CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

In the present passage caelibe evidently indicates that Manlius lacks a spouse, or indeed any kind of partner
– but how exactly? Schwabe (1862: 1.343) and Hartman (1916: 93) think that the word indicates that he is a
widower; but in fact caelebs only carries this meaning on two isolated occasions (see above) and there are
further problems with their theory. Catullus calls Manlius desertus, ‘abandoned’ or ‘shunned’, and even if
his wife should have ‘left’ him by committing suicide, this would hardly be a suitable term to refer to a
bereaved person; Manlius has asked Catullus for munera Veneris, that is, alternative sources of sexual
satisfaction, which is hardly typical of bereaved husbands in deep mourning; and the poem suggests as a
whole not that Manlius has been widowed, but that he has received a bitter blow of some sort himself, and he
is now trying to cope with the consequences.
It would suit the context better if caelibe were to mean ‘single’, ‘alone’, i.e. lacking not a spouse but a
partner (this is the suggestion of Quinn 1969: 108, n. 15 and Sarkissian 1983: 47, n. 16). In this case Manlius
would have been left behind (desertus) by his partner – presumably by a woman, as Most (1981: 122, n. 52)
rightly points out that caelebs is not found elsewhere in a homoerotic context, while same-sex marriage is
only attested in ancient Rome from the 1 st century A.D. onwards (see Williams 1999: 245-252; some of these
unions involved the eccentric Emperors Nero and Elagabalus, others only lesser citizens). But elsewhere
caelebs always means ‘lacking a spouse’ and never ‘lacking a partner’. Catullus could have taken the liberty
to extend the meaning of the word in this direction. One should note that since Roman society never fully
condoned extramarital liaisons, there does not appear to have been a stable set of terms describing such
affairs and the roles that are possible within them: there was nothing like the set of terms in modern English,
which has one set of terms for liaisons that do not involve marriage (‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘partner’,
‘relationship’ and ‘single’) and another for those that do (‘wife’, ‘husband’, ‘spouse’, ‘marriage’ and
‘unmarried’). Elsewhere Catullus drew on the language of friendship to describe his relationship with Lesbia
(see Reitzenstein 1912: 30f.); here he could be drawing on the language of marriage. Still, it is awkward that
caelebs is not attested in this sense.
Coppel (1973: 22) argues that since at Ov. Her. 13.105 and Sen. Ag. 185 caelebs refers to people who have
been separated temporarily from their spouse, the word may well mean the same here, that Allius’ beloved
has just gone on a journey. However, it is questionable whether one can regard as parallels passages in which
caelebs is used to describe not separation in general, but separation of a dramatic and potentially definitive
sort: that of Laodamia and Clytemestra whose husbands have gone to fight under Troy. (In both cases the
word is used with a degree of tragic prescience: both Laodamia and Clytemestra will see their marriage end,
for different reasons.) caelebs is certainly not used anywhere for someone whose spouse has gone to the
neighbours’, or to the next town.
The most straightforward interpretation of the word may be the most literal one. Manlius’ bed may be called
caelebs simply because he is unmarried. Perhaps his wife left him, or he simply thought that he was sexually
frustrated because he did not have a wife. The former hypothesis would go well with desertus, though less
well with Manlius’ request that Catullus find him an alternative source of sexual satisfaction. The latter
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