The Question of the Gift by Mark Osteen

Author:Mark Osteen [Osteen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415282772
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1479260
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

The bodies of men

A number of poems from the collection appear to offer an implicit critique not just of the “biggest pricks” in Roman provincial government, but also of the system responsible for them. For instance, poem 28 begins with a dismal portrait of our friends Fabullus and Veranius; they are a “bankrupt band” (cohors inanis), having endured cold and hunger under the leadership of Piso Caesoninus. Lines 9 and 10, however, expand the scope of the poem to address Catullus’s own experiences with Memmius in Bithynia: “O Memmius, you fucked me good and slow and I took that timber all the way down my throat” (O Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum … tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti). Through this comparison, the experiences of staff members in provinces as different as Spain and Bithynia emerge as identical – the staff are always screwed because the governor is always an irrumator. Likewise, poem 29 flattens the Roman world and represents the provinces as uniform sites of past and potential exploitation by cataloguing a whole series of provinces looted by Caesar:

Was it on this account that you were in Britain?

So that tired penis of yours

could eat up twenty to thirty million HS?

First he squandered his inheritance, secondly the Pontic prize, thirdly Spain, and now they’re afraid in Britain.

As in poem 28, the imagery is sexual and violent. Mamurra (Caesar’s cohort) is described as Caesar’s exhausted penis, and Caesar is called Cinaedus Romulus (homosexually passive founder of Rome).

The figuring of politics as sex or sex as politics has a familiar ring, for Catullus is certainly not the first author to employ such metaphors. Yet the preponderance of Catullan scholarship reveals a tendency to separate the two. More specifically, critics have often addressed portions of the collection according to theme. Thus, even contemporary critics interested in pushing the boundaries of Catullan criticism have opted to treat, for instance, the “Lesbia poems” (love poems directed at a woman called “Lesbia,” in reference to the Greek poet Sappho) separately from the campaign poems.20 Yet even cursory inspection shows that Catullus regularly moves back and forth between using sex and politics as the tenor of his metaphors. While a full examination of the Lesbia poems remains beyond the parameters of this essay, I would like to return to the subject of sex and move it alongside the relations between subjectivity and empire addressed thus far.

One thing that unifies the various sex acts that serve as metaphors for unethical plundering is their unpleasant, if not graphically violent nature. Poem 28 portrays life in the provinces as analogous to homosexual rape; poem 29 represents the plundering colonial as an insatiable penis. A metaphor such as that found in poem 28 – of being slowly gagged by a timber – draws attention to the permeability of the victim’s body. The use of helluor (“to gluttonize”) and lancino (“to rend”) represents booty as ingestible. Such terms necessarily assume, if they do not actively construct, a body – a Roman self

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