"If only we could all become eunuchs!" he declared. "What man wouldn't be happier?"
"I suppose we could become eunuchs, if we wanted."
"Ha! The act is harder than you might think. I know, I've seen it with my own eyes. While I was in Bithynia, I took a journey to the ruins of old Troy, to find the place where my brother's buried. So far from home! On the way back a stranger asked me if I'd like to see the initiation rites of the galli. He wanted money, of course. Took me to a temple on the slopes of Mount Ida. The priests wanted money, too. I felt quite the gawking tourist, dropping coins into all those eager hands, just another crass, thrill-seeking Roman looking for a taste of the 'real' East. They took me to a room so smoky with incense I could hardly see, and so loud with flutes and tambourines I thought I'd go deaf. The rite was under way. The galli chanted and whirled in a weird dance, like fingers of the goddess keeping time. The young initiate had worked himself into a frenzy, naked, covered with sweat, undulating with the music. Someone put a shard of broken pottery into his hand-'Samian pottery,' the guide whispered in my ear, 'the only kind sure to avoid a putrid wound.' While I watched, the fellow turned himself into a gallus before my eyes. All by himself-no one helped him. It was quite a thing to see. Afterward, when the blood was running down his legs and he couldn't stand any longer, the others swarmed around him, swaying, chanting, shrieking. The guide sniggered and poked me in the ribs and made a show of covering his balls. I ran out of the place in a panic."
Catullus fell silent for a while. We reached the top of the path and entered the maze of dark, silent streets.
"Imagine the freedom," Catullus whispered. "To leave the appetites of the flesh behind."
"The galli have appetites," I said. "They eat like men."
"Yes, but a man eats and is done with it. The craving I'm talking about feeds on itself. The more it's fed, the hungrier it grows."
"A Roman controls his appetites, not vice versa."
"Then perhaps we aren't Romans any longer. Show me a man in Rome who's larger than his appetites."
I thought about this while we made our way through the winding, deep-shadowed streets.
"But even castration can't guarantee an end to passion," Catullus resumed. "Look at Trygonion!" "What about him?"
"Don't you know where his name comes from? The famous epitaph by Philodemus?"
"Should I recognize that name?"
"Barbarian! Philodemus of Gadera. Probably the greatest living poet of the Greek tongue."
"Oh, that Philodemus. An epitaph, you say?"
"Written years and years ago for a dead gallus called Trygonion. Can you follow the Greek?"
"I'll translate in my head."
"Very welclass="underline"
Here lies that tender creature of ladylike limbs,
Trygonion, prince of the sex-numb emasculates,
Beloved of the Great Mother, Cybele,
He alone of the galli was seduced by a woman.
Holy earth, give to this headstone a pillow
Of budding white violets.
"That old poem is how our Trygonion got his name. I don't remember what he was called before, something Phrygian and unpronounceable. One time, teasing him about his weakness for Lesbia, I called him our little Trygonion, the gallus who fell for a woman. The name stuck to Trygonion the way Trygonion sticks to Lesbia. I think of him whenever I consider castrating myself. It might do no good, you see. A useless gesture. Sometimes passion is stronger than flesh. Love can last beyond death, and in some rare instances a man's weakness for beauty can even outlive his testicles."
"Trygonion is that devoted to Lesbia?"
"He suffers as I suffer, but with one great difference."
"Which is?"
"Trygonion suffers without hope." "And you?"
"While a man still has his balls, he has hope!" Catullus laughed his peculiar, barking laugh. "Even slaves have hope, as long as they have their balls. But a gallus in love with a beautiful woman-"
"So much in love that he would do anything for her?"
"Any at all, without question."
"So much in love that he might be blinded by jealousy?" "Driven mad by it!"
"He could be dangerous. Unpredictable… "
"Not nearly as dangerous as Lesbia." Catullus was suddenly giddy, trotting ahead of me and circling back, leaping up to swing at lamps hung from upper-story windows along the street. "Damned bitch! The Medea of the Palatine!"
"Medea was a witch, as I recall, and rather wicked."
"Only because she was 'sick at heart, wounded by cruel love,' as the playwright says. A witch, yes, and wounded-only it's me she's bewitched, and Caelius who wounded her. Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans!"
"A quadrans? As cheap as that?"
"Why not? The price of admission to the Senian baths." "But Clytemnestra murdered her husband."
"Agamemnon deserved it!" He whirled like a frenzied gallus. "Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a-quadrans!" he chanted. "Who calls her such things?"
"I do!" said Catullus. He abruptly stopped his whirling and staggered ahead of me, gasping for breath. "I just made them up, out of my head. What do you think? I'll need some fresh invectives if I'm to get her attention again."
"You're a strange suitor, Catullus."
"I love a strange woman. Do you want to know a secret about her? Something that no else in all the world knows, not even Lesbius? I wouldn't know myself, if I hadn't spied on her one night. Do you know that giant monstrosity of a Venus in her garden?"
"I happened to notice it, yes."
"The pedestal appears to be solid, but it's not. There's a block that slides out, opening a secret compartment. It's where she keeps her trophies."
"Trophies?"
"Mementos. Keepsakes. One night in bed with her, happily dozing after hours of making love, I felt a tickling at my groin. I opened one eye to see her clipping away a bit of my pubic hair! She stole out of the room with it. I followed her to the garden. From the shadows I watched her open the pedestal and put what she had taken from me inside. Later I went back and figured out how to open the compartment, and I saw what she kept there. Poems I had sent her. Letters from her other lovers. Bits of jewelry, clippings of hair, childish gifts her brother must have given her when they were little. Her love trophies!"
He suddenly staggered against a wall and clutched his face. "I wanted to destroy it all," he whispered hoarsely. "I wanted to scoop up all her treasures and throw them on the brazier and watch them burst into flame. But I couldn't. I felt the eyes of the goddess on me. I stepped back from the pedestal and looked up at her face. I left her mementos alone. If I destroyed them, I knew she would never forgive me."
"Who would never forgive you-Venus or Lesbia?"
He looked at me with tragic eyes. "Is there any difference?"
Chapter Eighteen
The wrath ofAchilles would pale beside the wrath ofBethesda.
Her anger runs cold, not hot. It freezes rather than scalds. It is invisible, secretive, insidious. It makes itself felt not by blustering action, but by cold, calculated inaction, by words unspoken, glances unreturned, pleas for mercy unheeded. I think Bethesda shows her anger in this passive way because she was born a slave, and remained a slave for much of her life, until I manumitted and married her to bear our daughter in freedom. Her way is the way of slaves (and the hero of Homer's Iliad): she sulks, and broods, and bides her time.