The actor concluded his final skit to great applause. Clodia stepped onto the stage.
"And now, something very special," she said. "An old friend has returned from his wanderings in the East-"
"Like Odysseus?" said someone. I looked around and saw that it was the young man with the bad haircut.
"If Catullus is Odysseus, does that mean Clodia is Penelope?" said one of his friends.
"I hope not," said another. "You know what Odysseus did to Penelope's suitors-he crashed a party and killed them all!"
"As I was saying," said Clodia, raising her voice above the laughter, "an old friend is back. Wiser, one presumes; certainly older, if only by a year; and with new poems to share with us. I mean our dear friend from Verona, Gaius Valerius Catullus, whose words have touched us all."
"And wounded a few of us!" yelled someone.
"While he was in the East, Catullus tells me, he took a journey to look at the ruins of ancient Troy. He climbed pine-covered Mount Ida, where Jupiter sat to watch the Greeks and Trojans do battle on the plain below. He saw the place where his beloved brother is buried, and performed a funeral rite. And while he was there, he saw something that few men have ever seen. He was invited to witness the secret rites at the Temple of Cybele, including the ceremony by which a man becomes a gallus in the service of the Great Mother."
I expected to hear more lewd comments at this point, but instead a hush fell over the crowd.
"This experience, Catullus tells me, moved him to compose a poem in honor of Attis, the consort of Cybele, the lover who gave up his sex in her worship, the inspiration of all the galli since. On the eve of the Great Mother festival, what could be more appropriate than the first public recitation of this poem?"
She left the platform. Catullus took her place. His lids looked heavy, his eyes bleary and he seemed to barely avoid falling as he stepped onto the stage. I held my breath, wondering how he could possibly perform before an audience. He was too drunk, too bitter, too unsure of himself, too weak. He seemed to be thinking the same thing. For a long time he stood completely still, his shoulders slumped, staring first at his feet, then at something above the heads of the audience. Was he bemused by the giant Venus behind us, or simply gazing into space?
But when he finally opened his mouth to speak, the voice that emerged was unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was light and airy yet strangely powerful, like a glittering net thrown over the audience, like a whisper in a dream.
I have heard countless orators in the Forum, listened to many actors on the stage. Their voices are their tools, skilled at shaping utterances suitable to the occasion; words emerge at their decree like slaves suited to a particular task. But with Catullus, everything seemed reversed. The words were in control; the poem ruled the poet, and used not just his voice but his whole body for its delivery, shaping his face, gesturing with his hands, causing his feet to pace the stage all to the poem's purpose. The poem would have existed with or without the poet. His presence was merely a convenience, since he happened to have a tongue which the poem could use to deliver itself to the ears of Clodia's guests on that warm spring night in her garden on the Palatine:
"Attis sailed his swift vessel through the deep waves
And set his eager feet upon the Phrygian shore.
He entered the sunless forest, where his mind became
As dark as the dense woods around him.
Moved by madness, he picked up a sharp stone.
He sliced off his manhood. He rose up transfigured:
A woman, the blood dripping from between her legs
Giving life to the dank, pungent earth.
Attis snatched up a drum and beat it, making music
To the Great Mother and her mysteries,
Singing rapturous falsetto to the servants of Cybele:
'Come galli, all together, to the groves on the mountain.
Sea salt stings the wound-turn away from the sea.
Turn away from Venus. Rid yourselves of manhood.
Leave that loathsome sort of love behind you,
Embrace the ecstasies of unsexed passion…' "
It was a long, strange poem. At times it became a chant, and the poet a dancer, moved to sway and stamp his feet by the poem that possessed him. The audience watched and listened, spellbound.
It was the story of Attis, and the madness of Attis, which moved him on a dark night, in a dense forest, far from home, to castrate himself and consecrate his existence to the Great Mother, Cybele. Still bleeding from his wound, he summoned the followers of the goddess and led them in a wild, ecstatic procession up the slopes of Mount Ida to her temple. They sang shrill chants, beat on drums, clanged cymbals, whirled about in frenzied, delirious dances with Attis leading them, until at last they fell exhausted into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When Attis woke, his madness had passed.
He saw what he had done.
He was horrified.
He ran to the seashore and gazed at the horizon,
sorry that he had ever left his homeland.
As a boy he had been a champion of the games,
a decorated athlete, a wrestler.
With his beard he became a man of the city,
known, respected, called upon.
What was he now?
A shipwrecked soul unable ever to return to his home,
neither man nor woman,
a fragment of his former self, sterile,
miserable, terribly alone.
His fanatic devotion had cut him off
from all that mattered to him, had cost him everything,
even his humanity.
Up on Mount Ida,
Cybele heard his wretched lament.
She looked down to see Attis weeping on the beach.
Did Cybele take mercy on Attis,
or was she only being practical
when she sent her lion down to the beach, not just to fetch Attis back, but to rend Attis's mind
and make him mad once and for all?
Attis in his sanity was too miserable for a life of worshiping Cybele, but in his unsexed state
what other life was he fit for?
So the roaring lion went crashing
down the mountainside and drove
Attis back into the forest, back into the
madness and raving ecstasy,
back into a life of loyal, unsexed
slavery to the Great Mother.
Catullus shivered, as if the poem were slowly releasing him from its grip. His voice began to fade, until the final lines were barely audible:
"Goddess, Great Mother Cybele,
guardian of Ida,
Madden other men-not me!
Give others your raving dream.
Avert your furies from my house.
Draw others into your scheme!"
Catullus was transformed. Mounting the stage, he had looked like a man stupefied by wine and self-pity, all soft and uncertain. Now his face was haggard and his eyes glowed, like a man emerging from a terrible ordeal, winnowed to his essential core. He stumbled a bit leaving the stage, not like a drunken man but like a man drained of all energy.
The garden was silent. Around me I saw raised eyebrows, uncertain frowns, thoughtful nods, grimaces of distaste. Sitting close by the stage Clodia stared unblinking at the spot Catullus had vacated. Her face was blank. Did she consider the poem a tribute to her, or the opposite, an insult? Or could she not see herself in a young man's poem about inescapable obsession, the obliteration of dignity and freedom by overwhelming passion, and the unequal, disastrous union of a mere mortal with an aloof, uncaring goddess?
Behind me I heard a stifled sob, like the sound of a woman weeping, so soft that except for the utter quiet I would never have noticed. I turned my head. Away from the other guests, on the steps leading down into the garden, a figure sat by the pedestal of the monstrous Venus, concealed in its shadow. He hugged his ankles as if to keep from shivering and hid his face against his knees, but by his dress I knew it was Trygonion.