Take that! even in an un-prudish age, the language has the power to shock. Once we are over it, what is going on?
On the face of it, Catullus is insulting two men for saying, on the evidence of his erotic poetry, that he leads an immoral life. Stripped of insults, Catullus’s reply is that a distinction must be drawn in interpreting works written in the first person between imagination and autobiography, statement and belief. (The same points necessarily apply to this poem too.) Other issues in modern literary criticism about reliable and unreliable narrators are not far away.
Some possible explanations are less highbrow: invective poems have a strong pedigree as a genre in the ancient world, and Catullus may simply have decided to write one. Whether the people he says are involved, and the reason he gives, are real, or whether he made them all up, we have no way of telling. I imagine a lot of ink has been spilt over these issues, but not by Professor C J Fordyce of the University of Glasgow, who as recently as 1961 omitted the poem from his definitive commentary on Catullus as one of “a few poems which with good reason are rarely read” – along with 31 others.
Real or imaginary, Aurelius and Furius are both referred to by Catullus with varying degrees of disrespect in other poems: both feature as his rivals for the love of young men, and Furius is represented as an impoverished hanger-on with pretensions to social acceptability.
As well as an invective poem, this is a comic one. It is impossible to keep the joke detector quiet when Catullus replies to the accusation of being parum pudicus in terms which are so very far from being pudicus themselves, when we know very well that his accusers are not at all pudicus either, and when we see how he describes the target audience for his erotic poetry.
See the (chastely) illustrated blog post here.
It is hard to know what tone to adopt for delivering this poem – Noel Coward? The Incredible Hulk? Piers Morgan? To hear one possibility among many, press play:
