Lesbius est pulcer. quid ni? quem Lesbia malit
quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua.
sed tamen hic pulcer vendat cum gente Catullum,
si tria natorum suavia reppererit.
Lesbius is pretty. Why Not? Lebsia prefers him
More than you with that whole family, Catullus, of yours.
But however, let this pretty man sell Catullus with his family
If he can find three kisses of well-born men.
Top is the latin, below it, about as literal a translation as can be done. But don’t let 79 fool you. It’s one of the most interesting poems in the corpus.
For those who do not know Catullus, he is most famous for his seemingly endless series of poems about a woman known only as Lesbia. In a cycle repeated and plagaraized countless times since, he watches her from afar, falls madly in love with her, is betrayed, grows bitter, cynical and miserable, and, depending on how you read the organization of the poems in the manuscript, may or may not eventually make his peace with her.
79 is curious because many hold that it reveals the identity of Lesbia. “Lesbius,” under the rules of Roman nomenclature, would be Lesbia’s brother. Pulcher means “pretty” in the girly sense, but was also the cognomen of one branch of a notable roman family, the Clodii. A certain member of this branch, M. Clodius Pulcher was a famous politician and a contemporary of Catullus’.
Rumors about Pulcher’s sex life abound. Though a love affair with his middle sister, Clodia (known to history as Clodia Metelli, which would later become her married name), is hinted at repeatedly, what everyone seems to agree on is that Pulcher was not particularly concerned with the gender of his bedmates. Now, in Roman times, it was common for men (even straight men) to greet each other with kisses, a Euro-style peck-on-one-cheek-then-the-other kinda thing. But if one reads enough Martial, it becomes clear that bad breath (or an otherwise unsavory mouth) was an inevitable result of engaging in a certain sexual practice.
Thus, Catullus strikes a masterful blow in 79, unveiling his trecherous ex’s identity, revealing her incestuous trysts, and reiterating her paramour’s unusual taste for sexual encounters. Fortunately for him moral character was largely a non-issue for politicians in Ancient Rome.
Lesbius is a Fairchild, sure,
Whom Lesbia would take before
You, Catullus, even when
She knows the riches of your kin.
But let that dandy Fairchild sell
Catullus and his kin as well
If he knows three men of taste and wealth
Who’ll accept just one kiss from his mouth.
