Substack 2
Some Humorous and Obscene Poems translated from Latin
And not only Catullus.
There is apparently an audience for PG poems from ancient and medieval times if my previous post is of any indication. And though I do not particularly enjoy this sort of thing, either ancient or modern, one has got to feed the algorithm somehow. The following post obviously contains explicit material. Proceed only if you are okay with that.
Introduction
If you were to ask otherwise well-read people who had no specific Latin focus on whether they knows any sort of vulgar poetry from ancient times, the name of Catullus would probably be the most common answer. Everyone has heard of the famous “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”, haven’t they? Catullus 16 in particular seems to be somewhat of a meme in the online Latin community for being unusually explicit and bawdy. I don’t really know what the reason behind this perception is, though if I had to throw a guess it’s because Catullus is one of the authors usually included in school curriculums and going from the lofty pietas of the Aeneas to Catullus is indeed a strange experience. And while Catullus is indeed quite explicit, he is not an aberration unheard of in Latin poetry. Martial, for example, can be as explicit and graphic as Catullus, sometimes more.
The poems translated below contain mainly poems from the ancient era (so no medieval Latin poetry or Renaissance stuff) : Catullus, Martial, Priapea and so on. As always, I have translated into prose but with line breaks for I have no skill in (English) poetry. For each poem, I have included both the original text for those who know Latin and have followed the translation with some basic notes that draw attention to anything I find noteworthy in the original or on translation choices.
On a more general note, I don’t find these Latin epigrams, even those of Catullus, very interesting. Latin poetry in general has much to offer but those on the more explicit end are all kind of monotonous. Haha, I’ll r*pe you. This is more or less what all these come down to. I don’t really know why this is or how it connects to Roman and wider Mediterranean understanding of sexuality and human nature. Maybe they are shocking for the first time.
Catullus
Catullus perhaps needs no introduction. I have included both his famous Pedicabo poem and some others.
1
The ‘thousands of kisses’ are references to Catullus’ poems where such phrases occur usually in relation with his love to Lesbia. It should be emphasized that although Catullus seems to be lashing out at his critics for criticizing his poems and raising questions on his manhood, it is likely not serious but banter with his close friends. Furius and Aurelius appear in other poems as Catullus’ buddies. Catullus 11 even starts with “Furius and Aurelius, the companions of Catullus, whether he reaches the furthest Indies … ”.
2
The Caesar is Julius Caesar. Suetonius reports that the two were ultimately reconciled when Caesar was hosted in Catullus’ paternal villa.
3
Doesn’t sound very funny to me. Cato the younger was a notorious party pooper. I don’t think he’d have found it very funny either.
4
As Lesbia is commonly identified with Claudia, the Lesbius will be her brother Publius Clodius Pulcher. Catullus is accusing Claudia of incest here, an accusation that was not unknown in the public at that time. Cicero brandishes similar accusations in his Pro Caelio. Pulcher is moreover not just an adjective for Lesbius but also refers to the cognomen Pulcher of Clodii.
5
Poor Aemilius. He should visit the dentist soon.
6
The as is a Roman coin designation.
This much for Catullus. There are a lot more of Catullus’ invectives against all sort of people which are generally full of curses and vulgarity but I’ve included some of my favourites. But Catullus also has serious and heart touching poems. His poem on the death of his brother (No 101) is extremely good. His joy on homecoming after a long time (No. 31) is great too. He can translate and adapt older poems so good people start thinking it’s actually about his own life (No. 51, which is a translation from Sappho). It is perhaps well that the more shocking poems introduce new readers to his poetry which is not all crass and vulgar but also high and cultured.
Priapea
Fig: Priapus from a fresco in Pompeii.
I have translated an interesting long poem from the Priapea before. I’ll just quote that post for an introduction:
Priapea or Carmina Priapea is a collection of short Latin epigrams in various meters on the shenanigans of the god Priapus. Priapus is, as the subtitle says, is the well-endowed one. The comically large phallus, which is his most characteristic aspect, seems to connect him to fertility though he himself is tragically infertile. Compared to the major Olympian gods, there are few myths about Priapus that survive and those that do survive often have contradictory information even on things as basic as his parentage. The more popular version seems to have him a son of Aphrodite (i.e. Venus) cursed by Hera with ugliness and an ever-erect large penis (which amusingly he cannot sustain for an actual intercourse). Another myth records him as attempting to rape a sleeping Hestia who was waken up by an ass. As a result, Priapus bears a deep hatred for asses ever since.
Priapea, then, is a collection of about 80 epigrams about this Priapus. When was it written? Is the whole collection by a single poet or is it a product of different hands over time and space? Even as the god himself, we don’t have a certain answer to any of these basic questions. From at least the time of Suetonius (early 2nd CE) there was a tradition that Priapea was written by Vergil. Manuscripts evidence generally supports this view. From the Renaissance onwards, scholars often couldn’t believe that a poet like Vergil, whose serious and high-minded Aeneid was one of the most popular Latin works in the middle ages and who was seen as a sort of pre-Christian prophet due to one of his eclogues being interpreted as a foretelling of Christ, could have written so much explicit and vulgar epigrams. There arose a multitude of opinions as to the date and authorship in the succeeding centuries. Ovid, Martial, group of poets under Maecenas’ patronage, etc. were the common contenders. At the beginning of the 20th century, the received wisdom seems to point that the it was collection of Priapic poems by various authors compiled sometimes in the Augustan or silver ages of Latin literature.
After the pioneering study by R.S. Radford (1921), pendulum has swung back to a unitary authorship, though necessarily not Ovid as he suggested.
More or less all of the poems collected in Priapea are connected in one way or the other to the Priapus’ phallic form. I have generally chosen shorter epigrams to longer ones.
1
The double entendre is clear enough. This sort of threats against intruders and thieves who try to steal from the garden where Priapus has been set up is his stock in trade. It should be kept in mind while reading Priapus’ threats that it is not Priapus as a generic figure but especially as the dedicated statue placed at gardens that is threatening the thieves.
2
This one plays on the difference between tē dīcō (I say to you) and pēdīcō (I’ll sodomize you).
3
The third punishment is irrumatio (oral). As opposed to a boy (puer) or a girl (puella), a bearded (barbatus) thief implies that it is an adult male who is being threatened.
4
5
Priapus here compares his own weapon, if it be styled as such, to the characteristic weapons of other gods. There are a handful of epigrams on this theme in the Priapea. In one (No IX), Priapus directly questions why his weapons should be covered while the other gods display their quite proudly.
Jove is Jupiter. Liber is the Roman god often identified with Greek Dionysus. Minerva was equated with Greek Athena.
6
This one, like others, threaten the prospective thief too but is in addition to that a parody of epic themes. The bearing of royal sceptres which often occurs in epics, Homeric and otherwise, in descriptive epic metaphors is here parodied by Priapus to the bearing of a different type of sceptre. I’m quite fond of this scene in Iliad I:1
7
The nature of Priapus is, of course, very open.
8
Priapus responding to an unnamed questioner about why the girls love him though he is but a woodenspearand his weapon is, let’s say, ineffective.
9
Priapus’ curse to the guest invited to dinner at his place who don’t recite some poem. I quite like the image of offering a libation of verses (lībāre … versūs)
10
11
The raising of the eyebrow is an indication of seriousness and moral gravity. The person likely to be characterized as raising an eyebrow is certainly not the one to enjoy such vulgar poetry. This also gave rise to the longest attested Latin word in antiquity:subductisupercilicarptor(an eyebrow-raising fault-finder), said to have been coined by the poet Laevius to describe his critics.
As for ‘observing our walls’, the poems in the Priapea are supposed to have been written into walls in much the same way that the surviving Pompeii graffiti are.
12
Usual Priapean threat. E——D looks something like an erect penis.
13
Some thieves have stolen the sickle of Priapus but he fears lest even his other spear, i.e, his characteristic organ, be stolen. If even that be stolen, Priapus would go from being a citizen of Lampsacus in Anatolia to being a Gaul. The Gaul (Gallus) is a double-entendre. It refers to Gauls as in Celts but also to Galli who were castrated priests of Cybele.
So much for Priapus. I’ve translated a longer piece from the Priapea in which Priapus does some lighthearted literary criticism of Homeric Epics. If you want to read it, you can find ithere.
Martial
Martial was a first century CE Roman poet who basically invented the modern epigram. He wrote short, biting poems that focused on the real and often messy lives of everyday people in Rome rather than myths or legends. He frequently turns out little disses on people.
Fig: Martial roasting fellow Romans. 1st Century AD. Colorized.
Martial has a lot, and I mean alot, of obscene verses but he also does have other insults and invectives. His verses are, moreover, short enough.
1
Poor Aelia.
2
Bassus has got his own priorities. There’s no bowl in the original just ‘miserable gold’.
3
Many poets who write these lewd verses seem to have a poem or two justifying their oeuvre. Catullus does this in his famous poem (translated as No 1 above), Priapea has some of these, Pliny the Younger expresses this sentiment and now Martial does too.
Floralia was a flower festival where prostitutes performed naked. Gallic means, as we explained above, an eunuch priest of Cybele. Being an eunuch would deprive Priapus of his very character, his very essence: what could be worse than that?
4
Nothing new under the sun I guess. Iuvenal has a similar rant in one of his poems (Iuvenal 6 if I remember correctly).
5
Candidus apparently had both the chair and the technique perfected.
6
You need to lock in and looksmaxx Phoebus.
7
Roman body-positivity ? Probably not.
8
Paula is neither young enough to be of marriageable age nor old enough to make you an inheritor and die off. The word for old woman used here, ‘anus’, is a vivid demonstrator of the need of considering vowel length in Latin for the only difference between ‘anus’ (old women) and ‘ānus’ (anus) is the length of the initial vowela. That there could be some pun at this in the poem itself cannot be completely denied.
Even more than the other authors here, a lot (as in literally thousands) of Martial’s epigrams survive and there are many, many obscene ones. I’d entreat the interested reader to the original work itself, either in translation or in original. But do make sure to get a more recent translation as lots of older translations either omit epigrams that are too salacious or tame them quite forcefully (like the case with ‘wondrous femininity’ discussed below).
Miscellaneous
1. Caesar’s Soldiers
The following poems are taken from Suetonius’Life of Divine Iulius(49 & 51) where they are said to be sung by Caesar’s own troops at his triumphs:
The reason for this rumour, that Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, had had illicit relations with Caesar was that Caesar had spent some time at the beginning of his career with that king and apparently returned again even after the rumour had spread on the excuse of having to exact the debt of one of his clients.Life of Divine Iulius 2.
2. Goodbye Wondrous Femininity
The graffitis that were preserved in Pompeii and Herculaneum after the disastrous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius buried those towns have much interesting content. The following piece, CIL(Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum) 4.3932 from the Brothel ofInnulusandPapilio, is often included in pop discussions of Pompeii graffitis. You’ll often encounter the following translation:
I haven’t been able to find who the original translator was in this specific case but the translation itself has circulated widely. It is interesting then that the translation is very sanitized. The original text is not complete and is missing many words:
This was presumably an elegiac couplet but as it is now reads: “grieve, you girls. Ass-fucks … goodbye over-proud cunt.”
I’ve seen a completion of this that fits the metre which goes like:
The translation quoted above must be of this reconstructed verse. In any case, superbus doesn’t mean superb in the English sense but over-proud, haughty or vain. Similarly, you’d have to do considerable mental gymnastics to justify translatingcunnus(cunt) as femininity.
3. More from the Burned Cities
There are many more funny graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum but as we’ll included only a few ones that are in verse.
This is a parody of Vergil’s Aeneid, which starts withArma virumque canō, Trōjae quī prīmus ab ōrīs(I sing of the arms and the man who first from the shores of Troy…), found at a clothes cleaner’s shop in Pompeii.
4. Florus
There is uncertainty whether various authors named Florus were a single person or not but if it was a single person, Florus lived in late first and early second century AD. An epitome of Roman history attributed to him survives, and so does a portion of a work called ‘Vergil: Poet or Orator?’. Beside these there are some surviving epigrams. Many of these are quite nice and standard epigrams. Here’s one on misogyny though:
An anecdote is related in theLife of Hadrianof the uber-reliable Historia Augusta that Florus once criticized Hadrian with these verses:
Hadrian2, who is characterized as vain to the point of writing his own biography and having others publish it in their name, is said to respond as:
Well, I’d personally want to to Hadrian, other than the whole Antinous thing of course, than Florus.
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Valete sodales!
