The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus Part 32

C. viii. v. 18. Plautus speaks of Teneris labellis molles morsiunculae.

Thus too Horace:

Sive puer furens Impressit memorem dente labris notam.

Or on thy lips the fierce fond boy Marks with his teeth the furious joy. _Francis_.

Plutarch tells us that Flora, the mistress of Cn. Pompey, used to say in commendation of her lover, that she could never quit his arms without giving him a bite.

C. xi. v. 5. In the Cla.s.sics, Arabs always appear as a soft effeminate race; under primitive Christianity as heretics; and after the seventh century as conquerors, men of letters, philosophers, mediciners, magicians and alchemists.--_R. F. B._

v. 20. _Ilia rumpens_. More exactly rendered by Biacca:

E sol di tutti Tenta l'iniqua ad isnervar i fianchi.

Guarini says of a coquette, that she likes to do with lovers as with gowns, have plenty of them, use one after another, and change them often.

C. xiii. v. 9. I understand this, "Thou shalt depart after supper carrying with thee all our hearts."--_R. F. B._

C. xiiii. v. 15. Whence our Christmas-day, the Winter Solstice connected with Christianity. There are only four universal festivals--"Holy days,"--and they are all of solar origin--The Solstices and the Equinoxes.--_R. F. B._

C. xv. v. 7. The Etymology of "platea" shows it to be a street widening into a kind of _place_, as we often find in the old country towns of Southern Europe.--_R. F. B._

v. 18. _Patente porta_. This may be read "Your house door being open so that each pa.s.ser may see your punishment," or it may be interpreted as referring to the punishment itself, _i.e._, through the opened b.u.t.tocks.

v. 19. This mode of punis.h.i.+ng adulterers was first inst.i.tuted amongst the Athenians. The victim being securely tied, a mullet was thrust up his fundament and withdrawn, the sharp gills of the fish causing excruciating torment to the sufferer during the process of its withdrawal, and grievously lacerating the bowels. Sometimes an enormous radish was subst.i.tuted for the mullet. According to an epigram quoted by Vossius from the Anthologia, Alcaeus, the comic writer, died under this very punishment.

Lo here Alcaeus sleeps; whom earth's green child, The broad-leaved radish, l.u.s.t's avenger, kill'd.

C. xvi. v. 1. _Paedicabo et irrumabo._ These detestable words are used here only as coa.r.s.e forms of threatening, with no very definite meaning. It is certain that they were very commonly employed in this way, with no more distinct reference to their original import than the corresponding phrases of the modern Italians, _T' ho in culo_ and _becco fottuto_, or certain brutal exclamations common in the mouths of the English vulgar.

v. 5. Ovid has a distich to the same effect:

Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostri; Vita verecunda est, musa jocosa mihi.

"Believe me there is a vast difference between my morals and my song; my life is decorous, my muse is wanton." And Martial says:

Lasciva est n.o.bis pagina, vita proba est.

Which is thus translated by Maynard:

Si ma plume est une putain, Ma vie est une sainte.

Pliny quotes this poem of Catullus to excuse the wantonness of his own verses, which he is sending to his friend Paternus; and Apuleius cites the pa.s.sage in his Apology for the same purpose. "Whoever," says Lambe, "would see the subject fully discussed, should turn to the Essay on the Literary Character by Mr. Disraeli." He enumerates as instances of free writers who have led pure lives, La Motte le Vayer, Bayle, la Fontaine, Smollet, and Cowley. "The imagination," he adds, "may be a volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice." It would, however, be difficult to enlarge this list, while on the other hand, the catalogue of those who really practised the licentiousness they celebrated, would be very numerous. One period alone, the reign of Charles the Second, would furnish more than enough to outnumber the above small phalanx of purity. Muretus, whose poems clearly gave him every right to knowledge on the subject, but whose known debauchery would certainly have forbidden any credit to accrue to himself from establis.h.i.+ng the general purity of lascivious poets, at once rejects the probability of such a contrast, saying:

Quisquis versibus exprimit Catullum Raro moribus exprimit Catonem.

"One who is a Catullus in verse, is rarely a Cato in morals."

C. xviii. This and the two following poems are found in the Catalecta of Vergilius, but they are a.s.signed to Catullus by many of the best critics, chiefly on the authority of Terentia.n.u.s Maurus.

v. 2. Cf. _Auct. Priapeiorum_, Eps. lv. v. 6, and lxxvii. v. 15.

v. 3. _Ostreosior_. This Epithet, peculiarly Catullian, is appropriate to the coasts most favoured by Priapus; oysters being an incentive to l.u.s.t.

C. xx. v. 19. The traveller mocks at Priapus' threat of sodomy, regarding it as a pleasure instead of as a punishment. The G.o.d, in anger, retorts that if that punishment has no fears for him, a fustigation by the farmer with the self-same mentule used as a cudgel may have a more deterrent effect. Cf. _Auct. Priap._ Ep. li. v. 27, 28:

Nimirum apertam convolatis ad poenam: Et vos hoc ipsum, quod minamur, invitat.

Without doubt, ye flock to the open punishment [so called because the natural parts of Priapus were always exposed to view], and the very thing with which I threaten, allures you.

And also Ep. lxiv.,

Quidam mollior anseris medulla, Furatum venit hoc amor poenae.

Furetur licet usque non videbo.

One than a goose's marrow softer far, Comes. .h.i.ther stealing for it's penalty sake; Steal he as please him: I will see him not.

C. xxiii. v. 6. Dry and meagre as wood; like the woman of whom Scarron says, that she never snuffed the candle with her fingers for fear of setting them on fire.

C. xxv. v. 1. Cf. Auct. Priap. Ep. xlv.

v. 5. This is a Catullian _crux_. Mr. Arthur Palmer (Trinity College, Dublin, Jan. 31, 1890) proposes, and we adopt--

"c.u.m diva miluorum aves ostendit oscitantes."

(When the G.o.ddess of Kites shows you birds agape.)

Diva miluorum is--Diva furum, G.o.ddess of thieves; _i.e._, Laverna Milvus (hawk) being generally used for a rapacious robber. Mr. Palmer quotes Plaut. (Poen. 5, 5, 13; Pers. 3, 4, 5; Bacch. 2, 3, 40), and others.--_R.

F. B._

v. 6. _Involasti_, thou didst swoop--still metaphor of the prey-bird.--_R.

F. B._

C. xxvi. v. 3. Still the "Bora" of the Adriatic, extending, with intervals, from Trieste to Bari. It is a N.N. Easter of peculiar electrical properties, causing extreme thirst, wrecking s.h.i.+ps, upsetting mail-trains, and sweeping carriages and horses into the sea. Austral, the south wind, is represented in these days by the Scirocco, S.S.E. It sets out from Africa a dry wind, becomes supersaturated in the Mediterranean, and is the scourge of Southern Italy, exhausting the air of ozone and depressing the spirits and making man utterly useless and miserable.--_R. F. B._

C. xxviii. v. 10. These expressions, like those in carmen xvi. ante, are merely terms of realistically gross abuse.

C. xxviiii. v. 5. _Cinaede Romule_. The epithet is here applied in its grossest sense, which again is implied in the allusion to the spoil of Pontus; for this, as Vossius proves, can only be understood to mean the wealth obtained by Caesar, when a young man, through his infamous relations with Nicomedes, king of Pontus--as witness two lines sung by Caesar's own soldiers on the occasion of his triumph:

Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Galliam; Nicomedes non triumphat, qui subegit Caesarem.

v. 13. _Defututa Mentula_ = a worn-out voluptuary. Mentula is a cant term which Catullus frequently uses for a libidinous person, and particularly for Mamurra.

v. 24. Pompey married Caesar's daughter, Julia, and is commonly supposed to be the "son-in-law" here meant; but Vossius argues with some force, that _socer_ and _gener_ apply, not to Caesar and Pompey, but to Caesar and Mamurra. Those words, and the corresponding terms in Greek, were often used in an unnatural sense, as for instance in an epigram on Noctuinus, attributed to Calvus, in which occurs this very line, _Gener socerque perdidistis omnia_.

C. x.x.xi. v. 1. As the Venice-Trieste railway runs along the southern bar of the pyriform narrow, Lago di Garda, with its towering mountains, whose heads are usually in the storm-clouds, and whose feet sink into the nearest vineyards, the traveller catches a sight of the Sirmio Spit, long and sandy. It is a narrow ridge boldly projecting into the lake (once called Benacus) which was formerly a marsh, but now made into an island by the simple process of ditch cutting: at the southern end is the Sermione hill and its picturesque Scottish-German Castle. To the north are some ruins supposed to be the old Villa of Catullus, but they seem too extensive to serve for the purpose.--_R. F. B._

C. x.x.xii. v. 11. Pezay, a French translator, strangely mistakes the meaning of the pa.s.sage, as if it amounted to this, "I have gorged till I am ready to burst;" and he quotes the remark of "une femme charmante," who said that her only reply to such a billet-doux would have been to send the writer an emetic. But the lady might have prescribed a different remedy if she had been acquainted with Martial's line: