The Original Situationship: Catullus 85

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. / nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask.

I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented.

Translation by A. S. Kline

Let’s play a game. Choose wisely.

What is this?

1. 1am drunk text

2. 1am drunk text

3. Catullus 85

4. 1am drunk text

If you guessed C: spot on! If not, you were very close—it happens to the best of us.

Catullus 85 belongs to a body of work written by Gaius Valerius Catullus, a poet from Verona who arrived in Rome in the early 50s BC and became central to a circle later termed the poetae novi (the “new poets,” or, the Neoterics) who broke from the grand, nationalistic traditions of earlier Latin verse in favor of something shorter, highly polished, and deeply personal. Catullus was notably inspired by Hellenistic lyric tradition, drawing heavily on Greek poets Sappho and Callimachus, and his surviving corpus of roughly 113 poems ranges from wedding epyllions (mini-epics) to some of the most viciously personal invectives in the Latin language. He died young (likely in his early thirties), but the collection that survives him is still widely read, taught, and analyzed today.

A substantial portion of that corpus (exactly 25 poems) concerns a woman he names Lesbia, a name chosen, most scholars agree, as a direct homage to Sappho of Lesbos—also known as the “Tenth Muse” and the first to famously describe eros (love) as glykupikron (bittersweet). The historical consensus, supported largely by explicit identification in Roman writer Apuleius’ Apologia, claims Lesbia is Clodia Metelli (Clodia Pulchra)—a notoriously prominent, wealthy, and politically influential noblewoman. In Pro Caelio, the famous orator Cicero says plenty about Clodia: defending his client Marcus Caelius Rufus against Clodia’s accusation that Caelius had tried to poison her, Cicero painted her as promiscuous, manipulative, and untrustworthy in order to undercut her credibility with the jury. His account lines up with how Catullus and others describe her—a woman of real social power, conducting her affairs on her own terms, largely indifferent to the consequences for the men around her.

Read across the whole Lesbia cycle, the poems trace more closely to a slow unraveling than a clean, altogether sequential story. Poem 51 shows Catullus early on, overwhelmed just by being near her (he can’t speak, his ears ring, his vision goes dark, he breaks into a sweat). It’s adapted from Sappho, and it reads akin to a man describing a medical emergency and calling it love. Poem 85 here comes later and strips all of that away, down to the bare contradiction.

The two lines of this poem reward close attention; every word is loaded.

Odi et amo. I hate and I love. There’s no “but” or “yet”  (no conjunction) anywhere in the line to manage the clash between them; two contradictory verbs sitting next to each other, unresolved. Catullus doesn’t give an explanation how both can co-exist, only stating that they just do—the same way an individual today might mention, in passing, that they “blocked him” and also “still have their mother’s house address memorized.” Neither fact cancels the other out, I guess. Both are just true at the same time in the same person.

Arguably, the real pinnacle of this couplet falls on the final word: excrucior. Translated as “I am tortured” or “I am tormented,” excrucior is composed of two parts: ex and crucio, the latter derived directly from crux—the Latin word for cross, the same root that gives us “crucifix” and “excruciating.” The infinitive of crucio, cruciare, means “to crucify,” so it seems Catullus isn’t reaching for some watered-down, PG version of the word. What makes this choice seem deliberate rather than just him being dramatic is the grammar underlying it: Catullus isn’t torturing himself, nor is he inflicting anything. He’s the object of the sentence, not the subject, which means that whatever this feeling is, it’s happening to him rather than being something he’s consciously and independently doing or choosing to do. It seems he barely has some agency or a hand in his own suffering, grammatically speaking, and that absence of agency is the whole argument the couplet seems to make.

Catullus 85 houses the unresolved contradiction, the lack of explanation, the total absence of agency—which seems to me to be a beautiful description of a modern-day situationship.

Catullus had the same problem in 56 BC, minus the contemporary slang for it, which might explain why his version sounds so much more serious than ours. We invented “situationship,” truly popularizing it in 2017, a word that sounds almost cute, almost low-stakes, to describe something the Romans apparently thought required the language of crucifixion. 

So if Catullus diagnosed the issue with more precision than we have now, the obvious next question is whether he ever got out of one. He wrote more poems about Lesbia after 85, and depending how generously you read them, he either found an answer or just got better at performing one.

By poem 11, he’s stopped asking what they are and tells her, more or less, to go live with her “three hundred lovers,” holding none of them properly, wearing them all out one by one—read nowadays as “I’m so over it, I’m moving on.” Right up until the final stanza, he compares his own love to a flower at the edge of a field, struck down by a passing plow that never even noticed it had touched anything. The plow doesn’t slow down! It doesn’t know. Catullus knows that it doesn’t know, and says so anyway, in the same poem where he's supposedly done caring.

Poem 58 goes further into open contempt (she’s mingling about now, with everyone and their mothers, he says, “good luck babe”—but the structure holds: the performance of not caring sits brazenly on top of evidence that he still does.

Which is, as far as classical literature is concerned, the actual advice on offer: there’s no clean ending available, because there wasn’t one available to Catullus either—this is the man who wrote 25 poems on his feelings and still couldn’t find a way out of it. What he had instead was his method: stop asking what this is, write the version where you’ve moved on, say it like you mean it, and keep saying it until either the feeling dies or you’ve gotten so good at performing that you can’t tell the difference anymore.

Coping mechanism with excellent grammar. 10 points for Catullus.