According to Cicero, Catiline rallied his supporters by telling them that his own debts made him a fitting leader for the indebted. ‘No faithful defender of the wretched can be found except one who is himself wretched’, he is alleged to have said. ‘A man destined to be the leader and standard-bearer of those in trouble should have no share of fear, but a full share of trouble’.Footnote 1 Trouble was widespread. Cicero, in his taxonomy of the social groups drawn to Catiline’s revolt, describes rich men ‘sunk in debt’ (magno in aere alieno), looking to profit from chaos; other men ‘oppressed by debt’ (premuntur aere alieno), who longed for political control; colonists ‘sunk deep in debt’ (in … aes alienum inciderunt) through their unprincipled spending; and a further group, oppressed by poverty and unable to escape its clutches.Footnote 2 Finally, there were the men closest to Catiline himself, the gang of aesthetes, the fast crowd who had lapsed from fashion and sex to violence and crime. ‘These are the boys’, Cicero says scornfully, ‘so charming and effeminate (lepidi ac delicati), who have learnt not just to love and be loved, to dance and sing, but to brandish daggers, to use poisons’.Footnote 3 Cicero presents the Catilinarian revolt, with its cry of debt cancellation (tabulae novae), as the twin product of moral breakdown and financial insecurity. Biased as it is, his picture finds a parallel in Sallust’s retrospective analysis of the conspiracy some twenty years later, which presents ubiquitous debt among the Roman elite as an instigator of both moral decline and political unrest.Footnote 4
Revolt was Catiline’s response to the debt crisis of the late 60s. Even those virulently opposed to Catiline, however, still felt the weight of debt in their lives. After buying his house on the Palatine in 62, Cicero himself quipped in a letter to Publius Sestius: ‘let it be known that I am now so deeply in debt that I would gladly join any conspiracy that would have me’.Footnote 5 Near the end of his life, Cicero looked back on his consulship as the era when debt was at its height, and appeals for debt cancellation reached fever pitch.Footnote 6 But the problems were systemic and they endured. For the political elite, the career model in the Late Republic required that candidates on the lower rungs of the cursus honorum spend ever larger amounts of money to win favour and garner votes. Men gambled on their future, borrowing money to fund campaigns and public events, betting that they could rise to a high enough position to recoup enough money in the provinces or on campaign to repay their creditors.Footnote 7 Amid generations of Romans skating on thin financial ice, nobody bet on their future as aggressively as Julius Caesar, who accumulated astronomical amounts of debt throughout the 60s, and is said to have owed some twenty-five million sesterces before embarking on his praetorship in Spain in 61.Footnote 8 According to a narrative fostered by his own Commentarii, he cleared his slate due to the immense profits of the Gallic campaign. Yet as Rome devolved into civil war, Pompey could still claim that Caesar’s belligerence was a product of financial desperation. According to Suetonius, ‘Gnaeus Pompey kept insisting that Caesar wanted to throw everything into confusion and chaos, because he didn’t have the funds to complete everything he had started, and he couldn’t satisfy public expectation about his return from his own private funds’.Footnote 9
Borrowing and lending had played a key role in Roman political and economic life for centuries, so debt was nothing new. But there does seem to have been a quickened sense of crisis in the period stretching from the Catilinarian revolt to Caesar’s dictatorship, exacerbated by the power-broking of the first triumvirate and resulting political uncertainty, the mounting costs of paying soldiers, and possibly also a scarcity of physical coinage.Footnote 10 Scholars of other periods have noted the ways in which debt has snaked its way into other cultural forms, especially literature.Footnote 11 As Annie McClanahan has shown, in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, economic need formed both the ‘ambient context and manifest content’ of a wide range of novels, artworks, and horror films, all of which sought to convey some sense of a shared ‘autumnal condition’.Footnote 12 By contrast, after the financial crises of the late Republic, where was the Roman literature of debt? Writing less than a decade after the Catilinarian conspiracy, Catullus depicted elite Romans slumped into abject poverty; the perversion of love and friendship by lending; ostentatious parties and empty wallets; the frantic acquisition of wealth by ambitious men; and the obscene waste of colonial acquisition and exploitation. The urbane sophistication of these poems is shadowed by a consistent awareness of financial precarity. This article, then, argues for the Carmina as an example of the Roman literature of debt. The poems testify to the affective weight of indebtedness in the 50s b.c.e., and the emotional impact of lingering financial crisis.
Attitudes towards wealth and business in Catullus have certainly been a focus of previous studies, although they have tended to begin from quite different theoretical assumptions.Footnote 13 T. P. Wiseman explored the social and financial ascent of the Valerii Catulli. A frequent host to Julius Caesar, Catullus’ father was a ‘local magnate’ in Sirmio.Footnote 14 According to Wiseman, the Carmina suggest that the son brought an insistence on fair deals to the indulgences of fast-living Rome: the ‘poems offer a consistent portrait of a man concerned more with economy than extravagance — not easy to borrow from, irritated by petty theft, alleging cobwebs in his purse, contemptuous of those who have run through their funds, explicitly assessing his provincial experience in terms of profit and loss’.Footnote 15 Giorgio Maselli, in his Affari di Catullo (1994), noted the prominence of economic language in Catullus’ texts, estimating that some 40 per cent of the Carmina contain one or more words related to finance, money, or property.Footnote 16 Much as Ross identified the ‘vocabulary of political alliance’ in Catullus’ erotic poetry, Maselli proposes ‘property relations’ (rapporti di proprietà) as a lens through which the poet views aspects of his social and romantic life.Footnote 17 Yet Maselli ends by sketching a worldview for the Carmina very similar to that of Wiseman: he argues that the poems communicate a small-town frugality, contemptuous of profligacy and frustrated with waste.Footnote 18 By contrast, a different strand of scholarship emphasises the literary heritage of the impoverished poet, noting Catullus’ assumption of a persona traceable to Archilochus and Hipponax. For Maria S. Marsilio, for example, images of wealth and poverty are strictly to be separated from reality in the poetry of Catullus and Martial. Instead, they operate as literary symbols in the work of these authors, representing the ‘Callimachean slenderness and refinement of their poetry’.Footnote 19
While the studies of Wiseman and Maselli form an important basis for any consideration of economics in Catullus, I differ from their approach by emphasising the poet’s own immersion in a sunken world of economic dysfunction. Although the Carmina do mock other men for their poverty, I do not see the texts as an extended exercise in poetic flagitatio, castigating targets for their economic indiscretions, policing correct behaviour and safeguarding bonds of fides. After all, the poet’s purse is also full of cobwebs (C. 13.7–8). He too has profited less from the provinces than he pretends (C. 10). Rather, Catullus’ voice is alternately that of a lender and a pauper; he too is part of the fast-living culture of waste and want; he is also caught up in a culture of frantic accumulation, and expresses erotic desire by counting. The Carmina describe and implicitly critique a world of commodified relationships in which Catullus and his targets are equally immersed, a world shaped by contemporary political and economic pressures. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that anyone in the 50s b.c.e. could have read Catullus’ descriptions of broke aristocrats and understood them as timeless evocations of the impoverished poet. To his contemporary audience, the poet and his circle must have seemed very much like Cicero’s rhetorical scare figures from the Catilinarians — the charming (lepidi) young men who ‘love and are loved’, who burn through their patrimonies and now want Rome to burn too.Footnote 20 To be clear, there are no known biographical links between Catullus and Catiline, but the uprising was hardly a distant memory. To take one example, M. Caelius Rufus — lover of Clodia and almost certainly the Caelius of the Carmina — was drawn, like so many other young men, into Catiline’s web;Footnote 21 he revived the spirit of the uprising in 48 when he issued a praetorian edict that called for debt renegotiation or cancellation and granted tenants free housing for a year, only to be murdered months later.Footnote 22 Many details in Catullus’ own life are irrecoverable, but it is clear that debt and its pressures were never far away.
I proceed by close reading, examining a set of poems in which social relationships and literary form have both been shaped by the ubiquity of debt.Footnote 23 Prevailing descriptions of the poet and his circle tend to be grounded in the egalitarian exchange of gifts and poems, free from the anxieties of indebtedness and financial inequality.Footnote 24 I argue instead that economic factors consistently underlie other modes of engagement in the Carmina (friendship, patronage, literary community) in ways that are sometimes subtle and implicit, at other times frank and exposed. In C. 23, Catullus creates a mock consolation for the poverty of Furius, only to unveil his own voice in the final lines as that of Furius’ (potential) creditor, rejecting his peer for a loan. Is the poem a devastating attack or a joke between friends? The ambiguities of the Catullus–Furius relationship, I suggest, reflect a world in which friendship (amicitia) coexists with economic hierarchy and obligation.Footnote 25 I then turn to two poems, C. 103 and 41, which describe financial need among the poet’s contemporaries. As peers fall into debt, we see them slipping into the caricatured form of comic stereotypes, thereby recalling a complex set of associations between bankruptcy, theatrical performance and social death. Finally, I turn to C. 5, in which Catullus’ own voice is reduced to counting —albeit kisses, not coins.Footnote 26 Rather than the poem constructing an enclosed domain of emotion in opposition to political and economic reality, I argue that its cry to live and love mirrors contemporary aristocrats’ frantic calculation of scarce, fast-disappearing resources. No sober businessman, Catullus depicts his poetic self enveloped by the spirit of reckless accumulation which has absorbed and destabilised Rome around him.
I Invective, lending and the character of debt (C. 23)
Furius in the Carmina not only carries debt; he embodies it. In C. 26, Catullus tells us that Furius’ little villa is not ‘exposed’ (opposita) to drafts of wind in any direction, but is ‘mortgaged’ (opposita, the same word) to the tune of 15,200 sesterces. ‘What a horrific and pestilential overdraft!’, says Catullus, in mock-sympathy.Footnote 27 In C. 23, though, Furius is drained of every kind of resource, lacking even what makes a person human:
The poem’s hyperbolic vision of poverty exercised a particular influence on later writers, especially Martial.Footnote 28 In C. 24, Catullus tells his lover Iuventius that he should not allow himself to be seduced by the ‘man with no slave or cashbox’ (that is, Furius), so C. 23 could be an attack on an erotic rival. Alternatively, Furius could be the poet M. Furius Bibaculus, who wrote a poem — intriguingly like this one — describing the exaggerated poverty of another neoteric figure, Valerius Cato.Footnote 29 Given the metapoetic associations of words like ‘arid’ and ‘dry’, then, C. 23 could be implicit literary polemic between peers; Furius’ poetry lacks juice or wit.Footnote 30 In yet another reading, the poem’s point lies in its humorous redeployment of ethical language: Furius is an extreme avatar of old-fashioned, rustic virtue, or a parodic deformation of the Stoic sapiens.Footnote 31 All these readings usefully illuminate aspects of the poem, but the poem’s basic scenario — a man begging for a loan — has tended to fade from view. The final lines reveal a specific financial situation. Catullus transforms a parodic consolation on the blessings of paupertas into the stern judgment of a friend-turned-creditor, brutally assessing a debtor for his lack of assets.
Romans were well aware of the dangers of lending money between friends. ‘Whenever I’ve loaned anyone a talent’, says a comic senex in Plautus’ Trinummus, ‘I’ve used it to buy an enemy and sell a friend’.Footnote 32 Nonetheless, lending and borrowing money was a frequent occurrence among the Roman elite. Our sources distinguish between the mutuum, the loan without interest extended between amici, and the faenus, the loan with interest extended by professional moneylenders.Footnote 33 Shatzman lists the names of 25 men of senatorial rank known through literary evidence in the first century b.c.e. to have lent money, but there were probably many more, since lending is presented in our sources as an obligation owed to friends or a regular way to expand influence, not as an act that demonstrates unusual wealth or generosity.Footnote 34 While amicitia routinely had economic aspects, Philip Kay has interpreted the predominance of peer-to-peer lending in the late Republic as another potential index of financial crisis. Bankers (argentarii) appear regularly in literary and epigraphic texts of the second and early first centuries b.c.e., but are mentioned surprisingly rarely in the correspondence of Cicero.Footnote 35 Rather than viewing this absence as a sign of social decorum — the elite would rather turn to each other in times of need than to professional moneylenders of lower status — Kay argues that it reflects a decline in the activity of deposit banks in the late Republic.Footnote 36 When credit was tight or impossible to find, Romans in the era of Cicero and Catullus were turning more and more to each other, relying on their peers to rescue them from rising amounts of debt.
The circumstances under which one person lent to another could serve as a public measure of a close relationship. To be sure, financial assistance was assumed as part of amicitia; in 58, when Terentia was considering selling property to aid Cicero in exile, he dissuaded her, promising that ‘we won’t lack cash, if our friends remain true to their duty’.Footnote 37 The intimacy of economic relations could also be incriminating. In Appian’s description of the Sullan proscriptions, he says that accusations were made on the basis of ‘hospitality, friendship, and loans, whether giving or receiving’.Footnote 38 Cicero describes the closeness of Clodia and Caelius in the Pro Caelio partly by drawing attention to the loan she made him, with no conditions — a ‘supreme sign of a quite exceptional affection’, he says.Footnote 39 By contrast, if a lender contracted a debt with a stranger in Rome, it naturally gave rise to a need to investigate the debtor as thoroughly as possible, in order to assess the credit risk. In 45, Caesar’s scriba Faberius owed a substantial amount to Cicero. As payment, Faberius seems to have proposed to transfer to Cicero the debt owed to him by a certain unknown Caelius, through the process known as delegatio. Footnote 40 Before acquiring the debt, Cicero asked Atticus to find out as much as he could about the debtor. ‘Please see about this Caelius, so there’s no gap (lacuna) in repayment’.Footnote 41 Then, spurring Atticus on in a separate letter: ‘I must know the man’s nature (natura), not merely his means’.Footnote 42 In the end, Atticus advised against the deal, in part to avoid splitting up the debt, and in part because of what he discovered about the debtor.Footnote 43
Once we read the final lines of Catullus’ C. 23, then, they retrospectively transform the rest of the text from the parodic sermon of a cod-philosopher into a blunt, invasive assessment of a debtor’s ability to repay, as seen through the cold eye of a lender. Furius has no property. He has no arca (1), literally a ‘cashbox’, but a word bandied about in Cicero’s letters to describe a person’s cash resources.Footnote 44 He does have a father, to whom Furius should presumably have turned first for financial support, and yet the mention of a stepmother hints darkly at an estrangement of the usual relationship; and, in any case, his parents are poor too (note omnes in line 7). When the speaker begins cataloguing the excreta that Furius lacks (sweat, saliva, mucus, faeces), Sharland suggests that Catullus is adopting the pose of a doctor, but here too he could be a lender.Footnote 45 ‘I must know the man’s nature’, said Cicero before acquiring the debt of Caelius. ‘How carefully we enquire into the property and life of a debtor before we draw up accounts’, says Seneca.Footnote 46 That need to penetrate to the natura of a debtor is depicted with surreal exaggeration in C. 23: the poet examines Furius’ deepest cavities before eventually turning him down for the loan. Then, finally, the request. On one view, asking for 100,000 sesterces is a surprise — a comically large amount of money after Catullus has described a man who lacks even faeces and saliva, let alone cash or property. On another view, it is a perfectly plausible amount for a Roman to lend to another man to save him in a crisis, and a jolt away from the poem’s invective fantasia back to the real world of peer-to-peer lending.Footnote 47
The poet concludes his mock-sermon by telling Furius not to think his advantages ‘of little worth’ (nec putare parvi, 25), and to quit asking for money ‘as you are accustomed’ to do (quae soles, 26). The phrasing returns us briefly to the scene of valuation in the opening poem of the libellus, in which the dedicatee Cornelius Nepos was similarly ‘accustomed to think my nothings worth something’ (namque tu solebas/meas esse aliquid putare nugas, 1.3–4). The world of gift-exchange is never entirely divorced from economic considerations — puto means ‘to estimate’ or ‘assess’ as well as ‘to think’Footnote 48 — but the poet’s allusion to C. 1 in C. 23 nonetheless highlights a shift from an atmosphere of friendship and gift-giving in the opening poem to the hierarchical relationship of creditor and debtor in this one. We could say that the poet now wields a power over his addressee like that of lender to borrower: once Catullus inscribes Furius into his book, he controls the terms of representation and can alter them at will.
At the same time, the ambiguities that result from a reading of Catullus–Furius relationship in the libellus parallel the ambiguities that resulted from the economisation of amicitia in the late Republic. The Romans knew that to borrow money was to put someone over them: ‘debt is bitter slavery to a free-born man’, according to a sententia of Publilius Syrus.Footnote 49 In order to ease that discomfort, then, economic exchanges between peers tended to be veiled in the language of duty, favour and gift.Footnote 50 In poem 11, Furius was a comes, and Catullus is asking him (however ironically) for a favour; in poem 16, Furius seems part of a circle of literary exchange, and Catullus brands him a cinaedus for misinterpreting the kiss poems; in poem 21 he is stained by association with Aurelius, also poor and under invective attack. Catullus and Furius ‘clearly had a somewhat ambiguous relationship’, writes Ferguson.Footnote 51 But are creditors friends? Are debtors? The gaps that open up in the relationship between characters in the poetry book replicate gaps that must have emerged in a social environment in which friendship has been financialised, and the nature of a relationship could shift with each transaction. There is another layer of complexity, too: if Furius is mocked for having no cash or ‘spider’ (araneus, 23.2) or fireplace, that line’s closest analogue is in C. 13, when Catullus warns the guests he has invited to dinner that his ‘little purse is full of cobwebs’ (plenus sacculus est aranearum, 13.8). Whether or not C. 23 was circulated independently, any reader of the libellus will surely remember the poet’s persona in C. 13 as part of this crowd of economic adulescentes living beyond their means. The intratext reframes C. 23. When we read the poem on its own, we see the poet attacking a peer drowning in economic problems, apparently from a place of financial safety. But the recollection of the poet’s own empty purse in C. 13 is a reminder that Furius’ misery is part of a broader portrait in the Carmina of a landscape shaped by debt. Does the Catullus of C. 23 even have 100,000 sesterces? Or is he merely impersonating those who do? It is impossible to answer these questions as a matter of biographical reality, but the poems generate an uncertainty that resonates with a culture of reckless borrowing and circulating debt.
There is another detail in C. 23 which has not attracted much attention from previous commentators. At the very centre of the poem, even as the poet pretends to console Furius, he raises the spectre of social unrest (8–11):
Scholars have not unreasonably treated these lines as stock moralising: when you own very little, you have no fear of it becoming the target of others’ ill designs. Yet surely it is significant, at the heart of a poem addressed to a young man under patria potestas (5), that Catullus invokes the shadow of moral and social chaos, even under the cover of the negative non. Catiline’s alleged plan to incinerate parts of Rome was a signature part of his revolt, making fire a persistent trope in later accounts.Footnote 52 Cicero alleges that the power-hungry bankrupts following Catiline planned to seize control ‘amid the ashes of Rome and the blood of citizens’.Footnote 53 ‘Poison plots’ (dolos veneni) is an equally evocative phrase: as we have seen, Cicero alleged that the stylish young men radicalised by Catiline’s calls for debt cancellation learned to ‘scatter poisons’ (spargere venena), and accounts of the conspiracy allege a network of secret plots infiltrating various levels of society.Footnote 54 Memories of these events lingered in Romans’ minds: Cicero laboured for twenty years to keep them fresh. The fleeting recollection of social disorder at the heart of this poem hints at real desperation. Catullus imagines Furius begging for a loan while his creditor mockingly counts his beads of sweat. We are surely meant to laugh. But how many steps is Furius from Catilinarian furor, from patience at its end, from the desire to burn it all down?Footnote 55 The distance from comic poverty to debt-fuelled insurrection is not, perhaps, all that great. If witnesses of recent history had learned anything, it was that poverty could become powder-keg revolt at the turn of a dime, or an as.
II Snapshots from a world of debt: C. 103 and 41
This section focuses on two epigrams whose very brevity has given rise to a variety of interpretations. In C. 103 and C. 41, the poet is demanding a sum of money be returned. It is impossible to pinpoint the nature of the economic transaction with certainty, but given the ubiquity of peer-to-peer lending in Catullus’ era, it is highly likely that the person demanding money back is doing so as the result of a loan, and I assume (as Wiseman also does) that both poems describe loans gone wrong.Footnote 56 In both poems, Catullus alludes to characters from Roman comedy: the sleazy pimp (leno), the wily courtesan (meretrix), the besotted, broke young man (adulescens). I argue that the generic shift reflects a larger connection in the Roman mind. Having forsaken their fides as borrowers, the indebted also cede their place in respectable society, and thus become depicted as comic characters — stereotypes below the dignity of realistic representation.Footnote 57 ‘There is nothing harder to endure in hapless poverty than that it makes people ridiculous’, says Juvenal, a line that likely has origins itself in Roman comedy.Footnote 58 In Catullus’ Carmina, debt makes people comic, and that shift into a comic register activates a complex set of cultural associations about insolvency and social death.
C. 103 is a brief attack on a man named Silo:
The poem, structured around alternative scenarios, has generated opposing interpretations in scholarship. On one view, the poem is simple: Silo is a pimp. Catullus is unhappy with an erotic transaction, and he wants his money back.Footnote 59 But a poem in which Catullus calls a pimp a pimp lacks epigrammatic point;Footnote 60 and Silo is a well-known cognomen from a prominent family, making him an unlikely candidate to be an actual pimp.Footnote 61 Those that reject the literal reading argue that Catullus is demanding money back from someone within his circle of peers, and brands him a leno as an insult (note the word’s emphatic placement in the opening of the second pentameter). The repeated phrase saevus et indomitus (‘vicious and wild’) has also garnered opposing interpretations. De Grummond notes that the adjectives are used in extant texts to describe wild animals, and so Catullus is ‘admonishing Silo either to return the money he owes or else to stop acting like a pander and an inhuman beast’.Footnote 62 The point of the contrastive idem is that a pimp is supposed to wheedle his way into a customer’s confidence, and yet Silo is a brute; Skinner sees ironic wordplay in line 4 between leno and lenis (‘gentle’).Footnote 63 Gnilka, by contrast, argues that the words saevus et indomitus could connote something less derogatory for a Roman audience: an uncompromising toughness, ‘fierce and unbending’. As he notes, the rhetor Agamemnon in the Satyricon (5.20) urges his charges to imitate the ‘lofty words of indomitus Cicero’, and Caesar is acer et indomitus in Lucan (1.146).Footnote 64 In the logic of the poem as interpreted by Gnilka, Silo wants to be seen as saevus et indomitus. The poet tells him either to be strict and unbending and thus honour his financial commitment; or to drop the charade, and stop acting like a pimp (that is, hoarding other people’s money).
Instead of choosing whether Silo is a pimp or a peer, however, I would suggest that both views are enabled by the text, and make their presence felt progressively as the epigram unfolds. In the first couplet, when the reader sees the cognomen Silo and the demand to return money, we seem to be in the milieu of aristocratic finance. Saevus et indomitus is the imperious attitude that Silo affects, but it is incongruous with the fact that he is in debt; Catullus tells him that he can affect this attitude as much as he wants, so long as he repays the money. In the second couplet, when he either cannot or will not repay the debt, he is branded a pimp, and we have descended to the world of comic stereotype. Si nummi delectant (‘if you’re addicted to cash’) is clearly redolent of the stereotypical leno in Roman comedy, notorious for swindling money from others; in one extended passage from Plautus, the leno is likened to a banker, who oppresses others with bad deals.Footnote 65 By the end of the poem, even the cognomen (‘snub-nose’) has a comic ring. In sum, having lost his financial fides, Silo descends from noble stock to comic lowlife. The epigram’s curious double vision — is this the snapshot of an aristocratic transaction, or a scene from a dramatic plot? — reflects a key aspect of Catullus’ economic imagination: his tendency to render indebtedness in comic terms. Unable or unwilling to repay his debt, the poet’s invective target is stranded in an underworld beneath respectability.
That same double vision is evident in C.41, a blend of comedy, satire and invective:
Many commentators have assumed that Ameana has demanded money from Catullus in exchange for sex, though the poem never says that.Footnote 67 Rather, just as Silo slides from peer to pimp in C. 101, in C. 43 Ameana is insultingly cast in comic terms as a result of financial problems. She is the ‘girlfriend’ (amica) of the ‘bankrupt from Formiae’ (decoctor Formianus, 4), which suggests a quintessential literary trope: the young man in love with the meretrix, who wastes his patrimony due to his obsession with a courtesan’s charms. The demand for money (poposcit, 2) fits the fundamentally acquisitive nature of the meretrix in Roman comedy; ‘as soon as you have accepted something, pretty soon you prepare to ask for something else’, laments an adulescens in the Asinaria. Footnote 68 The adulescens whose passion for his beloved has led his family to bankruptcy is an equally familiar type. So, a senex in the Trinummus laments that an enamoured son has ‘blasted through’ (confregit, 108) his father’s wealth, and there is fear in the Heautontimoroumenos that another son will ‘force his father into poverty’ (ad inopiam redigat patrem, 929). The fact that Ameana is ugly is more reminiscent of satire and invective, and Skinner may be right to infer that Catullus is hinting at the trope of the sexually rapacious older woman.Footnote 69 If she were no longer really a ‘girl’, that would lend a stinging edge to the incessant repetition of puella in the poem (1, 3, 5, 7). Yet the final line returns us to comedy. The aes imaginosum could be a coin (a ‘bronze stamped with an image’);Footnote 70 but it naturally also suggests the mirror, and comedy, by a widespread ancient conceit, was the ‘mirror of life’, the genre to which one looks to see life as it is (qualis sit, 8).Footnote 71
Members of Catullus’ contemporary world stand behind comic masks in C. 41. ‘The bankrupt from Formiae’ is generally identified with a contemporary figure — Mamurra — who is pilloried throughout the Carmina for his financial extravagance and overspending. Puella defututa appears to echo the poet’s label for Mamurra at C. 29.13 (diffututa mentula), making Ameana a match, or even a double, of Catullus’ bête noire.Footnote 72 We see Mamurra elsewhere in the Carmina as an epitome of a culture of financial waste, whose overspending obscures the thinly veiled reality of an empty purse. He fleeces the provinces for what they have in C. 29, yet in C. 114 and 115 is still short of cash, as a result (says Catullus) of gross mismanagement of his estates.Footnote 73 Against this backdrop, I suggest, any contemporary of Catullus would have understood the scene in C. 41 as another snapshot from the world of aristocratic finance. Ameana demands 10,000 sesterces not as sexual payment but as a loan, whether for herself or as a go-between for Mamurra. Contemporary texts offer ample parallels for women’s participation in the economic world of the late Republic. Cicero shows us Clodia’s loan to Caelius in the Pro Caelio and his own borrowing from the wealthy Caerellia in the letters, while Sallust gloomily depicts Sempronia’s financial faithlessness (she ‘had forsaken her credit, repudiated her loans’) and the nameless crowd of women drawn to the Catilinarian conspiracy because they had ‘inflated massive debt’.Footnote 74 Catiline himself, at least according to Sallust, reassured Q. Catulus in a letter that he was in fact able to pay off debts from his own funds, and that his wife Orestilla and her daughter were also on hand to pay off others’ debts which were contracted for his benefit.Footnote 75 Just as in C. 103, the financial activities of Ameana are scurrilously miscast in comic terms as the actions of the ambitious meretrix. As in C. 23, the poet’s invective voice of C. 41 is also the voice of the potential lender, incredulous at the suggestion that he loan money to the girlfriend of a notorious bankrupt — a blatant credit risk.
Catullus’ shift into comic register in these two poems unites categories of people related in the Roman cultural imaginary. Comedy’s stock characters fell outside the realms of social respectability, either because they were foreign or enslaved, or because they suffered from the legal stigma of infamia due to their profession (prostitutes, pimps). The actors on the Plautine stage were in all probability a mix of free and slave, and free people later suffered infamia as a result of having performed.Footnote 76 All these figures suffered a sort of social death. That condition put them in a strange alliance with bankrupts, who were also subject to infamia. Footnote 77 Even more literally, a long-standing cultural belief associated a Roman’s loss of financial fides with his death: a law of the XII Tables was said to have allowed the body of a bankrupt man to be chopped apart by multiple creditors (at least, according to a discussion in Gellius’ Attic Nights), and Cicero describes the man who has to witness the sale of all his assets as ‘not only expunged from the crowd of the living, but, if it somehow possible, relegated to a state even below the dead’.Footnote 78 That situation was ameliorated only in the 40s by Caesar’s Lex Iulia de bonis cedendis, often regarded as the first bankruptcy law, which seems to have allowed debtors to declare insolvency before a magistrate. Through this process, they could retain enough property for survival and avoid the stain of infamia.Footnote 79 But that law would arrive after Catullus’ lifetime, and so comic allusions in his invective poems still activate a current set of associations in the Roman mind about debt, the loss of fides, and social death.
As I have emphasised throughout this article, though, Catullus is not merely weaponising his poetry to punish the indebted: he is painting a picture of an era in which the poles of waste and financial want have come to constitute the essence of social and romantic relationships, and in which he too has become immersed. In the last section, then, we turn to a famous poem in which his own romantic decisions seem to reflect the financial recklessness of his era’s biggest spenders.
III Love, profit and loss: C. 5
Twentieth-century criticism saw a shift in readings of the ‘kiss-counting’ of C. 5, moving from an intense attention to the realia of calculation and business to a stance in which the numbers’ imprecision epitomises the values of the lovers’ world and constitutes a defence against the stolid realities of quantification and material gain. In the 1940s and 50s, a controversy emerged over which ancient method of counting the poem’s final lines presumed. Levy argued that the speaker was imagining moving the calculi up and down on a Roman abacus, then physically shaking the abacus at the end of the poem to confuse the count. Pack, in response, assembled a fascinating set of evidence for Romans counting on their fingers. He conjectured a choreography of hand-movements for lines 7–11 to signify the accumulation of hundreds and thousands, with the word conturbare expressed by a ‘random wiggling of the fingers’, and the gestus impudicus given to avert invidia at the end.Footnote 80 Grimm showed that the kiss-counting was part of a pattern of economic imagery unifying the poem.Footnote 81 The gossip of the old men is subject to evaluation (aestimemus) and reckoned at a single as (3); redire (4) in financial parlance can mean ‘to come in as revenue’ and fecerimus (10) has the sense ‘to make money’.Footnote 82 I would add that there are verbal plays in other Latin texts on lucrum (‘profit’) and words derived from lux (‘light’), and so Catullus’ invocation of ‘short light’ (brevis lux) in line 5 may evoke the diminutive lucellum, a word he uses elsewhere in the Carmina to mean ‘small profit’.Footnote 83 The lovers regard their time together as fleeting gain in a world of loss; they build, as Grimm puts it, a ‘vast inventory of “kiss assets’’’.Footnote 84 Varro even seems to have alluded to the first line of Catullus’ poem in a Menippean Satire subtitled On Coins (περὶ νομισμάτων) — a tantalising connection, although too much is lost to deduce more.Footnote 85
After this mid-century interest in economics in the poem, however, criticism began to turn against it. In an influential article, Charles Segal insisted that, while the language of business might be detected in C. 5, its use was ironic, since the rational arts of calculation and control are fundamentally opposed to the lovers’ arts of romance and passion. The lovers employ ‘the language of the business world and practical affairs’, wrote Segal, ‘only to negate that world in the passionate insouciance of their own enclosed realm … The finite, serving as the vehicle for the infinite, is shattered as it performs its office’.Footnote 86 Rather than unify the world of love and money, the pretence of calculation serves to divide them. A series of subsequent readings, focusing upon the reference to invidia at 5.12 and the evil eye (fascinatio) at 7.12, argue not for the financial but for the magical connotations of counting in the poem. Dickie postulates an Egyptian or Babylonian origin for the idea that knowing a precise number might enable others to curse them.Footnote 87 Tesoriero argues that the poem itself constitutes a sort of fascinum to defend the lovers from the evil eye.Footnote 88 Schwindt, blending the magical line of criticism with Segal’s approach, sees the magic of numbers in Catullus as itself a defence against the external world of politics and business, a charm that preserves the poems and the lovers’ discourse as ‘closed entities sui iuris’.Footnote 89 Segal and scholars who adopt his approach argue that the kiss-counting represents the lover’s escape from rational calculation. I argue instead that it dramatises an inability to escape.
Key to both the financial and the magical readings of the poem has been the word conturbabimus (11): the lovers must ‘confuse the count’ to hide the total from the envious. As has long been recognised, since at least the time of Cicero the verb conturbo, when used in an intransitive sense, means ‘to go bankrupt’. Cicero is outraged, for example, that a Greek named Apollonius would go bankrupt (conturbat) and evade his creditors, and thereby act like Roman equites. Footnote 90 Yet this usage seems to derive from the transitive use of the verb, to ‘confuse the accounts’, which had the additional sense of deliberately hiding assets to mislead creditors.Footnote 91 The best example is in two letters of Cicero in which he has rendered the phrase rationes conturbare in Greek: from the confused and stammering answers of the freedman Philotimus, Cicero suspects that this financial agent has ‘confused the accounts’ (πεφυρακέναι τὰς ψήφους) relating to the sale of Milo’s property after his prosecution, and embezzled part of the funds for himself.Footnote 92 The overtones of desperation and duplicity are relevant to Catullus’ final call to Lesbia to confuse the count of their kisses. Given the immanent language of death and collapse in the poem, the image is not of lovers hiding their felicity at the peak of their happiness, but of thieves hiding their assets from creditors, anticipating ruin. In an exchange of letters dated to 54, Caesar joked with Cicero that even he was poor; ‘in response’, Cicero tells his brother Quintus, ‘I replied that he shouldn’t be going bankrupt relying on my cashbox’.Footnote 93 Surveillance of other men’s liquidity was the norm in a world in which the elite habitually acted as each other’s financiers.
It is not only the reference to bankruptcy that links Catullus 5 to the contemporary economic milieu. In his study of Catullus’ poems about Caesar and Mamurra, David Konstan observed a pervasive association between hyperphallic sexual desire and an insatiable desire for material gain.Footnote 94 Numbers fail in quantifying the acquisitions of these greedy men. ‘How can he fail to equal the riches of Croesus?’, asks Catullus in poem 115, after having begun to enumerate Mamurra’s property holdings. Has Caesar conquered Britain, he taunts in C. 29, just so this lieutenant can ‘eat through two or three hundred thousand sesterces?’Footnote 95 It would be easy to imagine Caesar in opposition to Catullus, as an embodiment of aggressive masculinity and imperial drive against which Catullus articulates his transgressive softness and vulnerability. But there is clearly something of the same acquisitive drive, the same union of sex and material gain, in lines 7–11 of poem 5. ‘Give me (da) a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then again another thousand’, he writes. Give me, he implores: Catullus’ libidinal drive for kisses is cast as the accumulation of objects that can be counted and exposed to the sight of the envious. His erotic desire is expressed in the same imagery of infinite acquisition that he associates with his political enemies. Numbers collapse in the face of limitless gain.Footnote 96 If we feel that the totals have exceeded rational calculation, this is not, as Segal and Schwindt argue, because Catullus is constructing an enclosed world of love impervious to rational control. It is because the era’s ubiquitous concern over spiralling, barely quantifiable debt has permeated even the language of love. Financial fears reach even here.
Indeed, if we are used to imagining Caesar and Catullus as opposites to one another, it is unnerving how similar how Catullus seems to Caesar in C. 5, how easily we can read the Catullan persona in C. 5 as Caesar’s double. If we swap kisses for cash, captives, triumphs, or provinces, we see the same manic urgency, the same drive towards gain, and the same suspicion of those who, driven by resentment, will try to take what you have claimed as your own. Seen in this light, the senes severiores look less like the garrulous old men of comedy than the conservative forces of the senate. Their rumours are not prudish gossip but attempts to undermine a singular figure among them. The idea that we will live for one brief day resembles the rhetoric of celeritas in the Caesarian commentarii, the speed that was central to the imperator’s public image and enabled him to best his opponents. The threat posed by invidia is also one dramatised in the commentarii; Caesar regularly assumes that opposition to his plans was driven by envy at his achievements and resentment at his success. Then, of course, there is the climactic desire to ‘confuse the count’, the reckless wish to destroy order in the heat of frantic action. Although both the event and the anecdote stem from a period after Catullus’ death, it is hard not to recall Pompey’s claim that Caesar, facing bankruptcy on the eve of the civil war, wished to do something very similar, to ‘throw everything into confusion (turbare) and chaos, because he didn’t have the funds to complete what he had started’.Footnote 97
My aim is not to show that poem 5 is somehow secretly about Caesar, but to note the ease with which the poem, ostensibly about the private world of Catullus and Lesbia, slips into the currents of contemporary literature and politics in the 50s b.c.e. It depicts grasping overreach, limited resources hoarded and squandered, and a libidinal desire which cannot be sated. It is true that kisses are not really like a commodity that can be traded or acquired. They are reciprocal, ephemeral, and multiform. Is it a kiss if only I am kissing? If I kiss on the hand or the cheek? What length of kiss counts as a kiss? Are there half-kisses? But the conceptual mismatch is what gives the poem its critical edge, as an embittered portrait of a world infiltrated by financial need. The poet is so enveloped in a discourse of acquisition and loss that he tries to count kisses on an abacus. In an idea that finds parallels in everything from Persuasion to House of Mirth to contemporary ‘recession pop’, bankruptcy and imminent financial ruin lend a sense of urgency to the erotic plot. The call to live and love is intensified by the notion that not just time, but money, is slipping through our fingers — if, that is, the generation before us has not spent it all already.
IV Conclusion: gift-exchange or debt?
The Catullan libellus begins with the dedication of the book as a gift, and scholars have generally envisioned gift-exchange as the dominant commercial paradigm in the poems. A particularly explicit formulation of this idea is found in Sarah Culpepper Stroup’s Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons: The Generation of the Text.Footnote 98 The ‘Society of Patrons’ in her title refers not to the hierarchical relationship of patron to client, but to a set of Romans she calls the ‘patronal class’, who engage in mutual exchanges of poetry and other texts as a means of creating and strengthening social bonds. Catullus, Cicero and their literary peers (including Caesar, Furius Bibaculus and others) make up, in her words, a ‘group of approximate social equals who participated, to varying degrees, in a form of indubitably “horizontal” — isonomic — sociotextual reciprocity’.Footnote 99 Stroup’s argument supposes a secure baseline of wealth for all these men; indeed, the very mutuality of their gifts isolates them from the realities of the economic world. ‘When an object or an office is identified as a munus’, she writes, ‘it is transferred from the sphere of monetary transaction and into a sphere of perpetual and non-monetary exchange and obligation’.Footnote 100 Catullus’ assertion in C. 12 that he is unmoved by the value (aestimatio) of the stolen napkin comes to represent an entire worldview: his charmed circle has its own system of values, which exists in counterpoint to the base realities of economics around him.Footnote 101 Of course, gifts and loans both impose obligations, so they cannot be too sharply differentiated, and loans between peers arose in a Roman context of amicitia in which mutual beneficia were expected. Nonetheless, an emphasis on ‘isonomy’ obscures the hierarchical realities of debt for many of the men in Catullus’ circle. Cicero and Caesar, to take one example, may have been literary peers but they were not financial ones, and when Cicero accepted a loan of 800,000 sesterces from Caesar in May 51, his letters expose great anxiousness that it be repaid quickly.Footnote 102 In December 50, Cicero’s relationship with Caesar — his effort to relate to him as an equal — is still troubled by the fear that Caesar may demand repayment at any time.Footnote 103 Debt creates hierarchy, which was no doubt why Caesar was eager to extend credit in the first place.
Should we, then, imagine a circle of equals? If we emphasise gift-exchange as the primary model for understanding Catullus and his circle, we risk acceding to the era’s own mystification of the economic underpinnings of social relationships. What would happen if we embraced debt and loans as a paradigm for social relationships in the Carmina? As a way of understanding Catullus’ investment in his futures with Lesbia?Footnote 104 As a way of conceptualising the economy of character, the verses expended upon different figures in his world?Footnote 105 As a web of connections that exists in tandem and tension with the relationships of friends, lovers and readers? We may end up with a corpus which is emptied of some of its neoteric bonhomie, but expressive nonetheless of the fault-lines in late Republican amicitia, and the weight of financial and political crisis. Catullus and his circle craft lives of sophistication and style amid the ashes of revolt. Their urbanitas is not a flight from politics, but a creative attempt to turn the pressures of indebtedness into art. ‘Confuse the count’, he tells Lesbia in C. 5. Amid a landscape of desperate, incessant calculation, she must have known how hard a task that was.
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