Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus was born around 84 BC in Verona, in Cisalpine Gaul, to a family prominent enough that his father hosted Julius Caesar. He came to Rome as a young man and fell into the circle of the neoterics — the 'new poets' who were revolutionising Latin verse by importing the techniques of Hellenistic Greek poetry: learned allusion, metrical experimentation, personal subject matter, and a jeweller's attention to verbal craft.

He fell in love. The woman he calls Lesbia — almost certainly Clodia Metelli, a senator's wife of scandalous reputation — became the subject of some of the most passionate, tender, obscene, and heartbroken poems ever written in any language. The arc of the affair can be traced through the poems: the first rapture ('Let us live and love, my Lesbia'), the growing suspicion, the bitter jealousy, the savage invective, and finally the desolate attempt to tear himself free ('I hate and I love. Why, you ask? I don't know, but I feel it and it torments me').

But Catullus was far more than a love poet. His longest poem, the Attis, is a disturbing narrative of religious self-mutilation. His poem 64, a miniature epic about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, is one of the most technically accomplished poems in Latin. His epigrams are filthy, funny, and lethal — he attacked Caesar, Pompey, and anyone else who annoyed him with a freedom that is almost inconceivable in the political climate of the late Republic.

He died around 54 BC, probably not yet thirty. His collected poems — 116 survive — were almost lost. They were preserved in a single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century, reportedly being used as a bung in a wine barrel.