Revenge porn, slut-shaming and jealousy—how the ancient Romans wrote about love

The Greeks invented love, the Romans invented relationships. Obviously, that isn’t literally true, but in terms of (one branch of) literary tradition it could be said to be. Sappho was the Greek poet-in-chief of longing. Her fragmentary works—only one poem has survived complete from the 7th century BC—are sharp little shards of desire and yearning. Somehow they are made all the more intense by being so fragmentary, because they have desire built into them—not just the eroticism of their material, but our desire for their completion.

It was Plato who, in the Symposium, has Socrates say that Eros, the god of love, personifies a desire for something lacking. But just as perfect knowledge is unobtainable, desire for a loved one always has at its heart an absence, is always tinged with loss. Happy Valentine’s day, kids.

One of Sappho’s most remarkable poems has its narrator watching her lover delighting in the company of a rival. The narrator’s embodied jealousy is richly described—her heart is racing, her voice is cracking, she feels as if a flame is running under her skin.

Centuries later, in the 1st century BC, the Roman poet Catullus translated this work into Latin, addressing it to his lover, to whom he gave the pseudonym “Lesbia,” in homage to Sappho’s home island. In his many poems about Lesbia, Catullus was the first in European literary history to anatomise an actual relationship—the whole arc from longing and ecstatic joy to jealousy and regret, then nosediving into despair and revenge porn and slut-shaming and blocking her on social media. Yes well, clearly not that last bit, but he would have done, had he been living now, probably in a Streatham flatshare while teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths and taking too many drugs at weekends.

The poems are raw and unsparing. Sometimes they are incredibly beautiful. At times they are crude and cruel. There’s a choice little epigram, for example, in which, after so many outpourings of love, a disillusioned Catullus accuses Lesbia of giving blowjobs on street corners. Many scholars think “Lesbia” was a real aristocrat called Clodia Metelli, a glamorous figure who might have been slumming it a bit by taking the talented but socially downscale Catullus as a lover.

What we don’t have is Clodia’s side of the story—her reply to his sublime “Let us live and love/ And value all the talk of stricter/ Old men at a single penny”; her riposte to “what a woman says to her eager lover/ One should write on the wind and the running water”; her reaction to Catullus’s obsession and lust and vitriol.

Catullus’s poems can be sublime, but they can make for awkward reading today. They fall into (or establish) tropes about the relationship between men and women that still persist: women are fickle, women are sexually incontinent, women can’t really be trusted… all wrapped up in our good old friend—still alive and well in the 21st century—the patriarchal double standard, by which rule men and women are to be judged differently for their sexual behaviour. Like a lot of literature from the past, it reads a little differently post #MeToo.

Women’s voices are hard to find in ancient Roman literature: exceptions, such as the delicate love poems of a writer called Sulpicia, stand out for their rarity. For the most part, there is only an absence, a gap—and it is Socrates’s Eros, our desire for completion, that gives us a way, imaginatively, to fill the gaps.