Lesbia. Painting by John Reinhard Weguelin.

My honeygirl, she holds her sparrow to her breasts

And plays with it, all greedy, it’s her delight

she pets it with her little finger, gives it a tweak,

hoping it’ll give her a sharp bite.

When my glorious desiregirl is moved

to play with a little thing she loves, 

I guess, when hard passion’s done and down,

It can give her relief and lift her frown.

I wish I could play with you like she does,

And ease her mind and all its woes. 

That translation’s mine. But that’s just vanity on my part. There’s no shortage of Catullus translations.

Anyway, there are people who say a sparrow is just a sparrow. But the imagery of the sparrow poems is too sexual for that to seem likely. And when the sparrow dies, Catullus calls on Eros and the Amors, the little gods of love, to weep for it. If it was just a dead pet sparrow, Eros wouldn’t give a hoot about it, or a twang. 

There are people who say it’s Catullus’s cock. I’d thought so when Svitlana took my cock and balls in her hand and cradled them like a pet. That happened in “One swallow doesn’t make a spring #20”, which you can find below. Svitlana’s gesture, playful and loving, though we were more or less strangers, reminded me of Catullus’s sparrow poems.

But I went through the process of translating them, expecting to find a poem in which a woman lovingly handles her man’s cock. I thought there’d be submissives who’d like the imagery, and the sense of being in a cock-cradling tradition over 2,000 years old. But as I went through the poems, I realised I was wrong. 

Lesbia. Victorian painting. She keeps her sparrow in her lap. Peep! Peep!

The sparrow is Lesbia’s cunt. She plays with it when Catullus is worn out and has no more “hard passion”. She puts her little fingers in and it bites, or at least the lips close on her finger. And Catullus would like to play with it too, until he gets his passion back. 

So what does it mean when her cunt “dies”, in the second sparrow poem? First, it’s possible that the death is the proverbial “little death”, and it’s a mock elegy on Lesbia’s orgasm. I can’t actually remember an example, in Latin literature, of the idea of orgasm as a kind of small death, or at least a shut-down of the body, but it’s certainly an old idea. If I can find an example from the right historical period, that would be useful. 

Second, it’s a prefiguring of the death of Catullus’s and Lesbia’s love. Her cunt becomes, in a sense, “dead to him”. 

One piece of support for the idea that Lesbia’s “sparrow” was her cunt is that Catullus uses the Latin word “passer”. This means any small bird, and not necessarily a sparrow. But “passer” also has a slang meaning, though we don’t know how old this slang meaning is. In Italian “passera” means both little bird and “vagina”. Did it mean that in ancient Rome too? 

Here I’m just going to guess, and say that some slang terms, like the ones for genitals, don’t change much, or at all, over time. So “passer” probably did make Catullus’s readers think of cunt. And sparrows too, of course.

Anyway, Lesbia’s sparrow was well worth her time, and Catullus’s. 

I’m going to hold off my theory about Lesbia’s sparrow and what it means, because it might be an idea to give the context for this, and why people care.

Catullus comforting Lesbia on the death of her sparrow.” Antonio Zucchi, 1773.

About 2070 years ago, somewhere around 60 BCE, the Roman poet Catullus wrote a book of poems. Quite a few of them were about his lover, who he called “Lesbia”, to disguise her real name. The poems addressed to Lesbia start with the poet besotted, but over the sequence of poems, the poems about arguments and doubts become more frequent, and the last poems he writes about her are only curses and insults.

We know much less about Catullus, and Lesbia, than people used to think.

We do know that Lesbia’s real name was “Clodia”. It used to be assumed that Catullus’s Clodia was the same person as the Clodia who is mentioned in one of Cicero’s court speeches. That speech was mainly an attack on her brother, but Cicero took time out to call Clodia a prostitute, degenerate and general slut.

So people used to treat Catullus’ account of his affair fairly sympathetically: “Of course, if an innocent young man takes up with a woman like that, he’s going to have a hard time. Poor bastard.”

But we don’t really know if Catullus’s Clodia is the same woman as the Clodia that Cicero attacked. But we do know that Cicero was a lawyer, out to win his case by smearing the other side. So we don’t really know if anything Cicero said about his Clodia is true.

So we’re turned back to the poems themselves, which is as it should be. What you get from the poems is that Catullus and Lesbia were lovers, who fell out and separated. Catullus took it hard, and by modern standards he didn’t take it very well. In fact he took it ugly.

It’s hard to feel sympathy for him all the way through, though I think most people forgive him because of his passion, his honesty (of a kind, and within limits), his wit and his readiness to put himself down as well as others.

But the fact is, Catullus is exactly the kind of guy who’d have published revenge porn about Lesbia/Clodia on the net if the technology had been around. “Here’s a photo I took when she was sucking my cock, and here’s one of her wanking for me, and here’s one of her in the bath. And here’s her facebook page and her mother’s email.”

But he couldn’t. So instead he wrote and published poems in which she supposedly stands by the road and fucks passing soldiers for money.

This is a modern statue of Catullus. We have no idea what Catullus really looked like, except that he died at about 30, so he was never as old as this statue seems to be.

So: Catullus. He’s hard to defend, except that he wasn’t just a young man (he died when he was about 30), he was a young man 2070 years ago, in a civilisation that wasn’t big on the rights of women, or sensitivity, and that tended to admire revenge. So he was a boy of his time, but he burned brightly, he shone.

He hurt Clodia and Clodia maybe hurt him (maybe, even leaving Cicero out of it). But they’ve all been a long time dead, now.   

Bear with me, please. I’ll finish this aside on Catullus in one or two more posts, and then we can get back to the punishing of Svitlana, and what she thought of having her bottom leathered, on a first date.  

My honeygirl, she holds her sparrow to her breasts

Sparrows doing what comes naturally.

She plays with it, all greedy, it’s her delight

she puts it to her little finger, gives it a tweak,

hoping it’ll give her a sharp bite.

when my glorious desiregirl is moved

to play with a little thing she loves… 

I have no good reason for using this picture. Because cats like sparrows? 

That makes the sparrow sound like it might be a code for a cock, doesn’t it? Of course, the words I’ve chosen for this translation help that interpretation.

But the poem isn’t finished yet, and it throws the question back up, sparrow-like, into the air. Or somewhere else.

I’ll translate the rest of the poem, and then reveal the answer. My answer, anyway. 

All the little spirits of love,

Painting of Lesbia and her sparrow by George Joy, a happy Victorian.

and all of you who beauty moves,

Should weep: my girl’s sparrow’s dead.

That sparrow was my girl’s delight.

She loved him more than her sight.

He was as sweet as honey,

He knew her like she knew her own mummy. 

He’d stay in her lap, never left her lap,

Hopping up and down. 

He sang to my girl, alone. 

But he’s gone down the shadow road.

No coming back from his new abode.

That’s the first half of one of Catullus’s two poems about his mistress “Lesbia” and her sparrow. The translation’s by me, and as you can see even from the English, it’s pretty rough. Anyway, there’s a question people have been asking about this poem for the 600 or so years since someone found a surviving copy of Catullus’s poems. Is the sparrow just a sparrow? Or is it Catullus’s cock?

I’ll translate the other Lesbia-sparrow poem, and then I’ll make my guess.