A Guide to Latin Elegy and Lyric. Barbara K. Gold
id="ulink_5aa0993b-08fe-5445-8cb3-1fa6b0a2f664">David Wray describes this as a poetic “performance” piece, an aggressive and uncompromising declaration of the kind of man that Catullus wishes to be (and to be seen as) – that is, the kind of man who is different in every possible way to Caesar (Wray 2001; see also Wray 2012 on this poem as a performance of Catullus’ “poetics of manhood”). In these two short lines we witness a scathing put-down of Rome’s leading figure, alongside a repudiation of the political life and a rejection of the military life that Caesar represents (and which were, at the time, the only two career options effectively open to men of status from “good” families). In his deliberate choice of vocabulary here, we see Catullus declaring that his own desires and interests lie elsewhere: Catullus doesn’t care what Caesar thinks or what he may do, Catullus doesn’t care about status and power, or sucking-up to powerful men – Catullus aims to please, to bring pleasure (placere – a term which carries erotic connotations in this elegiac context) and to answer his own desires in other ways. When Catullus says that he doesn’t know if Caesar is albus an ater homo (“a white man or a black man”) he is not expressing any particular concern with skin color or heritage; saying you don’t know whether someone is black or white means you know nothing at all about them (the equivalent of saying “who is this guy anyway?”). This is a shorthand way of saying that they are complete strangers to you. And Catullus doesn’t simply state these things, he performs them. The very act of rebuffing Caesar in this highly provocative and public fashion is itself a performance of the values that Catullus believes in. Catullus doesn’t just tell us what he thinks about Caesar, he shows us. At the same time he shows us what kind of man and what kind of poet he himself wants to be.
Horace negotiates his own self-conscious performance of both poetics and masculinity very differently and in a very different sociopolitical context. Before embarking on a career in poetry, Horace was a soldier – a military tribune serving under Brutus during the civil wars of the Second Triumvirate, fighting for the allies supporting the anti-Caesarian Republican cause, and against Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Antony. In the civil wars Horace fought, therefore, on the losing side at the decisive and bloody battle of Philippi. In Odes 2.7 (dedicated to his friend and companion Pompey) he writes with seeming candor about his experience of this defeat. Here he confesses to cowardice in dropping his shield on the battlefield in order to save his skin – his bravery, his manliness, his virtue, broken (fracta virtus, Odes 2.7.9–14). Yet, this “confession” too can be seen as a performance of Horace’s own “poetics of manhood”. The canonical Greek lyric poets Archilochus, Alcaeus, and possibly Anacreon too (Horace’s lyric role-models) had also written about dropping their shields on the battlefield: it is a familiar literary lyric trope. The historical “truth” of Horace’s account of his experience of Philippi is further compromised by his claim that Mercury rescued him from the enemy ranks, wrapped in a thick mist – just as epic heroes are rescued by their divine protectors in Homer’s Iliad.
This example of Horace’s poetic engagement with the turbulent politics of the period gives us a good idea of his general approach to such affairs of state. He likes to obfuscate, to hide political reality and personal opinion in a thick literary mist, so that we can never be entirely sure on which side his true political allegiances lie. This approach is clearly successful, because Horace manages to maintain a close relationship with Augustus for the rest of his long literary career (see Chapter 3). He writes under the patronage of Augustus’ political right-hand-man, Maecenas. He is commissioned to write a panegyric poem in celebration of Augustus’ ludi saeculares (literally, “the games of the century”), a long lyric piece known as the Carmen Saeculare, which was publicly performed as part of the games and in which Horace praises Augustus’ many great achievements. We find similar praise for the princeps in one of Horace’s so-called “Roman Odes” (3.6.) where he appears to speak on Augustus’ behalf in encouraging the people of Rome to mend their immoral and irreligious ways and instead to follow the examples of their ancestors (the mores maiorum). Yet it is never clear where Horace’s true political sympathies are placed. In the “Cleopatra Ode” (Odes 1.37), it is Antony who Horace figuratively wraps up in a cloud of mist and whisks away from the battlefield of civil war. The enemy in this poem is not a fellow Roman but an Egyptian queen, obfuscating the historical fact that Octavian/Augustus’ greatest victory was achieved in a civil war, fighting a Roman rather than a foreign enemy. And, although the poem ends with the word triumpho, the poem’s spotlight upon Cleopatra and her noble suicide subtly reminds us that she successfully escaped the humiliation of being paraded in chains in Caesar’s triple triumph of 29 bce. Horace, it seems, just like Mercury, is willing and able to rescue those who fight on the wrong side of Octavian/Augustus (on the complicated issue of Horace’s “Augustanism” see especially Lowrie 2007).
Tibullus is a contemporary and friend of Horace. He too sees military service and, again like Horace, he apparently displays a quiet reluctance to engage directly with the politics of the period. There is, in fact, a noticeable silence on the subject, and barely any direct reference to Augustus in any of Tibullus’ elegies. This is surprising, because Tibullus’ literary patron was a powerful politician – Messalla Corvinus, at one time an intimate ally and trusted friend of the future Augustus. Messalla seems to have retired from public life sometime after 27 bce, but before this retirement the princeps had appointed Messalla to the role of City Prefect and left him in charge of Rome while he himself was away touring the provinces. Messalla also led a successful military campaign for Octavian in Aquitania (accompanied by Tibullus) and was one of the very few Roman citizens to be granted the imperial privilege of a military “triumph” – a celebratory procession through Rome in 27 bce. These achievements by Messalla are duly recorded by Tibullus (1.7) but the closeness of the relationship between his patron and the princeps otherwise leaves barely a trace within his poetry.
Yet this is not to say that Tibullus is disengaged from the contemporary world in his writings, or that the radical political and cultural changes introduced by Augustus leave no mark at all upon his poetry. On the contrary, Tibullus’ efforts to distance himself from the new world order and its politics have a profound influence on the style and tone of his elegiac writing (see Chapter 4). In particular, Tibullus appears to be anxious about his role in this new world; his poetry repeatedly questions what it means to be a Roman citizen – and what it means to be a man. As Efi Spentzou explains (2013: 26): “There is in Tibullus’ poems a puzzling, intriguing quality: a studied air of distance from the political centre and yet a constant and deep-seated preoccupation with Roman duties, manhood and citizenship.” In this respect, Tibullus is profoundly engaged with the sociopolitical world around him and his silence about Augustus actually speaks volumes (see especially Miller 2004).
There are other aspects of the new political regime that clearly influence Tibullus’ elegiac writing. Tibullus opens and closes his first book of elegies with a forthright ideological rejection of war and imperial conquest, criticizing the desire for dominion and wealth that was driving Augustus’ imperial ambitions for Rome at this time. In direct and pointed contrast to such ambitions, Tibullus declares his own desire for peace and for a simple life in the countryside (elegies 1.1 and 1.10). He even invites his readers to see a connection between his own rejection of the status quo and the recent civil wars (just in case we happen to have missed it). He alludes to his poor “inheritance” (1.1.41–2) and the fact that his family have lost some of their ancestral property to the taxes imposed by Julius Caesar as part of the land-confiscations of 41–40 bce, which Caesar had used to dole out army pensions to those men who had been his supporters at the battle of Philippi. Tibullus does not always shy away from making political statements in his poetry, then, despite his withdrawal from the world of warfare and politics, and despite his reputation for softness and dreaminess (see Miller 2004; Spentzou 2013).
The merging of politics and poetry is far more prominent in Propertius, however. Here we see a particularly strong reaction against the bloodshed and violence of Rome’s recent history of civil war, and an anti-war rhetoric and ideology that directly opposes war (arma) to love (amor). Like Tibullus, Propertius