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Catullus' Passer as Passer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Julian Ward Jones Jr
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Poem 2 of the Liber Catullianus – the first of the passer poems – was probably the poet's most famous piece. The poem presents a charming and fascinating picture of a Roman matron who is said by the poet to divert her mind from her passion by playing with her pet bird. Of this seemingly innocent picture a peculiar esoteric interpretation was offered in the time of the Italian Renaissance. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Florentine scholar Angelo Poliziano suggested that Catullus had woven an obscene allegory into his poem, and he supported his argument by reference to the sixth epigram of Martial's eleventh book. This epigram is a vulgar poem that ends with the words ‘passerem Catulli’. It will figure prominently in our discussion below. Poliziano only hinted at an indecent meaning. The Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss, in his Observations on Catullus published in 1684, makes the matter explicit. The Greeks, he alleges, often used the names of birds to refer to a man's penis, and similarly passer in poem is ambiguous and at one level represents the poet's penis. By this obscene interpretation, the basic allegory of the poem would be something like this. Lesbia has great familiarity with the poet's male member. She delights in playing with it and in this way seems to satisfy her erotic impulses. The poet by means of similar play would like to take similar satisfaction for himself. He cannot because masturbation gives him no pleasure. According to Voss, this allegory continues in poem 3, the famous dirge for the dead passer. Here, he declares, we should suppose that the poet wishes to represent himself as ‘confectum et exhaustum lucta Venerea et funerata… ea parte quae virum facit’ (‘worn out and exhausted by a physical exertion erotic and deadly in regard to that part which makes a person a man’).

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , October 1998 , pp. 188 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

1. Poliziano's interpretation appears as in his first collection (Centuria) of Miscellanea. A translation of the full Latin text as it is printed in the Opera of Poliziano (Lyon, 1536), Volume 1, 520Google Scholar , is as follows:

In what sense Catullus' sparrow must be received and a place also indicated in Martial.

That sparrow of Catullus, I think, conceals allegorically some more obscene sense, which I am unable to declare if I wish to preserve my modesty. Martial persuades me to believe this through that epigram, of which these are the last verses:

Da mihi basia, sed Catulliana:

Quae si tot fuerint, quot ille dixit,

Donabo tibi passerem Catulli.

For the poet would be excessively obtuse sexually [nimis… insubidus] (and this is wrong to believe) if he should say in the final analysis that he is going to give a sparrow to the boy after kisses and not rather, as I suspect, something else. What this is, because of the modesty of my pen, I leave to each person to conjecture from the natural salaciousness of the sparrow.

2. See Cajus Valerius Catullus et in eum Isaaci Vossii Observationes (London, 1684), 5–9Google Scholar .

3. ‘Symbolism in the Passer Poems’, Maia 26 (1974), 121–5Google Scholar .

4. ‘Catullus Lyrics on the Passer’, Museum Philologum Londinense 1 (1975–1976), 137–46Google Scholar .

5. AJP 101 (1980), 421–41Google Scholar .

6. ‘In Defence of Catullus' Dirty Sparrow’, G&R 32 (1985), 162–78Google Scholar .

7. A Commentary on Catullus (Oxford, 1887), 7Google Scholar . Ellis cites Pliny, , N.H. 11.103.250Google Scholar.

8. Catulli Veronensis Liber (Leipzig, 1885), Vol. 2, 75Google Scholar .

9. Sustained allegory is not a technique employed elsewhere by Catullus; therefore the burden of proof rests upon the individual who would behold it in poems 2 and 3.

10. On the blue thrush, or passer solitarius, see Fordyce, , Catullus: a Commentary (Oxford, 1961), 88–9Google Scholar .

11. Merrill, , Catullus (Cambridge, 1893), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

12. However, there comes to mind a gravestone from Paros now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The stone represents a standing female figure who ‘holds’ two doves. One dove is perched on her left hand; the other she ‘clasps’ to her breast with her right hand. The figure is described by Gisela Richter in the Bulletinof the Metropolitan Museum Vol. 22. no. 1 (01 1927), 101–5Google Scholar .

13. Catullus, the Poems (London, 1970), 92Google Scholar .

14. Ormsby, Robert J. and Myers, Reney (trans.), Catullus: the Complete Poems for American Readers (New York, 1970), 3Google Scholar .

15. ‘Illustrative Elisions in Catullus’, TAPA 93 (1962), 147Google Scholar . Cicero, in Thornton Wilder's Ides of March, reacting to the poetry of Catullus, writes: ‘The sparrow! We are told that it often perched in Clodia's bosom – a much-traveled thoroughfare, only occasionally available to birds.’

16. The Poems of Catullus: a Bilingual Edition (Berkeley, 1969), 51Google Scholar .

17. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore, 1982), 32–3Google Scholar .

18. Skelton's poem leaves us asking questions. Was the nun's pet really a sparrow? If so, what kind? If it was not a sparrow, what species of bird was it? Was Skelton inspired by Catullus' poems and was he responsible for the practice of translating passer in Catullus' poems as ‘sparrow’?

19. Hooper, of course, attempts to support his views by reference to this poem. See 168–70 of his study (above n. 6).

20. Above n. 5, 427.

21. On strouthos meaning phallus, see Henderson, Jeffrey, The Maculate Muse (New Haven, 1975), 129Google Scholar . On passer as translation of strouthos, see Festus, Sextus Pompeius, De Verborum Significatu, ed. Lindsay, W. M. (Leipzig, 1913), 411Google Scholar .

22. Association of bird and penis would in any case be easy for Martial since the winged phallus was a persistent motif of Greco-Roman art. On this motif see Genovese, above n. 3, 122.

23. On Passer as a title see Wheeler, A. E., Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (Berkeley, 1934), 19Google Scholar .

24. Kay, N. M., Martial Book XT: a Commentary (Oxford, 1985), 75Google Scholar rightly identifies ‘Catulli’ as an example of para prosdokian. We imagine the poet as reciting his poem and pausing for a suspenseful moment after ‘passerem’.

25. The statement of Jocelyn (above n. 5,423) that ‘the pretty boys of antiquity did not welcome anal penetration’ is at best a generalization. We take Dindymus to be a pathic eager for oral or anal sex. We should probably not imagine a ‘pretty boy’ since he is compared to Pythagoras, the freedman eunuch whom Nero married(Tac, . Ann. 15.37)Google Scholar. See Wiseman, T. P., Catullus and His World: a Reappraisal (Cambridge, 1985), 12–13Google Scholar.