Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84-ca. 54 B.C.) was a Roman lyric poet. He is best known for the intense poems which reflect various stages in his love affair with "Lesbia."

Catullus belonged to a circle of neoteroi, or "new poets," who used as their models the learned Greek poet-scholars at Alexandria in the Hellenistic period and wrote elegant, allusive, and highly finished poems on love, mythology, and other topics. They cherished the epithet docti, "learned." Catullus's friends were the poets C. Licinius Macer Calvus, Furius Bibaculus, and C. Helvius Cinna; the orator Q. Hortensius, Cicero's rival in the law courts; and the biographer Cornelius Nepos, to whom Catullus dedicated his book of poems.

Catullus was born in Verona. St. Jerome gives the year 87 B.C. and says that he died at age 30. Since events of 55 B.C. are referred to in several of Catullus's poems, however, and no poem can be said with certainty to be later than 54, scholars accept the dates 84-54. Catullus's family was prominent and well-to-do. They owned a villa at Sirmio, and his father entertained Caesar when the later was governor of Gaul.

When Catullus went to Rome in 61, he met and fell in love with Clodia, the "Lesbia" of the poems, who was a member of the old aristocratic Claudian family and the wife of Metellus Celer. For this upper-class sophisticate 10 years older than Catullus, the young poet from Verona was but another liaison in her constant search for diversion.

After a brief affair Clodia replaced Catullus with Caelius Rufus, who traveled in the same fast set as Catullus and was a protégée of Cicero. When Caelius threw her over (a new experience for her), Clodia brought charges against him in order to ruin him politically and socially. Cicero defended him in a masterpiece of character assassination (Pro Caelio) in which he repeated the rumors that Clodia had murdered her husband and slept with her brother and implied, among other things, that she was an insatiable prostitute. Before accepting as true Cicero's portrait of Clodia, one must remember that at one time the orator had thought of divorcing his wife in order to marry her. Whatever this woman was like, Catullus's experience with her was the source of some of the finest Latin lyric poems.

In 57 Catullus went to Bithynia on the staff of Memmius, who was to be governor of that Eastern province. While there Catullus traveled to the Troad to perform rites at the tomb of his brother, who had died in the East, recording this act of devotion in a moving poem. After a year in Bithynia he returned to Italy and probably lived in Rome the rest of his life. Despite complaints of poverty in his poems, he seems to have owned a villa near Tibur (modern Tivoli).

The collected 116 extant poems - 18 to 20 are spurious - while arranged neither by chronology nor by subject, can be divided into three categories: The first, poems 1 through 60, is a group of short poems in various meters, with the hendecasyllabic and "limping" iambic predominating, among which are love poems, erotic poems, lampoons, and poems on a variety of other topics. The poems 61 to 64, the second group, are longer poems, including two wedding hymns (61 and 62); the Attis poem (63), about a youth who emasculates himself in order to become a priest of Cybele, then regrets his act; and the "Marriage of Peleus and Thetis" (64), an epyllion, or little epic, of some 400 hexameters. The poems of the third category, 65 to 116, are all written in elegiac meter. A few of these poems are elegies (65-68,76), the rest short poems of epigram type, as in 1-60, on a variety of topics.

Poems about Lesbia

Catullus's most memorable poems are the ones about "Lesbia." It is highly tempting to arrange them in an order that chronicles the poet's affair with Clodia: intense joy at the beginning, a break, reconciliation, then Catullus's awareness of his mistress's congenital faithlessness. Next comes bitterness and despair. The poet nearly loses his sanity but manages, by a great effort of will, to gain control of himself and is then slowly healed of his passion. To read these poems as autobiographical documents is a mistake, however. Catullus did not record this experience factually but, rather, used it as a source for poetry. Art and life were not the same for him. Rather, life was the matrix out of which a highly wrought art was formed.

Perhaps best known is 5, Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus ("Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love"). The English poets Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, and Crashaw, to name a few, wrote imitations of it. Nearly as well known are 7, Quaeris quot mihi basiationes ("You ask me how many kisses"); 8, Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire ("Poor Catullus, stop acting foolishly"); 85, Odi et amo … ("I hate and I love"); the poems on Lesbia's sparrow (2 and 3); and the two in Sapphic meters, one an adaptation of a poem by Sappho (11), and the other, one of his most affecting, an address to a friend to carry a message to Lesbia (51). These poems are appealing by their direct, apparently unreflective, outpouring of emotion. But they have been carefully composed with an art that conceals art. One critic speaks of their "controlled lyricism," which produces a fine tension between intellect and the emotions.

View of Love

Catullus's vision of love in his poems is far different from the casual, frequent, and merely sensual liasions represented in the elegant dilettantish poems of the "new poets." In his poems Catullus imagines a kind of relationship with a woman which may be called total involvement, intellectual as well as physical. This concept of love, taken for granted today, combines friendship with sensual pleasure. Catullus's affair with Clodia was itself probably not unique, but it did provide the poet with a starting point from which to develop his concept of an ideal love.

Catullus could be witty and charming, as in poem 13, an "invitation" to one Fabullus to dine with him - but he must bring his own dinner, for the poet's wallet is full of cobwebs. Nonetheless the host will provide a scented ointment, on smelling which Fabullus will pray to the gods to become all nose. Catullus could be witty and obscene, as in poem 39, on a certain Egnatius, who continually grins, whether appropriately or inappropriately, in order to show off his brilliant white teeth. The secret of his beautiful smile, however, is the urine with which he cleans them. Many of the poems are forthrightly obscene to a degree that may shock even modern readers (32, 33, 37, 80, 97). There are two lampoons of Caesar (29 and 57), which the great man conceded had hurt him. When Catullus apologized for them, however, Caesar promptly invited him to dinner.

Other Themes

The long poems exhibit another side of Catullus's talent. Poem 61, a wedding hymn written in honor of the marriage of a friend, has a grace and sensitivity which make it one of his most delightful poems. The same holds true of 62, another wedding hymn but without reference to a particular marriage. Poem 64, on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, is highly finished and subtle and was written for, and best understood by, a learned elite. In addition there are 76, the poet's plea to the gods to allow him to gain an ultimate perspective on the love that has consumed him like a disease, and 101, commemorating a visit to his brother's tomb and ending with the simple but expressive atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale ("But now for all time, my brother, good luck and farewell").

A critic called Catullus's little book of poems "maddeningly scrappy." The poems are indeed uneven in quality, and many are difficult to understand. Nevertheless he wrote a new kind of poetry which influenced poets for two generations after his death. His direct personal lyricism gives a quality to many of them which makes them similar to modern lyric poems.

Further Reading

A biography that considers the political and cultural milieu of Catullus's works is Tenney Frank, Catullus and Horace: Two Poets in Their Environment (1928). Two of the best studies of Catullus in English are E. A. Havelock, The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939), and Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (1934). Kenneth Quinn, The Catullan Revolution (1959), assesses the poet's importance in the development of Roman poetry. A later work is David O. Ross, Jr., Style and Tradition in Catullus (1969).

Additional Sources

Stoessl, Franz, C. Valerius Catullus: Mensch, Leben, Dichtung, Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1977.

For more information on Gaius Valerius Catullus, visit Britannica.com.

Catullus, Gaius Valerius, c.84–c.54 BC, Roman poet, born in Verona, son of a wealthy man whose acquaintances included Julius Caesar. As a young man he went to Rome and joined the fashionable literary circle (see NEOTERICS), addressing poems to Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, and Hortensius among others, and freely insulting Caesar and Mamurra. Very little is known of his life except what can be gleaned from his poems: that he spent a year (57 to 56) with his friend Cinna in Bithynia on the staff of the governor, Gaius Memmius; that he saw his brother's grave in the Troad; that he returned from abroad to a villa at Sirmio on Lake Garda. At Rome he fell in love with a married woman of some social standing whom he calls Lesbia, but whose real name was probably Clodia. Some poems suggest that she deserted Catullus for Cicero's young protégé Caelius. Catullus addressed twenty-five poems to Lesbia which chronicle his love affair from an idyllic beginning to final disillusionment.

His poems fall into three groups. 1–60 are short pieces, in hendecasyllables or other lyric metres (iambics, scazons, and in one case glyconics) or in elegiacs (see METRE). They are varied in subject and manner, embracing incidents of daily life, expressions of friendship, satires, political lampoons, love poems, even a hymn to Diana; poem 51 is a translation of an extant poem by the Greek poet Sappho. This collection was for the most part made by the author and shows traces of a careful arrangement. The second group, 61–64, are longer poems: 61 is an epithalamium for a friend, 62 another wedding song, 63 an extraordinary metrical feat, a poem in galliambics (see METRE, LATIN 3 (iii) d) on the legend of Attis, a young man who, in religious frenzy for the goddess Cybelē, emasculates himself and lives to regret it; 64 is an epyllion on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, consisting mostly of a digression on the story of Ariadne. The first four poems of the third group, 65–68, are longer elegiac poems, 66 being a translation of Callimachus' poem, The Lock of Berenice; 69–116 form a sequence of epigrams in elegiacs on a wide range of subjects. The second and third groups of poems were perhaps collected and arranged by an editor. The first and third groups both contain love poems, expressing happiness and disillusionment, and witty and malicious occasional poems, but the poems of the third group are not perhaps so adventurous or experimental; they express the poet's feelings in more traditional Roman terms. Groups one and two were more obviously written under the influence of Hellenistic Greek poetry in racy, often erudite language (the blend of the fashionable colloquial and the obscure is peculiarly Catullus' own), sometimes ingeniously fitted to metres hitherto purely Greek. Catullus was the leading figure among the new poets of the day who were looking for inspiration not to past Romans but to the Greeks, both to the learned, polished poets of the Hellenistic age and to the more direct lyric poets of earlier centuries, such as Sappho. Part of his appeal lies in his versatility, but it is as a love poet that he is chiefly remembered. He was the first ancient poet to describe the progress of one deeply felt love affair, and in this he exerted a wide influence on his successors, on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid and others whose works are lost. We are fortunate to have his poems, for they nearly perished. The three manuscripts in which they are preserved are descended from the only text of the poems known to have survived into the fourteenth century. See TEXTS, TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT 6.

(Caius Valerius Catullus) (kətŭl'əs), 84? B.C.–54? B.C., Roman poet, b. Verona. Of a well-to-do family, he went c.62 B.C. to Rome. He fell deeply in love, probably with Clodia, sister of Cicero's opponent Publius Clodius. She was suspected of murdering her husband. Catullus wrote to his beloved, addressed as Lesbia (to recall Sappho of Lesbos), a series of superb little poems that run from early passion and tenderness to the hatred and disillusionment that overwhelmed him after his mistress was faithless. Of the 116 extant poems attributed to him, three (18–20) are almost certainly spurious. They include, besides the Lesbia poems, poems to his young friend Juventius; epigrams, ranging from the genial to the obscenely derisive; elegies; a few long poems, notably “Attis” and a nuptial poem honoring Thetis and Peleus; and various short pieces. His satire is vigorous and flexible, his light poems joyful and full-bodied. He was influenced by the Alexandrians and drew much on the Greeks for form and meter, but his genius outran all models. Catullus is one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Two of his most popular poems are the 10-line poem, touching and simple, which ends, “frater ave atque vale” [hail, brother, and farewell], and “On the Death of Lesbia's Sparrow.”

Bibliography

See translations by R. Myers and R. J. Ormsby (1970), C. Martin (1990), and P. Green (2005); studies by A. L. Wheeler (1934, repr. 1964), T. Frank (1928, repr. 1965), K. Quinn (1959, 1970, and 1972), R. Jenkyns (1982), T. P. Wiseman (1985), J. Ferguson (1988), and C. Martin (1992).

Quotes:

"It is difficult to lay aside a confirmed passion."

"What a woman says to her avid lover should be written in wind and running water."

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