On not being Archilochus properly: Cato, Catullus and the idea of iambos

Materiali e discussioniper l’analisi dei testi classici

Fabrizio Serra editorePisa · Roma

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Direttore : Gian Biagio Conte (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa).Condirettore : Rolando Ferri (Università di Pisa).

Comitato scientifico : Alessandro Barchiesi (Università di Siena-Arezzo), Luigi Battezzato (Università del Piemonte Orientale), Emanuele Berti (Scuo-la Normale Superiore, Pisa), Maria Grazia Bonanno (Università di Roma « Tor Vergata »), Mario Citroni (Università di Firenze), Mario De Nonno (Università Roma 3), James Diggle (Queens’ College, Cambridge), Marco Fantuzzi (Univer-sità di Macerata), R. Elaine Fantham (Princeton University), Stefano Grazzini (Università di Salerno), Philip Hardie (Trinity College, Cambridge), Richard Hun-ter (Trinity College, Cambridge), Mario Labate (Università di Firenze), Glenn W. Most (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Michael Reeve (University of Cambridge), Gianpiero Rosati (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Alessandro Schiesaro (« Sa-pienza » - Università di Roma), Ernst A. Schmidt (Universität Tübingen), Richard Tarrant (Harvard University).

Segretari di redazione : Andrea Cucchiarelli (« Sapienza » - Università di Roma), Maria Luisa Delvigo (Università di Udine), Mario Telò (University of California, Los Angeles).

Sede della redazione : Dipartimento di Filologia Classica, Università degli Studi di Pisa, i 56126 Pisa, Via Galvani 1, telefono +39 050 2215602, fax +39 050 2215621.

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«md» · 74 · 2015

Robert Cowan

On not being Archilochus properly :Cato, Catullus and the idea of iambos*

1. Of mediums, philosophers and small boys :from The Thought Gang to Catullus 56

In one of the most memorable scenes of Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang – though the competition is stiff – Eddie Coffin,

disgraced Cambridge pre-Socratic philosophy don turned exis-tential bank robber, and his lover conjure the spirit of Hipponax through a Hyères-based medium. The results are hilariously sca-brous, as the channelled iambist pours abuse on both his interlocu-tors while fondling the inert, elderly female body he is temporarily inhabiting. A brief extract will give the flavour :

« So what are you looking at, son of barbarian shit ? » The voice was that of Madame Lecercle, but hijacked, hoisted out of key, dragged over coals. « You asked for it, you’ve got it. »

Her nostrils flared, and took in spoor.« I can smell a philosopher, » the voice said. Another inhalation. « You

all reek like Thales. You couldn’t stink a little more to the left, privy-lizard ? »

« So, you’re Hipponax ? » broke in Jocelyne.The look transferred its force to her. « My name’s not Homer. » Pause.

« You’re not going to go hungry with a mouth like that, are you ? You must be popular in the alleys. » 1

To a classicist, the return of Hipponax from the dead inevitably evokes the opening of Callimachus’ first Iambos :

∆Akouvsaq’ ÔIppwvnakto~· ouj ga;r ajll’ h{kwejk tw`n o{kou bou`n kolluvbou piprhvskousin,

* Shorter versions of this paper were delivered at ascs 35 at Massey University, Palmerston North in January 2014 and ca 2014 at the University of Nottingham the following April. I am indebted to both audiences for their comments, especially but not exclusively Ronnie Ancona, Thomas Köntgen, Maxine Lewis, Kit Morrell, Hen-ry Spelman, Gail Trimble, Kathryn Welch and Marcus Wilson. Jeff Tatum and the anonymous reader for « md » made helpful suggestions on written drafts.

1 T. Fischer, The Thought Gang, London 1994, pp. 208-209.

10 Robert Cowan

fevrwn i[ambon ouj mavchn ajeivdontath;n Bou≥p≥avle≥i≥o≥n≥…

(Call. Iamb. 1.1-4 = fr. 191 Pf.) 1Listen to Hipponax, for – you’re not wrong – I have comefrom where they sell an ox for a centpacking iambos which does not sing of the scrapwith Boupalos….

Whether or not the allusion is, in the unfashionable phrase, an in-tentional one is hard to say. The doctrina of the author of Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid is considerable, as is evidenced in all his novels, but it also tends to be more explicitly and even showily signalled than this (in one sense at least) subtle reference to Calli-machus. Nevertheless, if the author is indeed dead (even when he is alive and well and writing for « The Guardian »), Madame Lecer-cle’s séance is unquestionably a de facto allusion to Iambos 1.

The very act of summoning any ghost from the underworld, let alone that of a poet, is an established trope for allusion, the resuscitation of (un)dead texts from the past, and the metaphori-cal implications of such a move can only be the stronger when the allusion is to an earlier necromancy. 2 In any case, the importance of the intertextuality between The Thought Gang and Iambos 1 for a discussion of Catullus 56 is that it constitutes a modern creative in-tervention in the on-going debate about the nature of iambos. Cal-limachus’ Hipponax, speaking in the characteristic scazons which he was reputed to have invented, is a paradoxically unHipponacte-an figure, not only promoting harmony instead of aggression, but (mildly) criticizing those who practise his own brand of divisive invective, an emblem of Callimachean rather than Hipponactean iambos. 3 By contrast, Fischer’s Hipponax Redivivus polemically

1 The text of Catullus is Mynors’ oct ; of Plutarch, Ziegler’s Teubner (2nd edn.) ; of Callimachus, Pfeiffer ; of Archilochus, West (translations are my own).

2 R. Parkes, Dealing with Ghosts : Literary Assertion in Statius’ Thebaid, « Ramus » 39, 2010, pp. 14-23 ; E. Pillinger, « And the gods dread to hear another poem » : The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft from Virgil to Lucan, « md » 68, 2012, pp. 39-79. On tropes for allu-sion more generally, see esp. A. Barchiesi, Figure dell’intertestualità nell’epica romana, « Lexis » 13, 1995, pp. 49-67 ; S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext : Models of Appropriation in Latin Poetry, Cambridge 1998, pp. 1-16.

3 « Che l’invito alla moderazione venga proprio dal ‘violento’ Ipponatte presenta naturalmente una forte carica di paradossalità. » : G. B. D’Alessio (ed.), Callimaco : Ae-tia, Giambi e altri frammenti, Milan 1996, p. 578 ; « [Hipponax] is the model in contra-distinction to whom Callimachus composes his own choliambic verses. » : B. Acosta-Hughes, Polyeideia : the Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition, Berkeley

Cato, Catullus and the idea of iambos 11

reasserts the obscene, abusive, aggressive, and destructive nature of his and, by implication, all ‘true’ iambos. It is just such an as-sertion of the fundamentally obscene and transgressive nature of Archilochean, as opposed to Hipponactean, iambos which I shall argue can be found in Catullus 56’s response to M. Porcius Cato’s (lost) iamboi, and it is high time that we left the 1990s Riviera and turned to Rome in the late Republic.

Catullus 56 is a puzzling poem. Indeed, it remains a puzzle even as to how far its enigmatic quality is itself an intrinsic poetic strat-egy or an accident of cultural distance and difference. 1 There are five main puzzles regarding it and, though with the evidence avail-able I cannot offer more than a broad and speculative explanation for the choice of Dione as the divinity invoked in l. 6, I shall pro-pose a unified solution which accounts for the other four, as well as situating c. 56 within both its late Republican context and the longer-term tradition of Graeco-Roman iambos. Before listing the puzzles, it will be worth quoting the short poem in full :

O rem ridiculam, Cato, et iocosam,dignamque auribus et tuo cachinno !ride, quidquid amas, Cato, Catullum :res est ridicula et nimis iocosa.deprendi modo pupulum puellaetrusantem ; hunc ego, si placet Dionae,protelo rigida mea cecidi.

(Catull. 56)What a laughable thing, Cato, and a funny one,worthy of your ears and your belly-laugh.Laugh, as much as you love, Cato, Catullus :The thing’s laughable and too, too funny.I caught just now a little boy shafting my girl ;Him I, if it please Dione,three-in-a-row with my stiffy buggered. 2

(ca) 2002, p. 32. See also R. Hunter, (B)ionic Man. Callimachus’ Iambic Programme, « Proc. Cambr. Philol. Soc. » 43, 1997, pp. 41-52 ; R. M. Rosen, Making Mockery : The Poet-ics of Ancient Satire, Oxford 2007, pp. 172-206.

1 « The accidents of history and of the transmission of knowledge have served to intensify the complexity of response that [cc. 56 and 58] solicit. » : W. Fitzgerald, Catul-lan Provocations : Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position, Berkeley (ca) 1995, p. 77.

2 As mentioned above, all translations are my own and, since all translation is interpretation, this one inevitably anticipates my preferred solutions to some of the poem’s puzzles.

12 Robert Cowan

One fixed point in the interpretation of this poem, which has been acknowledged by almost all commentators and critics since its identification by Westphal, is that the opening quatrain alludes to an epode by Archilochus, whose first four lines are preserved for their metrical interest in Hephaestion’s Encheiridion :

∆Erasmonivdh Carivlae, crh`mav toi geloi`onejrevw, polu; fivltaq∆ eJtaivrwn, tevryeai d∆ ajkouvwn.

(Archil. fr. 168 West)Erasmon’s son Charilaus, to you a laughable thingI’ll tell, much the dearest of my comrades and you’ll enjoy it as you hear it.

Yet even this single certainty about the poem serves to produce a puzzle, since the function of the allusion is totally obscure. This obscurity may, of course, be a result of the fragmentary nature of the Archilochean poem, though I shall argue below that the survival of the remainder of the epode would probably add noth-ing to its significance for c. 56. Nevertheless, in the current state of knowledge, and even allowing for the hermeneutic mantras that meaning is generated at the point of reception and intertextual-ity cannot be controlled or contained, it remains the first of our four puzzles as to what the significance of Catullus’ allusion to Archilochus is here. 1 The second puzzle is why such immense, and even self-consciously redundant, overemphasis is placed on how funny the anecdote is. Even if the story itself were widely consid-ered hilarious, the structural overloading of the four-line preamble to a three-line narrative might at least suggest an internal subver-sion of the poem’s own claim to humour. That the story is not, even allowing for cultural difference, obviously amusing only in-creases this second puzzle. The third, and probably most discussed, puzzle is what exactly happens in the anecdote, in particular what

1 The reader for « md » judiciously urges caution about the « spessore letterario » of the poem. Such is Catullus’ manifest and self-conscious Alexandrian doctrina through-out his oeuvre that even the most apparently straightforward nugae are susceptible of plausible metapoetic interpretations. A recent example is Sh. O’Bryhim, Malodorous Aemilius (Catullus 97), « Class. Philol. » 107, 2012, pp. 150-156. However, in the case of c. 56, the allusion to Archil. fr. 168 provides a more secure reason to look for a degree of « literary complexity » in what might superficially appear a crude squib.


the pupulus is doing, whether masturbating or penetrating the puel-la, with the related issue of whether he belongs to the girl in the genitive or is doing something to her in the dative. The fourth (and almost final) puzzle is the identity of the addressee, Cato. I shall argue that the solution to this puzzle is also the key to the others and so it is to this that I shall turn first.

2. No kidding ! Catonian iambos

Except for the possibility that the poem was addressed to an oth-erwise unknown Cato whom Quintilian mentions as the source which Domitius Marsus followed in a passage on laughter in his De urbanitate (Inst. Or. 6.3.125), all commentators argue that the ad-dressee was either P. Valerius Cato (who may also have been the author cited by Quintilian) or M. Porcius Cato, later Uticensis (who probably was not). 1 Arguments in favour of Valerius Cato tend to stress his links and aesthetic sympathies with the poets who can most conveniently be termed the Neoterics, which would make him a suitable recipient of c. 56’s ostensibly affectionate tone and perhaps someone who would indeed find the anecdote worth lis-tening to. 2 This identification is perfectly plausible and there are no strong reasons to reject it. Neither, however, are there any very strong reasons to accept it, or at least none as pointed and specific as those I shall propose for the alternative. Those who, following Buchheit, suggest that the addressee is M. Porcius Cato tend to take both the affectionate tone and especially the claim that he will find the anecdote funny as ironic, on the grounds that the poem is designed in a hostile manner to offend Cato’s famously austere morality and lack of humour. 3 Marilyn Skinner adds a further nu-

1 K. Quinn, Catullus : The Poems, London 1970, p. 254 alone expresses no strong preference for either solution (« presumably Valerius Cato… Unless of course these … lines are a provocation of Cato Uticensis »).

2 So, among others, W. Kroll (ed.), Catull, Leipzig 1923 ; G. P. Goold (ed.), Catullus, London 1983 (who also believes the pupulus is the Camerius of c. 55) ; D. F. S. Thom-son (ed.), Catullus, Toronto 1987 (on balance). The suggestion by J. Uden, Impersonat-ing Priapus, « Amer. Journ. Philol. » 128, 2007, pp. 1-26, at p. 10 that « The subgenre [of c. 56 as a Priapaean poem] may have been suggested by the fact that Valerius Cato had a statue of Priapus in his backyard » seems to build too much on Fur. Bibac. fr. 1.3 Hol-lis, since such statues were a common feature of Roman gardens rather than distinc-tive to Valerius’, though Uden’s Priapaean analysis of c. 56 is otherwise excellent.

3 V. Buchheit, Catull an Cato von Utica (c. 56), « Hermes » 89, 1961, pp. 345-356 ; B. Ar-kins, Sexuality in Catullus, Hildesheim 1982, p. 28. The idea is already noted, but reject-ed, by R. Westphal, Catulls Gedichte in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange, Breslau

14 Robert Cowan

ance to this by noting how the disingenuous ellipsis of the primary obscenities which Catullus uses elsewhere and which would suit the subject-matter mean that « the anecdote is ostensibly … fit for the ears and laughter of the addressee … famous for his severitas in his own time … and for subsequent generations an emblem of tight-lipped prudery ». 1 Two critics, to my knowledge, have argued for a non-ironic address to M. Porcius Cato. One was William C. Scott, as part of an unconvincing suggestion that the puella is Clo-dia, the pupulus Clodius, and hence Catullus and Cato politically aligned as the latter’s enemies. 2 The other was Robinson Ellis.

Ellis made the key connection between c. 56 and M. Porcius Cato as early as 1876, though he did not explore its full significance and his observation has been little noted since. 3 Among his other at-tempts to reconstruct the sort of playful, even ribald Cato who might, without irony, be expected to enjoy c. 56, Ellis notes an an-ecdote about the later Uticensis’ youth recounted in Plutarch’s Life of him. Ellis’ efforts to make a risqué sophisticate out of Cato, though a salutary corrective to the unreflective retrojection of lat-er stereotypes of stern morality, ultimately fail to convince, since the evidence he pulls, mainly from Plutarch, is too tendentiously selective and his interpretation even of that selection too strained. 4 However, the anecdote about Cato’s Archilochean verses is central to an understanding of c. 56, not because it points an affinity with Catullus, but because it is another point of divergence, not political or even fully ethical, but poetic. Before discussing Cato’s iamboi any further, let us look at the passage from Plutarch in full :

∆Epei; d’ w{ran w[/eto pro;~ gavmon e[cein, oujdemia`/ gunaiki; sunelhluqwv~, hJr-movsato Lepivdan, provteron me;n ejgguhqei`san Skipivwni Metevllw/, tovte d’ ajpeipamevnou tou ̀Skipivwno~ kai; th`~ ejgguvh~ luqeivsh~ scolavzousan. ouj

1867, p. 146 : « Man hat an den strengen Stoiker M. Porcius Cato gedacht und gerade darin den eigentlichen Witz des Gedichtes finden wollen, dass Cato, « der wandelnde Tugendspiegel in der sündigen Hauptstadt », aufgefordert wird, über eine solche Ob-scönität zu lachen. Ich glaube es nicht. ».

1 M. B. Skinner, Supplementary Note on the Latin Sexual Language : Catullus 56.5-6, « Liv. Class. Mon. » 7.9, 1982, p. 140.

2 W. C. Scott, Catullus and Cato (c. 56), « Class. Philol. » 61, 1969, pp. 24-29, refuted by W. J. Tatum, Catullus 79 : Personal Invective or Political Discourse ?, « Pap. Liv. Lat. Sem. » 7, 1993, pp. 31-45, at pp. 40-41. Scott does also refer to Cato’s Archilochean iamboi as another connection between him and c. 56 (p. 27).

3 R. Ellis, A Commentary on Catullus, Oxford 1876, p. 198. Kroll (ed.), op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 13], pp. 100-101 also notes the existence of Porcius’ iamboi, but still prefers Valerius.

4 Ellis, op. cit. [above, n. 3], pp. 197-198.


mh;n ajlla; pro; tou ̀gavmou metamelhqei;~ pavlin oJ Skipivwn kai; pavnta poihv- sa~ e[labe th;n kovrhn. oJ de; Kavtwn sfovdra paroxunqei;~ kai; diakaeiv~, ejpe-ceivrhse me;n ejpexelqei`n dia; divkh~, wJ~ d’ oiJ fivloi tou`t’ ejkwvlusan, ojrgh`/ kai; neovthti trevya~ eJauto;n eij~ ijavmbou~, polla; to;n Skipivwna kaquvbrise, tw`/ pikrw`/ proscrhsavmeno~ tou ̀ ∆Arcilovcou, to; d’ ajkovlaston ajfei;~ kai; paidariw`de~.

(Plut. Cat. min. 7.1-2)When he thought that he had reached the age to marry, never having had sex with any woman, he became engaged to Lepida, who had pre-viously been betrothed to Metellus Scipio, but was then unattached, since Scipio had renounced her and the engagement had been broken. Nevertheless, before the marriage Scipio changed his mind again and by doing everything in his power got the girl. Cato was immensely pro-voked and inflamed, and tried to take proceedings against him through the courts, but when his friends prevented this, in his rage and youth, he turned to iamboi, and hurled many insults at Scipio, making use of the bitterness of Archilochus, but rejecting his licentiousness and childishness.

Cato’s appropriation of Archilochean iambos constitutes a remark-able application of poetic tradition to ‘real life’. With the slight difference that Metellus Scipio 1 was the rival suitor rather than the prospective father-in-law, the situation in which Cato had his betrothal broken off and took revenge by launching iamboi at his former betrothed and a close male relation strikingly resembles Archilochus’ famous jilting by Neobule and terrible vengeance on her, her father Lycambes and her sister. 2 Indeed, Ian Du Quesnay and Tony Woodman have recently used it, along with Trebon-ius’ Lucilian invectives against Antony, as part of a salutary and judicious reaction to more extreme attempts to divorce Catullus’ poetry from any basis in ‘real life’, arguing that both Cato’s and Trebonius’ « real feelings are self-consciously expressed in poems

1 The future consul of 52 bce, by which time his name was Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica, was almost certainly still P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica at the date of this incident, which surely pre-dated his testamentary adoption by Q. Caecilius Me-tellus Pius around 64 bce, but I shall follow Plutarch’s anachronistic nomenclature, which has the virtue of recognizability.

2 « Archilochos war für Cato gerade in dieser Angelegenheit ein geeignetes ‘Stil-muster’, da er sich in der gleichen Situation als geprellter Brautwerber mit Schmäh-gedichten gegen seinen verhinderten Schwiegervater Lykambes gewandt hatte. » (R. Fehrle, Cato Uticensis, Darmstadt 1983, p. 69 n. 23). « Cato’s situation was not unlike Archilochus’ after Neobule was denied to him by her father : hence the simi-lar reaction. » (J. Geiger, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Cato minor, diss. Oxford 1971, p. 161).

16 Robert Cowan

which work in a defined literary tradition adapted to the realities of the moment. ». 1

We shall return below to the problematic issue of using Plu- tarch’s Life as evidence for Cato in general, but it is worth consid-ering here whether this striking correspondence between literary tradition and real events is in fact too striking to be true. It is well known that Plutarch regularly shapes his biographical narratives, on both a macro- and microscopic level, to map onto literary or historical paradigms, and indeed the life of Cato itself is carefully crafted to make him conform to the model of Socrates. 2 Could Plutarch in a comparable fashion have crafted this episode to make it conform to the model of Archilochus and Lycambes, with the probable inference to be drawn that there was no evocation of Par-ian iambos in the original incident ? 3 The possibility cannot be cat-egorically ruled out, but a number of factors tell against such a hy-persceptical thesis. The story of Archilochus and Lycambes would have been so familiar to any educated Roman of the late Republic that it would have been virtually impossible for someone to write iamboi, or even a broadly equivalent form of invective poetry, in response to being jilted without explicitly or implicitly evoking it. So far from our requiring a learned Plutarch to make a Lycambes out of Metellus Scipio, it is profoundly implausible that Cato would not have done so himself. To posit Plutarchan invention here, then, we should have to imagine that he invented the whole episode of Lepida and Metellus Scipio, or at the very least the whole notion of Cato’s composition of invective poetry. Such fabrication from whole cloth goes rather beyond Plutarch’s usual manipulation of emphasis and comparanda, but is still not impossible per se. What is even more improbable is that Plutarch should practise such radical

1 I. Du Quesnay, T. Woodman, Epilogue, in Catullus : Poems, Books, Readers, Cam-bridge 2012, p. 258.

2 On such literary patterning, see esp. J. M. Mossman, Tragedy and Epic in Plutarch’s Alexander, in Essays on Plutarch’s Lives, ed. by B. Scardigli, Oxford 1995, pp. 209-228 ; Eadem, Plutarch, Pyrrhus, and Alexander, in Plutarch and the Historical Tradition, ed. by Ph. A. Stadter, London 1992, pp. 90-108. On Cato and Socrates see T. Duff, Plu-tarch’s Lives : Exploring Vice and Virtue, Oxford 1999, pp. 141-145. That Duff thinks « the Sokratic parallels … were probably already to be found in Plutarch’s sources » (p. 142) does not substantially affect the issue since it is the presence of authorial patterning, regardless of the identity of the author, which has the potential to distort the depic-tion of events.

3 My thanks to Jeff Tatum (personal communication) for raising this possibility and encouraging me to address its implications for my argument.


invention to produce a story about Cato the passionate lover and, even less probably, Cato the poet. For the biographer to invent an episode which reinforces the pervasive parallelism between Cato and Socrates would fit convincingly within his wider literary and didactic strategy. To invent a bizarrely anomalous episode full of apparently arbitrary details, which uniquely depicts Cato as poet and lover in order – partially and again uniquely – to draw parallels between him and Archilochus could have no other motivation or function than to produce l’effet de réel, which would by no means fit Plutarch’s usual modus operandi. 1 It is far more likely that, in its core details at least, this anecdote reflects, not the reality effect, but something like reality itself.

With due caution, then, it is reasonable for us to proceed on the premise that Plutarch’s anecdote about Cato’s composition of iamboi against Metellus Scipio has some basis in historical fact, and hence, for the reasons given above, that his evocation of Ar-chilochus’ iamboi against Lycambes was either explicit, or at least heavily implicit and taken for granted by the poet and his circle of readers. However, Cato’s evocation of Archilochus is neither simple nor wholehearted. In making use of Archilochus’ « bitter-ness » but rejecting his « licentiousness and childishness », Cato is also making a creative and polemical intervention in the long-run-ning ancient debate about the nature and desirability of iambos. Before turning to a discussion of what Cato’s intervention might have been, let us briefly sketch the outlines of the debate.

The ancient reception of iambos, both critical and creative, has been the subject of considerable study, especially in the last thirty-five years, so that it is neither necessary nor desirable to do more than summarize the main issues. 2 From at least the time of Pindar,

1 R. Barthes, L’effet de réel, « Communications » 11, 1968, pp. 84-89.2 On « the idea of iambos » see esp. J. K. Newman, Iambe/Iambos and the Rape of a

Genre : A Horatian Sidelight, « Illin. Class. Stud. » 23, 1998, pp. 101-120 ; A. Cavarzere, A. Aloni, A. Barchiesi (eds.), Iambic Ideas : Essays on a Poetic Tradition from Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire, Lanham (md) 2001 ; M. Steinrück, Der neue Iambos : Studien zu den Formwegen eines griechischen Diskurses im Hellenismus und der Kaiserzeit, Hildesheim 2009 ; K. Lennartz, Iambos : philologische Untersuchungen zur Geschichte einer Gattung in der Antike, Wiesbaden 2010 ; A. Rotstein, The Idea of Iambos, Oxford 2010 ; T. S. John-son, Horace’s Iambic Criticism : Casting Blame (Iambike ¯ Poie ¯sis), Leiden 2012, pp. 35-76 ; T. Hawkins, Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire, Cambridge 2014. More specifically on the reception of Archilochus : A. von Blumenthal, Die Schätzung des Archilochos im Al-tertume, Stuttgart 1922 ; H.-G. Nesselrath, Lucian and Archilochus : or How to Make Use of the Ancient Iambographers in the Context of the Second Sophistic, in Hesperos : Studies in An-cient Greek Poetry Presented to M. L. West on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. by P. J. Finglass,

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critics and poets, both rival and sympathetic, expressed a sense of unease at a nexus of qualities present in (an idea of ) iambos which can loosely gathered under the heading of excess. Iambos tran-scends boundaries of appropriate language, appropriate subject-matter, appropriate form and above all of appropriate aggression. Of course, this process of reception constitutes a substantial nar-rowing as well as analysis of the genre, side-lining many important features such as narrative, beast-fable, politics, and myth, to make it almost exclusively the sort of aggressive poetry with which Ar-chilochus assailed Lycambes and Hipponax Bupalus. 1 Tradition travestied iambos into a litany of abuse and then criticized its abu-siveness. Indeed, the most remarkable accusation levelled against Archilochus was that (barely) preserved in a fragmentary section of the Mnesiepes Inscription that his work was ijambikwvtero~, too much itself, an excess of its own problematic (and excessive) nature. 2

In addition, a particularly developed example of the ancient ten-dency towards autobiographical readings of poetry, combined with the notion that « style is the man » led to a conflation between criti-cism of iambic poetry and of iambic poets. It was not merely the act of excessive aggression in driving Lycambes to suicide which could be used to stigmatize Archilochus as a man, but something more intangible and inherent in the nature of yovgo~ which reflect-ed something inherent in the nature of those who composed it. This correlation can already be detected in Pindar’s characteristi-cally pregnant and elusive image of seeing – from a safe distance – « many times in helplessness / blame-casting Archilochus with heavy-worded hatreds / getting fat. ». 3 More explicit is the famous

Chr. Collard, N. J. Richardson, Oxford 2007, pp. 132-142 ; J. Yvonneau, L’Archiloque de Plutarque, « Pallas » 77, 2008, pp. 77-89 ; M. Ornaghi, La lira, la vacca e le donne inso-lenti : contesti di ricezione e promozione della figura e della poesia di Archiloco dall’arcaismo all’ellenismo, Alessandria 2009.

1 On iambos and narrative : E. Bowie, Early Greek Iambic Poetry : The Importance of Narrative, in Cavarzere, Aloni, Barchiesi (eds.), op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 1-27. On the narrowing see esp. Newman, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 119-120.

2 seg, 15.517, col. 3.38. Mnesiepes seems to be reporting the misconceptions of the Parians about Archilochus’ introduction of iambos as part of a new Dionysiac cult, but this still constitutes a criticism which, according to tradition, could be and was levelled against the genre. For discussion, see D. Clay, Archilochos Heros : The Cult of the Poets in the Greek Polis, Cambridge (ma) 2004, pp. 16-23.

3 ei\don ga;r eJka;~ ejw;n ta; povll∆ ejn ajmacaniva/ / yogero;n ∆Arcivlocon barulovgoi~ e[cqesin / piainovmenon : Pi. P. 2.54-56. On the more widespread connection between blame and gluttony in Greek thought see N. Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens, Cambridge 2008.


criticism of Critias, blaming the blame-poet for revealing so many disreputable and discreditable things about himself. 1 Iambos was too excessive and transgressive, and above all too aggressive and vi-olent. These are the qualities which are repeatedly deprecated. We have already seen something of the way in which, in addition to critics criticizing aspects of iambos – or the degree of those aspects – imitators such as Callimachus could perform a comparable act of creative criticism by selective imitation, with or without more-or-less explicit programmatic commentary on the nature of that imi-tation. The practice continued with Horace and on through Ovid, Babrius and beyond, and it is into this creative, imitative strand of the iambic debate that I wish to insert both Cato and Catullus. In general, imitators agreed with those critics who found iambos too iambic, and their creative commentaries pronounce their verdict on this dimension of the genre by rejecting or at least softening it. Cato’s divergence from this tendency will be seen to be a notable exception.

Before turning back to Cato, it is important also to note the ques-tion of laughter in the iambic tradition. Of course, the ridicule of enemies and the rendering of them as objects of individual or gen-eral derision is a substantial part of the ancient notion of invective, and arguably even a transcultural one. Moreover, whatever the truth of the matter, many Greeks (and Romans) at least believed in an intimate connection between the genres of iambos and Old Comedy, with its similar combination of ridicule and abuse. 2 How-ever, the two are not inextricably linked. One aetiology of iambos is linked to the figure of Iambe, who made Demeter laugh with her obscene jokes when the latter was mourning Persephone. This connection of humour and obscenity in the (unmarked) absence of invective is an important one for the agonistic iambos of Cato and Catullus. 3 Even more important is Horace’s later, marked an-tithesis of the humorous and the bitter in the context of blame-poetry. He is contrasting Lucilius with himself and in the context

1 Critias fr. 88 B 44 D-K, with Rosen, op. cit. [n. 3 on pp. 10-11, at p. 11], pp. 248-255 ; Rotstein, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 300-317.

2 On iambos and Old Comedy see esp. R. M. Rosen, Old Comedy and the Iambo-graphic Tradition, Atlanta (ga) 1988, and now Iambos, Comedy and the Question of Ge-neric Affiliation, in Greek Comedy and the Discourse of Genres, ed. by E. Bakola, L. Prau- scello, M. Telò, Cambridge 2013, pp. 81-98.

3 hHom.Dem. 202-205. On this controversial passage see Newman, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17] ; Rotstein, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 167-182.

20 Robert Cowan

of satire rather than of iambos, but the close links between the two genres, and the affiliation of both authors with Archilochus, makes the passage relevant here : « The laughable is often stron-ger and better than the bitter, and settles great affairs », ridiculum acri |fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res (Hor. Sat. 1.10.14-15). Humour is set in antithesis with bitterness, the latter an impor-tant metaphor in the reception of Archilochus, including Cato’s. As Gowers notes, acer is « connected with sharp flavours and hostil-ity », 1 a precise equivalent of Plutarch’s (and perhaps Cato’s) pi- krov~. In addition to the unilateral question of how much (if any) ag-gression should be present in iambos, Horace shows, with respect to the closely related genre of satire, another debate between the efficacy of bitterness and of humour, a debate which we shall see played out a generation or two earlier between Cato and Catullus.

What then might Cato’s polemical ‘take’ on Archilochean iam-bos have been, and how might we set about reconstructing it ? Of course, we should not facilely retroject the image, so familiar from Petronius, Martial and others, of the austere and even prudish Cato onto the historical figure, though neither should we reject the pos-sibility that some such tradition, however distorting, might already have developed by the 50s bce in Catullus’ circle, and perhaps even in Cato’s own self-representation. 2 In particular, we must take into account sources which depicted Cato in terms very different to those of the stern moralist of the dominant tradition. Though some use can be made of Cicero’s contemporary evidence, and that of Sallust who had been a contemporary even though he was writing after Cato’s death, the most important source, Plu-tarch’s Life, is late and subject to the accrual of over a century’s worth of legend and tradition. Nevertheless it remains valuable evidence and offers a variety of depictions of Cato which, when used judiciously, can be used to reconstruct something of at least his contemporary image, if not ‘reality’. In addition to his fondness for dice, his attested proclivity to overindulge in alcohol offers an

1 E. Gowers (ed.), Horace : Satires Book i, Cambridge 2012, p. 315.2 On the contemporary ‘reception’ and construction of Cato see P. Pecchiura,

La figura di Catone Uticense nella letteratura latina, Torino 1965, pp. 13-24 ; R. J. Goar, The Legend of Cato Uticensis from the First Century b.c. to the Fifth Century a.d., Brux-elles 1987, pp. 13-21 ; S. Gäth, Die literarische Rezeption des Cato Uticensis, Frankfurt am Main 2011, pp. 3-44, though all except Pecchiura focus overwhelmingly on depictions which his erstwhile contemporaries (Cicero, Caesar, Sallust) wrote after the iconic and transformative event that was his suicide.


intriguing if elusive connection to the imagery of Archilochean ‘wine-drinkers’ in antithesis to Callimachean ‘water-drinkers’, but it by no means conflicts with a rejection of humour, obscenity and lack of decorum. 1

In addition, Cato was involved in what from a modern perspec-tive might be considered a sexual scandal and which was evidently a source of some discussion amongst his contemporaries, name-ly his giving of his wife Marcia to his friend Hortensius so that she might bear him children (after refusing to give him his mar-ried daughter Porcia), and his taking of her back on Hortensius’ death. 2 However, Eva Cantarella has made a strong case for how comprehensible (if unusual) these actions were in terms of Roman attitudes to marriage and sexuality. 3 Even if Cantarella’s argument for the transactions’ normality does not totally account for the evident surprise among contemporaries and later ancient sources which they evoked, that surprise is not generally associated with the sexual dimension. The purported rationale behind it (though there must surely also have been a political angle) seems to have been a particularly extreme version of the notion, shared in differ-ent ways by Roman traditionalists, Cynics and Stoics, that sexual relations are entirely for the production of children. If anything, this desexualizing of Porcia and Marcia moves Cato even further from the rakish Archilochus of the First Cologne Epode. It is particu-larly noticeable that, even in his virulent Anticato, Caesar attacked Cato, not for any sexual transgression in this matter, but for his al-leged avariciousness in lending Marcia to Hortensius so she could become his heir and taking her back when she was wealthy. 4

Perhaps the best approach to gaining a sense of Cato’s redefini-tion of iambos is to lay less emphasis on the sort of poetry which the sort of man various sources construct might have written, with each step reliant on dubious premises and deductions, and rather

1 Cato’s drinking : Sen. dial. 9.17.9 = Caes. Anticato fr. 7 Klotz ; Plut. Cat. min. 6.1-2 [also dice]. Wine-drinkers : N. B. Crowther, Water and Wine as Symbols of Inspiration, « Mnemosyne » 32, 1979, pp. 1-11 ; P. E. Knox, Wine, Water, and Callimachean Polemics, « Harv. Stud. Class. Philol. » 89, 1985, pp. 107-119 ; D. Wray, Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood, Cambridge 2001, pp. 169-176.

2 Plut. Cat. min. 25.3-9, App. bc 2.14.99 ; cf. Luc. 2.326-344. Thanks to Kathryn Welch for pointing out the potential relevance of this scandal.

3 E. Cantarella, Marriage and Sexuality in Republican Rome : a Roman Conjugal Love Story, in The Sleep of Reason : Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. by M. C. Nussbaum, J. Sihvola, Chicago 2002, pp. 269-282.

4 Caes. Anticato fr. 11 Klotz = fr. 7 Tschiedel = Plut. Cat. min. 52.5-8.

22 Robert Cowan

to focus, with due caution, on the words in Plutarch which are the very basis for thinking that he did redefine iambos. When Plutarch writes that Cato wrote tw`/ pikrw`/ proscrhsavmeno~ tou ̀∆Arcilovcou, to; d’ ajkovlaston ajfei;~ kai; paidariw`de~, it is by no means clear whether the biographer is reporting his own personal judgment of the poems, that of subsequent critics, or that of contemporaries, and of course there is the possibility of considerable or even to-tal overlap between all three categories. A fourth, very attractive possibility is that the words in some way reflect a more-or-less ex-plicit programmatic statement made by Cato himself, either in the poems themselves or in some paratext such as a prose preface or independent comment. 1 This is unprovable, without further evi-dence coming to light, and the remainder of the current argument by no means depends on it, though the scenario I propose would certainly gain greater piquance if Catullus were imagined as react-ing to Cato’s explicit rather than implicit idea of iambos. However, while certainty is still unattainable, the list of inclusions and ex-clusions is peculiar enough to make it at least strongly probable that, even if Cato himself was not its explicit source, it was suf-ficiently striking, distinctive and hence widely-known for Catullus to respond to it meaningfully a decade or two later. In short, as I shall show below, the sharp distinction between to; pikrovn and to; ajkovlaston, elsewhere closely-associated, and the exceptional inclusion of to; paidariw`de~ combine to make this smack of some-thing more specific and evidence-based than the conventional ver-dict routinely trotted out on any given item of iambography. In what follows, I shall mainly write as if Plutarch reflects Cato’s own explicit programme, but the caveats of this paragraph should be taken as implicit throughout.

It is interesting to compare Plutarch’s description of Cato’s iam-boi with Horace’s famous retrospective lines in the Epistles on his own earlier Epodes :

Parios ego primus iambosostendi Latio, numeros animosque secutusArchilochi, non res et agentia uerba Lycamben.

(Hor. Epist. 1.19.23-25)

1 Prose prefaces earlier than Martial and Statius’ Silvae in the Flavian era are not clearly attested, but the possibility of their existence remains. On possible anteced-ents see N. Johannsen, Dichter über ihre Gedichte : die Prosavorreden in den Epigrammaton libri Martials und in den Silvae des Statius, Göttingen 2006, pp. 26-35.


Parian iamboi I was the firstto show to Latium, following the metres and spiritof Archilochus, not the subject matter and the words which harried Ly- cambes.

The relevance of Cato’s iamboi to this passage has been noted by Cucchiarelli and Lennartz, with the latter claiming them as « an example of how a Roman might imitate not only the numeri but also the res Archilochi, though not the uerba [sc. obscena] too. ». 1 This assessment is valid up to a point but, perhaps deliberately, omits the fourth element of Archilochus’ poetry which Horace (and Cato) had to decide whether to imitate, and if they did, how to interpret it : its animi. 2 On one level, of course, this refers to the anger and vehement passion which were the undisputed hallmark of Archilochean iambos and which, since ojrghv was one of the fac-tors which Plutarch claims prompted him to choose this genre, it is reasonable to assume were a feature of Cato’s poems also. 3 Yet it surely also suggests the ‘spirit’ or ethos of iambos as embodied in the conventional persona of Archilochus, « the moral and mental constitution of a person, disposition, character », a sense in which Horace himself uses the word of, coincidentally, Cato in Carm. 2.1. 4 Since style was the man, this generic and psychological ethos was a quality which ancient canons of criticism did not totally separate from diction, register, tone and, in short, uerba. Obscene words describe and emblematize obscene subject-matter and both reflect and produce lowness of style and genre. Cato’s imitation of Ar-chilochus was, like Horace’s, a partial one, and as such constituted a polemical redefinition of what iambos was, or at least what it could be. In the absence of the poems themselves, it is only from

1 « Ein Beispiel dafür, wie ein Römer nicht nur numeri, sondern auch res Archilochi, wenn auch nicht verba (sc. obscena) imitieren mochte. » (Lennartz, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], p. 416 n. 1516). Cf. A. Cucchiarelli, La satira e il poeta. Orazio tra Epodi e Sermones, Pisa 2001, p. 183 n. 227, who, however, designates this « il mito dell’eroe repubblicano Catone Minore ».

2 On Horace’s complex engagement in the Epodes with the idea of iambos and of Archilocheanism, see esp. L. C. Watson (ed.), Horace : Epodes, Oxford 2003, pp. 4-12 ; S. J. Harrison, Some Generic Problems in Horace’s Epodes : Or, On (Not) Being Archilochus, in Cavarzere, Aloni, Barchiesi (eds.), op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 165-186 ≈ On not being Archilochus : Horace’s Epodes, in Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace, Oxford 2007, pp. 104-135 ; Johnson, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 77-179.

3 old, s.v. animus 11 : « (usu. pl.) Anger, animosity ».4 Ibidem, 14 ; atrocem animum Catonis : Hor. Carm. 2.1.24.

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Plutarch’s brief description that we can deduce something of what Cato, implicitly or explicitly, made of iambos.

Like Horace, Plutarch specifies both the Archilochean quali-ties which Cato adopts and those which he rejects. As I have ar-gued, it is at least plausible that this derives directly or indirectly from Cato’s own programmatic statement of his iambic aesthetic. Horace’s is, of course, a retrospective description of his own Ar-chilocheanism, embedded in a different text and a different genre almost a decade after the Epodes, but the programmatic opening of Callimachus’ first Iambos, as we have seen, and even some tantaliz-ing fragments of Archilochus himself suggest that self-conscious statements about poetics were not alien to the genre. 1 Whether or not Cato himself asserted that his iamboi would exploit bitter-ness but reject licence and childishness, this very distinct mixture of elements was clearly sufficiently recognizable for it to enter the tradition about the poems. Bitterness, to; pikrovn, is of course a fa-miliar quality associated with Archilochus in antiquity. 2 The word itself, as well as its adverbial form and compounds, is frequently used of both the poet and of iambos more generally, quite apart from many closely related notions such as Callimachus’ famous attribution to Archilochus of the « bitter bile of the dog and sharp sting of the wasp ». 3 Yet this very bitterness is the quality which critics most frequently criticize in Archilochus and which his imita-tors are keenest, explicitly or implicitly, to exclude from their own modified form of iambos. Both Callimachus’ Iamboi and Horace’s

1 E.g., Archil. frr. 1, 120, 121, 215 West. Intriguing for these polemical versions of iambos by successive poets is the suggestion that Archilochus himself may have been engaging with Lycambes as a rival poet, on which see T. Hawkins, Out-Foxing the Wolf-Walker : Lycambes as Performative Rival to Archilochus, « Class. Ant. » 27, 2008, pp. 93-114.

2 If « bitterness » was indeed mentioned by Cato and if his iamboi were in Latin, he presumably used acer, acerbus or amarus qualifying a noun, or perhaps a related adverb, rather than the prosaic acerbitas or amaritudo.

3 Bitter Archilochus : oJ pikro;~ ... ∆Arcivloco~ : [Meleager,] A. P. 7.352.3-5 ; pikrh;n / Mou`san : Gaetulicus, A. P. 7.71.1-2 ; pikrocovlou ... stovmato~ : Julian, A. P. 7.69.4 ; Loidorh`sai me;n pikrw`~ ta;~ oujk ejqelouvsa~ hJmi`n gamei`sqai : Oenomaus, fr. 11.36 ; drimuvn te covlon kuno;~ ojxuv te kevntron / sfhkov~ : Callim. fr. 380 Pf. Bitter iambos : tevtarto~ ijavmbou~ gegrafwv~, pikro;~ ajnhvr : D. L. 5.85 and Babrius in the next note. G. O. Hutchinson, Booking Lovers : Desire and Design in Catullus, in Du Quesnay, Wood-man, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 16], pp. 48-78, at p. 76 n. 53 suggests that ancient readers may have associated Archilochus’ bitterness especially with the iamboi against Lycambes and his daughters, which would fit Cato’s bitter mapping of them onto Metellus and Lepida (though Plutarch’s description of this is one of the passages he cites as evi-dence).


Epodes can be seen to follow this pattern, but the clearest rejection of bitterness is made by Babrius, at the end of his first prologue, when he promises to « soften the hard limbs of the bitter iamboi ». 1 Thus, while Timothy Johnson is unquestionably right in broad terms that « [t]he problem … is not the use of iambic/invective per se, about which the Romans were never shy, but Archilochus’ fail-ure to confine his rage to just limits », it is far from clear that Cato’s iamboi, which he immediately cites as an illustrative example, fit into this category. 2 One of the most remarkable things about Ca-to’s polemical redefinition of iambos is that it emphatically retains the element of hyper-aggressive bitterness which was most depre-cated by critics and hence most frequently omitted by imitators.

The explicit inclusion of to; pikrovn affects the way one inter-prets to; ajkovlaston, a word of considerable semantic range. The potential ambiguity of this term would have been much the same even if it were indeed part of Cato’s programmatic statement and hence probably in Latin. A similar semantic range, in both nature and magnitude, is shared by the most likely Latin word, licentia, and by intemperantia and incontinentia, which, though lexically clos-er to the privative formation of to; ajkovlaston, are markedly pro-saic and, in the latter case, extremely rare. 3 Although all senses of to; ajkovlaston include the notion of a lack of due proportion and restraint, nevertheless the ways in which that absence can make itself felt produce a relatively wide semantic range. 4 Its sense of unrestrained violence and aggression might be expected to tally well with one construction of Archilocheanism. 5 However, even

1 pikrw`n ijavmbwn sklhra; kw`la qhluvna~ : Babr. prol. 1.19. The complex issues of iambos as metre and as mode, and of the mixed metaphors of taste, texture, body and gender cannot be explored here. On Babrius and iambos see Hawkins, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 87-136. 2 Johnson, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], p. 54.

3 licentia is found in Plaut. Rud. 1225, Trinnum. 1034 ; Ter. ht 483, Adelph. 508 ; Lucil. fr. 1048 Marx ; Laber. fr. 28 Panayotakis (though Panayotakis himself reads licentium), and in various post-Republican poets. No extant verse includes intemperantia or in-continentia.

4 Aristotle’s contrast (en 1150b29-32) between oJ ajkovlasto~, who is inveterately, misguidedly and unrepentantly licentious, and oJ ajkrathv~, who sees the better path but cannot discipline himself not to follow the worse, should be borne in mind, but is probably not a central issue in Cato’s iambic programme. For its relevance to tri-umviral and Augustan erotic poetry see R. K. Gibson, Excess and Restraint : Propertius, Horace, and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, London 2007, pp. 49-53.

5 Forms of liber are often used to express the unbridled quality of iambos in Latin poetry, as at Hor. Epod. 11.16 (libera bilis) and Ov. Ib. 51 (liber iambus). See A. Barchie-si, Alcune difficoltà nella carriera di un poeta giambico. Giambo ed elegia nell’epodo xi, in

26 Robert Cowan

if by special pleading the aggression implicit in Cato’s retention of to; pikrovn could somehow be differentiated from an even more uncontrolled aggression, as suggested by to; ajkovlaston, neverthe-less, Plutarch’s assertion that Cato kaquvbrise Metellus evokes all the associations between « unrestraint » and « insolent aggression » (u{bri~) which recur in other sources. 1 Like to; pikrovn, there is fre-quent mention of to; ajkovlaston and related qualities such as ajko-lasiva and to; ajselgev~ in discussions, and particularly criticisms, of Archilochus. Although it is sometimes hard to distinguish from « unrestrained aggression » – and in some cases the ideas – deliber-ately coexist in an interrelated complex – it is often clear that it at least includes and even primarily carries the sense of « licentious-ness » and hence « obscenity ». Plutarch himself in On Meddlesomeness criticizes « the things said inappropriately and licentiously against women by Archilochus », tw`n uJp∆ ∆Arcilovcou pro;~ ta;~ gunai`ka~ ajprepw`~ kai; ajkolavstw~ eijrhmevnwn. 2 Although this transgression of acceptable boundaries in the sphere of sexuality, propriety and linguistic register is part of a complex of ajkolasiva and cannot easily be separated from transgression of acceptable boundaries of aggression and interpersonal interaction more generally, it seems to be just such a separation which Cato is striving to achieve by ex-plicitly employing to; pikrovn while at the same time excluding to; ajkovlaston. Even if we remain cautious about the wider tradition of Cato’s prudishness, it would certainly be in keeping with his de-piction as a virgin in Cat. min. 7.1 (oujdemia`/ gunaiki; sunelhluqwv~) to distance his iambos from Archilochean first-person sexual nar-ratives such as the First Cologne Epode.

It seems likely, then, that to; ajkovlaston or licentia in (or about) Cato’s iamboi primarily signified obscene language and subject-matter. However, while Cato or his critics seem to have striven to exclude the sense of uncontrolled aggression from the quality

Bimilenario de Horacio, ed. de F. Cortey, J. Carlos, Salamanca 1994, pp. 127-138, at p. 132 n. 9 ; A. Schiesaro, Ibis redibis, « md » 67, 2011, pp. 79-150, at pp. 89-91.

1 Hdt. 3.81.7 ; Pl. Com. fr. 105 K-A ; Plat. Apol. 26e8 ; D. H. Ant. Rom. 4.82.1, 11.41.3 ; Nic. Dam. fr. 64 ; Plut. Mor. 562c ; D. Chr. 33.23 ; Aristid. p.63.14 Jebb ; Ach. Tat. 2.13.1 ; Artem. 4.67.

2 Plut. Mor. 10.520a-b. Indeed it is striking how frequently Plutarch uses ajkovlasto~ in a sexual context, relating either to word or deed, far more so than earlier authors. A clear example from elsewhere in Cat. min. is at 24.2, where Caesar passes to Cato a letter sent to him by the latter’s sister, Servilia. Calling it a ejpistovlion ajkovlaston surely suggests impropriety of sexual language as well as of sexual practice.


which he was rejecting, it seems likely that the sense of a more general lack of due proportion remained. That Cato should wish to distance himself from such qualities makes sense, not because of simplistic clichés about his prudishness, but because of the de-gree of self-control which was part of a Roman elite male’s self-fashioning. 1 We have already seen how the principle that style is the man was particularly applicable to the writing of iambos, as exemplified by Pindar’s and Critias’ critiques of Archilochus, and a Roman iambographer might well wish to exclude to; ajkovlaston from his poetry lest he himself be branded ajkovlasto~. Interesting side-lights are thrown on this notion by other passages of Plutarch, though these must be treated with the same caution as everything from that source. The ubiquitous opposite of ajkovlasto~ from Plato onwards is swvfrwn, and it is as swvfrwn that Plutarch em-phatically depicts Cato, programmatically at the start of the Life and in the Political Precepts. 2 Plutarch also records an anecdote in which a certain Amnaeus complains about an instance of style’s not being the man, when a dissolute reprobate is preaching in the senate about eujtevleia and swfronismov~, one who dines like Cras-sus, builds like Lucullus and orates like Cato. The anecdote has a coda observing that those who were low and licentious (ajko-lavstou~) in other respects, but solemn and austere in their words, were jeeringly called either Catos or Pseudo-Catos. 3 Even if we treat Plutarch’s evidence on these points with extreme scepticism, the normative self-fashoning of the elite Roman male is sufficient to account for Cato’s rejection of to; ajkovlaston on social grounds, quite apart from aesthetic considerations, or more precisely inas-much as aesthetic decisions about style, form and content would carry social implications. However, the precise nature of these so-cial and aesthetic considerations is affected, not only by the disso-

1 On self-control and masculinity see C. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd edn., Oxford 2009, pp. 151-156 with further references, ancient and modern.

2 Plut. Cat. min. 1.1, Mor. 800f, which latter reference I owe to Geiger, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 15], p. 129. Cf. Cat. min. 3.6 (Caepio measuring his swfrosuvnh against Cato’s), and, with equal structural emphasis, 73.4, the work’s close (Porcia, called only hJ qugav-thr tou ̀Kavtwno~, not falling short in swfrosuvnh or ajndriva).

3 mocqhrou ̀d’ ajnqrwvpou kai; polutelou`~ lovgon ejn sugklhvtw/ diaqemevnou pro;~ euj- tevleian kai; swfronismovn, ejpanasta;~ ∆Amnai`o~ « w\ a[nqrwp’ » ei\pe, « tiv~ ajnevxetaiv sou, deipnou`nto~ me;n wJ~ Kravssou, oijkodomou`nto~ d’ wJ~ Leukovllou, dhmhgorou`nto~ d’ hJmi`n wJ~ Kavtwno~ ; » kai; tw`n a[llwn de; tou;~ fauvlou~ kai; ajkolavstou~, toi`~ lovgoi~ de; sem-nou;~ kai; aujsthrouv~, cleuavzonte~ ejkavloun ãYeudoÃ-kavtwna~ : Plut. Cat. min. 19.5). The supplement is Ziegler’s, comparing Cic. Att. 1.14.6 = sb 14.

28 Robert Cowan

ciation of to; ajkovlaston from to; pikrovn, but by its association as something to be rejected with the third iambic quality in the list, to; paidariw`de~.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Cato’s iambic programme (or at least Plutarch’s characterization of it) is his rejection of to; paidariw`de~, « childishness ». Unlike to; ajkovlaston and related notions, childishness is not a quality routinely associated with Ar-chilochus, and neither are its associations straightforward. The complex image can be positively valorized, as in the Aetia prologue, where Callimachus appropriates and remoulds (his own construc-tion of ) the Telchines’ negative depiction of him as a child. 1 How-ever, Cato’s rejection of childishness from his poetic programme is prima facie evidence that he conceived of it as a negative qual-ity. Children in ancient thought are generally associated with lack of judgment, and this includes artistic judgment. Polybius twice criticizes his predecessor Timaeus as « childish » (paidariwvdh~) in his willingness to believe and perpetuate what are, in Polybius’ po-lemical rhetoric, absurd and incredible historical and geographical claims, in one case pairing it with the insult of being « unintelli-gent, incapable of reasoning » (ajsullovgisto~). 2 However, the im-plication in our passage is more likely to be a failure to judge and discriminate, not on questions of intellect, but on those of taste and decorum. It is in this way that paidariwvdh~ tends to be used in rhetorical criticism, as in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ criticism of Demosthenes’ uncharacteristic speeches such as the Funeral Oration, which is « coarse, empty and childish » and the Encomium

1 Callim. Aet. fr. 1.5-6 Harder. « [A]s the poem’s opening unfolds, this accusation is transformed first into an aesthetic and then into the basis for Callimachus’ immortali-ty. » (B. Acosta-Hughes, S. A. Stephens, Rereading Callimachus’ Aetia Fragment 1, « Class. Philol. » 97, 2002, pp. 238-255, at p. 240). The bibliography is considerable, but see esp. Harder, p. 28 ad loc. ; Th. A. Schmitz, « I Hate All Common Things » : The Reader’s Role in Callimachus’ Aetia Prologue, « Harv. Stud. Class. Philol. » 99, 1999, pp. 151-178, at pp. 160-161 ; A. Ambühl, Children as Poets – Poets as Children ? Romantic Constructions of Child-hood and Hellenistic Poetry, in A. Cohen, J. B. Rutter (eds.), Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy, Princeton 2007 (« Hesperia Supplement » 41), pp. 373-383.

2 to;n de; Tivmaion ei[poi ti~ a]n ouj movnon ajnistovrhton gegonevnai peri; tw`n kata; th;n Libuvhn, ajlla; kai; paidariwvdh kai; televw~ ajsullovgiston kai; tai`~ ajrcaivai~ fhvmai~ ajkmh;n ejndedemevnon : Polyb. 12.3.2 ; Kai; mh;n ejn toi`~ peri; Puvrrou pavlin fhsi; tou;~ ÔRw- maivou~ e[ti nu`n uJpovmnhma poioumevnou~ th`~ kata; to; “Ilion ajpwleiva~ ejn hJmevra/ tini; ka-takontivzein i{ppon polemisth;n pro; th`~ povlew~ ejn tw`/ Kavmpw/ kaloumevnw/, dia; to; th`~ Troiva~ th;n a{lwsin dia; to;n i{ppon genevsqai to;n douvrion prosagoreuovmenon, pra`gma pavntwn paidariwdevstaton· 12.4b.1.


to Pausanias, which is « full of sophistic showiness ». 1 Significantly, puerilis is used in the same way by Roman rhetoricians, as when Quintilian writes of « that strained and childish affectation in the declamation schools ». 2 This inability to judge what is appropriate stands at an intersection of constructions of childishness, like that of Polybius, as a failure to judge and discriminate, and those which associate it more generally with a lack of decorum, moderation, or appropriateness. To turn once more to Dionysius, this sense is to the fore in his criticism of Gorgias, « seeing that he falls from moderation and often becomes childish ». 3

This sense of a failure to observe decorum of tone, structure or content brings together the metaphor of childishness, which is never applied to Archilochus, with other criticisms which are. 4 Llewelyn Morgan has shown how, in the case of Ovid and his critics, this notion of childish lack of decorum in literature could be both used as a criticism and embraced (albeit with a degree of self-conscious contrariness and defiance) as an aesthetic prin-ciple. 5 We have already seen how Plutarch himself links indeco-rousness with the other quality Cato rejects, licentiousness, in his condemnation of the things which Archilochus said ajprepw`~ kai; ajkolavstw~. ‘Longinus’ partially deprecates (though in the context of preferring his chaotic sublimity to the pedestrian per-fection of Eratosthenes) the way that Archilochus’ poems are « ill-arranged » (ajnoikonovmhta). 6 Indecorousness and its inevita-ble production of incongruity, a jarring clash of registers in « ill-arranged » elements, form a connection with another connota-tion of childishness : humour. Morgan emphasizes this aspect of

1 w|n ejstin o{ te fortiko;~ kai; keno;~ kai; paidariwvdh~ ejpitavfio~ kai; to; tou ̀sofisti- kou ̀lhvrou mesto;n ejgkwvmion eij~ Pausanivan: : D. H. Dem. 44. Dionysius more frequent-ly uses another ‘childish’ adjective, meirakiwvdh~, in a similar sense, e.g., Dem. 5 (of Gorgias, cf. n. 3 below), 21, 29 ; Isoc. 12 (bis), 14 ; Thuc. 46, 48.

2 illa uero frigida et puerilis … in scholis adfectatio : Quint. io 4.1.76.3 Gorgivan me;n to;n Leonti`non ejkpivptonta tou ̀metrivou kai; pollacou ̀paidariwvdh

gignovmenon oJrw`n… : D. H. Is. 19.4 An interesting, though far later, parallel is Pers. 1.113, where « the satirist is rep-

resented as a small boy, whose intention is to befoul the dignified vices of Roman society … for Persius, the child’s proposition is a justifiable comment on the adult world. » (J. C. Bramble, Persius and the Programmatic Satire, Cambridge 1974, p. 185, proceeding to survey ambivalent images of the child in satire and diatribe on pp. 185-189).

5 Ll. Morgan, Child’s Play : Ovid and his Critics, « Journ. Rom. Stud. » 93, 2003, pp. 66-91. 6 [Longin.] 33.5.

30 Robert Cowan

Ovid’s childish anti-epic mode, « flippant, playful, and given to puerile sexual humour ». 1

In Greek thought, this connection between humour and child-ishness can perhaps most clearly be seen in the associations of the word paidiav, whose etymological connection with pai`~ is at least suggestive and surely can never have totally been dissociated from the word in its wider senses of « play » and « amusement ». 2 paidiav is very frequently associated with humour and laughter, often paired in a virtual hendiadys with gevlw~. 3 One of these pairings also con-stitutes the only extant reference to childishness (at least inasmuch as paidiav carries that connotation) in relation to Archilochus and it is a telling one. In the Mnesiepes Inscription, the account of the poet’s initiation by the (disguised) Muses while driving a heifer to market describes his encounter with them as follows :

nomivsanta d∆ ajpo; tw`n e[rgwn ajpievnaiaujta;~ eij~ povlin proselqovnta skwvptein, ta;~ de;devxasqai aujto;n meta; paidia`~ kai; gevlwto~ kai;[ej]perwth`sai, eij pwlhvswn a[gei th;n bou`n·

(seg, 15.517, cols. 2.29-32)Thinking that they were going home from their work to the city, he mocked them, and they accepted him with childish play and laughter, and in addition asked whether he was taking the heifer to sell.

I am not making the improbable suggestion that Cato was allud-ing to the Mnesiepes Inscription, though it is quite feasible that he might have been aware of another, literary rather than epigraphic, representative of the wider tradition about Archilochus’ initiation to which the inscription belongs. 4 Any such direct link to the re-ception of Archilochus would unquestionably add point to a pro-grammatic rejection of to; paidariw`de~, but we have seen how this reference to childishness (if indeed we take paidiav in such a

1 Morgan, art. cit. [n. 5 on p. 29], p. 68.2 It is useful to compare Morgan’s comment (art. cit. [n. 5 on p. 29], p. 85 n. 77) on

the « evidence of Greek sources for childish metapoetical imagery … in the related Latin and Greek ‘game’ terminology to denote poetic activity in the ‘lesser’ genres ».

3 Xen. Cyr. 2.3.18 ; Hipp. Septim. 9, Morb. Sacr. 14 ; Arist. en 1128a, Rhet. 1380b ; D. S. 4.6.10, 13.3.2 ; Plut. Caes. 61.3, Cam. 14.4, Comp. Dem. Cic. 1.4, Lyc. 25.2 and Mor. 68c, 78b, 456e.

4 This is not to belittle Mnesiepes’ potential importance in Archilochus’ Hellenistic reception, on which see esp. Clay, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 18], pp. 10-26 ; T. Hawkins, This is the Death of the Earth : Crisis Narratives in Archilochus and Mnesiepes, « Trans. Amer. Philol. Assoc. » 139, 2009, pp. 1-20 ; Ornaghi, op. cit. [n. 2 on pp. 17-18, at p. 18], pp. 116-179.


literal sense) is unique in the comparatively rich extant testimo-nia on the idea of iambos. Rather it is most suggestive as an inde-pendent parallel demonstrating the connection in ancient thought between childishness and laughter, and if such a connection was made twice independently in an Archilochean context, that is al-most more suggestive than if one were dependent on the other. The « childishness » which Cato rejects from his iambic poetics thus constituted a range of indecorous and transgressive facets – all of them coloured by and in turn colouring the associated ‘licentious-ness’ – including obscene style, ill-proportioned form, and inap-propriate subject matter, but above all the humour and laughter which these incongruous elements would tend to generate.

It is particularly interesting to compare another strand of Mor-gan’s analysis of the role of childishness both in Ovid’s Metamor-phoses and in its early critical reception. Morgan shows how the dominant metaphor of epic as ‘man’ (i.e., adult male) can be chal-lenged by playing not only with the familiar gendered antithesis of masculine and feminine (often troping epic and elegy), but also with the age- or maturity-defined contrast between adult and child. 1 Morgan’s analysis of the metapoetic association of chil-dren with inappropriateness and incongruity is, as we have seen, of general relevance to the contrast between Cato’s decorous and Catullus’ indecorous forms of Archilochean iambos. However, the metaphorical association of epic with manhood is particularly relevant to Archilochean iambos, which had a similar tradition of being gendered masculine, in antithesis with feminine or effemi-nate Callimachean ‘water-drinkers’, what Wray vividly calls « the division of male poets into wine-guzzling he-men … and water-sipping nellies ». 2 The association is particularly marked in a late first century bce sympotic epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica, which bears a striking resemblance to Catullus 27, but makes the issue of gender more explicit : « today we pour libations for the day of masculine Archilochus and Homer », shvmeron ∆Arcilovcoio kai; a[rseno~ h\mar ÔOmhvrou / spevndomen. 3 We might also note again Babrius’ programme of modified iambos quoted above, where the

1 « [Ovid] is as conscious of and explicit about the childishness of his epic as he is of its compromised masculinity. » (Morgan, art. cit. [n. 5 on p. 29], p. 74).

2 Wray, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 21], p. 169.3 A. P. 11.20.5-6, with Wray, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 21], pp. 169-171. Newman’s (art. cit.

[n. 2 on p. 17]) argument for a suppressed tradition of female iambic voices might also be relevant here.

32 Robert Cowan

verb used for « softening » is significantly qhluvna~, « having femi-nized », associating the excesses of the genre with its hypermascu-linity as well as its hardness and bitterness. If to be an Archilochean wine-drinker was to be a ‘man’, then, while that persona’s most common antithesis would no doubt be the feminized water-drink-er, it remained possible to set it in opposition to the child and all that its childishness might connote. Especially when adopting an Archilochean persona to avenge and reassert his threatened mas-culinity in the face of a rival taking his mate, Cato might well have wished to reject any taint of the foolish or vulnerable child which might vitiate his claim to be a man.

At the same time, there is a suggestion in Plutarch’s description that the very act of writing iambos at all could be interpreted as a token of immaturity and almost childishness. The datives in the crucial phrase ojrgh`/ kai; neovthti trevya~ eJauto;n eij~ ijavmbou~ have shades of the temporal and of attendant circumstances, but must primarily be causal. It was because of his anger and youth, or to blend the two ideas in what is virtually a hendiadys, because of his youthful anger or angry immaturity, that he turned to iamboi. No matter through whom we wish to focalize this editorializing gloss, whether through Plutarch, one or more of his sources, or even the older Cato looking back (« My salad days… »), the clear implication is that writing iambos is something to which one is driven by youth, and specifically by the lack of emotional control associated with youth. The antithesis can be spun in various ways, such as between the laudable fire of youth and the dull torpor of age, but it must also lay any iambographer open to the charge of immature petulance. It is surely against this charge, as well as against criticisms of Archilochus’ style, tone and structure (or rather against this as an ethical charge to be associated with those aesthetic criticisms) that Cato was in part defending himself. We have already seen how his rejection of to; ajkovlaston constituted a defensive claim to the continentia which was the hallmark of an elite Roman male. The implicit charge of childishness must also be answered, or even forestalled. Some others may claim that his decision to write iamboi is the result of his childish intemperance and immaturity, but the sort of iamboi he writes are free of any such childishness. He is a man because he writes aggressive iamboi in defence of his compromised masculinity as a suitor and he is a man despite the fact that he writes iamboi, the literary equivalent of the teenage tantrum.


3. An excursus on Bibulus’ Archilochean edicts

An interesting and multiply pertinent comparandum for Cato’s Archilocheanism may be found in the edicts issued from his self-imposed seclusion by the consul of 59 bce, M. Calpurnius Bibulus, against his colleague C. Julius Caesar. 1 A series of Cicero’s letters to Atticus from July 59 attest to – or rather, allowing for Ciceronian ‘spin’, assert – the immense popularity of these, as he calls them, « Archilochean edicts », such that it was hard to squeeze past the crowds to read them. 2 It is far from clear in what sense Cicero is using the adjective Archilochius here, as with the similar case of the « Hipponactean auction-bill » with which he writes that Calvus « put Tigellius up for sale » in 45. 3 In the latter case, the adjective may simply refer to the poem’s being in the scazons closely associated with (and traditionally invented by) Hipponax. While it surely also evokes the aggressive ethos of Ionian iambos, it is hard (though not quite impossible) to imagine that Calvus’ mock auction-bill, evoking a very Roman non-literary ‘genre’, was closely modelled on a specific Hipponactean poem, in the way that Cato’s iamboi presumably evoked something of the letter as well as the spirit of Archilochus’ attacks on Lycambes and Neobule. 4 Likewise it is unclear whether Bibulus himself figured the (presumably prose) edicts as « Archilochean », or whether this characterization of them is entirely Cicero’s. The edicts may have evoked some details from Archilochus’ more public, political poems, or may more loosely have evoked (in Cicero’s mind, at least) something of the ethos, as

1 I am indebted to Kit Morrell for reminding me about Bibulus’ Archilochean edicts and their relevance to this argument.

2 Cic. Att. 2.20.6 = sb 40, 2.21.3-5 = sb 41, 2.19.2 = sb 39, written just before these two, also mentions Bibulus’ great popularity, but not the edicts or their Archilochean nature. Crowds : itaque Archilochia in illum edicta Bibuli populo ita sunt iucunda ut eum locum ubi proponuntur prae multitudine eorum qui legunt transire nequeamus 2.21.4.

3 eumque addictum iam tum puto esse Calui Licini Hipponacteo praeconio, « I think he was long since sold at auction by Licinius Calvus’ Hipponactean auction notice. » : Cic. Fam. 7.24.1 = sb 260. The first line of the lampoon (Calv. poet. fr. 3 fpl/flp = fr. 36 frp) is preserved by Porph. ad Hor. S. 1.3.1 Sardi Tigelli putidum caput uenit (« The fetid person of Tigellius the Sardinian is for sale »).

4 Hipponactean = choliambic : A. S. Hollis, Fragments of Roman Poetry c. 60 b.c.-a.d. 20, Oxford 2007, p. 79. Ethos of scazons : P. Watson, Contextualising Martial’s Metres, in Flavian Poetry, ed. by R. R. Nauta, H.-J. van Dam, J. J. L. Smolenaars, Leiden 2006, pp. 285-298, at pp. 286-291 ; Ll. Morgan, Musa Pedestris : Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse, Oxford 2010, pp. 115-130 ; D. E. Lavigne, Catullus 8 and Catullan Iambos, « Syll. Class. » 21, 2010, pp. 65-92.

34 Robert Cowan

it was received and constructed in late Republican Rome, of Parian iambos, but in either case they constitute important evidence for the nature of that reception and construction.

Their importance for the current discussion is even greater be-cause of the fact that Bibulus was Cato’s son-in-law and, along with L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, one of his closest political allies. 1 As such, it would be by no means surprising if his evocation of Ar-chilochean iambos were of a comparable kind to that of his father-in-law, though there is at the same time no reason to think that adfinitas and political sympathy need necessarily lead to agreement on poetics. At first glance, Bibulus’ employment of hJ ijambikh; ijdeva to inveigh against his colleague’s acta and to report his continual obnuntiationes might suggest a comparable severity and austerity to that which I am proposing for Cato’s earlier attacks on Metel-lus Scipio. Such a conception of Archilochus as a political poet is amply attested in antiquity, as when Athenaeus, quoting fr. 1 West, glosses its first line as a boast « that he could take part in political struggles ». 2 Indeed, Cicero’s first use of the phrase « Archilochean edict » relates to one postponing the consular elections, suggesting the procedural and constitutional rather than the salacious. 3 Even the popularity which Cicero claims for them could be attributed to the latter’s own construction of the people’s general hostility to the ‘Triumvirs’ and their seizing on any opposition to it, as op-posed to a salacious enjoyment of any invective obscenity. Sueto-nius, however, includes one of Bibulus’ edicts among his examples of invective allusions to Caesar’s alleged passive sexual relation-ship with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, including references to him as the « Queen of Bithynia » and, neatly connecting slander about the sexual past with a swipe at the political present, quipping that « the man who used to love a king now loves kingship ». 4 This nexus of

1 E. S. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, Berkeley (ca) 1974, pp. 55-57.

2 ∆Arcivloco~ gou`n ajgaqo;~ w]n poihth;~ prw`ton ejkauchvsato tw`/ duvnasqai metevcein tw`n politikw`n ajgwvnwn : Ath. 14.627c.

3 comitia Bibulus cum Archilochio edicto in a. d. xv Kal. Nou. distulit : Cic. Att. 2.20.6 = sb 40. Fehrle, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 15], p. 130 enigmatically refers to it as « einem besonders hämischen Edikt », but does not elucidate how either its Archilochean or its « sneering » quality might have related to delaying elections.

4 missa etiam facio edicta Bibuli, quibus proscripsit collegam suum Bithynicam reginam, eique antea regem fuisse cordi, nunc esse regnum : Suet. Iul. 49.2. On the alleged relation-ship, see esp. J. Osgood, Caesar and Nicomedes, « Class. Quart. » 58, 2008, pp. 687-691. Though less clear-cut, Cicero’s description (Att. 2.21.4 = sb 41) of the edicts’ effect on


the sexual and the political, characteristic of Roman invective, re-mains some distance from the self-consciously frivolous obscenity of Catullus 56 – especially if we compare Catullus’ employment of the same nexus in poems such as c. 29 and the immediately follow-ing c. 57 – but it unquestionably includes those same Archilochean qualities of humour and lewdness which I have argued that Cato might have, with equal self-consciousness, excluded from his iam-bos. While, as I have said, there is no prima facie reason for assum-ing that father-in-law and son-in-law must have written the same brand of iambos, it would be reassuring to have some evidence for a difference between them. Just such evidence can be found in Plutarch and Cicero.

Plutarch’s description of the opposition to Caesar and his allies in 59 tellingly juxtaposes and implicitly contrasts the actions of Bibulus and Cato : 1prattomevnwn de; touvtwn Buvblo~ me;n eij~ th;n oijkivan katakleisavmeno~ ojktw; mhnw`n ouj proh`lqen uJpateuvwn, ajll∆ ejxevpempe diagravmmata blas-fhmiva~ ajmfoi`n e[conta kai; kathgoriva~, Kavtwn de; w{sper ejpivpnou~ kai; foibovlhpto~ ejn th`/ boulh`/ ta; mevllonta th`/ povlei kai; tw`/ Pomphi?w/ proh-govreue…

(Plut. Pomp. 48.4)While these things were being done, Bibulus shut himself up in his house for eight months and did not come out while he was consul, but sent forth edicts containing both abuse and accusation, while Cato, like one inspired and possessed by Apollo prophesied in the Senate what would happen to the city and to Pompey…

Plutarch’s assertion that Bibulus’ edicts included both blasfhmiva and kathgoriva, combining two modes which tend to be set in an-tithesis in fourth-century Attic oratory, emphasizes its heady mix of sex and politics – equally valid but distinct aspects both of Io-nian iambos and of Roman public discourse. 2 Tellingly, Plutarch

one of their other targets, Pompey, that they « torture » (excruciant) him when he is « so unused to abuse » (tam insuetus contumeliae) strongly suggests something more scurrilous than an austere attack on his unconstitutional actions.

1 In the interests of space and relevance, I omit the immediately following descrip-tion of Lucullus’ refusal to act, but ought to declare that, correlated as the third term with a further dev, it softens what might otherwise appear an even sharper mevn/dev antithesis between Bibulus and Cato.

2 blasfhmiva and kathgoriva : Isoc. 15.197 ; Dem. De corona 123. Sexual invective at Rome : C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 63-97 ; A. Corbeill, Controlling Laughter : Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic, Prince- ton 1996, pp. 99-173 with a brief reference to the « Queen of Bithynia » joke at p. 149.

36 Robert Cowan

uses the same combination to describe Caesar’s abusive letter to the Senate about Cato in 55, responding to the latter’s proposal that Caesar be handed over to the Germani for war crimes. 1 Cato’s calm and calculating response not only rebuts Caesar’s charges, but brands them as « like abuse and gibes, revealing a certain child-ishness and buffoonery ». 2 Plutarch’s description of Caesar’s at-tack, including Cato’s own assessment of it (mediated, of course, through Plutarch and his sources) thus connects it both with the blasfhmiva and kathgoriva of Bibulus’ edicts and with the child-ishness which Cato excluded from his own brand of iambos, set-ting himself in implicit antithesis to both, as well as to the humor-ous element of skwvmmata and bwmolociva which I have argued lie behind the reference to childishness and licence. Indeed Plutarch on several occasions pairs the precise quality which Cato rejects, to; ajkovlaston – along with its cognate ajkolasiva, adjectival form ajkovlasto~ and semantically related words – with bwmolociva and its adjective bwmolovco~. 3

To return from this triangulation of Plutarchan passages to 59 bce and Pompey 48.4, Cato’s actions there are set in direct antithesis with those of Bibulus. In stark contrast to Bibulus the scur-rilous iambist, Cato is depicted as a vatic and even Sibylline figure prophesying doom in the manner more of a Cassandra than of a Thersites. 4 However much this depiction may have been overlain with more than a century of the incipient tradition about Cato, it tallies reasonably well with Cicero’s contemporary description of Cato’s attack against the consul M. Pupius Piso Frugi in 61 over the Bona Dea affair, an attack which he calls either a commulcium (« thrashing ») or a conuicium (« abuse »), but only to qualify the term (in Shackelton Bailey’s translation) « if one can apply such a term to a most impressive, powerful, in fact wholesome speech ». 5 Even

1 ejk touvtou Kai`sar ejpistolh;n gravya~ ajpevsteilen eij~ th;n suvgklhton· wJ~ d’ ajne- gnwvsqh blasfhmiva~ polla;~ e[cousa kai; kathgoriva~ tou ̀Kavtwno~ : Plut. Cat. min. 51.3.

2 ta; me;n eij~ eJauto;n ejgklhvmata loidorivai~ kai; skwvmmasin o{moia kai; paidiavn tina kai; bwmolocivan tou ̀Kaivsaro~ ajpevdeixen : ibidem.

3 bwmolociva and ajkolasiva : Agis 33.4 ; and ajselgeiva : Aratus 48.6, with paidiav again at Mor. 64E, with ajkrasiva at Mor. 97E. bwmolovco~ and ajkovlasto~ : Mor. 822C, Alc. 35.6, and (in a longer list) Mor. 88C.

4 foibovlhpto~ is extremely rare. Lycophron’s Cassandra calls herself th;n foibov-lhpton … celidovna 1460. On Thersites as a figure of invective, see Rosen, op. cit. [n. 3 on pp. 10-11, at p. 11], pp. 67-116.

5 hic tibi rostra Cato aduolat, commulcium Pisoni consuli mirificum facit, si id est com-mulcium, uox plena grauitatis, plena auctoritatis, plena denique salutis : Cic. Att. 1.14.5 =


when Cato is at his most aggressive, his invective remains full of grauitas, auctoritas and salus, and implicitly lacking the blasfhmiva, bwmolociva and paidiav of either Bibulus or Caesar. Thus, despite their family ties and political allegiance, there is ample evidence that the Archilocheanism of Bibulus was radically different to that of Cato.

4. An even briefer excursus on chronology

Before I turn to substantiating my principal argument, that Catul-lus 56 constitutes a polemical response to Cato’s idea of iambos as asserted, through explicit programme or implicit practice, in his iamboi against Metellus Scipio, the issue of when the latter poems were written must be addressed, as must the implications of that dating for any response to them. Although the dating of Catul-lus’ poems is notoriously uncertain and often based on dubious prosopographical assumptions, the conventional floruit assigned to him of the mid-50s bce will here be accepted. I do so partly because this is not the place to rehearse, let alone extend, the argu-ments, partly because his dates would have to be pushed back im-plausibly early into the early or mid-60s to run any risk of altering the simple point I wish to make about the period of time between Cato’s iamboi and c. 56. It is with the dating of the former, then, that we must briefly concern ourselves, and more precisely with the dating of the love-triangle between Cato, Metellus and Lepida which sparked them.

P. Licinius Crassus, son of the Triumvir, married Cornelia, the product of the marriage between Metellus Scipio and Lepida. 1 Even if we take a series of improbably extreme time limits, if Lepi-da fell pregnant immediately on her marriage and Cornelia was her first child, if Cornelia married Crassus as soon as she reached the (probably rarely utilized in this period) female age-limit of twelve, and that immediately before Crassus left for Parthia as his father’s legate in the spring of 54, there remains a terminus ante quem of 67 bce. The same terminus is provided by Plutarch’s anecdote about the anxiety shown by Cato’s first wife Atilia before his military tri-

sb 14. Shackleton Bailey prints the ms commulcium, though it is otherwise unattested. Both reading and emendation support the point.

1 Plut. Pomp. 55.1, with Bruce Marshall, Crassus : A Political Biography, Amsterdam 1976, p. 10.

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bunate in Macedonia in 67/66. 1 If the usual date of 56 is assigned to Hortensius’ notorious request for the hand of Cato’s daughter, Porcia (instead of whom, as has been mentioned, he gained Cato’s wife, Marcia), then the assertion that she had borne Bibulus two sons pushes their marriage back to at least 58 (unless, perhaps, if they were twins), probably earlier, and even in the unlikely circum-stances that she was not only married but conceived her first child at the age of twelve, Porcia must have been born in 70 at the latest, in turn dating Cato’s marriage to Atilia to no later than the same year, with at least a short further period intervening since his jilting by Lepida. 2 Du Quesnay and Woodman’s date of « the 60s » is thus just possible, but all probability points to a date in the mid-to-late or perhaps even the early 70s. 3

In any case, a minimum period of about a decade, and a more likely one of fifteen to twenty years lies between Cato’s iamboi against Metellus Scipio and Catullus 56. Clearly, then, Catullus’ po-lemical response was not an immediate one. However, this does not necessarily make it less likely that there is a connection be-tween the two works. If the thesis that there is such a link is ac-cepted as plausible on the basis of the arguments I have made so far and am about to make (and, in the absence of newly-discovered evidence, it cannot be more than plausible), then the period of time between Cato’s iamboi and Catullus’ response suggests that the former were not ephemeral productions known only to a pri-vate coterie, but had sufficient reputation and significance as con-tributions to the idea of iambos for it to be meaningful for Catullus to make a polemical response. This is not to say that the Catonian version of Archilochus must have held the field over the course of the 60s – and indeed Bibulus’ edicts, or at least Cicero’s contempo-rary reception of them, are ample testimony to the contrary – but, even if he was indeed a straw man, he had enough substance to be a recognizable straw man a decade or more after composition. I do not of course wish to make the circular argument whereby the sig-nificance of Cato’s iamboi both proves and is proven by Catullus’ response to them, when it is that response itself which I wish to,

1 Plut. Cat. min. 9.1. 2 See p. 21 n. 2 above for references.3 Du Quesnay, Woodman, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 16], p. 257. Adding the detail that

Porcia and Bibulus’ son L. Bibulus was a candidate for the augury in 43, and assuming a marriage a little above the absolute minimum age, Geiger, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 15], p. 157 firmly advocates an even earlier date : « As he had a marriageable daughter in c. 60, this could not be later than 75. ».


if not prove, at least argue for. Rather it is on the ways in which its status as such a response illuminates c. 56 that its plausibility rests, and to those ways I now turn.

5. A funny thing : Catullus responds

If the addressee of c. 56 is indeed M. Porcius Cato, and Catullus is polemically responding to his definition of Archilochean iam-bos, then solutions to a number of the puzzles about the poem suggest themselves. Before we turn to them, however, it is worth briefly sketching the familiar issue of Catullus’ Archilocheanism. The status of Catullus as an iambographer, though arguably the role with which he was most associated in antiquity, has only in the last quarter of a century begun to displace the romantic obsession with him as a love poet and forerunner of the Augustan elegists. 1 The choliambics inextricably associated with, and traditionally in-vented by, Hipponax are the second commonest metre among his polymetrics, and he also employs on a single occasion (c. 25) the equally Hipponactean iambic tetrameter catalectic, which may even allude to a specific poem by Hipponax himself. 2 Yet in gen-eral Catullus tends to dissociate the idea of iambos from iambic metres. He famously uses the word iambi on only four occasions, all of them in poems which – like c. 56 – are metrically hendecasyl-labic. By doing so and emphatically separating the word iambus from its metrical sense, Catullus foregrounds its status as a genre, a mode, a discourse. 3

1 On Catullus and iambos, esp. Archilochus : S. Koster, Die Invektive in der griechis-chen und römischen Literatur, Meisenheim am Glan 1980, pp. 282-293 ; J. K. Newman, Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian Sensibility, Hildesheim 1990, pp. 43-74, esp. pp. 45-59 ; S. J. Heyworth, Catullian Iambics, Catullian Iambi, in Cavarzere, Aloni, Barchiesi (eds.), op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 117-140 ; Wray, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 21], pp. 167-203 ; N. Holzberg, Catull : der Dichter und sein erotisches Werk2, München 2002, pp. 46-48 ; W. J. Tatum, Social Commentary and Political Invective, in A Companion to Catullus, ed. by M. Skinner, Oxford 2007, pp. 333-353, at pp. 337-338 ; Lennartz, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 627-650 ; Hutchinson, art. cit. [n. 3 on p. 24], pp. 75-78.

2 On Hippon. frr. 115 and 117 West, Catull. 25 and Hor. Epod. 10 see L. Koenen, Horaz, Catull und Hipponax, « Zeitschr. für Papyr. und Epigr. » 26, 1977, pp. 73-93. In addition, for an allusion to the Hipponactean topos of cold in c. 44, see B. Vine, A Hip-ponactean Echo in Catullus (frigus, 44.20), « Class. Philol. » 104, 2009, pp. 213-216.

3 The references to iambi are in cc. 36, 40, 54 and fr. 3. « Dennoch sagt Catull keines- wegs, dass die Hendekasyllaben metrisch Iamben sind. Das Metrum ist wiederum nicht so wichtig, aber um Iamben geht es doch – nach einem diskursiven Kriterium. » (Steinrück, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 140-141). The classic discussion is Heyworth, art. cit. [above, n. 1].

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This idea of iambos can be seen in his only other unambigu-ously identifiable allusion to Archilochus – a sample whose small-ness is probably the result of the loss of so much Archaic iambos rather than of Catullus’ pattern of reference – at the opening of c. 40, a hendecasyllabic poem which not only explicitly refers to iambi, but constitutes the illocutionary act of invective which it is describing. Here Catullus’ disingenuously incredulous reaction to one Ravidus’ insanity in incurring his iambic wrath clearly evokes Archilochus similar address to Lycambes. 1 Elsewhere, notably in c. 27, Catullus invokes not only Archilochus himself but his critical reception, and particularly his association with « wine-drinkers » as opposed to « water-drinkers ». Wray has taken this further and posited an « Archilochian code-model » which constitutes Catul-lus’ iambic, aggressive, « wine-drinking », hypermasculine voice in antithesis to the sophisticated, feminized, « water-drinking » Callimachean code-model. 2 It is always dangerous and reductive to generalize about Catullus’ poetics, and there is diversity to be found even within his iambic persona, quite apart from its coexis-tence with his Callimachean one. Thus Lavigne has shown how, by the manipulation of c. 8’s Hipponactean scazons and other iambic features, « Catullus, like Callimachus before him, signals his affinity to the archaic poet precisely through the distance he creates between his poetry and that of Hipponax. ». 3 However, for the most part, in contrast to the modified iambos of Callimachus before him and of Horace after, and perhaps also with closer affin-ity to Lucilius, Catullan iambos was aggressive, abusive, in short, ijambikov~. As Newman puts it, « [l]ike his friend Calvus, Catullus resurrects, not the spirit of Callimachus’ Iamboi, but that of the Ionian iambos. ». 4 A poet who reacts in this way to Callimachus’ Hipponax might well have a comparable response to Cato’s Ar-chilochus. The important distinction must be made, however, that

1 quaenam te mala mens, miselle Rauide, / agit praecipitem in meos iambos ? / quis deus tibi non bene aduocatus / uecordem parat excitare rixam ? / an ut peruenias in ora uulgi ? : Catull. 40.1-5 ~ pavter Lukavmba, poi`on ejfravsw tovde ; / tiv~ sa;~ parhveire frevna~ / h|i~ to; pri;n hjrhvrhsqa ; nu`n de; dh; polu;~ / ajstoi`si faivneai gevlw~ : Archil. fr. 172 West.

2 Wray, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 21], pp. 167-203.3 Lavigne, art. cit. [n. 4 on p. 33], p. 78.4 Newman, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 39], p. 54. His anthropological explanation for the

phenomenon, paralleling Plautus’ alleged greater affinity with Aristophanes than with Menander, is less convincing : « Because Roman society was more primitive than that of the contemporary Greek world, when Hellenistic genres entered this new ambience, they tended to retrace their development, to revert to type. » (p. 69).


Cato’s Archilochus was lacking, not in aggression, but in humour, obscenity and childishness.

Returning at last to c. 56, the allusion to fr. 168 West of course marks the poem as Archilochean and hence as a contribution to the debate about the nature of iambos in which Cato had also participated, but there is more to it than that. In the first place, it seems to evoke Archilochus in general rather than forging an intertextual link with a specific poem. Of course, we do not know what came after the four surviving lines of fr. 168, and it cannot be ruled out that it may have gone on to describe a situation roughly or precisely similar to that of c. 56. Indeed Holzberg, presumably thinking of the first-person sexual narrative of the First Cologne Epode, suggests just such a possibility. 1 However, the evidence of Catullus’ only other known explicit citation of Archilochus sug-gests an alternative possibility. In c. 40, Catullus’ attack on Ravidus closely evokes, as we have seen, Archilochus’ assertion in fr. 172 West that Lycambes must have lost his wits. Yet Catullus’ relatively brief squib does not include the extended fable of the fox and the eagle, which we know Archilochus’ epode to have contained, nor anything recognizably corresponding to it in nature or magnitude. It seems likely then that in c. 40 and also in c. 56, Catullus is employ-ing what Courtney, appropriating the term from Horatian studies, calls a Catullan « motto ». 2 As with the incipits of lyric poems with which Horace begins some of his odes before developing them in a totally different direction, Catullus here is evoking the idea of Ar-chilochus and the idea of iambos as a whole, rather than any indi-vidual poem, and it is that which enables him to make a larger state-ment about the entire genre in polemical contradiction of Cato. 3

1 « Auf jeden Fall ist denkbar, daß Archilochos in seinem Gedicht eine ähnliche Szene schilderte und dabei ebenfalls derbe Ausdrücke verwendete. Denn wie Catulls Ich-Sprecher beschrieb derjenige des griechischen Dichters sehr freizügig eigene ero-tische Erfahrungen. » (Holzberg, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 39], p. 47). He goes on to suggest a wider parallelism between Lesbia and Neobule.

2 E. Courtney, Two Catullian Questions, « Prometheus » 15, 1989, pp. 160-164. Cf. Lennartz, op. cit. [n. 2 on p. 17], pp. 647-648 : « Obschon in neuerer Literatur öfter die faktische Intertextualität der einschlägigen Stücke hervorgehoben wird, scheint mir ein wichtiger, vielleicht der wesentliche Punkt der Catullischen „reference“ noch nicht ausgesprochen, nämlich die vom Dichter kunstvoll gestalteten Verweise auf die „Gattungsalterität“ der hier in Dialog stehenden Gedichte. ».

3 Henry Spelman (personal communication) reminds me not to close down the intertextual possibilities of Horatian ‘mottoes’, where the specifics of the anteced-ent Greek lyric poem can have subtle and pervasive resonances throughout the ode. Examples include Carm. 1.37 and Alc. fr. 332 Voigt, where the latter’s context of

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Yet the choice of fr. 168 is not an entirely arbitrary one, or even one resting on its iconic status as emblematic of Archilochus, sepa-rate from its content. A large part of Catullus’ polemical correc-tion of Cato rests in his reassertion of the importance of humour and the childish indecorousness which produces it. What better way to ‘prove’ that true Archilocheanism ought to be funny than to imitate a passage in which Archilochus himself emphasizes the laughable and, in the fullest sense, ridiculous nature of what he is about to describe ? Of course, Catullus expands and emphasizes the centrality of laughter, exploding Archilochus’ succinct crh`ma geloi`on into five lines containing four words relating to laughter, two of them used twice. It is notoriously difficult to judge what is and is not funny, even within one’s own culture, let alone in one as alien as Republican Rome. 1 Yet, even if the sense of bathos and failure to find anything worthy of a guffaw in an act of retributive pedicatio can be ascribed to anachronistic modern ideas of what is funny, nevertheless, in purely structural terms, the three-line anecdote following a four-line build-up suggests that the sense of anti-climax and a lame joke may have been (to invoke authorial intention again) deliberate. 2 Catullus is not only asserting the hu-morousness of Archilochean iambos, but its childish lack of due proportion and decorum, an embrace of incongruity which con-tributes to and is inextricable from its ridiculous quality.

The motif of childishness is foregrounded and even reified in several ways. While this would be perfectly comprehensible as a response to Cato’s rejection of qualities of humour, incongruity and indecorousness which, as we have seen, are implicitly linked with the notion of childishness, that response would of course

Mytilenean stasis works against the former’s depiction of Actium as part of a bellum externum (M. Lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes, Oxford 1997, pp. 145-146). Comparable resonances might have been available to those of Catullus’ readers with access to more Archilochus.

1 Thomas Köntges (personal communication), apparently independent of Ellis, op. cit. [n. 3 on p. 14], p. 198, who also made the comparison, points out how amusing the mock-wedding of children at Petron. 25 is apparently meant to be, as an illustra-tion of cultural relativism in matters of humour.

2 Uden, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 13], p. 11 agrees about the bathos but attributes it to the poem’s Priapaean affiliations. Other explanations are possible, and Thierry Barbaud (Catulle : Une poétique de l’indicible, Louvain 2006, p. 131) emphasizes the Indo-European resonances and intensifying effect of the structural repetitions : « Ici, les épithètes en doublet ‘chantent’ la gaieté renouvelée, annoncent une anecdote crue qui n’occupe que trois vers. ».


be more marked, pointed and polemical if Cato had explicitly rejected Archilochus’ tendency to write pueriliter or some other equivalent of to; paidariw`de~ in a programmatic statement of his iambic poetics. To return one final time to Morgan’s analysis of Ovidian childishness, he discusses a number of and hypothesizes even more « instances where the childishness of the poetic exercise finds some kind of reflection in the plot of the Metamorphoses », such as the childish Cupid’s programmatic victory over Apollo in book one, a triumph of puerility as much as of elegiac eroticism. 1 In a similar manner, Catullus populates his reassertion of iambic childishness with children, filling the poem and especially the fifth line with juxtaposed pupulum puellae. It is tempting even to see a further trope of infantilization in the notorious jingle Cato Catul-lum. As Fitzgerald has noted, this juxtaposition of the vocative and accusative irreverently suggests a pseudo-etymological connection between the two names, their ostensible connection to each other throwing into relief the gulf between the individuals they signify. 2 The precise connection Fitzgerald proposes, however – « as though Catullus were a diminutive of Cato » – adds another dimension to the (ironically constructed) relationship. In keeping with c. 56’s po-etics of puerility, Catullus sets himself up as a childish ‘little Cato’ in contrast to the grown-up iambist who misguidedly rejects to; paidariw`de~. 3 Such a self-characterization is clearly appropriate to the poet who characterizes his works as nugae (c. 1.2) and their composition as « play » (c. 50.2).

Catullus’ response can also be seen to address the issue of adult masculinity raised by Cato’s rejection of childishness. By designat-ing the object of his sexual domination and iambic abuse a pupulus, he corrects Cato’s notion that the writing of obscenely humorous iambos would be « childish » and compromise his adult masculinity. In contrast, Catullus implicitly asserts, his ‘true’ Archilocheanism serves to place the object of his invective in the subordinated role of a child contrasted with his dominant man. To compare once more the commoner antithesis between masculine and feminine, the hypermasculine aggression of c. 16 is partly expressed through the feminizing of its targets Aurelius and Furius as pathicus and

1 Morgan, art. cit. [n. 5 on p. 29], quoting from p. 89, with discussion of Cupid on pp. 74-75. 2 Fitzgerald, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 11], p. 78.

3 Diminutives of course have complex functions and associations, on which see esp. A. Ronconi, Studi Catulliani, Brescia 1971, pp. 107-150.

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cinaedus respectively. The latter poem also helps with the poten-tial paradox of Catullus’ both embracing childishness as part of his own Archilochean persona and projecting it onto the object of his iambic attack. In c. 16, Catullus does not disavow the poten-tially feminizing poetics of his basia poems, but insists that they are not inconsistent with his hypermasculine penetrating persona. In a comparable manner, in c. 56, he distinguishes between the con-notations of childishness which Cato had joined together, demon-strating that it is possible to be ‘childishly’ humorous, transgressive and indecorous without being disempowered in a power dynamic between adult and child. Indeed he even implies that such a child-ish form of iambos is an effective – perhaps more effective – means of reducing the target of invective to the impotent role of child. 1

In addition to putting to; paidariw`de~ back into Archilochean iambos, c. 56 also restores to; ajkovlaston, which Cato had like-wise excluded. As we have seen, the two terms overlap in their emphasis on a general lack of decorum in form, content and lan-guage, but the latter’s primary connotation in Cato, especially if its Latin equivalent was licentia, was obscenity of subject-matter and diction. The multiple sexual acts of c. 56, whatever their precise nature, clearly foreground precisely the obscene subject-matter which Cato had rejected. 2 It should be noted, however, that, for all the lewdness of the scenario, there is a marked absence of obscene language, self-consciously marked indeed as an absence by the el-lipsis of the primary obscenity mentulam (understood as qualified by rigidam) and perhaps cunnum (implied object of trusantem). 3 Accepting Skinner’s observation about the disingenuousness with which Catullus avoids these words, we might also accept or rath-er extend her suggestion that their omission was part of the joke of addressing a poem with such lewd subject-matter to the prim Cato. As a response to Cato’s iambic poetics in particular as op-posed to his ethical system in general, Catullus’ ellipsis of obsceni-

1 Cf. R. H. Simmons, Deconstructing a Father’s Love : Catullus 72 and 74, « Class. World » 104, 2010, pp. 29-57, at p. 51 on the complex dynamic wherein a sense of feel-ing threatened by a mere boy undercuts even this, the « only time when Catullus appears to assert full masculine agency ».

2 Cf. Fitzgerald, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 11], p. 78 : « the obscenity of poem 56 is intended to infect the insistently named addressee with laughter ». However, by missing the poem’s deployment of ellipsis, he exaggerates « the extremity of obscene diction » (p. 79). I would also dissent from his emphasis on the element of desire rather than vio-lence in the rape of the pupulus. 3 Skinner, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 14].


ties means that he does not straightforwardly and systematically reverse Cato’s remodelling of iambos, but incorporates a parody of the latter’s practice by excluding, according to the letter but not the spirit of Cato’s poetic programme, sexual language from his own iambos, only to conjure it as an absent presence by that very suppression.

6. Who did what to whom(and for how many Jellybeans)

There remains the question of what actually happens in c. 56’s three-line anecdote and how this too relates to and may be illuminated by that relationship to Cato’s iamboi. The sexual technicalities of who does what to whom have long been the most discussed ques-tion about the poem, with a particular flurry of scholarly activity in the 1970s. The problems arise from the uncertainty of the mean-ing of the hapax trusantem, which in turn affects the relationship between the pupulus and the puella, and whether the latter is in the dative or genitive. 1 If truso is related to trudo, as used (sens. obsc.) by Martial, then the pupulus is masturbating and this solo activity leaves no role for the puella except to be his (presumably absent, though possibly spectating) genitive ‘possessor’. 2 If, however, truso is related to trudo in the sense of something like « thrust », then the pupulus is penetrating the puella, who would then be in the dative, either of direction, of advantage, with mentulam understood, or ‘sympathetic’, with ellipsis of cunnum. 3 The latter scenario would make more sense of protelo, a metaphor from ploughing where a number of oxen are yoked one behind the other, just as a series of penetrations ‘yokes’ Catullus to the pupulus to the puella. Cato the Elder uses it of a series of three oxen and, despite the attempts of

1 Emending trusantem is a further option, and the revival of Baehrens’ crusantem by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, O Rem Ridiculam !, « Class. Philol. » 71, 1976, p. 348 has its attractions. The latter’s emendation of hunc to hanc in l. 6 because « [l]ogic rather sug-gests that the object of Catullus’ intervention (if crusantem is right) should be, not the boy, but his playmate » does not convince.

2 So A. E. Housman, Praefanda, « Hermes » 66, 1931, pp. 402-412, at p. 402 ; D. Feh- ling, Gegen die neueste Äusserung zu Cat. 56, « Hermes » 102, 1974, p. 376.

3 In general, R. G. Tanner, Catullus lvi, « Hermes » 100, 1972, pp. 506-508 ; K. Rock-well, O Rem Ridiculam !, « Class. Philol. » 70, 1975, p. 214. Dative of direction : Ellis, op. cit. [n. 3 on p. 14] ; of advantage : Quinn, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 13] ; « sympathetic » : Skinner, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 14], building on J. N. Adams, Four Notes on the Latin Sexual Language. cil 4.8898. Persius 4.36. Martial 11.104.17. Petronius 21.2, « Liv. Class. Mon. » 7.6, 1982, pp. 86-88.

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Housman and Fehling to use Lucretian parallels suggesting an in-determinate number which is not necessarily three, it seems oddly redundant to specify that a single penetration yoked two men to-gether in an (arguably oxymoronic) series of two, and Ockham’s razor discourages the introduction of a fourth or fifth participant into the ménage. 1 Since the weight of probability lies heavily on the side of the pupulus penetrating the puella, I shall focus on the rela-tionship between that scenario and Catullus’ response to Catonian iambos, but I shall also briefly outline the potential of masturba-tion as a metapoetic metaphor.

In either scenario, once we recognize c. 56 as a response to Ca-to’s redefinition of how to formulate an iambic attack, it becomes clear that the act of retributive sexual violence perpetrated on the pupulus embodies – as well as being described in – Catullus’ iam-bos. Once more, c. 16 offers a useful parallel. Despite the future tense of both pedicabo and irrumabo, that poem is transparently an illocutionary speech-act, asserting the speaker’s masculinity as it simultaneously negates that of his addressees in a zero-sum game, paralleling aggressive speech and aggressive penetration, each tro-ping the other. 2 In c. 56, the addressee seems not to be the object of the sexual attack, unless the shift from the second-person address of Cato to the third-person narrative about the pupulus occludes the fact of their being the same person. This is just possible, and would best fit the metapoetic potential of masturbation, if that is what trusantem is taken to mean. In contrast to the effective, object-directed aggression of poetry-as-penetration, masturbation would be an apt trope for an ineffective, solipsistic travesty of invective, iambos without the money-shot. On this model, Cato would be the pupulus, infantilized despite his rejection of to; paidariw`de~, in-dulging in the poetic equivalent of masturbation, tossing off iam-boi which don’t even hit, let alone penetrate, their target. Catullus’ polemical response would not only demonstrate the correct way

1 Cato, Orig. fr. 103 Peter. « Lucr. 2, 531 und 4, 190 sind es unbestimmt viele. » (Feh- ling, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 45]). Though I believe Tanner is right about protelo, one of his justifications, the supposed likelihood of the pupulus’ being too distracted by pen-etrating the puella to notice Catullus mounting him, is weak and offers an easy target for Fehling.

2 « [Catullus] hyperbolically and facetiously fashions himself as an avenging ‘Pria-pus’ with his verses as his phallus » (Uden, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 13], p. 14). As Uden and many others have shown, Catullus in c. 16 and elsewhere (perhaps even in c. 56) un-dermines and complicates this trope (on which see the coda below), but it is his play with its simple and even simplistic surface which I wish to stress here.


to compose penetrating invective, but do so by making Cato the victim as well as the pupil of the exemplary lesson. This reading has a number of attractions, but they are outweighed by its weak-nesses. The shift from second- to third-person and attendant con-flation of message and medium would be harsh but by no means impossible. More problematic is the lack of correspondence be-tween our reconstruction of Cato’s Archilocheanism and the poet-ics of masturbation. The latter would better suit an idea of iambos such as Callimachus’, which renounced aggression, than that of Cato, which rejected other qualities, but employed the vituperative « bitterness » which would tend to correspond rather than contrast with the trope of penetration. 1 Cato’s austere, humourless iam-boi may have had many flaws, but they were not verbal wanking. However, the strongest objection is not against the link between masturbation and Cato, but that, as argued above, the image con-jured by protelo, to cite only the strongest piece of evidence, makes it overwhelmingly likely that the pupulus is not masturbating at all, but penetrating the puella.

If the anecdote involves the pupulus penetrating the puella, then its relation to Catonian iambos is clearer. The metapoetic parallel-ism between aggressive verse and aggressive penetration remains largely the same (though we shall nuance it in a moment). How-ever, the pupulus’ action would no longer stand for the showy but ineffective verbal wanking of Cato’s iamboi, but, with less distance between image and symbol, for the sexual usurpation of Metellus Scipio and any other generic rival who steals the generic iambist’s girl. If anyone were to shaft my puella as Metellus did yours, Catul-lus is effectively saying to Cato, this is how I would punish him, expressing my manly superiority and reducing him to the level of a child. Since we have seen that the level of aggression is not a point of divergence between Catonian and Catullan iambos, the trope would have to reclaim some of the connotations of the literal act of penetration. It is not so much penetration as a violent act which is held up to Cato as a corrective exemplum (though as a standard trope for iambos, that connotation is by no means rejected), but penetration as a sexual, and hence potentially obscene act, and one

1 Any attempt to support this reading using Cato’s rejection of obscenity, so that he is being set in opposition to the image rather than the import of penetration, would founder on the simple fact that the image of masturbation with it which would then be aligned is hardly less obscene.

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which, in the absurd and demeaning circumstances described, may also become ridiculous. Iambos-as-penetration possesses the qual-ity of to; pikrovn on which Cato and Catullus agree, but it also par-takes of to; ajkovlaston and to; paidariw`de~. This reading would inevitably raise the question as to whether the puella, even without the usual defining mea, is to be thought of as Lesbia. The matter is almost impossible to adjudicate on and fortunately has little im-pact on c. 56’s relationship to Cato’s iamboi. If the puella is not Les-bia, then this is a hypothetical exercise showing Cato and all other would-be Archilochi how to deal properly with their Metellus or Lycambes. If the puella is Lesbia, then it shows Catullus putting the same theory into practice : he was in the same situation as Cato (and Archilochus), and this was how he dealt with it in the proper iambic way.

Frustratingly, one puzzle remains unsolved. Catullus’ invocation to Dione has been taken as affirmatory or as mildly apologetic (« as if the punishment taken in the goddess’ behalf were rather beyond what the goddess herself could approve »). 1 Since I have striven to show that every other aspect of these seven Phalaecian hendeca-syllables can be understood in terms of the way it responds to Cato’s iamboi and their self-positioning within the tradition of and about Archilochean iambos, it would not be infeasible if this these three words were also comprehensible in that way. 2 Of course, the invocation of the mother of Venus is broadly relevant to an erotic context, and Cato’s exclusion of the obscene may have extended to the sexual altogether. 3 However, it is tempting – if speculative, even by the standards of this article – to imagine that there was a reference to Dione in a lost poem of Archilochus, or of Cato, or even better of both, to which this alludes. Beyond that speculation, and since the likelihood of Cato’s iamboi ever being discovered is slim, we can only hope – for this among many other better reasons – for more papyrus finds of Archilochus.

1 Ellis, op. cit. [n. 3 on p. 14], p. 200.2 Ellis’ reference (op. cit. [n. 3 on p. 14], p. 198) to Cato’s joke about Aphrodite/

Venus in the context of dice at Plut. Cat. min. 6.1 is not convincing, since it neither explains why Dione rather than Venus is mentioned, nor is it clear that this would associate even Venus with Cato outside a small circle, and in a very different context. It is, of course, part of Ellis’ interpretation of c. 56 as sympathetic rather than polemi-cal towards Cato.

3 Uden, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 13], p. 12 sees Dione as forging another connection with Priapus, but his case for a clear association between them is not strong enough for what would otherwise be a very oblique allusion.


7. Coda

The nature of M. Porcius Cato’s iamboi against Metellus Scipio as assessed by ancient critics and perhaps even their own explic-it poetic programme can be plausibly, though of course by no means conclusively, reconstructed from Plutarch’s testimonium about their author’s « making use of the bitterness of Archilochus, but rejecting his licentiousness and childishness ». By comparing the use of these qualities as descriptive and evaluative terms by ancient critics of iambos and other genres (as well as by poets themselves), certain deductions can be made about the poems. By including « bitterness », Cato’s iamboi seem to have retained the hy-peraggressive mode of attack and invective which was most often deprecated by Archilochus’ and Hipponax’s critics and omitted by their imitators. However, by rejecting « licentiousness » and « child-ishness », they excluded obscenity of language and subject-matter, humour, and with them a more general transgression of decorum, encompassing bathos, structural disproportion, and other such jarring elements. Such a selective form of imitation would situ-ate Cato within a long tradition, whose distinguished representa-tives include Callimachus, Horace and Ovid, of modified iambos, suppressing aspects which were perceived as being distinctively Archilochean (or Hipponactean) but nevertheless undesirable on aesthetic, ethical or social grounds.

If this was the nature and even the programme of Cato’s iam-boi, Catullus 56 can be seen as a response addressed to Cato the iambist, reasserting the importance of « licentiousness » and « child-ishness » to the art of being Archilochus properly. The reassertion of these qualities is both enacted by the poem’s practice and re-ified in its literalized imagery. Humour is explicitly foregrounded and Archilochus’ own authority invoked by using as a motto and massively expanding the latter’s own reference to a crh`ma geloi`on. Obscenity is also central to the subject-matter of the anecdote, with its multiple sexual couplings, though Catullus may ironically gesture towards Cato’s exclusion of obscene language through dis-ingenuous ellipses of actual primary obscenities, which paradoxi-cally make their lewd absent presence even more blatant. A more general violation of structural decorum can be seen in the bathetic three-line anecdote following a repetitious four-line introduction. Catullus also reifies the poetic qualities he is reasserting by includ-

50 Robert Cowan

ing a pupulus and puella to embody childishness, and equating the composition of humorous, obscene iambos with the humorous, obscene, but also aggressive, act of retributive rape perpetrated on the pupulus.

The whole of this article, and its summary thus far in this coda, has taken c. 56’s response to Cato’s iamboi as more-or-less ‘straight’ and unproblematic. However, ‘being Archilochus’ always, perhaps even for Archilochus himself, included a degree of self-attack, as invective undercuts itself and the shafts of iambos bounce back against the hand which hurled them. The presence of such self-attack in the archaic iambists is controversial, asserted by scholars such as Miralles and Pòrtulas, but questioned by others such as Carey. 1 Whether or not it can be traced back to these originary figures, the critical idea that the iambist puts himself in a nega-tive light, which we have seen represented by Pindar, Critias and others, seems to have become a part of the iambic idea which Ar-chilochus’ imitators could acknowledge as well as reject. While a Callimachus or a Babrius might self-consciously strive to craft a new, improved form of iambos by excluding negative elements, others incorporated them within their (equally self-consciously) normative form of iambos, still acknowledging them as qualities open to criticism, but treating them as indispensible parts of the genre. Perhaps the most developed example of this is one strand of the iambist’s persona in the Epodes, a collection which sometimes resembles a post-Callimachean form of modified iambos, but also displays, as Watson puts it, « Horace’s debt to archaic and Hellenis-tic iambos, where the poet often demonstrates his fecklessness in the most graphic way possible. ». 2

In a similar manner, Catullus frequently undercuts the hyper-masculine aggression of his Archilochean persona, revealing in particular the ways in which its hyperbolic bombast hints at an anxiety about a failure of masculinity and control. The iambist is

1 « [Archilochus] played the game of a congenital, perhaps unexplained inferior-ity, in an intermediate position between the outcast and the outlaw » (C. Miralles, J. Pòrtulas, Archilochus and the Iambic Poetry, Rome 1983, pp. 21-22) ; « Hipponax was trying to besmear his enemies (either real or pretended personae) with the infamous role of pharmakós ; but he adopted it himself, up to a point, at least partly. » (Iidem, The Poetry of Hipponax, Rome 1988, pp. 46-47) ; « It is the victim, not the poet, who is marginalised. » (Chr. Carey, Iambos, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, ed. by F. Budelmann, Cambridge 2009, pp. 149-167, at p. 159.

2 L. C. Watson, Horace’s Epodes : The Impotence of Iambos ?, in Homage to Horace : A Bimillenary Celebration, ed. by S. J. Harrison, Oxford 1995, pp. 188-202, at p. 189.


at least as full of folly, vice and feebleness as those whom he at-tacks. « The voice of Catullan invective, like its Archilochean an-tecedent…is not evenly continuous throughout the collection : an adulterer decries adultery, the masterful moralizer is sometimes reduced to comic ineptitude … or even to complete disgrace. ». 1 Skinner has argued that the iambic obscenity directed at Lesbia and her lovers in cc. 11, 37 and 58 is in fact unleashed against the speaker himself, and that obscenity is actually used as a ‘marker’ for the point at which he is about to withdraw from the power struggle with his puella and his rivals. 2 We should of course always be aware of the danger of eliding the Otherness of Catullus and of Late Republican Rome as a whole, and of aligning him (and it) too closely with the values, sensitivities and anxieties of the twen-tieth and twenty-first centuries, and even of certain ethnic, social and cultural subdivisions of that era. Nevertheless, for all that an unreflective, unreconstructed iambic voice of hypermasculine ag-gression can be convincingly hypothesized within the Rome of the 50s bce, the complexity of Catullus’ poetry, with its interplay of Sapphic, Callimachean and countless other voices as well as the Archilochean, its subtle oscillation between self-assertion and self-abasement (even made explicit in c. 22), all indicate that we should be no less wary of using an anthropologist’s gaze to posit for it a simplistic, monolithic masculinity. 3

We have already seen, in passing, how the element of self-attack and even self-parody can be detected in c. 56, making the speaker, as well as the pupulus and the addressee, ridiculus. Even if we do not follow Uden in seeing the self-mockery as complete, or Sim-mons in psychologizing a paranoid Catullus overreacting to the perceived threat from the pupulus, there remains an absurdity and

1 Tatum, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 39], p. 338 ; cf. Wray, op. cit. [n. 1 on p. 21], p. 175. 2 « Obscenity encodes anomaly as an authentically virile voice, the voice of the

Priapic polemicist, concedes weakness and lack. » (M. B. Skinner, The Dynamics of Ca-tullan Obscenity : cc. 37, 57 and 11, « Syll. Class. » 3, 1991, pp. 1-11, at p. 10) ; « [The irruption of obscenity] designates a turning point in the power struggle, the instant when the speaker is compelled to capitulate and withdraw from the agonistic encounter. That appropriation of obscenity as a marker of breakdown calls his polemic authority and, if we follow Foucault, his masculinity itself into question. » (ibidem, p. 6).

3 For a reading which unpacks a further complexity to the phallic metaphor in Catullus’ poetry, not undercutting itself but incorporating homosocial desire, see J. P. Hallett, Nec castrare velis meos libellos : Sexual and Poetic Lusus in Catullus, Martial and the Carmina Priapea, in Satura Lanx : Festschrift W. A. Krenkel, ed. by C. Klodt, Hildesheim 1996, pp. 321-344, at pp. 327-333.

52 Robert Cowan

lack of dignity about the anecdote which reflects on Catullus as much as on the pupulus. 1 How can such self-attack be reconciled with the polemical attack on Cato’s iambic poetics, one which seems to reassert the very qualities which lay the iambist himself open to ridicule and derision ? Catullus corrects Cato’s distortion of iambos, restoring the licentiousness and childishness which are indispensible for his construction of ‘true’ Archilocheanism, but at the same time restores that element of self-attack which is also quintessentially Archilochean, indeed which is inextricably bound up with licentiousness and childishness, an aspect which is suscep-tible to criticism, but without which no one can really claim to be writing iambos. Such a warts-and-all characterization of iambos by Catullus could be thought of as an ironically detached critique, which mocks the ‘true’ Archilocheanism it exemplifies as much as it does Cato’s austere travesty. However, it is equally feasible and arguably more attractive to see it as a whole-hearted embrace of the genre in all its gloriously problematic self-contradictoriness.

The University of Sydney

1 « [T]his Priapic outlook would itself have been ridiculous, insofar as it co-opts the attributes of a figure in Roman culture who was an object of ridicule, the archetype of farcical hypersexuality » (Uden, art. cit. [n. 2 on p. 13], p. 13). « Catullus’ reaction to the sexual behavior of the little (slave) boy suggests that the poet feels threatened, and is preemptively treating the boy as an adulterer. » (Simmons, art. cit. [n. 1 on p. 44], p. 51).

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Sommario

Robert Cowan, On not being Archilochus properly : Cato, Ca- tullus and the idea of iambos 9

Giovanni Zago, Per la storia e la costituzione del testo delle Fa- vole di Fedro. Un nuovo manoscritto, il Vat. lat. 5190, e un nuovo testimone indiretto, gli Hecatomythia di Lorenzo Astemio 53

Francesco Padovani, Il nome di Osiride nella riflessione di Plu- tarco 119

Jeroen Lauwers, Narcissism and sophistry. Reading Philostra- tus’ Life of Polemo of Laodicea 143

Juan Pablo Sánchez Hernández, Neanivskoi : the privileged youth of Lesbos in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe 181

corpo minore

Daniele Sberna, Liguv~ swan and intratextual unity in Cal- limachus’s Aitia prologue 207

Antonio Ramírez de Verger, On the slave’s breast : Ovid’s He- roides 3, 131-132 225

On not being Archilochus properly: Cato, Catullus and the idea of iambos

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