A Verona manuscript in 1305 rescued Catullus from near silence
Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–54 BC) wrote neoteric Latin lyrics still read for love and invective. After late antiquity his poems nearly vanished until a manuscript surfaced at Verona in 1305, grounding today’s anthology of about 116 carmina.
Equestrian Verona family ties let his father host Julius Caesar in Cisalpine Gaul. In Rome he moved with Calvus, Cinna, and other sharp tongues; Lesbia is usually read as Clodia Metelli. A Bithynian staff year under Memmius (summer 57–56 BC) included rites at his brother’s Troad tomb.
No ancient Life survives; chronology is inferred from poems and stray citations. The collection mixes short polymetrics, long set pieces, and elegiac epigrams, with debated authorial order but clear thematic clusters. Jerome and Boethius still nodded to him while copies were scarce.
The surviving anthology holds 116 poems in three formal blocks: about sixty short polymetric pieces, nine long poems and forty-eight epigrams in elegiac couplets. Several long poems treat marriage; 61 and 62 are wedding hymns, and 64, at 408 lines, is a miniature epic weaving together two myths. The short poems fall into loose groups: erotic verse to Lesbia and to a boy named Juventius, obscene invective aimed at traitorous friends, rivals, Caesar and Cicero, and solemn condolences, above all poem 101 for his dead brother.
He wrote in the Alexandrian manner of Callimachus, one of the poets Cicero labelled neoteroi, or moderns, for turning away from Homeric epic. Poem 51 reworks Sappho 31, and his two uses of the Sapphic stanza may have caught Horace's attention. Rediscovery of the Verona manuscript later fed Petrarch, Milton, Herrick, Yeats, Frost and Ezra Pound, and composers kept setting him: Ned Rorem put poem 101 to music, and Dominick Argento's 1981 choral cycle I Hate and I Love uses about 50 lines in his own translation.
Source: Catullus
