Catullus and Lesbia: hate and love in late Republican Rome

Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona and died young, probably around the middle of the first century BC; the dates handed down by Saint Jerome are debated by scholars. In a few years he composed a small book of 116 poems that is the most vivid portrait of love in Latin poetry. At the centre of many of them stands a woman called Lesbia, a poetic name paying homage to Sappho, the poet of Lesbos whom he admired and translated.

Who Lesbia was

The writer Apuleius, in the second century AD, states that a certain Clodia was hidden under the name Lesbia. Most scholars identify her with Clodia, wife of the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer and sister of the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher, the same woman Cicero attacked fiercely in his speech Pro Caelio of 56 BC. The identification is plausible and widely held, but it is not certain, and should be kept separate from the reading of the poems.

In any case, the Lesbia of the poems is above all a literary construction. Catullus tells the story of a love that moves from enthusiasm to jealousy, from betrayal to break-up, with no secure chronological order, since the arrangement of the book probably does not go back to the author. The reader pieces the story together from fragments, as one would with the scattered pages of a diary.

From kisses to betrayal

Some poems have become proverbial. In the fifth the poet invites his beloved to live and to love, «Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus», and to ignore the gossip of stern old men, because the sun sets and returns, while for human beings, once the brief light is spent, there remains an endless night. Then comes the famous request for a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, to be muddled so that no envious person can count them.

The tone changes in other poems. In the eighth Catullus addresses himself, «Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire», ordering himself to stop being a fool and to accept the end. In poem 72 he distinguishes between loving and wishing well: betrayal drives him to love more, but to esteem less. Poem 11, in Sapphic stanzas, entrusts two friends with a harsh farewell to the woman.

Odi et amo

The couplet of poem 85 is perhaps the most famous love text in Latin: «Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris», I hate and I love, perhaps you ask why I do so. The poet replies that he does not know, but feels it happening and is tortured by it. In just two lines lie the paradox of the feeling and the impossibility of explaining it by reason.

Catullus belonged to the circle of authors whom Cicero, with a touch of irony, called the new poets. These poets looked to Alexandrian models, loved short and refined compositions and considered private experience worthy of poetry. The translation of Sappho's fragment 31, in poem 51, shows clearly this bond with Greek lyric and at the same time its transformation into a personal voice.

With Catullus love becomes, for the first time in Latin literature, the subject of an inner biography. The idea of the love pact as a foedus, a sacred bond betrayed by the other party, would pass to the elegists of the Augustan age and, through them, to European poetry. The book was rediscovered at the end of the Middle Ages thanks to a manuscript found in Verona, later lost, on which almost the entire tradition depends.