The obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer (c.2 and 3) is well known. It goes back in the modern era to Poliziano, who understood Lesbia's pet sparrow as an allegory for the poet's male member.Footnote ¹ His modesty kept him from saying so outright, but he cited the following lines of Martial that left no doubt as to what he meant:

These words are addressed to one Dindymus at a party on the Saturnalia, whom Martial compared a little earlier to Nero's notorious male lover Pythagoras (line 10). Poliziano is therefore justified in his suspicion:

In other words, Catullus’ passer was interpreted by Martial as a reference to the poet's penis. The heading of this entry in the Miscellanea, moreover, implies that Catullus himself intended this reference: Quo intellectu Catullianus passer accipiendus, locusque etiam apud Martialem indicatus (‘In what sense the Catullan sparrow is to be understood, and also a passage in Martial cited [sc. in support of this interpretation]’). For Poliziano, then, the obscene sense of Catullus’ passer is not just Martial's dirty mind at work;Footnote ³ it is the sense in which Catullus’ passer is, in fact, to be understood.

Was Poliziano right? I think so. I am convinced partly by Giuseppe Giangrande, who brought this interpretation back to life in contemporary classical scholarship,Footnote ⁴ but mostly by Richard W. Hooper, who argued forcefully for it,Footnote ⁵ and by Richard F. Thomas, who brought in supporting details from Hellenistic epigram and Roman comedy.Footnote ⁶ I will not review all of their arguments here, but I will briefly add an observation of my own, which I have not seen elsewhere.Footnote ⁷

In another (undoubtedly obscene) poem of Catullus, we are told that the notorious pair, Furius and Aurelius, read his kissing-poem addressed to Lesbia (c.5) and somehow concluded from it that he was male…marem (‘scarcely a man’, c.16.13).Footnote ⁸ This accusation is consistent with line 4, where we are told of their claim that the poet is parum pudicum (‘not pure enough’). Furius and Aurelius, then, have obviously interpreted something in Catullus’ poetry to suggest that he engaged in an unmanly and degrading sexual act. It is telling that Catullus does not even try to refute their interpretation. If he disagreed with it, he could have just said that his poetry does not mean what they claim it does. Instead, he replies that there is no need for his verses to be chaste (line 6) – thus conceding the point that they are not. Catullus defends himself only by asserting that his poetry is at odds with his true character: he himself is castum (‘chaste’, line 5). This, of course, amounts to an admission that Furius and Aurelius were right to detect in his poetry a reference to his involvement in a disgusting sex act; they were wrong only in assuming that Catullus was serious.

The claim of Furius and Aurelius cannot have been based solely on the poems to Juventius (esp. c.48). The words milia multa basiorum (‘many thousand kisses’, c.16.12) specifically point back to milia multa (sc. basiorum) in Catullus 5.10. Moreover, I know of no evidence that homosexual relations were regarded as unmanly or degrading, as long as one took the active role. It was cinaedi and pathici (both words refer to men who take the passive role in anal intercourse) who came in for all the abuse. So much is clear from c.16 itself: Catullus asserts that he is a real man and pure and chaste – in a poem where he threatens to violate two men in every imaginable orifice, treating them like the cinaedi and pathici that they are (the threat is in lines 1 and 14; the terms of abuse appear in line 2).

This means that their interpretation was based on Catullus’ famous kissing-poem, c.5. Furius and Aurelius apparently inferred that, as Thomas N. Winter puts it: ‘Anyone kissing a girl 3,300 times…must be incapable of anything else.’Footnote ⁹ In other words, they claimed that Catullus was impotent, and therefore unable to take the active role in sexual intercourse. Impotent men were commonly assumed to engage in shameful sexual acts.Footnote ¹⁰ Once Furius and Aurelius concluded that Catullus was impotent, their further conclusion would follow, like night after day, that he was ‘scarcely a man’, ‘not pure enough’, and not the ‘chaste’ man that he now claims to be.

But how could Furius and Aurelius make this argument stick? No normal person would read c.5 and take it as an admission of impotence rather than what it appears to be: a poem on the importance of living for right now, which for Catullus means that he and Lesbia should throw themselves into love with total abandon. That is what all the kissing is about. Not that Furius and Aurelius were necessarily normal. But still, why put forth an argument that was unlikely to convince anyone else? Yet Catullus found their reading of his poetry so plausible that he was forced to concede the point. Why would he have done so if their evidence was so flimsy?

One possibility, I would suggest, is that the evidence was not flimsy, but as firm as it could be: Catullus had announced to the world – with a nod and a wink, under the cover of the dead passer in c.3 – that he was impotent. After that, it would be easy for Furius and Aurelius to read impotence into c.5 in a believable way. Catullus could then be accused of engaging in unmanly relations with Lesbia. This presumably involved os impurum (‘impure mouth’ – the condition arising from performing oral sex on someone): Catullus implies in another poem that Lesbia enjoyed being serviced in this way (by her brother, naturally; c.79).Footnote ¹¹ Catullus’ admission of impotence would also, of course, cast his Juventius-poems in a whole new light: it would be hard, I imagine, to take the active role in homosexual intercourse without an erection. Juventius will have had to do all the work. But that is not Furius’ and Aurelius’ main concern at the moment. When they said that his verses were molliculi (‘soft little things’, c.16.4), they appear to have been thinking about the impotence that Catullus admitted first in c.3 and then confirmed in c.5.

I would therefore paraphrase Catullus 16 this way: ‘Furius and Aurelius, you read c.5 and assumed from it that I was impotent, and ended up having to satisfy Lesbia in an unmanly and degrading way; I cannot dispute your interpretation of my poetry (since I all but admitted as much to the world in c.3); but I am here to tell you that it was all a joke; I am far from impotent, and will prove it by violating you orally and anally.’Footnote ¹² This is only one possible reading, but it adds to the likelihood, established by many other arguments,Footnote ¹³ that Catullus meant, and his contemporary readers understood, c.3 to be a poem on the ‘death’ of his mentula (‘penis’). So much can be said, then, about the obscene interpretation of Catullus 3.

Almost as well known, if not as venerable, is Stephen E. Hinds’ interpretation of Ovid's psittacus-poem, which begins as follows:

It is easy enough to see that Amores 2.6 alludes to Catullus 3: in each of them, the poet mourns the death of his mistress’ pet bird. But Ovid helps us along with language that self-consciously draws attention to the fact that he is engaging with Catullus. As Hinds puts it: ‘Corinna's engaging psittacus is modelled on Lesbia's famous passer, or “sparrow”: and it is called an imitatrix ales by Ovid not just because, as a parrot, its role in nature is to mimic; but because its role in the Latin erotic tradition is to “imitate” that particular bird celebrated by Catullus.’Footnote ¹⁴

The purpose of this article is to ask whether it may be possible to bring these two interpretations together in some way. For if Ovid is consciously alluding to Catullus, and readers as early as the Late Republic read c.3 as a poem about impotence, then we might reasonably expect the psittacus-poem to refer at some point the obscene interpretation of the dead passer. Hooper tries desperately to find an Ovidian reference along these lines. He suggests that the origin of the psittacus ‘from the Eastern Indians’ (ab Indis…Eois) is an allusion to Catullus’ farewell poem to Lesbia, in which the poet imagines travelling ‘to the Indians on the edge of the world’ (ad extremos…Indos, c.11.2), ‘where the shore is beaten by the long resounding Eastern wave’ (Eoa | …unda, lines 3–4).Footnote ¹⁵ He also detects an ‘exaggerated and humorous contrast in sound between passer, deliciae and psittacus imitatrix’.Footnote ¹⁶ Then, in the last line of the article, he comes up with this joke:

A nice punchline to end the article, I suppose, but I wonder whether Hooper might not have missed a much more obvious joke. A little way into Amores 2.6, after Ovid has, like a praeco (‘herald’), summoned all pious birds to the funeral, he addresses the dead parrot:

Most modern readers, even if they understand this poem as an allusion to Catullus 3, will probably not have the obscene interpretation of the passer in mind. But if ancient readers took Catullus’ passer in the obscene sense and understood Ovid's psittacus as an imitation of it, then it is easy to see how this couplet may have elicited a chuckle or two. Hopefully it will not ruin the joke to look at some suggestive elements of Ovid's phrasing.

To begin with the hexameter: passer in the obscene sense, with a verb of giving, apparently means to have sex with someone. The line of Martial, quoted above, suggests this: he says that he will ‘give’ Dindymus ‘the Sparrow of Catullus’ (donabo tibi Passerem Catulli, 11.6.14–17). Julian Ward Jones Jr., believes that Martial is leading Dindymus on by suggesting that he will ‘give him the passer’, only to add Catulli at the end, so that the gift turns out to be merely a book of poetry: ‘Dindymus expects a mentula; he is promised metrica!’Footnote ¹⁸ Perhaps. But in order for the joke to work, the phrase passerem donare must have meant to penetrate sexually. The synonymous, cognate verb dare presumably meant the same thing. If Ovid's psittacus stands in for Catullus’ passer, then it is strange for him to ask the dead bird (if I may paraphrase): ‘What good does it do you to have pleased Corinna from the first time I gave you to her?’

Turning to the pentameter, we find that the phrase nempe iaces is also suggestive, as iaceo is Ovid's preferred verb when talking or joking about impotence. Two examples from the Amores will suffice. First a very clear one. In his well known impotence-poem, Ovid uses the verb no less than four times to describe his problem:

Although it is more oblique, I cannot resist adding the example of Ovid's famous Militat omnis amans-poem, where he notes (among many others) this parallel between the life of a soldier and the life of a lover:

I will not try to improve on J. C. McKeown's note on the obscene interpretation of this couplet, with ample parallels for resurgo meaning ‘to become erect again’ (though we might add consurgere in Ov. Am. 3.6.75), for iaceo meaning ‘to be impotent’, and for victus meaning ‘sexually exhausted’.Footnote ²⁰ Ovid's bird may have pleased Corinna from the first time he gave it to her, but now it lies limp and dead. Again, it is all innocent enough on the surface. But since Ovid deliberately sends us back to Catullus 3, it is hard not to see in these lines a joking reference to the obscene interpretation of his source.Footnote ²¹

Just to be clear: I do not mean to suggest that my reading of this couplet is the key to understanding Amores 2.6 as a whole, or even that it plays a particularly important role in the poem. For that matter, I do not believe that the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer-poems is absolutely essential to our appreciation of them. I have always thought of them as a kind of Rubin's Vase: different readers, or even the same reader at different times, can look at them and see different things – though I do think that their ambiguity was one of the reasons why Catullus thought highly enough of them to place them at the beginning of the poetic book that bore the name of Passer in antiquity.Footnote ²² As for Ovid, he was engaged with many other aspects of the literary tradition, some of which seem much more vital to the present poem. There was the seemingly omnipresent concern of all the Latin love elegists: how to take a theme from a short-format love poem (in this case, c.3) and expand it into a full-length elegy?Footnote ²³ Also, how to work in elements of the epicedion and native Roman funeral rites?Footnote ²⁴ Or, again, how to convert Tibullus’ famous Elysium for lovers into an Elysium for lovers’ pets?Footnote ²⁵ Any one of these concerns is closer to the heart of Ovid's program as a Latin love elegist.

What I think happened is this. As Ovid was sorting through these literary issues and trying to have some fun with them along the way, he remembered, as Martial would later do, that Catullus 3 admitted of an obscene interpretation. It was unlike Ovid to let anything like that pass without comment, and so he wrote the couplet in question using similarly ambiguous language – almost a throw-away line, but one that might make any reader who remembered the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer laugh knowingly along with him. It is almost like the passer-poems themselves: we can either choose to see Ovid's joke, or we can choose not to. However that may be, I would submit that, in the long-standing debate over the obscene interpretation of Catullus’ passer, Ovid may have something to add to the discussion.