Classical Quarterly 55.

2 15 (2005) Printed in Great Britain

doi:10.1093/cq/bmi064

S CO R T U M D I L I G I S : A R E A D I N G O F CAT U L L U S 6
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The canonical interpretation of Catullus 6 characterizes the poem as a playful, 1

occasional2 piece between friendsgossipy Catullus (some commentators
compare c. 67) tries to extract details of his friend Flavius latest affair. Fergusons
comments are typical: to him, this piece is . . . clever, friendly, not to be taken too
seriously . . ..3 But more careful attention to the wording of the poem will not
allow so light-hearted an interpretation. Rather, Catullus 6 is an attack on a woman
whose details are lost to us, but presumably known to Catullus and his readers. The
insults are, it is true, encapsulated within the playfully indirect form of a hackneyed
genre4the sympathetic, or nosey, outsider inquiring into a friends love lifebut
the poems true intentions lie in the startling directness of the insults, which force
our attention away from the surrounding frame and onto the woman herself.
At its beginning, Catullus 6 is tactfully indirect. Apparently coy, Catullus suggests
in lines 13 that Flavius would be talking about his latest amourto him were
she not gauche and inelegant (illepidae atque inelegantes in line 2). But in lines
4 5, Catullus abandons this indirection and appears to be telling Flavius directly
what kind of woman Flavius is in love with; note the emphatic verum beginning
line 4 (the truth is . . .).5 She is nescioquid febriculosi/scortisome kind of
fever-ridden slut. The strength of this phrase ought to be noted. Morgan pointed
out that the only known occurrence of febriculosus before this is in Plautus
Cistellaria at 406 to describe common whores (as to its literal meaning, Morgan supports an earlier view that it refers to someone who has malaria).6 Morgan does
acknowledge that this word is much harsher than customarily admitted but
counter-intuitively suggests that its shock value rivets the readers attention on
the lines which immediately follow, referring to the witty bedroom scene at
lines 611.7 Surely it rivets attention onto itself and onto what it purports to
describe: the girlfriend.
Scortum itself is shocking, and deliberately emphasized through enjambment and
alliteration (nescio . . . febriculosi/scorti). This is the only time it appears in
Catullus poetry;8 in comedy, it tended to refer to undifferentiated harlots (as
opposed to the noun meretrix, referring to specic prostitutes), but elsewhere it was
most commonly used as abuse, in which case, although not a vulgarism, it had a
1 Cf. M. Skinner, Semiotics and poetics in Catullus 6, LCM 8 (1983), 1412, at 141:
Certainly the piece is playful in tone . . ..
2 D. Thomson, Catullus (Toronto, 1997), 221: . . . this occasional piece removes us temporarily from all deeper and more personal feeling.
3 J. Ferguson, Catullus (Lawrence, KA, 1985), 25.
4 M. Skinner (n. 1), 141. On the ubiquity of the topos, she cites Catullus 55, Propertius 1.9,
Horace Odes 1.27 and 2.4, and in Greek, A.P. 12.71 and 134 [Callimachus] and 135 [Asclepius].
See also A. Wheeler, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (Berkeley, 1934), 227.
5 Verum often connotes a strong turnaround or change in tone in Catullus; cf. 10.31, 15.9,
26.4, 76.14, 99.3.
6 M. Morgan, Nescio quid febriculosi scorti: A Note on Catullus 6, CQ 27 (1977), 33841,
at 339.
7 Morgan (n. 6), 341.
8 The diminutive form scortillum does appear elsewhere (10.3).

Classical Quarterly 55.2 # The Classical Association 2005; all rights reserved

JAMES UDEN
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strong emotive force. This makes the word with which it is juxtaposed, diligis, all the
more surprising.10 In Catullus, the verb diligere is used to indicate a deeper emotional
bond to a lover, rather than a merely sexual one;11 this meaning is perceived most
clearly in poem 72, in which Catullus says that he has loved (dilexi at 3) Lesbia
not only as a common man does his girlfriend (that is, in a sexual sense), but also
as a father loves (diligit at 4) his sons and sons-in-law. The very concept of loving
a scortum is oxymoronicnote the contrast drawn in Plaut. Truc. 678: uel amare
possum uel iam scortum ducerebut Catullus use of the emotive diligere makes
the juxtaposition particularly pointed. In this serious context, then, hoc pudet fateri
in 6.5 is, I suggest, less likely to refer to a bashfulness in kissing and telling than
as an insult to the girl, intending to ascribe to Flavius the kind of shame Catullus
expresses of himself in his meditations on cruelly misguided love, c. 75 and 76.
The next section, 612, mirrors the same movement (indirection then abrupt
directness) that we observed in lines 1 5. The complexity of Catullus use of his
models in lines 611 ought to be noted. It has previously been observed that
Catullus is here adapting a Hellenistic motif whereby a lover is described by way
of the after-effects of love;12 so, for example, Asclepiades in A.P. 12.135 describes
Nicagoras tears and unhappy eyes and the wreath on his head slipped out of place,
all of which betray that he is in love. But look more closely at how Catullus remodelling accords with the themes of the poem: he not only transfers the description of the
lover to an inanimate object but also transforms the conventionally amatory motif into
a purely sexual oneso, the tottering bed betrays not that Flavius is in love but rather
that sex has taken place.13 This is a continuation of the scortum diligis motif, an
implied contrast between loveand mere sex. Meanwhile, Catullus, despite his indirection, maintains the air of condemnation by giving his application of the motif a
further, forensic twist. To describe the tottering of the bed (at 11), he uses the
word inambulatio, which, in the technical language of oratory, refers to the orators
walking up and down the rostra (cf. Cic. Brut. 43.158 and Auct. Her. 3.15.27).
Combined with the elaborate (rhetorical?) sound-effects, well analysed by Tracy,14
Catullus seems facetiously to create an image of the inanimate objects of the room
engaged in courtroom condemnation of the sex which has taken place. It should
also be noted, though, that in doing so Catullus is accentuating an undertone of condemnation which is already a common element of the original Hellenistic motif,
especially when it is applied to women. So, for example, in A.P. 5.175 (Meleager),
a poem which bears considerable similarities to our own, the speaker notes of his
love that her hair has been scented (line 2), her head is bound in a garland (4) and all
her limbs are tottering from the wine (6). The speaker concludes that she is in love, but
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See J. Adams, Words for prostitute in Latin, RhM 126 (1983), 321 58, at 325 6.
The juxtaposition is also noted by H. Rohdich, Liebe, Gesellschaft, Dichtung: Catull c.6,
A&A 46 (2000), 116 23, at 117.
11 Nielsen (Catullus c.6: on the signicance of too much love, Latomus 43 [1984], 104 10,
at 107) reads against the Latin here. She says that, even though elsewhere in Catullus (72.3,
76.23) the verb connotes a fuller relationship between lovers, in this case, diligere qualies
ties that are carnal. Why should it have a different meaning here?
12 So, W. Kroll, C. Valerius Catullus 2 (Leipzig, 1929), ad loc., Wheeler (n. 4), 227, and
Morgan (n. 6), 340.
13 Cf. Epod. 12.11 12. Furthermore, the evidence of vigorous sexual activity (that is, the
shaken state of the bed) extends the pejorative characterization of Flavius amour as a
scortum, since, according to Catullus contemporary Lucretius, vigorous movement during
sex was the habit of scorta (4.1274).
14 See S. V. Tracy, Argutatiinambulatioque (Catullus 6.11), CP 64 (1969), 234 5.
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his observations are not, as with those poems about men, part of friendly jest, but in
condemnation of this woman, since they prove that she has broken her oath to him (1).
In this context, attritus in 10 (applied to a pillow) may be signicant. The technique
here is a similar one to that in c. 17, in which, as Niall Rudd argued in a classic
article,15 Catullus uses words and images in the description of inanimate objects
(the bridge and the town) to add to our understanding of the poems central protagonists (the inept husband and his young wife). The verb tero, from which attritus is
derived, is at times used in a sexual context as a euphemism for various sexual
acts,16 but specically seems to have connoted excessive or threatening sexuality.
So, at Anthol. Lat. 148.8 (148 Riese 137 SB), the same compound is used of the
sexual action of a man penetrating a mare, and at 3.20.6, Propertius uses tero in his
suggestion to a woman that her man is probably having sex with another woman.17
Often, moreover, tero seems to have been used in connexion with excessive or threatening female sexuality. In Lucretius 4.1127, the verb is used of womens expensive
garments worn away by love-making, amidst a famous passage detailing the damaging physical and economic effects on men of falling in love. Most damningly, in
Propertius 3.11.30, an elegy on the power of women over men, tero is used of the
threatening Cleopatra, who is worn away through sex with her slaves.18
These overtones of a negative sexuality subtly foreshadow the very blunt condemnation of line 12. Ostensibly, of course, this line continues the conceit of the rst three
lines, encouraging Flavius to speak up about his sexual misadventures. But the real
force of the line lies in Catullus use of stupra.19 Originally denoting any public disgrace or disgraceful act, stuprum came to refer to unlawful sexual intercourse between
citizens. Elaine Fantham comments: Most uses of the noun stuprum in Republican
authors treat it as either a form of corruption or violation of the passive partner by
the penetrator, or (where the passive partner is held up for reproach) of selfcorruption . . .; 20 of its forcefully condemnatory tone, she writes: Stuprum is not
used to describe the speakers actions or those of his friends, even when the term
has become approximate with overuse.21 The elliptical syntax of the line, too,
seems to draw attention to the condemnatory sentiment as much as it can; so,
rather than nil ualet stupra tacere or the like, Catullus writes Nam nil stupra ualet
as a stand-alone phrase, and only after this sentiment has been voiced does he add
nihil tacere to complete the line and continue the topos of the friends silence.
15 N. Rudd, Colonia and her bridge: a note on the structure of Catullus 17, TAPA 90 (1959),
238 42 K. Quinn (ed.), Approaches to Catullus (Cambridge, 1972), 129 35.
16 See J. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), 183 4 on the use of tero and
its compounds in a sexual context.
17 Note also Petronius 81.6, in which attero is used bitterly of the sexual excess of a former
love with a new boyfriend, and Juvenal 9.4, loosely of the oral sex of a prostitute in his satire on
a situation of excessive sexuality. In these examples the overtone of femininity (see following)
may also be in play.
18 Cynthias ghost also uses it in the sexual, threatening end to Propertius 4.7, of grinding
bone upon bone, when she alone will hold Propertius after his death (at line 94).
19 Nil stupra ualet is an emendation ( for the manuscript in ista preualet)but an extremely
likely one. Most editors (including Ellis, Quinn, and Thomson) have favoured this reading,
and it is easy to see how by false word division and a confusion between in and ni the corruption
could have occurred. Archibald Allen (Love Awry in Catullus, Maia 34 [1982], 2256)
rejected the emendation, though, commenting: stupra surely is a shade too strong, too moralistic for the contextwhich is, I think, exactly the point.
20 E. Fantham, Stuprum: public attitudes and penalties for sexual offences in Republican
Rome, Echos du Monde Classique 10 (1991), 267 91 at 270.
21 Ibid., 271.

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But the poems loudest reprobation of Flavius alleged amourcomes in line 13. To
my mind, ascribing to Flavius latera ecfututa simply cannot, in a Roman context,
constitute, as Nielsen suggests, Catullus commending Flavius on his masculine
powers, and on his lack of sexual inhibition.22 It is by no means assured that in a
Roman context a lack of sexual inhibition would indeed have connoted masculinity,23
but, in any case, this interpretation ignores the passive force of ecfututa; Flavius has
himself been sexually exhausted by this woman, and such suggestions of female
sexual voracity are nevercomplimentary in Catullus. In fact, this line seems closer
in spirit to Catullus abuse of Lesbia through allegations of a lack of sexual inhibition;
cf., for example, 11.1720 (note especially ilia rumpens at 11.20, a not dissimilar
anatomical detail to latera at 6.13).24 The primary obscenity (the rst of the collection) is also a shock, demanding attention.25 If the poem was truly as friendly as
commentators have made out, it is hard to see what it is doing here; all of the other
ve instances of fut- verbs in Catullus appear in poems of abuse,26 so the presence
of such a verb here with an entirely different connotation would be quite remarkable.
Line 14 pulls us back, for the end of the poem, into the lighter, supercial world of
neoteric judgements on art/lifestyles with which Catullus 6 began. In the past, commentators have been too keen, I think, to read the last three lines as entirely determinative of the meaning of the poem. As with c. 22, the central, forceful, poetic thrusts
of Catullus 6 unfold throughout the body of the poem, and the ending is rather ambiguous and subtly ironic. Catullus urges Flavius to speak up about whatever he has, of
good or bad; of course, the rest of the poem makes clear that Catullus knows exactly
what Flavius has, and it is all bad, but this is pretended civility which prepares us for
the joke of the nal two lines.27 The reason is, he says, that he wants to immortalize
Flavius and his lover in verse, but these last lines are clearly disingenuous for three
reasons: rst, the hyperbolic ad caelum is ridiculously high-sounding and incongruous, and not meant to be taken seriously;28 secondly, the point of the line is in lepido,
which, in pointed contrast to lines 2 and 14, only goes to prove that Catullus possesses
the social grace which Flavius girl sorely lacks. Thirdly, as others have pointed out,29
it is Catullus 6 itself that is the charming verse of which Catullus speaks in the last
line. Flavius and his lover have indeed been immortalized, but the terms of their
immortality are surely not what they would have wished.

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Nielsen (n. 11), 109.

The connotations of male sexual voracity seem to have depended on the context and who
was being described. One must weigh up instances of men boasting about their own stamina
(Cat. 32.7 8, Ovid Am. 3.7.24 7) and pulling power (Prop. 22A), with that rhetoric of
abuse which links other mens sexual insatiety with effeminacy, on which see Cat. 57.8 10
and C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 1993), 81 7.
24 Cf. Adams (n. 16 at 141) on Cat.11.20: this use of ilia is not unlike that of latus above
[citing Cat. 6.13]. Cf. also Cat. 80.7-8, in which the rupta ilia of misellus Victor, like the bed in
6, shout out (clamant) about Gellius debaucheries.
25 Cf. T. Wiseman, Catullus and his World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge, 1985), 141: . . . the
vulgar phrase comes as a shock, and probably came as a shock to Catullus contemporaries too.
26 diffututa (29.13); confutuere (37.5), defututa (41.1), futuit (71.5 and 97.9). One exception
could be said to be fututiones in 32.8; though this is a magniloquent neologism with, arguably, a
different tone.
27 The quidquid partitive genitive construction can connote irony (56.3) or contempt
(37.4); both of these may be felt here.
28 For a similarly disingenuous promise of poeticized catasterization, cf. L. Watson, A
Commentary on Horaces Epodes (Oxford, 2003), 542 and 5623 on Hor. Epod. 17.40ff.
29 See Morgan (n. 6), 341; Skinner (n. 1), 141; Nielsen (n. 11), 110.
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Without delving into the mire of biographical criticism, it is nevertheless possible

to sketch the shape of the situation constructed by the text. Is Catullus attacking
Flavius? Flavius hardly gures here at all; compared to the ostensibly similar
Catullus 55, all of the matters which Catullus criticizes can be sourced back to the
girl and her corrupting inuence. So, then, the target is Flavius girl. We ought furthermore to reject those who take Catullus at his word and suggest that this girl
was actually a low-class whore.30 Why so forcefully call a spade a spade? The
emotive force of the language here (diligis, stupra, ecfututa) suggests something
more. Rather, by comparison with poems such as c. 37 and c. 58, in which the
high-class Lesbia is abused by being likened to a common prostitute, we see that it
is more likely that Catullus is launching an attack on whatever high-class woman
Flavius is in love with, but, in an example of the witty indirection and sophistication
that characterizes lepidus versus, he does so through the hackneyed motif of the man
inquiring about a friends new love.31
University of Sydney

JAMES UDEN
jamesuden@yahoo.com

30 It is unlikely, at this point of the development of the word, that stupra (line 12) would have
been used of a low-class whore anyway; the word was usually used of more shocking and
improper intercourse than merely that between a man and a prostitute. See Fantham (n.20).
31 I would like to thank Dr Lindsay Watson and Ms Frances Muecke for their helpful criticism and personal encouragement.