Roman nonverbal codes of elite male bodily control. 86
A man was to be durus, not mollis (muliebris). This was achieved, if it could
really be achieved, by constant self-policing, by ceaseless willpower.
Myles McDonnell has recently shown that two divergent and competing
models of masculinity were present and debated in late republican Rome.
He uses Sallust’s account of Julius Caesar and M. Porcius Cato to dem-
onstrate them: Caesar represents “old-time” Roman martial virtus/mascu-
linity, whereas Cato represents the Greek-influenced, new, private, ethical
virtus. 87 In a way, Catullus’ poetry reflects this split as well. In embracing
Hellenistic Greek poetic aesthetics and rejecting the traditional political path
of the male Roman elite, Catullus lives, as much as he can, in the private,
otiosus manner fashioned by the neoterics. In poems such as 50 Catullus
shows us, with both narrative situation and idiom, the great importance of
verbal charm, wit, and grace in elite self-presentation. 88 On the other hand,
his poetry reflects also the body behavior expected of elite men that stems
from Rome’s traditional militaristic society. 89 He seems unable to transcend
this code bodily, even as he “plays the other” emotionally; as I have shown,
Catullus’s speaker in 51 is studiedly more bodily taciturn and stoic than
those of poets working with Sappho 31 both before and after him. Perhaps
because he was ambitious but disadvantaged as a man from Verona, Catullus
was especially careful to maintain his speaker’s “masculine” bodily stance in
his efforts to compete and win in late republican Rome. His inner “playing
the other” is not manifested on his speaker’s body, although he presents his
emotional vulnerability and penetrability publicly in his poetic competition
with other men in this complex cultural system of gender, sexuality, and class.
Creighton University
85. Compare Tib. 4.5.17: optat idem iuvenis quod nos, sed tectius optat.
86. See Lateiner (1996, 236 n. 19) for more on affect displays revealing emotional shifts.
87. See esp. McDonnell 2003, 251–58.
88. Consult Krostenko 2001, 258–59, for a discussion of this in Poem 50; see passim for the use of
words associated with style and charm to express both disdain and approval in various works of Cicero and
Catullus.
89. Wray examines what he calls two different “code models” of Catullan manhood—character intertexts
that “form part of the speech and gestural lexicon of Catullan self-fashioning, as markers for individually
recognizable modes of Catullus’ poetic performance of manhood: an Archilochian mode . . . and a Calli-
machean mode” that, while displaying “the manhood of a ‘feminine’ delicacy,” is “ultimately no less
agonistically performative of its own excellence” (2001, 167). He connects these with the “coexistence of
two divergent models of masculine behavior: one connected ideologically with Roman mos maiorum . . .
the other connected with the prestige of Hellenistic culture and more or less ‘cosmopolitan’ ” (207). Thus,
he homes in on the same phenomenon as McDonnell.
Long
Catullus 51 279
LITERATURE CITED
Alston, R. 1997. Arms and the Man: Soldiers, Masculinity and Power in Republican and Im-
perial Rome. In When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiq-
uity, ed. L. Foxhall and J. Salmon, 205–23. London.
Bailey, C. 1947. Titi Lucreti Cari “De Rerum Natura” Libri Sex. Oxford.
Baker, R. J. 2000. Propertius I. Warminster.
Barton, C. A. 1994. All Things Beseem the Victor: Paradoxes of Masculinity in Early Imperial
Rome. In Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. R. C.
Trexler, 83–92. Binghamton, N.Y.
. 1999. The Roman Blush: The Delicate Matter of Self-Control. In Constructions of
the Classical Body, ed. J. I. Porter, 212–34. Ann Arbor, Mich.
. 2001. Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones. Berkeley and Los Angeles.
. 2002. Being in the Eyes: Shame and Sight in Ancient Rome. In The Roman Gaze:
Vision, Power, and the Body, ed. D. Fredrick, 216–35. Baltimore.
Bickel, E. 1940. Catulls Werbgedicht an Clodia und Sapphos Phaonklage im Hochzeitslied an
Agallis. RhM 89: 194–216.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge.
. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif.
Braund, S. M. 2002. Latin Literature. London.
Camps, W. A. 1969. Propertius: Elegies I. Cambridge.
Celenza, C. 2004. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy.
Baltimore.
Clark, C. 1993. Regina Bacchatur: Sexual Roles and Politics in Aeneid VII. NECJ 21.2: 62–67.
. 2001. The Body of Desire: Nonverbal Communication in Sappho 31V. Syllecta
Classica 12: 1–32.
Coarelli, F. 1983. I santuari del Lazio e della Campania tra i Gracchi e le guerre civili. In Les
“bourgeoisies” municipales italiennes aux IIe et Ier siècles av. J.-C., 217–40. Paris.
Conte, G. B. 1994. Latin Literature: A History. Trans. J. B. Solodow. Rev. D. Fowler and
G. W. Most. Baltimore.
Corbeill, A. 1996. Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic.
Princeton, N.J.
. 2004. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton, N.J.
Courtney, E. 1993. The Fragmentary Latin Poets. Oxford.
Ellis, R. 1876. A Commentary on Catullus. Oxford.
Fantham, E. 1972. Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery. Toronto.
Ferrari, W. 1938. Il carme 51 di Catullo. AnnPisa 11 (7): 59–72.
Fitzgerald, W. 1995. Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position. Berkeley
and Los Angeles.
Fordyce, C. J. [1961] 1978. Catullus: A Commentary. Reprint, with corrections, Oxford.
Fowler, D. 2000. Roman Constructions: Readings in Postmodern Latin. Oxford.
. 2002. Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin
Poetry. In Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Litera-
ture, ed. E. Spentzou and D. Fowler, 141–59. Oxford.
Fraenkel, E. 1957. Horace. Oxford.
Fredrick, D. 1997. Reading Broken Skin: Violence in Roman Elegy. In Hallett and Skinner
1997, 172–93.
Friedrich, G. 1908. Catulli Veronensis Liber. Leipzig.
Furley, W. D. 2000. “Fearless, Bloodless . . . like the Gods”: Sappho 31 and the Rhetoric of
“Godlike.” CQ 50: 7–15.
Gleason, M. 1990. The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second
Century c.e. In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient
Greek World, ed. D. Halperin, J. J. Winkler, and F. I. Zeitlin, 389–415. Princeton, N.J.
. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, N.J.
Greene, E. 1999. Re-Figuring the Feminine Voice: Catullus Translating Sappho. Arethusa 32(1):
1–18.
Gruber, M. I. 1980. Aspects of Nonverbal Communication in the Ancient Near East. Rome.
Gunderson, E. 2000. Staging Masculinity. Ann Arbor, Mich.
Habinek. T. 1997. The Invention of Sexuality in the World-City of Rome. In The Roman Cul-
tural Revolution, ed. T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro, 23–43. Cambridge.
Hallett, J., and M. Skinner, eds. 1997. Roman Sexualities. Princeton, N.J.
Holford-Strevens, L. A. 1977. Towards a Chronology of Aulus Gellius. Latomus 36: 93–109.
Itzkowitz, J. B. 1983. On the Last Stanza of Catullus 51. Latomus 42: 129–34.
Joshel, S. 1997. Female Desire and the Discourse of Empire: Tacitus’ Messalina. In Hallett and
Skinner 1997, 221–54.
Keith, A. 2000. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic. Cambridge.
Keyser, P. 1989. Horace Odes 1.13.3–8, 14–16: Humoural and Aetherial Love. Philologus 133:
75–81.
Krostenko, B. 2001. Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance. Chicago.
Laidlaw, W. A. 1968. Otium. GaR, 2nd ser., 15: 42–52.
Lateiner, D. 1992. Affect Displays in the Epic Poetry of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid. In Advances
in Nonverbal Communication: Sociocultural, Clinical, Esthetic, and Literary Perspectives,
ed. F. Poyatos, 255–69. Amsterdam.
. 1995. Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic. Ann Arbor, Mich.
. 1996. Nonverbal Behaviors in Ovid’s Poetry, Primarily Metamorphoses 14. CJ 91:
225–53.
. 1998. Blushes and Pallors in Ancient Fictions. Helios 25: 163–89.
Lattimore, R. 1944. Sappho 2 and Catullus 51. CP 39: 184–87.
Lyne, R. O. A. M. 1980. The Latin Love Poets: From Catullus to Horace. Oxford.
. 1983. Lavinia’s Blush: Vergil, Aeneid 12.64–70. GaR, 2nd ser., 30: 55–64.
Martin, C., trans. 1990. The Poems of Catullus. Baltimore.
Mauss, M. 1935. Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique
32: 271–93.
McDonnell, M. 2003. Roman Men and Greek Virtue. In Andreia: Studies in Manliness and
Courage in Classical Antiquity, ed. R. M. Rosen and I. Sluiter, 235–62. Mnemosyne
Suppl. 238. Leiden.
Melville, A. D., trans. 1986. Ovid: “Metamorphoses.” Oxford.
Morel, W. 1927. Fragmenta poetarum latinorum epicorum et lyricorum praeter Ennium et
Lucilium. Leipzig.
Mynors, R. A. B. 1958. C. Valerii Catulli Carmina. Oxford.
Nisbet, R. G. M., and M. Hubbard. 1970. A Commentary on Horace: “Odes,” Book 1. Oxford.
O’Higgins, D. 1996. Sappho’s Splintered Tongue: Silence in Sappho 31 and Catullus 51. In
Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. E. Greene, 68–78. Berkeley and Los
Angeles.
Pardini, A. 2001. A Homeric Formula in Catullus (c. 51.11–12 gemina teguntur lumina nocte).
TAPA 131: 109–18.
Pham, X. H. T. 1999. Mourning in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. Sheffield.
Pichon. R. 1966. Index Verborum Amatoriorum. Hildesheim.
Powell, J. U. 1925. Collectanea Alexandrina. Oxford.
Quinn, K. F. 1962. Docte Catulle. In Critical Essays on Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric, ed.
J. P. Sullivan, 31–63. Cambridge, Mass.
. 1970. Catullus: The Poems. London.
Richardson, L. Jr. 1976. Propertius: Elegies I–IV. Norman, Okla.
Rissman, L. 1983. Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho. Königstein.
Catullus 51 281
Ross, D. O. 1969. Style and Tradition in Catullus. Cambridge, Mass.

Russell, D. A., ed. and trans. 1964. “Longinus,” On the Sublime. Oxford.
Schnelle, I. 1933. Untersuchungen zu Catulls dichterischer Form. Leipzig.
Segal, C. 1970. Catullan Otiosi: The Lover and the Poet. GaR, 2nd ser., 17: 25–31.
Skinner, M. 1981. Catullus’ Passer: The Arrangement of the Book of Polymetric Poems. New
York.
. 1997. Ego Mulier: The Construction of Male Sexuality in Catullus. In Hallett and
Skinner 1997, 129–50.
. 2005. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Malden, Mass.
Sutherland, E. H. 2005. Writing (on) Bodies: Lyric Discourse and the Production of Gender in
Horace Odes 1.13. CP 100: 52–82.
Svenbro, J. 1984. La tragédie de l’amour: Modèle de la guerre et théorie de l’amour dans la
poésie de Sappho. QS 19: 57–79.
Syndikus, H. P. 1984. Catull: Eine Interpretation. 3 vols. Darmstadt.
Tatum, W. J. 1997. Friendship, Politics and Literature in Catullus: Poems 1, 65 and 66, 116.
CQ 47: 482–500.
Torelli, M. 1995. Studies in the Romanization of Italy. Ed. and trans. H. Fracchia and M. Gualtieri.
Edmonton.
Traglia, A. 1974. Poetae Novi. Rome.
Vine, B. 1992. On the “Missing” Fourth Stanza of Catullus 51. HSCP 94: 251–58.
. 1993. Catullus 76.21: Ut torpor in artus. RhM 136.3/4: 292–97.
Walters, J. 1997. Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.
In Hallett and Skinner 1997, 29–43.
Wees, H. van. 1998. A Brief History of Tears: Gender Differentiation in Archaic Greece. In
When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity, ed. L. Foxhall
and J. Salmon, 10–53. London.
Wilkinson, L. P. 1956. Greek Influence on the Poetry of Ovid. In L’influence grecque sur la
poésie latine de Catulle à Ovide, 223–43. EntrHardt 2. Berne.
Williams, C. 1999. Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity.
Oxford.
Wiseman, T. P. 1974. Cinna the Poet and Other Roman Essays. Leicester.
. 1985. Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal. Cambridge.
Woodman, A. J. 1966. Some Implications of Otium in Catullus 51.13–16. Latomus 25: 216–26.
Wormell, D. E. W. 1966. Catullus as Translator. In The Classical Tradition: Literary and His-
torical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan, ed. L. Wallach, 187–201. Ithaca, N.Y.
Wray, D. 2001. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Cambridge.
Zanker, P. 1983. Zur Bildnisrepräsentation führender Männer in Mittelitalischen und Cam-
panischen Stätten zur Zeit der Späten Republik und der Julisch-Claudischen Kaiser. In Les
“bourgeoisies” municipales italiennes aux IIe et Ier siècles av. J.-C., 251–66. Paris.
Zeitlin, F. 1996. Playing the Other: Essays on Gender and Society in Classical Greek Litera-
ture. Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The University of Chicago Press

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Poetics of Manhood?

Nonverbal Behavior in Catullus 51

n her important article “Ego mulier: The Construction of Male

I Sexuality in Catullus,” Marilyn Skinner argues that Catullus’ poetic

Classical Philology 103 (2008): 257–81

Table 1: Comparison of Internal Reactions and External Signs of

responses of the nervous system such as sweating, pallor or trembling, and

4. Lateiner 1992, 257.

5. Bourdieu 1977, 72–95; 1990, 52–79.

ojppavtessi d∆ ouj de;n oßrhmm∆, ejpibrov-

†eßkade† m∆ ≥drwÍ kakcevetai, trovmoÍ de;

a˚lla; pa;n tovlmaton, ejpeµ †kaµ pevnhta† (Voigt)

Sappho carefully constructs these lines around affect displays. 11 First,

11. Clark 2001.

One Line Short

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus 18

otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:

That man seems to me equal to a god,

laughing sweetly, which snatches all my senses

But my tongue is numb, a subtle ﬂame

Lack of action, Catullus, is troublesome to you;

A scene of a man and a woman provokes an immediate physical reaction

One Line Short

Catullus presents the experience of erotic heat in a semantic nexus with

in classical literature from Homer on, pallor expressing emotion appears in

For you know the pain that two-faced Venus gave

To this my mind has been led/dragged down by your fault, Lesbia

If 51 marks the start of the speaker’s interest in or involvement with Lesbia

53. Ellis 1876, 141.

Catullus directly addresses the problem of the performance of masculinity

Valerius Aedituus’s Bashful Lover

dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis,

When I try to speak the love of my heart to you, Pamphila,

he does so because the speaker is not identiﬁed as “Aedituus.” Or perhaps

Why do you carry the torch, Phileros, which we don’t need?

Horace’s Jealous Lover

When you, Lydia, praise Telephos’

76. Wray 2001, 60.

As the groom reclines on a purple couch, he is totally intent on his bride.

83. Ibid., 132.

The ﬂame burns in that man’s

Ross, D. O. 1969. Style and Tradition in Catullus. Cambridge, Mass.

You might also like