Catullus
(c. 84 B.C.–c. 54 B.C)
During the troubled years of Rome’s civil wars, when most writers were chiefly concerned with politics and public statements, one personal, lyric voice was heard. Catallus came to Rome as a naive and talented youth to join the literary circles of the city. He is considered the finest love poet since Sappho, and he is the only Roman writer to convey his emotional experiences so directly.
A large number of Catullus’s poems are addressed to the notorious and fickle Roman matron, Clodia, whom he calls Lesbia. (Such pseudonyms were fashionable in the love poetry of the day.) The fact that Clodia was as faithless as she was beautiful, as well as some years his senior, did not discourage Catullus. His poems range in tone from tentative hope to cynical disillusionment, as he records the course of his love through the brief years of his brilliant and tempestuous career.
