Melville House Books

Gaius Valerius Catullus

It’s a British legal case wherein an employee is saying harassment from her boss grew so deranged that he hired a hit man to kill her … and it was all triggered by an email quoting first century BC Roman poet Catullus, in Latin, in what may or may not have been an obscene line of poetry. See, the case has come to hinge on whether or not the line is properly translated.
As a BBC News story explains, the case snowballed from accusations made against financier Mark Lowe by his former employee Jordan Wimmer, who claims that in the course of business “She sent over a Latin passage from St Paul which talked about ‘love your enemy’ and, in response, the 59-year-old millionaire replied with the phrase, ‘irrumabo vos et pedicabo vos’ from the poet Catullus.”

But according to another report,by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, “The line in question (misquoted by the BBC website, and perhaps, for all I know, by Lowe himself) is this: ‘pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo’.”

Further, says Higgins’ Guardian report, “The BBC declines to translate it, merely saying that it ‘threatens a violent sexual act’.” HIggins, however, says, “I am not so coy. It means ‘I will bugger you and stuff your gobs.’” Unfortunately, Higgins does not, of course, translate that from the British. But you can guess from there, and she goes on to render — with great gusto — other obscene moments from the rest of the poem, before getting to Lowe’s defense of his use of the line. “It is burlesque, it was always light-hearted in the first century and it still is now.”  And, says Higgins, “he’s probably right about its original tone.”

Higgins avoids further commentary on the case, but she does make an interesting case for the fact that the ever-bawdy Catullus is often so-edited, and “there’s no point trying to understand Catullus without these cheerfully rude and explicit works.”

But as for the legal case, as put by Bookninja, who pointed us to this story, it could just be evidence once again that “Quoting Catullus can still get you in trouble if you’re a moron.”