Furius and Aurelius, who will accompany Catullus,
whether he will penetrate to the Indians at the outside limit,
where the beach is beaten by the wave
of the far-resounding Dawn,
or to the Hyrcani and the soft Arabs, 5
or the Sagae or the arrow-bearing Parthians,
or the plains dyed
by the sevenfold Nile,
or whether he will march across the high Alps,
inspecting the monuments of Caesar the Great, 10
the Gallic Rhine, the Britons, horrible with woad
and on the edge,
prepared to try along with me all these things,
wherever the heavenly ones’ wish will tend,
give my girl a brief message, 15
not a kind one:
good-bye and good luck to her, along with her adulterers,
whom she holds three hundred at a time in her embrace,
loving none of them truly, but again and again
rupturing the loins of all of them; 20
nor should she look back, as before, on my love,
which by her fault has fallen like a flower
on the edge of a meadow, after it has been nicked
by a passing plow. 24The language of extremities and borders controls the whole poem, as Catullus
plays with the idea that he will emulate Pompey and Caesar in their emulation of
Alexander the Great, going to the edge of his world with the end of his love, where
the vulnerable flower of his love will go under to the civilizing plow of Lesbia (22 –
24). Pompey had bragged of taking over the province of Asia when it was ultimam,
on the outside edge, and making it mediam,in the middle (Pliny HN7.99). In
Catullus’s poem, this language of extremity is vital: ends, boundaries, extremities
of all kinds, are what makes this poem of termination work. The word ultimosis in
the middle of the poem (10 – 11), and it recurs at one of the edges of the poem, in
the second-to-last line (23), while its synonym, extremos,is at the other edge of the
poem, its beginning, in line 2. Catullus is responding to the notion that the limits
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East