I am very delighted to present Annabel’s artwork responding to poem 16! Check out down below how she visualises violence in Catullus’ poetry and how this ultimately inspired her to this illustration:
In Catullus 16 the poet seems to be attempting to enforce his own masculinity at the expense of others by violently insulting them with reference to their own sexual conduct. The poem equates to a public humiliation of a certain Aurelius and his friend Furius. To us both men are now ultimately unidentifiable (although scholars can guess at their identities), but they were both probably readily identifiable to Catullus’ contemporaries and his first readers/listeners.
In my drawing I treat Aurelius alone. The verbal attack is portrayed as if it were physical. So, Catullus has ripped his victim (Aurelius) apart. Only the bloody head remains.
I feel like the themes of gender and sexuality that constitute the insults aimed at him actually say more about the poetic persona “Catullus” and how he responds to his work being called molliculi (soft/unmanly [verses]) and himself accordingly as parum pudicum (not at all chaste/virtuous/straight?) than it does about Aurelius or Furius. That is why I’ve included lines 5 and 6 of the poem, where Catullus tries to separate himself from his poetry, in an apparent attempt to preserve his own masculinity, or at least to perform this attempt… I find his method of rebuttal ironic. He wields homophobic slurs in the same collection of poems that presumably includes his love poems to the boy, Juventius. I added two of the insults (pathicus and cinaedus) into the drawing to show how the victim was attacked for what we would now call his sexuality. But the violent act performed by Catullus seems to be undercut by the fact that elsewhere Catullus identifies with the subordinate and wronged (sometimes female) lover, which by the standards of the time positioned him in an emasculated role. When it comes to gender — Catullus is a complex poet.
