A Greek youth named Attis sails across the sea to Mount Ida, where he and his companions will worship the goddess Cybele. When they reach the mountain's dark groves, Attis castrates himself in a sudden frenzy before rousing his companion galli (priests of Cybele) to head still higher towards the goddess’ lofty abode.Footnote 1 Once there, they fall asleep exhausted. A glaring sun rises in an elaborate montage of rational awakening. In a brief reprieve from Cybele's dark madness, the now lonely youth returns to the shore to deliver a regretful lament in which he contrasts the cold wilderness with the warm thresholds of the city he left behind. Cybele overhears Attis’ complaints and is angered by his desire for freedom. She sends a lion to scare him back into her forest and, we are to understand, her psychological control. Though economical in his descriptions of the natural environment throughout this narrative, Catullus evokes shadowy forests and desolate shores, and Attis’ movement to and through this place is presented as an integral part of his experience of change. The poet manipulates the literary tradition surrounding Mount Ida to create a snowy environment devoid of the people and pastoral activities for which the mountain was known, but he retains its wild beasts and dense, green forests. By setting his narrative on this storied mountain of the East, Catullus renders this tale of emasculation a potentially Roman one: Trojan Ida was entangled in the Roman national story even in Catullus’ time not only through the myth of Aeneas but also through Rome's recent conquest of Asia; Catullus’ experience on Memmius’ cohort in Bithynia, a province neighbouring Asia, also suggests an analogue to poem 63's narrative of the youth abroad. To draw out these themes, I will take the Idaean environment as my focus, using an ecofeminist approach to understand how Attis is made like a female, an animal, and a slave through his contact with a foreign landscape.
Previous scholarship has examined ‘nature’ in poem 63 to a limited extent. Some once considered the poem a translation of an Alexandrian original,Footnote 2 but more recent criticism has emphasised that it has meaning as a late Republican artifactFootnote 3 and that there are links between the characterisation of Attis and the Catullan persona.Footnote 4 Among critics who consider the role of the natural environment in the poem, Janan summarises the uncivilised Otherness of Ida as a ‘Dark Continent’, echoing Freud's use of the term to describe the mysteries of adult female sexuality: Attis’ dislocation into this wild space expresses his disintegration of self in the face of the goddess.Footnote 5 Others have highlighted the contrast between civilisation and nature, connecting it to the other ‘opposing ideas’ such as male/female, Greek/Phrygian, reason/emotion, and freedom/slavery that form poem 63's conceptual framework.Footnote 6 While also emphasising the importance of this framework, Garrison focuses on the physical environment and argues that Catullus’ grove was a precursor to a later topos that emerged out of the Roman experience of northern European forests. Connecting the poem to the horror siluestris experienced by Caesar's soldiers in Gaul, he suggests that we might see it as a ‘translation into fictive narrative of a personal encounter with strange and distant forests’ and in this way appreciate the ‘subjective feeling of unease that Romans in the service of the empire felt on unfamiliar ground’.Footnote 7 I will follow a similar track, understanding poem 63 in light of the ‘unease’ of the imperial officer abroad, but I want to pay attention to the specificity – indeed, the reality – of the Idaean landscape in this narrative of transformation.Footnote 8
Ecocriticism has been gaining traction in Classics.Footnote 9 Fundamentally, it is ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. …[E]cocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies’.Footnote 10 A subset of ecocriticism, ecofeminism links the oppression of women and other marginalised groups to the domination of the nonhuman environment: as Gaard argues, ‘the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature.’Footnote 11 Plumwood investigates the nature of this ideology and identifies the possession of reason as the mark of this oppressing master. She argues that rationality underwrites a series of hierarchical dualisms which have run through the Western tradition since at least Plato and Aristotle: culture/nature, male/female, human/nonhuman, free/slave are just a few examples of these.Footnote 12 Reason/nature is the fundamental dualism:
The category of nature is a field of multiple exclusion and control, not only of non-humans, but of various groups of humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature. Thus racism, colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body construed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture.
Plumwood (Reference Plumwood1993) 4For Plumwood, the oppression of women is an expression of the same master logic by which the environment is exploited, people are colonised, and nonhuman animals are reduced to sources of flesh or entertainment. These oppressions take place because women, subjected peoples, animals, and nature itself are seen to lack rationality.
Poem 63 demonstrates the primacy of reason as the legitimising force behind a series of hierarchical dualisms. The poem explores Attis’ loss and brief recovery of rationality, and it aligns this concept with manhood, culture (specifically Hellenism and its manifestations in the manmade environment), freedom, and humanity. It is his loss of reason – as much as the loss of his phallus – that results in him becoming feminine, foreign, and slave-like, and akin to a nonhuman animal in the wild. An ecofeminist approach to poem 63 can therefore help us to tease out the connections between Attis’ loss of his masculinity and his humanity, and it allows us to map these losses against a landscape that was as mythologically important for the Greeks and Romans as it was exploited for everyday human ends.
Ida, Mother of Wild Animals
A mountain range rather than a single peak, Ida (now called Kaz Daği) was known for its freshwater springs and its forests of pine, oak, and Trojan fir, which were home to brown bears, wolves, and big cats. Homer describes Ida as the ‘many-springed mother of wild beasts’ (πολυπὶδακα μητέρα θηρῶν, Hom. Il. 15.151; cf. Il. 8.47, 14.283, 20.59), while for Hesiod, it is windy and many-valleyed (πολυπτύχου ἠνɛμοέσσης, Hes. Theog. 1010). The author of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite likewise depicts a landscape of many springs and wild animals (πολυπίδακα, μητέρα θηρῶν, Hom. Hymn Aph. 5.68). Aphrodite is described passing along the mountainside with a train of wolves, lions, bears, and wildcats in her wake (70–2).Footnote 13 It is also clear, even from these early texts alone, that the area was inhabited by humans who worked the natural environment. Aphrodite traverses the mountain to reach a farmstead where the shepherd Anchises plays his kithara (Hom. Hymn Aph. 5. 69, 75–80). The mountain's flanks were regarded as suitable places for grazing sheep, goats, and cattle (Hom. Il. 11.105–6; 20.91; 21.448–9).Footnote 14
Aside from feeding the grazing herds, Mount Ida provided a ready source of timber from its thickly wooded forests. The very name of the mountain range identifies it as ‘the wooded hill’ (from ἴδη ‘timber-tree’). In fact, Theocritus uses forested Ida as a metaphor for the abundance of material before him when he sets out to praise Ptolemy: ‘when a woodcutter comes to thickly wooded Ida, he glances about for where to begin among the plenty’ (Ἴδαν ἐς πολύδɛνδρον ἀνὴρ ὑλατόμος ἐλθών / παπταίνɛι, παρɛόντος ἄδην, πόθɛν ἄρξɛται ἔργου, 17.9–10). These abundant forests fuelled a variety of activities.Footnote 15 We might think of the ‘high-leafed oaks’ (δρῦς ὑψικόμους, Hom. Il. 23.118) felled for Patroclus’ funeral pyre, but the Greeks, and later the Romans, considered Idaean timber particularly good for shipbuilding (Theophr. Hist. pl. 4.5.5), and it was harvested for this purpose during the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 4.52; Xen. Hell. 1.26).Footnote 16 Theophrastus implies that this practice may have led to some deforestation when he remarks that timber suitable for shipbuilding can be found in only a few places, including Ida, but that ‘it is not abundant’ (οὐ πολλήν, Hist. pl. 4.5.5). Ida had a reputation for lush forest but also for being a place where people extracted resources and otherwise cultivated the natural environment.Footnote 17
Mount Ida was a familiar landscape then, but you would not know it from reading Catullus’ poem because all marks of pastoralism, the timber industry, and human habitation have been erased. His Ida is resolutely ‘wild’, a darkly forested environment populated only by untamed nonhuman animals and the goddess and separate from human culture and reason.Footnote 18 This wilderness is sketched only hazily. It is a different environment altogether from the old, decaying forests depicted in dreadful detail by the likes of Seneca and Lucan, but, like the European forests that Garrison argues were the basis for those loci inamoeni, and like the real Ida, Catullus’ Idaean groves are densely wooded.Footnote 19 Catullus does not linger on descriptions of the omnipresent ‘grove’ (nemus, 2, 12, 20, 32, 52, 58, 72, 79, 89).Footnote 20 It is introduced as ‘the goddess’ shady places wreathed with forest’ (opaca siluis redimita loca deae, 3) and our primary impression up until Attis and his companions rush towards the summit of ‘green Ida’ (uiridem … Idam, 30; and later, uiridis … Idae, 70) is that it is a place of darkness (opaca nemora, 32) wrought from this verdant abundance.Footnote 21 This darkness is reinforced when Attis awakes (alone though he had fallen asleep alongside his companions) to the contrast of a dazzling sunrise which reveals further aspects of his new home's desolate environment. The sun surveys the ‘white sky, hard ground, wild sea’ (aethera album, sola dura, mare ferum, 40). Its bright rays bring clarity to Attis’ mind after the figurative dark madness of the forest, allowing him to see his surroundings properly (liquidaque mente uidit sine quis ubique foret, 46) and this insight prompts him to return to the shore to lament his actions.Footnote 22
When Attis addresses his native home across the sea, he now portrays Mount Ida as a place of snow and wild animals. It is a bleak environment of hidden dangers, and its geography is ill-defined in comparison to the detailed topography of the patria:
‘patria o mei creatrix, patria o mea genetrix,
ego quam miser relinquens, dominos ut erifugae
famuli solent, ad Idae tetuli nemora pedem,
ut apud niuem et ferarum gelida stabula forem,
et earum operta adirem furibunda latibula,
ubinam aut quibus locis te positam, patria, reor? 55
cupit ipsa pupula ad te sibi derigere aciem,
rabie fera carens dum breue tempus animus est.
egone a mea remota haec ferar in nemora domo?
patria, bonis, amicis, genitoribus abero?
abero foro, palaestra, stadio et guminasiis? 60
miser a miser, querendum est etiam atque etiam, anime.
quod enim genus figurae est, ego non quod obierim?
ego mulier, ego adulescens, ego ephebus, ego puer,
ego gymnasi fui flos, ego eram decus olei,
mihi ianuae frequentes, mihi limina tepida, 65
mihi floridis corollis redimita domus erat,
linquendum ubi esset orto mihi sole cubiculum.
ego nunc deum ministra et Cybeles famula ferar?
ego Maenas, ego mei pars, ego uir sterilis ero?
ego uiridis algida Idae niue amicta loca colam? 70
ego uitam agam sub altis Phrygiae columinibus,
ubi cerua siluicultrix, ubi aper nemoriuagus?
iam iam dolet quod egi, iam iamque paenitet.’
Catull. 63.50–73O fatherland, my mother, o fatherland, my creator,
which I am wretched for leaving, as slaves running away
from their masters often are. I have brought my foot to the groves of Ida
to be in the snow and the icy dens of wild animals,
and to approach hidden lairs full of madness.
For where or in what places do I imagine that you are, fatherland?
My very pupil desires to aim its glance towards you,
while for a brief time my mind is free from wild frenzy.
Am I to be brought from my home into these remote groves?
Am I to be far away from my fatherland, my property, my friends, my parents?
Am I to be apart from the forum, the palaestra, the stadium, the gymnasium?
Ah, wretched, wretched mind, it must be lamented again and again.
For what kind of shape is there that I have not entered?
I the woman, I the young man, I the youth, I the boy;
I was the flower of the gymnasium, I was the glory of the olive oil,
my doors were crowded, my thresholds warm,
my home was wreathed in flowery garlands,
where I used to leave my bed when the sun rose.
Am I now to be called a maid-servant of the gods and Cybele's female slave?
Shall I be a Maenad, I a part of me, I a sterile man?
Shall I cultivate green Ida's places clothed in cold snow?
Shall I spend my life under the high peaks of Phrygia,
where the wood-dwelling deer is, where the grove-wandering boar is?
Now, now it pains me what I have done, and now, now I am sorry.’
With its terms related to motherhood (creatrix and genetrix, 50) the lament's first line suggests the generative power of his native land to imbue Attis with form and character, but the repeated address to his ‘fatherland’ (patria appears twice in the line) tempers the image of ‘mother earth’ with the shaping effects of masculine culture.Footnote 23 Attis has left behind a masculine landscape of civic institutions, a constructed environment of forum, palaestra, stadium, and gymnasium (60) – all socialising spaces for the citizen male. A sharp contrast is drawn between the floral garlands that once ‘wreathed’ (redimita, 66) his thresholds and the uncultivated forest, initially portrayed as Cybele's ‘dark places wreathed with forest’ (opaca siluis redimita loca, 3).Footnote 24 Marooned in this comparatively shapeless wilderness, Attis uses some terms that suggest the civilising hand of man: the dens of wild animals are ‘stables’ (stabula, 53);Footnote 25 the Idaean landscape is ‘clothed’ (amicta, 70) in snow; and he imagines not only living in this new environment but ‘cultivating’ (colo, 70) it. This bid to transform the wilderness into an approximation of home is understandable from a psychological perspective, but it also sounds like conquest. Whatever colonising activities he imagines here, however, there is an anxious tenor to these lines which suggests that Attis does not have the ability to withstand the cold (or other such hardships) that was one of the traditional proofs of manly virtue (cf. Xen. Anab. 3.1.23). It seems that Attis will fail to make his mark on Ida as the mountain has already and will continue to make its mark on him.
Soft Lands, White Hands
In Graeco-Roman discourse about the origins of ethnic identity the land was often figured as a ‘mother country’, who gives birth to her people and imbues them with certain characteristics.Footnote 26 According to this theory – now called ‘environmental determinism’ – the natural environment has the potential to influence men in ‘good’ ways and ‘bad’.Footnote 27 Harsh, rugged lands were thought to produce hard-bodied, masculine virtue while lush, fertile places softened and effeminised.Footnote 28 The concept was frequently employed to differentiate peoples and, to some extent, to explain why some people rule and others are ruled. From an ecofeminist perspective, we might see ancient environmental determinism as an example of what Plumwood calls ‘radical exclusion’, a rhetorical move whereby the other is marked out as different from the master in ways that make him or her inferior and legitimise his or her subjugation.Footnote 29 Although environmental determinism might seem to assign a powerful role to nature, its ideas were inconsistent, highly artificial, and rhetorically motivated; speaking from a healthful centre, proponents looked out at foreign peoples they regarded as inferior and found reasons for this inferiority in the natural environment.Footnote 30
According to the most famous proponent of environmental determinism, the Hippocratic author of Airs, Waters, Places, Asia was a land of abundant growth and poor moral fibre. The region situated at a fecund midpoint between heat and cold is described as,
αὕτη μὲν ɛὐκαρποτάτη ἐστὶ καὶ ɛὐδɛνδροτάτη καὶ ɛὐδιɛστάτη, καὶ ὕδασι καλλίστοισι κέχρηται τοῖσί τɛ οὐρανίοισι καὶ τοῖσιν ἐκ τῆς γῆς. οὔτɛ γὰρ ὑπὸ τοῦ θɛρμοῦ ἐκκέκαυται λίην οὔτɛ ὑπὸ αὐχμῶν καὶ ἀνυδρίης ἀναξηραίνɛται οὔτɛ ὑπὸ ψύχɛος βɛβιασμένη, <οὔτɛ> νοτίη τɛ καὶ διάβροχός ἐστιν ὑπό τɛ ὄμβρων πολλῶν καὶ χιόνος.
Hippoc. Aer. 12; text from Jouanna (Reference Jouanna1996)very fruitful, the most abounding in trees, and very mild, and it enjoys the finest waters, both from the heavens and from the earth. For it is not burned excessively by the heat nor is it dried out by drought and lack of water, it is not constrained by cold nor is it damp and soaked from a lot of storms and snow.
The text goes on to praise the bodies of this region's inhabitants. They are ‘well nourished, the finest in physique, the greatest in stature’ (ɛὐτραφέας ɛἶναι καὶ τὰ ɛἴδɛα καλλίστους καὶ μɛγέθɛι μɛγίστους, 12). Their character is a different story: ‘Manly courage, hardiness, grit, and spiritedness could not be bred in such an environment, <…> either among natives or immigrants, but pleasure must rule’ (τὸ δὲ ἀνδρɛῖον καὶ τὸ ταλαίπωρον καὶ τὸ ἔμπονον καὶ τὸ θυμοɛιδὲς οὐκ ἂν δύναιτο ἐν τοιαύτῃ φύσɛι ἐγγίνɛσθαι <…> μήτɛ ὁμοφύλου μήτɛ ἀλλοφύλου, ἀλλὰ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἀνάγκη κρατɛῖν, 12). The fertility of Asia's soil and gentleness of its climate thwarts the military spirit.
Although many ancient accounts of environmental determinism concern people who live in their native home, migration to a new climate was thought to change a person – usually for the worse.Footnote 31 The Hippocratic author above, for example, reckons that Asia can enervate even immigrants. The Romans were also concerned about the effects of dislocation.Footnote 32 In a rallying speech to his troops as they prepared to fight the Galatian Gauls in Asia Minor in 189 BCE, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso says that these ‘Gaulish-Greeks’ (Gallograeci, 38.17.9) are of inferior stock to their ancestors (degeneres, Livy 38.17.9) and impure (mixti, 38.17.9) because they left their native Gaul. Comparing them to plants, animals, and other displaced peoples, Manlius comments that ‘whatever is grown in its own home is of better stock; transplanted to a foreign land, it declines as its nature turns itself towards that by which it is nourished’ (generosius in sua quidquid sede gignitur; insitum alienae terrae in id, quo alitur, natura uertente se degenerat, 38.17.13). He further warns his troops that they too could be corrupted by the fertility of Asia if they are not careful: ‘by its most fertile land, its exceedingly mild climate, the gentle natures of its inhabitants – all that ferocity of theirs was tamed when they came to this place. By Hercules, you should be on your guard, men of Mars, and from the first avoid Asia's delights: to such a degree can these foreign pleasures destroy strength of spirit; contact with the customs and characters of its inhabitants is capable of so much’ (uberrimo agro, mitissimo caelo, clementibus accolarum ingeniis omnis illa cum qua uenerant mansuefacta est feritas. uobis mehercule, Martiis uiris, cauenda ac fugienda quam primum amoenitas est Asiae: tantum hae peregrinae uoluptates ad exstinguendum uigorem animorum possunt; tantum contagio disciplinae morisque accolarum ualet, 38.17.17–19).Footnote 33
Like Manlius’ troops and the Gauls, Catullus’ Attis did not come from Asia Minor and his ‘transplantation’ to this land affects him negatively. Attis was traditionally Phrygian, but Catullus shapes the narrative to characterise the young man as Greek, perhaps even specifically Athenian.Footnote 34 The shift allows him to depict the story as a moment of corrupting contact between an archetypal figure of Occidental, rational, masculine hegemony and the irrational, feminine, and enslaved East. Physical contact between this exemplar of Western rationality and the fertile but snow-covered Mount Ida is emphasised, and its effects are felt immediately. Attis is twice described touching the grove with his feet (nemus citato cupide pede tetigit, 2; ad Idae tetuli nemora pedem, 52), and, upon contact, he is ‘goaded there with mad frenzy’ (stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, 4). Although we will learn that Cybele's lion is similarly goaded by the goddess (stimulans, 77), the focus upon the grove in these lines and the phrasing of line 4 leave room for the possibility that the natural environment is partially responsible for the changes to self that Attis experiences.
Attis’ lament addresses the land that created and shaped him, and it reflects upon how dislocation has affected his identity and his body. Throughout his speech, Attis likens himself to a female slave and suggests that slavery to the goddess will be his permanent fate (51–2, 68; the narrator later confirms that Attis will be a famula, 90). Entwined with this repeated concern about his civic status is an anxiety about changes to his gender identity. ‘What kind of shape is there that I have not entered?’, he asks at line 62 (cf. 63, 68–9), listing male and female forms he has inhabited. His questions indicate a burgeoning likeness to the Idaean environment as he talks of being full of the forest's dark madness (furibunda, 54), living like the wild animals (53–4, 71–2), and being like a Maenad whose worship of Bacchus inherently involved roaming the forested mountains (69). Firmer details about Attis’ physical appearance after arriving upon Ida's shores are revealed elsewhere by the narrator when he picks out the youth's ‘delicate fingers’ (teneris … digitis, 10), ‘rosy lips’ (roseis … labellis, 74), and ‘snow-white hands’ (niueis … manibus, 63.8) – the last is especially significant considering Attis’ description of the landscape as snowy (niuem, 53; algida … niue, 70).Footnote 35 While theories of environmental determinism often explained that cold, snowy landscapes bred courageous fighters,Footnote 36 the word niueus is usually associated with femininity in Catullus: Polyxena has ‘snow-white limbs’ (niueos … artus 64.364); Laodamia is like a ‘snow-white dove’ (niueo … columbo, 68b.125); the feminised, bride-like Hymenaeus comes on ‘snow-white foot’ (niueo … pede, 61.9–10); and the Parcae bend their ‘snow-white heads’ (niueo … uertice, 64.309), where white hair could mark gender as well as its primary connotation of age.Footnote 37 Attis’ snow-white hands may be interpreted in light of the widespread Graeco-Roman association between white skin and femininity.Footnote 38 These are a remarkable attribute for a strapping young lad who, as we learn from his lament, used to spend his time in the palaestra and gymnasium. To become the ‘glory of the olive oil’, Attis would have stripped naked to exercise, and we must assume that he would have tanned after all those hours of well-oiled exertion.Footnote 39 Upon contact with an Eastern environment, this athletic Greek youth develops a distinctly feminine, pale complexion.Footnote 40
Masters of the East
As the speech of Manlius Vulso implies, the Romans had a long history of engagement with Asia Minor. A mere sixty kilometres from Troy as the crow flies, Ida was intimately involved in the Trojan, and then Roman, story,Footnote 41 but Rome's relationship with the Asian environment and its peoples was not only the stuff of myth and distant history. Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed the wider region to Rome upon his death in 133 BCE. It was a valuable inheritance, and Rome proceeded to exploit it. When Mithridates IV Eupator took the throne of neighbouring Pontus in 120 BCE, there began a long period of regional unrest as the king sought to add Bithynia and Asia to his territory. The Romans were at war with Mithridates sporadically until his final defeat by Pompey in 65 BCE. To celebrate, Pompey orchestrated a lavish triumphal procession including subjugated peoples and many treasures. Spectators would have seen a square mountain made from gold and encircled by a golden vine with deer and lions among the fruit trees on its slopes (Plin. HN 37.14). Ebony trees were led in the procession as though they were prisoners of war (Plin. HN 12.120, cf. 111). As Ann Kuttner remarks, Pompey ‘paraded the Asian landscape through Rome's streets.’Footnote 42 A theatre and temple complex followed, where visitors could admire gardens filled with statues and plants from East.Footnote 43 Plants became ‘part of the visual and symbolic language of victory’.Footnote 44 Here was a Roman who had dominated the environment of Asia.
Several of Catullus’ polymetric poems are set against just such a world in the throes of Roman expansion. Poem 11 associates the furthest reaches of Roman power – exemplified by Caesar's exploits across the Alps – with Lesbia's destructive and all-consuming female sexuality.Footnote 45 Poem 29 similarly blasts Caesar for allowing Mamurra, ‘that fucked-out cock of yours’ (ista uestra diffututa mentula, 29.13), to plunder Pontus, Spain, Gaul, and Britain so rapaciously, and marvels that ‘Poofter Romulus’ could allow this to happen (cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres? 29.5, 9).Footnote 46 Poems 9, 12, 28, and 47 develop a narrative about Catullus’ friends Fabullus and Veranius, following them abroad on Piso's cohort and back as they return full of travellers’ tales and little else: these young men were out to make money (ecquidnam in tabulis patet lucelli / expensum, 28.6–7) but suffered instead cold and hunger (frigoraque et famem tulistis? 28.5) while working for a praetor who was either unwilling to let anyone make money (poem 28) or simply nepotistic (poem 47).Footnote 47
Catullus shared their difficulties when he served in Memmius’ cohort in Bithynia and Pontus, a province neighbouring Asia that had been redrawn by Pompey in the aftermath of the Mithridatic wars. Catullus depicts the region as hot and fertile (Phrygii … campi / Nicaeaque ager uber aestuosae, 46.4–5), but we intuit that this has been an oppressive heat from which the young man is eager to escape.Footnote 48 According to poems 10 and 28, Bithynia was an unprofitable and ultimately humiliating experience. This ‘bad province’ (mala prouincia, 10.19) afforded ‘nothing’ for anyone, ‘neither the locals, praetors, nor their cohort’ (nihil neque ipsis / nec praetoribus esse nec cohorti, 10.9–10). While success in the province is imagined in terms of effeminate luxury when the comes brings back expensive, perfumed oils for the hair (‘why would anyone bring back a slicker hairstyle?’ cur quisquam caput unctius referret, 10.11), failure is a far worse emasculation. The praetor is a ‘mouth-fucker, who didn't rate his cohort at a hair’ (irrumator / praetor, nec faceret pili cohortem, 10.12–13) and by denying them the opportunity to enrich themselves, he might as well be forcing them to take the receptive role in sex.Footnote 49 Catullus ruefully recalls the situation: ‘O Memmius, you fucked my face nice and slow with that whole beam of yours while I was flat on my back a long time’ (O Memmi, bene me ac die supinum / tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti, 28.9–10). In these accounts, when a Roman man travels abroad, failure to exploit his power there compromises his masculinity.Footnote 50
Echoing his polymetric narratives of young men who travel to foreign climes and risk emasculation, Catullus depicts the galli in terms reminiscent of a provincial cohort.Footnote 51 After castrating himself, Attis addresses his ‘companions’ (comitibus, 63.11) and urges them to go to Cybele's high grove, following him (simul ite, sequimini, 19) just as they have done before: ‘you who, like exiles seeking foreign places, have followed my way, with me as leader, as companions to me’ (aliena quae petentes uelut exules loca / sectam meam exsecutae duce me mihi comites, 63.14–15). The narrator repeats these terms as he describes the group's final push to the summit: simul haec comitibus Attis cecinit notha mulier, 27; comitata tympano Attis per opaca nemora dux, 32; ducem sequuntur, 63.34. It has been argued that dux and comites were religious titles among the galli,Footnote 52 but Attis is using a language of leading, following, and companionship that also appears in accounts of service on provincial cohorts. Catullus, for one, ‘followed [his] praetor’ (secutus / praetorem, 28.7–8) to Bithynia and bid farewell to his ‘companions’ (comitum, 46.9) when he left,Footnote 53 but these terms appear in other contemporary accounts such as when Cornelius Nepos describes Atticus’ refusal to engage in the traditional cursus honorum as a refusal to ‘follow’ a governor: ‘He accepted the prefectures offered to him by many consuls and praetors on the condition that he did not follow anyone into his province’ (multorum consulum praetorumque praefecturas delatas sic accepit, ut neminem in prouinciam sit secutus, Att. 6.4).Footnote 54 These parallels are ultimately sharpened by Attis’ designation of the galli as a ‘wandering cohort’ (uaga cohors, 25) since cohors so readily evokes the retinue that followed a provincial governor into his post. While Attis likens his comrades to ‘exiles’ (l. 14) – perhaps to underscore the permanent and voluntary nature of their divorce from their native land – he also addresses them as though they were his staff on assignment to master Asia.Footnote 55
The Unmanning of Attis
Considering Rome's recent history in Asia and Catullus’ depictions of service on provincial cohorts, Attis’ journey to Ida may be interpreted through a very Roman lens despite his many Greek attributes. Rome's presence in the East brought great wealth and better access to the rich resources of the Asian landscape, but it also exposed Roman men to a fantastically fertile, effeminising environment. When Attis is transplanted to this landscape at the very beginning of the poem, he is unmanned through his self-castration, but, as we have seen, Catullus’ Ida is notable for its absence of human civilisation. In this wilderness where even his companions disappear after they fall asleep on Ida's peak, Attis’ unmanning entails a more thorough loss of mastery.
Catullus gives no indication at the outset that his Ida hosts the grazing cattle for which its slopes were known, but animal imagery pervades the poem nonetheless. Sandy has argued that its dominant metaphor is the bovine flock and its leonine predator.Footnote 56 When Attis arrives and touches the grove ‘eagerly with hastened foot’ (citato cupide pede, 2) – as though he were a horse, the animal to which the term ‘driven’ or ‘hastened’ (citatus) most often applies – animal terms and animalistic language begin to be applied to him and his companions. Line 4, stimulatus ibi furenti rabie uagus animis, evokes a series of animals as stimulatus suggests oxen and horses, rabies connotes dogs, and uagus, goats. Attis urges his companions to go to the summit, calling them the goddess’ ‘wandering herds’ (uaga pecora, 13) and this is reinforced by the narrator who describes Attis ‘wandering’ (uaga, 31) and compares him to an ‘untamed heifer shunning the burden of the yoke’ (iuuenca uitans onus indomita iugi, 63.33).Footnote 57 Despite the range of animals evoked, our main impression of Attis and the galli is that they are like cattle. This extended metaphor of the ‘wandering herd’ overlaps with that other pattern of imagery used to describe Attis and the galli in lines 1–38, the governor and his cohort. The phrases uaga pecora (13) and uaga cohors (25) occur in the same seat. It is as though the uaga cohors become Ida's grazing herd.
By portraying them as animals as they rush through the forest towards the summit, Catullus underscores their loss of rationality. Throughout antiquity there was considerable debate about whether nonhuman animals could reason (and if so, which ones possessed this faculty).Footnote 58 The dominant view in the late Republic was that humans were different from other animals because they could reasonFootnote 59 – and of course, that some humans were more rational than others.Footnote 60 Aspects of human character that were regarded as negative, especially the appetites, were disparaged as ‘bestial’.Footnote 61 The fact that Attis and the galli have become irrational beasts mirrors their other losses of masculinity and freedom. This animalistic language continues to describe the group until they reach the summit. Although it is kept in our mind during Attis’ lament when he asks if he will spend his life among wild animals (ll. 53–4, 71–2), in this part of the poem Attis’ rational faculties are highlighted (reor, 55; animus, 57; anime, 61). Attis’ lament is his final moment of freedom, the final moment we can attribute to him anything of Plumwood's logic of domination.
After Attis’ speech, animalistic language is transferred to Cybele's lion. Angered by Attis’ desire to flee her control (mea libere nimis qui fugere imperia cupit, 80), Cybele releases one of her lions to terrify him back into the ‘wild groves’ (nemora fera, 89). This lion reminds us in many ways of Attis earlier in the text. Both are goaded (cf. stimulatus, 4 and stimulans, 77) and harm themselves for the sake of the goddess: Attis castrates himself, while Cybele urges the lion, ‘slice your back with your tail, suffer your lashes’ (caede terga cauda, tua uerbera patere, 81). As the lion prepares to stalk Attis, it is reminiscent of him and the galli as they began their ascent of Ida. Concepts like ‘swiftness’ and ‘wandering’ occur in both contexts (‘that beast rouses his mind, urging himself to be swift, / he rushes, he roars, he breaks bushes with his wandering foot’: ferus ipse sese adhortans rapidum incitat animo / uadit, fremit, refringit uirgulta pede uago, 85–6; cf. rapidae … Gallae, 34; uagus, 4, and uaga, 13, 25, 31). The lion is released from his yoke by Cybele (iuncta iuga resoluens, 76; religatque iuga manu, 84) where Attis was like a calf ‘shunning the burden of the yoke’ (uitans onus…iugi, 33). Even the shaking of the lion's russet mane (rutilam ferox torosa ceruice quate iubam, 83) may gesture towards the raucous dancing of the traditionally blond gallus—though Catullus only partially describes Attis this way.Footnote 62
By drawing linguistic parallels between Attis and the lion, Catullus underscores the youth's animalistic nature as he wandered to Cybele's high grove,Footnote 63 but this mirroring also foreshadows their encounter. Earlier literary treatments of encounters between galli and lions celebrated the ability of Cybele's devotees to make these ferocious animals harmless. In several Hellenistic epigrams that were undoubtedly important sources for Catullus’ poem,Footnote 64 galli meet lions and tame them (Alc. Mess. HE 21 = Anth. Pal. 6.218) or scare them off into the wilderness by playing Cybele's drum (Diosc. HE 16 = Anth. Pal. 6.220; [Simon.] HE 2 = Anth. Pal. 6.217; Antip. Sid. HE 64 = Anth. Pal. 6.219). A fragment from one of Varro's Menippean Satires, called ‘The Ass [Listens] to the Lyre’ (Ὄνος λύρας), records the same kind of interaction. An interlocutor asks, ‘Haven't you seen the statue of the lion at Ida in that place where once, as soon as they saw this four-footed beast, the galli straightaway made it tame with their drums so that they could touch it with their hands?’ (non uidisti simulacrum leonis ad Idam eo loco ubi quondam subito eum cum uidissent quadrupedem, galli tympanis adeo fecerunt mansuem ut tractarent manibus? fr. 358 Cèbe = 364 Astbury). The gallus overcomes the lion with the power of Cybele's music in these texts, but Catullus offers a darker version where the lion attacks Attis and forces him back into Cybele's grove.Footnote 65 Catullus’ wild lion is ultimately the ‘enemy of the herd’ (pecoris hostem, 77) and his supremacy highlights Attis’ failure to overcome the Asian environment.
Conclusions: Going Native
Attis is already flawed when he comes to Ida because he has already made the mistake he regrets in his lament: leaving home. As others have shown, this is a youth who did not want to become a fully gendered uir.Footnote 66 Nevertheless, once he touches the Phrygian grove, he is progressively stripped of the aspects of the master identity that he does possess – with the loss of his phallus, his rationality, and his freedom, he is made like a notha mulier, iuuenca, and famula. Plumwood's hierarchy of dualisms becomes inverted by the failure of the master to maintain the logic of domination. Unlike a Pompey, Attis fails to conquer the Asian landscape and is instead conquered by it. Like shrubs snaking their way over bricks, poem 63 represents the power of nature to overwhelm culture.Footnote 67 This is a tale of subversion in which someone who should be a master ‘goes native’; a coloniser fails to colonise. The poem inverts the hierarchy of dualisms by telling the story of a cultured, free human male who is enslaved by a wild, female environment. Attis and his companions become the herds of cattle that had long roamed Ida in literature and reality.
The Idaean landscape that accomplishes this is not a cause for concern in the poem. Catullus is no conservationist, and he does not discuss the impact of human activity on the natural environment. Still, Ida was and is a real place and, even in Catullus’ time, it had been shaped by people whose attitudes to the natural environment have cast long shadows. It is not certain that lions ever inhabited Ida,Footnote 68 but some fifty years ago local villagers reported seeing badgers, hares, jackals, boar, deer, wild cats ‘of some sort’, partridges, bears ‘in the main massif only’, and leopards ‘only in the west towards Ayvacık’.Footnote 69 These species remain there today, despite some evidence of indiscriminate hunting,Footnote 70 but their ongoing existence depends upon a healthy habitat. This biodiverse area boasts over eight hundred species of plants, 32 of which are endemic.Footnote 71 One of these, the Trojan fir (Abies nordmanniana ssp. equi–trojani) was the reason that the area was declared a national park in the early nineties.Footnote 72 Despite this protected status, many mining licences have been granted since the early 2000s.Footnote 73 In 2019 there were large demonstrations against a Canadian gold mining company as it was feared that it was taking far more trees than had initially been permitted and that it was going to use cyanide in the extraction process.Footnote 74 The company has been compelled to halt its activities, but concerns remain about water pollution created by the drilling of another private mining company.Footnote 75 Modern studies in the environmental humanities are often driven by the perception of ecological and climate crisis. Poem 63 may have been driven by fears of a looming political crisis precipitated by powerful individuals greedily taking more money, more land, and more power. When read in concert with poems like 10, 28, 29, and 47, poem 63 emerges as a comment on the folly of imperial forays into the corrupting East.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions have greatly improved this article. I am grateful to the participants of the Catullus in the Treehouse conference for their questions and comments on a paper that provided the foundations for this piece. In a conversation made possible by the Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies Mentoring Scheme, Kit Morrell offered expertise on Pompey and the provinces. Rhiannon Evans, Marguerite Johnson, Bob Cowan, and David Konstan read draft versions and offered insightful feedback.
