When is a Philosopher not a Philosopher?
Catullus 47 and Prosopographical Excess

Susan O. Shapiro (Utah State University)

For readers of Catullus' poetry, it is sometimes helpful -- even essential -- to know the identities of the people who are mentioned in a poem.  To take an obvious example, the two-line poem 93 (in which Catullus professes his utter lack of concern for Caesar's good will) would be incomprehensible if we did not know who Caesar was.  But if our goal is to understand the poems, then the poems themselves should guide our prosopographical research.  When such investigations are undertaken for their own sake, I believe we are in danger of becoming antiquarians, and that such research can actually impede our task.

I would like to use Catullus' poem 47 as a case in point.  In this seven-line poem Catullus names no less than five individuals: Porcius, Socration, Veranius, Fabullus and Piso.  The identities of Veranius and Fabullus are unknown, but that does not impede our understanding of the poem, because they appear (alone or together) in four of Catullus' other poems (9, 12, 13, and 28), and it is clear from the affectionate tone with which they are always mentioned or addressed that they were Catullus' close personal friends.  On the other hand, we are fairly certain that we know who Piso was.  From his appearance in poem 28 (with Veranius and Fabullus again serving on his staff), it seems likely that he was L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the governor of Macedonia from 58-55 B.C. and Caesar's father-in-law.[1]  Porcius and Socration are not mentioned in any other poem and are otherwise unknown,[2] but a number of scholars have argued that Socration was actually a nickname for the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, who was known to be associated with L. Calpurnius Piso.[3]  In this paper I will argue that this identification cannot possibly be correct and that the ongoing discussion of this issue has distracted scholarly attention from the meaning of the poem.

The argument that Socration is a pseudonym for Philodemus depends chiefly on the mistaken belief (based on a misreading of one of Philodemus' epigrams) that Philodemus was present with Piso in Macedonia.[4]  Scholars have also paid insufficient attention to the character of Socration as Catullus portrays him.  Philodemus was a distinguished philosopher and a true Epicurean, temperate in his pleasures and moderate in all things,[5] while the Socration of poem 47 is a gluttonous toady, who helps Piso steal from his province (duae sinistrae, line 1) and hosts lavish banquets at midday (lines 5-6).[6]  Thus, our concentration on a possible Philodemus connection has distracted our attention from the real point of Catullus' poem: Porcius and Socration are low-life nobodies who have been preferred to self-respecting Romans because they are all too willing to serve their master's vices.