I first came across the Roman poet Catullus over 40 years ago and instantly took to him.
So I have enjoyed today’s Radio 4 programme on the man from the series In Our Time.
"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catullus (c84-c54 BC) who wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene.
He found a new way to write about love, in poems to the mysterious Lesbia, married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his explicit poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years.
Once the one surviving manuscript was discovered in the Middle Ages, though, anecdotally as a plug in a wine butt, he inspired Petrarch and the Elizabethan poets, as he continues to inspire many today.
With
Gail Trimble
Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, Simon Smith, Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, poet and translator of Catullus, and, Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson*
Pictures; Rome, 2020, from the collection of Saul Simpson
*Catullus, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d1rg
"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Catullus (c84-c54 BC) who wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic, and some of the most obscene.
He found a new way to write about love, in poems to the mysterious Lesbia, married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his explicit poems were to blight his reputation for a thousand years.
With
Gail Trimble
Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, Simon Smith, Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, poet and translator of Catullus, and, Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London
Producer: Simon Tillotson*
Pictures; Rome, 2020, from the collection of Saul Simpson
*Catullus, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d1rg
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