Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,
nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes (Catull. 58).
Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia, that same Lesbia, whom alone Catullus once loved more than himself and all others, now jerks off the descendants of magnanimous Remus on street corners and in back alleys.
Glubit is one of the more infamous words in the Catullan corpus and for good reason1. The verb represents a rare (at least in extant literature) piece of Roman sexual slang and it delivers the punch line for an insult poem belonging to the Lesbia cycle2. Shocked by its “truly awful salaciousness”, John Bodoh argues that the word “controls the whole” of Catullus 583. Scholarship on glubere in Catullus has tended to focus on its vulgarity and which (if any) specific sex act the word denotes. Here, I revisit the word to interpret the implications of its agricultural origins. My own concern is not over which particular sex act the verb signifies but rather for the polysemic meanings imported by the slang metaphor’s literal definition. I do not aim to challenge or supplant the efforts of others to define glubere but instead to suggest an additional layer of meaning to its usage. I offer that the verb glubit introduces the specter of violence into the poem and serves to intensify and invert dynamics of power, portraying Lesbia as an overly active, dominant, and dangerous sexual being while compromising the masculinity of the Roman men she services.
Scholarship on Catullus 58.5 and its Priapic mockery has obsessed over the actual act signified by glubit. For example, Robert J. Penella makes a compelling case (following Lenz) that glubere refers to manual stimulation of the genitals (as I have translated above), while J. N. Adams insists that Catullus “provides no clue what form of stimulation he intended”4. Others, such as J. G. Randall, argue that glubere is at least suggestive of oral sex5. Still others question whether the verb implies a transitive sex act at all, while Kenneth Quinn offers the possibility that glubit might only refer to “stripping” lovers of their clothing and, in a financial sense, their money6.
Much of the confusion stems from the peculiarity of its usage, since Catullus is the earliest surviving author to use the word in a sexual context. Glubere is, in its more literal sense, a technical agricultural term meaning “to strip the bark off a tree”, “to peel the husk off of grain”, or “to skin a sheep”. For example, Cato advises to “cut the willow at the right time, strip the bark and bind it fast” (salictum suo tempore caedito, glubito arteque alligato; Agr. 33.5). Varro uses the word to describe stripping bark from olive branches (Rust. 1.55.2) and proposes that gluma (“husk”) is etymologically derived from glubere, “because the grain is stripped from this shell” (quod eo folliculo deglubitur granum; Rust. 1.48.2)7.
Glubere clearly became a sexual metaphor in Roman slang, and it is hardly alone as a Latin agricultural term to do double duty by representing some aspect of sexuality8. Perhaps harkening back to Catullus, the Late Antique poet Ausonius uses deglubere to mean “manipulation of the penis during masturbation”9. As Julia Gaisser suggests, “stripping” or “peeling” the bark likely refers to the foreskin of the penis, indicating sexual arousal and an erection10. H. D. Jocelyn therefore notes that glubit “possessed an obvious metaphorical potentiality for anyone talking or writing about sex in a community which did not practice circumcision”11. Jocelyn observes the importance of glubere’s rustic origins, offering that “its use at [Catullus] 58.5 conveyed a tone of urbane contempt for the woman’s present way of life”12. Randall also invokes the agricultural meanings of glubere, arguing that “just as a human hand is instrumental in stripping the bark off a willow or indeed in divesting an animal of its skin, so the hand of one or the other of the partners is responsible for retracting the man’s foreskin”13. Peter Green connects glubit with Juvenal’s use of praeputia ducit (“leading back the foreskin”), evocative of masturbation, at Sat. 6.238 and argues that glubit “skins” an uncircumcised male through manual stimulation14.
However, as anyone who has ever stripped the bark off an actual tree without the aid of a pressure washer (for the record, I have) can attest, there is hardly a tree that will shed its bark with a gentle caress. Rather, the task is typically performed with a knife, axe, sickle, or similar tool. This was certainly true in Greco-Roman antiquity15. The sexual appropriation of the verb therefore invokes the imagery – whatever the sexual act described – of Lesbia taking a sharp tool to a phallic object. This reading is further supported by the etymological origin of glubere. The verb is imported from the Greek γλύφω, meaning to carve, cut, or gouge with a knife. So it is that, more than a century ago, William Loring concluded that glubere presumes an action performed with a cutting tool of some kind16. An incisive tool must also be assumed in skinning a sheep. Even in case skinning, in which the animal’s skin is removed like a sock (perhaps most suggestive of praeputia ducit among glubere’s agricultural definitions), incision and cutting remain prerequisites. In its third agricultural potentiality, removing the husk from grain, a knife would not have been used. Nevertheless, threshing was a process that involved violent stamping, often by livestock, on the grain. When a threshing board or sledge (tribulum) was employed, this implement used sharp stones or iron to remove the glume17. The Iliad captures the violence of threshing, since it likens warfare to the threshing and winnowing of grain. Achilles’ horses trample the dead like oxen threshing and husking barley while an arrow rebounds from Menelaus’ breastplate like beans or chickpeas sent flying by the blade of the winnowing shovel18.
As Jeffery Henderson has observed, all three possible agricultural definitions of glubere and the word’s sexually charged slang usage find earlier precedent in Greek synonyms, such as the various compounds of δέρειν (“to skin”, “to flay”) and λέπειν (“to peel”)19. Shane Hawkins notes these agricultural definitions and their earlier Greek attestations, and he argues that “we are not supposed to imagine Lesbia doing any of these things in a literal sense, but ... glubere is a double entendre with a sexual connotation”20. This is, of course, true, yet the role of glubere’s rustic origins in the double entendre can be pushed further; all of glubere’s agricultural definitions, as well as the de prefix of deglubere, conjure not merely retraction but separation21. Hence, there is a certain violence to glubere’s imagery, and Catullus’ sexual use of glubit seems to imply an act of violence in addition to whatever lewd act he might suggest, threatening the male bodies of the magnanimi Remi nepotes who are its object. As Benjamin Eldon Stevens argues of Catullus’ vulgar and vituperative slurs and threats, they contain “literal, physical, and sexual force”22. Titillating as its figurative sense might be, glubit in its literal sense should make most men at least slightly uneasy. This would have been especially true of Catullus’ Roman audience, who found circumcision an abhorrent practice23.
Rabelais seems to have understood Catullus 58 in this way, since he connects Catullus’ use of glubere with a scheme of women to flay men alive, as well as with the Jewish custom of circumcision:
Les femmes, au commencement du monde, ou peu après, ensemblement conspirerent escorcher les hommes tous vifz, parce que sus elles maistriser vouloient en tous lieux. Et feut cestuy decret promis, confermé et juré entre elles par le sainct sang breguoy. Mais, ô vaines entreprinses des femmes, ô grande fragilité du sexe feminin ! Elles commencerent escorcher l’homme, ou gluber, comme le nomme Catulle, par la partie qui plus leurs hayte, c’est le member nerveulx, caverneulx, plus de six mille ans a, et toutesfoys jusques à praesent n’en ont escorché que la teste. Dont, par fin despit, les Juifz eulx mesmes en circuncision se le couppent et retaillent, mieulx aymans estre dictz recutitz et retaillatz marranes, que escorchez par femmes, comme les aultres nations.
When the world began, or not long after, women got together and decided to skin men alive, because all over the world they wanted to be in the driver’s seat. So they all swore this great holy oath – but how silly women are! Oh, the endless fragility of the entire female sex! They did indeed begin to skin men alive (peel them, as Catullus puts it), and they began with the part they liked best, namely, our nerveless, swerveless stick – and here we are, more than six thousand years later, and in all that time they haven’t gotten past the head of it. And so, with a wonderful flair for revenge, the Jews actually circumcise themselves, cutting all around the head: they’d rather be called nipped pricks or chopped-off Marranos than be skinned by women the way other people are24.
For Rabelais, then, the erotic “peeling” conjured by Catullus’ glubit functions as a performative symbol of violence, and Rabelais’ satire situates this act within gendered struggles for power. If the verb glubere represents a “demonstration of male virility”, as David LaGuardia argues, Rabelais obscenely locates its origins with “women’s phantasmic desires to skin and emasculate men”25. Furthermore, if glubit does add a violent layer – even if more symbolic than literal – to the poem, we might connect the Lesbia of Poem 58 with both the Lesbia rumpens of Poem 11 and the monstrous Scylla of Poem 6026.
In Poem 11, we find a Lesbia in tension, posing a threat to the men with whom she associates, even as she pleasures them (17-20):
cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens
Let her live and let her flourish with her adulterers, three hundred of whom she holds in simultaneous embrace, loving none of them truly, but breaking the groins of all of them again and again.
After describing his own prospective travels in terms evocative of sexual penetration (penetrabit, 2), Catullus reverses the poem’s asymmetrical gender relations. Overly active and rapacious, Lesbia repeatedly “breaks” or “destroys” the groins of her male partners, as rumpens suggests destructive consequences well beyond simply bringing to orgasm27. As R. T. Scott observes, ilia “turns up frequently” in Latin poetry “in descriptions of mortal wounds being inflicted in combat”28. Lesbia’s “hold” (tenet, complexa) on these men degrades their masculine standing and diminishes them to moechi (if they weren’t already). The danger posed by Lesbia’s sexuality to masculine power is reiterated in the poem’s final lines. Catullus laments his own alienation and wounded love (amorem, 21) (22-24):
qui illius culpa cecedit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratro est.
Which by her fault has fallen just like a flower at a meadow’s edge, touched by the passing plow.
As the aggressive initiator of her many liaisons, Lesbia asserts sexual dominance and cuts down Catullus’ masculine standing (with imagery drawn from a traditionally male agricultural activity). Catullus here alludes to Sappho 105c and the poet positions himself, bitterly, as the vulnerable “feminine” party enduring abuse29. As David R. Sweet notes, penetrabit “gives way to tactus est”. Catullus “becomes feminine, a virginal flower”, while Lesbia becomes “masculine”, “conquering”, and “man-devouring”30. When Lesbia takes or discards a lover, it is she who does the plowing.
Poem 60, which Hawkins convincingly argues is directed at Lesbia, asks whether its addressee is the monstrous child of “Scylla barking from the deepest part of her crotch” (Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte, 60.2). As Marianne Hopman has shown, drawing upon a “triple analogy among mouth, female genitals, and straits” present in numerous classical sources, Scylla is associated with the folkloric archetype of the vagina dentata – “the woman whose genitals are covered with teeth and who therefore threatens to castrate or kill her sexual partners”31. This allows us to press this connection between the Lesbia of Poem 58 and the Scylla of Poem 60 one step further. For Hopman, Scylla is representative of gender anxieties and tied to “to androgynous females like Clytemnestra, who appropriates male attributes” and – at least symbolically – unmans her male victims through her sexual aggression32. If I am correct in my reading of glubit and if Lesbia is scorned as a daughter of Scylla, Poems 58 and 60 present in tandem a picture of Lesbia as a femme fatale, who voraciously menaces Remi nepotes.
According to conventional interpretations, the proposed sexual definitions for glubit would place Lesbia in the position of the passive/penetrated partner. In both manual stimulation and fellatio, the Romans considered the receiving partner to be the active penetrator, particularly with respect to the latter act33. Julia Dyson argues that when Lesbia “shucks”, she not only displays “indiscriminate sexual rapacity” but also suffers “added humiliation represented by what the Romans considered the most degrading of sexual acts”34. Hence, Gary Dyer reads Catullus’ final picture of Lesbia in Poem 58 as “one of degradation”35. This degradation is, of course, amplified by the quadriviis et angiportis, which serve as base, public settings for her trysts and suggest that she performs as a prostitute and services lovers beneath her social station36.
However, through the active voice of glubit and its perhaps violent connotations, Catullus portrays Lesbia eagerly participating in – yet also exercising power through – sexual acts that should ordinarily control and degrade her. Lesbia is rendered an overly active sexual being, appropriating the dominant role normally reserved for men. This empowering dimension to the vigorous activity of glubere is underscored by the word’s agricultural origins, since Cato – an early source for glubere – presupposes that the Roman villa is a male administered and male dominated environment, and that the agricultural activities denoted by glubere would ideally be performed by males. Glubere is thus gender-coded, much as spinning and weaving are feminine activities in Greek and Roman literature. Taken a step further, we might read the gendered implications of glubere in tension with connotations of class: glubere may be a male activity on the Roman villa, but it is likely a servile one. Glubit thus undermines Lesbia’s social standing even as it suggests a masculine performance. Lesbia’s active, masculine dominance inverts the normative model of the active/passive dichotomy, constructing the Lesbia of Poem 58 (in conjunction with Poems 11 and 37) as a deviant representation of femininity. For Holt Parker, such an abnormal female becomes “a monster who violates boundaries ... built on a model of aggressive male sexuality”37. Catullus thus makes a farce of Lesbia, whose sexual voracity is something of a familiar joke in the Catullan corpus and beyond.
This farcical dimension to glubere’s sexual dynamics bears something, too, in common with Catullus’ use of cinaediorem of a woman at 10.24. Lesbia performs as a man, but badly: even while she asserts sexual agency, independence, and dominance, Lesbia actively and aggressively makes herself available as a vehicle for the gratification of male sexual pleasure. Like a cinaedus, Lesbia’s indulgence threatens to compromise the masculinity of her male citizen lovers, the descendants of Remus38. If we understand Lesbia as cinaedus-like – even if Catullus does not use this precise word of her – glubit helps construct a Lesbia in tension, who prefigures a later imperial “tendency to ascribe aggressiveness ... to the cinaedus” as someone who “challeng[es] the paradigm of sexual dominance and submission by ... role interchange”39.
In my reading, glubere’s agricultural, literal definitions go beyond constructing Lesbia as a degraded woman with amplified and deviant sexual appetites. In contrast to other verbs at Catullus’ disposal, glubere at least hints towards the violent diminishment of her lovers’ masculinities and so extends the joke to the men Lesbia services. As Jonathan Walters well notes, the body of a Roman male citizen was supposed to be inviolable. However, adulterers who slept with married women lost this privilege, and Roman poetry suggests castration and anal rape at the hands of slaves as punishments for adultery40. Of course, I do not suggest anal rape as a sexual act implied by glubere. However, glubere seems to share in the gender and socio-hierarchical dynamics of these Roman folk punishments for moechi. Glubit humiliates Lesbia’s lovers by symbolically evoking the violation of their male bodies by social inferiors and, possibly, pairs a punishment fit for adultery with the act itself.
This interpretation finds support in Plautus’ Poenulus, in which Antamonides uses deglubere to insult Hanno as a “skinned fish” (deglupta maena, 1312). The barb is levied amidst a tirade of invectives, dispensed against Hanno because Antamonides believes Hanno to have embraced a woman without the social standing to do so. Wolfgang de Melo reads deglupta as “an insult based on Hanno’s presumable circumcision”41. Deglupta maena is but one part of a flood of obscure epithets and insults that systematically debase Hanno’s masculinity, non-Roman ethnicity, and social status. For example, Antamonides suggests that Hanno belongs to a “Lotharian race with flowing tunics” (genus hoc mulierosumst tunicis demissiciis, 1303), calls Hanno a “man with with long tunics like a tavern boy” (homo est cum tunicis longis quasi puer cauponius, 1298) and an “African hussy” (amatricem Africam, 1304), and addresses him as mulier (“woman”, 1305). John Starks argues that ligula (“little spoon” or “shoe-tongue”, 1309) suggests “the demeaningly unmasculine act of cunnilingus” and that “hallex viri (‘man no better than the residual smut at the bottom of garum’) certainly means that he is worthless, smelly, disgusting scum, but also may disparage Hanno’s sexuality”42. A few lines later, Antamonides charges Hanno’s Carthaginian relative, Agorastocles (who would also be presumed circumcised), with the worst kind of unmanliness: nam te cinaedum esse arbitror magis quam virum (“For I judge that you are a cinaedus rather than a real man”, 1318), while insinuating that the man is a member of the cult of Cybele, whose male followers were castrated and depicted as effeminate, womanish half men43. Whatever else the idiomatic deglupta maena implies, Plautus’ text associates deglubere with the cinaedus, an effeminate man who desires to be penetrated. To be a vir degluptus, then, is to have one’s masculinity (and, perhaps, one’s Romanity) diminished. This reading of glubere at 58.5 invites associations with Lesbia’s presumed lovers of Poem 37, whom Catullus threatens with irrumation44. As Maria S. Marsilio reads of the sexual dynamics and role inversions of Poem 37, Lesbia “has abandoned the pudor that should characterise the ideal behaviour of the proper matrona” and fails to heed social boundaries. Her “action merges the military and the sexual”, and, coupled with her denial of “high social rank, fidelity, modesty, restraint and shame”, Lesbia reduces “crowds of men ... to her sexual subordinates”45.
Quinn observes that the ironically grandiloquent tone of magnanimi Remi nepotes insults the men as well as Lesbia herself46. Choosing the reading magnanimos for magnanimi, Muse suggests that the epithet effeminizes Lesbia’s customers by casting them as “decadent progeny” and “dandified prodigals”47. My reading of Poem 58 would have glubere add to this insult. Like the Lesbia of Poem 11 who “breaks the groins” of her men, and her associations with Scylla in Poem 60 (following Hawkins’ reading), Lesbia’s monstrous sexual voracity threatens the manhood of her clients. If one layer of glubere’s meaning does introduce the specter of penetrating violence and diminished masculinity into the poem, then magnanimi (or magnanimos) Remi nepotes acquires meaning beyond the grandiloquent irony observed by Quinn and Muse. Remi is by no means a haphazard or metrically convenient alternative to Romuli. The men whose “bark” Lesbia strips are descendants of Remus, the brother whose body was penetrated, not of Romulus, the brother who wielded the blade.