And he did have politics after all...

[rozk]

This one - Catullus 29 - is a bit odd. It's not his usual cliquish banter and to some extent it seems as if he is writing it in code. There is another poem in which he talks of Mamurra as Julius Caesar's greedy catamite so I think that's what he is implying here in what seems to be a protest against the stripping of conquered provinces for personal benefit.

What I've written is accordingly quite free, and uses imagery that he doesn't. One of the reasons for this is that the repetition of 'Cinaedus Romulus' is simply not going to shock us.

But I think this gets what he meant...

Mamurra

How can we bear this? Only someone like
Mamurra could; he's shameless in his greed.
He's stripped the Gauls, the Britons too, and he'd
Make Romulus his bum boy. Like a pike

That strips a lake of fish, he leaves behind
Desolate emptiness. He seems so fair,
like an Adonis. And you took him there,
great Caesar, knowing your cute boy would find

so much to steal. Like pigeons, he will peck
until the garden's bare. He has devoured,
all his own cash, the loot of Spain. He scoured
the Black Sea coast sore. Now leaves Gaul a wreck,

Britain as well. What has he got on you?
That marriage? Did he bugger that up too?

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

No, I think Romulus is simply Romulus...I'd got confused about who was married to whose daughter - my mistake, so I'll change it to 'That' marriage.

If Pompey is in the poem, I think it's just for the son-in-law gag.

Like I say, my reading is Caesar fucks Mamurra who fucks everyone else including Rome itself. And this is why I write versions and not translations.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see what you mean. I'm not sure I buy it - I would expect that a Roman writer would talk about Roma if that's what they meant. Although Romulus could be held up as a mythical ancestor figure (as Catullus does with the 'grandsons of Remus' in Poem 58), I would naturally expect the use of Romulus in this fashion to be a cover for some contemporary figure who could (ironically or not) be seen to encapsulate some of the values of Romulus. (I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the addressee in lines 5 and 9 not being included in the addressees of the last two lines, where the piissimi must be Caesar and Pompey.)

But you could be right. And as you say, these are your versions, and you can read the poems how you like for them.