Catullus

Lore & Background

Catullus was born to a leading equestrian family of Verona, in Cisalpine Gaul. His father’s social prominence allowed him to entertain Julius Caesar when Caesar was proconsul of Hispania Ulterior. Catullus describes his happy homecoming to the family villa at Sirmio, a peninsula on Lake Garda, in poem 31. He or his family also owned a villa near Tibur. He spent most of his young adult years in Rome, where his friends included the poets Licinius Calvus and Helvius Cinna, Quintus Hortensius, and the biographer Cornelius Nepos, to whom Catullus dedicated a libellus of poems. He appears to have been acquainted with the poet Marcus Furius Bibaculus. Prominent contemporaries such as Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey appear in his poetry. According to Suetonius, Caesar did not deny that Catullus’s lampoons left an indelible stain on his reputation, but when Catullus apologized, Caesar invited him to dinner the same day.

Reader's Guide

Catullus’s poetry has been preserved in an anthology of 116 carmina, divided into polymetra, longer poems, and epigrams in elegiac couplets. The text used today is based on a manuscript that surfaced in Verona in 1305; after the late 2nd century CE his poetry was relatively unknown. There is no scholarly consensus on whether Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems. The longer poems often lack his lyrical style and differ in subject, including traditional marriage hymns and a miniature epic (poem 64) that demonstrates chronological dislocations. Poem 68 marks the invention or prologue of the genre of Roman erotic elegy. The polymetra and epigrams can be divided into thematic groups: poems to and about friends, erotic poems (including those about Lesbia, usually identified with Clodia Metelli), invectives, and condolences. Catullus’s poetry was influenced by the Hellenistic Age, especially Callimachus and the Alexandrian school. Cicero called these local innovators neoteroi or 'moderns' (poetae novi). Catullus’s works remain widely read as teaching tools and for their personal or sexual themes.

Did You Know?

• Catullus’s father entertained Julius Caesar when Caesar was proconsul of Hispania Ulterior.
• The 'Lesbia' of his poems is usually identified with Clodia Metelli, sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher.
• Catullus spent the year from summer 57 to summer 56 BC in Bithynia on the staff of Gaius Memmius.
• No ancient biography of Catullus has survived; his life is pieced together from references in other authors and his poems.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC) was a Roman poet, the dominant figure among the New Poets (neoterici) of the 1st century BC." — Catullus "Quotations in English are taken from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, trans. Francis Warre Cornish (Cambridge University Press, 1904), unless otherwise noted." — Catullus "Cui dono lepidum novum libellumArido modo pumice expolitum?" — Catullus "To whom am I to present my pretty new book, freshly smoothed off with dry pumice stone?" — Catullus