Roman Politics and Poetry: Cicero and Catullus

welcome to this vodcast from the Trobe University on politics and poetry in ancient Rome my name is Rhiannon Evans this is Sonia Wooster and we're going to talk today about two very significant figures in late Republican Rome the politician Cicero and the poet Catullus now this vodcast runs alongside our iTunes U course on ancient Rome and Sonia is going to give a full audio lecture on Cicero on his life and his work so if you're interested in Cicero you'll find more on him there I'm going to start with some brief brief background on both men and then we'll talk about how their worlds intersected if we look at the lives of these two men Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Valerius Catullus we can see that their lives intersected Catullus seems to have not lived very long he probably died when he was about thirty but he during the whole of his life Cicero was alive and having very successful political career and Cicero had come from a very different background to Catullus though Cicero had come from a wealthy but not very aristocratic background nobody in his family had been a consul before which was the highest magistracy in Rome however he rose to the consulship now this was very unusual because normally the consulship just got recycled between a very small group of families so Cicero was what we called a new man and nor was Almo and that meant he'd become consul nobody in his family had before Catullus was exactly the kind of man you might expect to rise through these ranks and get a high magistracy but he didn't he came from an elite family from northern Italy but the most he seems to have got around to doing is being part of the entourage of a governor of a Roman province for governor of Bithynia and really he was just a staffer hanger-on in around 57 BCE instead he chose the life of a poet and this is a kind of rejection of duty to the state and he chose a particular form of poetry which we call neo Tareq or new poetry and Sonya is going to talk now a little about how this might have brought him into you some kind of conflict with Cicero so we're not really sure of the neo Tareq's were a group of poets as such who kind of hung around one another but it seems to be the case that they were from the way that Cicero talks about them now we only really have three references to Cicero that Cicero makes excuse me to the neo Tareq's and the first one is in his letter to his friend Atticus and he says a very calm wind blowing from on cazness blew me from a Paris and what he seems to be doing in this letter is really making fun of the style of poetry and as you can see this is a very verbose and over-the-top way of saying there was a good wind that helped me get from point A to point B and so what he seems to be doing is labeling these poets as faddish and whether or not he's actually criticizing them here is not that clear and later on though in on oratory he makes it clear that he really doesn't like this group of new poets and he actually goes to the explains to us why he doesn't like them and he says that they really try too hard their style of poetry is over the top and he tells us that Cicero buffers a style that is less practiced so what he seems to be doing is making a comparison here between traditional Roman styles of poetry and new forms imported from particularly Greek poetry and so in short it seems that Cicero really disapproves of Catullus now katella's himself claims in the opening line of his collection of pollens that his style is a very constructed style of poetry so the first line in poem one is to whom shall I bestow my new charming little book just now polished with a dry pumice stone so this use of the word charming implies something that a lot of effort has been put into a lot of finesse it's not just something quickly written down and the reference to the dry pumice stone this is how they used to rub down the papyri on which the poems would have originally been written but it also very much implies a style of poetry that's heavily constructed not natural at all now Cicero however really doesn't just disapprove of Catullus for his style of poetry his issue with Catullus lies with the fact that he is not very traditionally Roman so not only is his style of poetry very different to traditional simpler Roman styles of poetry but Catullus himself with his lack of political involvement is also a bit unromantic really relied very heavily on political involvement by members of the elite so for Catullus to not participate is very much a disavow of traditional Roman I kind of ways of being now this is exactly the same problem that Cicero has with members of the elite who espouse epicurean philosophy and epicurean philosophy argued that the best way to be happy was to live a life of withdrawal so don't participate in politics and so this is Cicero this is a consistent theme in Cicero's work that he doesn't like members of the elite who don't contribute to Roman politics Cicero also very much disapproves of the attitude that Catullus has towards love and duty and we know a lot about catalases attitudes to these two themes in his poems and what's catalysis poetry does is it actually adopts the language of the military and pastoral language to talk about desire and love and what Catullus does in his poems is he says I don't really feel a duty to the Roman state I feel the duty to my love life basically and so Cicero has a bit of a problem with the fact that Catullus is not respectful towards the Roman state so really Cicero disapproves of Catullus and thinks he's unromantic of his lack of political involvement his emotional openness and his poetic style Catullus is most famous for his love poetry and I'm going to talk to you about a number of his very famous love poems but first I want to talk you through a poem which actually does engage with a major political figure and that is Julius Caesar but as we'll see it's entirely critical and it's basically just saying snidey nasty things about him and it does also contain some obscenity this is poem 57 and by the way we label catalases poems just by a number it does it doesn't mean anything about the order in which they were published which we have no idea about this is just traditional so this poems I say very nasty khatola says they are beautifully matched the perverse buggers memoria the catamite and Caesar and catamite if you're not familiar with it means pretty much the same as bugger he says there's no surprise they're both equally dirty the Romans believed that you could be soiled by the wrong kind of sexual contact and you would be literally dirty and diseased as he says later in the poem so he's really having a go at Caesar and a man called manure who was actually with Caesar on campaign in Gaul he was his chief of engineers and he did things like building bridges over the Rhine Catullus isn't interested in these very important big state activities he's interested in their sex lives and in having a go at them for their sex lives he says they are greedy adulterers and that they go for little girls he's not very consistent with his critique he calls them buggers and he says that basically they engage in pederasty which is what catamite is suggesting but that they basically play the part of the boy in boy love which is absolutely the wrong thing to do as a Roman politician as a Roman figure who is an adult male you're meant to be the active participant in sex and that's really all the Romans care about they don't care whether you're having sex with a woman or a boy but you shouldn't be acting the part of a boy and Caesar shouldn't be doing this so really he's having a go at him for acting out the powerless position for being dirty and diseased as he calls it it's very typical actually of the kind of critique the kind of invective that Roman politicians around about each other and Cicero says much the same in some of his speeches about people like Mark Antony it seems amazing to us that they could go into the Senate and throw around this kind of language but it was possible and it was their way of getting at each other and it doesn't actually mean that Catullus thought that Caesar was engaging in this kind of activity it's a way of insulting him he has a go at memoria remember caesar chief engineer in a couple of other poems including poem 94 where he memorably calls him mentor the word meant allah has the same metrical rhythm Asma Mora but it's the Latin word for penis and this name play is something that we'll talk about in his other poems as well as an interesting little note the the aftermath of all of this was apparently that Julius Caesar forgave cattell us entirely this is what Suetonius Caesars biographer tells us so Caesar it was a lot nicer than Catullus in this episode as I say that's about as much engagement as we get with political figures from Catullus is purely negative but what he does a lot more of is this very intense love poetry so let's have a look at that now one of catalases most famous poems is poem 85 it's a short as a Catalan poem can be it's only those two lines long I haven't taken anything out of that it's absolutely immediate and absolutely to the heart he says I hate and I love it really sums everything up right he's in love with someone but he hates her as well presumably it's a she he says why should I do that you may ask I don't know but I feel it and it tortures me so it's all about feeling it's all about how excruciating this is for him the number of times the word I occurs there really is all of our III and what I feel and the terrible emotions that I'm suffering suffering through love and we can see why Cicero might have had a problem with this the Roman elite are meant to be dedicating their lives to the state catalases poetry is all about himself it's very self involved as we can see their catalysis view of love isn't that it's always benign far from it it can really be a torment we do see happier poems with Catullus both happier and sadder ones I must say and a lot of the most famous ones involve a love affair that he says he's having with a woman called Lesbia now one of the famous Lesbia poems is poem 5 and I've quoted the beginning of that on the slide here and it's very immediate again very intense so it starts off let us live my Lesbia and let us love and there's a real equivalence there between living and loving they're the same thing apparently to Catullus and he distances himself from the kind of man who might be involved in official activities specifically dealing with money here with finances he says let us count all the talk of stricter old men at a single penny we don't care about these old people who might disapprove all we care about is living and loving and each other and this poem continues with the same kind of immediacy and the same kind of just concern for themselves and rejecting everybody else so Catullus goes on sons can set and rise again for us once the brief light has set there is one eternal night for sleeping so the daytime activities which might include official business finances mean nothing to Catullus everything is about the night everything is about love for him and this is a poem where he very cleverly takes on that idea of finances and accountancy being boring daytime stuff and he applies it to these nighttime activities but in a way that says we won't care about counting out we won't care about numbers so he says give me a thousand kisses then a hundred and then the bit of the poem I've cut out just keep saying that then another thousand another hundred and so many that we can't count them basically so many thousands we'll mix them up so we don't know we don't know how many kisses there are there'll be so many and he imagines as though there's somebody watching on here nor can some evil man envious when he knows how many kisses there are that's actually the end of the poem and it's this idea that there is this this envious figure looking on maybe one of the stern men who's doing the accounting and lesbian Catullus don't care about him and love can't just be counted out there are so many cases that he's not going to know and you can't just write it down in a book and passion is really all that matters here for Catullus it's very intense very moving very emotional however if we look at the the less happy side of love we get a lot of that with Catullus because he talks about what happens when his lover betrays him in several of his poems but in this one which I've given you the end of he's talking to two friends he's relying on them for support when his love affair breaks down and his girlfriend here she's not named as Lesbia but it kind of makes sense that it might refer to her as I'll discuss she's represented as unfaithful in a great degree in a kind of extreme way but he's asked his friends to go and give her a message he says to them tell my girl this in a few ill-omened words so give her some insults and what he says to pass on to her is let her live so very much like the previous poem poem five that I talked about let us live but this time it's let her live on her own although not on her own because she'll be happy with her adulterers embracing all 300 of them together so as if she's having sex with 300 men at the same time it's truly extreme but it's entirely loveless loving none truly so she's just in it for the sex and again you get slightly obscene breaking the groins of all again and again so she's just having sex and more sex and more sex and he's really showing her to be a here basically however the poem has this streak of anger it but Catullus is very good at changing tone and he changes from the tone of anger to one of that's quite a lyrical ending so the last stanza imagines and this makes absolute psychological sense to us still I think imagines that she might come crawling back and he says no I'm just I'm not going to take you back if you come back he says let her not look for my love as before she whose crime destroyed it so he depicts her as a criminal because she's betrayed him in love and he ends with a very moving image he says like the last flower of the field touched once by the passing plow and I think that's a really beautiful image which in in a basically very angry poem and which actually displays Catullus if you think about it in this simile he's very powerless because he's like the flower who's been destroyed by the plow and the plow of course is big and powerful and I guess is is the the girlfriend who's betrayed him in this poem and he's sort of collateral damage the plow isn't there to play up flowers but it will clip off the flower a lot of people read this poem by the way as an analogy with castration but with clipping off the flower is like castrating Catullus so he's put himself in a powerless position here and he's shown how devastating love can be that he can't Yama's can't survive it ok I want to talk now about Lesbia again and some important facts about where we think catalyst got her name from and he's making really a clever literary allusion because he took the name Lesbia from the name of an island that is the island lesbos which is in the eastern Mediterranean with the Greek world but just off Turkey now and the reason he took her name from lesbos is that it was where the poet Sappho lived Sappho was a Greek poet who lived about 500 years before Catullus but similarly wrote about love poetry in a very intense passionate way now sefa is quite famous for writing Poe to women so female lovers but she actually wrote poems to male lovers as well she's most famous for writing those poems about female love to us but in antiquity she just seems to have been famous as someone who writes about love in an intense way and this I think is what Catullus is calling on what he's recalling for us when he names Lesbia Lesbia alright so he wants us to see that sequence of Lesbia lesbos Sappho and he's making that connection with her and we can see that connection very strongly in this last poem that I'm going to look at with you which is poem 51 which we know is based on a Sappho poem now almost every poem we have of Sappho's is fragmentary and this one is no exception although it's it's not as fragmentary as some sometimes we only have a word or half a line but we can tell that it's very closely modeled this poem of Catullus on Sappho's is almost a translation but it's a very artful translation and it's quite a complex poem because it sets up a kind of triangle not quite a love triangle but it starts off with the poet looking or talking about a man so the same thing happens in the Sappho poem it looks like there might be a male love interest here because he says he seems equal to the gods to me that man if it is possible more than just divine so you look at someone and think wow they're more than a god but he's not actually the love object and Catullus does occasionally write poems to male loved objects but he's not the love object here he's the man who is sitting opposite you endlessly seeing you and hearing you and you are laughing so sweetly but with fierce pain I'm robbed of all my senses because that moment I see you Lesbia Lesbia is the love object and nothing is left to me okay so as I say there's a triangle set up here where Catullus can't believe how this man he must be a god if he can sit there and not be overwhelmed by Lesbia she is so amazing she's so seductive what happens to Catullus on the other hand well there's a line missing I haven't left something out there there is actually this is fragmentary - ironically this poem seems to be fragmentary in exactly the same place as Sappho's but what happens to Catullus is clearly being described in the last stanza my tongue is numbed and through my poor limbs fires are raging the echo of your voice rings in both ears my eyes are covered with the dark of night so all these senses have gone he can't hear he can't see he can't speak he can't move love or just looking at Lesbia has completely overwhelmed him and this this is like the other poems that we've seen if Catullus about love we see that he he can't act independently he can't act rationally he can't act in a way that would be any use to the state after all because love just takes him over he gives himself over entirely to the emotional life so there's a real visceral reaction to love here and this is this poem really sums everything up the debt that he owes to Sappho the fact that he is overwhelmed by the Lesbia the fact that his entire life is given to emotions okay now thinking about Lesbia and sonia and i are going to have some discussion about where we think Lesbia might have been a real person in ancient Rome this is a lot of scholarly debate on this but there's a real desire to want to think about who was the real Lesbia did she exist so Sonia is going to introduce the background to this topic and say where we think lesbian might have been or where some people think lesbian might have been in ancient Rome so one of the main reasons why we think lesbian and Claudia might have been the same person or we'd like to think they were is a piece of evidence from a 2nd century orator called a Peleus and Apuleius says therefore in the same manner they should accuse Catullus because he called Claudia Lesbia so that's really the primary piece of evidence that we have that Claudia and Lesbia might have been the same person now within a contest the correct context what applause is doing here is he's actually defending himself from the charge that he uses Oh hides the identities of those he's talking about by using aliases and he says well if you're going to give me a hard time about it then you need to give a hard time to people like Catullus because he also hides the identities of those he's writing about now the problem that we have with Apuleius as a source is that we don't know where he got this information from so he might have actually just made it up that a belay that collodion Lesbia were the same person so he's not overly reliable another reason that scholars think that Claudia and Lesbia might have been the same person is the representation of Claudia in Cicero's text the pro Kiley oh now this is a speech a defense speech of a young man that Cicero gave and one of the charges against Kiley as' is that he had an affair with this woman Claudia and the way that Cicero describes Claudia is very similar to the way that Catullus describes Lesbia so here I say nothing against that woman again you'll notice the absence of naming here but he's talking about Claudia but let us suppose that there is another woman different from her who gives herself freely to everybody so this is very similar to catalysis comment that Lesbia is having you know sex with 300 men and I mean everybody who always has a lover to show off I've deleted a bit of text there that she is a hussy and lives brazenly that she is a wealthy woman and lives extravagantly that she is a slave to her appetites and lives like a so that's rather similar to catalases insult to Lesbia once they've broken up that she's basically a prostitute should I consider a man and an adulterer if he takes a little liberty when he meets her that's in reference to Kiley as' and Cicero is trying to say Karlie's can't really be charged with having an affair with Claudia because she was having sex with everyone anyway now Cicero actually uses the term prostitute in the pro Caleo more than any other Latin text that we have extent today and so that's one reason why scholars think that Claudia and Lesbia might have been the same person and as I said this imagery of adultery also contributes to this overall idea now Claudia as you can see is represented by Cicero as a woman who is completely ruled by her lust and desire so and that's a similar reoccurring theme that we have in catalysis poems so this idea that they kind of belong to the same social group gets supported by the fact that Claudia seems to be driven by her lust and passion and she also leads a very luxurious lifestyle which again is somewhat antithetical to traditional Roman ideas about living quite a simple life so the question is can we really say that Claudia and Lesbia are the same person well I don't think either of us think that we can be conclusive about this but there are let me raise some of the problems there are problems with talking about Claudia the name Claudia because of Roman naming customs which were very boring in our terms because any daughter of an elite man basically took on a female version of his name so Claudia had two sisters and they would have been called Claudia - so she's known as Claudia mattelli because she married a man called Metellus but there were two other Claudia's at least floating around at the same time that Cicero is writing the speech and Catullus is alive and there would have been other families with the same name - so there are any number of other Claudia's there's the problem that Apuleius is writing a lot later he's writing in the second century see II there's also I think some problems in terms of the way that Cicero is using the very traditional ways of representing women what do you think about that Sonya yeah i mean i don't i think would be lovely if we could say this cloudier and Lesbia were the same person but cicero has an agenda with the way that he's representing criteria simply his role is to get Kylie as off the charge that he's in court for so he is trying to refocus the entire case on to Claudia and away from Kylie's and he does that by focusing on sexuality and her lifestyle was a way of showing that she's an unreliable witness I don't think it he's just picked up kind of stereotypical characteristics of women who are threatening and use those to kind of have a go at Claudia I don't think that because they happen to match up with the traits of Lesbia that that's enough evidence to say that the same we could argue that Catullus is using the same stereotype because after all we don't know whether someone called Lesbia existed at all or someone he called Lesbia we don't know if he had a love affair all we know is what he writes in his poetry and after all do you believe everything that people write in their poetry when they use the word I and I often make the analogy to a modern pop song just because somebody sings in a pop song they're going through a tragic love breakdown doesn't mean it's actually happening in their life all right they write that and sing it so they can get in the pop charts and Catullus might have written this poetry because he wanted to write highly emotional poetry and he might have invented Lesbia for that reason so he's using the same kind of rhetoric that Cicero does it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the same person no the only thing that sort of muddies the waters is this Catullus poem 79 and in it he says lesbian is beautiful so that's the male form of the name Clos at Lesbia sorry and obviously Claudia's brother was called Claudius and his full name was Claudia's poelker so Claudia Claudia is the beautiful so you could see this lesbian as beautiful as being a reference to Claudius and then he says so what well Lesbia prefers him and there was actually a charge leveled against Claudius and Claudia that they had a incestuous relationship with one another so whether that's what this poem is referring to here and then of course catalysis rather than you could tell us and your whole family so Claudia or Lesbia prefers her own brother or having a love affair with her own brother apparently to having one with Catullus so I mean again I wouldn't want to go out and say yes this is this helps prove that Claudia and Lesbia at the same but it certainly confuses the issue a little bit away it is quite suggestive yes but again Cicero is using a little bit like catalyst did in that poem that I showed about Caesar he's using the kind of invective that we'll see you use that charge against people because they're your political enemy because you don't like them because you decide you want to criticize them and so in conclusion I'm sorry it's not an absolute conclusion we can't really say that Lesbia is Claudia you will actually read that in a lot of books though some scholarly books and not even very old books will just say Lesbia is this real life woman called Claudia who lived this disgusting lifestyle they're often quite moralistic about her in ways that I don't think is very helpful with studying antiquity so just to sum up Sonia and I are going to sum up with what we think we can learn from looking at Cicero and Catullus I think they're really important in terms of seeing what's what's significant to Roman elite men in the late Republic and so this concentration on the idea of duty or whether you reject duty what kind of lifestyle you live if you are an elite man should you go forward and have a political career that debate I think is going on in Cicero and Catullus what else do you think is significant about looking at Cicero and Catullus Vanya well I think it kind of indicates that this is a very transformative period in Roman history and you see all those cultural influences that have kind of been slowly coming into Rome for a couple of hundred years they suddenly have a major impact in the late Republic and you have a divergence in the way that people want to express themselves so you have Cicero who as a new man is trying to say I'm actually very traditional and I'm not threatening as a new man then you have catalyst he comes from an old family who doesn't want to follow in the traditions that have kind of sustained Rome and so you get this tension between two different sorts of Roman identities really and it is the late Republic we call it late Republic because about to end Catullus and Cicero didn't know that but they could sort of see that this is a time of transition and that there was an awful lot of between political individuals and for a lot of Romans particularly people like Cicero they put that down to a moral decline they thought that it was because many of the Roman elite were acting like Catullus perhaps weren't carrying out their duty that this was going to lead to the inevitable end of the Republic and it did end probably not for that reason much more to do with the political struggles between people like Caesar and Pompey the great but that's what the Romans thought they thought that this kind of behavior this kind of conflict was going to mean the collapse of their state or the collapse of their state as they knew it so we can see that very clearly in the conflict between Cicero and Catullus and their ways of life there okay we hope you've enjoyed that conversation that we had together and if you want to find out more about what we're doing in Mediterranean studies at Latrobe you can look at our website or join in through Facebook or Twitter thank you

Channel: La Trobe University

Views: 19,100

Rating: 4.9050846 out of 5

Keywords: Cicero (Author), Catullus (Author), La Trobe University, Rhiannon Evans, Sonya Wurster, Rome, Roman history, history, poetry, roman poetry, politics, roman politics, ancient history, Ancient Rome (Dated Location)

Id: -1-C5mbV9Lk

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2014