Latin Poetry and Latin Lovers 1

Catullus, hating and loving.

The most famous short poem in Latin is probably Odi et Amo, ‘I love and hate’, by Catullus (poem 85), a Roman poet who wrote wonderful and deeply personal love poetry aged in his 20s during the decade 60-50 BC.

Poem 85 sums up in two lines his contradictory feelings about the young woman he elsewhere calls ‘Lesbia’, a pseudonym for a well-born married girl whose real name was Clodia:

                        I hate and love: perhaps you ask how both of these I do?

                           I don’t know, but I feel it and it’s tearing me in two.

                            Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris?

                                     Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

For centuries there have been divided views about how the first line should be translated. While some translated quare ‘how’, most opted for ‘why’, since this is what the word means in the majority of subsequent Latin texts. However, in texts of the period prior to when Catullus was writing, quare is used to mean ‘how’, while the standard word for why is cur.

I was long aware of another problem with ‘why’. 116 poems of Catullus have come down to us, and around a dozen of them allow us to trace his brief affair and doomed infatuation with the alluring but maddeningly faithless ‘Lesbia’. In poem 72 he states plainly that her faithlessness makes him ‘burn more keen’ for her but care for her less:

Catullus is your all, you used to say,
   Lesbia, nor would Jove more favour win.
I loved you then, not in the usual way,
    but as a father loves his sons and kin.
I know you now; so though I burn more keen,
   I fear you’re much diminished in my mind.
How so? Because such faithlessness will mean
   a lover yearns much more, but feels less kind.

Here the question ‘How?’ is posed and answered. So when Catullus asks the question in poem 85 that his imagined interlocutor might be thought to inquire of him, we can expect the same logic.

It might be puzzling, after all, to hear him claim that he holds two contrary feelings simultaneously. We might be inclined to ask ‘how are you doing that?’ (rather than ‘why?). But that’s what Catullus feels is happening to him, and when he says nescio ‘I don’t know’, he’s indicating his inability to understand how it’s happening, not why.

I argued this in more detail here:

https://psyche.co/ideas/loves-contradictions-catullus-on-the-agony-of-infatuation