I have amended my previous post to correct the reference for the sketched reconstruction of the somewhat later Valerii Catulli villa, which is on page 65 of
T P Wiseman's contribution, "The Valerii Catulli of Verona" in
A Companion to Catullus, edited by Marilyn B. Johnson.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Allen Tice
Thanks, Gregory, a most un-boring reply! I will reread it more than twice in the coming weeks. Asolo. Good thought re Browning relevance. Your answer is full of grist. I like that bus ride idea, but might rent a car. I've driven before in Italy and Greece too (that one's a caution --- but well worth it). As I said, I will reread this carefully.
As to those rich ruins you refer to: They might not have all been there when our poet was active, but there was already a decent start. The famous Catullus Valerius (poet of Lesbia and co) was part of an already successful, widely spread extended trading family. T. P. Wiseman has found representatives in Spain, the Greek islands, and Anatolia who were contemporary with or possibly earlier than Catullus, the teaser of Caesar. (See " Catullus and His World" for loads of info, and the reference above for even more info.) If you and everyone else will forgive me here, I'd like to quote myself briefly. The following is from the last half of the essay I published in The London Magazine, August 2, 2012.
"Catullus was born into a north Italian business family successful enough to have entertained Julius Caesar overnight when he travelled. T. P. Wiseman of the University of Exeter and Christian Settipani of the Sorbonne and Oxford have found that after Catullus died his extended family continued to flourish and grew very wealthy near Verona. Solid evidence exists for direct relatives there up to two hundred years after the poet’s birth, and we know that a single odd ‘Catullus Valerius’ was born in AD 235." |
In both references, and especially in the volume edited by Skinner, Wiseman shows just how wealthy the early and later family of the poet were.
The family moved into governmental circles also. One non-material sign of an individual member's success might be Suetonius's mention (in
Calgula 36.1) of a later Valerius Catullus who quite wore himself out as a sexual partner of Caligula. Now, I do suspect Seutonius of a randy imagination and a desire to "sex up" his portrait of Horace, for example, with stories about implausibly expensive bedroom mirrors in his farm house before it was rebuilt and expanded a century later, but Suetonius was two generations closer in time to Caligula, and Caligula was quite the horny lad of some sort (... he was
aspirationally horny, at least ... not to put too fine a point to it, y'know, still, I wonder just what it was that wore out our pore l'il VC ...). In any case, even if false, the story shows one non-mercantile and non-bureaucratic area where this family was rumored to fly high, wide, and handy.
But back to the trip!