Nothing to excess

Probably just because of what gets taught in schools. You end up getting the impression that a poems are about one of

Being sad

Walking through nature

Being sad whilst walking through nature.

Which is a slightly reductive take on a whole fucking medium.

Anyway, Catullus was less the stereotypical "upper class guy with a lot of education who loves nature and being depressed" sort of poet and is more to the "battle rapper" end of poetry.

He's got multiple poems that are basically diss tracks. This is exactly why Poem 16 (this one) comes straight out the gate with "I AM GOING TO BUTTFUCK AND FACEFUCK YOU" (lowercase letters wouldn't be developed for a few hundred more years, by definition everything Catullus wrote was in ALL UPPERCASE): Catullus is directing this poem at Marcus Furius Bibaculus (Bibaculus to his friends), who had an affair with Juventius: a woman Catullus had a (possibly unrequited) love for. In fact, this sort of reputation is part of what Catullus is saying. He's like "oh, you think I'm some weak pansy faggot because I'm a poet? Let's see how you feel after I shove my huge* manly dick up all your holes, bitch."

Anyway the whole reason I was supposed to be replying is to talk about how Latin is an amazing language to swear in. They've got some very fun words like irrumo, ittumare which means basically "to fuck someone's mouth", but in a single word. Face-fuck is really the best translation English has, and that's two words.

Plus Latin is an infected language! He didn't just say "face fuck", he said the first person singular future active indicative of "face fuck".

Irrumabo is a single word that packs all this info into its infected form. It's not just "what" (face fucking), it's who and when and how.

Who: me, singular. "We" are not going to face fuck you, I, personally, and going to face fuck you.

When: in the future. This is a thing that's going to happen. Latin has multiple moods for this, the indicative, imperative, and subjunctive.

He doesn't use the subjunctive, which'd mean "I hope I facefuck you: it'd be great if someday I get to face fuck you".

He doesn't use the imperative, which is for stating commands. He's not saying "get facefucked, idiot".

He uses the indicative. This is for stating facts. He's saying this as just a thing that will happen. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow... I will facefuck you.

It's also active not passive, which means it's not "you will be facefucked by me". It's active, meaning it's "I am going to facefuck you".

The word is also derived from the word for teats? As in, it meant something like suckling?

Catullus is saying you're going to suck his cock like a baby feeding from their mother, and he's going to make you do this. This is just a thing that is going to happen.

And he says that all in ONE SINGLE WORD.

Latin is a lovely language for this sort of thing.

(there's also a lot of fascinating stuff about the second line of the poem: he calls Aurelius as pathicus, and Furius a cinaedus. These mean slightly different things! Translating them as "cocksucker" and "butt boy" is definitely one way to do it, but there's more to say about this, but this post is already way too long)

Anyway, while "first poet to ever get his bone on" is highly inaccurate (Sappho was centuries earlier! You think a woman who was so gay she gave us two of our words for WLW didn't BONE?), he definitely was one of the poets who most noticeably Absolutely Fucked and he made sure you knew it.

But yeah, kinaidos meant basically the receptive partner, which was the bad partner to be. the Greeks and Romans were very specific about 'it's not bad as long as you are doing the penetrating', though I think the Greeks had a specific thing about like... sucking cock was submissive? That might have just been one city state or something, I do not remember where I found that information.

For the record, what aetherograph is referring to is actually the Roman verb irrumare itself. It is a violent word, and while all the folks above are right that Romans and Greeks alike had a lot of moral panic surrounding men being the receiving partner of penetrative sex, irrumare is specifically more threatening and insulting than, say, pedicare: you're specifically muting the person and potentially blocking their airways here, making them even more vulnerable. It also implies very strongly that the penetrating person is controlling the movement: this is not a verb that can be translated synonymously to "blowing" a person, for example. The word means to forcibly fuck a person's mouth, an act so degrading that it is beyond imagination that an upstanding man would or could tolerate it without being forced.

These are Bad Words to a Roman, and I think translations should incorporate that as well as trying to convey the violence of the words. I really don't like translations that try to downplay the extent to which Catullus 16 is a very, very vivid rape threat in response to (inferred) loss of masculine status on account of spending too much time and attention with female lovers. I think there is a tendency to be delighted by profanity and obscenity themselves in the hallowed halls of literature, and certainly this is one hell of an ancient Italian poetic tradition that continues well into the modern day. But I also think that obscenity and poetry both exist to turn strong feelings into meaning, and I think Catullus' poetry is most powerful and effective when we stop thinking about how naughtily he was saying something and start thinking about what exactly he was saying as he did it.

Catullus certainly is one of the Roman poets that fucked, but Catullus 16 is not a romantic poem but a violent one. (This isn't that uncommon for Catullus, who writes vividly about sex, emotion, and violence as recurring themes and can be almost as aggressive to women as to men. One of his other famous ones, Catullus 11, involves him feeling spurned by a lover and declaring that his friends Furius and Aurelius should go tell her that he says he hopes she's happy with all her many suitors, her three hundred lovers, none of which she truly touches despite the rupture of their thighs; another (Catullus 58) has him complaining that his lover whom he was so attached to is off lying in the back alleys fucking all the "grandsons of Remus," AKA any Roman who shows up and hikes up his tunic.) He was also very capable of mushy sweetness! But the anger is always there lurking beneath the surface.

“careful layers of meaning around astonishingly raw emotions, glittering and artistic to behold”

I thought this part was pretty funny, Odysseus crashes out

POV: Achilles & Odysseus hate the same guy (they would be a pretty interesting duo ngl)