When I was in high school, I was lucky to have a knowledgeable teacher who taught in a slightly less “orthodox” way, with offbeat observations, challenges, ironic digressions and provocations.
Without her, I thought, I would soon have lost any love of learning, surrounded by teachers who dragged themselves to the front of the classroom and repeated exactly the same lines every year, with knowledge so often reduced to tidy summaries of concepts, characters and dates to memorize, plus other such “delights.”
But that teacher was different. She told us, for example, that the texts of Catullus in our schoolbooks and in the ones she had used as a student were full of cuts and censorship: some verses had been omitted because they were considered “scabrous” or obscene. That was why she went back to the original texts to find the passages marked with asterisks.
When I say Catullus, perhaps these are the lines that come to mind:
Odi et amo.
Quare id faciam fortasse requiri.
Nescio. Sed fieri sentio et excrucior.(I hate and I love.
Perhaps you ask how this can be.
I do not know. But I feel it happening, and I am tormented.)
Forget the lovesick Catullus counting Lesbia’s kisses the way he was presented to you from the classroom. That is not what we are talking about today. We are talking about a man accused of being too tender and sentimental who did not issue a press statement to apologize, plead context, threaten a lawsuit or appeal to freedom of expression. He simply picked up his pen and wrote the most obscene, violent, ruthless and brilliant verse of classical antiquity.
Brace yourself: we are about to plunge into the depths of Catullus’ Poem 161, the text that has made two thousand years of translators and censors break out in a cold sweat. You probably never read it in a school textbook. It is about time to put that right.
1. The Neoteric poets and the scandal of feelings
To grasp the thermonuclear force of Catullus’ response, we need to understand the cultural climate in which he worked. We are in Rome, in the first century BCE: the Republic is creaking; the generals are carving up the provinces with their legions, and the ideal Roman citizen is still the sort of man who reeks of sweat, wields a gladius, tends his field and bleeds for the Senate. In this climate of testosterone-fuelled patriotism, where the mos maiorum (the custom of the ancestors) demands austerity, discipline and self-sacrifice for the state, a group of young provincials arrives in Rome. Many come from Cisalpine Gaul. Catullus, for example, was from Verona. They are rich, educated and bored.
They are the so-called Neoteric poets (or poetae novi), a conventional label used by modern critics. Cicero criticized some of their poetic choices. Rather than rejecting every long form or turning their backs entirely on politics, these poets favored short, polished poetry, learned allusion and private experience.
They wanted to write about consuming passions, betrayals, elegant dinner parties, stolen napkins at banquets and intense attachments. They cultivated nugae, “trifles”: short poems polished to perfection through the famous labor limae, the work of the file. With these poets, attention to individual experience and private life grew stronger. Catullus was the undisputed master of the movement.2 When he writes to Lesbia, “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand,” he is doing something subversive: saying that the intensity of a private moment matters more than a military campaign in Asia Minor. And this is where the Roman mindset starts to come unstuck.
2. Furius and Aurelius’ fatal mistake: measuring manliness by poetry
In ancient Rome, sexuality and manliness were not measured through the categories of orientation we use today, but often through power dynamics: active and passive, dominant and submissive. A true vir (the fully realized Roman man) was someone who dominated in every sphere of life: in battle, in the political forum and in bed. Showing vulnerability, yielding to a woman’s charms or—worse—writing tender, delicate verse was considered a symptom of softness (mollitia), an almost intolerable deviation from public morality.3
Enter two characters: Furius and Aurelius. They were probably regulars in the same literary circles as Catullus, perhaps aspiring poets or simply acquaintances with a taste for unsolicited criticism. They make the same mistake that many amateur critics still make: confusing the voice of the poem with the author in the flesh.
Reading the very sweet poems about kisses (such as the famous Poem 5) or the agonized laments over Lesbia’s betrayals, the two draw a sweeping sociological conclusion: if Catullus writes things so sugary, soft and delicate, then Catullus himself must be a soft, weak, unmanly creature. They start spreading the story and mocking him in public, accusing him of being an impudicus, a man who has surrendered his dominant dignity. They have hit the raw nerve of Roman society: male honor.
If a contemporary poet got a review like that, they might launch into a self-pitying rant on X (formerly Twitter) or write an unbearably dull essay about deconstructing gender stereotypes. Catullus, by contrast, reaches for the lethal weapon. He takes a sheet of papyrus and composes Poem 16.
3. Apocalypse in Phalaecian hendecasyllables: Poem 16
Poem 16 opens with a nuclear blast: a Phalaecian hendecasyllable that allows no reply, negotiation or context. It is the Latin line that made centuries of manuscript-copying monks break out in a cold sweat and whole generations of schoolbook editors insert prudish black asterisks or dots into their anthologies:
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi,
qui me ex versiculis meis putastis,
quod sunt molliculi, parum pudicum.4
Now, I know we are in a digital space watched over by puritanical algorithms that could block this page at the first literal translation. So do me a favor: make an effort of abstraction—or open Google Translate. Yes, it translates Latin too. Let us soften the wording, but keep the violence of the intent intact.
In these lines Catullus does not whine in his own defense. In response to being called “soft,” he promises Furius and Aurelius brutal, total, humiliating physical domination—and makes it unmistakably clear who will be in the active role. In effect, he is saying: “Oh, you think I am unmanly because I write sugary poems? I will physically subdue you in the two most humiliating ways our vocabulary can name, and show you who holds the power here. You will be the ones on the receiving end: Aurelius the submissive, Furius the effeminate—you who dared to judge me by my little verses.”
The comic, grotesque and terrifying effect comes from the absolute contrast between form and content. Catullus uses exquisitely refined meter (the Phalaecian hendecasyllable, the stuff of the highest literary craft) to deliver the crudest barroom threat imaginable. It is as if an English lord in evening dress challenged you to a duel, then used Shakespearean diction to threaten to smash a bottle over your teeth in the pub car park. The hyperbole is so extreme that it becomes pure art.
4. The golden rule of literary criticism: I am not my verses
And yet, stopping at the swear words or the physical threat would do Catullus’ intelligence a disservice. The real masterpiece of Poem 16 is not its obscenity, but the lines that follow. After frightening his detractors out of their wits, Catullus suddenly calms down, puts on his literary-theory-professor glasses and lays down one of the most important, brilliant rules in the history of Western art:
Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est;
Which means: “A devout poet ought to be chaste in person; his little verses need not be.”
It is a flash of insight. Catullus is separating the author’s life from the work of art, for the first time in such an explicit and polemical way. He is asserting the total, absolute freedom of literary fiction. A writer can explore the tenderest depths of human feeling or describe the darkest misdeeds without thereby being a softie or a criminal in real life. Art must be free, provocative, exciting (Catullus adds shortly afterwards that verses have a special charm when “pruriat incitare possunt,” when they can arouse desire and stir the reader—even the coldest old men), but none of this compromises the moral integrity of the person holding the pen.
This defense, born of an angry insult, would become a fundamental principle in world literature. Decades later, Ovid himself, when the emperor Augustus sent him into exile on the Black Sea on the formal charge of writing excessively licentious poetry (Ars Amatoria), would use precisely the same Catullan principle to defend himself. In Book II of his Tristia (line 354), Ovid would write in desperation: “Crede mihi, mores distant a carmine nostro / vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea” (“Believe me, my conduct is far removed from my poetry: my life is modest, my Muse playful”). Ovid tried, but Augustus was not as sophisticated a literary critic as we are and left him to die in exile. Catullus, fortunately, lived in an age when he could still bully his censors.5
5. The afterlife of an insult: why Furius and Aurelius lost everything
So, who won in the end? History itself gives us the answer.
Today we do not possess a single word written by Furius or Aurelius. We know nothing about their supposed moral standing, their unimpeachable Roman manliness or their critical opinions. In literary histories they survive only as empty shells, condemned to endure Catullus’ verbal fury forever whenever a student or curious reader opens the Liber.
That is the magic of great satirical and polemical literature. Catullus took two tedious, moralizing critics, unable to separate fiction from reality, and bricked them alive inside a fourteen-line masterpiece. He made them immortal, yes—but as laughingstocks. Their identity is frozen in the role of men who got royally screwed (and, given the opening line, perhaps not only figuratively) by Rome’s greatest lyric poet.
That is why Poem 16 is not just a dirty outburst to be omitted from schoolbooks or hidden beneath a snowfall of reassuring asterisks. It is a manifesto for the independence of art. It is an indelible reminder that the written page is a free territory where ordinary morality has no jurisdiction, and where self-appointed moralists enter at their own risk.
So next time someone on social media is scandalized because they confuse an author’s views with the actions of their characters, or judge an artist by the measuring cup of their own personal ethical obsessions, do not waste time on long, peaceful debates. Just give a knowing smile and think of Catullus: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.
Notes
- Latin text: Perseus, Carmina 16. ↑
- Reference: Eric A. Havelock, “The poetry of Catullus”, Encyclopaedia Britannica. ↑
- On the use of obscenity as verbal aggression and a posture of dominance in Catullus 16: John Godwin, “Catullus: Foul-mouthed Genius?”, Antigone. ↑
- School anthologies varied; not all were censored. For example, a 2010 Zanichelli school handout prints Poem 16 in full. ↑
- Ovid, Tristia II; Ovid, Encyclopaedia Britannica; Dickinson College Commentaries, “Life of Ovid”. ↑
