The life of Gaius Valerius Catullus is something of a mystery. St Jerome tells us that the poet was born in Verona in 87 bce and that he died thirty years later. Catullus in his poems refers to known individuals from the period (such as Caesar (poem 93) and Cicero (poem 49)) and speaks (poem 10) of his foreign travel on the staff of the Roman governor Memmius. It seems therefore that he was at least on the lower rungs of the political ladder in his youth and it is quite possible that he was destined for an eminent political...

Catullus has often been seen as the bringer – or at least one of the collaborators – of a revolution in Roman poetry – a very influential book by Kenneth Quinn in 1959 was simply calledThe Catullan Revolution. This image of Catullus and his friends blazing a new trail in the tired old world of Roman poetry is of course drawn from the self-promoting claims of Catullus himself and is hard to assess fully because so little of the earlier poetry survives. There is, however, plenty of evidence that much of the earlier literature was less tired (and more...

In the ancient world Catullus was more famous for his love poems, and one of them in particular, than for all the other poems in the collection. His famous poem immortalising his girlfriend’s sparrow (discussed in the previous chapter) became in some ways his calling card. This chapter will look at the love poems of Catullus in the wider context of the sexual manners of the Roman world in which he lived.

The girl whom Catullus addressed directly in many of his love poems is called Lesbia by the poet. The ancient writer Apuleius tells us that this was a...

Catullus, like many Roman poets, was ‘learned’ (doctus) and many of his poems read like highly crafted and skilled exercises in poetic technique and mythological allusion. This may come as something of a surprise to some readers. Catullus is, after all, popular in many Latin courses because he isnotsoaked in learned allusions. Many of his shorter poems in particular are direct, personal and instantly accessible to anyone. This is true – but to concentrate solely on these poems would be to close our eyes to much of the greatest poetry in the collection. This chapter will look in...

The previous chapter looked at two of the sublime and poignant longer poems of Catullus. Many readers, however, remember Catullus from their years of learning Latin because he is often neither sublime nor solemn. This chapter will look at the exuberant uses of humour and obscenity in the poetry.

Editing and publishing Catullus was always difficult in the past owing to the obscenity of some of his poems. Older editions (and not so old, such as that of Fordyce in 1961) simply omitted the offending poems altogether. The older Loeb edition would leave the rudest Latin untranslated or replace Catullus’...

This chapter will look at the arrangement of the poems in the book, and the significance of the first and last poems in the collection, as well as examining some of the ways in which the poet signals closure in his text.

The ordering of the poems is worth discussing. The 116 poems which make up the book are ordered in three clear groups: the poems in a variety of metres, followed by the ‘long poems’ 61–8, followed by 69–116 which are all composed in elegiac couplets. Within the overarching metrical groupings, however, the poems are ordered in...