Glenn Hughes Digresses

A Work in Progress
50

Lesbia’s slaves are remaking a disheveled bed, and they display another coverlet. 

This has an embroidered scene showing Lesbia abandoned by Catullus, who is sailing away across a lake where a military company is waiting on the other side.   The scene portrayed dissolves into footage of Roman cavalry (Catullus among them) raiding a town in Gaul, looting its consecrated Druid space and either killing or enslaving the inhabitants.

We also see World War 1 footage of trench warfare and Richard Aldington on a dark night leading soldiers from his company illuminated by occasional flares, moving between corpses of gas masked soldiers suspended on barbed wire, removing their dog tags.  When touched the dead fall apart.  They have been on the wire for a long time.  Some of the dead have German helmets, others British.

Next Episode (Denny Hall, University of Washington)

Glenn Hughes turns back to the class after watching the footage:

“What happened over two thousand years ago is old enough to be shrouded in myth.  Can we really distinguish the story of Catullus and Lesbia from other stories that were probably well known to a Roman audience in the time of the Triumvirate?  Stories about couples such as: Aphrodite and Anchises, Artemis and Hippolytus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Theseus and Ariadne?  In all these myths the male is mortal, not a god.  They were mortal men who loved either a goddess or a mortal woman.  In the myths, the women were depicted in ways that would fire the imagination of a warrior although in the Jason story the woman is a powerful sorceress capable of exacting revenge.  Catullus depicted his Lesbia in ways that went beyond these older treatments of women.  He set her in a contemporary location and let her appeal to his intellect as well as to his loins.  She is a mortal woman who can love and leave, perhaps more than one man.”  

“H.D and Aldington also come to mind.  It’s because I met them, I had the idea of linking them with Catullus and Lesbia.  I met H.D. briefly in Paris, I even danced with her in a night club where she had a great time with Aldington, who was also there. I’d stayed with Aldington at his cottage in England before.  I exchanged letters with both, a lot more with Aldington.  I’m selling all those letters to a library in Texas by the way.”

“There is no evidence to show that Catullus did not know Lesbia, perhaps even married Lesbia, when he was 21 and she was six years older.  There is no evidence that they separated soon thereafter.  Did she have a miscarriage?   Did Catullus go off to fight in Spain or in Gaul?  The scholars will tell us there is no evidence that Catullus was ever in a war.  But he was a high born Roman.  War was a summer job, something Romans did to get rich!  Why would he write about something so mundane?  The scholars will confirm that divorce was easy to accomplish in pre-Augustan Rome, perhaps even easier in Verona, his hometown, where his father was a prominent businessman.  Now ten years have passed, and Catullus is in Rome at the same time as Lesbia.   She is married to a very rich man and flaunts her wealth and prestige.   Catullus is dependent on his father.   He has been composing poems about her again, finding himself jealous of her husband and her other lovers, even equating her with a whore.  Just as Aldington, having rejected H.D. ten years before, may have fallen in love with her again in Paris where she was now unattainable.  Both Catullus and Aldington wrote about women in revolutionary ways.” 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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