Chapter 4 - Naughty Girls

Summary

With a few exceptions, Catullus is interested in “bad” women who break the mold, and the more forcefully they do, the more fascinating they are to him. For him, the feminine ideal seems to have been not the bona mulier but the pessima puella, the “naughty girl.” Something similar can be said of Roman comedy, whose malae meretrices are often the stars of the show, and to whom Catullus alludes throughout his poetic corpus. This chapter explores poems in which women are explicitly marked as “bad” and argues that, in each case, Catullus uses their malitia as a way to consider and display tensions that arise when men and women compete for control. These women take on characteristics of comedy’s meretrices callidae, or “clever sex laborers,” while he aligns himself with familiar antagonistic stock types such as the “harsh father” or “braggart soldier,” figures through whom traditional aristocratic values and male concerns are caricatured.