LATIN LOVER

Tender, obscene, sophisticated, Catullus continues to seduce us.

- BY DANIEL MENDELSOHN

The emotional volatility of the poet's work had no precedent in Latin verse.

Was it something to do with blow jobs? Incredulous, I looked again at page 82 of my Latin textbook, then over to the entry in the dictionary; then once more at 82. From the bottom of the page, the word I'd been puzzling over all day seemed to be leering back at me. Until that moment, “Two Centuries of Roman Poetry” had struck me as harmless enough: a collection of excerpts from the major Latin poets, pitched to the reading level of an intermediate college Latin student—which is what I happened to be that evening in the early autumn of 1979, when I learned what the word really meant and it dawned on me that there might be more to Roman verse than philosophical musing, pastoral idylls, and heroic derring-do.

In class that morning, I'd been called on to sight-translate a handful of lines by Gaius Valerius Catullus, the first-century-B.C.E. poet who, the professor had warned us, was among the most erudite and sophisticated, the most doctus, of all Roman writers. In the poem at hand, Catullus ruefully recalls having served on the staff of a provincial governor, bitterly referring to him—because he didn't let his subordinates enrich themselves at the expense of the locals—as an irrumator. When I stumbled across the unfamiliar noun, I hazarded a guess: “Cheapskate?” Professor Stocker, who'd got his Ph.D. before the Second World War and liked to wear bow ties, pursed his lips, made a face, and declared, a little too loudly, “You may render that word as ‘bastard.’”

So I did. But something about his discomfiture had made me curious. That evening, in the library, I took down a Latin dictionary from the shelf and flipped to the “I”s. Within moments, I saw why he'd hurried me past the word. According to “An Elementary Latin Dictionary,” the verb inrumo—the root of