One Roman poet …… a heap of poems and ...... a story

 Today I am renewing my friendship with Catullus.

2016

To be more accurate I am reading the biography of my favourite Roman poet.

I first came across him in 1966 along with the 16th century poet John Donne and they have stayed with me ever since.

Both appealed to a sixteen-year-old with their mix of funny, irreverent and love poetry, and anyone who has fallen in love, only to lose that love will remember just how bitterly intense the feelings are when you are a teenager.

1966 edition

All of which brings me back to Poem 8 with its angry response to an ended affair

“Break off 

                    Fallen Catallus

     time to cut losses,

bright days shone once

               you followed a girl

               here and there

............................................

now a woman is unwilling

Follow suit

a clean break

hard against the past”*

So that’s it.

Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, Daisy Dunn, 2016

"A biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome’s first great poet, a dandy who fell in love with another man’s wife and made it known to the world through his verse.

2004 edition

This superb book gives a rare portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history through the eyes of one of Rome’s greatest writers.

Living through the debauchery, decadence and spectacle of the crumbling Roman Republic, Catullus remains famous for the sharp, immediate poetry with which he skewered Rome’s sparring titans – Pompey, Crassus and his father’s friend, Julius Caesar. But it was for his erotic, scandalous but often tender love elegies that he became best known, inspired above all by his own lasting affair with a married woman whom he immortalised in his verse as ‘Lesbia’. A monumental figure for poets from Ovid and Virgil onwards, his journey across youth and experience, from Verona to Rome, Bithynia to Lake Garda, is traced in Daisy Dunn’s brilliant portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history”.**

Pictures; cover Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, 2016, cover of The Poems of Catullus, Translated by Peter Whigham Penguin Classics, cover shows a portrait of Arteidorus from Hawara, Egypt, second century, British Museum 1974, reprint, and Catullus The Poems Translated by Peter Whigham Penguin Classics, 2004, cover shows a detail from a Roman mosiac 3rd-4th century AD in the Piazza Armenia villa of Maximinorous. Sicily, photoo AKGO/Eric Lessing

*Poem Eight, The Poems of Catullus Penguin Books, 1966

** Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, Daisy Dunn, 2016