Trustees of Boston University

Gellius and the Lover's Pallor: A Note on Catullus 80

Author(s): Leo C. Curran
Source: Arion, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1966), pp. 24-27
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163003 .
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AND THE LOVER'S

GELLIUS
A NOTE ON CATULLUS
80
Leo

PALLOR

C. Curran

rosea ista labella

Quid dicam, Gelli, quare
hiberna fiant candidiora niue,
mane

nescio

cum

domo

e molli

exis

et cum

te octaua

quiete

longo suscit?t hora die?

quid

certe

est:

an uere

susurr?t

fama

grandia temedii tenta uorare uiri?

sic certe est: clamant Victoris rupta miselli
ilia,

et emulso

labra

notata

sero.

Why Gellius, are those rosy little lips of yours whiter than winter
snow, when you come out of your house in the morning and when
you rise after a languid siesta on a long summer afternoon?
There's certainly something going on. Is there truth in the whis
a
pering rumor that what you devour is big, stiff, and belongs to
man? That's certainly it! It's proclaimed by poor little Victor's
ruptured groin and by your lips, stained by the whey you milk
him dry of.

Vlthough

it

is

prorarly

in

c.97 that Catullus comes closest to making real poetry out of the
unpromising material of obscene invective,1 c.80 nearly matches
it

in

controlled

perhaps
and by

invective

ferocity

and

obscene

accuracy,

and

surpasses it by its subtle variation in diction and tone

the additional element of burlesque of a literary con

vention.

Why, Catullus asks in a tone of innocence that will prove de

ceptive, are Gellius' lips so pale? Any reader of ancient litera
ture would expect as answer that clich? of Greek and Latin love
poetry, the conventional and usually metaphorical
pallor of the
are called labella; the diminutive form,
literary lover.2 Gellius' lips
so common in the sermo amatorius, along with the largely poetic
adjective, rosea, evokes the language of love poetry. ("Lips" looks
for "face," but as we shall learn shortly,
like simple metonymy
Catullus has other reasons for specifying this part of his anatomy. )
Gellius'
lips are not only white, but "whiter than snow." It

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Leo

C. Curran

25

would be hard to think of a more obvious comparison and indeed

its later occur
it is as old as Homer
(Iliad 10.437). However,
rences in literature are relatively infrequent. This is easy enough
to explain, for the very obviousness of the comparison and a fre
quency in everyday language which can be presumed to have
been as great then as it is now must have invested itwith a banal
ity that sharply reduced its use in serious writing. Its force here
is surely to enhance the impression of strict conventionality.
Clich? reinforces clich? and the reader ismisled into thinking that
nothing unusual is going to be said in this poem. As if two clich?s
were

not

our

to disarm

enough

we

suspicions,

are

a third

offered

in hiberna as an epithet for snow. As sure as snow is wintry, as

sure as snow is the standard of whiteness,
so Gellius has the com
plexion of all lovers.
With an introductory couplet like this, establishing the very
strong likelihood that Gellius is in love, we might expect the rest
of the poem to concern itself with the identity of the beloved in
some such way as, for example, c.6 does. Or the point of the
poem might turn out to be the revelation by Catullus himself of
the beloved's identity. (This is, of course, a part of the point of
if Victor

the poem,

is, as

(7)

seems

probable,

proper

name.)

In the next three lines, Catullus plays with Gellius and with his
readers. He still gives no indication that he has anything more in
mind than metaphorical
and conventional pallor. MoHi (4), it is
true, frequently has connotations of a particular unnatural vice,
when used of men or their actions, but we are not yet invited to
infer from it anything more specific than sensuousness or languor
in general. It has an effect like that of the diniinutive labella, for
it too is a favorite word in the the sermo amatorius.
The truth emerges step by step in line 6, where vocabulary
choice and word order are savagely effective. In euphemistic el
lipsis Catullus omits the essential substantive, but the other words
absent noun.
gradually reveal the identity of the conspicuously
The word grandia may at first seem quite innocent, but as Catul
lus

adds

the

other

words,

medii,

uorare,

tenta,

and,

finally,

uiri,

the truth becomes clear. Each of these words, as it takes its place
in the line, reinforces and is reinforced by what has gone before.
Catullus has just told us that he is reporting fama, and the mean
ing of the line grows, just as fama does, gradually enlarging and
a
building upon itself as each increment adds bit more. To change
the

metaphor,

there

is a

crescendo

of

increasingly

explicit

decency.

in

There is a certain point beyond which Catullus has not yet

taken us. Although we know by the end of line 6 that Gellius'
love is homosexual and that he is a fellator, there is still no reason
why his pallor should be anything other than literary convention.
But there is more in store for Gellius. The final revelation begins

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GELLIUS

26

AND

THE

LOVER'S

PALLOR

: A NOTE

ON CATULLUS

8o

in a tone of triumphant confidence: sic certe est (7). Note the

from feigned ignorance to suspicion to certainty
progression
marked by the opening words of couplets 1, 3, and 4: quid ... ?
(1); nescioquid certe est: an uere ... ? (5); sic certe est. (7)
So too we progress from the whispers of gossip (susurr?t, 5) to
the shout of the truth (clamant, 7). The conventional erotic clich?
is finally exploded once and for all by the disclosure of a shocking
neces
ly literal reason for the whiteness of Gellius' lips (8). It is not
sary to dilate upon the perfect visual aptness of the comparison
of what is on his lips to whey, but the language of the last line
does deserve comment. Catullus now discards both the euphe
mistic obliqueness of the third couplet and the poetic love-talk of
the first. We have instead a last line made up of the brutally plain
and specific language of medicine
and the farm. Grandia and
tenta (6) had no nouns, but now rupta is completed by ilia, a
word that is specific, technical, and medical
(Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae s.v. ite). Of the words which state the highly appropri
ate comparison
(one of them the climactic final word in the
a
poem), two are straight from the barnyard and a third is pun
on an agricultural word. Emulgere
is a rare word; its usage and
that of mulgere are restricted, except for Catullus and Christian
writers, to agricultural contexts (Thesaurus Linguae Latinae s.w.
is in both its innocent and its
emulgere ir mulgere).
Emulgere
sexual meanings the exact counterpart of that other piece of farm
seems to be actu
inspired indecency, irrumare, although the latter
(cf. A. Ernout and
ally obscene. Serum is also a rustic word
A. Meillet, Dictionnaire
?tymologique de la langue latine, Paris
s.v.

1950-51,

serum).

for "lips" becomes labra, a straightforward and prosy

not the only
replacement for the sentimental labella. But "lips" is
a word fre
means
L?brum
also
this
word
"tub,"
suggests.
thing
quently occurring in agricultural contexts (e.g. Cato R. R. 11
12.50). As Cato's
[bis] and 13; Virgil Georgi?s 2.6; Columella
The word

usage

shows,

labra

could

vary

in

size

and

and

function

we

can

a tub of whey. By punning on labrum Catullus has

easily imagine
us
a
new
point of comparison, which goes beyond the literal
given
of Gellius' lips. Now his mouth, to
explanation of the whiteness
with
what
Catullus
claims
by implication to be its contents,
gether
is likened to a tub of whey. Gellius suffers a fate at his hands very
much like that of the unfortunate Aemilius of c. 97; there Catullus
uses

the

same

sort

of

barnyard

language

to assert

the

likeness

of

his victim's mouth to a cart of dung.3 Aemilius would have been

able to see from the language of the first couplet of the poem
devoted to him the gross nature of the insults Catullus was pre
a deceptive atmos
paring for him; Gellius was to be misled by
a
an
of
convention,
appropriate strategy against
literary
phere
man who seems to have had some pretensions to poetry himself.4

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Leo

C. Curran

27

Poetic,
Kenneth

Scientific,

and
The

NOTES
1 For

of c. 97 cf. Joshua Whatmough,

analyses
Forms
and
Other
1956,
of Discourse,
Berkeley
Catullan
Melbourne
Revolution,
1959, p. 36.

Quinn,

2 It is at least as old as
so many
31.13-14.
Like
cf. Frag.
Sappho;
it was
to suffer the ultimate
fate
stock conventions
of love poetry
line of Ovid's:
statement
in an epigrammatic
definitive

of
of

the

palleat

omnis

3 Cf.

Whatmough,
ironic recognition
are two
significant

minutive miselli
separation

of rupta

amans:

hic

est color

aptus

ti

loe. cit., for this interpretation

at the
in language
of the change
modes
of the discarded
echoes

(7) recalls the diminutive

(7)

from

its noun

is the natural

inference

to be

1.729).

(Ars

c. 97. As an
of c. 80, there
the di
speech:

of
end
of

in the first line and the

in the

following

drawn

in c.

coy ellipsis of grandia and tenta (6 ).

4 This

aman

line

116

recalls

from

the

the

fact

that itwas by the gift of a translation of Callimachus that Catullus had

in that same poem,

Gellius'
to
furthermore,
him;
hoped
mollify
to have been,
like Catul
(tela, 4 and 7) may be presumed
"weapons"
8 ), poems.
lus' "weapons"
(nostris,

once

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