WHAT IS THE POINT OF LUKEWARM LOVE?

IF I AM NOT DROWNING IN IT I HAVE NO DESIRE FOR IT

The Catullus translations in this essay are my own. In referring to specific poems, I use the abbreviation “c.” for carmen, poem.

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It feels pretty appropriate to publish this essay on Valentine’s Day. If ever there were an ancient man who would have appreciated a holiday centered around heart-shaped food items and florid greeting cards, it was Gaius Valerius Catullus. Born and raised in Verona during the last glory decades of the Roman Republic, in the city of Rome he became a figurehead for the poetae novi, “the new poets,” a group of avant-garde literati who spurned traditional norms and turned towards more elegant literary construction and more personal literary themes. Today, he is an indispensable presence in the Latin literature canon and is most well-known for his love poetry.¹

The autobiographical aura of Catullus’s oeuvre is magnetic. He compels you to lean in. He swung between intense passion and intense despair: he was besotted, drunk on tenderness, overflowing with affection; he was completely isolated, had been heartlessly betrayed, could depend on no one. My love, he wrote, dies like the flower at the furthest part of the meadow, after it was touched by the passing plow.² His poems are a mirror for these feelings—and if, as T.P. Wiseman has suggested, the order in which we read Catullus’s surviving poetry is the same order established by Catullus himself in the 50s BCE,³ they also reflect the violent seesawing of his emotions. Pure happiness was an infrequent and short-lived visitor; another season of melancholy was always waiting around the corner: c. 31 is a joyful, carefree ode to returning home after a long time away, but the preceding poem, c. 30, is a bitterly desperate rebuke of a former friend.

Alfenus, forgetful and false to your like-minded companions:
harsh man, do you feel no pity anymore for your sweet friend?
Do you no longer hesitate to abandon and deceive me, you traitor?
The wicked deeds of treacherous men don’t please the gods—
but you ignore this and forsake me, miserable in my distress.
Alas! Tell me what men should do—in whom they should have faith?
Certainly you kept commanding me to surrender my soul, you cruel man,
leading me into love, as if it all would be safe—
but now you draw yourself back, and you allow the empty winds
and airy clouds to carry all of your words and deeds away.⁴

Catullus wrote a handful of these “quarrel poems,” and yet he rarely tells us the cause of the quarrel. He speaks in metaphors and deliberate omissions, leaving us scrambling to fill in the gaps. Who was Alfenus? What was his crime? We don’t know, but whatever it was had struck an especially sensitive nerve. Even for a man prone to moping, c. 30 is “uncomfortably self-pitying… Catullus was not usually so nakedly vulnerable.”⁵

And that was a high bar. Catullus has been called “the tenderest of Roman poets.”⁶ His work, although not all about love and yearning and heartbreak, is loaded with deep-seated sentimentality. “He gets under the skin,” wrote Isobel Williams. “You suffer with him if you meet him in the schoolroom: all that wounded self and thwarted desire.”⁷

In a society that tended to view personal relationships as akin to business transactions—obligation and reciprocation, profit and loss—this was a dangerous attitude to hold. Catullus certainly expected to be treated well by those whom he had treated well, but at times his poems hint at a naïveté that was misplaced in the corrupt, cynical world of elite social circles. He couldn’t quite be called a gentleman by our modern standards—he fucked around, played with a long string of lovers, was sexually involved with much younger boys⁸—but he held an idyllic view of romance that would come to torture him. Love, he thought—romantic or platonic—was something to be cherished and protected; and when he fell, he fell hard, with nothing to slow his descent or soften his landing. If relationships were business transactions, Catullus seemed to “approximate love and friendship, equating the emotional rewards and responsibilities of each.”⁹ It was idealistic, and his poems reveal how often the world didn’t live up to the ideal.

He wasn’t without his moments of peace. In c. 9, he wrote fondly of his friend Veranius:

I will kiss your delightful mouth and eyes.
Of all the blessed people there are,
who is happier or more blessed than me?

But in c. 77, the pendulum swung back to despair:

Rufus, whom I believed to be a friend—uselessly, and in vain
(in vain? no, in fact, with a great and terrible price)—
in this way you crept up to me and, burning up my guts,
you tore away every good thing of ours from miserable me.

And c. 38, perhaps more than any other poem, is particularly revealing about the scales of love and friendship as Catullus viewed them. Things are bad for me, he wrote to his friend Cornificius, painfully so, more and more with each hour. He complained:

With what word of comfort have you consoled me—
the least and easiest thing you could do?
I’m angry with you. You treat my love like this?

The raw, undiluted force of Catullus’s emotions is partly why he is such a captivating poet: we feel for him; we bleed for him. But it can be difficult, too, to overlook the feeling of suffocation that must have gone hand-in-hand with his devotion. He was a needy friend and an obsessive lover, easily wounded and frequently sent into spirals of despair. In a commentary on c. 30, Daniel H. Garrison wrote, “The personal affection Catullus expressed was intense and sometimes demanding beyond the capacities of those he loved.”¹⁰

This cycle is most apparent in his relationship with Lesbia—the wealthy, politically powerful sophisticate who inspired 25 of his 116 surviving poems. Most modern scholars accept Lesbia as a pseudonym for Clodia Metelli, wife of the politician Metellus Celer and elder sister to Publius Clodius Pulcher; her own string of lovers provoked long-lasting scandal and Cicero scathingly dubbed her Medea Palatina, Medea of the Palatine.¹¹ Her affair with Catullus can only be described as toxic, characterized by an on-again, off-again pattern that filled him with buoyant hope and then sent him crashing back to the ground. Let us live and let us love, he wrote to her. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand.¹² Then they quarreled—she dumped him—they got back together—she left him again—he railed against her—he wanted her back even as he knew she could not commit to him. Catullus, stop being a fool, he admonished himself, a wretchedly despondent attempt at a pep talk. Don’t live miserably. Carry on with a resolute mind—harden your heart!¹³

Watching the doomed relationship unfold throughout his poems gives the reader a painful sense of secondhand misery. The bliss of the honeymoon era is palpable in c. 87:

No woman is able to say that she was truly loved so much
as my Lesbia was loved by me.
There was never such trust in any bond
as that which was found, from my side, in my love for you.

And in c. 109, he believed the feeling was mutual:

You propose to me, my life, that this love of ours
shall be delightful and everlasting between us.
Great gods, see to it that she is able to promise truly,
and that she speaks sincerely, from her heart,
so that we might be permitted to carry through our whole life
this eternal bond of sacred friendship.

This pair of poems is especially wounding in their use of foedus—translated here to mean “bond,” it can also mean “a formal peace treaty.” It can also mean “marriage.” This is not an indication that Catullus expected to marry Lesbia—not least because she was already married—but it is an indication that he viewed their relationship as something quasi-marital in its sanctity and devotion. It may also have been an indication of the unease lurking beneath his happiness: would he need to pray for sincerity if the sincerity felt assured? Foedus reads like a plea in the way of all strung-along partners. Aren’t we good together? Don’t I make you happy?

The eventual realization that she did not view their relationship in the same terms clearly caused an emotional upheaval for Catullus, although it’s less clear what he did about it. He tried to process his thoughts in c. 75, but no actual conclusion is reached: he is in a “pathetic paradox.”¹⁴ He despises her; he cannot forget her.

At this point, my Lesbia, my mind has been dragged down by your doing,
and so it destroys itself with its own devotion—
such that it can no longer wish you well, even if you become the best,
nor can it stop loving you, even if you do every bad thing.

His poetry does not give us a satisfactory ending to this story. In c. 8, he seems to give up for good,¹⁵ but the poem still has the undeniable air of a lovesick man trying to convince himself to move on. And in c. 73, he doesn’t try to hide his despair:

Stop wishing to receive good things from anyone, in any respect,
and stop thinking that anyone is able to show gratitude.
All things are thankless. It is not useful to have acted kindly—
no, in fact, it is tiring and causes even more harm.

The Reading (Catullus and Clodia) — Giulio Aristide Sartorio

In So Sad Today, Melissa Broder wrote, “Sometimes we don’t want to give up our idea of a person, because it provides us with a beautiful place to go to in our heads—even when that beauty is painful.” An alternate reading here is even when that beauty is a constructed fantasy. She went on:

Another form of romantic obsession is to fall in love with a person who doesn’t exist at all. With this type of romantic obsession, you fall in love with a magic hologram of a person you create based on a distant image. But he or she cannot be a flesh person whom you actually encounter in waking life. In this version of romantic obsession, the hope is that if a magic hologram falls in love with you, then you are magic too. The longing is hope. It keeps you alive.

Catullus was certainly alive in 55 BCE—some of his poems reference events from that year—but he disappears from the historical record soon afterwards, and 54 BCE is usually presumed to be the year of his death: he was thirty years old.

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This is the essay that pushed me to start writing a newsletter, and I’m so glad to finally share it with you. Title from rbhvleo on Tumblr.

1. His love poetry and perhaps also his sexually explicit poetry, such as c. 16—the first line of which has been called (quite delightfully) “one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin or any other language.”

2. c. 11: nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.

3. T.P. Wiseman, Catullus & his World: A Reappraisal (1985).

4. I’ve excluded the last two lines of the poem here. The following translations in this essay are also fragments and do not reflect the full poems: c. 9, c. 38, c. 73, c. 77.

5. Wiseman.

6. Tennyson said this.

7. Isobel Williams, Switch: The Complete Catullus (2023).

8. It’s possible that the various “young boyfriend poems” Catullus wrote were actually about the same young boyfriend: Juventius, who received his pseudonym from iuvenis, young man, and is characterized as being in the flower of his youth (flosculus … Iuventiorum, c. 24.1). He was probably a teenager. He was certainly younger than Catullus, who was likely in his mid to late twenties at the time of their relationship. For the Romans, as for the Greeks, these types of age-gap affairs were not uncommon.

9. Wiseman.

10. Daniel H. Garrison, The Student’s Catullus (2004).

11. The Palatine Hill was Rome’s wealthiest neighborhood and home to the city’s uppermost elite, of which Clodia was a part. Her alleged bad behavior is immortalized in Cicero’s speech Pro Caelio.

12. c. 5: vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus . . . da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera.

13. c. 8: miser Catulle, desinas ineptire . . . nec miser vive, sed obstinata mente perfer obdura.

14. C. J. Fordyce, Catullus: A Commentary (1961).

15. Farewell, girl! Now Catullus is holding out. He won’t seek you out, nor will he beg someone unwilling. But you will be sorry when you’re not asked out at all.