2 - A Thousand Kisses

Summary

ROME TO RENAISSANCE

In the humanist Republic of Letters the kiss was the foremost attribute, almost the aegis, of the Roman poet Catullus, who had kisses and sparrows as St Catharine had her wheel. Sannazaro, in his epigram ‘On the correction of Catullus, to Gioviano Pontano’, imagines that if the learned (‘doctus’) Catullus were to return from Elysium, he would be so grateful for Pontano's emendations of his corrupted texts that he would give the Neapolitan poet fond embraces and—what else but kisses? (‘oscula grata’). Later, when the Secundan basium genre had become a formal kind, Bonnefons would refer to ‘Catullus pater osculationum’, ‘the father of osculations’. It was by that time usual for basial poets to allude to Catullus both implicitly and explicitly; and in the Secundan kiss-poem, if any ancient poets are to be named, Catullus is sure to be first in rank.

Several of the carmina of Catullus deal with kissing, but the ones that proved most popular with imitators were poems 5 and 7. With these, Catullus bequeathed to posterity the enduringly popular theme of ‘counting kisses’. Here is carmen 5, composed in a metre that will feature very prominently in the kiss-poetry of the Renaissance, and so also in this book, the Latin hendecasyllabic or phalaecean:

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

Rumoresque senum severiorum

Omnes unius aestimemus assis!

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

Dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

Dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

Conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

Aut ne quis malus invidere possit

Cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

(Catullus, ed. Thomson, pp. 102–3)

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and think all the gossip of dour old men worth hardly a penny! Suns may set and rise again; but for us, when once our short light has set, only remains to be slept the sleep of one perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred; then another thousand, then a second hundred; then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have tallied up many thousands, we shall confuse our count, so we'll lose the reckoning. Nor shall any ill-willing person be able to grudge them, when he knows that our kisses are so many.