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

My favourite Roman ........ Catullus ..... on the wireless today

I have returned to the poems of Catullus.

The 1968 edition

I first came across him in 1975, during a very messy moment at the end of a relationship.

And since then I regularly return to his poems.  

And today I am doing so with Natalie Haynes and her wonderful series Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics * which the sleeve notes tell me Catullus was 

"The brilliant Roman love poet is the poster boy for teen angst. He feels everything intensely, from the stealing of his favourite napkin to the death of his lover Lesbia's pet sparrow. And then he dies young. Of course the Romantics loved him, as do his biographer Dr Daisy Dunn and Professor Llewelyn Morgan.

The 2004 edition

Born to an aristocratic family in Verona, Catullus is fearless in abusing in sophisticated verse his father's friend Julius Caesar, his ex-lover Lesbia and the poets unlucky enough to be his contemporaries. Satirical, scurrilous and obscene, his popularity endures.

'Rockstar mythologist' Natalie Haynes is the best-selling author of 'Divine Might', 'Stone Blind', and 'A Thousand Ships' as well as a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greek and Rome.

Dr Daisy Dunn is an award-winning classicist. Her books, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation, were published in 2016 and earned her a place in the Guardian‘s list of leading female historians.**

Producer...Beth O'Dea Read less"

Pictures; 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

*Catullus, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, Series 11, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm

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

My favourite Roman ........ Catullus ..... part 2

I have returned to the poems of Catullus.

1968 edition

I first came across him in 1975, during a very messy moment at the end of a relationship.

He was born around 84 BC and died thirty years later and was “one of the most lyrical and passionate poets of any age, [who] found inspiration in the glittering Roman society of the late Republic.

There he met and fell in love with the Lesbia of these poems – a love that brought him ecstasy, pain, and disillusionment.  But Catullus is more than a love poet, whether he is lamenting a dead brother, eulogizing his beloved yacht, or satirizing his acquaintances his sincerity is apparent”.*

Given how I was feeling at the time I was drawn to those poems relating to his love affair with Lesbia, which had also gone horribly wrong.

In poem 8 he opens with that bitter advice to himself which many of us will empathize with,

“Break off
                fallen Catullus
                               time to cut losses”

Continuing,

“a clean break
              hard against the past” 

2004 edition

But he could also be more thoughtful, reflecting in no. 85

“I hate and I love.  And if you ask me how,
I do not know:  I only feel it and I am torn in two”.

Added to these there are many more poems, some very funny and unprintable and many more that fall into the category of “everyday life”.

My return was occasioned by a discussion on the wireless about Catullus, which in turn sent me off looking for that 1975 edition, only to discover it was lost.

Now having read other translations, Mr. Whigham’s best captured my sense of the poet, so I ordered up a new edition, which arrived on the day I found the old one.

Never mind my first copy was pretty battered, so it will sit beside the new one which I suspect will become equally well used.

Pictures; 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


*Sleeve notes from The Poems of Catullus, Translated by Peter Whigham Penguin Classics, 1968

My favourite Roman ........ Catullus ..... part 2

I have returned to the poems of Catullus.

1968 edition

I first came across him in 1975, during a very messy moment at the end of a relationship.

He was born around 84 BC and died thirty years later and was “one of the most lyrical and passionate poets of any age, [who] found inspiration in the glittering Roman society of the late Republic.

There he met and fell in love with the Lesbia of these poems – a love that brought him ecstasy, pain, and disillusionment.  But Catullus is more than a love poet, whether he is lamenting a dead brother, eulogizing his beloved yacht, or satirizing his acquaintances his sincerity is apparent”.*

Given how I was feeling at the time I was drawn to those poems relating to his love affair with Lesbia, which had also gone horribly wrong.

In poem 8 he opens with that bitter advice to himself which many of us will empathize with,

“Break off
                fallen Catullus
                               time to cut losses”

Continuing,

“a clean break
              hard against the past” 

and ends with that all too familiar bitterness.

2004 edition

But he could also be more thoughtful, reflecting in no. 85

“I hate and I love.  And if you ask me how,
I do not know:  I only feel it and I am torn in two”.

Added to these there are many more poem, some very funny and unprintable and many more that fall into the category of “everyday life”.

My return was occasioned by a discussion on the wireless about Catullus, which in turn sent me off looking for that 1975 edition, only to discover it was lost.

Now having read other translations, Mr. Whigham’s best captured my sense of the poet, so I ordered up a new edition, which arrived on the day I found the old one.

Never mind my first copy was pretty battered, so it will sit beside the new one which I suspect will become equally well used.

Pictures; 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


*Sleeve notes from The Poems of Catullus, Translated by Peter Whigham Penguin Classics, 1968

My favourite Roman …….. Catullus …….. one I am listening to

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