Retreat from the Male: Catullus 62 and Sappho's Erotic Flowers

Abstract

Catullus described a full emotional circle in his short life from delight in unconstrained aesthetic sensuality free of socially-defined patterns (cc. 5, 6, 13 for example) to longing for a stable bond in the relationship of man to woman. He pictured such a bond as placed within the traditional Roman frame of marriage and home, but cast in a personal mold; he wanted to preserve his aesthetic and sensual response to a woman while combining it somehow with the stability and intimacy appropriate to friendship (amare and bene velle). Poems 72 and 87, for instance, directly express the ideal in acknowledging its absence from Catullus' relations with Lesbia. Catullus liked to feel that the possibility of complete union was what he offered Lesbia. Perhaps it was his inability to fashion a compelling synthesis of sexual intimacy and friendship with her that led him to write a series of poems exploring attempts, mainly failures, at full reciprocal love. The successful attempts are idyllic or mythic (Septimius and Acme, Peleus and Thetis, neither unambiguously positive). The failures come, in Catullus' portrayal, when union founders on the obstacle of the narcissistic personality, the man or woman unable to forfeit autonomy, desirous of holding others in thrall without being himself held. Catullus' highly developed sensitivity to narcissism must be a reaction to its prominence in the character of a certain kind of sexually attractive individual, the one who is alluring but uncapturable, the kind of woman, like Lesbia, with whom Catullus sought union. Catullus conveys the quality of narcissism in such a character in part through the image of the flower (appropriately, considering the source of the modern name for it).

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