Catullus 16

Neoteric poetry was a movement of Roman poetry in the first century BC that, in opposition to the epic poetry that had dominated popular Latin composition to that point, focused on tightly-crafted language and more personal topics. In the case of Catullus, the most well-known neoteric poet, his poetry touched on such topics as his fierce love for his beloved Lesbia, the everyday life of a Roman aristocrat, and threats to sodomize his critics. This last topic is the theme of “Catullus 16”, perhaps the most obscene poem ever written in any language. Let’s dive in.

First, a warning. There are interpretations of this poem in which it is obscene not just in language but in moral content. If you have any reservations about reading about sexual assault, please feel free to skip this review. I am not endorsing any of the actions described in the poem in this review and condemn them in the harshest possible terms, even if I do not stop each time the opportunity arises to repeat my condemnation. Catullus, as far as we know, never acted out any of the actions he threatens in this poem, and I plan to address it as a work of art rather than a criminal confession.

With the disclaimer out of the way, below is the poem in three forms. One is the original Latin, one is a relatively literal translation from Wikipedia (surprisingly one of the few to faithfully represent the infamous irrumabo of the first line), and one is a more inventive translation by Zukofsky. The Zukofsky is what’s known as a homophonic translation, which intends to maintain the sound of the original Latin. I recommend you read it out loud (unless you are in a public place, in which case please do not read it out loud).

Latin

Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō
Aurēlī pathice et cinaede Fūrī,
quī mē ex versiculīs meīs putāstis
quod sunt molliculī, parum pudīcum.
Nam castum esse decet pium poētam
ipsum, versiculōs nihil necesse est
quī tum dēnique habent salem ac lepōrem
Sī sint molliculī ac parum pudīcī
et quod prūriat incitāre possint
nōn dīcō puerīs sed hīs pilōsīs
quī dūrōs nequeunt movēre lumbōs.
Vōs quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum
lēgistis male mē marem putātis?
Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō

Wikipedia

I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,
cocksucker Aurelius and butt-boy Furius,
who think, from my little verses,
because they're a little soft, that I have no shame.
For it is right for the devoted poet to be chaste
himself, but it's not necessary for his verses to be so.
[Verses] which then indeed have taste and charm,
If they are delicate and have no shame,
And because they can incite an itch,
And I don't mean in boys, but in
Those hairy men who can't move their loins.
You, because [about] my many thousands of kisses
You've read, you think me less of a man?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.^[1]

Zukofsky

Piping, beaus, I’ll go whoosh and I’ll rumble you
pathic Aurelius and catamount Furius,
who mix my versicles with your poor tasties—
the sound is a mollycoddle’s, I’m not up
to par for chasteness. But the pious poet
is chaste, his versicles not nailed to his need,
quick to themselves with no lack of decorum,
if the sound models not quite pure for pudency
what incitement it carries passes into
now I won’t say hairless boys’, but such hoary
necks as endure not quite up to feel lumbar.
Milling thousands of kisses are base or make
me out some mare of a male—you impute that?
Piping, beaus, I’ll go whoosh and I’ll rumble you.

What is going on here?

So the gist of the poem is pretty clear from the second version (or, I suppose, if you are fluent in Latin or know what versicles are, the other versions as well). Catullus, offended by Aurelius and Furius, threatens to perform sex acts upon them, before protesting that his poems do not reflect on his own character, then that his poems get people going no matter how old, and finally reprises his threat of sexual violence word for word. It’s a decent amount of ground to cover in just fourteen lines, which is standard for Catullus -- he’s never satisfied with just one subject when he could squeeze three or four in.

But even though the surface level meaning of the poem is somewhat clear, it raises the question of: what the hell is going on here? Why is Catullus threatening pedicabo (literally, I will treat you as a Greek boy) and irrumabo (literally, I will give you an udder to suck on) to these two people, Aurelius and Furius? Who are these guys, what is their relation to Catullus, and why is he choosing to publicly threaten them with sex acts?

Not much is known about these two men other than their appearances in Catullus’s poetry. Wikipedia tells us that Furius refers to Marcus Furius Bibaculus, another neoteric poet of the same era with only fragmentary work remaining, which seems likely; but in the same paragraph dubiously asserts that Aurelius refers to Marcus Aurelius Cotta Maximus Messalinus, a senator born 30 years after Catullus’s death. Unless Catullus had excellent foresight, I think it’s likely Aurelius was another lesser-known colleague of his. Within Catullus’s work (which comprises 116 carmina, or poems, with each referred to by a universally agreed upon number -- hence Catullus 16), the two men appear a few times, allowing us to learn a bit more about their relation to the poet.

The duo appear in the 11th carmen, one of Catullus’s longest and also one of his funniest, in which he begins by listing all the places he is looking forward to going with Aurelius and Furius -- India, Parthia, and Arabia with Crassus or the Alps, Gaul, and Britain with Caesar -- and then concludes by asking the two men to do the much easier journey of telling his girlfriend to forget about him and go enjoy her 300(!) other lovers (Catullus and Lesbia had a very on-again off-again sort of relationship). So there is, it seems, some sort of friendship between the three men.

He devotes two other carmina to each of them, which gives a little more insight into their respective relationships to Catullus. In the 15th and 21st carmina, he begs Aurelius to first not sleep with Juventius, a young man that Catullus himself is smitten with, then later to stop sleeping with him (clearly the first poem did not work). Meanwhile, in the 23rd and 26th carmina, he spends the entire time telling Furius to stop bugging him about a debt of 100 sestertii (about two weeks’ worth of wages for a day laborer), both because Furius is so blessed -- for example, by being such a dried-out bag of bones that he only has to shit ten times a year -- and because Catullus himself is so poor. Hopefully by now you’re starting to get the sense of Catullus’s poems, and why he was so popular in his day.

So perhaps the most straightforward reading of this poem is that Catullus is lashing out at two former friends, after the relationships have soured over love and money. The final straw comes when he hears that Aurelius and Furius are mocking him for his poem Catullus 5, in which he writes to Lesbia,

Dā mī bāsia mīlle, deinde centum,
dein mīlle altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde ūsque altera mīlle, deinde centum;

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand, then a hundred;

Notice the parallelism of that poem with Catullus 16, in which he writes “Vōs quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum” -- essentially, they are making fun of him for how much he loves to kiss his girlfriend.

In this reading of the poem, then, we have a clear narrative: a slighted artist writes witty poetry toward his enemies, going so far as to impugn their sexuality and threaten violence. This sounds pretty familiar to me, and is what I would call the “Catullus 16 as a diss track” reading.

The parallels are obvious. Compare to, say, Nas’s “Ether,” the legendary diss of Jay-Z that has become a by-word for destroying someone’s reputation on a rap song:

Is he Dame Diddy, Dame Daddy or Dame Dummy?
Oh, I get it, you Biggie and he's Puffy
Rockafeller died of AIDS, that was the end of his chapter
And that's the guy y'all chose to name your company after?
Put it together, I rock hoes, y'all rock fellas

Or Ice Cube on “No Vaseline,” hitting back after leaving NWA:

Ay yo Dre, stick to producin'
Callin' me Arnold, but you been-a-dick
Eazy-E saw your ass and went in it quick

In both songs, and many other rap diss tracks throughout history, you can see an echo of Catullus 16: a former friend’s character is tarred by association with homosexual acts in verse. But there is one glaring difference between the poem and these songs -- who is performing the act.

In the turn-of-the-millennium gangster rap scene, there was no room for a man to be associated with a homosexual act. Everybody involved was implicated in a shameful encounter. In contrast, Catullus’s pedicabo and irrumabo end in the first person -o. He even goes so far as to include an extra grammatically unnecessary “ego” (“I”) next to the “vos” (“you”) in the first line, a Latin poetic device called a pleonasm, to really highlight it: I am doing this to you, he is saying with emphasis. There can be no doubt who is doing the penetrating of Furius and Aurelius, and he is far from ashamed.

As many readers familiar with the Classical Mediterranean view of sex may know, there was nothing shameful about being a man in the penetrative role during sex, no matter the gender. In fact, as Craig Williams writes in his Roman Homosexuality: Second Edition, the “normative sexual experience is regularly portrayed in Roman texts less as loving intercourse between two partners and more as a series of penetrative encounters in which one party (a man) acts upon another (a non-man, whether a female, a boy, an effeminate man or cinaedus, or slave).” In fact, Romans struggled to conceive of somebody who did not, on occasion, sleep with men -- Williams points out that the best Suetonius, in his The Twelve Caesars, could come up with to describe the emperor Claudius was, “He was possessed of an extravagant desire for women, having no experience with males whatsoever.”

It’s for this reason that Catullus can write about his love for the boy Juventius, and even write about Aurelius’s similar desire, and yet nothing is seen as insulting (or even out of the ordinary), until Catullus -- an adult man -- threatens to penetrate Aurelius, another adult man. In fact, the state of being unpenetrated as a man is often referred to using the term pius. Despite being the root of our English word that means holy (and in fact Wikipedia chooses the term “devoted” for it), in the context of the poem would have carried an even more distinct connotation of unpenetrated when Catullus writes in the poem, Nam castum esse decet pium poētam.

Thus, Catullus is drawing the central contrast between himself and his critics: he is the furthest thing from a male marem (lesser man), and is willing to prove it in a very physical sense to Aurelius and Furius in the most humiliating way imaginable to a Roman.

The “Catullus 16 as a diss track” reading is by far the most popular interpretation of the poem. In fact, it very well might be the accurate representation of Catullus’s intentions when composing the poem, and we really have no way of ever knowing. I would like, however, to propose an alternative interpretation, which I’d call the “Catullus 16 as banter” reading.

It is, I think, a back-and-forth as old as male friendship: one guy gets in a relationship, the rest of the group rags on him for being too lovey-dovey, and the newly-minted boyfriend gets defensive and lashes out with something equivalent to, “Fuck you!” In this context, it might be helpful to note that there is no definitive Latin obscenity so ubiquitous as “fuck” is to us, so “pedicabo” and “irrumabo” might just be the closest words available to Catullus. The precision of their meaning to us makes them sound intense, like pointed threats of specific acts, but to Catullus, Furius, and Aurelius it might have been taken no more literally than “motherfucker” is to us.

Now, I am sure this type of banter is not a universal experience even in the modern day and do not want to make it out to be one; I also am wary of projecting 21st century American cultural experiences back 2000 years. On the other hand, to quote a different Classical Latin work, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human -- nothing human is foreign to me). So I think I am not too far out of bounds in proposing this might not be perfectly genuine anger.

All other mentions of Furius and Aurelius in the carmina point to a close friendship -- in Catullus 11, he calls them his companions and discusses traveling the world with them. In Catullus 15, he says to Aurelius, “I entrust my loved ones and myself to you.” He borrowed a large sum of money from Furius, normally not something you do from an enemy. As you may have been able to figure out by now, Catullus is an acerbic writer, and it’s possible that any expression of camaraderie is just sarcasm; it is, of course, also possible he fell out with the two of them. But he is also an outrageous, self-deprecating, and shameless poet -- I’d propose there is a very real chance he is just joking around with Aurelius and Furius, pretending to threaten and insult them in the same way one middle school boy might to another in the cafeteria today.

Now, I do not think anybody alive today would publicly threaten sexual assault on a friend as a joke, nor do I think that sort of behavior is indicative of any sort of normal friendship, male or otherwise. Roman culture, though, had different norms about such things; sexual humor was commonplace, as was playful deprecation of even those above your station. As Williams relates, _“_Caesar’s own soldiers chanted ribald jokes concerning his adulteries” at his triumph, and even his co-consul was wont to call him “‘the Queen of Bithynia’” over an alleged affair with the king of that country. In fact, even Catullus got some digs in at Caesar, and then wrote,

irascere iterum meis iambis
immerentibus, unice imperator

you are going to be angry at my iambics once again,
sole Imperator (Caesar), though they don’t deserve it.^[2]

Per Suetonius, Catullus later apologized and Caesar graciously invited him to dinner the same day. So there is a history of Catullus, in jest, insulting someone who at the time was the most powerful man in the Republic -- some playful back-and-forth with friends seems in character for the poet.

Again, I think the evidence for this “Catullus 16 as banter” theory is scant, so opting to believe it over the more straightforward reading would be going too far. That said, it gives me hope that if I compose the perfect roast of my friend in the group chat, there’s a chance it could still be read and analyzed two millennia later.

The Three Line Problem

Catullus 16, unsurprisingly, has a complicated history with the Latin establishment. The poet as a whole was not a favorite of the monks who transcribed Latin works after the fall of Rome (for obvious reasons) and it was only during the Renaissance that Catullus assumed his place in the Latin poetic pantheon. But his 16th poem was particularly troublesome, its obscenity too core to the poem to be fully bowdlerized or elided.

In his monograph “Catullus Purified,” Thomas Nelson Winter documents some of the ways translators have taken on the challenge of including it in otherwise family-friendly collections. Some omit the poem in part or altogether -- the Loeb Classical Library series, essentially the Penguin Classics of Latin translation, printed only lines three through six of the poem. Some opt for the stilted and opaque, like the, “Furius, Aurelius, I’ll work your/ own perversions on you and your persons” of Horace Gregory. Winter does include an example of an attempt at faithful translation from C.H. Sisson, but the venerable classicist and poet has Catullus saying, “I’ll bugger you and suck your pricks,” (emphasis mine) which gets the threat a bit backwards.

It’s not just stuffy translators of the 19th and 20th century that struggle with discussing the poem, though. Professor Mary Beard (of SPQR fame) read the poem aloud on NPR, and the result was the longest bleep in NPR history -- and she was reading the Latin text. No doubt the intention was to protect any vulnerable young Latin speakers who may be listening.

Winter points out at the end of his monograph that discussion of the poem has often been confined to just the first two lines and the repeated last line. I think this is to some extent a complaint only a Classicist could have, seeing as in my experience Catullus 16 is not the subject of any kind of discussion at all, but I do think there is some truth to the sentiment. It raises the question -- is this poem only worth discussing for the shock value?

Even in my treatment of the poem so far, I’ve focused an outsized amount of attention on these pedicabo and irrumabo lines. There’s eleven other lines of text which we haven’t spent much time on -- if not for the sensational opening and close to the poem, would they be worth reading, let alone 2000 years later?

I would venture to say… maybe. There’s some good stuff in these eleven lines. There’s the onomatopoeic alliteration in the p’s of the first few lines (all the putāstis and parum pudīcum) which suggest the poet is spitting on his subjects. There’s the cavalcade of m’s later on, which is preserved in Zukofsky’s translation:

Vōs quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum
lēgistis male mē marem putātis

Milling thousands of kisses are base or make
me out some mare of a male—you impute that?

You can almost hear the “mwah’s” of the kisses one after another. Latin poetry was largely intended to be read aloud, almost like a theatrical performance or perhaps a poetry slam, so opportunities for the reader to really lean into the action-nature of the language would have been an important piece of a good poem. It’s for this reason that Zukofsky’s homophonic translation is in some ways the most faithful: it preserves the auditory experience a Roman audience would have had, which was often what the poet was optimizing for.

In these eleven lines there’s also perhaps the first ever instance of someone asking us to separate the art from the artist, when Catullus tells us even if his verses are filthy he need not be. There’s the unconventional brilliance of the boast that he can get even an old man aroused, which is exactly what good poetry is supposed to be: saying something in a way that nobody else would have thought of. So there’s a lot in there that’s worth reading, but it maybe doesn’t rise to millennia-enduring status on its own.

But -- should it have to? Sure, if we remove the three most impactful lines from the poem, it might drop a few notches in quality, but this is exactly what we’d expect to happen. If we took the song “Layla” and removed the guitar riff and the guttural way Clapton says “Layla,” then we’d still have a pretty great song, but it wouldn’t be in my Spotify top 5 every year. It’s almost tautological that if the best part of a work is removed, the work as a whole will be worse for it.

I’d also posit there’s a bit of a “there’s only one ball” aspect to a poem like this, which is a concept from basketball where if you have a couple really good scorers, adding more scorers doesn’t necessarily translate to a better team -- after all, there’s only one ball for people to score with. Instead you might look to add other types of utility: rebounders, passers, defenders, and so on. In a similar way, if every one of the fourteen lines packed the in-your-face punch of “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,” then the impact might start to get a bit diluted.

So yes, perhaps the three lines have an outsized role in how we think about the poem. But I think Catullus handled it the right way: start strong, grab the reader’s attention, then allow a bit of diversion, wander through the philosophical relation between a poet and his work, throw in a bit of humor about old men’s erections, and when the reader has started to relax a bit, hit them once more with the knock-out punchline. I guess he does, even 2000 years before the invention of the sport, know ball.

A Brief Aside on Latin Meter

People, of course, love when poetry rhymes. Unfortunately, Latin poetry does not rhyme. In part, this is because Latin word endings are so standardized that much of their language would have essentially “rhymed” anyway (for example, without intending to rhyme at all, several of the lines in Catullus 16 rhyme on the “-um” sound). Another reason is rhyming is inherently tied to the stressed syllables in a word (here is an exhaustive breakdown of what does and doesn’t rhyme, and how syllable stress plays into that) and unlike English poetry, Latin poetry does not care about syllable stress in its meter.

Instead, Latin poetry is based around vowel length -- every vowel in Latin is either long or short, with long vowels being held when speaking for about twice the length of a short vowel. The long vowels are partially responsible for the chant-like sound of Latin (the other part is that Latin these days is almost exclusively used in Gregorian chants and exorcisms). The length of a vowel can have extremely critical implications on the meaning of a word: anus when said with a short ‘a’ means old woman; when said with a long ‘a’ it means exactly what you would think.

Catullus wrote most of his poems in the hendecasyllabic meter, which had exacting rules for where each long or short syllable sat (except for the first two syllables of any line, which were free to vary) and meant Catullus had to be very precise in his word choice. It gives the poetry a lively, musical quality to it, but it can be hard for English speakers to pick up on. In longer poems, like the Aeneid, the meter would have been less rigidly adhered to, instead allowed to be a background theme to the piece that shined through in key moments. For casual readers of Latin poetry (myself included) I recommend following the same practice -- allow the meter to draw your attention only when it pops up of its own accord, and otherwise just allow the natural sound of the words to wash over you. Although sometimes this can get you into trouble, as when you try to translate a popular children’s book to Latin and accidentally end up with the title, The Anus That Swallowed the Fly.

Final Thoughts

Diss track, friendly banter, or perfectly constructed basketball team -- whatever Catullus 16 is, it makes a hell of an impression. Its content is shocking and, even with a more generous interpretation, morally questionable. Catullus and his fellow neoteric poets, though, would have been less concerned with the meaning of the poem as how it sounds, how it fits together, how it makes you laugh or shudder. His poems often have the tossed-off vibe of a tweet until you read them a few times and realize just how tightly crafted they are, how there’s nothing left to add but also “nothing left to take away,” as the old saying about perfection goes.

So I’d recommend you scroll up to the top of the review and give one of the three versions of the poem (or all of them) another read, and hopefully something new, something I haven’t even mentioned in this rambling review fifty times the length of the poem, will jump out at you. That’ll be Catullus’s talent shining across language and millennia. One of his most famous quotes, other than the one about face-fucking, is from the same Catullus 5 that started his beef with Aurelius and Furius:

Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever^[3]

And at least in this case, he’s wrong. His obscene, outrageous, shameless light is still here.