Sunday, February 5, 2012
Ah-- Egnatius! An elite Roman reader would absolutely have perceived this method of oral hygiene as gross. One of the self-assigned duties of the invective poet (invective meaning the poet who attacks his enemies) is to "stain" his enemy with his verse. This "staining" is very often done through accusations of various kinds of impurity. Sexual impurity is always popular! but so are accusations that the person has an inappropriate mouth. So, accusations that a person can't speak properly, or eats inappropriate food, or uses his mouth for inappropriate purposes (back to the sexual impurity trope), or has strange dental work, or has lost teeth, or does something like brushing his teeth with urine are all available to an 'attack poet' to use. Your observation that it would be unpleasant for Lesbia to kiss someone who brushed his teeth with urine gets at the real point of the poem-- Catullus is "staining" Lesbia by revealing the worst about the men she prefers to him.
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ReplyDeleteThank you for posting this. It is very interesting to learn about this concept of "staining" in Roman poetry, in conjunction with broader cultural ideas about impurity. I remember noticing in Dugan's Roman Civ assigned readings last year that there was a subtle but recurrent theme of impurity and pollution in one or two of the historians we read. Not to mention the fabulous (or is it "Fabullus"?) symbolism of the Cloaca! In this class it seems sometimes that the poet &/or narrator is describing people or their writings by telling us what they are _not_ almost as often as he does by telling us what they _are_, e.g. "insulsa," "infestus," "inelegans," "ineptio," etc. Cf. Garrison's count of three instances of "invenustus" and seven for "venustus" (in the endnote for 12.5).
ReplyDeleteGratias K Roache.
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