Catullus 17

Marriage guidance from Catullus

What can happen when a young wife is married to an older man is a theme as old as European literature, and this is Catullus’s take on it. Just how old the husband is, is an open question: the emphasis is more on how dull and oblivious he seems to what is, or might be, going on. Catullus’s remedy is to give him a shock to the system that will yank him out of his inertia by throwing him off a bridge into a mire. Both the dozy husband and maybe also the town are probably made up – Catullus makes no bones about naming real people that he has a go at, and doesn’t do it here. It feels less likely that he would make up a bridge, so perhaps he had a real one in mind as a model, which might have identified the setting to someone in the know. The metre is an unusual one: Priapeans, which Greek poets of the preceding two or three hundred years had used for hymns to the phallic god Priapus. There may be an in-joke here about the husband’s sexual prowess or supposed lack of it. For any metrical buffs, the line is made up of a glyconic followed by a pherecratean, both components of Asclepiadic froms widely used by Horace in the Odes.

We have no clear information about just what the rites of Salisubsalus involved, if those really are Catullus’s own words and not an error in the manuscripts, but the first syllable carries a suggestion of dance or jumping.

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O Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere longo,
et salire paratum habes, sed vereris inepta
crura ponticuli axulis stantis in redivivis,
ne supinus eat cavaque in palude recumbat,
sic tibi bonus ex tua pons libidine fiat,
in quo vel Salisubsali sacra suscipiantur,
munus hoc mihi maximi da, Colonia, risus.
quendam municipem meum de tuo volo ponte
ire praecipitem in lutum per caputque pedesque,
verum totius ut lacus putidaeque paludis
lividissima maximeque est profunda vorago.
insulsissimus est homo, nec sapit pueri instar
bimuli tremula patris dormientis in ulna:
cui cum sit viridissimo nupta flore puella
(et puella tenellulo delicatior haedo,
adservanda nigerrimis diligentius uvis),
ludere hanc sinit ut libet, nec pili facit uni,
nec se sublevat ex sua parte, sed velut alnus
in fossa Liguri iacet suppernata securi,
tantundem omnia sentiens quam si nulla sit usquam
talis iste meus stupor nil videt, nihil audit,
ipse qui sit, utrum sit an non sit, id quoque nescit.
nunc eum volo de tuo ponte mittere pronum,
si pote stolidum repente excitare veternum
et supinum animum in gravi derelinquere caeno,
ferream ut soleam tenaci in voragine mula.

O Colonia, you would like a game on that long bridge of yours, and you’re all set for dancing on it, except that two things worry you: the little structure’s rickety legs; and that, stood on reclaimed timbers, it might flop down flat and lie swallowed in the swamp. May your bridge become just as sound as you could wish, sound enough even to hold those dance rites of yours, Colonia, provided you grant me this favour: a really good laugh. What I’d like is for a certain neighbour of mine to go straight down off that bridge of yours head over heels into the mud, right there where the morass is deepest and most off-colour in all the lake and its stinking marsh. The man’s a complete idiot, he hasn’t got the sense of a sleeping two-year-old rocked in its Daddy’s arms: when a young girl – friskier than a tender little kid, and needing watching over more carefully than grapes at their dark ripest – is married to him at the peak of her bloom, he allows her to play as she likes, and makes absolutely nothing of it. And he hasn’t the gumption to rouse himself at all, he lies there like a tree in a ditch, hamstrung by a Ligurian’s axe, and takes as much notice of everything as if there was nothing there at all; and that’s how this numbskull I am telling you about sees and hears nothing. What I want is to throw him face down now off your bridge, to see if the shock will wake him out of his senile stupidity, and if he can leave his inertia in the clinging mire, like a mule leaves its iron shoe behind in sticky mud.

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