Desire, Agency and the Divine in Catullus and Contemporary Philosophy

Catullus invokes the love gods Venus and Cupid/Amor some twenty times within the relatively exiguous corpus of his surviving poems. On occasion, their names seem to be little more than metonyms for love, desire or sexual attractiveness; but the modern reader may wonder what we should make of apparently more personalized references, such as the allusion to the ‘two-faced goddess’ in poem 68, or—still more so—the despairing appeal to the gods in general that concludes poem 76. To what extent do the poems presuppose the existence of personal deities who exert control over human affairs? Or are the traditional divine names mere façons de parler, serving only as vehicles for the representation of what we would call emotions or drives? This article approaches these questions from two interrelated perspectives. Catullus’ poetry is contextualized within the intellectual currents of his era, as represented in the works of Cicero and Lucretius, both of whom are—in rather different ways—sceptical as regards traditional modes of representing the divine, but also testify to the persistence and continuing importance of the beliefs that they critique. Against this background, I consider two conflicting models of love and desire with which Catullus can be seen to operate: as a freely chosen foedus (‘pact’), for which the human partners are fully responsible; and as a divinely inflicted disease, against which the mortal sufferer has no recourse except prayer. This latter, more traditional model, I will suggest, reflects persisting ways of thinking about desire and the other passions, to which both Epicureanism and Stoicism are opposed.