CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

personal development alone: ‘When I was a young man…’, not ‘Five years ago…’. In short, the lament has a
thoroughly subjective structure, with emotional content altering narrative regularity, and statements
emphasized through repetition.
Catullus’ assertion that his brother’s love nourished his pleasures in life and that after the death of his brother
he banished all these joys from his mind (lines 23-26) are as startling for their introspective depth as little
else in ancient literature outside his poems. As long as no source can be found from where he could have
taken over such a confession, it remains the easiest to assume that he is indeed writing about his own
experiences here. What he says about them is quite extraordinary. His brother’s affection and support
ensured him a pleasurable love-life. It is fashionable today to see Roman sexuality as a matter of power
relations, with a rich, free-born adult male using sexually a woman or a socially inferior, youthful male. Here
it emerges that Catullus’ love-life is related to his social life: it is interrupted by the death of his brother not
because that affected in any way his status in society (in fact, it may even have increased the value of his
inheritance), but because he could find no substitute for his brother’s affection and support.
15 tempore quo primum In this context the phrase cannot mean ‘when first’, which is what one would
expect, as Catullus received the toga uirilis only once; it cannot mean ‘ever since’ either, which is how
Quinn would render it, as Catullus’ love-life has been interrupted in the meantime; Baehrens has surely been
right to paraphrase it with ubi primum, ‘as soon as’. In fact, tempore quo primum is found at the same place
within the hexameter in Lucretius (5.917, meaning ‘as soon as’), Virgil (Aen. 9.80, ‘when first’) and Valerius
Flaccus (2.82, ‘as soon as’). These passages are otherwise unrelated, and Kroll’s hypothesis of a lost Ennian
model is attractive. That passage may have been reinterpreted by later poets in view of prose phrases such as
quo tempore primum (‘as soon as’, Cic. Quinct. 46 and Clu. 162; ‘when first’, Plin. N.H. 14.97) and ab eo
tempore quo primum (‘immediately from the time that’, Colum. 12.30.1). Cfr. also line 113n. tempore quo.
uestis mihi tradita pura est The toga pura, libera or uirilis (of undyed light wool) was handed to an
upper-class Roman youth of about 16 to mark his passage to adulthood, generally at the festival of the
Liberalia on 17 March, in a ceremony where he laid down the golden bulla or amulet that had protected him
during childhood and the purple-bordered toga praetextata proper to well-born children, magistrates and
priests. The most detailed account of the ceremony available is still given by Marquardt (1879: 122-134); see
now also Néraudau (1984: 148f. & 251-256), Eyben (1993: 6f.) and Rawson (2003: 142-145), who refers to
the dissertation of Dolansky (1999), which I have been unable to consult. Among the sources note Cic. Att.
5.20.9, 6.1.12 and 9.6.1. On the togae involved see Wilson (1924, esp. 51-56) and Wilson (1938: 130-132).
A number of authors mark out this event as the beginning of a youngster’s sexual licence: thus also
Propertius 3.15.3f. ut mihi praetexti pudor est ablatus amictus / et data libertas noscere amoris iter, Stat.
Silv. 5.2.68f. quem non corrupit pubes effrena nouaeque / libertas properata togae?, Cic. Phil. 2.44 (wearing
the toga praetexta, Mark Antony was bankrupt; with the toga uirilis he became a prostitute) and Pers. Sat.
5.30-35 with Kißel (1990) ad loc. The change of dress must have constituted a powerful initiation ceremony,
as after it the teenager would all of a sudden be recognizable from his clothes no longer as a child, but as a
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