Names and naming are important in Catullus: the Index Nominum of Mynors’ OCT runs to five pages,Footnote ¹ and both the great public figures of the day and those about whom we know nothing other than their name feature in the Catullan corpus.Footnote ² Many of the poems begin with a named addressee as their incipit or in their opening lines,Footnote ³ and Catullus names individuals explicitly in order to honour them (see, e.g., Cat. 1.3 and 68.41–6),Footnote ⁴ or, alternatively, to shame or insult them (see, e.g., Cat. 93.1 and 78b.4, which, although missing a proper name, strongly implies that its recipient was identified by name in a now missing portion of the poem).Footnote ⁵ Catullus’ own name features twenty-five times in a corpus of only around 116 poems,Footnote ⁶ on which Amy Richlin comments ‘the poet's own name recurs again and again, undistorted, insistent, and upstage’.Footnote ⁷ The name which has attracted by far the most attention in the Catullan corpus is, of course, that of his beloved Lesbia, and scholarly interest has been piqued by its use in poem 51, a translation of a fragment by Sappho of Lesbos; most famously of all, in poem 79, Catullus appears to identify the real woman behind the pseudonym ‘Lesbia’ via a pun; I shall treat an alternative, more controversial approach to the name Lesbia which is consonant with the argument that guides this paper in its final section. However, the significance of proper names and of the act of naming individuals in the Catullan corpus has not yet been fully explored, despite some studies of the phenomenon of Catullan play on proper names which have either concentrated on isolated examples,Footnote ⁸ or focused largely on such wordplay as exemplifying Catullan doctrina.Footnote ⁹ This paper examines several previously unidentified examples of play on the names of individuals within Catullan poetry, analysing them both in their contemporary socio-political context, and in terms of their alignment with archaic iambic verse. It thereby offers a new interpretation of the use and significance of names and naming in Catullus, and in particular the way in which Catullus both participates in the public abuse culture of late Republican Rome and writes himself into the tradition of iambic poetry.

Given the number and variety of names of individuals that feature within the Catullan corpus, a necessary preliminary to this investigation of Catullan play on names is the categorization of names within the corpus. Leaving aside the naming of mythological characters, such as Remus (Cat. 28.15 and 58.5),Footnote ¹⁰ we can divide the names of individuals in the Catullan corpus into five broad categories:Footnote ¹¹ (1) those referring to known, living historical individuals: e.g. Julius Caesar (Cat. 11, 57, 93) and Cicero (Cat. 49);Footnote ¹² (2) those denoting deceased historical personages (e.g. Simonides in Cat. 38.8 or Callimachus, identified by the patronymic Battiades, at Cat. 65.16 and 116.2); (3) examples of invented names or pseudonyms behind which the reader is apparently supposed to be able to recognize historical individuals named directly elsewhere in the Catullan corpus: e.g. Mentula (‘prick’: Cat. 94, 105, 114, 115), who has been identified with Julius Caesar's praefectus fabrum, Mamurra (Cat. 29, 57);Footnote ¹³ (4) those which can neither be identified securely with known historical figures, nor seem to have a point particular to the context in which they appear; (5) those names referring to characters who cannot be identified with historical figures, and which seem to bear a significant charge in the context in which they feature, as Catullus plays up their (usually, but not always, etymological) connotations as part of his iambic attack. The first four of these categories will not be treated here at any great length, owing largely to constraints of space, but also to the major focus of this paper upon my fifth category: instances where Catullus can be observed to play upon the connotations of names and in which such wordplay contributes to the force and point of Catullus’ invective.

A few scholars have considered the possibility of Catullan literary play on names through the phenomenon of ‘speaking’ names; that is, names which cannot be easily identified extratextually with any historical figure and which seem so pointed in the context within which they are deployed that they are ‘certainly or probably chosen solely on account of their derivation’, to use the words of Niall Rudd.Footnote ¹⁴ So Amy Richlin has suggested that ‘Rufus’ (‘Red-head’: Cat. 69, 77; see too my discussion of ‘Rufa’ and ‘Rufulus’ in Cat. 59, below), ‘Gallus’ (‘Eunuch’: Cat. 78), and ‘Naso’ (‘Nose’: Cat. 112) are redende Namen;Footnote ¹⁵ however, Richlin's examples seem to fall into the fifth and final category of Catullan names identified above. That is, these potentially ‘speaking’ names do not appear to fit the context of the poems in which they appear and thus they seem to constitute a case of simple ‘name-calling’ and insult, rather than the more sophisticated play I identify in the examples under consideration in this paper.Footnote ¹⁶ Better aligned with the examples under consideration in this paper is the play that Fitzgerald proposes upon the echoes of the word ‘phallus’ that he hears in the name ‘Thallus’ in Cat. 25: Fitzgerald connects this proposed play on the similarity between ‘Thallus’ and the word ‘phallus’ to ‘the comparison of Thallus’ softness with the languid penis of an old man (3)’Footnote ¹⁷ (Cat. 25.3 ‘uel pene languido senis situque araneoso’). However, Fitzgerald fails to note that the rapaciousness of Thallus (‘turbida rapacior procella’, Cat. 25.4), would fit nicely with Catullus’ iambic characterization of rampantly greedy pricks elsewhere (e.g. ‘Mentula’ in Cat. 114 and 115), and thus undervalues the broader generic implications of such play on names. The unknown ‘Porcius’ and ‘Socration’ of poem 47 and ‘Acme’ of poem 45 have also been identified as possible examples of the phenomenon of Catullan play on the etymological force of names: so ‘Porcius’ in poem 47, with its obvious hints of the porcus or pig, fits well with the alleged lavish banqueting of this parasite, and ‘Socration’ (‘little Socrates’) in the same poem seems an ironic nickname (unless it is supposed to be a name indicating a ‘type’ or stock character; for this phenomenon, see further below) for a man accused of the same behaviour,Footnote ¹⁸ whereas ‘Acme’, with its connotations of the Greek word ἀκμη (and thus the suggestion that the girl is at the height of her loveliness or, in the words of Quinn, ‘in the bloom of youth and beauty’),Footnote ¹⁹ seems an ironic moniker for a woman whom Septimius loves in hyperbolical terms which perhaps ridicule his passion and the couple (Cat. 45.3–6, 22).Footnote ²⁰ It is possible that other examples of significant names and wordplay which add to the invective point of Catullus’ poems may be found in addition to those that this paper explores.Footnote ²¹

Yet the fact that some names in invective poems in the Catullan corpus fit the context in which they appear so perfectly, enhancing the poem's attack on the named individual, need not necessarily suggest that these are invented or ‘speaking’ names in the sense outlined above. It is possible that actual historical individuals are identified by the names under consideration in this paper: Roman cognomina do have meanings, often with pejorative connotations,Footnote ²² and such etymologies were frequently played upon by orators in the late Republic. There are always potential jokes to be realized within Roman names. As Anthony Corbeill demonstrated,Footnote ²³ in the late Republic, cognomina were almost exclusively applied among men of the senatorial class, and names were treated as a marker of the character of their bearer;Footnote ²⁴cognomina were thus not just empty labels, but were believed to offer insight into the nature of the person who carried that name,Footnote ²⁵ and public attacks on aristocratic men through the etymological connotations of their names were frequent, and have been argued to serve the function of regulating deviant if not actually illegal social behaviour.Footnote ²⁶ In at least one of the instances I discuss below of Catullan play on names (that of Victor, my first example), Catullus seems to play upon the connotations of cognomina precisely in order to shame their bearers in respect to actions which his poetic corpus criticizes both in the poem relating to Victor and elsewhere, and his invective therefore participates within, and can fruitfully be compared with, the wider culture of abuse within the society in which he lived. In Catullus’ late Republican Rome, Cicero's ‘maledica ciuitas’ (Cael. 38), slanders and libels were a very visible part of everyday life,Footnote ²⁷ and we shall see that Catullus’ poetry is closely aligned with other invective of the period through its attacks on named individuals.

Conversely, while there were many public attacks on named individuals through the connotations of their names in the period during which Catullus was writing, it is also important to observe that the precedent of the Greek iambic tradition suggests that it may not always be necessary to link the names on which Catullus plays with historical individuals. For all of my examples of Catullan play on names occur within poems which have an iambic generic charge, in the sense that these poems attack the named characters who appear within them.Footnote ²⁸ On a purely metrical definition, there are only twelve iambic poems in the extant Catullan corpus of around 116 poems, and many of these do not contain content which is typical of iambic; instead, as Stephen Heyworth has convincingly argued, Catullus plays on the generic expectations of the iambic tradition, as Catullan references to iambic poetry occur in non-iambic metres, and invective is found in poems of all metres.Footnote ²⁹ There are good generic precedents for the practice of using invented, significant names in invective poetry, as we shall see in the first section of this paper, which treats both the generic background and selected examples of Catullan play on names, including some examples where the names look to indicate characters who seem temptingly fictional.Footnote ³⁰ The second section analyses the implications of Catullan invective play on names for those characters within the corpus to whom Catullus addresses first-person erotic poetry, including Juventius and the notorious Lesbia. Finally, the conclusion traces some broader implications for the Catullan corpus, his late Republican context, and the poetry of the early Empire. A major concern throughout is to suggest that scholars’ failure to recognize either the possibility and/or the implications of play on names in the Catullan corpus has minimized both the creative artistry of these poems and their self-conscious alignment with the broader contexts of invective in contemporary Roman oratory and the iambic genre.

The broader context of ancient verse is the starting point of my study of Catullan play with names. It is surely no coincidence that most of the suggested examples of this phenomenon which have been identified to date in the Catullan corpus occur in invective or iambic poems (broadly defined: see above), since archaic iambic poetry attacks individuals who have been identified as stock characters, with apparently ‘speaking’ names which chime with their poetic depiction and reveal their fictionality. So, for example, the name ‘Neoboule’ (or ‘New plan’), of the woman who was initially promised in marriage to Archilochus, before the promise was broken by her father, Lycambes, seems so appropriate to the scenario Archilochus’ poetry depicts that most scholars now believe that it is a fictional name chosen for its connotations;Footnote ³¹ similarly, the name ‘Lycambes’ has given rise to suspicions that he is a stock iambic character.Footnote ³² Given both the archaic iambic background and Catullus’ interest in genre,Footnote ³³ it is perhaps surprising that scholars have not studied names in his poetry with more focus on the influence of archaic iambic verse, in which punning on apparently invented proper names is a frequent feature;Footnote ³⁴ however, the tendency to treat Catullus’ poetry as autobiographical may go some way towards explaining this oversight. It is also unclear whether Catullus himself would have anticipated modern scholars in reading some of the names that are found in archaic iambic as invented or fictional, given the widespread ancient practice of reading first-person poetry as autobiographical, and, more importantly, the biographical tradition that the invective of Archilochus and Hipponax drove their victims to suicide.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, vast chronological and other distances separate Republican Rome from archaic Greece, and it would be foolish to think that exactly the same generic rules and topoi were applied by poets in exactly the same way in these societies: one obvious difference is that the ritual aspect of iambic abuse has presumably dropped out by Roman times.Footnote ³⁶ But a more important way in which Greece and Rome differ in terms of invective abuse is that Roman and Greek nomenclature are quite distinct from one another: unlike Greek names, which tend to have positive connotations,Footnote ³⁷ Roman cognomina (as we have seen) often have negative connotations, which are played upon by orators and others who use these names to make public attacks on the qualities or actions of their bearers. Yet a public culture of abuse of real-life targets attacked under, and indeed, for, their own names need not preclude the possibility that Catullus could write invective poems attacking characters using speaking names that hint at the etymological connotations of those names, and thereby align himself more closely with the traditions of iambic poetry.Footnote ³⁸ Certainly, we shall see that some of Catullus’ plays on the names of individuals occur in contexts in which Catullus’ poetry is linked closely with archaic iambic poetry; this is particularly the case in the attacks on Ravidus and Rufa/Rufulus discussed below.

In turning to Catullan play on the significance of names, I begin with an obvious example. In poem 80, Gellius, the target of Catullan invective in several poems (Cat. 74, 88–91, 116), is linked sexually with one Victor, who bears a name unique within the Catullan corpus:

The implications of Victor's name (if this is indeed a name and not a common noun) and the way in which it is here introduced have only been partially explored to date: Curran comments: ‘… the point of the poem might turn out to be the revelation by Catullus himself of the beloved's identity. (This is, of course, a part of the point of the poem, if Victor (7) is, as seems probable, a proper name).’Footnote ⁴⁰ Curran's assertion that the revelation of Victor's identity is an important part of the poem seems correct; the structure of the poem, with three couplets building up to Victor's identity and name in the final couplet, suggests that here we have an almost epigrammatically pointed poem, and that Victor's name must be an important part of the point.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, Curran does not go on to consider what this proper name suggests, and William Fitzgerald comes the closest among modern scholars to doing so: ‘Victor is an ironic name because his loins “shout” only insofar as they betray the signs of having been “broken” by the ministrations of Gellius.’Footnote ⁴² Fitzgerald rightly detects irony in the way in which the ‘victorious shout of the irrumator’Footnote ⁴³ evokes a military conquering hero who, having ‘broken’ loins, hardly lives up to his name (as I shall discuss further below), but Fitzgerald seems, along with other scholars, to miss a point of broader significance about the connotations of Victor's name.

That is, the name ‘Victor’ exactly fits the rôle its bearer plays in this poem in terms of Roman (and Catullan) ideas about appropriate sexual rôles and behaviour, where the ‘active’, penetrating, and, above all, masculine partner appears as the winner in the sexual contest, and superior to the ‘passive’, penetrated one, who suffers shame as he takes on a subordinate, ‘womanly’ and ‘conquered’ rôle:Footnote ⁴⁴ compare Catullus 16.1–2 for Catullus’ investment in this penetrative model of masculinity and domination. In poem 80, Victor inserts his penis into Gellius’ mouth and therefore fully deserves the label uir which is attached to him in line 6.Footnote ⁴⁵ Gellius’ shameful rôle as the implied loser in this sexual encounter is underlined by the name of ‘Victor’ for the one who penetrates him and by Victor's characterization as a uir who penetrates. Compare Sen., Epist. 47.7 on the slave who is ‘in cubiculo uir, in conuiuio puer’ (‘a man in the bedroom, a slave-boy in the dining room’); Williams comments on the thrust of this passage's insult against the slave's master and his passivity as ‘conveyed precisely by the word uir’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, Victor in this poem is a ‘man’ insofar as he takes the penetrating rôle in sex, and Gellius is thereby shamed by his unmanly rôle in the same encounter.

Catullus may further play on the name Victor as suggesting the winner in a sexual encounter when he describes Victor's ‘ilia’ as ‘rupta’ (lines 7–8) by Gellius’ ministrations; although the only other example of rupere attached to ilia is also found in a similar sexual context in Catullus (11.20), the description of this area of the body being broken by Gellius may suggest that Victor is wounded in combat, since the ilia are frequently the site of wounds to warriors in epic poetry.Footnote ⁴⁷ The connotations of victory in this name are thus ironized.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, while making use of standard Roman ideas about male sexuality by drawing attention to the connotations of Victor's name, Catullus simultaneously undermines such societal norms, firstly by presenting Victor as less than the conquering hero via the diminutive ‘misellus’ (7) which enhances the description of his loins as ‘rupta’, and also by presenting Gellius as an enthusiastically and abnormally active partner,Footnote ⁴⁹ given that performing fellatio was seen as shameful for Roman men, since they were thereby failing to take an ‘active’, penetrating rôle, in accordance with Roman ideas about appropriate sexual rôles and behaviour. In this sexual encounter, both participants are ultimately presented as ‘losers’, even though Victor's name may initially suggest that he plays a victorious and manly rôle; this shaming of both participants should come as no surprise, given the repulsive picture of Gellius that Catullus paints in the corpus as a whole (on which, see further my appendix below).Footnote ⁵⁰

Although the name Victor is unattested in Republican inscriptions,Footnote ⁵¹ it is frequent later on, and the fact that this was a common name in Rome may strengthen the possibility that Catullus deployed it here as a fictional ‘speaking’ name in order to draw attention to the sexual rôle-play in the encounter (see further the material in my appendix on Victor's partner in shame, Gellius, as a potential iambic stock character). More likely than this, however, is the possibility that Catullus uses the name of a real individual, Victor, to point out that this man fails to live up to this honorific cognomen (presumably bestowed on an ancestor rather than the man himself), and thereby particularly shames him for a (probably inherited) name which acts as a false advertisement of his nature.Footnote ⁵² For invective attacks based on the mismatch between a name and the bearer of that name, compare the comment of Corbeill, on invective in oratory in the late Republic: ‘Occasionally name and behavior do not coincide. Since cognomina denoting positive characteristics appear to be relatively infrequent, the failure to live up to a positive name often brought special censure.’Footnote ⁵³ Corbeill provides a relevant parallel in his analysis of a similar play on names in a Ciceronian invective oratorical fragment, In Clod. 25, ‘sed credo, postquam speculum tibi adlatum est longe te a pulchris abesse sensisti’ (‘but, I reckon, after the mirror was brought to you, you realized that you were far from one of the beautiful ones’), which must be read in the context of Publius Clodius Pulcher's alleged gate-crashing of the rites of the Bona Dea in the dress of a woman. The word pulchris here operates as a pun on two levels, as Corbeill explains: on the connotations in Publius Clodius’ cognomen ‘Pulcher’ (or ‘beautiful’), referring to his ‘pretty’ (that is, effeminate) appearance as he attempts to disguise himself as a woman,Footnote ⁵⁴ as well as ‘foreground[ing] the extent to which Clodius differs from his ancestors, the illustrious Pulchri’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Catullus’ play on the connotations of victory in Victor's name seems to partake of the same Republican desire to attack contemporaries as failing to meet the expectations raised by their illustrious family heritage, in particular in the matter of less than manly behaviour. In Catullus, an attack on an individual on the grounds of a name falsely indicating positive aspects of their conduct or character might usefully be compared with the (admittedly far less savage) indictment of Suffenus for failing to live up to the public image that he projects of an urbane, witty and charming individual (Cat. 22.2), by being in fact a dreadful, unsophisticated poet (‘caprimulgus aut fossor’, 22.10, a rustic goatmilker or a ditchdigger, instead of ‘urbanus’, 9).

Scholars have long noted parallels with a fragment of Archilochus in my next example, Cat. 40:

Compare Catullus’ accusations of madness, implication that the addressee has made some sort of aggressive move against the poetic persona, tone of concern for the iambic target, repeated questions, and threat of public humiliation (which is fulfilled by the poem itself) with Archilochus, fr. 172 (West):Footnote ⁵⁶

Catullus’ homage to Archilochus, however, becomes both wittier and more pointed if we hear in the otherwise unattested name ‘Rauidus’ a suggestion of the adjective rabidus (= ‘raging, frenzied, mad’),Footnote ⁵⁷ which is possible aurally in terms of the ancient pronunciation of these labials.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, Catullus seems to play upon such connotations in his addressee's name in emphatically imputing madness to his addressee: as if mala mens in the first line were not a clear enough indication of Ravidus’ raging nature, the quarrel he is involved in is described as ‘uecordem’ (4), and ‘praecipitem’ (2) may also have connotations of recklessness and frenzy which fit the aural connotations of this name.Footnote ⁵⁹

Support for my argument that Catullus uses the aural connotations of the name Ravidus as part of his play on the madness of his addressee is paralleled in the (admittedly slightly later) case of the Augustan orator, Labienus, who became known as ‘Rabienus’ (or ‘The Frenzied’), according to Seneca, Contr. 10, praef. 5: ‘libertas tanta, ut libertatis nomen excederet, et, quia passim ordines hominesque laniabat, Rabienus uocaretur’ (‘[he exercised] such great licence, that he went past the term “licence”, and, because he kept savaging the social orders and folk indiscriminately, he was called “Rabienus”, with its connotations of madness’). Corbeill notes this example as a type of play on names in which the true name is ‘distorted’ or inaccurately represented by the change of a few syllables (compare e.g. ‘Biberius Caldius Mero’=‘Tiberius Claudius Nero’), and cites disapproval from Quintilian for such wordplay as feeble (frigida).Footnote ⁶⁰ However, since Catullus does not actually distort the name ‘Ravidus’ but rather suggests its connotations by exploiting the aural possibilities of such proximity in sound, Catullus’ wordplay here would perhaps have escaped the censure of such experts in rhetoric.

Not least because Catullus uses the term rarely,Footnote ⁶¹ several scholars have explored the appropriateness and significance of Catullus’ use in this poem of the word iambus (‘iambos’, Cat. 40.2), given that the poem evokes Archilochus.Footnote ⁶² We might push its significance further in relation to the possibility that Ravidus is a name invented for the purposes of this poem: Catullus would therefore follow Archilochus in including a character with a speaking name in a poem which is indebted to Archilochus on many levels, and would signal his debt to his iambic predecessor as the inventor of the tradition of giving characters such names via the use of the word iambos, which points the reader back to the presence of the name Lycambes in his model. Catullus’ postulated comment upon Archilochus’ use of invented names as Catullus uses a speaking name himself would therefore help to establish Catullus’ place in the iambic tradition.

An additional Archilochean debt and generic point worth exploring further in relation to the name Ravidus is the potential significance of the connotations of animality evoked by its suggestion of rabidus. The word is applied by Catullus himself to animals at 63.85 (as he talks of the ‘rabidum … animum’ of Cybele's lion), and there are many other examples (some predating Catullus) of the term's application to animals, although it is also used more widely.Footnote ⁶³ If the name Ravidus works to paint Catullus’ opponent as a rabid animal in this poem,Footnote ⁶⁴ this would fit well with the animalization of the targets of invective both before and after Catullus: compare Hipponax’ Bupalus, evoking the figure of the bull,Footnote ⁶⁵ the connotations of wolves in the name Lycambes, Archilochus’ fable of the vixen and the eagle (frr. 172–81, 186–7 West),Footnote ⁶⁶ and, in Catullus’ iambic successor, Horace, Epode 6, which presents readers with numerous animals or animalized foes pitted against each other (‘canis/ lupos’ at 1–2; ‘Molossus aut fuluus Lacon/ fera’ at 5 and 8; Horace raises his cornua at 12, and his enemy attacks atro dente at 15), and makes reference to Archilochus and Hipponax via the animalistic names of their victims (‘Lycambae’, 13, and ‘Bupalo’, 14).Footnote ⁶⁷ Scholars have previously identified a potential self-referential animal pun on Catullus’ own name in the description of Catullus’ target in poem 42 as ‘ridentem catuli ore Gallicani’ (9),Footnote ⁶⁸ but to date there has been a lack of analysis of Catullus’ use of this topos via proper names.Footnote ⁶⁹ The possibility that ‘Ravidus’ through its approximation to rabidus evokes animals therefore suggests that Catullus, like his iambic predecessors and successors, participates in this pre-eminently iambic topos.

A further archaic iambic topos which Catullus frequently employs — indeed, arguably even develops (although our view may be distorted due to the loss of relevant archaic material) — is that of imputing incestuous acts to his enemies: compare Hipponax fr. 12.2 (West) ὁ μητροκοίτης Βούπαλος (‘the mother-fucker Bupalus’)Footnote ⁷⁰ with Catullus 88, 89, 90, and 91, all of which accuse Gellius of incest with a variety of partners,Footnote ⁷¹ or 111, which suggests that Aufillena commits incest with her uncle.Footnote ⁷² Some scholars have noted the overtones of brother-sister incest in my next exhibit, poem 59:Footnote ⁷³

The near-identity of the names ‘Rufa’ and ‘Rufulus’ hints that this adulterous act is exacerbated by the sibling relationship of its participants. I suggest further that the physical juxtaposition of the words ‘Rufa’ and ‘Rufulus’, and the closeness with variation in these names (the simple feminine form and the masculine diminutive) emphasizes that the point to incest taboos is in fact juxtaposition and closeness with variation; that is, the closeness (in terms of blood relation) yet variation (in terms of individuals sharing the same family heritage yet being distinct individuals) of family members who become too physically close.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘Rufa’ and ‘Rufulus’ thus act as pointed names in this poem insofar as they indicate that these people are brother and sister, and they are examples of Catullan word play in that Catullus uses juxtaposition and slight variation to comment on the very nature of the phenomenon that the names taken together suggest. ‘Rufa’ and ‘Rufulus’ are thus of a slightly different kind from the other examples of play on names that I treat in this paper, since Catullus’ iambic attack on the pair in combination is not based solely on the connotations of these individual names (to which I shall return below), as Catullus deploys these names together in pointed arrangement to score an iambic hit in the context in which they are combined; compare the use of Lesbia and Lesbius in poem 79, where most scholars understand the names to hint at incest.

The most obvious connotation of the names Catullus uses in this poem is their status as outsiders who have red hair, and all that this implies;Footnote ⁷⁶ however, Catullus does not seem to make anything of such connotations, preferring the more oblique attack on the sibling pair I have analysed above. Andreas Michalopoulos has already identified another subtle attack on Rufa based on the connotations of her name, in an argument which is worth revisiting here: noting that ‘Rufa’ may be a pseudonym (presumably on the grounds that the connotations of the name seem too good to be true in context), he recognizes that the name is highly appropriate for one identified in the next but one word as a fellatrix (‘Rufa … fellat’, Cat. 59.1), given that the Greek verb ῥοφέω (or ῥυφέω in Ionic) means ‘to suck’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This provides a good parallel to the play on the sexual connotations of Victor's name identified above, and a clever bilingual pun on Rufa's name that insults her even further.

However, Catullus’ iambic affiliations in poem 59, a poem which attacks Rufa on so many different grounds, have not been fully explored to date. Christopher Nappa rightly notes that poem 59 ‘implicate[s] Rufa in nearly every possible form of sexual vice’:Footnote ⁷⁸ the poem accuses Rufa of performing the shameful sexual act of fellatio (1), as well as incest (1) and adultery (2), hints that she is a graveyard prostitute (2), and goes on to conclude with the claim that she submits to public sex with a cremator (who may be a slave (5)). I suggest that the generic implications of interpreting Rufa and Rufulus as names that bespeak an incestuous sibling pair — and, indeed, of Rufa as a name that indicates that its bearer is of course a fellatrix — should be taken further. To accuse one's enemies of a wide variety of sexual misdemeanours — indeed, to implicate them in as many forms of sexual vice as possible — seems to be a part of iambic poetry from the very inception of the genre: in Hipponax, fragment 12 (West), it may be significant that Bupalus is called ‘mother-fucker’ while apparently engaged in a sexual act with another woman, Arete;Footnote ⁷⁹ the point to sexual imputations against one's enemies is that the crimes alleged are varied, over-the-top, and virtually comprehensive, as befits the vices of stock characters. The Rufa of poem 59 thus fits this iambic picture perfectly; so does Gellius, whose degradation in poem 80 has previously been discussed, and whose potential rôle as a stock iambic character I discuss in my appendix.

Rankin has attributed Catullus’ interest in incest to personal disgust at the incestuous behaviour of Lesbius (‘quem Lesbia malit/ quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua’: Cat. 79.1–2) with Catullus’ beloved Lesbia, who are commonly identified in and partly on the basis of poem 79 as brother and sister,Footnote ⁸⁰ and ‘Lesbius est pulcer’ (Cat. 79.1) is widely read as a punning pointer to Publius Clodius Pulcher, who is elsewhere alleged to have conducted an incestuous relationship with his sister.Footnote ⁸¹ My argument about Catullan play on names in this paper suggests that Catullus’ use of the theme should also be viewed as part of an ongoing iambic tradition, an approach to reading Catullus that does not preclude the possibility of attacks on a personal enemy for real-life transgressions, but that also allows for an element of literary homage in framing attacks on his enemies in terms which recall earlier iambic poetry.

The final example of a speaking name which I will treat in this section of my paper is Quintia, who features in poem 86 alone in the Catullan corpus,Footnote ⁸² and is attacked in rather more gentle terms than Rufa or indeed the unnamed woman of the very similar poem 43. Poem 86 has rarely been read as having iambic features: there are far more crude and graphic ways to insult women in ancient verse,Footnote ⁸³ and it is easy to interpret Quintia's sole literary function here as lying in her use as a foil to the utterly beautiful Lesbia.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the iambic aspect of poem 86 should not be overlooked: to deny a woman's attractiveness is an insulting theme inherently suited to iambic poetry, and occurs from the earliest examples we possess onwards: see e.g. Archilochus, fr. 188 (West) and fr. 196a.26–8.Footnote ⁸⁵

Quintia's name, I would argue, forms part of the iambic texture of 86 as the poem comments on the connotations of this name. For Catullus allows Quintia three of the qualities which make up his definition of formosa (‘candida, longa,/ recta’, 1–2), but withholds uenustas and sal (3–4). Can Catullus’ division of the ingredients of beauty into 3+2 here be a mere coincidence? After all, this poem repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the numerical: compare multis (1), singula (2), tota (5), and omnibus una omnis (6). My interpretation of Quintia as a speaking name evoking the number five is of course open to two objections: firstly, that Quintia is an extremely common Roman name.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is undeniable, but Catullus could have chosen to give any (or, indeed, on the parallel of poem 43, no) name to the woman he slightingly compares with Lesbia in this way. Perhaps a more serious objection is that Quintia's name strictly speaking means ‘fifth’ rather than ‘five’, but the name nevertheless suggests the number five, despite its precise meaning. That Quintia's name evokes the number five and that five qualities are given or denied to her (thus ironizing the name) should therefore be read as Catullan literary play.Footnote ⁸⁷ Scholars have already recognized that part of the point to this poem lies in its punning on proper names: for the reason for Catullus’ denial of the quality of uenustas (3) to Quintia is revealed only in the final line of the poem, and ultimately its final word, which makes an etymological pun on the proper name Venus as connected with uenustas:Footnote ⁸⁸ Quintia cannot have uenustas (‘loveliness’, one of Catullus’ five elements of beauty), for Lesbia has taken for herself all of this quality. A double pun on proper names which advertises Catullus’ numerical play with the implications of the name Quintia seems to me an impressive, if unobtrusive, example of literary play.

I now turn to erotic verse, where there has been some attention to Catullan play on names, but not from the invective angle that this paper argues is so important. To approach the names of those loved by Catullus as containing play with a potential iambic charge on their connotations can reveal more about Catullan play, artistry and investment in invective. It has been widely recognized in the case of both the later Latin love elegists and certain of Catullus’ contemporaries that the names of love objects are pseudonyms which have literary connotations:Footnote ⁸⁹ among Catullan contemporaries, witness Ticida and his ‘Perilla’, whose name has been argued to evoke the inventor of Phalaris’ brazen bull, Perillus/Perilaus, and therefore the erotic burning inflicted on her lovers by the woman for whom this was a pseudonym.Footnote ⁹⁰ Compare too Catullus’ contemporary Varro Atacinus and his beloved ‘Leucadia’, presumably a pseudonym with long-resounding literary implications, alluding to Sappho's suicidal leap from the Leucadian rocks, and therefore perhaps to Catullus’ own Lesbia, but possibly also suggesting links to Apollo, anticipating the Apolline connections of the names of many of the women loved by the Latin love elegists.Footnote ⁹¹ Such a common literary practice of writing about beloveds with names that seem to matter in both contemporary and near-contemporary erotic poems suggests that we should therefore pay attention to the implications of these names. Furthermore, despite textual uncertainties and controversy over the meaning of the name, the ‘Ipsitilla’ of Catullus 32 has widely been recognized as an invented name,Footnote ⁹² authorizing us to look harder at the objects of Catullus’ love and the names which they bear. Finally, I have already argued that invective elements should encourage us to interrogate the potential force of names. While Lesbia and Juventius are clearly not solely or straightforwardly iambic figures, poems concerning both do contain invective elements: for example, Lesbia is attacked by name as she is accused of various sexual offences in poems such as 11, 58, and 79, and poems 24 and 81 represent attacks on Juventius and/or the man or men he prefers to Catullus.

Scholars have long expressed surprise that Juventius, the male beloved who features by name in poems 24, 48, 81, and 99,Footnote ⁹³ appears to bear without any traces of a disguise the name of a distinguished aristocratic family;Footnote ⁹⁴ indeed, Catullus explicitly addresses him as a member of the gens at Cat. 24.1–3:

Such surprise is occasioned by Catullus’ deviation from the common poetic practice of using pseudonyms for the objects of one's passion, a practice usually interpreted as having the function of sparing the blushes of the real-life beloved. In this case, scholars suppose the embarrassment would have been particularly acute, because Catullus’ poetry on Juventius concerns a relationship which would have gone against Roman sexual mores, as it seems to depict Catullus attempting to seduce a freeborn, aristocratic boy into playing a subordinate rôle (as the ‘passive’ recipient of kisses in Cat. 48 and 99) in a male-male encounter, a prosecutable offence.Footnote ⁹⁵ Some critics have attempted to explain away Catullus’ apparent failure to use a pseudonym in these circumstances by claiming that Catullus’ Juventius poems are modelled on Greek pederastic poems, thus rendering them safely ‘literary’.Footnote ⁹⁶ One explanation for Catullus’ apparent departure from the usual literary practice of using pseudonyms for the names of beloveds might be that Juventius is in fact a pseudonym and moreover a ‘speaking’ name which hints at qualities that this boy possesses; alternatively, given the wordplay that has been observed in the case of the names of real people, Catullus may refer to an actual member of the Juventii (albeit an individual who cannot be securely identified) in what constitutes a broader attack on this gens. That the name ‘Juventius’ has connotations of youth has been recognized by some scholars,Footnote ⁹⁷ although I have found no full discussions of the point to such connotations. Moreover, it has not been fully recognized that Catullus draws attention to his play on the youthful connotations of this name; this is evident from the reference to him as flosculus (‘little flower’) at Cat. 24.1,Footnote ⁹⁸ and the reference to annis at 24.3 may further allude to the boy's own youthful years.Footnote ⁹⁹ Furthermore, Juventius is represented as playing at Cat. 99.1, a quintessentially childish activity,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and Cat. 81 also seems relevant, as Juventius is contrasted there with a homo (2) described as a guest from ‘moribunda … sede Pisauri’ (3, ‘a fellow … from the decaying seat of Pisaurum’); moribunda here may act as a transferred epithet from the man to the place he comes from, which would suggest that his advanced age is a further reason why this rival to Catullus is painted as unattractive, perhaps drawing on Greek lyric and iambic, where being aged renders lovers unsuitable to play the game of love.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Secondly, the youthful connotations of Juventius are eminently suited to the sexual rôle that Juventius is implied to play in Catullus’ poetry: for like Victor, whose name fits his rôle, the youth Juventius plays the erotic rôle of younger, ‘passive’ male to Catullus’ active older man, thus fitting (Greco-)Roman ideas about appropriate sexual mores. Yet these social norms are — as in the case of Victor — simultaneously disrupted as Catullus seems to break Roman social mores by naming his beloved as part of an aristocratic gens where one might expect him to use an obvious pseudonym to spare the boy's blushes. Therefore Catullus may teasingly play with the idea both that Juventius is the name of a real individual from the gens of the Juventii but also potentially a pseudonym for a boy whose name marks him out as the youthful, subordinate partner in his relationship with Catullus, and one who is attracted to older, unattractive men at that.

The final candidate for Catullan play on names that this paper will treat is also by far the most controversial: Lesbia. The connotations and significance of this name, generally agreed to be a pseudonym, have been much debated, not least because it is clear to the most biographically-minded critic that there are literary connotations from poem 51 alone, where the name ‘Lesbia’ denotes the object of Catullus’ desire as Catullus translates a first-person erotic poem by Sappho of Lesbos, fr. 31. Poem 79 has, however, probably been the poem most examined in discussions of the name, since it is widely read as containing a pun which daringly reveals Lesbia's true identity.Footnote ¹⁰² Yet biographical approaches have limited the extent to which scholars have recognized Catullan play on this name; scholars have been happy to accept that Catullus’ choice of pseudonym constitutes (in the words of Niklas Holzberg (Reference Holzberg2000), 33) ‘a romantic idealization of his puella’Footnote ¹⁰³ inasmuch as Lesbia's name obviously alludes to Sappho of Lesbos. Most readers are also happy to hear in ‘Lesbia’ a reference to the famous beauty contests which took place on the island of Lesbos in antiquity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, another possible connotation of this name has not won widespread acceptance. Undercutting romantic readings of Catullus, Holzberg argues that the name is to be connected with the Greek verb λεσβιάζειν=fellare, and suggests therefore that Lesbia is depicted through her name as well as in the descriptions of her in the poems as a fellatrix.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Michael Fontaine has developed Holzberg's theory with reference to poem 5 in particular, arguing for a bilingual pun whereby its opening words ‘uiuamus, mea Lesbia’ can be translated into Greek as ζῶμεν, Λεσβιά, and then the order of these words reversed to give an obscene allusion to the Greek verb λεσβιάζωμεν (with Catullus declaring to the significantly named Lesbia, ‘let us perform fellatio’).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ I detect a further example of play upon these connotations of the name Lesbia:Footnote ¹⁰⁷ I suggest that the final line of poem 7 alludes to fellatio, appropriately enough for a poem which concerns above all the actions of the mouth (at issue are the number of basiationes (1) which Lesbia asks would be enough to satisfy Catullus; basia and basiare feature at line 9). Catullus concludes the poem and his hyperbolic claims about the number of kisses it would take to satisfy him thus at lines 9–12:

David Wray comments on these lines: ‘Poem 7 … locates the feared threat in the curse or bewitchment (fascinus) of wicked tongues (7.12). Fascinus was the Latin name given both to magic spells and also to the phallic charm worn around the neck to avert them.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Catullus therefore here brings together the two organs involved in the act of fellatio, the phallus (via allusion to the fascinus or fascinum) and the lingua. Although previous arguments that the name ‘Lesbia’ evokes fellatio have not won widespread acceptance, my study of Catullan play on names would tend to support theories that this name can have such connotations. Finally, although only a few of the poems in which Lesbia is named make a linguistic connection between words evoking women from the island of Lesbos and the activity lesbiazein,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ once that link has been made — and this is a link which dates back to Old Comedy, far predating CatullusFootnote ¹¹⁰ — we might ask ourselves whether it can ever be entirely erased for the audience.

My paper has thus far explored the possibilities for, and of, play on proper names in the Catullan corpus, suggesting that there are far more examples than have previously been recognized; I have argued, furthermore, that Catullus thereby asserts his place in both the contemporary Roman culture of abuse of prominent men of the senatorial class, and the literary iambic tradition. Furthermore, such wordplays emphasize the artistry of short poems which are often overlooked. It is worth considering here the flipside to the possibility this paper has explored that some Catullan play on names may involve invented or ‘speaking’ names; for some might object that to approach some of the figures who appear in Catullus’ iambic poetry as being fictional and having speaking names gives us a Catullus whose iambic bite has a rather blunted edge because if some of these names seem so clearly to have the ring of invention and to fit the contexts in which they appear so perfectly, Catullus does not attack in those poems readily identifiable historical individuals: Catullan iambic becomes less dangerous if it is less personal. Furthermore, as noted above, there are many examples in the Catullan corpus where Catullus does attack the great public figures of the day such as Pompey and Caesar, and sometimes in a very uncompromising manner; it could be objected that the Catullan corpus would thus be disconcerting for the reader insofar as it contains both ‘speaking’ names indicating fictional, stock characters and the names of historical figures. I would, however, be tempted to view such a lack of unity rather as part of the appealing and obviously designed variety of Catullus’ corpus. Moreover, in generic terms, it is notable that stock characters seem to have been a feature of archaic iambic (see above), so that the stock characters that I have suggested can be found in Catullan iambic, whose status may perhaps be hinted at by their seeming to bear ‘speaking’ names, give it the general applicability that we find in archaic iambic and that Heyworth Reference Heyworth, Cavarzere, Aloni and Barchiesi2002, 136 misses in Catullan iambic.Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus while Catullan invective may lose some of its personal bite if it includes characters attacked under ‘speaking’ names, its generic charge is nevertheless enhanced.

To conclude, then, this paper offers a reading of play on names in Catullan ‘iambic’ poems (with the generic term understood in a broad sense: see above) which suggests that Catullus is invested in both the abuse culture that has been much more widely studied in late Republican oratory, and the traditions of iambic poetry that stretch back to archaic Greece. Catullus’ attacks on contemporaries of the senatorial class and alignment with the iambic poetic tradition both serve to position him as an ‘insider’: in terms of his contemporary society, he joins in with the shaming — and consequent social control — of outsiders, that is, those who do not conform to contemporary mores. In more literary terms, Catullus’ play on names and exploitation of the themes of archaic iambic demonstrates his urbanity and literary doctrina as he participates in a literary genre with an impressive pedigree. Wordplay involving names in Catullus is thus an important part of his poetic programme and persona.Footnote ¹¹²