Alexandra O’Neill, Trinity College, Dublin
The figure of Attis in Catullus’ poem 63, for many modern readers, presents a problem to be solved.
The poem is declared ‘complex and difficult’ (Harrison 2004: 532), it ‘shocks and
bewilders…fascinates and repels’ us (Skinner 1997: 133). Like the monster in a creature feature, Catullus’ Attis, ‘not a very appealing protagonist’ in the opinion of Annemarie De Villiers (2017: 157), seems mostly to inspire fascinated horror in modern audiences. This paper will investigate what it is about Catullus’ Attis that provokes this reaction. It will argue that Attis can usefully be read as both a disabled and a transgender figure; that their gender instability is inextricably tied up with their disability (McRuer 2006); and that, finally, the ways that scholars discuss Attis reflect and reenforce contemporary discourses about transgender and disabled people in an environment of increasing hostility towards both in the Anglophone world.
Catullus’ poem 63 is generally read as an exploration of liminality (De Villiers 2017) or a ‘study in contrasts’ (O’Hearn 2021), especially between the supposed binary oppositions of man/woman,
Roman/foreign, sane/mad, human/animal, and culture/nature. The poem has frequently been read metaphorically, as an expression of elite male anxiety and disenfranchisement in the dying years of the late Republic (Skinner 1997) or a warning about the corrupting potential of the effeminate and effeminising East (O’Hearn 2021). Scholars have also drawn links between 63 and the Lesbia cycle (Skinner 1997), with 63 and 64 having long been read as “autoallegories” for the poet’s own relationship with his mistress (Harkins 1959), although Nauta (2004) has cautioned against such a reading.
Attis is, however, very rarely read as disabled, despite their frequently referenced ‘madness’ (rabie, 4 & 44; furor, 38) and the unassimilable ‘bodily variation’ (Garland-Thomson 2002: 5) this produces. Through their self-castration, the result of divinely-inspired furor which can be read as an attempt to arrest the transition which their body would otherwise “naturally” have made from desirable adolescent male object to desiring adult male subject, Attis is cut off from their native Greek society, becoming a figure of indeterminate gender and diminished capacity (both mental and physical), living on the margins of the Greco-Roman world: to borrow Garland-Thomson’s word, a “misfit” (Garland-Thomson 2011). It is the social consequences of this act of self-castration, not the castration itself, with which Catullus is concerned and which make up the bulk of the poem. Catullus thus highlights the ways in which bodies are discursively marked as non-normative, locating the site of Attis’ isolation not in Attis’ body itself but in the society which interprets that body as deviant and punishes it accordingly. This paper will then conclude by suggesting that the modern distaste towards Attis is rooted at least in part in contemporary attitudes towards the twin Others of the gender nonconforming and the disabled in addition to (or rather than) the poem itself.