28 Explōrātiō Sexta (VI) Adventure Six
Catullus, Poems The Dative Case The Ablative Case
Genitive, Dative, and Ablative Pronouns Introduction to Interrogative Pronouns
Mōns Palatīnus, Rōma Mēnsis Iūnius
Cn. Pompeiō C. Caeciliō Metellō Piō Scipiōne cōnsulibus
“D
Palatine Hill, Rome June, 55 BCE
ōnum tibi habeō, I’ve got a gift for you,” she announced. What is it?
“When you return from Rome, you never bring anything back home except memories and a notebook. I wanted to prevent you from thinking the past is just a hallucination or an occasional waking dream, so I brought you a coin from the city.”
It was a small piece, the size of a dime, made of bronze. The image on the front showed a head with two faces, one looking left and the other right, while on the back there was the prow of a ship. “The two-faced god is Janus or Ianus, the Roman god of transitions. This coin is called an as.”
How much is it worth?
“An as is one tenth of a denarius, and a denarius was the minimum daily wage of an unskilled worker in Rome. A few dollars, I’d say.”
No, I meant how much is it worth today.
“Today? Don’t ask questions like that. It’s a gift; it’s just an ordinary coin.”
So, she said: just an ordinary coin. But as soon as I rolled it through my fingers, we were suddenly, once again, in the ancient world…
Nox erat, sed lūx lūcēbat: It was night, but a light was shining. The full moon was peering through the windows of a dining room, overwhelming with its glow two oil lamps sputtering in the corner. Seven men and one woman were sprawled on a u-shaped arrangement of couches, nibbling the last olives from silver platters that had once been full. The men were visibly and audibly drunk, and the man at the head couch was holding forth for the others. Latinitas paraphrased his speech for me later – we were watching from the garden outside, taking care to go unobserved. He was expounding on the following rēs, or subject: how his wife should take care of his corpse, should he die suddenly, struck down by an assassin or the faithless goddess Fortune. He wanted to be embalmed in the style of the Egyptians, his mummy laid out in a chamber inside a specially-built pyramid. The pyramid should be at least 50 feet tall and made of precious Parian marble. The tomb was to have a secret entrance, for which only his wife had the key, and she was to visit every night at midnight, to make sure that all was in order, to bring an offering of cheese and mixed olives, and to drive away the witches that are especially active at such times. Each night, when her watch was over, she was to give his mummy a long kiss, lasting ten heartbeats – ‘and then you can have something more, if you want it’. With that remark all of his companions broke into uncontrollable laughter, which dragged out for minutes. As the laughter died down, and began to be replaced by low snores, he asked his wife – a dignified young woman, who sat in rigid silence through his whole speech – for a kiss, shoving his lips out through a greasy gray beard. His lips held there motionless, then softened into an open gape.
Drawing in air by the mouthful, he expelled it in loud, erratic snores, asleep and unconscious, as the moon continued to throw its pale light on his cold, hard skin.
His wife, Clodia Quadrantaria, rose to go to her bedroom. She woke up her maid and asked her to take out two poems that her sometime lover, the poet Gaius Valerius Catullus, had sent.
Clodia kept them hidden from her husband, the Roman general Metellus, but many of Catullus’ friends, as well as friends of his friends, had read them. They became still better known years later, when Catullus and Clodia were long dead and gone, and Catullus’ talent was reaffirmed by later poets and readers who found the passion and impact of his poetry undeniable. Clodia’s maid (who, like her mistress, was literate) read out loud for her, and Latinitas translated for me. You can probably figure out some of the Latin now:
Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let’s assign all of the rumoring
of mean old men the value of one as.
Vīvāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amēmus, rūmōrēsque senum sevēriōrum omnēs ūnīus aestimēmus assis!
Suns are able to set and rise again; for us, light is short, and once it sets
we’re forced to sleep one never-ending night.
Sōlēs occidere et redīre possunt:
nōbīs cum semel occidit brevis lūx, nox est perpetua ūna dormienda.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred.
Dā mī bāsia mīlle, deinde centum, dein mīlle altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mīlle, deinde centum.
Then, once we’ve made it several thousands,
we’ll mix those thousands up to keep ourselves from knowing, and to keep some no-good man from bearing us a grudge, once he finds out how many were our kisses.
Dein, cum mīlia multa fēcerimus, conturbābimus illa, nē sciāmus, aut nē quis malus invidēre possit, cum tantum sciat esse bāsiōrum.
She held still for a minute; then, perhaps because the memory was too warm and she preferred, for now, the cold discipline of dolor, of pain, she asked that a different poem be read. It began Miser Catulle, and clearly it upset her. When the maid reached the end of it, Clodia repressed a sob, and buried her face deep in her pillow.
What did that one say? I asked.
“Come this way. You will understand the Latin better after a little more study.” Latinitas gestured me away from the house, towards a clearing behind the garden that overlooked the river Tiber. She hung an oil lamp from the branch of an apple tree – a shower of petals fell off its blossoms – and had us sit down on a broken marble pillar.