BrahminBoss
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Cos they chose women who had light brown skin which is dysgenic.
To many, Quintia is beautiful; to me, she is gleaming white, tall,
graceful. I will admit each of these.
But I deny that all that is ‘beuatiful’: for there is no Venus-ness,
not a grain of wit in all that tall body.
Lesbia is beautiful, for as a whole she is the prettiest
The gleaming whiteness of Quintia is no match for Lesbia, who is attractive both for her looks (implicitly not whiter than white) and her wit. In fact, Ovid suggests why poets in particular might not find paleness attractive – in Amores 1.8, a procuress addresses one of her prostitutes to give her some advice (lines 35-6):
Erubuit. 'decet alba quidem pudor ora, sed iste,
si simules, prodest; verus obesse solet.
She blushed. “Indeed a white face suits modesty, and that,
if you can fake it, helps: the truth tends to get in the way.
But most of the poets – and most lovers – don’t want a modest girl. Whiteness is suggestive of innocence, purity, and virginity, all of which make for a terrible lover (particularly within the generic constraints of elegiac poetry). So Catullus only uses whiteness to characterise a woman as beautiful in poem 61, a wedding-song (lines 9, 194), and this is because here her virginity is important
To many, Quintia is beautiful; to me, she is gleaming white, tall,
graceful. I will admit each of these.
But I deny that all that is ‘beuatiful’: for there is no Venus-ness,
not a grain of wit in all that tall body.
Lesbia is beautiful, for as a whole she is the prettiest
The gleaming whiteness of Quintia is no match for Lesbia, who is attractive both for her looks (implicitly not whiter than white) and her wit. In fact, Ovid suggests why poets in particular might not find paleness attractive – in Amores 1.8, a procuress addresses one of her prostitutes to give her some advice (lines 35-6):
Erubuit. 'decet alba quidem pudor ora, sed iste,
si simules, prodest; verus obesse solet.
She blushed. “Indeed a white face suits modesty, and that,
if you can fake it, helps: the truth tends to get in the way.
But most of the poets – and most lovers – don’t want a modest girl. Whiteness is suggestive of innocence, purity, and virginity, all of which make for a terrible lover (particularly within the generic constraints of elegiac poetry). So Catullus only uses whiteness to characterise a woman as beautiful in poem 61, a wedding-song (lines 9, 194), and this is because here her virginity is important