One of Catullus’ best-known poems describes a man who smiles at every occasion. When people are crying in the courtroom, he smiles. When people mourn at a funeral, he smiles. The sting in the tail of poem 39 is that the man, Egnatius, is from Spain, where people brush their teeth with urine, and so his smiling reminds Romans of his native province's grotesque hygiene. But perhaps there is more to this Egnatius – or at least not quite as little as Catullus’ invective caricature of him suggests. The Spaniard is serenely unmoved: he ‘beams’ (renidet) even when others are affected by grief at a funeral, or by reversals of fortune in a court case. ‘In every situation’ (39.2) he is untroubled by the turmoil of everyday life. What if that unchanging smile were less a result of tactlessness or vanity, and something closer to the smile of the lotus-eating Epicureans in Tennyson’ poem quoted above? Egnatius appears again in another poem of Catullus as a bearded foreigner among a group of pleasure-seeking contubernales in a bar; Catullus sarcastically calls him ‘good’ (bonum, 37.19). Such a characterization matches many invective attacks on Epicurean figures. Hostile observers often misrepresented their philosophical pursuit of uoluptas as mere licentiousness or degenerate pleasure seeking. On any reading, these descriptions of Egnatius are insulting. But if some rival poet or thinker were concealed behind the aggressive simplifications of abusive verse, Catullus would then be engaging in another kind of attack. By reducing Epicurean pleasure to dissolute indulgence, and the pursuit of ataraxia to incessant smiling, Catullus strips these philosophical actions of any intellectual dignity or integrity. They become social gaffes, undistinguished and banal.
This article analyzes the representation of Egnatius as an example of a wider banalization of philosophy in the Carmina. Cicero's philosophical treatises offer a window onto the Hellenistic sects as an object of debate and a means of self-definition in the late Republic. References to words and ideas throughout the letters show the easy acquaintance his addressees had with philosophical learning.Footnote 2 While Cicero's alarmist claim that Epicureans have ‘taken over all of Italy’ is obviously an exaggeration, it testifies both to the number of Epicurean devotees and to their persistent stereotyping as literarily and philosophically unsophisticated, even boorish.Footnote 3 I argue that Catullus also makes use of such stereotyping in his poems about Egnatius. The argument that Egnatius was an Epicurean has certainly been made before, in greatest detail by Neudling in his Prosopography to Catullus (1955), and then, without any reference to Neudling, in a little-cited article by Németh (Reference Németh1998), both of whom are primarily concerned to tie Egnatius to other major figures of the period: an Epicurean school close to Catullus that included Caelius (Neudling), or a group that included Caesar (Németh).Footnote 4 By contrast, this article shows in detail how the representation of Egnatius employs standard invective tropes against Epicureans, reinterpreting poems 37, 38, and 39 as a series unified by the humorous banalization of philosophical tropes. The banal is not necessarily the unimportant; many poems in Catullus’ corpus invest significance in moments of everyday life and etiquette that we would ordinarily classify as fairly banal. Rather, by attacking personalities for their failures of taste rather than for their philosophical convictions or beliefs, Catullus represents his invective targets in a discursive field over which he has control. Poets, philosophers, statesmen: Catullus judges them all for their elegance or gaucherie, and as a result, many contemporary figures – even major ones – end up seeming strangely small.
The idea that a serious Epicurean may lurk behind Catullus’ attacks on Egnatius is made more tempting by the fact that we have two fragments of a poem entitled De Rerum Natura by a man named Egnatius from the Republican period, ‘probably an Epicurean poet’, according to Neudling.Footnote 5 Macrobius cites just over a single line of the De Rerum Natura as one of two sources (along with Accius) for Vulcan's epithet Mulciber in Aen. 8.724.Footnote 6 He then cites two lines as the source for the adjective noctiuagus in Aen. 10.215.Footnote 7 There may be a third piece of evidence: the late antique Origo gentis Romanae refers to ‘book one of Egnatius’ for the startling theory that Remus was never killed by Romulus, although it could be a false reference, since the text is notoriously prone to error.Footnote 8
The fragments are tantalizing, but they also demand caution. Neudling's presumption that the poet was Epicurean rests on the fragments’ stylistic and metrical similarities with Lucretius. Particularly similar are the use of denique to sum up an argument, the heavy alliteration (labentibus … pulsa lo co cessit con cedens), and the occurrence of ‘sigmatic ecthlipsis’ (suppression of the final ‘s’ before a consonant) in the phrase labentibus Phoebe.Footnote 9 Yet the verses’ content is not especially Epicurean. If, as Courtney argues, the first fragment describes a volcanic eruption, then Egnatius and Lucretius would share an interest in natural science and a tendency towards mythological allegory (cf. Lucr. 2.655–60), though of course neither of these elements is exclusively Epicurean. Lucretius uses the word noctiuagus, and if the adjective originated with Egnatius, it might signal indebtedness to a poet from the same sect. But it is surely significant that Lucretius uses the word in passages describing views he rejects, once in evoking the noises that people irrationally imagine in the night (4.582) then again in describing the excessive religiosity of primitive humanity (5.1191). The title De Rerum Natura might have had an Epicurean ring, since it is attested also as the title of a work by a third Epicurean contemporary, Catius; but it is also attested as the title of a work by Varro, and in any case ‘nature’ was the watchword of more than one philosophical school.Footnote 10 If he was indeed a poet contemporary with Lucretius, and if Virgil alluded to him through his own use of noctiuagus (Aen. 10.216), then he is someone whose work we might expect Catullus to have known.Footnote 11 But the fragments are lamentably scant. My strategy in this article is to demonstrate that Egnatius was an Epicurean by reference to the extensive reworking of invective tropes against the sect within Catullus’ poems. The fragments might add tantalizing details to the argument, but they have unfortunately little probative value on their own.
I aim also to make a methodological point in this article about our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and poetry in the Catullan corpus. Very often the model to which we turn in classical scholarship to understand the interaction between discourses is one of ‘influence’. The poet, naturally receptive and open to the absorption of whatever is around him or her, draws influence from any and all ideas circulating in the contemporary cultural environment. Automatically presuming an openness to influence, though, leaves little room in our analysis for any deliberate attempt to downplay the importance of particular cultural currents, to create meaningful silences, to resist the pull of certain ideas. This article aims to replace a model of philosophical influence with one of competitive self-differentiation. By reducing matters of philosophical doctrine to issues of style and decorum, Catullus undermines his targets’ means of social distinction. The ‘banal’, as Saikat Majumdar has put it, represents the ‘absolute tyranny of the immanent and the inescapable’, the absence of what is transcendent, exceptional, unique. The banalization of philosophy in Catullus’ corpus is a means of diminishing the stature and distinction of others and enhancing the singular voice of the poet himself.Footnote 12
The need for competitive self-differentiation is exacerbated by the possibility that Catullus may well have seemed like someone swayed by Epicurean ideas. In his Carmina, he appears to live a life detached from any serious political ambition, paints a warm and affectionate picture of the value of friendship, and speaks openly of the pleasures of food and sex.Footnote 13 It is highly probable that Catullus read works by Epicurean contemporaries, such as Philodemus and – although the chronology is highly debated – Lucretius.Footnote 14 Yet such similarities should not obscure more obvious differences. As Lucretius’ parody of the besotted lover in book 4 of his De Rerum Natura reminds us, Catullus’ intense declarations of love and hatred are the precise antithesis of the Epicurean, who must pursue the absence of mental distress (ataraxia) by avoiding romantic love. Catullus’ subjective focus on the individual's own emotions (jealousy, anger, grief) runs completely counter to the aims of Hellenistic philosophy to preserve the mind from irrational intrusions.Footnote 15 I argue in this article that Catullus incorporates philosophical ideas into his poetry only to contrast them with his own, more personal credo about life and love, differentiating his individual perspective from a devotion to the schools. In a recent review of the question of Catullus and Epicureanism, John Godwin argues that, far from subscribing to Epicurean ideas, Catullus uses ‘ironic personae from literature and philosophy in order to lampoon, parody, and attack his targets’.Footnote 16 This article extends this observation but focuses on a particular mode of attack: the reduction of philosophical ideas to trite commonplaces and social gaffes.
1. Catullus 37: The Epicurean Herd
Catullus 37 is an invective poem addressed to an inanimate tavern and its nameless contubernales (‘mess-mates’ or ‘bar-mates’).Footnote 17 A huge crowd lolls around in this disreputable place:
Sleazy bar, and all you bar-mates, ninth pillar from the pilleus-wearing brothers: do you think that only you have cocks, that only you are permitted to fuck all together any female around, and think other men goats?Footnote 18
A group of men – a ‘hundred or two hundred’ (7) – enjoy the erotic opportunities that are offered in the bar. A primary object of their affections is a woman loved by Catullus ‘as much as no girl has ever been loved’ (12) – almost certainly Lesbia, given the clear echo of c. 8.5. The poem ends with the first mention of Egnatius, the most objectionable of all (praeter omnes, 17). Neudling argued that the prominent use of contubernales in the opening line alludes to a specific philosophical use of the word contubernium to describe Epicurean ‘fellowship’, though it should be admitted that the evidence for that usage is limited and from a later period.Footnote 19 Yet the poem does offer a deliberate, if patently inaccurate, representation of Epicurean aspirations towards pleasure and philosophical community. Capped with a reference to the bearded Egnatius, the text mobilizes many of the clichés of anti-Epicurean invective that remained consistent from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity: the frequenting of bars, the association with prostitutes, the devotion to pleasure rather than to any nobler idea. To describe Egnatius and Lesbia in these terms is obviously an insult. But it also differentiates Catullus, or at least the speaker of his poem. He adopts a poetic voice marked by sexual and emotional extremes, setting himself emphatically apart from the hazy groupthink of the Epicurean herd.
Epicurus’ conception of pleasure as telos gave rise to a stubborn mischaracterization of his thought. Despite his protests that ‘constant drinking and partying and enjoyment of boys and women’ were not the components of a pleasant life, his followers were frequently linked in the popular imagination to drinking and sex.Footnote 20 Athenaeus preserves fragments of the third-century-BCE comic poet Bato in which a character cites Epicurean ideas as license for his own pleasure seeking:
…the man who can recline with a beautiful woman in his arms, and take
hold of two pots of Lesbian wine: this is the sensible man, this is a good thing. Epicurus told us what I'm telling you now. If everyone lived this life I'm living, no-one would be unnatural, no-one an adulterer.Footnote 21
Since Epicurean philosophy is reduced in this comic parody to the pursuit of bodily pleasure, its adherent can use the philosopher's name to excuse the kind of drinking and promiscuous sex that would otherwise lead him to be labelled atopos (‘unnatural’; literally, ‘out of place’) or moichos (an ‘adulterer’).Footnote 22 Cicero uses many of these tropes with particular force in the In Pisonem. He depicts the Epicurean Piso with crowds in lowlife bars. ‘You listen to them in brothels’, he charges, ‘amid debauches, while drinking and dining’, those men who ‘define pain as evil, pleasure as good’.Footnote 23 At one point, he describes Piso with his ‘extremely low-class herds’ (sordidissimis gregibus) at an unbridled drinking party that resembles the banquet of the Lapiths and the Centaurs.Footnote 24 The slander persisted well into the Imperial period. ‘Live unnoticed’? Yes, says Plutarch. Drinking and sex with prostitutes are activities best done in the dark.Footnote 25
Many details in Catullus’ picture of the contubernales in poem 37 mirror stock tropes of anti-Epicurean invective. The brutish, indiscriminate sexuality at the sleazy bar – ironically, these men accuse others of being he-goats (hircos) – matches attacks on Epicurean pleasure as animalistic.Footnote 26 As in Cicero's attack on Piso, the milieu is also emphatically low-class. Scholars have often pointed to the sexual sense of Latin sedere (‘to sit’) in explaining the poem's repeated use of the word (sedetis … sessores … consedit), but the mere fact of the men sitting at the tavern, rather than reclining in precise positions in the careful hierarchy of an elite Roman dinner party, reinforces the impropriety of the contubernales’ dissolution of social boundaries.Footnote 27 The repeated image of sitting also creates an impression of lethargy which fits the stock image of the indolent Epicurean, removed from any worthwhile social or political activity.Footnote 28 The poem also vividly represents the denizens of the bar as a herd, an exaggeratedly large group of people who come together to devote themselves to pleasure. The verb repeated most often in these opening lines is putare, ‘to think’. Again and again the word describes pluralized thought, the slavish adherence of a group of people to a set of mistaken ideas. ‘You think’ (putatis, 3) that only you have cocks? ‘You think’ (putare, 5) that other men are goats? You ‘don't think’ (non putatis, 7) I would dare assault you? ‘Think again’ (Atqui putate, 9).Footnote 29 Behind the abuse remain the shadows, faint but still perceptible, of virtues: shared thoughts and ideas, fellowship in large numbers, social equality. Catullus’ obscene neologism confutuere (5), with its sense of both collective action and intensification, may be a wicked recasting of amicitia as a group ideal; as Nappa (Reference Nappa2001, 63) puts it, the ‘unification of multiple entities into a collective is perhaps the dominant trope of this poem’. Although we can see the outlines of a coherent philosophical group in this repeated vocabulary, those positive values are vanishingly faint under the distorting invective lens.
Watson (Reference Watson2009) has shown that Catullus uses the characteristic language of Roman prostitution throughout the poem to present the salax taberna as a brothel as well as a bar, and this representation also fits aspects of the Epicurean tradition. The time Epicurus spent with hetairai, and his admission of women to his philosophical school, was a constant element in hostile accounts of his life.Footnote 30 Later Epicureans seem to have positively recommended sex with prostitutes as a means of safely satiating sexual desire. In two particularly complex lines, Lucretius twists romantic clichés to instruct his reader to replace love's metaphorical blows with the physical act of sex with a prostitute.Footnote 31 In an instance of sexual one-upmanship that sounds similar to the brash boasting of the contubernales in Catullus 37, Philodemus boasts that he pays just five drachmas for twelve screws from the prostitute Lysianassa, whereas other men waste much more money – and their mental wellbeing – by pursuing married women (Epig. 22).Footnote 32 Similarly, at the beginning of c. 37, the contubernales think that they can have sex with quiquid est puellarum, ‘any woman around’ (4). Like the comic character in the Bato fragment who says that Epicurus has allowed him (ἐξόν) to loll drunkenly with a woman, these men think that they are licensed by their philosophy (licere, 4) to discharge their sexual urges with whichever woman is available. Bato's comic character says that if everyone subscribed to the same ideals, no-one would be called an ‘adulterer’ (μοιχός). Yet Catullus’ voice in the poem is just this sort of unphilosophical outsider: once he realizes that Lesbia is among the ‘women available’ in the bar, he calls them moechi, a word that ‘signifies only a man who pursues inappropriate women’.Footnote 33
The association with prostitutes also led to the charge – apparently paradoxical, by modern if not by Roman sexual sensibilities – that the Epicureans were effeminate, unmanned by being oversexed. By a familiar Roman cultural paradox, the ‘excessive’ active sexual behaviour of Epicureans with women was coded as a kind of effeminizing weakness.Footnote 34 Already among Greek thinkers, the Skeptic Arcesilaus (third century BCE) reportedly quipped that Epicureans never left their school to join other sects, since, after all, a eunuch cannot become a man.Footnote 35 Roman texts assimilate members of the sect with stock archetypes of effeminacy, such as cross-dressers and worshippers of Eastern goddesses, and Epicurus himself was insultingly labelled the κιναιδολόγος (‘professor of passive penetration’).Footnote 36 In Catullus 37, by threatening to irrumate the contubernales all together (6–7), and to inscribe (or tattoo?) the ‘front’ or ‘face’ of the taberna with penises (9–10), the poet asserts their sexual passivity and emphasizes their effeminacy and weakness.Footnote 37 The ironic use of military language throughout the poem – starting with the primary sense of contubernales as military ‘tent-mates’, and climaxing with the suggestion that Lesbia is a kind of Helen for whom the poet has fought ‘great wars’ (13) – also alludes ironically to their failure of masculinity, recalling the familiar vision of Epicurean pleasure-seekers as the unmanly opposite of Roman soldiers.Footnote 38
Egnatius himself appears climactically as the opening word of line 19 after a parodically grandiose introduction that singles him out as the worst of the lot:
You above all of the long-hairs, a son of rabbitful Celtiberia, Egnatius: your shady beard makes you ‘good’, and your teeth are brushed with Spanish urine.
Commentators have long seen Egnatius’ beard as the potential mark of a philosopher.Footnote 39 It is worth underlining how rare it is. No other figure in Catullus’ poetry wears a beard.Footnote 40 Although a beard could connote the remote mores of an older Rome, in the late Republic a heavy beard was ‘worn chiefly by philosophers and foreigners’ (Christenson Reference Christenson2004, 61). The semiotics of hair in these lines, with their combined references to shagginess and softness, are also redolent of a larger invective discourse exposing the immorality of sham philosophers. Egnatius’ beard makes him seem ‘good’, advertising his virtue as a philosopher. Its shadowy darkness [opaca] suggests at once its thickness and the cultural associations of his sect; Seneca called the Epicureans ‘the crowd that stays in the shadows’ (umbratica … turba, Ben. 2).Footnote 41 Yet he is also one of the ‘long-hairs’ (capillati), scion of soft and furry, ‘rabbitful’ Spain (cuniculosae, a neologism), words that suggest the archetypal appearance of pueri pathici. Egnatius is hinted to be a moechocinaedus, a man who is both ‘an active lover of woman and a passive lover of men’.Footnote 42
Catullus moves quickly from aggressor to aggrieved in the poem, in a manner typical of his self-protective insistence on sexual propriety in the Carmina. The speaker is outraged that the contubernales also love Lesbia, a woman he says has been ‘loved as much as no woman will ever be loved’ (amata tantum quantum amabitur nulla, 37.12). This hyperbolic declaration irrupts at the centre of his invective text as if it had intruded from another world – as indeed it has, since it is quoted almost exactly from a very different poem, Carmen 8, ‘Miser Catulle’ (8.5). It represents an ideal in direct opposition to the contubernales. Fitzgerald articulates what was so suspect about romantic love to the Epicureans. Because it ‘focuses the attention of the lover on a unique, irreplaceable beloved, love is a prime manifestation of the attitude preventing participation in a constantly changing and generously varied universe … [T]he love which fosters a sense of the uniqueness of the lover … is also an enemy of mental health’.Footnote 43 The individualism of the anguished Catullan persona contrasts with his opponents’ undifferentiated groupthink (cf. mi … meo … mihi at 11–13 with omnes … omnes … omnes at 15–18). He separates himself from an emotion that looks suspiciously or dangerously similar to his own, the generic ‘love’ (amatis, 15, the same word) of the pleasure-loving Epicureans.Footnote 44
In Carmen 37, Catullus reduces philosophical ideals to mere banality, depicting Egnatius and his companions as a herd of indiscriminate pleasure-seekers. By contrast, the hyperbolic declaration of love at the centre of the poem represents the speaker's striving towards excess, a climactic recapitulation of the intensely individualized romantic drama of his erotic verse, a surplus of passionate feeling that rejects the sedentary pleasures of Epicurean happiness. Acting only by repetition, the contubernales sit, and think, and love, with the passive acceptance of the faithful herd.
2. Catullus 39: The Smiling Outsider
Readers of poem 39 tend to see Egnatius as Catullus wants us to see him, as the single grinning buffoon in a sea of sad faces at a court case and a funeral. But if we recall the serene observer of a shipwreck in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (2.1–13) – the philosophical initiate who thinks it ‘sweet’ to view others’ distress from a position of mental security – Egnatius’ behaviour is suddenly recognizable as a philosophical pose:
Egnatius, because he has white teeth, smiles in every situation. If someone approaches the defendant's bench, when the advocate provokes weeping, he smiles; if there is mourning at the pyre of a dutiful son, when a bereft mother weeps for her only boy, he smiles. Whatever it is, wherever he is, whatever he does, he smiles.
In the first line of the poem, Catullus gives an explicit – and insultingly trivializing – explanation for Egnatius’ habit of smiling in upsetting situations: he has very white teeth. But the poet then goes on to describe a series of scenarios in which it is possible to read his curious behaviour very differently, as a deliberate philosophical response to life's troubles. Epicurean training encouraged initiates to recalibrate their vision of the world around them. The ordinary incidents of human life, and even life and death itself, become no more than the movement of atoms. Epicurus wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus that followers must ‘accustom’ themselves to ‘believe that death is nothing’. The wise person according to this principle, ‘will not take thought over funeral rites’.Footnote 45 Equally, since he or she must reject what empty opinion considers a good and assess everything in terms only of the pleasure or pain it offers him- or herself, an Epicurean will not be moved to tears by someone else's court case. In a letter from early 53, Cicero mocks the recent Epicurean convert C. Trebatius Testa for the lack of fit between his new philosophical principles and his work as a jurist: ‘how will you uphold the ius ciuile when you do everything for your own sake, and not for the citizens’?Footnote 46 At funerals or in court, the Epicurean is an inappropriately serene interloper amid the drama of everyday life.
One outward sign of this serenity was smiling or laughing.Footnote 47 An Epicurean ‘must philosophize while laughing’ (γɛλᾶν ἅμα δɛῖ καὶ φιλοσοφɛῖν), according to a sententia preserved in one of the ancient collections, and will be ‘happy, even when stretched on the rack’.Footnote 48 The emphasis on laughing and good humour is probably part of the legacy of Democritus, the ‘laughing philosopher’, who seems to have exerted a significant influence on the ethics as well as the materialist cosmology of Epicureanism.Footnote 49 Among Romans, Horace famously claims to ‘tell the truth with a smile’ in the Satires (ridentem dicere uerum), a phrase that Sergio Yona associates with the Philodemean dictum that the Epicurean sage be ‘cheerful, friend-loving, and gentle’, neither rebuking others aggressively nor troubled by others’ insults.Footnote 50 The image of the laughing or smiling Epicurean also occurs in the writings of the sect's opponents. Cicero imagines a devotee ‘smiling to himself’ while others talk of duty and public virtues in the law courts or the Senate (Fin. 2.76). Plutarch presents the forced merriment and incessant good cheer of Epicureans as an aggravating delusion (Mor. 1091B). At the heart of this idea is the aspiration to live a life that approximates the perfectly happy, imperturbable existence of the gods. ‘We should make the statues of our gods cheerful and smiling’, according to a fragment of Diogenes of Oinoanda, ‘so that instead of being fearful, we smile at them in response’.Footnote 51 Elsewhere, the smile of Epicureans was thought to project a godlike detachment. Statius depicts the Roman Pollius Felix, himself a composer of Epicurean verse, gazing down from the ‘high citadel of his mind’, smiling a detached smile at human error and on ordinary – that is, misguided – joys (Silv. 2.2.131–2).
Something of that godlike detachment is evident in the word Catullus uses for Egnatius’ smile: he ‘shines’ or ‘beams’ (renidet). Interpretations of the word to mean a ‘boorish grin’ (Neudling Reference Neudling1955, 58) or a ‘silly grin’ (Nisbet and Rudd Reference Nisbet and Rudd2004, 104) are excessively swayed by preconceptions about this particular poem. Catullus 39 is the first extant text to use the verb of a person. In the contemporary or near-contemporary poem of Lucretius, renidet is used of a rich man's house ‘gleaming’ with gold (2.27), and the related verb renidescit is used of the earth ‘flashing’ with the bronze armour of marching soldiers (2.326). It is true that in the Augustan period and later the verb becomes a more familiar way to describe a human smile, used variously for the imperious gloating of a Parthian general, the guileless glee of Icarus, and the innocent smile of a baby.Footnote 52 Yet even then it retained its impersonal sense of ‘shining’. Horace, for example, uses the word in the Odes to describe moonshine reflected on the ocean's surface (2.5.19), and in the Epodes to describe the household gods, which gleam when polished with wax (2.66). With its overtones of a grander, impassive ‘beaming’, Catullus’ word for ‘smile’ conveys a sense of his target's philosophical pretensions while reminding us of the more literal shine on his teeth. He ‘gleams’. There may even be a specific philosophical allusion since Epicurean texts often associate their sect's truth with shining light. Lucretius hails Epicurus as the first man who could ‘bring forth light from such darkness’ (3.1–2; cf. 3.1043–4), and Torquatus in Cicero's De Finibus says that Epicurean truth is ‘clearer and brighter than the sun itself’ (1.71).Footnote 53 It may be mere coincidence, but it is suggestive that both extant fragments of Egnatius describe shining light: one describes the flash of ‘Vulcan’ into the sky, and the other the break of daylight at dawn. The paucity of fragments makes it impossible to prove, but it is conceivable that the beam of Egnatius’ smile is a deflation of philosophically inflected images of shining light from the man's own writings.
In the remainder of c. 39, the poet tells his addressee that he will teach him a lesson, mimicking the stiffly formal tone of a censorious orator – or, perhaps, a philosopher. He has already said that Egnatius has a morbus, a ‘disease’ (7), a word that has a potentially philosophical ring, since Epicureans, among other ancient thinkers, considered their teachings a therapy necessary for ensuring the health of the soul.Footnote 54 Then, at line 9, he says that he ‘must issue a warning to you, good Egnatius’ (Quare monendum est te mihi, bone Egnati, 39.9).Footnote 55 If Egnatius’ provincial origins had been in one of any number of regions, anywhere that washes teeth with clean water, his ceaseless smiling would still be a social flaw. The ethnic groups the poet names as possibilities for Egnatius’ origins in lines 10–13 move outwards in an imagined itinerary from the metropolitan centre (Roman, Sabine, Tiburtine, Umbrian, Etruscan) and then dart back closer to Rome for Lanuvium, before reaching Catullus’ own point of origin (‘to touch upon my own people too’), the area north of the Po (Transpadanus, 13). Yet Egnatius’ outsider identity far exceeds Catullus’ own. His origins lie in a more distant and alien colonial outpost:
But as it is, you are Celtiberian: in the land of Celtiberia, what each one pisses he uses every morning to brush his teeth and gums until they're red. So the more polished that tooth of yours is, the more piss it tells everyone you've drunk.
The idea that Spanish tribes used urine to wash their teeth is attested in other sources, but it may still be, as a scholar of the archaeology of the region puts it, ‘an invented stereotype aimed at making the indigenes appear subhuman’.Footnote 56 Cultural memory preserved an image of the Celtiberi as warlike and aggressive, a reputation fostered by the bitter Celtiberian Wars of the second century BCE and no doubt reinforced in the decade after Catullus’ death by Caesar's reports of the Celtiberi and other ‘barbarian’ tribes fighting on the Pompeian side (BCiv. 1.38). It therefore became a byword for a lack of civilization.Footnote 57 Cicero harps upon the same blemish of provincial origin in attacking L. Decidius Saxa, tribune of the plebs and former officer of Caesar's army, whose origins nonetheless lie ‘in farthest Celtiberia … a man drawn from the farthest peoples’.Footnote 58 Syme doubts whether this Saxa, with his important military position and three Roman names, was really the ‘barbarian’ that Cicero accuses him of being, and the same may be suspected about Egnatius.Footnote 59 Catullus turns the man into a rustic caricature – and, indeed, in the writings of Cicero and other opponents of Epicureanism in Rome, rustic caricatures is often how Epicureans appear.
The lack of literary polish in Epicurus’ own writings and the alleged barbarousness of pre-Lucretian treatises in Latin helped create the stereotype of Epicureans as uncultured.Footnote 60 Just as Catullus attacks Egnatius’ smiling as ‘neither discriminating, as I judge it, nor urbane’ (neque elegantem, ut arbitror, neque urbanum, 39.8), so in similar language Cicero attacks the Epicurean Piso, for example, in whose pleasure-seeking there is ‘nothing elegant, nothing discriminating, nothing refined’ (nihil … lautum, nihil elegans, nihil exquisitum, Pis. 67). Epicurean addressees of Cicero's letters seem especially eager, as Griffin (Reference Griffin and Powell1995) 333 observes, to ‘demonstrate their Roman polish and urbanity, qualities felt to be lacking the solemn orthodoxy of professional Epicurean philosophers’.Footnote 61 They could also be associated with provincial origins. ‘You collect your men from all the hick towns’, charges Cicero to his Epicurean interlocutor in the De Finibus, ‘good men, no doubt, but certainly not very educated’.Footnote 62 The idea of a Celtiberian philosopher must have seemed particularly paradoxical; later, Valerius Maximus says that the ‘philosophy’ (philosophia) of the brutish Celtiberi is to die fighting wherever possible.Footnote 63 The image of the serene, urine-swilling Spaniard in c. 39 can be read, then, not as the opposite of a philosopher, but as a comic exaggeration of charges of infacetia that were already being levelled at Epicureans in the middle of the first century BCE.
Finally, Catullus’ aggressive mischaracterization of Egnatius reflects a particular colonial dynamic in the Carmina. The poet, while drawing attention to his own provincial origins, also becomes an arbiter of others’ ability to adapt their identities to metropolitan expectations. He establishes a hierarchy. Even when he is being self-deprecating or ironic and deflating, Catullus’ poems flaunt the fact that he has succeeded in Rome. He sentimentalizes his origins in the province of Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy, making these origins amenable to a typical Roman yearning for the values of the countryside. But Egnatius’ roots lie in a far more distant part of the Empire. His origin is beyond the pale.Footnote 64 Spain is not romantic but barbaric; not humble but backwards; not a place that could be loved in cultured verse – at least not yet. It is a place of base physicality, which can only ever be veiled by a simulacrum of urbanity. Catullus, the ‘good’ colonial subject who can move fluidly between the Roman and provincial parts of his own identity, is able to spot the pretender, the ‘bad’ colonial subject who cannot. Behind the incessant smile of Egnatius’ philosophical serenity, then, is something basely physical: an alien custom of brushing one's teeth with urine. That provincial stain is exposed every time Egnatius opens his mouth.
3. Catullus 38: Banalizing Consolatio
There is a final connection to philosophical ideas in the short, apparently unrelated poem that appears between the two Egnatius texts.Footnote 65 In poem 38, the Catullan persona angrily rebukes a friend, Cornificius, for not consoling him. Q. Cornificius is remembered in Ovid's Tristia in a list of ‘neoteric’ poets that includes Catullus and his contemporaries (Calvus, Cinna, Anser, and Valerius Cato). His life is also documented in a series of letters from Cicero beginning in 50 that start with his marriage and chart his rising career amid the political upheavals of the 40s. He died in 42 as governor of the province Africa Vetus, having led forces against a rival governor appointed by the triumvirs.Footnote 66 He is also someone, at least from the evidence from the 40s, with an interest in philosophy, almost certainly of a Stoic stripe. When Cornificius had first been appointed governor in 44, Cicero wrote to him urging him to quell disturbances with harsh punishment, even though, he says, ‘you bear such things calmly on account of your greatness of both mind and soul’. Cicero says that he himself is thankful that he has been ‘armed’ by philosophy against the assaults of Fortune, and bids Cornificius be thankful for the same reason – ‘but’, he concedes, ‘you know these things better than I do’.Footnote 67 These letters – admittedly from a period after Catullus’ likely death – praise Cornificius for his ‘hard work’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘great intellect’ as well as his ‘culture’ and ‘wit’, and urge him repeatedly to throw his whole self into service to the state.Footnote 68 Rawson has argued from the philosophical language in these letters that Cornificius should also be identified with the author of a Stoicizing treatise on etymology, the De Etymis Deorum, which is cited by Macrobius and the grammarians.Footnote 69 In Servius Auctus (ad Aen. 3.332), that author is named Cornificius Longus (Cicero never mentions a cognomen). If Catullus’ addressee was in fact ‘the long one’, there is potential wordplay in his assertion in c. 38 that providing a consolation would be ‘a very small thing’ (minimum … est, 38.4).
Readers have long noticed other details in poem 38 that suggest that Catullus’ address to this high-minded friend might not be entirely serious. The repetition of simple, almost childlike vocabulary in the opening lines could evoke real pathos, or it could be exaggeratedly self-pitying:
Things are bad, Cornificius, bad for your Catullus, by Hercules, and full of labours – and getting worse and worse, by the day and the hour.
The use of male (‘badly’) twice in two lines has its closest parallels in the Catullan corpus in poems of mock anger or lament: in c. 3, when the poet curses death for stealing away Lesbia's pet bird, and in 14, when Catullus curses Calvus for sending him a gift of horrid poems.Footnote 70 This is the only poem in which Catullus swears ‘by Hercules’, and if it makes sense here to invoke the traditional exemplar of Stoic discipline, he also follows it with a particularly Herculean word, laboriose, an ‘unmistakably playful allusion to Hercules’ labors’.Footnote 71 In the final lines of the poem, Catullus asks Cornificius: ‘with what address [allocutio] have you consoled me [solatus es]’? (38.5).Footnote 72 He pleads for some small consolation from Cornificius ‘sadder than Simonides’ tears’ (maestius lacrimis Simonideis, 8), presumably mirroring the elegiac tone popularly associated with the Greek lyric poet.Footnote 73
Yet, as Burkard (Reference Burkard2006) argues most convincingly, sympathy and tears are the opposite of what one should expect from a Stoic consolation. If Cornificius is the man whom Cicero described, and if Catullus’ allusions to Hercules recall the addressee's Stoic ideals, then surely any consolation was more likely to contain the usual bracing reminder to bear life's ills with grim acceptance. In the incongruity of asking a Stoic friend for a sad, sympathetic consolation, Catullus seems to draw teasing attention to the conflicting sides of Cornificius’ personality, as both a writer of (vividly emotional?) neoteric verse and a devotee of Stoicism, guardian of the rationality of one's own mind. Just as poem 37 treated Epicurean ideas about sexuality as mere indulgence, and 39 treated Epicurean ataraxia as tactless, ceaseless smiling, so 38 transforms a hallmark of Stoic interaction – the consolation – into little more than a request for mutual sympathy. Catullus 38 has none of the invective venom of the surrounding poems, but it shares their banalizing reduction of philosophical integrity to questions of social manners.
4. Conclusion
The poetic sequence from Carmina 37 to 39 sheds light on a particular aspect of the poems’ worldview. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Catullus never seems to take serious philosophy very seriously. Many figures who are linked publicly with Epicureanism in the period appear in Catullus’ texts, as both enemies (Memmius, Piso, Caesar) and friends (Manlius Torquatus, Quintilius Varus). In the Carmina, however, the philosophical aspects of their character remain mostly invisible, or at best implied. Catullus’ representations focus inevitably upon whether these people were good to him, not how or whether they pursued the good in other parts of their lives. There is little question that Catullus, like any educated Roman of his period, is aware of philosophical ideas like officium and virtus, and can twist allusions to them to his own ends. But any identifiable philosophical language that appears in the Carmina is transformed, subordinated to the poet's own values and program. Catullus may evoke a sort of philosophical dialogue in his erotic epigrams, for example, and yet his unanswerable questions draw attention instead to the irrational paradoxes of his personal romantic drama.Footnote 74 The poems representing grief for his brother describe a situation well examined in contemporary philosophical texts, and yet their open expression of mourning flouts their usual prescriptions for appropriate masculine behaviour.Footnote 75 The Carmina stress repeatedly and emphatically the priority of a private and emotional life over other people's determinations of propriety or virtue. The sequence of poems from 37 to 39 reveals that this apparently minimal impact of philosophy upon Catullus is instead a deliberate diminution. He diminishes the vital importance of philosophy as a mode of individual self-expression in his elite circle, and thereby throws into higher relief his own persona, which is marked by the sort of emotional extremes expressly condemned by the Hellenistic schools.
This diminution of contemporary philosophy may be demonstrated by one last example, drawn from the Catullan work most often read through a philosophical lens: poem 13 (Cenabis bene). As has long been noticed, the poem is strikingly similar to an invitation poem by the contemporary Epicurean, Philodemus.Footnote 76 I leave aside here the difficult question of which poem came first; even if Catullus wrote before Philodemus, the Philodemean poem shows that an invitation to a frugal dinner among friends could potentially be read as an Epicurean motif. Yet assessing poem 13 alongside its explicitly Epicurean counterpart shows just how far Catullus has gone to avoid communicating any philosophical ideal. Notoriously, the poem invites Fabullus to a meal that is precarious and uncertain – it is delivered in a series of conditional clauses – and will only occur if the guest brings all the food, wine, laughter, and women himself. More than a playful turn on an expected idea, Catullus puts into doubt the very thing that an Epicurean would find desirable: the sharing of a meal with friends. Whereas Philodemus invites Piso in his poem to spend time with ‘ever-faithful comrades’ (ἑτάρους … παναληθέας, 27.5), Catullus emphasizes not social equality but something much more singular and elite. He will grace the (potential) dinner guest with his exceptional sense of style, presenting him with the perfume bestowed by Venus and the Cupids on his beloved (13.11). Philodemus evokes the charmed world of the Phaeacians in order to evoke a placid, carefree atmosphere (27.6). Catullus, by contrast, infuses his party with a more flamboyant air of divine paradox, climaxing with the prediction that Fabullus will want the gods to make him ‘all nose’ (13.14) – after which, presumably, he will not be able to eat. Compared to the Epicurean dinner invitation, Catullus’ dinner is flagrantly unreal, elevated by lofty allusions to the gods and to his own aesthetic ideals, and yet also stripped of any meaning as a gesture of philosophical community. An actual meal between companions or initiates is the banal norm against which the poem defines itself. It is an ordinary ideal that the poet exuberantly rejects.
As a doctus poeta of the late Republic, connected with elite intellectual circles in Rome, Catullus was surely familiar with the ideas of the Hellenistic schools. He was surrounded by others who discoursed constantly about philosophical ideas, and perhaps if writings in other genres survived by Catullus himself, he might have discoursed in more detail about them too. But the carefully crafted world of the Carmina does not reflect the easy absorption of those influences. Rather, philosophy is deliberately diminished in importance. In this singular and subjective world, philosophical ideas are stripped of any specificity or integrity and are represented as commonplaces, and devotees of the schools are deprived of any nobility and represented as mere types. So Egnatius the philosopher vanishes behind a veil of banality. He is not charged with any dangerous or destructive ideas; he is pathetic and inoffensive, mocked for his faux pas. This is, of course, an exercise of power, a case of poetic one-upmanship that succeeded all too well. Today only the smallest traces of Egnatius survive. The most memorable is the glint of that smile, which Catullus has made truly, indelibly, permanent.
Acknowledgments
I presented my initial ideas for this paper at the ASCS Conference in 2019 at the University of New England, and I thank the audience on that occasion for their questions and suggestions. Leah Kronenberg, Leah O'Hearn, Katharina Volk, Patricia Watson, and Lindsay Watson generously read and remarked on various drafts. Finally, thank you to Bob Cowan and the anonymous readers for Antichthon for their comments and suggestions, all of which helped to improve the final piece.
