About Catullus

The Latin poet Catullus lived a little over two thousand years ago, at a turbulent time just before the start of the Christian era. Julius Caesar (who had a connection to Catullus’ family) was alive, and the autocratic Roman Empire was soon to replace the Republic and its elected officials.

Catullus’ dates are probably 84-54 BC, and the little we know of his life we’ve learned from what historians wrote about him after his death, and from a few clues in his poetry. He was born in Verona, and died in Rome. His family must have been wealthy, as they owned both a house in Rome and villas in Sirmio and Tivoli. He had a brother who died before him. For a year or so he held a bureaucratic post under the governor of Bithynia (now northern Turkey).

And he wrote poetry, most famously love-and-hate poems addressed to the woman he called Lesbia, who’s thought to have been Clodia Metelli, a married woman living in Rome. He was a member of a group of poets who wrote small-scale, finely crafted works in a very personal style. This school paved the way for later poets like Virgil and Horace, but only Catullus’ own poems survive from it. They are indeed highly personal, and speak to the reader in a voice by turns passionate, erotic, angry, mocking, light-hearted, warmly friendly, and grief-stricken. It’s frustrating that we don’t know more about Catullus, but the poems say a lot!

There’s something about the ancient Romans, as they look out at us from wall paintings, ceramics and mosaics, that makes them seem very nearby. And Catullus is surprisingly modern in many ways, for instance when, after mockingly putting down another poet he doesn’t think much of, he realises that he himself may have his own shortcomings. But of course his world in the first century BCE was very different from ours today. Some of the pleasure of reading him is to try and hold together the strangeness of that past age and the familiar humanity with which Catullus speaks to us.