Catullan Invective: Meter and Masculinity
in the Egnatius Poems

Ryan Platte (University of Washington)

Catullus makes frequent use of Sapphic-inspired glyconic meter as a vehicle for manipulating the perceived masculinity of his poetic persona; however this is complicated by the rare but noted use of hyper-masculine Hipponactean choliambic meter, used not only in invective against others, but implicitly and explicitly against the poet’s narrator himself.  In this paper I attempt to demonstrate the relevance of metrical phenomena to Krostenko’s elucidations of the evolution of Roman literary culture in the 50s BCE and Wray’s insights into the poetic performance of Roman manhood by means of a reading of Catullus’ choliambic Egnatius poems.  In this reading I demonstrate that the insults directed at Egnatius also impugn particular manifestations of the poet’s own literary project in a way which illuminates the complexities of self-presentation for the Roman male in the literary environment of the first century BCE.

I discuss three specific points.  First, I demonstrate that the attacks on Egnatius in poems 37 and 39 attack him, at least partially, as an embodiment of the attributes of Catullan poetry.  Egnatius frequents a tavern known to be salax, a term central to the neoteric poetic program (37.1), and is ridiculed for being a son of  cuniculosae Celtiberiae, which activates a pun in the programmatic lepidus, suggestive of “bunny-like” (37.18; 1.1).  The invective against Egnatius also specifically focuses on his habit of washing his mouth with urine, a process which renders his teeth expolitior, which is a direct reference to another central quality of Catullus’ book of poetry, the fact that it is expolitum (39.20; 1.1).

Secondly, I examine how this elaborates the poet/persona dichotomy discussed in poem 16, and throughout the corpus.  In poem 16 Catullus attacks Furius and Aurelius for assuming that one must embody the traits of one’s poetry, for failing to recognize the distinction between poet and poetic persona.  In 37 and 39, Catullus molds Egnatius into an actual human manifestation of his poetry, allowing the processes of art to take repellent physical form, and at this point Catullus does make use of the choliambic meter, which he does not in his attack on Furius and Aurelius.  In doing so, Catullus creates a hyper-masculine persona, typified in threats of hyperbolic penetrative power: an, continenter quod sedetis insulsi / centum an ducenti, non putatis ausurum / me una ducentos irrumare sessores.  He indicates that he, as much as anyone else, can be an attacker of the attributes of neoteric poetry when they exist in an actual human male rather than as symbolic literary tropes.

Finally, I show that this is part of a larger issue involving the relationship between Catullus’ choriambic and choliambic meters by looking at poem 8.  Poem 8 is a choliambic poem in which Catullus upbraids himself for excessively lamenting the loss of Lesbia.  When Catullus depicts himself as a lovelorn poet, he usually voices this persona in the Sapphic-inspired choriambic meter of his hendecasyllabics. Here, however, Catullus as the agent of Sapphic longing finds himself as the addressee of Hipponactean invective meter, thus facilitating a dialogue between his two poetic personas.  Poem 8, then, serves as a demonstration of the tension between the artistic ambitions of the neoteric poets and the performative constraints of republican Roman manhood.  The interplay between the sexually destabilizing choriambs and the compensatorily restabilizing choliambs reflects the issues attendant to the emergence of the increasingly refined Hellenized elite in a Roman society still uncomfortable with such a development.

Catullus’ attacks on Egnatius not only demonstrate the animosity of rival Republican poets but provide an insight into the role of meter in Catullan gender play and its function in dramatizing the complexities of Roman male persona as explored in the intentional confusion of the poet/persona dichotomy.