Reading Cominius: The ‘Why Bother?’ Question

Catullus 108 is an unloved and unlovely poem. Syndikus begins his analysis of it by referring to ‘the verses that initially are only repulsive’, but, though he grudgingly acknowledges that Catullus does not lack a sense of artistry in treating his disgusting theme, there is little sign that he is any less repulsed by the end of his reading.Footnote ¹ It is not hard to see why so many critics react to the poem in this way or, more often, ignore it altogether.

The gruesomeness of its details, the elusiveness of its target's identity, and the apparent absence of the erotic and metapoetic subject matter that dominate Catullan scholarship have doubtless contributed to its neglect. Only one article has been devoted to the poem, almost fifty years ago, and it is mentioned only in passing in the many monographs and articles on Catullus.Footnote ³

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating poem. It is simultaneously characteristic of the Catullan corpus and anomalous within it. Its aggressive tone and invective content can be paralleled by many of the polymetrics and epigrams, but its imagining of its target's death is unique in the corpus, which elsewhere limits itself to verbal humiliation or non-lethal, generally sexual violence. The singling out of an individual for a moral or social transgression is common in Catullus, but the transgression, be it incest or body-odour, is elsewhere generally identified explicitly rather than hinted at through vague references to ‘unclean morals’. Moreover, the criteria by which such transgressions are adjudged transgressive and punishable are usually determined by Catullus’ own narrow clique of self-appointed social and cultural mandarins, whereas Cominius is to be condemned by the populi arbitrium.

All these elements are related to the poem's literary context within the tradition of iambos, its historical context in the political violence of the late Republic, and the complex relationship between the two. Du Quesnay and Woodman have made the case for a third way between arid formalism and naïve biographical interpretations. Citing Plutarch and Cicero's testimony for Cato's Archilochean iamboi against Metellus Scipio and Trebonius’ Lucilian satires against Antony, they argue that ‘real feelings are self-consciously expressed in poems which work in a defined literary tradition adapted to the realities of the moment.’Footnote ⁴ Their course takes them closer to biography than to formalism, and the definition and the recoverability of ‘real feelings’ are at best problematic. Nevertheless, the connection and adaptation of literary tradition to ‘the realities of the moment’ remains an extremely useful concept for the interpretation of Catullus.

Catullus’ self-construction as an iambist in the tradition of Archilochus and Hipponax has increasingly been recognized as central to his poetic project, set alongside, and perhaps in tension with, a Callimachean code model.Footnote ⁵ Many of its characteristic features made the literary tradition of iambos particularly well-suited to being adapted to the realities of the political moment in late Republican Rome: the aggression that was its defining characteristic; its blaming and shaming of individuals; the physical violence that was frequently threatened and even more frequently inscribed in iambos’ status as almost an illocutionary speech act.Footnote ⁶ Catullus takes the iambic aggression he has inherited from the tradition and adapts it to the political violence of his times. In c. 108, he takes this equation to its limits, moving beyond threats of rhaphanidosis, as in c. 15, to the deadly force that was such a feature of the 50s BCE. It is not only the verbal and physical violence that is taken to its limits, but the degree of equation between the two. Catullus explores how political violence does not merely match iambos’ traditional content but can be expressed, symbolized, and even enacted by its style. The result is an unlovely poem indeed, but an important one.

Versifying Cominius: The Generic Question

C. 108 is unquestionably invective, but is it necessarily iambic? The definition of iambos is fraught and there is ongoing debate about the relative importance of metre, content, and stylistic register. Catullus’ explicit references to iamboi, one of them clearly evoking Archilochus, all occur in hendecasyllabic poems, as does his other most marked allusion to the great Parian iambist.Footnote ⁷ Although the notion of iambos in elegiacs stretches the playful manipulation of metre and genre still further, Heyworth notes Archilochean echoes in the Gellius cycle and at 65.3–4 and 68.10.Footnote ⁸ Ovid's elegiac Ibis simultaneously and disingenuously declares its own anomalous status as an iambos in the ‘wrong metre’ and draws attention to the appropriateness of that metre.Footnote ⁹ Metre is no obstacle to the identification of c. 108 as an iambos.

The Ibis also offers strong positive encouragement to regard c. 108 as iambos, since both it and Horace's fifth Epode, two unambiguous examples of the genre, contain curses-cum-prophecies so strikingly similar that they could even be considered allusions. Epode 5 ends with the boy kidnapped by witches transformed from a pitiful figure pleading for mercy into ‘an almost inhuman force of vengeance’ (Mankin (Reference Mankin1995) 109). It climaxes with a prophecy of communal execution and dismemberment by birds and beasts:

The parallels with c. 108 are clear. The ambiguity of Catullus’ populi arbitrium is resolved here with an unequivocal description of mob violence (turba), but one that retains an awkward balance between unofficial legitimacy and transparent anarchy. Stoning partakes of both qualities, a collective expression of the community's will, but also one that stands in opposition to the official sanctions of the law. Even uicatim, ‘street by street’, simultaneously evokes two antithetical images. The reader sees the common people organized according to their civic divisions, analogous to arranging them centuriatim or tributim, and indeed uici were the divisions used by Julius Caesar and Augustus to perform their enumerations of the people.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet she also sees Clodius enlisting slaves and undesirables into his gangs street by street.Footnote ¹¹ Iambos’ oscillation between communal justice and mob anarchy is very much to the fore. Dismemberment is also predicted here and the specific animals that will perform it: wolves (though no dogs) and ‘the carrion crows and vultures’ as which Watson (Reference Watson2003, ad loc.) identifies the Esquilinae alites. The iambic quality of a passage from the Epodes, or at least from the first eight poems, hardly needs justification, but the boy's second speech is particularly iambic. It begins with an allusion to Archilochus and ends with one to Hipponax, and its illocutionary performance of violence upon its targets establishes the boy as an iambist within the iambos.Footnote ¹²

The key passage from the Ibis also predicts – with the force of a curse and threat – the denial of burial and dismemberment by birds and beasts:

Although the conventional list of animals that mangle unburied bodies was relatively short and standardized, Ovid notably shares with Catullus vultures, dogs, and wolves, in the same order, with only the crow omitted. Like Catullus and the boy in Epode 5, Ovid appeals to the consensus of the community, but with a further variation. Catullus’ populus offers an ambiguous, quasi-judicial arbitrium on Cominius. Horace's turba will be explicitly and actively involved in the lynching of the witches. Ovid's populus merely expresses its approval by applauding, while the dirty work is performed by their official surrogate, the carnifex. The phrase populo plaudente has an interesting history and Nachleben. Ovid is recycling it from his description of the procession of sacrificial animals at the festival of Juno in Falerii, intratextually designating the execution of Ibis as a sacrifice and more specifically as a scapegoat or pharmakos corresponding to the Falerian she-goat.Footnote ¹³ Its reception in Petronius, where Eumolpus applies it to beasts eating criminals in the arena, and Prudentius, describing Marius leading Iugurtha in triumph to his execution, indicate that both appreciated Ovid's association of the phrase with the communal approval of the violent execution of a criminal, public enemy, or pharmakos.Footnote ¹⁴

It is impossible to be certain whether all three of Catullus, Horace, and Ovid are alluding to a specific, shared iambic antecedent or to more general iambic themes of communal violence against a scapegoat.Footnote ¹⁵ It is also possible that both Horace and Ovid are creatively claiming c. 108 as an iambos by imitating its punitive and violent motifs in their own explicitly iambic poems.Footnote ¹⁶ Ovid may even be marking c. 108 as iambic through Horace by means of a window allusion. All three share the characteristic iambic quality of ‘bitterness’ (τὸ πικρόν, acerbitas).Footnote ¹⁷ The element of humour that is often present in the genre is not particularly prominent, though arguments have been made for humour in Epode 5 and Ovid's ironic wit is always potentially amusing.Footnote ¹⁸ The threat and illocutionary enactment of violence is a defining feature of iambos and its reception, most explicitly enshrined in Meleager's description of Archilochus’ ‘violent iamboi’ (ὑβριστῆρας ἰάμβους, Anth. Pal. 7.352.7).

There is one distinctively iambic motif that we have seen prominently displayed in all three of c. 108, Epode 5 and Ibis 161–70, but which is notably absent from other Catullan iambos. Heyworth specifically remarks on this absence, though not on its presence in c. 108:

This reference to the collective is precisely what we find in Catullus’ reference to the populi arbitrium and in its Horatian and Ovidian reception. Skinner (Reference Skinner2003: 221 n80) has argued that the later epigrams of the elegiac libellus appeal to the ‘collective judgment of the community’ and that c. 108 forms a climax of this sequence. Her argument rests on Catullus’ use of maxims and proverbial phrases in c. 93 and 94, which is not the strongest of bases, though it does present the possibility of an interesting further parallel with iambos, which similarly appeals to popular wisdom in the form of gnomai and ainoi.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, however one reads the surrounding epigrams, c. 108 unambiguously appeals to the ‘collective judgment of the community’ and does so in the case of someone who has committed transgressions against societal norms that, though vaguely expressed, seem to extend beyond the social faux pas targeted in Catullus’ other iamboi. By doing so, Catullus is adhering more closely to one of the key generic qualities of archaic iambos. As Brown puts it, ‘[t]he iambist is a protector of his community and by means of ἴαμβος repels any who threaten the stability of his world.’Footnote ²¹ Even more important than the nature of archaic iambos in its original context is the reception of the idea of iambos. Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2014: 91) has shown that this conservative ethos prevails in the long post-archaic reception of iambos. By appealing to collective judgment to reinforce traditional values, Catullus evokes the essence of iambos.

Before moving from the ‘defined literary tradition’ to ‘the realities of the moment’, and the relationship between the two, it is worth considering whether the appeal to collective judgement in c. 108 might evoke not merely iambos in general but a specific poem. To my knowledge, critics have not commented on the striking echo in c. 108 of a fragment of Hipponax:

This fragment is preserved by Polemon as evidence that Hipponax was the inventor of epic parody and it is its relationship to Homeric and other epic that has been the main focus of attention.Footnote ²² However, scholars including Degani, Faraone, Compton, and Allan have also noted its possible relationship to the pharmakos ritual that is more explicitly engaged with elsewhere in Hipponax and to incantations for expelling famine demons from the community.Footnote ²³ In both interpretations, Eurymedontiades is not merely a glutton but a political threat to the community, and one who will devour its substance if he is not eliminated. The resemblance of Hipponax's βουλὴ δημοσίη to Catullus’ populi arbitrium is remarkably close. While one might expect collocations corresponding to ‘the will of the people’ to be common, the precise Hipponactean phrase occurs only once elsewhere in extant Greek and is one of very few instances of cognates of βουλή and δῆμος used together to express this notion.Footnote ²⁴ This was probably because writers were wary of evoking the common formula ἡ βουλὴ καὶ ὁ δῆμος, but whatever the reason, the result is that Hipponax's βουλὴ δημοσίη stands out as a distinctive and recognizable phrase that Catullus’ docti lectores could be expected to recognize behind populi arbitrium.

Although Archilochus is more frequently discussed as Catullus’ iambic code-model, Hipponax's importance as an intertext is being increasingly noted.Footnote ²⁵ The strong claim for a direct allusion to Hipponax fr. 126 can certainly be made. In addition to the verbal echo of βουλὴ δημοσίη in populi arbitrium, and even of ὄληται in intereat, the situation evoked is very similar: an enemy of the community is to be killed – unpleasantly – in accordance with the popular will and his body exposed. Even if this claim is not accepted, fr. 126 offers a clear example of an archaic iambic precedent for these key features of c. 108. Fr. 126 is not of course in an iambic metre, but its aggressive, violent, moralizing ethos and its Hipponactean authorship strongly align it with that genre.Footnote ²⁶ The other important feature that fr. 126 exhibits is the foregrounding of its own status as explicitly causing and implicitly enacting the violence that it describes. The Muse is bidden to speak (ἔννɛφ’) in order that (ὅπως) Eurymedontiades may die (ὄληται). Speech causes action and comes to constitute that action in its status as a speech-act, a common feature of iambos.

Reconstructing Cominius: The Prosopographical Question

The ‘defined literary tradition’ within which c. 108 works is that of iambos. The greatest challenge in reconstructing ‘the realities of the moment’ that the poem reflects is the uncertainty about the identity of its addressee and the actions that provoked Catullus’ attack. The manuscripts unanimously offer the nonsensical sic homini but, though a few other conjectures have been made, Guarini's 1521 suggestion of si, Comini has been universally accepted by subsequent editors and critics.Footnote ²⁷ However, this partial solution only poses the further question: who was Cominius?

The nomen Cominius, probably most famously held by Postumus, the consul of 501 and commander of the young Coriolanus, occurs a few times in the surviving historical record of the late Republic, including the Sextus gagged and dragged to prison by Verres and the Caesarian Quintus whose ship unfortunately drifted into Scipio's camp at Thapsus.Footnote ²⁸ However, as critics routinely observe, the strongest – though still not unproblematic – candidates are the brothers Publius and Gaius (or possibly Lucius) Cominius from Spoletium, who prosecuted L. Aelius Staienus in 74 BCE and C. Cornelius (tr. pl. 67), abortively in 66 and unsuccessfully in 65, when Cicero for the defence delivered the lost Pro Cornelio.Footnote ²⁹ The events surrounding the case in 66, including the brothers’ escape over the rooftops, are vividly described in Asconius’ commentary on that speech (Asc. Corn. 59-60C). These colourful and dramatic events would certainly fit the image of a man who might be subject to violent revenge populi arbitrio, especially since Cornelius’ political leanings were markedly popularis.Footnote ³⁰ In particular, it is worth noting the reference to duces operarum, the leaders of the political gangs, especially associated with Clodius in the 50s, whose status stood somewhere between a fully-privatized army of hired thugs and an organized, mobilized form of the existing populus and its collegia.Footnote ³¹ The ambiguous and ambivalent nature of these gangs and their threats against the Cominii resonates strongly with that of Catullus’ populi arbitrium, oscillating between the people's sovereign will and the mob's capricious whim.Footnote ³² Some suggest C. Cornelius as the addressee of c. 102, though there is little basis for this beyond the coincidence of a very common name.Footnote ³³

There is much to be said for the identification of the Cominius of c. 108 with one of the brothers of Spoletium, but the case is far from conclusive. The decade that had passed between the events of 66–65 and Catullus’ floruit of the mid-50s makes it harder to imagine the latter's immediate impetus to compose his invective, though we know nothing of Cominius’ later career prior to his death reported as recent in Cicero's Brutus of 46 (271). The modern reader once more lacks the historical details that might have illuminated aspects of one of Catullus’ elusive and allusive attacks on a contemporary. We do not know who Cominius was, but the more important and interesting question is whether Catullus’ contemporary readers knew who he was, or at least whether the poem's rhetoric is constructed on the basis that at least one level of its implied readership would know.

Hartz (Reference Hartz2007: 161) adopts an extreme position on this, writing of this very poem that the difficulties faced by modern readers in understanding the poem were matched by those of Catullus’ contemporaries who were not in his inner circle of friends, since ‘the addressee of these epigrams was the group of the Neoterics, they were not intended for the general public.’ He sees this as part of their ‘social discourse of the exclusion of the public from the results of literary production’, a social discourse that finds its equivalent in Hellenistic poetics of exclusion. This is an attractive notion when applied to many of the epigrams, but it is problematic for c. 108, with its appeal to the will of the people and its condemnation not of napkin-stealing or incest behind closed doors but of the use of the tongue in such a way as to render it the enemy of good men. The very vagueness of Cominius’ unclean morals and wicked tongue produce a complex effect in generating an implied audience. It constructs a community, the populus ready to express its arbitrium, who are so familiar with Cominius’ sins that they do not need them spelt out. The actual reader can resort to an Emperor's New Clothes pretence that she is familiar and tacitly enrol herself within that community. Every scenario constructs Cominius as a real person whose real actions have provoked Catullus’ real feelings. Cominius is indeed a stock iambic target like Lycambes, Bupalus, or even Eurymedontiades. However, he is also a figure from the public life of the late Republic because c. 108 constructs him as one and constructs a readership that will read him as one.

Affiliating Cominius: The Political Question

Once the poem or its implied readers have constructed Cominius, the next question is what they have constructed him as. In the highly polarized political climate of the late Republic, we might expect a political attack on an individual to indicate in some way his political affiliation. If the addressee is indeed P. Cominius of Spoletium, then his prosecution of the popularis tribune C. Cornelius, opposed by gangs, would tend to align him with the optimate end of the political spectrum.Footnote ³⁴ This would fit one sense of the populi arbitrium that may cause his death but ‘the lingua inimica bonorum does not seem to fit very well a man who went in to bat for the most conservative part of the Senate’ (Syndikus (Reference Syndikus1987) 122). Since Cominius’ mores impuri are not only vague on details but politically neutral, the only two remaining indications of what he has done wrong appear to pull in opposite directions.

Syndikus goes on to remark, ‘but it is completely unclear what Catullus understands by boni here’, and this is key. Political terminology in late Republican Rome was fluid and contested, and the usage of boni more than most. It had a socio-economic sense, those ‘with considerable means that relieved them of the need to work, … respectable well-to-do pillars of society’ (Mouritsen (Reference Mouritsen2017) 81). This is the sense Catullus himself employs elsewhere in the phrase boni beatique (37.13), though with considerable complexity and irony (Krostenko (Reference Krostenko2000) 258–69). Hand-in-hand with that socio-economic sense went the political orientation most frequently manifested by that class, and its overlap with the etymologically related optimates reflected its association with conservative politics. Yet, that conservativism tended to construct itself as not only ethically normative but also all-encompassing. The politically loaded use of boni was particularly suited to ‘pushing an ideology that is both conservative and inclusive’ (Stone (Reference Stone, Welch and Hillard2005) 60). Indeed, Lacey (Reference Lacey1970: 13) has argued that ‘boni are those who support the laws and seek civil concord through consensus politics, and that this is what the common people really want’.

It is beyond the scope of this article to explore Cicero's use of the word boni, but even the smaller sample of instances where he refers to someone or something as inimicus bonorum (or bonis) confirms this tendency to elide the distinction between the ethical and the socio-political, to reach for what could be considered consensus between the orders or the disingenuous appropriation of the people's political will against their own interests. The description of Gabinius’ treatment of the publicani in Syria comes closest to acknowledging the word's narrower social, economic, and political connotations, calling him ‘the foe of the Senate, greatest enemy of the equestrian order and of all good men’ (hostem senatus, inimicissimum ordinis equestris bonorumque omnium, Prov. cons. 11). Yet even here Cicero exploits the totalizing, inclusive force of boni omnes simultaneously to associate it with the higher orders and to imply that even those outside those orders, if they are truly good, would naturally align themselves with them. The totalizing, ethical appropriation of the term is more noticeable in its application to two of Cicero's three bêtes noires, enemies of decency and right, but also popularis opponents of the socially elite and politically conservative. He conjures inconceivable atrocities that Antonius might commit if he grew angry, on the a fortiori principle that, even when he was not angry, ‘he was an enemy to all good men’ (omnibus bonis fuerit inimicus, Phil. 3.30). Most strikingly for c. 108, the peroration of the First Catilinarian prays that Jupiter will keep Catiline and his confederates away from the markedly popular features of the city's roofs and walls (tectis urbis ac moenibus), will protect the lives and fortune of all citizens (ciuium omnium), and deliver to eternal punishment ‘these fellows who are foes of the good, enemies of their homeland’ (homines bonorum inimicos, hostis patriae, Cat. 1.33). Unlike his tactic with Gabinius, here Cicero begins with an inclusive picture of the Roman people, and one with an emphasis on the people, then seamlessly applies the loaded term boni to them, thus aligning them with the conservative element to which Catiline was opposed.

Catullus’ depiction of Cominius as someone who, while his tongue was an enemy of the boni, could still die populi arbitrio has much in common with Cicero's use of boni as a vague, inclusive, and appropriative term that could be tendentiously applied to the common people. The tendency of that usage to be employed by conservatives against popularis targets does not correspond as closely with the apparent political leanings of P. Cominius. However, the uncertainty about his wider political career and even about whether he is the addressee of c. 108 make this a lesser consideration. More significantly for our exploration of ‘a defined literary tradition adapted to the realities of the moment’, the poem's juxtaposition of the popular and the conservative corresponds not only to contemporary Ciceronian rhetoric, but to the traditions of iambos. Despite the self-representation of Archilochus and Hipponax as outsiders, critics have increasingly shown how the genre tends to appeal to the normative values of the community and that those values tend towards conservatism: ‘a conservative attitude prevails and works toward the reestablishment of idealized social norms that allow society to function smoothly’ (Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2014) 91). The similarity to Lacey on Cicero is striking. Both Cicero and Catullus can be read as tendentiously uniting disparate parts of the community through their shared opposition to an enemy of the whole community who must be killed or expelled, a pharmakos like Eurymedontiades. Nevertheless, the very extremity of Catullus’ juxtaposition of populus and boni, and the ambiguity of the target's transgressions and his affiliations, could also serve to interrogate and problematize this collapsing of political polarities, this disingenuous appeal to consensus that is actually prestidigitation of language. Catullus may be imitating Cicero in constructing a community, but he may also be drawing attention to the problematic aspects of that very process.

Sentencing Cominius: The Legal Question

For Gnilka (Reference Gnilka1973: 258), in his splendid – and solitary – study of c. 108, ‘the understanding of the poem stands and falls with the expression populi arbitrio in line 1’ and he goes on to specify, ‘the expression does not belong to juristic language, does not at all constitute a genuine legal process.’ This is the starting point for his argument that the poem depicts an act not of legal execution but of Lynchjustiz. Gnilka is perfectly correct about populi arbitrium, but the tendency of critics to give it an unmerited legal status is in itself significant. The closest parallel, in time and (Gnilka's) sense, though he does not cite it, is in Philus’ speech on the preferability of the mixed constitution to simple constitutions, including democracy's tendency to be a euphemism for ochlocracy: si uero populus plurimum potest omniaque eius arbitrio reguntur, dicitur illa libertas, est uero licentia. (‘If indeed the people have the most power and everything is governed by their will, that is called freedom, but it is really licentiousness’, Cic. Rep. 3.23.6).Footnote ³⁵ Philus uses arbitrium to cast the legitimate, democratic power of the people as arbitrary caprice, because that is his construction of the nature of democracy.

The word is particularly suited to this role by its semantic range, covering the spectrum from ‘the power of judging or deciding … regarded as a right’ (OLD 4) and ‘control, supervision, direction, command, authority’ (OLD 5) to ‘(of more or less arbitrary and irresponsible action) wish, whim, caprice, pleasure’ (OLD 7b). The multivalence of the word can be felt in another passage where legitimate authority is travestied as whim. Among the indignities to which Horace claims Virtus does not stoop is the taking up or laying down of the axes of office by the authority/caprice of the popular breeze (nec sumit aut ponit secures / arbitrio popularis aurae, Hor. Carm. 3.2.19–20). Nisbet and Rudd (2004 ad loc.) note that, ‘[a]s arbitrio suggests a legal adjudication or at least a serious decision, it is paradoxically combined with aurae.’ Certainly, the arbitrium of the people, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with the Senate, is often depicted in straightforwardly legitimate terms, as when Caesar has Ariovistus cite the Roman people's custom of commanding the conquered according to their own authority, not another's ordinance (non ad alterius praescriptum, sed ad suum arbitrium, Caes. BGall. 1.36).Footnote ³⁶ Most famously, Augustus claims to have transferred the res publica from his own power to the control of the Senate and people of Rome (ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium, Aug. RG 34).

It is this ambiguity that Catullus exploits to the full in c. 108. On one level, he performs the opposite operation to Cicero and Horace. Because arbitrium can refer to the caprice of arbitrary action, it is entirely appropriate to the arbitrary caprice of Volksjustiz.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, because populi arbitrium is so often used to refer to the legitimate authority of the people, that sense is strongly evoked. Cicero and Horace taint legitimate popular authority with the suggestion of arbitrary whim by using unambiguously pejorative terms such as licentia and aura to pull arbitrium to the capricious end of it semantic range, while still acknowledging but rejecting its more respectable sense, ‘the authority of the people, as some consider it, but we all know it is really the whim of the people’. Catullus conversely depicts a lynching as a pseudo-legitimate decree by a contio, ‘the whim of the people, as some would doubtless consider it, but such is the sovereignty of the community that it is really the authority of the people.’

This appeal to the authority of the community and the attempt to legitimize it are, once again, very characteristic of iambos. To return to Hipponax fr. 126, we have already seen the appeal to collective authority in assigning Eurymedontiades’ death to the βουλὴ δημοσίη, a phrase strikingly similar to populi arbitrium. Hipponax also mentions a ψηφὶς κακή, an ambiguous phrase that could mean the legitimate casting of votes or the arbitrary casting of stones. By either obfuscating whether Eurymedontiades’ death is an execution or a lynching, or collapsing the distinction between the two, Hipponax bestows legitimacy on this act of mob-violence. Catullus makes the same move with populi arbitrium. As with his Ciceronian conflation of the populus and the boni, this move has the potential to be read as Catullus’ own or as an indication of the sort of move that others make. Perhaps Catullus is legitimizing mob-violence. But perhaps he is drawing attention to how such legitimation is performed: ‘the authority of the people and the whim of the people are expressed by the same two words and that is just the sort of sleight-of-hand that can be used to delegitimize popular authority or to legitimize mob violence’.

Executing Cominius: The Practical Question

As with Cominius’ identity, his transgressions, and his political affiliation, c. 108 leaves the manner of his death deliberately vague: he simply ‘dies’ (intereat). It cannot be ruled out that he is to be executed by the public executioner, the fate Ovid predicts for Ibis. The studied ambiguity of populi arbitrium just about leaves this possibility open, but we have seen that it strongly tends towards the legitimation of popular justice rather than the denigration of state justice. If the reader is to envisage Cominius’ death as an act of Volksjustiz, she might imagine a stoning, as explicitly predicted by Horace's puer and implied by Hipponax's ψηφὶς κακή. There is nothing in the poem that would rule this out, but neither is there much in its favour apart from these far-from-telling parallels and the general association of stoning with popular justice, and even that tends to be Greek rather than Roman.Footnote ³⁸

Gnilka's argument was that Cominius is the victim of discerptio, the tearing apart of the victim by the mob. Not only was this an established form of Volksjustiz, traditionally dating back to the senators’ tearing to pieces of Romulus, but it was widely attested in the late Republic. Perhaps the most famous example and the one closest personally to Catullus, though it lay up to a decade in the future when c. 108 was written, was the discerptio of C. Helvius Cinna, mistaken by a mob for the liberator Cornelius Cinna and torn to pieces.Footnote ³⁹ Valerius Maximus also describes the dismemberment of the urban praetor Sempronius Asellio by a mob in 89 BCE when he was supporting debtors in a dispute between them and moneylenders.Footnote ⁴⁰ The most vivid description of discerptio and the most suggestive for a reading of c. 108 is Florus’ of those which took place in the Sullan proscriptions, almost dismissed by praeteritio, but in such a way that their horror is the more emphasized:

Many aspects of this gruesome picture resonate with c. 108, in particular the very iambic combination of mockery (ludibrio) with violence, and the detailed, mimetic reduction of the body to its constituent parts. However, the deaths of Cinna, Asellio, Baebius, and Marius all show that, in the late Republic, the horrific act of discerptio did not merely conjure memories of Romulus or Mettius Fufidius in the distant past but were very much part of ‘the realities of the moment’.Footnote ⁴¹

Dismembering Cominius: The Pragmatic Question

As with stoning, there is no explicit indication of discerptio in c. 108, but unlike with stoning, the poem itself can be seen to enact the violent process of dismemberment. Gnilka seems to be approaching a similar observation, only to draw back. He rightly emphasizes the importance of the poem's structure to its meaning, but primarily because its ‘conciseness’ (Knappheit) indicates that the populus from line 1 and not the animals tear Cominius apart (1973: 261). However, c. 108 does not merely indicate but enacts the dismemberment of its victim, moving from the integrity of the whole body to the increasing fragmentation of its constituent parts. The use of bodily metaphors for the text facilitates the simultaneous, mimetic dismemberment of the body in the text and the text in the body.Footnote ⁴² This equivalence is particularly prominent in Senecan tragedy, where the ‘indecorous mangling of the body in the text … [is] parallel to the mangling of the body of the text.’Footnote ⁴³ Catullus presents a repulsive, dismembered poem that is mimetic of and embodied by the repulsive, dismembered corpse of Cominius, a spectacle to prompt the public disgust and derision that cap his punishment.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, there is at least as much focus on the process of dismemberment as on the end result, and on the iambist's violence upon his target and his poem. By enacting the violence it describes, the poem becomes a speech act.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Catullan corpus is particularly rich in speech acts. His poems repeatedly collapse the distinction between the description or threat of action and its performance. The ‘not good words’ that he enjoins Furius and Aurelius to carry to his girl are already carried to her by c. 11 itself, but the illocutionary force of the utterance extends beyond doing what it purports to ask others to do. The poem marks the dissolution of his relationship with Lesbia and, since that relationship is pervasively depicted as a marriage, so its dissolution is depicted as divorce. This divorce is performed by the poem through Catullus’ evocation of the legal procedure whereby a messenger is employed (Mayer (Reference Mayer1983) 297). If Hawkins is correct that Furius and Aurelius are also being cast in the role of the ‘iambic herald’, a common figure in Archilochus, Hipponax, and other iambists, then the interconnection of Roman custom, iambic convention, and pragmatics is even closer.Footnote ⁴⁶

However, it is in the more overtly aggressive iamboi, where verbal or physical violence is threatened, that we can most clearly see how that violence is also pragmatically enacted. In c. 37, Catullus’ abusive attack on Lesbia's lovers in the ‘randy inn’ is constituted both by the graffiti dicks (sopiones, 10) he threatens to paint on its walls and by the poem's own description of those dicks and of the act of painting them.Footnote ⁴⁷ Furthermore, the painting and writing of these mimetic dicks also equate to Catullus’ threatened, hypermasculine penetration of his targets (una ducentos irrumare sessores, 37.8), his response to their (projected) emasculating belief that only they have dicks (solis putatis esse mentulas uobis, 37.3). The equivalence between textual and sexual violence is even closer in c. 16, where the threat of anal and oral rape is enacted by the poem itself. Furius and Aurelius’ reading of Catullus’ appropriation of their words means that he is stuffing those aggressively phallic words into their mouths (Stroup (Reference Stroup2010) 225). The level of detail with which the style and structure of Catullus’ poems enact the violence they threaten can be seen in Fletcher's (Reference Fletcher2017) observation that the sequence of the threats, pedicabo followed by irrumabo, constitutes ‘ATM’ or ‘ass-to-mouth’. The detail that Catullus’ penis will have been in Furius’ and Aurelius’ anuses before he forces it into their mouths, with the implications of ingesting faecal matter and producing an os impurum, adds an extra degree of humiliation to the poem's threat and its textual enactment.

These Catullan speech acts are particularly concentrated in his more overtly iambic poems. For iambos itself is closely bound up with the violent physical effects of its verbal violence. Catullus himself evokes the image of iambos as a weapon to be hurled (ἰάπτɛιν) when he threatens to ‘brandish fierce iamboi’ (truces uibrare iambos, 36.5). Wray writes of Meleager's epigram on Archilochus,

Once again, Hipponax fr. 126 offers a particularly clear example. One could take ὅπως … ὄληται as an indirect question, with future indicative, so that the Muse is asked to tell how Eurymedontiades will die, and this would correspond closely to Catullus’ predictions of Cominius’ death and dismemberment, predictions which also enact that death and dismemberment. However, it is more attractive to take it as a final clause, with aorist subjunctive, so that the Muse's utterance (which is of course Hipponax's utterance) will be the direct cause of Eurymedontiades’ death, so that the equivalence between description and enactment is even closer. The way in which the stylistic details of the text serve to enact the violence in detail is also a feature of archaic iambos, and Telò (Reference Telò, Kurke, Weiss and Foster2019: 286–7) has recently demonstrated how the experience of reading Hipponax is mimetic of the suffering of his iambic targets. Particularly pertinent for c. 108 is Worman's observation that writers of iambos and satyr plays ‘describe the grotesque body in piecemeal fashion, with its most disreputable parts foregrounded especially when being beaten, abused, denied, or threatened with a dismemberment that reiterates the representational scheme’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dismemberment, both bodily and textual, and the illocutionary enactment of violence are central features of iambos, and Catullus incorporates both into c. 108.

Cominius’ body is verbally torn into its component parts, as the integral Cominius of line 1 is reduced to lingua, oculi, intestina and cetera membra. The process of reducing a coherent and substantial whole into smaller and smaller pieces is further enacted as the body of the poem, a single, ample sentence spanning three full elegiac couplets, is fragmented into ever decreasing cola. Its linguistic limbs (κῶλα, membra) dwindle in size from the tongue's line-and-a-half to the eyes’ single hexameter to the mere hemiepes assigned to and representing each of the intestines and – whether the phrase is dismissive or euphemistic – the other limbs. The poem's illocutionary violence also extends to points of stylistic detail. Whether we take the elision of lingu(a) exsect(a) auido as brutal apocope or smearing synaloepha, the effect is a gruesome one: either there is a grim mimesis of cutting or the absence of metrical articulation leaves the reader with a shapeless lump of flesh tossed to the vulture.Footnote ⁵⁰

Catullus’ depiction of Cominius’ dismemberment is closely grounded in ‘the realities of the moment’, a time of mob violence when people such as Asellio, Baebius, and Cinna were torn to pieces. His illocutionary enactment of it in a threat that is its own fulfilment situates the poem in the ‘defined literary tradition’ of iambos. However, this is not merely another generic feature that can be adapted to the realities of the moment. Because the illocutionary force of iambic utterance emphasizes its ability to impact upon the real world around it, Catullus’ decision to dismember Cominius textually is a self-conscious reflection on how iambos operates in his contemporary world. Iambos cannot exist in a cage of the Muses because it has real effects in the real world. C. 108 does not literally tear Cominius to pieces any more than Hipponax fr. 126 literally kills Eurymedontiades, like some Ephesian Avada Kedavra curse. Yet the conceit that it does so foregrounds the potential of hate-speech, that describing men as gut-knives or having tongues hostile to all good men leads directly to physical violence, so insulting your enemy is as good (or bad) as killing him. Iambos kills and c. 108 reflects Catullus’ realization of this.

Reading Catullus: The Final Question

The reader may take this realization as something that the poem embraces or that it reacts against. What sort of poem would we expect ‘our’ Catullus to write?Footnote ⁵¹ We should be wary of domesticating Catullus and transforming all his unsettling Otherness into a modern, liberal commentary on that Otherness.Footnote ⁵² Iambos too can be taken as a self-critical genre that problematizes its own violence, but Carey and others have made a strong case for its normative assertion of mainstream values: ‘Archilochus the outsider is not a modern invention (he is there in Critias); but invention he is. … Archilochus’ attacks are firmly based on shared social values. It is the victim, not the poet, who is marginalised.’Footnote ⁵³ It is certainly possible to read c. 108 as subtly, deliberately, and effectively employing the strategies that this article has detected: the legitimation of mob justice, the disingenuous construction of a community of boni, the endorsement of violence resulting from and enacted by hate-speech. However, Catullus long post-dated Critias and the ancient ‘invention’ of the problematic iambist as outsider. We need not construct an idealized, romanticized Catullus to imagine a poet profoundly familiar with the idea of iambos and its ambivalent reputation, employing the art that reveals art to show how problematic the adaptation of a defined literary tradition to the realities of the moment could be, when that tradition is iambos and those realities those of political violence. But the question remains open: how do you like your Catullus?Footnote ⁵⁴